Jennifer Garner gasps for air as thugs dunk her head in a toilet. Dazed survivors stagger through the wreckage of Oceanic Air Flight 815. Philip Seymour Hoffman screams at a battered Tom Cruise, “Where’s the rabbit’s foot?” A Manhattan going-away party is interrupted by…something big. Nearly every story by geek-god superproducer J.J. Abrams—including his radical new Star Trek—begins mid-action, with some intense havoc. His stories grab you by the throat and throttle you to attention.

It’s just one reason Abrams has become this generation’s George Lucas or Steven Spielberg: an unrepentant geek thriving in the thick of pop culture. So, with apologies to the master, this story about the rebooter of Star Trek and Mission: Impossible III, cowriter of Armageddon, and creator of Lost, Alias, Cloverfield, and Fringe begins the same way.


Stardate: October 2007
“It’s a crisis point,” says Star Trek screenwriter Roberto Orci. “It’s either warp speed or shut down.”

Orci and his cowriter, Alex Kurtzman, both veterans of Alias and M:I3, have finally persuaded J.J. Abrams to direct the long-anticipated, four-years-in-the-making big-screen reboot of Star Trek. Green lights are blazing, the script is locked, shooting begins in a couple of weeks. Suddenly, Abrams says: Stop. Something’s not right.

“It’s way beyond the 11th hour,” says Kurtzman. “J.J. wants a whole new action sequence, and that means adding millions to the budget.”

One problem: The writers’ strike is just days away. If the strike begins before they can devise a massive new action sequence, the studio will have to shut down the film. Another problem: Abrams needs millions more and Paramount is already all-in, gambling more than $140 million on a franchise whose last film earned less than half that.

“If J.J. can persuade them to give us the extra money, we’re going forward,” says Kurtzman. “If he can’t, we’re not.”

Why risk the whole film? It isn’t just to cram in more action, though Abrams promises his Trek will have “a ton of action”—time travel, space battles, gunfights, bar fights, even a little non-Starfleet-approved sex. The real reason has everything to do with why Paramount is betting that Abrams can take geekdom’s nerdiest franchise, pointy ears and all, and make it a bigger mainstream phenomenon than it has ever been before. The real reason is—well, we’ll save that for later, because every J.J. Abrams story also begins with a mystery.

Stardate: February 2009
“I was more of a Star Wars kid, actually,” J.J. Abrams admits, reclining in a leather armchair at a Hollywood studio the size of an airplane hangar. “I always thought Star Trek was a lot of talk, and it felt a little self-important. It was hard for me to get into it.”

Dressed nerd-casual in black pants and a gray V-neck sweater, Abrams looks like your friendly neighborhood Apple Store Genius or graphic designer or indie record store fanatic. And he is all these things: a Prius- driving, typeface-obsessed tech nut who recorded the theme song for Lost on the same MacBook he used to design the show’s title sequence. He owns a Segway (a gift from Tom Cruise) and a collection of vintage tin robots. He paints, he sculpts, and he also just happens to be one of the most powerful producers and directors in the world.

Just hint at the rumor of a new J.J. Abrams project and the fanboy world flips out like the insane Spock of “All Our Yesterdays” (the episode in which the rational Vulcan gets horny and hungry, then howls, “I have eaten animal flesh, and I have enjoyed it!”). The reason Abrams gets mobbed at Comic-Cons is that he launched the freakiest network TV series since Twin Peaks (Lost), the hottest viral campaign in Internet history (Cloverfield), and Jennifer Garner’s career. Today he stands at the epicenter of the pop culture universe. Geek is now the mainstream (see: The Dark Knight, Spider-Man, The Lord of the Rings), largely because of pop auteurs like Abrams who’ve created living, breathing, immersive worlds out of the myths and fantasies that used to be treated as silly, disposable, or even vaguely pathetic. He combines the big-impact alt-universe creations of Lucas, the genre-hopping mastery of Spielberg, and the cult-audience sincerity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Joss Whedon. He is to ravenous fanboy culture what Judd Apatow is to clubby comedy—a polymath at the height of his powers.

Abrams is many things—father, amateur magician, amateur guitarist—but he was never, ever a Trekkie. “I didn’t even remember that Spock was half-human. I thought, Well that’s fucking interesting!” Abrams chuckles, smiling mischievously in his Clark Kent glasses. “There were things about these characters that sucked me in, regardless of and despite their being on Star Trek.” Still, when first approached to bring Kirk, Bones, and company kicking and screaming into summer 2009, he wasn’t sure he was the man for the gig.

Abrams has noticed that the franchise “has fallen upon harder times recently,” as he kindly phrases it. Abrams didn’t think much of the six TV series, 10 films, and endless fan conventions until Orci and Kurtzman brought him into their Trek script meetings with the hopes of seducing him. “Little by little we reeled him in, until he felt some ownership of it,” says Kurtzman, who showed Abrams 30 pages at a time. “Then we hit him with a stick and dragged him onto the boat,” adds Orci.

The writers knew the difference between the Klingons’ K‘t’inga-class starships from the original movie and their Vor’Cha-class ships from the Next Generation; Abrams just brought along his breathless, action-heavy, character-focused, genre-loving sensibilities. With Alias, which Abrams calls his “comic book come to life,” and Lost, he helped create complex mythologies and conspiracies—and made them blockbuster hits. On M:I3 he managed to make middle-aged Scientologist Tom Cruise seem somewhat human and his long-in-the-tooth Mission: Impossible franchise feel relatively cool. In short, Abrams had become a pop hero with cult appeal, the perfect man to rescue Star Trek from the hardcore geeks.

“This movie was not intended to honor the existing Star Trek fans’ expectations as much as it was intended to be entertaining and emotional and fun and relevant,” says Abrams. “If it works, a lot of people will enjoy it who never knew they wanted to see a Star Trek movie. Because, honestly, for many of us that was the case.”

Abrams doesn’t like the word reboot, but that’s exactly what this is (even if Leonard Nimoy, as a very old-looking Spock, does make an appear­ance). The new USS Enterprise is stocked with a younger and sexier crew and is set back when there were a lot more places where man had yet to boldly go. “Star Trek is something people hold dear to their hearts, so there’s no blaming them for feeling, ‘Oh, God, new actors are playing my character!’” he says. “I get it, but having not been one of them until now, I just don’t carry that burden.

“I understand there are these fundamental things you can’t change. We used the stuff we felt was completely worth reinvig­orating.” Abrams pauses, perhaps thinking of the scantily clad alien girl who stole Spock’s brain or William Shatner’s famously ridiculous fight with a rubber-costumed lizard man in “Arena,” Episode 19 (Google “Worst Fight Scene Ever”).

“We did not use the other stuff,” he says.