Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Lance Parkin
Read between
January 18 - January 28, 2017
Three days after the crash, he wrote to his parents that “the real trick of the matter is that everyone performed wonderfully including the badly injured and proved what fine people average human beings are when confronted by a catastrophe involving life and death.
Roddenberry was transferred to Hollywood division to serve his six months’ probation. There he met another probationary sergeant, Wilbur Clingan, who became a firm friend (and would lend his surname to one of Star Trek’s most famous creations).
Occasionally an interviewer would refer to him as the creator of that show, and—to the annoyance of Herb Meadow and Sam Rolfe, the actual creators— Roddenberry would consistently never correct them.
Seeing Jeffrey Hunter in the first Star Trek pilot, or Gary Lockwood playing either a Marine lieutenant or a Starfleet officer, it becomes obvious just how much of a contribution William Shatner makes to the success of Star Trek. It’s something of an understatement to say that Shatner’s performance is not naturalistic in places. Many places. It’s clearly a choice, though, with the actor working against the solid, businesslike nature of a lot of Roddenberry’s scripts, finding interesting words to emphasize and odd places to smile or shrug.
Shatner’s performance works extremely well with the “pedantic and self-important” material Roddenberry was prone to supply. Kirk, especially early on, shares Lieutenant Rice’s unease at being in command. He never lets on in front of his men, but he’s troubled. He understands that decisions he makes could result in the deaths of his crew, or provoke wars that will see civilians killed; he understands that his enemies can be justified in their actions, and that there are situations where he must reach decisions quickly and live with the consequences. Shatner instinctively saw that a solemn,
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She once told an interviewer, “I don’t think. I really don’t. I’m not an intelligent person. I’m very shallow. I like being shallow. I like fun and laughter.” When the interviewer suggested that was exactly the sort of thing someone cunning would say if they were trying to mask their intelligence, Barrett changed the subject to hat
Herb Wright, co-producer of the first season of The Next Generation, says that when they started discussing one of the new alien races, “He spent twenty-five minutes explaining to me all the sexual positions the Ferengi could go through. I finally said, ‘Gene, this is a family show, on at 7:00 on Saturdays.’ He finally said, ‘Okay, you’re right.
As far as anyone knows, an on-air announcement that a show had been renewed was truly without precedent. It may well have been designed to stop the flood of letters to the network—if so, it backfired, because for the next month, NBC were swamped with “thank you” notes from grateful Star Trek fans.
Roddenberry paid to print up the STAR TREK LIVES and I GROK SPOCK car stickers that ended up on the back of every limousine in the NBC executive parking lot in New York, after a fan, Wanda Kendall, smuggled herself past
With the biggest conventions offering four-figure appearance fees, James Doohan bought a recreational vehicle and made more money touring the convention circuit than he ever had playing Scotty on television.
The cliché that all Star Trek fans are basement-dwelling virgins was never quite true—evenings at Seventies Star Trek conventions were notoriously debauched.
The film never went over budget because a budget had never been set.
Leonard Nimoy would not be returning as Spock. Although Spock was the character featured most heavily on the covers of comics, books, and magazines, Nimoy received no money for this use of his image, nor for the constant syndicated repeats. He was particularly affronted to find a British billboard ad which featured Spock’s limp ears perking up when he drank a pint of a particular brand of lager.
Nimoy had been sent a copy of the script, and was asked what he thought. His response was a masterpiece of passive-aggression: “Well, is this the screenplay you plan on
There’s the distinct sense that Roddenberry reveled in getting the Enterprise looking just the way he wanted. The subdued color scheme of both the new Enterprise and the uniforms is noticeable similar to the Enterprise of the first pilot, “The Cage,” rather than the primary colors of the broadcast series and Star Trek II.
But Khambatta was able to assert at the time that “everybody was so nice and helpful to me.”11 Whatever her merits as an actress—and a role in which she was transformed from a navigator reporting what her instruments were saying into a stiff, monosyllabic robot possibly wasn’t the best way to assess those—Khambatta suffered for her art. Having already had her head shaved, she burned her throat on the dry ice used in a shower scene, and almost fell fifteen feet through a gap in the set. Most horrifically of all, the xenon lights used in her final “ascension” sequence were so bright they seared
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The dispute between Roddenberry and Livingston meant that multiple, conflicting script pages would appear, bearing the initials GR or HL, often specifying to the minute when they’d been written. At one point Livingston rewrote a scene not knowing it had been filmed three weeks before.
One extra, Billy Van Zandt (nowadays an established playwright), was hired for a single day to play an alien crew member (he wore contact lenses and a wig). By the end of filming, he’d been there twelve weeks and been paid $16,000.
Roddenberry was feeling the pressure. George Takei noticed that his boss was gaining weight. Susan Sackett reports that Roddenberry was smoking more pot, and— for the first time—was seeing a therapist in Beverly Hills because of “his obvious stress and mounting depression.”19 Roddenberry was also, for the first time in his life, using cocaine.
The final script was only ready on November 29—to put this in perspective, about a week after Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, and George Takei had completed filming.
By February, Robert Wise had become extremely concerned that he’d not seen any effects footage. Around February 20, he insisted Abel show him everything his team had produced. A screening was arranged. Wise had dealt with every problem so far with a calmness and professionalism that had impressed the cast and crew and steadied a lot of nerves. All reports have him emerging from the screening of the special effects footage incandescent with rage.
It was the first time even Wise had seen the completed film. Roddenberry had not been involved in the editing process—he’d accepted that there wasn’t time for them to implement any changes he might have suggested. The reaction was not good. William Shatner fell asleep. Other cast members emerged baffled. The consensus afterwards was that the movie was a major misfire.
Nicholas Meyer was hired to direct in late August 1981. Meyer had written the smart, revisionist Sherlock Holmes novel The Seven Percent Solution (1974) and the screenplay for the 1976 movie version, and he’d adapted and directed the time-traveling Jack the Ripper movie Time After Time (1979). He admitted from the start that he knew nothing about Star Trek except that it was set in the future, what the USS Enterprise looked like, and that there was a character with pointy ears. (The movie would begin with an in-joke to that effect: it started with a caption announcing it’s the twenty-third
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Khan and Kirk never meet each other in final movie—Meyer brushed this objection aside, noting that Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots never met, either.
Roddenberry hated The Wrath of Khan at every stage of development, and hated the final film.
The original series movies have all generated more money for the studio on home video than they did in the cinema.
Understanding that he was extremely lucky to have been given another chance, and that running a TV show had been an exhausting, stressful experience when he’d been twenty years younger, Roddenberry went into rehab at the weekends, starting in September.
While the new Enterprise crew would be politically correct, their creator was still a man capable of writing character notes like “Beverly Crusher’s walk resembles that of a striptease queen.” D.C. Fontana talked Roddenberry out of another idea: “I objected to Troi having three breasts. I felt women have enough trouble with two. And how are you going to line them up? Vertically, horizontally, or
At the core of the show Roddenberry placed . . . three versions of Gene Roddenberry. The captain was to be nearing the end of his career and (after he was originally called “Julien”) Gene made him his phonetic namesake: Jean-Luc. The new captain would be an old sage offering advice to the up-and-coming William Riker, a clean-cut leading man—an idealized Gene Roddenberry firmly from the same mold as Lieutenant Rice, Captain Pike, and Dylan Hunt. Finally there was Wesley Crusher, a bright teenager about the same age that Roddenberry’s son was at the time—and who was given Eugene Wesley
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the start of Star Trek: The Next Generation was almost legendarily messy. In 2014, a documentary about the making of the first season was released. It is called Chaos on the Bridge. And at the center of the chaos was Gene Roddenberry.
Patrick Stewart introduced a new note to his performance, and started to subtly start playing against the scripts. Rather than sit and nod while someone gives a little speech, he’ll make a subtle movement that suggests Picard is secretly more impatient, amused, or angry than he’s saying. Gradually, this starts to infect the rest of the cast, who relax a little—start to give each other knowing looks.
Much of the success of the show is the result of investment in their roles by William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, and other actors.
Roddenberry’s public social security records spell out the remarkable journey his life took: Born: 19 August 1921, El Paso, Texas; Died: 24 October 1991, Santa Monica, California; Buried: 1997, outer space.
His autobiography Warped Factors: A Neurotic’s Guide to the Universe (1997, Taylor Pub) charts his issues with anxiety, and how it affected his life and career.
