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| Jeff Schnaufer playing MetaCheckers in New Orleans, while wearing his Team Neelix T-shirt, 2016. |
I wanted to let the Star Trek community know we lost one of our own on Dec. 16. He may not be very well known, but his love of space, science, science fiction and Trek in particular was undeniable. His story may also give some perspective to those of you who wondered about that one episode where all of a sudden Neelix becomes a journalist.
Jeff Schnaufer and I met in 1993 in the newsroom of the Los Angeles Times in Chatsworth where we had been hired as community reporters covering the San Fernando Valley.
He was an explorer. He loved going to new places, meeting new people, finding out new things. He
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| Jeffrey A. Schnaufer July 28, 1964 - December 16, 2022 |
loved astronomy, and he loved Star Trek, again because it was a show about going to new places, meeting new people, learning new things.
One day, Jeff landed an interview with one of the producers of a new show coming out, Star Trek: Voyager. At the end of the interview with Jeri Taylor, he said, “You know, you never have journalism on the show.”
She replied, “You’re right, and I’m a former journalist. We should have journalism in there somehow. Tell you what, if you come up with an idea, give us a call.”
When Jeff told me this later, I begged him to let me work with him on the idea. I loved Star Trek too, and I had written spec scripts for Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.
He could have gone alone with this, if he wanted to. But we partnered up and spent hours and hours tossing around ideas about how to bring journalism into the show.
We went into our first pitch meeting with Jeri Taylor and it did not go well. None of our ideas worked, but Jeri was kind and gave us useful feedback. She invited us to come back.
Jeff and I went back to tossing around ideas, rehashing them, turning them over and over trying to find good stories. We needed 3-4 stories that could be pitched within a couple of minutes each. One night, we stood outside in the parking lot after work and it seemed like we were getting close on a couple of concepts, and then decided to stop for the night.
He got into his car and drove away, but then he turned around and drove back into the lot. He pulled up to me, rolled down his window and said: “Neelix starts a newspaper.”
We pitched that idea and 3 others to Jeri Taylor and that was the one that got traction. At the end of the meeting, I asked her, “Where were you a journalist?”
“Oh it was some little newspaper you probably never heard of, The Blooming Herald … “
“Telephone!” I said to complete the name. I’d gone to journalism school at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Jeri Taylor is from Indiana, and I dare say this is also why Bloomington became the birthplace of Captain Janeway.
The fact that I knew the Bloomington Herald Telephone (Now the Herald Times, I believe) helped end the meeting on a high note.
Later, Jeff and I were invited to another meeting to discuss in more detail how this idea of Neelix as a journalist would fit into the show. The meeting was with Jeri Taylor, Michael Piller, Brannon Braga, Ken Biller and Lisa Klink. As I recall, Brannon Braga was not excited about the idea. He said journalism was too passive, but Jeri and Michael were still on board.
Michael also had some journalism background and an appreciation for the role of journalism in history. He talked about a time when JFK made a deal to give a journalist a story, but only with the promise that it would not be used until after the crisis had passed. (Possibly Cuba missile crisis?) From that, he eventually hit on the idea: “Neelix finds out someone on the ship wants to leave.”
Then Jeri gave us our assignment to write a short treatment of the story. The day that we turned it in, my fiance Amy was working as a bartender at the Sonora Cafe at La Brea and Third. As she worked the bar, she kept overhearing a couple of guys tossing around a lot of Star Trek terms. It turns out it was Ken Biller. She told him who I was. “Oh yes, I just got their treatment in my mailbox. They had a lot of ideas. That’s what they need to do.”
The final version of the episode was very different from what we had written. That’s not too surprising. Jeri Taylor wrote the script with credit to Jeff and I as co-writers for the story. The idea of someone leaving the ship had become a multi-episode story arc in which Tom Paris appears to become disgruntled with things and leaves. But the core of the idea that Jeff came up with in that parking lot was still there. This is why I insisted that when the credits were officially approved that Jeff’s name should be ahead of mine.
We were invited to the studio when the episode was being filmed. They gave us a tour of the sets. I remember visiting sickbay (That text in the background you can never read is actually song lyrics). We stood on the transporter pad together, which is probably one of the coolest things a Trek fan could do. Then we watched a scene being filmed.
Jeff and I stood off to the side of the set for Janeway’s ready room in a scene with Neelix, Janeway and Chacotay. (Stay out of Kate Mulgrew’s line of sight, we were asked. It would throw her off. Understandable!)
“I want to meet Neelix,” Jeff said during the break. So we went over to chat with Ethan Philips at the craft services table. It was dimly lit, and I was thrown off because his yellow contact lenses seemed to glow in the dark.
“You wrote this episode?” he said. “Oh, I’ve been having a lot of fun with it!”
It was a story in which Neelix got to do a lot of things he never got to do, even playing the hero and defeating the villain. It was also the episode in which the future king of Jordan had a cameo. (We didn’t meet him tho.)
In March 1996, we held a watch party at Webers Grill in Reseda with our friends and colleagues from the L.A. Times. A cheer went up when our names popped up on the screen. My share of the money helped Amy and I afford our wedding in Upstate New York that summer.
Jeff and I kept talking about Star Trek ideas. Having sold an episode, we had an open door with Voyager, and we pitched ideas throughout its seven year run. We weren’t pitching journalism ideas anymore, that had run its course. We kept trying to come up with cool sci fi ideas that also got at the core of telling a character’s story. Meanwhile, as a journalist, Jeff would also keep scoring interviews with actors in the Star Trek world.
After one meeting in the Hart building on the Paramount lot, Jeff and I stepped out of the building and he spotted someone just as they stepped out of the building across the way. “Hey, I know that guy!” he shouted. And the fellow came over to chat with us. It was someone he had interviewed.
Jeff turns to me and says, “This is my friend, Ed.” We shook hands and walked along together for a little while, talking about the upcoming film “Star Trek: First Contact.”
I can be a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but finally it dawned on me – “Holy Crap. It’s Riker!” Jonathan Frakes was very nice and he told us they had just approved the movie poster for First Contact, which he directed.
Ultimately we ended up selling only the one story for “Investigations.” For a Star Trek fan, it’s the best memorabilia you could have, a bound copy of the Star Trek script with our names on the front page. I also get a residual check every few months. It comes in a big green envelope from the Writers Guild and my family always plays a game guessing how big the check is, usually in the $10 to $20 range.
But my friendship with Jeff was more than journalism, more than Star Trek. We both enjoyed standing in front of young people and explaining why and how journalists work. So, we both became community college journalism professors. We also helped launch a newspaper together in Santa Monica.
In 2001, Amy and I moved back to Upstate New York to be close to her family after we had our first child, but Jeff and I stayed in touch. We talked on the phone just about every week, texted and emailed. When they became available, we each got “Team Neelix” T-shirts and called ourselves that. He was my biggest cheerleader in every endeavor. Most recently, he helped me write a book about canine distemper and he encouraged me as I developed my board games MetaCheckers, When Gods Collide and Puzzle Board Chess.
This is what I had to say about him in the acknowledgements in the back of the book:
On the day he died, Jeff had gone to Pyramid Lake north of Los Angeles and rented a boat by himself. Somehow, while driving the boat slowly in second gear, he had some sort of medical problem, went into the water and died. Other people at the lake noticed the boat going slowly in circles without anyone at the helm, and this prompted a search which found his body that afternoon.
His wife and son were not able to reach me until the next day. Since then, I have had to adjust to life without my friend, fellow writer and Star Trek fan.
