On Saturday, James and I went to WonderCon in San Francisco. It was sort of a last-minute decision I made because I wanted to check out the Star Trek movie panel that day. The WonderCon website‘s description for panel didn’t name anyone, simply saying there was a “special guest”. I thought to myself, it’s probably just one of JJ Abrams’ people… or maybe even JJ Abrams himself, if I’m lucky!
James and I got there, and we were sitting in the audience, wondering who was going to show up and what was going to happen. It WAS JJ Abrams!! He came out, excited about the movie, and showed us the new trailer which will be showing with The Watchmen this Friday. It was pretty cool that we were the first people to see it.
He then brought out his other writer/producers, Robert Orci and Bryan Burk. AND… Zoe Saldana (Uhura), Zachary Quinto (Spock), and Chris Pine (Kirk). Wow! I was in the same, albeit huge, room as Zachary Quinto. They talked about the movie and answered some questions. Zachary Quinto mentioned how he’d seen the movie for the first time the night before, and he was speechless for about 20 minutes after because it was so good. I loved hearing Quinto talk about the movie and his experience working with Leonard Nimoy (or maybe I just love hearing Quinto talk?).
It was interesting how JJ Abrams described his formula for creating a story: take some normal, relatable people and put them in a crazy scenario. He also said something I found funny: his fans won’t complain about any of the crazy sci-fi stuff that happens on his shows. For example, in the Fringe pilot, there was a guy dying and turning invisible, and his girlfriend enters his mind, and no one complained about that stuff. However, they said, “Hey, they get a FREE lab at Harvard? How does THAT happen?”
We attended part of the Disney/Pixar UP panel, in which they showed us so many clips from the movie that I may as well have already seen it. Seriously, I know what the movie’s about now.
We also went to the Terminator: Salvation panel (no, Christian Bale was not there). I’ve never seen director McG before, and I don’t know if it was an act, but with all his swearing and talking about whether to display actress Moon Bloodgood’s boobs in the movie, he came off as rather a-hole-ish. Anton Yelchin, who plays Kyle Reese, was part of the panel. Why wasn’t he at the Star Trek panel as well (since he also plays Chekov in the new movie)?
Unfortunately, I don’t have any cool me-with-a-celebrity pictures like I usually do after going to conventions, but it was really awesome to see JJ Abrams and his crew (get it? crew? lol).
