Possibly of interest to some of you, from The Verge:
What do you do when you’re a sci-fi star but your TV show has been dead for years? You spend a lot of time at conventions, and a pair of Firefly actors want to let fans know what it’s like from their perspectives. Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk are launching a web series called Con Man about two former sci-fi stars — yes, one a ship’s captain, the other its pilot — who have gone on to have wildly different levels of success. Fillion’s character is a huge star, while Tudyk, who is writing and directing this series, plays a character who’s still stuck in smaller roles…
… A handful of other sci-fi stars will also appear in the series. That includes Firefly costars Gina Torres and Sean Maher, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, as well as Felicia Day, Amy Acker, and Seth Green. It’s a crew and a concept that deep sci-fi fans won’t be able to ignore, so it’s no surprise that the campaign is already funded: the real question is how high it’ll go.
From Variety:
… In a meta nod to “Firefly,” Tudyk will portray Wray Nerely, the co-star of sci-fi series ‘Spectrum’ (in which he played the spaceship’s pilot) — which was cancelled before its time and eventually became a cult classic beloved by fans. Fillion will portray his good friend Jack Moore, who starred in the series and has gone on to become a major celebrity. While Jack enjoys the life of an A-lister, Wray tours the sci-fi circuit as a guest of conventions, comic book stores, and lots of pop culture events. The show will feature all the weird and crazy things that happen to Wray along the way at these events…
From Tudyk’s Indiegogo page:
… I wanted to make a show that featured all of my favorite convention artists and friends together. Not only that, I wanted to celebrate the world where heroes, villains, zombie hunters, and space pirates all overlap. I especially wanted to work with my friend Nathan Fillion again…
The convention world is unique and not easily understood from the outside. To tell this story right, you need to have first hand experience. Although, to tell this story for more than cable access production values you need a partner. In show business, a network/studio could add plenty to the business of Con Man, but at the expense of the show. Complications such as dictating what guests we may have, changing the tone of the show, going into production freezes, having a delayed release, or forcing the show to only be described by a tagline like “Extras meets Galaxy Quest,” though we will admit that is sort of an on the nose description….
It looks like they’ve funded 11 episodes already (out of a possible 12). My con-going days (the 1970s/80s) were a much more ramshackle and haphazard era, but from everything I’ve heard, the modern megacon remains a rich source for humans being extremely… human.
Mustang Bobby
I’d watch it. I’d even send in money. So I will check it out.
Tommy
I have not been to a con. Kind of sure I might not at first glance fit in. But looking to my left, comic books, or my bathroom a Doctor Who shower curtain. Oh and Firefly just rocked. Own it on DvD. Heck wearing a E=MC squared tee shirt. I’d like to go to a place where I could tool around with other geeks, nerds abd sci-fi fans.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym
I can’t do large cons. 4th Street Fantasy convention, which is really a con for writers rather than fans, with its 100-150 attendees is really about all I can take. I’m not sure what it is about cons that causes my autism developed sensibilities to become overwhelmed, as opposed to walking down a crowded street (though that did happen once while I was in Xi’an) or at a sporting event. It probably has something to do with expecting and being expected to interact with those around me.
At a hockey game with 20,000 other people (or more like 2,000 at a women’s game) I can just focus on the game. Of course, this leads to me becoming known as That Guy Who Yells at the Mascot and Nine-Year Olds Who Obstruct His View During Play. One time a bunch of little girls were zooming around in the stands in front of me during the second period and my reaction prompted a mother to ask me, “Don’t you remember what you were like at that age?” My answer was, “Yes, and according to my parents, by the time I was three I was already yelling at people who blocked my view.”
raven
ugh
OzarkHillbilly
I never was one you could throw into a large group, add water and mix (alcohol doesn’t work any better). I always settle out at the edges of the pot. I did go to an NSS convention one year. I’ve had fun before. That weren’t it.
Mike E
welcome to my world for the next two days… My conference center is hosting one of these.
satby
I’ve been to two in my life, mostly at the behest of friends, and had fun at both. But then I have fun almost everywhere (so far about the only exception being a NASCAR race I was dragged to) and I enjoy people. It’s as good a plot for a show as any other.
Mike E
@satby: Even The Shat has made his peace with the whole “Con” thing
satby
@Mike E: Shatner is a pretty complex guy when you think about the range of stuff he’s done. He’s gotta be in his mid-eighties by now, I hope I have 1/2 his energy at that age.
Punchy
Seems like the Pope aint up for Big Popin’ more than another year or two. I bet they make sure to vote in a hardliner next time…no Pope who cares about The Poorz or advocates compassion to The Gheys…
Randy P
I’ve been to one con. It was in the era when Star Trek had not yet been revived as a film or TNG, and only the fans at cons were keeping the memory going. I think Walter Koenig was the guest celebrity. I played my one and only game of Dungeons and Dragons there, and costuming was fairly mild: Spock ears, and people sitting around singing Dorsai songs.
It was OK and I am fairly geeky. If I’d ever known a decent dungeon master who had a good game going I would have played a lot more D&D I think. But somehow I never have, nor have I been to another con.
ThresherK
@OzarkHillbilly: Oh, that sounds like me. A “crowd” is a very small number to me, even when they’re lauding me and being supportive and I’m not doing something difficult.
My wife has this “bubble of ease” thing in crowds, no matter a party, convention, dance, or who is there (friends, wedding, near-mandatory function with work people she wouldn’t spend free time with otherwise, dinner party in which she knows two of fifteen attendees). She’s not the “life of the party” except when appropriate, but simply doesn’t get thrown by it.
That’s one reason I married her.
I, on the other hand, interfaced with ham radios when that meant vacuum tubes, keyboards when that meant IBM Selectric, and that continues to this day.
Yeah, I’m really fighting the stereotypes of engineer and social worker.
Randy P
@Randy P: However, I must say I love the sound of this show. Galaxy Quest is outrageously great and I’ll never get tired of watching it.
Phylllis
@Randy P: Rewatched it last night. A perfect blend of homage and gentle poking fun.
ThresherK
@Randy P: “I’m not [gonna die on this mission]? Then what’s my last name?”
Ohh, I’m a sucker for movies and TV that refer to the business of movies and TV, and Galaxy Quest is one of the best. If there were no cons, there’d be no Galaxy Quest. I will never go to a convention, but as a secondary effect I’ll be grateful that they exist.
greennotGreen
I’ve been to one SF convention:STTNG, and it was a mix of, “This is kind of fun,” and, “I think some of these people are kind of weird.” BUT I’ve been going to the same hobbyist convention every year since 1992, and it’s SO much fun because I get to hang out with all the friends I’ve made there. I wouldn’t be surprised if SF cons aren’t the same way, plus folks have an opportunity to get their cosplay on.
MomSense
@Randy P: @Phylllis:
I love that movie and just realized it has been too long since I’ve watched it.
Galaxy Quest and Mystery Men are two of my favorite homage/poking fun movies.
Phylllis
@MomSense: Galaxy Quest is on Netflix streaming. Now must rewatch Mystery Men. Add that to the list of Spring Break binge-watching.
K488
I’m appreciating Anne Laurie’s posting time. I should have waited an hour, until 9:26!
maurinsky
I’ve only been to one con, it was in Boston, years and years ago, and my now 17 year old daughter was maybe 4 or 5 – she was doing that thing where she was walking one way and looking another way, and she smashed right into Nichelle Nichols. So that’s a fun memory (we were there because a couple of cast members from Buffy the Vampire Slayer were there).
MomSense
@K488:
I definitely needed a second cup of coffee to get the math joke. It’s too damned early in the morning for math!
raven
There’s a star wars one here today. RUN AWAY,RUN AWAY. What a bunch of fucking dweebs!
http://www.ath-con.com/
jafd
Spent ten years on the committee of volunteers that planned and ran one of the country’s leading science fiction conventions – not just TV and movies, but the black-marks-on-wood-pulp stuf, too.
Bunch of brilliant people involved in the grunt work, but sometimes wished I could have gotten a time-and-age-regression machine, taken them back for a summer of Remedial Little League.
Anyway, will put Ms. Laurie on our email list, so mayhaps ’twill be a BJ get together in the ConSuite this fall.
Happy Pi Day, everyone !
FridayNext
Although I like both of these actors and most of their roles (not a big Castle fan) but I always thought Tudyk was the better actor, or at least has the more interesting career and has played more varied roles. (He was Steve the Pirate!!) Fillion always seems to be a version of Mal. If the goal is becoming a celebrity, Fillion wins. If the goal is being a good actor with a varied career, I’d give it to Tudyk. But they are both still young and I look forward to seeing them both in lots of stuff, so it ain’t over.
donnah
I am a huge fan of Firefly, and I am really excited to hear that they’re going to produce another show with some of my favorite characters. There was great chemistry among the actors on Firefly and I look forward to seeing what the new series has to offer.
Scott Peterson
@Tommy:
I have not been to a con. Kind of sure I might not at first glance fit in.
Everyone fits in at a comic book convention these days. Seriously, if you have any interest at all, check one out. (Except the San Diego Comic-Con — that one’s nuts and crazy hard to get into.)
zippity
I have a friend that helps with all the Walker Stalker cons. She flies all over the country. I’m planning on being a volunteer for the next one in Chicago. Since I’ve never been to a Con, it should be interesting. I love the idea of Con Man-and Seth Green. Just contributed. Thanks for posting this.
TaMara (BHF)
Never been to a Con, but loved Firefly (almost anything Joss Whedon – except Dollhouse), so I was in on this fund raiser early. And now we’ll be having a watch party when the series is released online in July.
I have geeky friends. ;-)
Citizen_X
@FridayNext:
Huh? As in the last season of Buffy, where he played a demon thinly disguised as an evangelical preacher, or in Much Ado About Nothing, where he played the buffoonish captain of the guard?
(And ok, I’m staying in the Wheedonverse, which tells you my perspective.)
Hunter
I have an acquaintance who couldn’t understand why Fox cancelled Firefly after one season. I ran across a comment that made it crystal clear: “It was a very intelligent series.”
Robert Sneddon
I used to average about a dozen SF conventions a year, I’m down to two or three now. I did sit down a while back and try to work out exactly how many I’ve been to in my life, I gave up counting when I reached about two hundred or so.
I don’t do TV/film media conventions, the ones where they wheel paid-for celebrities onto the stage and there are escalating privilege tickets (front-row seating, Meet the Stars etc.) sold to attendees. The cons I go to have members instead and the guests are on an honorarium and expenses rather than working for a paycheck.
I spent a few hundred hours of unpaid time working on the 2014 Worldcon[1] in London, before during and after. I paid my money to go to this event and work my socks off just like I’ve worked every other Worldcon I’ve ever been to, from San Francisco to Yokohama. And I’ve enjoyed every single minute of it.
I don’t have a problem with crowds, luckily — I’ve done the Tokyo Comiket twice now and I’m really tempted to go back again some time; the last one I was at had a total membership of 550,000 over the three days it was open.
[1]The Worldcon is a good example of a not-a-media convention. I ran into George RR Martin a few times during the weekend there, not a surprise as George is a regular at Worldcons. He wasn’t a guest though, just a member like me. He was on a few panels and spent a lot of his time hanging out in the fan bar, well apart from doing assorted media interviews and the like. He wouldn’t be at a media convention unless someone was paying him to be there and he wouldn’t be able to just hang out because he’d be the focus of attention of people who had paid good money to see him. See also “Pratchett, Terry, Sir” who was a fan and a familiar face at cons long before he got to be famous.
ruemara
I hated Firefly, yet enjoyed Serenity, which makes me an anomaly of a Whedonverse fan. However, I’ll check this out, since it wasn’t the actors fault I hated the show. It just didn’t click with me. Everyone gave great performances. Also, if we decide on a Balloon Juice SDCC meet up, that’s cool too.
MBunge
I hope at least one episode of the series deals with the evolution/devolution from comic cons, sci-fi cons and the like to pop culture cons like Wizard runs all over the country.
Mike
nfh
Aw, rich Hollywood celebrities want ordinary people to give them money for a vanity project. How cute !
Yatsuno
@ruemara: Soonergrunt will be there. You might want to drop him an e-mail to see if something can be organised. And perhaps a few from the LA crowd can be bovvered to voyage downward as well.
@nfh: Alan Tudyk is many things. Rich is not one of them. He’s just had a bit more success than the average actor in LA.
Citizen_X
@nfh: Rich? You think actors at that level are Brangelina or something?
Luthe
@maurinsky: My friend had something similar happen to her at a WorldCon. She wasn’t looking where she was going, walked around a blind corner, and ran straight into a nice older gentleman wearing a hat.
She found herself apologizing profusely to (dear departed) Terry Pratchett.
yodecat
@Hunter: You’re right.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
Alan Tudyk has become to Disney Animation what John Ratzenberg became to Pixar — a good luck charm who always does a voice in the animated features. Sometimes he’ll do a big part (like the villain in “Wreck-It Ralph”) and sometimes he’ll do a small part (like the tech mogul in “Big Hero 6.”) He’s a very versatile voice actor — in “WIR” he did a dead-on impression of Ed Wynn, who among other things was the voice of the Mad Hatter in the Disney version of “Alice in Wonderland.”
Bobby B
“The hell you sayin’? WASH IS KIN!”
TaMara (BHF)
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Frozen, the villainous and annoying Duke.
Marcus
@Scott Peterson: I gave up on San Diego after Watchmen came out, and have been attending the Phoenix one since 2005 or so. Much better (IMHO), since it has plenty of space to expand into as it grows, unlike San Diego. Only issue some would have is that it is in Phoenix at the beginning of Summer (but it’s a dry heat!).
gwangung
@nfh: Aw, how cute….another ignorant twit shows his cluelessness about production and actors.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@TaMara (BHF):
I usually think of him as the Duke of Red Herring, since he never really does anything particularly harmful. That character is also one of the purveyors of the “Arrested Development” references in the movie — he does a chicken dance like the Bluth kids did to taunt each other.
nfh
@gwangung: You’re welcome.
FridayNext
@Citizen_X:
He just is always himself, or his public persona that I expect, and I never ever forget I am watching Nathan Fillion usually doing a quippy alpha-male character. With Tudyk there are times I am not even sure it’s him until I look up the credits, especially his animated work. I just think he is the more talented actor where Fillion is the more charismatic celebrity. I like them both.
maeve
Dollhouse is deeply flawed but for me the two “epitaphs” make up for it – especially the second when Tudyck as “Alpha” does a 180 – before that he was a standard psychotic serial killer which was a good job in the role but I am bored by standard psychotic serial killers (in tv/movies – in real life I’m sure I wouldn’t be bored).
Firefly is also flawed – mostly by the insistance on standard plots- the crew were great but then they’d do the Train Job or hootenanies etc. – I love Jayne though and hope Adam Baldwin can be in Con Man – Serenity made up for it especially with the character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Trinity
I am so excited about this! I can’t donate though because I gave what little extra money I have to “Exploding Kittens” kickstarter last month.
Go Browncoats.
maeve
@maeve:
Replying to my own post because I couldn’t edit:
Also in Dollhouse i loved the character Victor played by Enver Gjokaj (now appearing in Agent Carter) and Sierra played by Dichen Lachman (now appearing in Agents of Shield)
The main actress playing Echo was actually the least interesting.
(For those who didn’t see the series it had a group of mind-wiped characters who were given names from the series Alpha, Bravo… , Echo l.. Sierra …Victor, etc.)
And, yes, I’m a geek – impatiently waiting for new episodes of Agents of Shield, Agent Carter and for Age of Ultron to come out …
Tehanu
I’ve been to a few cons but they weren’t my thing even when I was younger, and now that my hard-of-hearing-ness is becoming actual deafness, even less so. Which is not to say they aren’t worth going to, if you want to meet writers and hear them talk, especially in panels, or even just in the bar afterwards. I met Tim Powers that way once and he couldn’t have been nicer, and it was a real thrill.
OTOH there are cons where “con” is really the operative word — where you pay thru the nose for the “privilege” of waiting in line for hours to see celebrities and the vast majority of the activities are simply conning you out of large amounts of money for grossly overpriced tat.
Groucho48
Back in the mid-70’s to mid-80’s, I did maybe 6-8 cons a year. Mostly medium sized regional Cons. Had a ball. They were very much book oriented, with a movie room that showed corny 50’s S-F movies and maybe a pirate Rocky Horror. The attendees were hyper, intelligent, verbal, obsessed and immensely observable. Most were completely absorbed in the milieu. From driving to the Con early Friday, to arriving back home late Sunday, most folks would have totaled about 6-8 hours of sleep and a gallon or so of alcohol. Intense conversations about, say, Little Fuzzy, from a talk about cute animals, to intelligence, to what is a human, to kittens, to philosophy, to science stuff as portrayed in the book, to religion, to kittens, to other books with cute animals and whether they had souls and such, to Heinlein’s Willis the Bouncer and whether he was a distant kin of the Fuzzies, to Heinlein in general, to S-F in general, etc., etc., all in a floating group of four or five people all of whom knew all the S-F references being thrown around. And, then the group would drift around and you’d encounter another intense conversation revolving around, say, the Pern books and the same kind of thing would happen.
In the days before the Internet, for S-F fans, who usually felt isolated from the folks around them…It is a proud and lonely thing to be a fan… S-F Cons were a revelation and a paradise. Not to mention, this was about the same time fem fans were increasing in numbers, which was another remarkably wonderful thing for nerdy guys like me.
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
It’s amazing to see the difference between the experience of old-school, fan-run not-for-profit science fiction conventions for people who actually read the stuff (as Sneedon describes) and the sort of bloated, for-profit, media-oriented commercial shows that some people have been misled to believe are SF conventions.
Easy ways to tell:
Do they sell tickets, or offer memberships?
Do they emphasize the actors who will be there, or the writers?
Are they operated by some chain or corporation headquartered out of state, or locally run and controlled by a non-profit club?
Your experience will vary enormously, according to which thing you are attending.