Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Randy Landers

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Media Fandom Oral History Project Interview with Randy Landers
Interviewer:	Megan Genovese
Interviewee:	Randy Landers
Date(s):	August 20, 2017
Medium:	aural, transcript
Fandom(s):
External Links:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

In 2017, Randy Landers was interviewed by Megan Genovese as part of the Media Fandom Oral History Project.

Interview length: 1:26:47.

The Media Fandom Oral History Project is supported by the Organization for Transformative Works, the organizers of Escapade conventions, and the University of Iowa Libraries. For more information about the origins of this interview, where it is housed, contact information, suggestions regarding future interviewee candidates, and how to become volunteer interviewer or transcriber, see the Media Fandom Oral History Project page.

Some Topics Discussed

• getting hooked on Star Trek during the original airing and by reading Star Trek Lives!
• Randy wrote his first published fic in 1979 when he was 17, began publishing his zine Stardate when he was 18; he used some of the money he was given as a high school graduation present to publish the first two issues of that zine
• being very grateful to an aunt who gave him a free Olivetti Editor typewriter, despite the fact it had a rogue key "E"
• never being very satisfied with his own fiction and artwork, and feeling his talents lay in helping others create theirs via editing and publishing
• the fan film Potemkin, and other fan films he has created, many of which are on Vimeo and YouTube and are shown at various conventions
• only having one fanfic submission in four years, and he turned that into a film instead of a story in print
• the pleasant irony of having Joan Winston (one of the Big Name Fans fans who'd gotten Randy into fandom) edit one of Orion Press' zines, Number One while using the pseud "Wynn Jones"
• the statement that when Randy began publishing zines in 1979, that every Trek zine was a slash zine
• real life consequences due to having one's real name out there in the wild, and how that can be used against you
• Rick Berman and Brannon Braga and their ruination of Trek, and how ceasing his publication for zines that were not Classic Trek was a good decision: "I made the right decision. So you've never regretted that decision at all. The only thing I regret is that I lost a lot of friends. I really did. But you know what I'd do it again. That's what's sad is I would do it again, stand by your decision, right or wrong."

Excerpts

I was buying the books, from Bantam Books religiously whenever one of them came out . And Joanie and Jacqueline Lichtenberg wrote a wonderful thing about people writing their own fan fiction and I'm like, Ooh, I want to do that... I had always written my own little stories in the notebook. A three ring three ring binder. I started submitting to Roberta Rogow at Grip in '77 and in 1979, I started publishing my own fanzines. [My first published story] was probably "The Planet of Death" and Roberta published it. I wrote a couple of others things in Grip...it was in Grip #4. Roberta was really sweet, a sweet woman. I originally submitted a story to Jacqueline, no, it was Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath for Star Trek New Voyages. And they rejected me, and told me to write for fan fiction, write for a fanzine. And I contacted Roberta and she says, "Oh, you're going from the sublime to the ridiculous." And she accepted my story. Wonderful.

I read a fanzine article that was online about Paragon, a fan film that these guys made and they were using cardboard set. And then I saw the starship Farragut episode. Um, and I said, you know, I could do that, and it was just like with the fanzines, remember I told you, I said, you know, I could do that and did it myself. I did the same thing with the fan films, and we're still producing one fan film a month. Actually, I am prolific.

We actually didn't stop publishing [all zines] in 2010. That was kind of a misinformation. I had stopped publishing The Next Generation. We stopped publishing Deep Space 9. We stopped publishing larger. We never published Enterprise. And we went back just to our Classic Trek. In 2013, I sold my business...

[snipped]

And somebody says, well, who do you blame? And I'm like, don't blame anybody. It just as a natural evolution of things, it's the internet. We'll have thousands of visitors to our website archive every year, every year. I mean I check it, it's been dropping, but you know, the Internet's changed. If I wanted to write a story right now, I could write it and post it and tens of thousands of people would read it. And boom, there you go. Now that the days of people wanting a physical fanzine, those people are diminishing number, I'm afraid.

I have never had an issue with Paramount or CBS ever. They have actually talked to me the conventions. One time a convention in Atlanta, they talked to me. Some state guys in Maryland said they wanted sales tax for zines that we sold... One time they wanted some official copy of something, and I sent them a copy. That was it. Never heard anything back from it. I really think people like to make CBS and Paramount into the devil but they're not; they're there to protect their interests and I can appreciate as a former businessman.

Star Trek Atlanta in 1977. William Shatner, Deforest Kelley. I want to say Jimmy Doohan, or maybe it was Walter who came one year. It was wonderful. Shatner was promoting his record, William Shatner "Live", and he gave a dramatic presentation from that record during his talk at the convention. Oh, my word. It was wonderful. God, that was wonderful. He was such a great performer onstage.

I was part of the Emory Science Fiction Fantasy Symposia in 1981, '82 and '83. And then we did a Draft Trek in 1985, and I was not the head honcho of draft trek. I was more of financial backer, and we lost a lot of money. I realized the conventions are just, they're not for the, not for the shallow pocketed. We rented a drafthouse, we leased Star Trek: Wrath of Khan and Star Trek: The Search for Spock. We had a guest, David Gerrold, and we had a hundred people there on Friday, and we had a dozen people on Saturday, and it was just killed. I mean, conventions are serious financial risks... and my wife, said, like, never again, I'm angry. So whenever I get the urge and people want me to put together a Star Trek fan film convention and I'm like, no, thank you. Yup. I'll let someone else do that.

I can appreciate slash I understand that. I understand the appeal. Um, some of it was very erotic. I rather enjoyed that aspect of it, but it's not something I felt comfortable publishing and moreso being in, uh, Albany, Georgia when I was -- when I was living in Atlanta was one thing. But living in Albany, Georgia, which is in the middle of the Bible belt, it's not exactly going to go over very well. "Local print shop manager is busted for publishing homoerotic fiction." That [headline] would not go over well. Now as far as the Kirk and Spock relationship being slash, I didn't see it. I still don't see it. I can read it. I have a collection of Susan James' fanzines, um, and our stories and you know, I'm very proud of those and, and very delighted to have them as part of my collection. But it's not something I would, I would publish. I don't think people realize how difficult certain markets would be to publish that until they live in that market. And then they might feel things are a little bit or see things a little differently.

[snipped]

I'm using my real name on everything we do. So if something is not acceptable, you know, I'm gonna get in trouble for it. There are real life consequences...

When I first got into fandom, it was 99 percent women, I mean, no doubt about it. Richard G. Pollet, Rick Endres myself, Bill Hupe, I can't name another publisher or editor that's a male. Oh, Jim Rondeau with Clipper Trade Ship, but you know, and it's because most of the fiction was relationship fiction. Men were wanting action adventure, and that's all it started. First thing we published was actually adventure. Somebody says, "oh, that's a good story, but there's nothing about the character on them." And I'm like, "OK, thanks." That was fine. That was a compliment. I heard it's a good story, and I mean we, we, we grabbed a hold of that, and held onto it and then later on our TNG zines had more relationships are modern Trek when had more relationships. There's very little relationship fiction when we started Orion, but the relationshippers, there's still a few.... you know, David Gerrold came out and trashed relationship fiction, which was odd, but whatever. And you know, the relationship fiction, I don't think it really exists all that much in fan films, while there's a lot of it's still online, it's less and less every year. I mean, I go and look. I'm a big Kirk/Uhura, by the way. And the right Kirk/Spock story will be interesting to me...

I would love to see a resurgence by the way of fanzines. I really would. But with the Internet being so prevalent, I just don't think it'll ever happen. Maybe. Maybe one day. Yeah. Well, I'm probably the only guy who still takes a book into the bathtub with me instead of a phone.

Editing is the most unappreciated thing, but trust me, your most important thing. I wish to God that every, I wish to God that the Internet had light before we can publish your story. We must have edited. But I don't want the editor to be, you know, rewriting the story. I want the editor to just please fix these problems. And you know, people don't seem to be. There are the programs that do that too, by the way, but people don't seem to use them.

Get out there and create something if it's not Star Trek, than then finally find what it is and create and have fun. ... I met a man who was just so sad because he's approaching the end of his life and he's done nothing with it than he was lamenting the fact that he'd always wanted to write and they never had the time and now it's to the point he can't. He's got Parkinson's and the shaking so badly, he can't even type, he's going to go to his grave with regrets. Don't be that person.