Every great Hollywood career has an odd first chapter. For the man who shepherded Star Trek through four television series and four feature films, it involved both a fly and a Beatle.
On Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny, the podcast hosted by Star Trek: The Next Generation stars Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes, producer Rick Berman told the story of his strangest job. When one of the hosts said there was a name he was “dying to hear dropped,” Berman delivered: John Lennon.
“I did a movie, in fact, I did two movies with John Lennon,” Berman said. These weren’t Beatles films, he explained, but “little crazy movies that he made with Yoko.” The main one was Fly, an experimental film in which a single fly crawls across a nude model, shot with extreme close-up lenses.
“I was given the task of catching the flies,” he said.
Lennon and Yoko Ono shot the film in December 1970 in a loft on the Bowery in New York. Berman, then 25, approached the job with a plan. “First we went to a pet store and bought some fish nets,” he recalled, before heading to a Horn & Hardart automat to ask for cups with lids and permission to search the basement.
“You figured there’d be flies anywhere in New York City in the basement,” he said. “And we caught about six flies and put them each one per coffee cup. And then we brought it down to the Bowery where we were shooting this… and they lived through the trip down on a subway.”
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The flies were then sedated with carbon dioxide. “They would put the fly on the girl, and the fly would walk for a good two minutes before it would fly away,” Berman said.
One of the hosts had a verdict. “I’m telling you, Rick, no wonder you got Star Trek.”
Berman spent two days on set with the couple. “We worked for two days with John and Yoko and a film crew,” he said. “Good time was had by all.”
The story had a sequel. About four years later, Berman was on a date with a British woman at a production of The Threepenny Opera at Lincoln Center when someone tapped him on the shoulder at intermission. It was Ono, with Lennon beside her. “She didn’t remember my name,” Berman said. “She said, ‘The fly guy. You’re the fly guy.’”
“You can imagine what it’s like to be on a date with an English girl and to have John and Yoko tap you on the shoulder to say hi,” he added.
A decade later, Berman joined Paramount, where Gene Roddenberry chose him to help launch The Next Generation in 1987 featuring Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. He went on to run the franchise for 18 years, overseeing what the hosts tallied as 624 episodes of television.
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