Star Trek

[Doctor Strange]

Well said, Lizzie! Absolutely dead right.

And I'm not going to explain again why I hate, HATE, HATE the new Abramsverse feature films. They're "not your father's Star Trek"... but (to borrow a line from that other franchise), I AM YOUR FATHER.

 

[Zombie_61]

...I have to give Jonathan Frakes full credit where it's due. At least 3 times in the show's run, he managed to convey to the audience, by facial expression and body language alone, what was going through Riker's mind. Of course that's the job of any actor worth his Equity card, but I say it to point out that Frakes was not just a tall galoot...

I agree Jonathan Frakes is a better actor than most give him credit for, but I think The Next Generation and Commander Riker--who was often not much more than a James T. Kirk surrogate--weren't necessarily the best venue and/or character opportunities for him to display his talents.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I think, Riker would have done fine as nerdy chief-engineer without beard, instead being 1st officer. LaForge as security-chief and legendary o'Brien as 1st officer(!).

 

[HanauMan]

I'm not a big fan of TNG but I always thought that Jean Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) complimented each other in their roles. Picard was the objectively serious, wise and experienced captain and Riker the more easy going and subjective 'Number One'. They were a double act in so many ways and made, I think, an effective screen partnership.

To be honest, there wasn't any character that I disliked intensely in any of the Star Trek spin offs.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think Frakes had a good handle on what he was trying to do with the role, and he had an excellent handle on Picard -- we had him here for a Trek event in 2006, and he brought down the house when he called Jean-Luc a "tea sipping imperialist." But I think the writing very often failed the character -- he was made out to be far more uptight than he should have been. We were often told how he was this cool guy who liked to relax playing the jazz trombone, but what we actually saw most of the time was an uptight, humorless, and rather arrogant jerk. I blame the writing for that more than the actor.

I liked his transporter duplicate Thomas Riker better, to be honest, and I thought they did a neat job of meta-commentary in his DS9 appearance of pinpointing the difference between him and the original Will by having Tom impersonate Will as a swaggering, skirt-chasing ass. (And the moment when "Will" peeled off his fake sideburns to reveal Tom's Evil Goatee was one of the greatest Trek in-jokes of all time!)

 

[Zombie_61]

...I liked his transporter duplicate Thomas Riker better, to be honest, and I thought they did a neat job of meta-commentary in his DS9 appearance of pinpointing the difference between him and the original Will by having Tom impersonate Will as a swaggering, skirt-chasing ass. (And the moment when "Will" peeled off his fake sideburns to reveal Tom's Evil Goatee was one of the greatest Trek in-jokes of all time!)

 

[LizzieMaine]

Evil Riker agrees.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Aw. man, maybe I should try the goatee look. . . .

 

[LizzieMaine]

Apropos all the recent Trek talk, I recently picked up a copy of "Inside Star Trek,"" written about twenty years ago by Herb Solow and Bob Justman -- two men who played a central role in the development of the show as executives at Desilu in the mid-1960s. This isn't a fannish nostalgia romp, although there are lots of humorous anecdotes and rare photos. Rather, it's a thorough discussion of just how the show was sold to Desilu and to NBC, and of how it was developed by the studio and its staff. Solow and Justman seem to have saved just about every piece of paper that passed thru their hands during their Trek days, and there is impeccable documentation for the points they make -- the main point of which seems to be that Gene Roddenberry had an unfortunate tendency to gild his own lily in creating the legend of himself as "The Great Bird Of The Galaxy."

Solow and Justman point out that, while Roddenberry created the original show format, and ran the show as producer for most of the first season, he also delegated a great deal of the creative responsibility to others -- especially Justman and Gene Coon, both of whom deserve as much credit as Roddenberry himself for the final shape of the show. They also debunk many of the legends that have grown into "facts" to Trek fandom, legends generally cooked up by Roddenberry to embeillish his own role in the program. The most significant of these is the story of exactly why the character of "Number One," the no-nonsense female first officer under Captain Pike, was eliminated from the show after the first pilot was rejected by NBC. The story Roddenberry told down thru the years was that this was done at the instance of NBC, which claimed audiences objected to this "who does she think she is" woman on the bridge of the ship, and that he had strongly objected to the elimination of the character. The truth, as documented by the actual letter sent to Desilu by NBC, is that the network not only *didn't* object to the character -- they *praised* her, and very much liked the idea of having a strong female second-in-command. What they did object to was the casting of Majel Barrett in the role -- arguing that she didn't seem experienced enough an actress to play the second lead in the series. What NBC didn't know at the time was that Barrett was Roddenberry's mistress, and that he had written the role especially for her -- and that if she couldn't play it, he'd rather eliminate it from the show than recast the part. Such gamy sexual politics played a significant role in other casting decisions as well, and Solow and Justman don't shy off from discussing this issue.

The character NBC really wanted to get rid of was Spock -- and while this fact is well-known, Solow and Justman provide much previously unseen documentation about the network's concerns. There's also much about Leonard Nimoy's constant clashes with Roddenberry over the integrity of the Spock character, and the serious jockeying between Nimoy and Shatner for the position of "star of the show," conflict which finally caused Roddenberry to tell Nimoy to his face that Shatner was, in fact, the star. Also revealed is the fact that Roddenberry himself wanted to get rid of the character of Scotty after the second pilot -- he didn't feel he was "necessary," and it was only an appeal by James Doohan himself that kept the character in the show.

This is a pretty hefty tome, and it isn't always light reading -- but again, anyone interested in the internal office politics behind 1960s television in general, and Trek in particular, won't be able to put it down.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ great stuff - thank you for sharing. Really interesting about Barrett as I "believed" the tale told that NBC killed the "strong woman" role. I thought she was outstanding in the pilot, so I wonder if it was her "experience" or they wanted a better known name (a legitimate but different issue)?

Many band members, in many bands, over many years - who were not the lead singer - had to learn that the lead singer is the star (like it or not). Hmm, sorry Spock, seems the same applies to the captain of the ship.

 

[HanauMan]

I believe that Leonard Nimoy was probably better known to most TV and movie audiences of the day than William Shatner was at the beginning of Star Trek. I read somewhere that Nimoy was happy to play secondary characters as he didn't deem himself to have 'star qualities'. However the public took to the character in a big way.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Better known at the beginning? No. Shatner had appeared in key supporting roles in major feature films like The Brothers Karamazov and Judgment at Nuremberg. Nimoy was primarily a TV actor.

And Lizzie, that's a great book, a useful corrective to Roddenberry's self-aggrandizement (which began with his quotations appearing in all caps like the word of God in The Making of Star Trek).

 

[HanauMan]

Leonard Nimoy starred in quite a few B movies before he auditioned for Star Trek. I know, I've seen more than a few of them, such as Them! and other, best forgotten, gems. And yes, more than a few TV shows, including the Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I'm not saying he didn't work plenty, but Shatner was the more well known actor. A film like Them, back in the fifties and early sixties, was considered kiddie junk, not the timeless classic it is now. And one-shot appearances in TV shows didn't add up to much back in those days. It was a very different world for character actors (vs. stars) back before cable, home video, and Wikipedia put their careers at our fingertips.

 

[Trenchfriend]

I think, today, after decades, the difference between Nimoy/Spock and Shatner/Kirk, is, that Nimoy seems to be a real legend, more than ever and Shatner became just "cult" with the negative part of the meaning.
When I was younger, I truly liked Kirk, but I was too young to "love" the Enterprise-A crew more than the Enterprise D-crew. And Spock appeared always "curious" to me. But the older I get, Spock became more and more for me, what Sarek was for Picard.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Better known at the beginning? No. Shatner had appeared in key supporting roles in major feature films like The Brothers Karamazov and Judgment at Nuremberg. Nimoy was primarily a TV actor.

And Lizzie, that's a great book, a useful corrective to Roddenberry's self-aggrandizement (which began with his quotations appearing in all caps like the word of God in The Making of Star Trek).

Bill was also a well-known Shakespearean actor. That wouldn't mean much to the average TV viewer in Sheboygan, no, but it gave him some cachet in the business. It was considered quite a coup for Roddenberry & Co. to sign Shatner; he was thought of at the time as a hot, up-and-coming young actor.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Shatner was very, very busy in 1950s live TV, which was one of the greatest training grounds there was for acting, and according to Solow and Justman, it was quite a coup for Trek to get him. A lot of other actors were bandied about for the part after Jeffrey Hunter's wife insisted he drop out of the show, and Roddenberry pushed hard for Jack Lord, until Lord said he'd only do it if he got a percentage of the show. Roddenberry balked at this, and Lord went on to make a very great deal of money owning a percentage of "Hawaii Five-O."

But something Solow and Justman reveal that I had never heard before was that *Shatner* also insisted on a percentage -- and he got it. This, they believe, is the main reason he dug in so hard on being "star of the show," because that gave him the leverage to keep that percentage in his contract from season to season.

Shatner's journey from fine actor to self-caricature reminds me a lot of the life and career of John Barrymore -- who went from being the greatest Shakespearean of his generation to clowning it up with Rudy Vallee and Kay Kyser in the space of twenty years. Embracing self-parody is a very dangerous, slippery slope for any performer, because once you start it has a way of getting out of your control very fast.

Of the two, I do think of Nimoy as the better actor with the wider range, but he was doing a very internalized kind of acting with Spock. He needed a flamboyant personality like Shatner/Kirk opposite him in order for his own characterization to fully work. Spock opposite Pike would not have been the same type of character at all, because Pike, in his own tendency to internalize his conflicts, had much more in common with Spock than Kirk ever did. The contrast would not have been there, and it was the contrast that made Nimoy's characterization work.

 

[Zombie_61]

Aw. man, maybe I should try the goatee look. . . .

Do it. The worst that can happen is that you don't like it and shave it off.

I think, today, after decades, the difference between Nimoy/Spock and Shatner/Kirk, is, that Nimoy seems to be a real legend, more than ever and Shatner became just "cult" with the negative part of the meaning...

I think part of this is the way Nimoy and Shatner approached their roles. Nimoy always seemed to be concerned about maintaining the integrity and consistency of his character, while Shatner seemed to be more concerned with drawing attention to himself and making sure the audience knew he was the star of the show. In the end each approach worked for their respective characters and provided the necessary contrast between the two that Miss Lizzie mentions above, but in retrospect it seems Nimoy was serving the show and the character while Shatner was serving his ego.

When I was younger, I truly liked Kirk, but I was too young to "love" the Enterprise-A crew more than the Enterprise D-crew. And Spock appeared always "curious" to me. But the older I get, Spock became more and more for me, what Sarek was for Picard.

That's an interesting observation. For me the opposite is true--I grew up watching Star Trek from day one, and The Next Generation was always a pale imitation for me. I had never considered the parallels between the Kirk/Spock and Picard/Sarek relationships, but you could be right. Commander Data was clearly intended to be the "Spock" character on The Next Generation--emotionless and logical--but I don't think he and Picard ever developed the kind of relationship that Kirk and Spock had, or that Picard and Sarek had for that matter.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think the difference between Spock and Data was that Data was, increasingly over the run TNG, a comic character -- which I think stems largely from the difference between Nimoy and Spiner as actors. Not to say that Nimoy didn't have a sense of humor, or that Spock couldn't have his little joke once in a while -- but Spiner seemed to be much more home playing for laughs than with the serious material he was given. And I always thought he was very very good at playing Data's naivete for laughs.

 

[PeterGunnLives]

And Data wanted to be more human.
Spock didn't.