Also, I should point out with the Fade In book that people tend to treat it as gospel, when ultimately it's a bitter writers' POV of what went down. You have to take it with the same big grains of salt that you take Shatner's "Making of Star Trek V" book. By which I mean to say, the studios and forces outside their control did play a role, but at the end of the day Pillar still wrote some egregious shit too.
I don't think "big grains of salt" are required, because so much of what he's saying is matter-of-fact. It's like, "Here's my first draft" (and the first draft of Insurrection is presented verbatim). And then "Here's how Patrick Stewart responded" (and a letter from Patrick Stewart is presented verbatim). Piller doesn't sugarcoat the fact that by the end he was just throwing words at the typewriter, trying to get a green light on his work so he could be rid of it, and that the final product (which he was initially hopeful would save the TNG movies from their downward spiral) was terrible. It's a look behind the curtain of Hollywood screenwriting.
If anything, what's missing is context, because other writers haven't been so open. But for example, I said that Insurrection was the only TNG movie with a chance to become good, because Piller recognized the problem and intended to fix it, while I don't think Ron Moore and Brannon Braga, or
Brent fucking Spiner, had any such intentions.
Moore and Braga are on record saying that they wrote the award-winning finale "All Good Things" while they were writing "Generations", and writing All Good Things was easy, they banged it out in a month. Generations on the other hand, took an entire year and was difficult to write because they were serving too many masters (and in their opinion, it turned out like shit).
Piller reveals that the indispensable TNG actors flexed their veto muscles and refused to do the TNG movies (contracts signed on a movie-by-movie basis) unless they were given complete control over the script (with writing being a job for dime-a-dozen disposables). Patrick Stewart says (in his notes to Piller) that the problem with Generations was that it was too much like TNG, and that he had "great success" in steering Moore and Braga towards turning First Contact into action schlock, and he intended to do the same with Piller and Insurrection.
First Contact is the least awful TNG movie because Moore and Braga (having experienced Generations) closed their eyes and allowed the actors to write the movie. Insurrection is the worst TNG movie because Piller
tried (and failed) to do something smarter with it. With Nemesis they just gave up completely and let Brent Spiner write it.
