Transcript Episode 4: Comikaze 2014 — Huston Huddleston & Hollywood Sci-Fi Museum
Intro music.
Angie: Welcome to Geek Out with Angie Fiedler Sutton, an ongoing discussion on geeky topics.
In this episode, we continue the coverage of Stan Lee’s Comikaze, 2014 Edition. This interview was with Huston Huddleston, the founder of the Hollywood Sci-Fi Museum, scheduled to open in 2015. I asked him what made him decide to start this adventure.
Huston: Well, this whole thing began because I rescued the bridge of the Enterprise from “Star Trek,” the “Next Generation bridge” and the original series bridge, and that began two years and two months ago.
Angie: And what prompted — I mean, you rescued it, but what made you go, “I should turn this into a museum?”
Huston: When we started on this thing, I discovered two things: A, not enough people cared about just rescuing the bridges and restoring them .… I mean, there were Trekkies, yeah, but on a bigger level, you couldn’t get sci-fi fans just in general, in bulk come and say, “Yes, I want to support this.” And more importantly, you couldn’t get the millionaires, billionaires to support it.
Huston: And the other big part of this is there’s no permanent location that would have allowed the two bridges that we had and let people do what we wanted, which was to have people sit in the Captain’s chair, to play with the computers, to actually eventually work real computers on the “Next Generation” bridge and learn from it and fly a mission and all this stuff. And we realized the only way to do this is to create our own museum.
Angie: How do you define science fiction?
Huston: Science fiction, in the literary term, is the future of what our technology can be. In my view of this, starting this museum, it’s really giving people a chance and an opportunity to be whoever they want to be, and I think that’s really important. Because we’re going to allow cosplay in our museum. There’s no museum in the world that allows cosplay, or if they do they just poopoo it, or what have you. We encourage it. We want people to show their creativity, to show their inspiration, and to me, that’s what sci-fi is. There are other genres, yeah, okay, (laughs) but sci-fi is so much more of a positive thing. There are many more genres of sci-fi that you can incorporate it in, whether you’re a costume maker, whether you’re a writer, artist, director, writer, CG artist, costuming — you know, whatever it is, it can all go into that niche and be very, very positive.
Angie: And will the museum incorporate things like horror and fantasy, which are sometimes incorporated with science fiction but sometimes aren’t?
Huston: Yes. We will incorporate all those areas of interest in talent into our sci-fi museum because we’re in the middle of Hollywood. We can do that. We can bring basically any star we want, any prosthetic company we want into our museum because it’s around the corner, really. And yeah, I want to do it and we can do it. We can teach filmmaking, we can teach the art of how these films are made. That makes it to me. So, you got both levels: you got the fan mentality, and you got the “I want to be in this business mentality,” and whatever you’re interested in, all of it will be in our museum.
Angie: If someone is not interested in science fiction, why would they come to this museum?
Huston: People don’t have to be “fans” of sci fi. They don’t have to be crazy sci-fi fans. That’s not what this is about. The overall vision is making the world a better place, and that’s the tie-in with real science. That’s the ti-in with my meeting with NASA, and two NASA board members — I’ve got Cady Coleman, who’s an astronaut. I’ve got a woman who’s in charge of the interactivity at NASA. Both are board members, along with Rick Sternbach and Ronald D. Moore, who produced “Battlestar Galactica” and all these people. Namedrop city, but damn it, I’m gonna name drop because it’s incredible we got these people! It’s astonishing! We came from nothing! We had no millions of dollars. We didn’t have Elon Musk on our board of directors. It’s some little schmucky fans like me coming in and creating this thing in two years, and we’re creating a museum that’s unheard of. It’s incredible.
Angie: And you’re hoping to open March 2015.
Huston: We’re hoping open at the end of 2015 if we get the millions that we need. If not, then it will be in 2016. But it will happen because we’ve just got too much going for us to not make it happen.
Outro music.
And that’s Geek Out’s latest take on Stan Lee’s Comikaze, 2014 Edition. Next round is an interview with a member of the R2-D2 Builders Club with obligatory interview with R2-D2 included. Stay tuned to Sci-Fi For Me for more coverage of the 2014 Comikaze Expo.
Thanks for listening to Geek Out with Angie Fiedler Sutton. The theme song is “Schoolyard Haze” by Jari Pitkanen, available via the Free Music Archive. The podcast is recorded in partnership with Sci-Fi For Me Radio and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Links for more information on all this are available on angiefsutton.com.