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(written from a Production point of view)

Richard Joseph Anobile (6 February 194710 February 2023; age 76) was an author who worked on both releases of the Star Trek Photostories. In the pre-home video era of the 1970s and early 1980s, Anobile was known for his large-format books that reproduced complete movies using stills and transcribed dialogue, such as Frankenstein and Casablanca.

He edited the photonovel adaptation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1980. For the similar adaptation of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, released in August 1982, his work was credited simply as "By Richard J. Anobile".

Anobile served from 1989 to 1991 as a "Feature Production Executive" at Paramount Pictures, [1] but it is not known if he had any involvement with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country which was in production at that point in time.

Career[]

A City University of New York graduate, Anobile started out his career as a prolific reference author on the subject of Hollywood productions, with the 1971 title Why a Duck?: Visual and Verbal Gems from the Marx Brothers Movies (ISBN 0821203738) as his first recorded published work, followed by many, many more. As stated and even though he did not invent the genre as such, he became renowned for his pioneering adaptations of motion picture productions into the book-format photonovels of the late-1970s. Before he embarked on the two such Star Trek titles he had already done so in 1979 for two other genre productions, to wit, the 1978 theatrical film Battlestar Galactica (ISBN 0425041395) and the 1979 science fiction thriller Alien (ISBN 0380466317).

Around 1988 Anobile made a career switch of sorts when he actually started to work for the industry he had previously and profusely written about, becoming a production supervisor from then on for a plethora of Hollywood motion picture productions, predominantly television ones, the 1988 animated film Pound Puppies and the Legend of Big Paw was his first known contribution as such. Doing so at first in the employment of either the studios themselves, such as Paramount, or production companies like Franklin Waterman Entertainment (1991-1995), Anobile became an independent contractor from 1997 onward, having in the meantime relocated to Toronto, Canada. His last recorded projects he had worked on concerned the genre television series The Strain (2014-2017) and October Faction (2018) for Netflix, he both served on as associate producer. In this Anobile exhibited foresight as Toronto has as of late increasingly become the hub for North-American motion picture productions, those for television in particular – Star Trek: Discovery for example, is the first of the Star Trek live-action productions to be entirely produced in Toronto.

External links[]

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