Rebel Alliance

Long before running some of the hottest shows on television, these guys and their peers were just wee-geeks growing up obsessed with archetypal battles of good versus evil and mind-bending special effects. Star Wars epitomized how mainstream such fantasy could be. Star Trek, considerably more low-budget and hammy, with its campy Klingon villains and furry Tribbles, was for the die-hard sci-fi crowd. But both franchises deeply vested legions of powerless kids in their mythological worlds.

The problem was, as Moore and his cohorts tell it, in the pre-Web days of the 1970s and 1980s, fans didn't have an accessible way to reach out to one another. And so they cheered mostly in solitude. "I was obsessed and thought Star Trek was just my show," Moore says. Only when he wandered into a drugstore in his hometown of Chowchilla, California, and happened on a fanzine called "Starlog" did he learn that he wasn't alone. "It was a revelatory moment when I realized there were other people who watched this show," he says. "It was like a secret club."

Around the country, members of this club poured their passions -- and piggy banks -- into their fandom. They road-tripped to conventions. And they loaded up on memorabilia -- lots of it. "I bought all this crap," confesses Shankar.

Grillo-Marxauch is nodding. "There were bumper stickers that said I Grok Spock," he says.

"Spock ears," says Shankar.

"Blueprints for the ship," says Moore.

Fans didn't just build collections; they wanted to participate in a virtual world and expand it. "It was a universe you wanted to play in," Moore says, "so people bought anything they could get their hands on."

As these guys know well, fandom saves shows. Fans wrote letter campaigns to save recent faves such as Jericho and Firefly. (Jericho was saved; Firefly wasn't but went on to sell more than 200,000 DVDs in six months.) When Star Trek was almost canceled after its second season in 1968, a massive letter-writing campaign resurrected it for one more round. And after the show went off the air, fans kept the characters alive by creating stories of their own, which they would publish in zines and swap at conventions. "They had nowhere to go, and they wanted the show to go on," Moore says.

After becoming friends at Cornell University, where Moore received a library award for having the biggest collection of Star Trek books, Moore and Shankar came full circle as writers on the early 1990s Star Trek series The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, ushering the former fanboys into the new class of Hollywood writers and producers. Moore, Shankar, and this emerging crop of writers began communicating with fans online, figuring that was exactly the kind of dialogue they had wanted with the Star Trek and Star Wars creators back in the day. Not only was it cool, it was a way to essentially build the value of their intellectual property. "If you can actually find people who like your stuff," Moore says, "there are probably enough people who can make it a going concern for you -- if you can find them, if you can monetize them."

And there is one member of the Geek Elite -- their Jedi master -- whom they all point to as their inspiration. "That's the genius of Joss Whedon," Grillo-Marxauch says.

It's a Smurf-blue morning as Joss Whedon, a gawky 43-year-old with short, wavy brown hair and a gray T-shirt, jogs up to his office in Santa Monica. Whedon works in a residential neighborhood, in a Spanish-style bungalow neatly decorated with gothic figurines and framed anime art. "I'm a huge fan of the Final Fantasy film," he says as he heats up a pot of breakfast tea after his run. As his peers attest, Whedon defined a new generation of nerd worship with his iconic late-1990s series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cheeky pop-culture powerhouse about a blond teenage demon killer. Then he continued his reign with a Buffy spin-off, Angel, and later Firefly. Today, he's working on his next series, Dollhouse, which follows a young woman who can be imprinted with different identities to accomplish a variety of missions.

While not always runaway hits on the air, Whedon's shows are renowned by his peers for spawning some of the most thriving aftermarket around. Whedon sheepishly admits his shows "do crazy" on DVD, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. Whedon's achievement, say his fellow geeks, is not just creating an isolated TV show but also building a universe that has earned its own nickname, the Whedonverse. As Lindelof puts it, "The Whedonverse was, like, if you have a core fandom, how do you get that core fandom to buy a lot of shit?" And perhaps more important, how do you sell them all that stuff with integrity, so you don't end up burning your biggest fans?