Last night at a program designed to let aspiring screenwriters hear from professional working screenwriters, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci — the scribes of the upcoming "Star Trek" movie directed by J.J. Abrams — spoke about their creative process on projects such as last year's "Mission: Impossible III," "Transformers" — which opens on July 4th — and the as-yet-untitled "Trek" film, scheduled for release on Christmas Day 2008.

It was part of "The Dialogue Series," held in Santa Monica at a commercial workspace for writers called "theOffice." The session with Kurtzman & Orci was moderated by Jay A. Fernandez of the Los Angeles Times who writes a weekly column called "Scriptland."

Below are a few excerpts from that session, such as Kurtzman's remark that getting a greenlight from Paramount on the new "Star Trek" movie a mere day after delivering the script was one of the most satisfying experiences of the pair's career, and how other scripts as diverse as "The Insider" have provided inspiration for certain emotional moments in "Trek."

But in our own conversations with the guys before and after the program, we did confirm a few items: One, their script for the next "Star Trek" film is "pretty much locked," Orci said; two, filming will start in November; and three, they're planning to be in attendance at the San Diego Comic-Con in July, along with "Trek" producers Abrams, Damon Lindelof and probably Bryan Burk, at the Paramount panel on Thursday of that weekend, to make whatever announcement they're ready to make by that time.

Another refreshing tidbit that came up when we spoke with them was the degree of research they delved into for the "Star Trek" project — Orci even commented that they keep Michael & Denise Okuda's "Star Trek Encyclopedia" and "Star Trek Chronology" within reach on their desk at all times. Even though the script is essentially finished, they are still deeply involved in the project and will be throughout production because they are also serving as executive producers.

During the session, Fernandez brought up some news that was reported that very morning in Daily Variety: Kurtzman & Orci are attached as producers (but not writers) on a new movie to be directed by Ron Howard that is based on a graphic novel. The title is "Cowboys & Aliens." "It's about, cowboys and aliens," Orci said wryly. The movie, according to Variety, deals with a skirmish between cowboys and Apaches that gets interrupted by the crash landing of a spaceship, and when the aliens attempt to enslave everyone, the cowboys and Indians turn their six-guns against them. Orci said that audiences are so savvy and have seen so much, that "in a way you have to try and go for those genre blends, and see if you can find an organic way to do it."

When Fernandez asked Kurtzman and Orci — who broke into the business on the TV shows Hercules and Xena and then on Abrams' Alias — if they would ever write for TV again, Orci said, "We're actually writing another pilot right now with J.J." "Of course you are," Fernandez laughed.

Here are some quotes from the one-hour "dialogue" Thursday night with Kurtzman & Orci on their writing process:

Fernandez: When writing action sequences ... what's your approach in terms of spectacle and what's your approach in terms of character, and how they play in the storyline?

Orci: Well, we would think of the action last. You know, in Alias the last thing we'd think of is what the missions were going to be — because that's a given. In "Transformers" in particular, you know that the robot action is gonna be a total given. I mean, from the minute you get on there, okay, we're gonna have a car chase and they're gonna have to stand up in the middle and fight — very awesome, that's the easy part. All that is meaningless unless it's coming out of some story tension or some character tension, so we wanted to make sure that we had a character idea — what the end would be that way — and also have a structure that would reveal the action in a way that seemed like it was building according to a developing situation. Y'know, not just come in on everybody in a room fighting or whatever.

Kurtzman: I think action movies really are only as good as your investment in the characters. The movies that really influenced us the most were, like, "Die Hard" or "The Hunt for Red October" or "Lethal Weapon," and those were amazing character stories that happened to have an action background. You know, "Die Hard" is a story of a guy trying to reunite with his wife; "Lethal Weapon" is a story of a guy who's trying to find normalcy. It's always a matter of figuring out what that story is first, and then figuring out how to plug that into whatever the event of the movie is.

Fernandez: Can you give an example from, let's say, "Mission: Impossible III" of having character motivation or plot motivation drive an action sequence?

Orci: Our code name for that movie from Meeting One with the whole gang was "Marriage: Impossible." It was about a guy whose life was not going to allow him, or possibly going to endanger, his relationship and his ability to have a normal relationship. You could almost describe that entire story in character terms. The action terms are, "A spy gets commissioned to go save an agent," but really it's a guy who find out his friends are in trouble, tries to save his friends, fails, and as a result endangers his wife. You could tell the whole story in character terms and not ever say "spy" or "politics" or "world scenario."

Fernandez: The kind of movies you write are very, very well structured — they have to be in the genre you typically work in. How much outlining do you do?

Kurtzman: We never work without a structure, [worked out] through to the end. TV teaches you that for sure. Especially when you're doing action movies which are so much about architecture, you have to make sure that your structure is really intact, and we always know generally where we're going — we always leave a little bit of room to improvise, sometimes you find surprises along the way — but you really need to kinda know your beginning, middle and end because it informs every little detour you take along the way.

Orci: And the kind of movies we're doing sometimes have [very tight] deadlines, and we sometimes prep off of the outlines, so we tend to try to make them as detailed as possible.

Fernandez: What's the typical window for you guys, like "Star Trek," from getting the job to filing the first draft?

Kurtzman: That [the "Trek" window] would be an anomaly I think.

Orci: But the typical window is like, seven, six months. Two or three months on story, two or three months to write it. Even though the contracts never say that — all the contracts say twelve weeks. Impossible.

Fernandez: Are you guys, like, "lock-yourselves-in-a-room-for-three-months" type of guys? Or do you do things like, take field trips for inspiration, or go in there with the action figures and just live it for—

Orci: The Universal Hilton has always been very lucky for us. We'll lock ourselves away in an emergency when we're not making progress, or if we need to go break the back of the story so that we know where we're going — um, yeah, we'll lock ourselves away for a few days in a hotel and just order room service.

Kurtzman: Yeah, we were at a point in "Transformers" where we had done the first draft and it really just focused on the kids, and everyone kinda felt like, "Yes, the kids are the beating heart of the movie, but to justify the scope of the movie it needs to be bigger somehow," and we didn't really know what that was gonna be. And there was incredible pressure, just time-wise — like, they threw us in a marketing meeting before we even had our story, and we were out there pitching to Activision, and that was, like, the last time we were ever gonna do that ... you haven't figured it out, and you're like, trying to tap dance, make it sound good! ... And we had one particular weekend that I remember where we were really stuck — we're like, if we don't figure out and break the paradigm, this movie's probably not gonna happen. And there was so much noise around it — the studio wants one thing and the producers want something else and everyone has a point of view — and that's usually when Bob and I go, "Let's lock ourselves away and hear our own voices and figure out what we want to do." And that's when certain instincts that we had, we were able to play around with and flesh out, and then suddenly the movie came to life...

We had the same thing on "Star Trek." We had the same thing, where we had fallen behind because we were doing some producing and we needed to like, "get it," and the studio mandate was, "We need the script, we need the script," and we locked ourselves away for a good two months actually, and just kinda didn't take calls, and finished it. And then, you know, they got the script, and it was greenlit the next day, which was—

Fernandez: Must have been satisfying.

Kurtzman: It was the most satisfying [result] we ever had, I think.

(CONTINUED)