In Year-End YouTube Videos, Robert Meyer Burnett Promises to Release Axanar Feature Script, Footage

It’s been four and a half years since Prelude to Axanar and the Vulcan Scene, exactly three years since the copyright lawsuit was filed and almost two years since that suit was settled. As AxaMonitor prepared for its 2018 Top 10 Axanar Stories retrospective, we were scrounging to find as many as 10 big stories. That all changed on December 29 and 31, 2018, with two YouTube live chats in which former Axanar director Robert Meyer Burnett took producer Alec Peters to task for failing to produce the two 15-minute Axanar short films in the nearly two years since the lawsuit settlement in January 2017.

BURNETT SAID the live chats were prompted by threatened lawsuits from Peters alleging Burnett had stolen Axanar property and that the former director owed Peters $30,000 the producer had spent buying Burnett a new car and paying his rent and expenses.

Burnett resigned from the project in November 2017, and had largely remained quiet about Axanar. Throughout 2018, however, rumors began to swirl about escalating financial disagreements heading toward possible litigation between the two former collaborators.

Burnett said he spent thousands of dollars to get Peters’ lawyers to back off until finally Burnett’s business partner sent him a copy of an email in which Peters “threatened to ruin my reputation and destroy my career.”

In the first broadcast Burnett announced he was publicly releasing the final shooting version of the Axanar feature screenplay, completed by him and writer Bill Hunt, who also left the project in 2017; the script was to have been a perk delivered to Axanar donors. Burnett said he and Hunt believed donors deserved to finally see at least the screenplay they had paid for.

Both nearly two-hour broadcasts began with a statement from Burnett, followed by a fair amount of time answering viewers’ questions, including discussing Peters’ fateful decision to build his own film studio before producing Axanar and wondering why it’s taken four years to deliver the project’s thousands of donors their promised perks.

Meanwhile, Peters began drumming up support from his Facebook followers by repeating his allegations against Burnett without naming him. His followers dutifully heaped condemnation against the unnamed object of Peters’ scorn — all of which only served to encourage Burnett to conduct his second live chat.

Without knowing Peters appeared to refer to Burnett, Peters’ followers condemned the unnamed subject as “dead man walking,” “worthless waste of skin,” “the winner of a one-way trip out the airlock of your life,” and his alleged actions as “the betrayal itself is a form of criminality.”

Peters’ public rants spurred Axanar’s spokesman and longtime counselor, public relations professional Mike Bawden, to plead with his client to refrain from airing such grievances publicly, particularly given the pending litigation:

Peters’ other PR adviser, Morey Altman, echoed Bawden: “Using the public forum to vent those frustrations only plays into the hands of those who want to ridicule you and Axanar.”³⁾

Peters refused his friends’ professional counsel: “So allow one side of the story? Allow him to lie and defame me? No defense? Just take it? … I’m going to end this in court and then let everyone know this lying thief screwed us all. … The lawyers feel it is a great case. And frankly I am sick of those who make excuses for him and enable his bad behavior.”⁴⁾

By the next day, as he has regularly done on Facebook with comments he doesn’t like, Peters deleted both Bawden’s and Altman’s advice.

RMB comes across as honest and sincere and he pulls no punches regarding the fact that his motivation for coming forward, now, is in response to Alec contacting his business partner and telling him that he intends to destroy his reputation and ruin his life. It’s clear that he’s felt Alec was a useless sack for A LONG TIME, but like Christian Gossett, held his tongue out of courtesy until Alec made it personal.

The recurring theme of his criticism is the observation that Peters has produced nothing in the two years since the lawsuit settled and that he believes that the donors deserve the film they paid for.

He also makes a point to repeatedly mention that Jonathan Lane is a sycophant but the weird part is how polite he is about it. I don’t know how he managed to pull it off, but he did.

He also confirms what others involved in the production have relayed.

Also, he makes a compelling case (that I and others have made before) that if you’re going to hire professionals to work on your fan film, they need to be paid for their work, even if it is a fan film. There’s a huge difference between a production like Axanar and something that, for example, Vance Major Owen produces (no offense, Vance). So, without further ado…

5:51 - Rob debunks Alec’s claim that he had to come in and direct Prelude and should have gotten a co-director credit. Note, this is just the first comment in a pattern of comments praising ALL of the professionals who worked on Prelude and Axanar.

9:10 - Rob acknowledges he was hammered in the editing bay confirming Christian’s claim.

13:05 - Rob (like Christian) blames Alec’s ego for when Axanar went off the rails when Alec, rather the retain the team that made Prelude so successful, wanted to assume control and more authority, but the problem was that he had never made anything BUT Prelude before. So, to sum up, Axanar went off the rails immediately after Prelude premiered as Christian had indicated.

14:35 - (SPOILER ALERT) Alec didn’t hire a production accountant.

15:27 - Tension between Christian and Alec developed because Christian believed money was not going to the film and on top of that, Alec was marginalizing his production team (y’know — the team that made Prelude). I forgot to timestamp this one, I just loved the quote: “They don’t need press, they don’t need adulation. You know why? Because we already know what we made is good. We don’t need anyone to tell us it’s good. We already know.”

26:36 - Rob praises the work of Dean Newberry and Dominic Parry in constructing the sets for Axanar and laments (annoyed) that the transporter set being cut into pieces and destroyed because they were too difficult to move. Dean actually told me that this happened and he’s still furious about it.

31:58 - Alec’s Garth was a Mary Sue in the script he wrote. This is something we already knew but it was nice to hear. Rob and Bill Hunt completely rewrote Alec’s script because it was so awful.

35:34 - Alec would look at Rob with blank stares when Rob would discuss the character development of Garth. With all discussions like this, he would put his head down after two minutes and just tune out.

36:09 - It was clear to Rob after going to acting classes with Alec that he didn’t have the chops to carry a feature film.

37:04 - Alec doesn’t understand how casting directors work and didn’t like the professional casting director Rob brought in. Also, there were several actors cast before the lawsuit.

Speaking of quotes that I ❤️…

“37:26 “What the fuck do you know about producing ANYTHING?”

38:35 - Beginning in October of 2015, Rob was paid $3K per month to direct Axanar full-time. This contradicts Alec claim that he only paid him $5K in total in the annual report, IIRC. When the lawsuit hit, Alec felt that he could just stop paying him.

39:00 - The lawsuit destroyed Rob’s professional relationship with CBS and kept Free Enterprise from being released on Blu-ray.

40:00 - Loved working with John Van Citters. Says no one knows more about Trek at CBS than him, he deserved his promotion. Repeats his praise near the end of the video.

46:10 - The money was drying up when the lawsuit broke. This, of course, contradicts Peters claims that the lawsuit cost fans $500K but we already knew this.

~48:00 - Unloads on Alec for not producing anything in two years.

51:20 - Alec threatened to sue him.

52:00 - “That’s Alec Peters, that’s what he does. Rather than make Axanar, rather than make his two 15-minute films, he’d rather come sue me.”

52:19 - Peters attorney “quit” when asked for evidence of Peters’ claims.

52:45 - Alec sent an email telling Rob’s business partner that he wants to destroy Rob’s reputation and ruin his life.

53:21 - Announces release of 90 minute documentary that includes everything he shot. “…more than Peters has given donors in two years.”

54:35 - He’s going to release Peters’ acting class performance of Nathan Jessup from a A Few Good Men. 😂 Interestingly enough, like the outtakes we released, this has Peters more worried than anything as he has already publicly threatened to sue Rob on Twitter over it.

Hey, Axafants… check this part out. Looks like Rob had a solution to the studio rent problem but like everything else, #TehKeeperOfTehFaith and. #IAmSuccess let his ego get in the way and fucked that up, too.

1:01:41 - “I brought in a group that was going to take over the studio, trick it out so they could shoot live things there… I was going to make some decent money… I brought this in through a friend of mine. Then Alec told me I couldn’t make those kind of decisions, TOOK IT OVER, and that deal went away. To this day, I don’t know what happened to that.”

1:05:29 - Rips into sycophantic Jonathan Lane re: the TrekZone debate. Calls him a sycophant multiple times. At one point near the end, Lane pretends to have left the live chat and says “What did I miss?” and without missing a beat, Rob recaps him on what a sycophant he is. 😂

1:11:28 - After the Vulcan scene, they should have been shooting segments every weekend and he doesn’t know why they weren’t.

1:18:26 - “When Alec sues people, it once again puts Alec at the center of attention. He can go after people and feel like he’s doing something rather than actually — y’know — PRODUCE THE WORK THAT HE’S BEEN PAID TO PRODUCE BY HIS DONORS.”

1:21:47 - “I’ve never met a lazier human being who expected to be a movie producer. I really haven’t.”

1:22:48 - Takes the blame (on behalf of Axanar) for Tommy Kraft not being able to make his follow-up to Horizon.

1:26:50 - “Jonathan Lane… he’s a rubbernecker.”

1:27:10 - “Alec did nothing to alleviate anyone’s fears during that lawsuit. Never. He also hasn’t thanked people for standing by him all that time… he just sues them.”

Also points out that Alec reveled in the lawsuit because of how much attention it got him.

Additional reporting by Shawn O’Halloran