“ONE DAY OUR MINDS BECAME SO POWERFUL WE DARED THINK OF OURSELVES AS GODS.”
The addition of Gene L. Coon in the midst of Star Trek’s first season set the show on a fairly steady course creatively, with some of the series’ best episodes yet to come in the sophomore year. At the same time, the seeds of discontent that had been planted in that first year began to take root. As production commenced on year two, the shock waves were truly beginning to reverberate.
When Star Trek was launched, the concept was that William Shatner would be the series’ star as Captain James T. Kirk. Indeed, the show’s “bible” offers, “The stories, certainly for a series, certainly for all the early ones, must be built strongly around the central lead character. The basic problem must be his and he must dominate the events and work out his solution. Considerable attention must be given to establishing and constantly examining his full character, giving him an interesting range of mixed strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies—and the net sum must result, must attract the audience and invite audience-identification.”
The intent seems pretty clear, but once episodes began to air the audience very quickly embraced Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, with the media following in lockstep. As this so-called second banana rose in popularity, the stoic Vulcan science officer threatened to eclipse the captain. Now, whether this was ego or an actor recognizing his position and attempting to maximize the potential for himself, Nimoy and his talent agency representatives came up with a list of demands—both creative and fiscal—that resulted in the very real possibility that the character would be replaced. Indeed, actor Lawrence Montaigne, who had played a Romulan officer in season one’s “Balance of Terror” and the Vulcan Stonn in season two’s “Amok Time,” was put under contract in early April 1967.
LAWRENCE MONTAIGNE (actor, “Amok Time”)
Leonard wanted more money and they negotiated with my agent for me to replace him as another character, not Spock, but with the same background. Then Leonard came back and my agent called me and said, “You’re out.” But I was working so much at the time that it didn’t really matter to me. The idea of joining the show was interesting. They made a very attractive deal. Not as much as Leonard was getting, but it was steady work and I wouldn’t have to go out and audition for roles. I’m one of those actors where I had three shots at series, but none of them worked out, for better or for worse. So I was not very upset or anything.
MARC CUSHMAN (author, These Are the Voyages)
They almost didn’t have Spock for the second season of Star Trek. The fan mail got so intense during the first year, sacks and sacks of mail every day. His agent said, “He’s only getting twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week and he needs a raise,” but Desilu is losing money on the show and the board of directors was thinking of canceling it even if NBC wanted to continue because it was bankrupting the studio. So they said, “We can’t give you a raise,” and they replied, “He’s not reporting to work.” Gene Coon returns from vacation on April 1 and has a memo from Gene Roddenberry that says “Dear Gene: This is not an April fool’s joke. It looks like we’ll be going forward without Mr. Spock. We’ve hired another actor and he’ll be playing a different Vulcan character on the show.” It really came down to the wire, and the one that broke the stalemate was the one that didn’t want Spock in the first place: NBC. “You are not doing the show without that guy. Pay him whatever you need to pay him to keep him on the show.”
LAWRENCE MONTAIGNE
Shortly thereafter they called me and said they wanted me to play the character of Stonn in “Amok Time.” They sent the script to my agent and he called me and said, “I think we’d better discuss this.” So I went to the office and all of the character’s dialogue was on one page. It didn’t explain that he was a focus all the way through, that he was the guy. But I looked at the five lines and said, “I ain’t doing this.” My agent said, “Don’t worry, we’ll ask for some ridiculous amount of money and star billing, and they won’t consider it.” So he calls me back and says, “I’ve got good news and bad news. They accepted the deal.” And I was stuck. I went ahead and did it, it was an easy job. I just had to stand there and look menacing. But the funny part about it is that almost fifty years later I returned as the same character in the [fan] film Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. And Arlene Martel, who played the girl I was supposed to marry in “Amok Time,” performed the marriage ceremony between my character and Nichelle Nichols as Uhura. Star Trek is a small world.
While Roddenberry and Desilu were united in the notion of recasting Spock, NBC ultimately rejected the idea, recognizing the importance of Nimoy’s presence and not willing to alienate the fan base for a show that was, to use the parlance of today’s television-speak, “on the bubble.” In the end, Nimoy’s demands were met and instead of Kirk or Spock being the lead, the scripts began focusing on them as a team. Problem solved? Not exactly. The sense of competition continued, and it impacted the production of the series—as did the actors’ attempts to exert more control on the show creatively.
JOSEPH PEVNEY (director, “Amok Time”)
In the beginning, there was the word and the word was “cooperation.” But then they started reading the fan mail. This was the first year and they were on tenterhooks. Every time the phone would ring it was, “Are we canceled? Are we canceled?” Everybody was lovely in the beginning. The relationships were exciting and good and then Gene Roddenberry let things get out of hand. I have to blame the producer on this, because the director is a lover and father image and all that, and he’s in love with his people and must treat them very carefully so as not to offend or hurt. But the producer’s function is to be the stern father who punishes for misbehavior and so on. Gene could never play that role. Gene Coon could a little, but they didn’t pay too much attention to him because Roddenberry was the top boss. So they would give lip service to Gene Coon, and then Roddenberry would come down and love everything he saw.
MARC CUSHMAN
Most of the people didn’t get a sense of the feud. They came back for that second season, and the Emmy nominations came out, and Leonard Nimoy was nominated for an Emmy, and William Shatner wasn’t. Here your costar, your second banana, just got a raise, a record deal, and script approval, and is up for an Emmy and getting more fan mail than you, but other than that they were friends. But as the star you have to protect your position. And William Shatner was a star.
JOSEPH PEVNEY
Right after the second season pickup, things started to occur. The actors wanted to make a bigger contribution in the writing, so they wanted a rehearsal table thrown on the stage. The motivator of all this was, I think, Bill Shatner. Leonard could make his contributions in a quiet way by going into the office and talking to Coon or Roddenberry, and they were all very receptive. But all of a sudden things started to move away from the producer and director and to the actors. So like a producer himself, Bill would arrange the table and seats and he would talk to the property man to move things over to the side. Well, when you’re doing television in five or six days, or whatever the schedule was back then, there’s no time for this constant rehearsal, a reading rehearsal, offstage, with pencils in hand and making changes. Because once you start making changes on the set, they have to be approved by the producer.
The propensity of the leads to make changes, particularly Shatner, prompted a memo from Roddenberry which he copied to Nimoy as well as Gene Coon and Robert Justman. “Due to our production staff being deeply involved in postproduction problems, it was necessary to make a number of script dialogue and action changes on set. And we appreciate the hard work you and others did in accomplishing this. However, obviously none of us want this to become a habit since it is precisely this type of thing which has destroyed the format and continuity of more than one television series … where one person makes a change, others who may be less capable are encouraged to stick in their oar too, the director is encouraged to toss in some ideas of his…”
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, Star Trek)
Bill was the instigator of the rehearsal table. He wanted to be able to rehearse and I said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what. In between takes we’ll set up a table, we’ll grab everyone and go over the next scene.” Bill had wanted to do that and we made it possible. It was useful. It certainly helped an awful lot.
JOSEPH PEVNEY
It’s time-consuming. It destroys the most important thing of all, the disciplinary control of the director on the set. It’s a very critical and tentative thing, which the television industry has gone away from completely. The director on a television set is nothing anymore. He doesn’t mean a goddamned thing. He’s an errand boy. I’m an angry guy when it comes to this kind of shit. I come from a disciplined school where everything is in the script. Nothing else counts. What is the story? And that is your function. Your responsibility is to tell the story as the writer intended it. That is my definition of a director. Once that’s interfered with, he loses all control. So anyway, every time you would have a “Cut. Print,” you’d have these guys rushing over under Bill’s command to the table to work on the next scene.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
I don’t think Leonard or Bill ever gave up wanting to make the show better. Especially Leonard. He always wanted to make it better, make his character more believable, and not take the easy way out. The problem is, of course, that the actors get the script a few days before they start the shooting, and then it’s a little late to try and effect changes. We did try to accommodate them as much as we possibly could, even though it made our lives hell. There wasn’t any time.
I initiated a policy in the second season that may have had something to do with that feeling. We alternated directors rather than in the first season where we had scattergunned. For the most part we had Marc Daniels and Joe Pevney alternate, because they knew the show, they seemed to know what to do with the show first season very well and the film was generally very, very good. So I said, speaking from a cost factor, we’d be able to get as many shows as we could possibly get with the time and money we had to spend.
These two guys were very, very good, but at the same time we found out—I found out—familiarity breeds contempt. I shouldn’t say that. It tends to relax a little bit too much when it’s the same guy every time and you lose a little bit of that excitement you wanted to maintain. You should understand that Joe was extremely well liked on the set. The cast really liked him, the crew really liked him. He was very likable and motivated. Marc, on the other hand, was a different kettle of fish. Marc, in my opinion, turned out better shows, but he was a more difficult personality. He was truly well versed in all forms of drama and comedy. His experience was unlimited, because he had been a successful movie director, stage director, television director, and he had a very good eye for compositions. He was a very all-around kind of director, but he was more demanding than most. He ran a tougher set.
JOSEPH PEVNEY
While Marc and I went off to other shows, they brought in new directors, and the new directors had ideas. But the actors were already ingrained in behavior patterns which did not permit new inventiveness which was, as they felt, opposed to their character. That was the real beginning of the problem. Bill would not do certain things because Kirk wouldn’t do that. Leonard certainly felt that way, very strongly, because his character was so deeply ingrained that he knew precisely how Spock would behave in a certain setting.
VINCENT MCEVEETY (director, “Balance of Terror”)
I think it’s true of many series. Look at how locked Gunsmoke was. Take Jim Arness, for example. How much did he vary from his basic portrayal? Any time there was a stretch, they’d pull back. The traditional words on Star Trek were “Well, Spock wouldn’t do this; Kirk wouldn’t do that.” All of a sudden they’re entities in and of themselves, when they were nothing two years prior when no one knew what they would do in a situation. By saying this, I’m not necessarily being critical, but as Joe Pevney said, it is extremely limiting and that’s all. I have worked on too many series where the attitude has been similar, if not more vocal, and they’ve been extremely successful.
JOSEPH PEVNEY
It was right in certain respects with the actors protecting themselves, and it was wrong in the fact that their minds were closed to new inventiveness. There were good and bad things involved, but then when we would come back, there would be a whole different attitude by the actor. Now the actor had become coproducer, codirector, and cowriter. A whole different attitude toward me or Marc Daniels.
RALPH SENENSKY (director, “Metamorphosis”)
Doing episodic television is like jumping on a freight train that’s in movement. As a director what you have to do is jump on it and not break your legs. Once you’ve boarded it, you have to climb on top of the train, run across, and get in the engine and take over running it. What happens is that before you can bring anything personal to the story, you have to get acquainted with who the people are. Not in terms of who you want them to be but in terms of who they really are already. These are already established characters. You do that, and then you can start to find the warts and things to do, outlets to extend and expand. As a result, what would happen is that you have to rely on the cast to help you out. You’d say, “Would your character do this?”
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
Somewhere along the line, Captain Kirk and I melded. It may have been only out of the technical necessity; the thrust of doing a television show every week is such that you can’t hide behind too many disguises. You’re so tired that you can’t stop to try other interpretations of a line, you can only hope that this take is good because you’ve got five more pages to shoot. Lacking that pretense, you have to rely on the hope that what you’re doing as yourself will be acceptable. Captain Kirk is me. I don’t know about the other way around.
DeFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy”)
I think perhaps all of us have some of the traits of our characters. I think that really comes about in casting. Roddenberry sat down and probably said, “Gee, this guy has a quality I want for the doctor.” That’s what he’s looking for, that particular quality. When he looked at Leonard Nimoy, he probably thought, “Gee, this guy is what I want in Spock.” We all, however small it might have been, have some of these behavior patterns within us. You find yourself more or less building on that. You know, it’s a building block. Bill is like Captain Kirk in many ways. He loves to ride horses and motorcycles and he is very athletic. Leonard in his way is not unlike Spock. I guess we all have a bit of it.
WILLIAM SHATNER
I played Kirk the way I would like to be. Given his battles with a monster, or his decisions to go to war or whatever, I played him as I’d like to have behaved in that situation.
VINCENT McEVEETY
They call it protecting the character. The character first, before story, before stretch, before anything, because they claim in their vision that that is the key to the success of the series, and I think in many instances they’re right. What you have to do is write for the character. Sometimes writers get very lazy and just write a script, but these actors are very concerned about being put in a weak position. That’s okay in acting class, but they’re depreciating their character. If anything was lacking in later years on the show, even more than not accepting growth of the characters or even more conflict, it was lack of writing. I think it became more cliché writing, if you will. They came up with a story, went in there, and put the actors in that story. They bring in writers who aren’t terribly familiar with the series who say, “Wouldn’t it be fun if Spock did this?” Then you get on the stage and you find out that Spock just doesn’t do those kinds of things, so it isn’t much fun. It’s not writing with total intelligence.
HARLAN ELLISON (author; writer, “The City on the Edge of Forever”)
They operated off the philosophy that exists in the television industry, which is “Our characters wouldn’t act like that,” meaning that there is utter inflexibility. That’s the death of drama. It’s bad enough that you have the rigors of a weekly series where the characters have to reappear every week and you can’t kill anyone, but people don’t act that way. They don’t act in a uniform way. They act bizarrely. That’s why they’re people, for Christ’s sake.
GEORGE TAKEI (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”)
There was one director—and directors go from show to show, they don’t know about the conventions that have been established—who wanted me to hit a button near the top of the panel, just for the camera effect, and that’s not where warp three was supposed to be. I had to get into a very involved discussion and he kept saying, “This is science fiction, I just need it for the shot.” So to persuade him away from that, I told him that was the button we used just last week to implode the engines, so that wasn’t the thing to do. Another argument I used, in a contemporary show, if I was driving a car and wanted to stop it, I wouldn’t make a hand gesture to where the horn is; it would be a foot gesture to stop the car, and this was the same thing. There were certain conventions and you can’t break them. It wasn’t until I threatened him with implosion that he was finally persuaded.
JOSEPH PEVNEY
If I had come in with the script for “The Trouble with Tribbles” during the third season, I would have been laughed off the set. They’d say, “You can’t do this piece of shit,” and that would be the end of it. The hero of the show was a little fuzzy animal, and they don’t want that. They want to constantly be the heroes, and this is the mark of a spoiled actor. This is a guy who reads his mail and is no longer aware of the need for teamwork.
RALPH SENENSKY
Sometimes actors come in for the first season and get a job that they’re thrilled to get, but by the second season they know more about writing, directing, producing … whatever else, than anyone. There is a taking advantage of that position, too. There’s a very fine line that I certainly appreciate, because actors do help. Through the years I’ve found myself many times using the actor as a way to get a script changed when we’ve both agreed that it should be. I would go through the actor, because the producer will be more apt to relent if the actor goes to him than if a new director comes in and says, “I don’t like your script.”
I remember on the third-season episode “Is There in Truth No Beauty?,” it was the first day of shooting and the cast literally refused to shoot it. Gene Roddenberry, who wasn’t very involved in the third year, came down, they had a meeting, and we lost half a day. We literally sat around talking, and then I went off to shoot something with the guest stars. I shot a scene with them in the afternoon while Gene was rewriting the other sequence to try and mollify the objections. That’s not only Star Trek, that’s an ongoing battle. That doesn’t mean that I’m more lenient about it than Joe or Marc, but I’ve had it in so many other places, too, that people shouldn’t think that it only happened on Star Trek.
As for the so-called Shatner–Nimoy feud, in an interview on the Inside Star Trek record album from 1976, Shatner addressed the situation directly, noting, “I would put it in a way that two children from the same family might squabble over something. Loving each other, but squabbling. Any member of a family would know what I mean, and that means all of us. You can say, ‘No, I don’t think that’s right’ in that querulous tone and be angry at the moment, and then forget it the following moment because you care about that person.”
For his part, Nimoy added in the pages of David Gerrold’s The World of Star Trek, “Bill and I are both very committed to and concerned with the work that we do, and we both tend to have strong personalities … and we both have strong feelings about what’s right and what’s wrong. So yes, there were times when we had differences of opinion about how a thing should be done or whether it should be done at all. But we are very good friends; we’re very close.”
DAVID GERROLD (writer, “The Trouble with Tribbles”)
The problems with Shatner and Nimoy really began during the first season when Saturday Review did this article about Trek which stated that Spock was much more interesting than Kirk, and that Spock should be captain. Well, nobody was near Shatner for days. He was furious. You’ve got to look at it from his point of view. He had been hired to be the star of the show. It was “starring William Shatner, with DeForest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy.” All of a sudden, all the writers are writing all this great stuff for Spock, and Spock, who’s supposed to be a subordinate character, suddenly starts becoming the equal of Kirk.
The show that started out about Kirk is now about Kirk and Spock. Bill definitely feels that he was lessened by that. On the other hand, Leonard is a very shrewd businessman, a very smart actor, and recognized that this Spock business was a way to be more important than an also-ran, and he pushed.
NORMAN SPINRAD (writer, “The Doomsday Machine”)
I had had a long unpublished novella that took place entirely on a spaceship, which was kind of a variation on Moby-Dick, so that became “The Doomsday Machine” on Star Trek. I was also told to write a part for Robert Ryan, who they wanted to give a good role to. So I developed the idea of Robert Ryan playing an Ahab-type character. And then when they didn’t get Ryan and they got William Windom, things had to be adjusted. I had to make him a little softer, and I think it might have taken some of the edge off of the story. In the original version, Commodore Decker was much stronger. They don’t find him slumped over in the ruined ship as they do in the episode. Instead, they find him staring out the viewscreen and in a very bad mood.
There was also the feeling that a guest star with that kind of presence would overshadow Captain Kirk, and therefore his character had to be toned down and his lines reduced. Also, some of Spock’s lines had to be given to Kirk.
ANDE RICHARDSON (assistant to Gene L. Coon)
Shatner would take every line that wasn’t nailed down. “This should be the captain’s line!” He was very insecure. Shatner was the one who had to have the apple crate on set. He’s the one that insisted that when William Marshall [as Richard Daystrom] appeared on the show, that Marshall should be sitting down so Shatner could be as tall as him. He had to be at least eyeline or taller than the other person. I remember seeing him standing on it. I can’t say he did it for a lot of people, but maybe because William Marshall was one of my favorites, so I tended to be around a bit more when there was somebody like him or Ricardo Montalban on the set. Like I said, William Marshall is a very tall guy … so tall that out would come the apple crate.
JOSEPH PEVNEY
If there are rumors about a rivalry, they’re probably true. Now, Leonard and Bill are both good actors. They enjoy working with each other. If the script is equally good to both characters, there’s no problem. It’s when one becomes a straight man for the other that you have rivalry. That they resent and probably for good reason. Sometimes, storywise, it’s impossible to have both people answer the question, but a good writer can solve that in two seconds. All he’s got to have is a straight man who’s a third character, and let both of the heroes be heroes. It’s not too difficult to do. Roddenberry was always conscious of it, but he lost control of the show because of Bill and Leonard. I’m sure of that.
NORMAN SPINRAD
Yes, Shatner counted lines. I was on the set during the making of “The Doomsday Machine.” Marc Daniels was directing and they couldn’t get it to work. The reason for this is that it was a dialogue sequence set up as Kirk, Spock, Kirk, but the intervening Spock line had been taken out in the line count, so there was no reaction line for the next line to work. I took Marc aside and said, “Have him grunt or something,” and I explained that there was a missing line there. But things like that did happen. Observing it depended on how close you were to the production. Here I was watching the director struggle. But not too many people were able to hang around the set. The point is that they have to give their lead characters prominence.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I was off in somewhat of a cloud. I heard Leonard arguing one day on the phone so I knew there was a problem with the front office on occasion. I saw Bill blow up on the set and I knew there was jockeying between these two gentleman as to their roles, but I really knew nothing concrete about what was going on. My recollection was a general sense of well-being for the second season, a growing ennui in the third season. I asked to leave for a month for a play, which they gave me permission to do. It was a happy set with Shatner being the leader and cracking jokes, laughing a lot. Not a lot of tension in terms of our involvement. Whatever tension was between those guys and the executives. On the set, it was always great fun. Always the sense, on the other hand, that he was the star, but not in a negative way. It was just a pleasant time.
TRACY TORME (creative consultant, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Gene used to say that it was very difficult dealing with Bill’s ego, that you always had to factor his ego into whatever he was doing or complaining about or not wanting to do. It all had to do with [Gene’s perception] that he was very insecure, and because he was so insecure his ego was kind of off the charts.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
I don’t think the rivalry began to arise until later, when Leonard started getting all this fan mail. To both of their credit, it never got in their way. They were professionals, they came in prepared, they knew what they had to do that day, they were never late, they knew their lines, and they worked their asses off. They couldn’t have been more professional, so it came out in other ways. They both had to work together, and I’m sure that there must have been, at first at least, some liking between them, but at least outwardly they were professional, and we never had to come down onstage and smooth things over because one of them was in a snit.
The rivalry further heated up in the summer of 1967 when Charles Witbeck, in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, claimed that Mr. Spock “saved Star Trek from oblivion,” while numerous articles asserted that Nimoy was receiving the most fan mail on the show, prompting a full-court press by Roddenberry to protect the fragile détente between his stars.
Frank Liberman, William Shatner’s publicist at the time, wrote to Roddenberry after Rona Barrett, a prominent gossip columnist, reported Shatner was going to be replaced on the show—a rumor debunked by Gene Coon—and he noted, “I’m sure that you’re aware of the fact that Bill Shatner has always said only complimentary things about Leonard Nimoy and his fellow cast members. Needless to say, he will continue this policy—not only for his own good but for that of the series.” He closed his letter by acknowledging, “This sort of thing went on with Robert Vaughn and David McCallum [on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.] and I guess it will always happen when two men are involved in a series.”
Roddenberry also wrote Nimoy’s publicist, Joe Sutton, on August 16, 1967, to put the kibosh on comparisons regarding fan mail. “We’re all riding in the same boat, perhaps in this case the same starship, and comparisons of this type in any area, true or not, damage morale as nothing else can. I’m equally sure you understand and approve my strong feelings that we simply won’t have it and would cease to cooperate in publicity with any actor who gave out such information. They must boost each other!”
Attempting to further douse the flames of the growing antagonism between Shatner and Nimoy, Roddenberry wrote to Charles Witbeck on August 22, 1967, at the Herald-Examiner, to dispel him of the notion that it was Nimoy who saved Star Trek. “We agree that Leonard Nimoy has done an excellent job in portraying the character, but in all fairness must point out that Mr. Spock was conceived at the same time as the rest of the format and is being played today almost exactly as conceived over five years ago. We believed Mr. Spock would ‘catch on’ and are delighted to have this belief and plan proved right,” further pointing out that “his ability helped us stay on the air but to credit him with a ‘save’ overlooks the contributions by Bill Shatner and the other extraordinarily talented actors on the show, the fine writers we had, the excellent directors, the whole Star Trek production ‘family.’”
JOSEPH PEVNEY
When we started the show, “teamwork” was the key word. Nobody was more important than anybody else. The captain was the captain of the ship, but the actor was no more important than anybody. When Gene Coon left the show, a lot of the discipline had gone out of it. From the time I made “Arena” to the time I did my last show, there was a hell of a difference.
If you run both of them, there was a difference in performance quality, changes which give you a sense of the overbearing captain and Spock. And a kind of challenging between the two of them on-screen, which is okay in life and rehearsal, but shouldn’t be there on-screen. Then Leonard would say, “I’m the second in command, when can I do a story where I’m commanding the ship?” Well, those stories came to be and, after a while, Bill would say, “Wait a second, I’m the captain!” There you’ve got problems originating from, I would say, actor to producer, because when they were through with their shows, Leonard, primarily, and Bill would be up in Gene’s fanny, making suggestions as to how the show should go, some good and some horrible. All of them, I think very selfishly instigated.
Even producer Bob Justman was concerned about the way the characters were being developed. In a memo of March 21, 1968, Justman says, “I am struck by the fact that Captain Kirk seems to be getting even more of the lion’s share of the action and content of our stories. I know Captain Kirk is the star of our show … as presently written, the parts of Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy are nothing more than a little flavoring added to the stew to make it more palatable. My feeling is that if Kirk is the meat, then Spock and McCoy are the potatoes and gravy and should be considered vital ingredients.”
HERBERT F. SOLOW (executive in charge of production, Star Trek)
The last thing we wanted was to have the network, the sponsors, or the television audience feel that it was not a wonderful, marvelous family on Star Trek. We didn’t want anybody to see a crack in this dam that we built; we wanted everybody to see that everyone loved each other and got along, and that Bill was the star and Leonard was the second, but it happened on the stages, in the offices, and we knew there was friction. If you know actors, they count their fan mail, and if one has ten and the other has eight, and the one who has ten happens to slip it into the conversation, that’s the way it works. Actors are very competitive people, and when you get a man who is the star of the show and he’s contracted, paid, and billed as the star of the show, and then you get a second guy who gets a quarter of his money, who doesn’t get star billing but becomes the most popular actor on the show, there’s always going to be friction. Happily, the guys kept it under control, so internally there was some friction but as far as the outside world was concerned, we all did our best, including the actors, to play the game and not upset NBC, the sponsors, or the fans.
WALTER KOENIG
Shatner was a lot of fun. You’d blow a line and he’d laugh. There was a lot of joy and enthusiasm and ebullience on the set, but I did notice that every shot was ultimately set up so everyone who was in a scene with Bill was behind him. But he was fun. I really didn’t know about all this acrimony and the counting of the pages, which I had validated by Harlan when Bill came up to his house and showed him a script and how in “City” Spock had more lines than he did. I shudder at that. That’s something that actors don’t do.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Bill was very upset when Leonard came on particularly strong at the beginning [of the series] because he said, “Am I not the captain? How come [the writers] don’t appreciate that?” It was a very natural reaction. I said to Shatner, “If we had an Eskimo as a second character, you could be sure the Eskimo would get the most delightful lines because of what he is.” I advised him not to worry about Spock because all that reflected on Shatner. Particularly if Shatner continued to treat Spock properly in the show. I suggested they should show each other a lot of friendship in the show and it would eventually right itself.
NORMAN SPINRAD
Bill Shatner’s problem is that he just wasn’t given as interesting a character to play as Nimoy was. He was the lead character—supposedly the most important—but he couldn’t be most interesting. It was not a reflection on him as an actor, because I remember him as a very good actor before that, but he didn’t have the part even though the contract said he did. That led to all the line stealing and all that kind of crazy lunatic stuff in any number of scripts where the captain went crazy, because somebody was trying to take away his ship. In a funny kind of way, this gave the character of Kirk more depth. It gave Kirk a little edge somewhere that was really Shatner, which is a good way to use it. Another thing to consider is that if this cast has been together for this long, then the actors have got to become a part of the character which can give them more depth … if people know what they’re doing.
GEORGE TAKEI
There is a difference between working with Leonard and working with Bill. Leonard has an iron core, that determination to get what he wants, but at the same time you get from Leonard a principled position, and there is sincerity in what he says. With Bill, you always suspect a second agenda; that he’s got his reason for wanting whatever he wants. If you don’t agree with Leonard, you can have an honest, straightforward discussion of issues, whereas Bill would try to cover it up with a jokey camaraderie, an anecdote, or some flattery, but you don’t trust Bill. With Leonard, I usually see what he’s driving at, and if you don’t he will sincerely be open to listening to you, taking what you see and either accepting it on its merits, or if he has differences, you discuss them until you arrive at a genuinely mutual position, whereas Bill has a more vivaciously suspect attitude.
WALTER KOENIG
Bill had an enormous sense of responsibility for the show. He was the star, he was going to make it work, and he was the guy who was getting paid the big bucks, so he wanted to make sure the vision that he saw that represented the show’s success was consistently there in every episode. But he was also very self-involved and was concerned primarily about his character, but he was fun and charming.
YVONNE CRAIG (actress, “Whom Gods Destroy”)
I didn’t want him to touch me, he’s an awful man. Part of it is the fact that he just has no social skills. As long as I was painted green, he was trying to grab me behind flats on the sets. He invited me to his dressing room to have lunch the first day and it was the strangest lunch I ever had. We didn’t talk, we ate lunch, and he told me that he raised Doberman pinschers. He didn’t grab me or anything, it was just weird, and after that, when he wasn’t after me he’s giving me all this background about my character and telling me where he wants me to stand so that his best side is showing. It was just horrible.
ROGER C. CARMEL (actor, “Harry Mudd”)
Bill Shatner, that very dignified captain, is really at heart a very crazy kind of comic. He’s a giggler and loves to laugh. A couple of years after Star Trek folded, I was doing a charade game show called Stump the Stars. It was all charades. We laughed so much on that show. I was on the home team and we would challenge all the newcomers. Bill Shatner was a guest and we always wanted him to come back because he had such a good time. He couldn’t really let out that comic spirit on Star Trek, he had to be the responsible leader so he didn’t have much of a chance to let out on-screen that comic devil inside him. He sure did let it out on the Star Trek set, though! We had a hell of a good time!
WALTER KOENIG
Leonard was so Spock that I truly never got to meet him. “This is a wrap for today, do you want to have a beer?” Nothing like that, never happened. Never got to know who this man was. He was Spock always. It certainly enhanced the character. There are thousands of actors that could have played the roles that we played, but there was only one actor who could’ve played Spock.
The gentleman who plays it in the new Star Trek movies is great, but he’s acting. Leonard was Spock. He was always the character. I didn’t get to know him or any sense of him until Star Trek VI and I came off camera and Leonard and Bill are talking about familial problems that Leonard was having, but that was a guy I never met. That was the difference between the two guys.
DIANA MULDAUR (actress, “Return to Tomorrow”)
Leonard was a very dear guy, he was the one I’d go out and have a drink with afterward, and we would talk about the old days. He had a wife and then he changed wives, but he couldn’t have been a sweeter guy, but I felt no tension of any kind. It was a very different show, we were learning our lines on the set because they were being written overnight, and I just noticed the genius of the people around; the cameraman was brilliant and the directors were terrific, everyone was an “old pro.”
YVONNE CRAIG
I adored Leonard Nimoy, he just had the most droll sense of humor. The first time I went into makeup I had my eyes closed, and when I got home I realized they had shaved my eyebrows. They could just as easily covered them with mortician’s wax and I was furious. I said, “If my eyebrows don’t grow back, I swear to God I will sue them,” so Leonard said, “Yvonne, I couldn’t help but overhear what you were saying and I just wanted to say when I started the show I went to a dermatologist and he assured me that anyone who can grow a beard can grow their eyebrows back” and with that he turned and left. So I’m standing there saying, “Grow a beard?” He was so funny. He has a great sense of humor.
NICHELLE NICHOLS (actress, “Nyota Uhura”)
Initially, Star Trek the series and Star Trek the films were designed for an ensemble of stars who would each be given equal time. But at some point, the decision was made to separate Bill and Leonard from the rest of us, and I’m not happy with that situation. I don’t mind Bill and Leonard being the stars, but in light of the fact that we were totally typecast through Star Trek, I felt the least they could have done was not totally defuse our characters.
WILLIAM SHATNER
If the original concept of the show was still in effect and the series was still going today, the situation would be exactly the same. There are people whose names and parts are above the title and people who aren’t. That’s the nature of the business and that’s the way these stories are told.
JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)
Bill has a big, fat head. Bill thinks of Bill, whereas Leonard thinks of the show first and thinks of himself second. Bill doesn’t like anyone to do good acting around him. I can remember De [DeForest Kelley] complaining about that when we were doing the series. The scripts would come in with De having major parts and somebody talked them out of it. And there were parts where I was favored during the second year that were all cut out. I’d end up with six lines.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Certain people and certain characters lose sight of the overall larger issues and are totally involved in their own world. That’s good for an actor because he takes care of his own business. Traditionally actors are totally self-involved. There’s no reason for them to see “Where does this scene fit in?” and “Where does the character fit in?” Take the actor who comes in during the last five minutes of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire, who plays the doctor, who has the last five lines of the play. When asked what the play was about, he answered, “It’s a play about a doctor who comes in.” That’s okay. That syndrome has always been part of an actor’s makeup. I can’t fault Jimmy Doohan for thinking what he does.
WALTER KOENIG
I was more aware about cast members losing lines and close-ups to Bill on the features. I was pretty much grateful for whatever I got in the TV show, because I was the new kid on the block and it was such a novelty to be getting a paycheck every week. Yes, I was aware of it, but it’s old news. It’s interesting, because I think appearing on the TV series Babylon 5 gave me an insight into Bill Shatner, because there was a point when I was trying to reconcile how somebody could be diametrically opposite in terms of his behavior from one situation to another, and the immediate solution that you grab for is one behavior is false; that he’s pretending when he’s being charming or funny, that it’s all a ruse.
That seems to be the only way to justify such contradictory behavior. But while exploring the character of Bester on Babylon 5, I realized from appearance to appearance, there are very specific changes or the introduction of new elements to the character, and I had to justify on the one hand killing people with my mind, and on the other hand feeling great passion for a love that I had.
In exploring the character, I began to realize a very obvious truth about Bill, which is that we’re all complex beings. It’s not a matter of hypocrisy or chicanery, that Shatner, like everybody else, is capable of a vast variety of attitudes and emotions. It’s just that he’s in the spotlight and his behavior is so magnified that he’s given certain license to express all of this. Whereas the rest of us learn to restrain ourselves on behalf of socialization and a sensitivity toward our fellow beings, Bill being the star and constantly heralded as the star, how do you not get seduced by all that? He thought that he had license to behave exactly how he felt. Not to say that we don’t feel the same way, it’s just that we don’t have that same license.
WILLIAM SHATNER
It’s coming from a couple of people. I don’t understand that. I’m not even aware of it, quite frankly. Occasionally, I’ll hear something from an ardent fan of mine who’ll say, “So and so said this about you” and it bewilders me because I have had no trouble with them. Nothing certainly bad, nothing particularly good either. We have done our job and gone on and I have never had bad words with anyone. I don’t know what vitriol is spilling out.
HERBERT F. SOLOW
When you’re dealing with a film editor, you turn out one show a week, and back then we didn’t have the advantage of working with computer-generated editing machines. You worked on a Moviola and cut each piece separately, and therefore there wasn’t that much time to properly finish each show. When there was any confusion, the famous line in the movie business is “Cut to the star.” The star is the money, and even though there is a big difference between what Bill did and what Leonard did, the bottom line is, the star of the show was always Bill. The action stemmed from Bill. He drove the action, he was the one who was there at beginning saying, “Start the engines,” and at the end saying, “Close down the engines.”
It was always Bill who was the stereotypical captain of the ship. What happened with Leonard is that he was such a different character, and he handled his role so well—and became a pain in the neck after a while, demanding certain things for his character, but those demands were not for Leonard, his only interest was making sure that his character was properly portrayed week after week. Although I think Leonard was brilliant at what he did, he was never the star of the show. However, if push came to shove, and we had to recast both characters, it would have been easier to recast Bill’s part than Leonard’s, so you tell me: Who’s the star of the show?
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
I don’t think Bill has any mean bones in him. I just think he didn’t realize that perhaps he was trampling on other people’s prerogatives. It just never occurred to him in his determination to do as good a job as he could do, and his knowledge that he was the star. Well, we sometimes—and I’ve been guilty of it, too—bruise other people’s egos in our quest for excellence, and we don’t realize that we’ve done that. We would probably be horrified to discover that we had done it and feel very guilty, so I don’t think Bill was ever aware of it. Bill is Bill, and he’s a particular kind of person.
DIANA MULDAUR
Bill could be a pain, he would ruin a take deliberately, just for fun. He did it to DeForest one day, and we had to shut down shooting because DeForest had one of the nine-hundred-page speeches to make and by the time he got through two-thirds of it and was interrupted, as a joke, he couldn’t remember anything anymore. He was totally in the zone and lost it, and we went home. We went back in the morning and he started with that and he knocked it off right away. I felt so sorry for DeForest, it’s not what you want to watch happen to someone who is totally capable and wonderful. It was always practical-joke time.
WALTER KOENIG
I think Bill’s difficult. He’s the epitome of the star in many of the negative ways. He’s totally preoccupied with himself and his career and his work on the show. I want it understood that I respond to the working relationship, not the man. He can be congenial and enormously seductive. It’s very difficult to dislike him if he decides he wants you to like him. He has incredible charm. In fact, I have to keep slapping myself.
Problems with the cast—particularly Shatner and Nimoy—finally came to a head insofar as Gene Roddenberry was concerned on August 17, 1967, when he issued an ultimatum written to the two of them, with DeForest Kelley thrown in for good measure.
Of this famed letter, David Gerrold wrote in The World of Star Trek, “There was a deterioration of morale. And Gene Roddenberry felt that much of the grumbling was unwarranted. He was very aware of the problems and was working to solve some of them. So he wrote the letter. It was a very confidential piece, sent only to the cast, only the regulars. No one, not even Gene Coon, saw copies of it. In this letter, Gene Roddenberry—the silver-tongued bird of the galaxy himself—took his actors to task and gave them all a proper bawling out. What was said to each is unimportant—what is important is that it worked. Afterward, things settled down. Somewhat.
“Toss these pages in the air if you like, stomp off and be angry, it doesn’t mean that much since you’ve driven me to the edge of not giving a damn,” Roddenberry wrote in part in that letter, which is excerpted for the first time in this volume. “Gene Coon is ill and leaving, due to emotional fatigue for which you bear some share of the blame; Robert Justman came by last night asking to get out; I’m discussing with my agent now the pros and cons of turning the series over to the tender mercies of Paramount and their Gulf [&] Western accountants.”
“No, William,” Roddenberry stated, “I’m not really writing this to Leonard and just including you as a matter of psychology. I’m talking to you directly and with an angry honesty you haven’t heard before. And Leonard, you’d be very wrong if you think I’m really teeing off at Shatner and only pretending to include you. The same letter to both; you’ve pretty well divided up the market on selfishness and egocentricity. Of the three, it goes to DeForest to a lesser extent, but even you have shown signs lately of wanting to join our Child Star Club. I want you to know exactly where you’re all taking yourselves, your professional reputation, the show, and the investment you’ve all made in it.
“… Star Trek began as one of the TV productions in town where actors, as fellow professionals, were not only listened to but actually invited to bring their script and series comments to the production office. When small problems and pettiness begins to happen, as it happens on all shows, I instructed our people that it should be overlooked where possible because we should all understand the enormous physical and emotional task of your job. Think back, Gentlemen, on the staggering list of efforts made to understand, to fix, to set right. You and I agreed that a company of mature professionals should be treated as mature professionals, thus we’d have no insoluble problems. Well, it hasn’t worked.… The result of Gene Roddenberry’s policy of happy partnership? Star Trek is going down the drain.”
Roddenberry compared the three of them to a trio of “fishwives trying to divide the day’s catch” noting that, in his opinion, each was “weighing, counting, craftily trying to con others and each other with smiles or tantrums, depending on which seems to work best at the moment. Then departing bitter that God in His wisdom did not provide a Solomon who would have understood that your true worth deserved more. Well, God didn’t have a Solomon to spare for Star Trek.” This, he clarified, was due to the fact that they felt that one script or another didn’t put their character in strong enough light, or that they wanted a line that had been written for another, or even which one of them a scene would end on. Added Roddenberry, “If the show should go on, under whatever leadership, or if you manage to kill the show and go on to some other, you’re still going to get shit on now and then. And I doubt that your continued cries of surprised indignation are going to change the hard realities of life and the television business.
“Now, to specifics. William, yes, when discussing the Spock character you say all the right things—‘Wonderful character for the show; highly valuable; a large factor in our success; Nimoy handles it with skill.’ Nice sentiments, very ‘pro.’ Except that your actions make it painfully obvious to everyone that you don’t believe it for a minute. Your constant frantic concern, not only over Spock’s lines, but lately McCoy’s, Scott’s, and most recently even Chekov’s small part, is almost embarrassingly apparent and is a key factor in the sabotage and breakdown of whatever stage morale is left.
“You said to me the other day, and more lately to others, that you’re going to show us what a star is really like. If that is meant as a threat, I’ll be forced into the only possible answer—I’ll show you what a producer is really like. Let each of you be aware that as long as I’m on this show, I’ll run it and I’ll damned well keep running it until the day I leave. You’ve been saying lately that you were told you’d be completely dominant as the star of the show, that you’ve been misled, and the stories had better start being exclusively about you or else! Bullshit! You saw the first pilot, you read the format, you played some twenty or more episodes without any such comment or complaint. The name of this show is Star Trek; it’s not about to be changed to The Adventures of Captain Kirk. The concept stays as we’ve played it for a year and a half and that concept will not be changed.
“… I want you to realize fully where your fight for absolute screen dominance is taking you. It’s already affecting the image of Captain Kirk on the screen. We’re heading for an arrogant, loud, half-assed Queeg character who is so blatantly insecure upon that screen that he can’t afford to let anyone else have an idea, give an order, or solve a problem. You can’t hide things like that from an audience, the camera is there day after day, and like it or not it’ll show through.
“And now, Leonard. I must say that if I were Shatner, I’d be nervous and edgy about you by now, too. For a man who makes no secret of his own sensitivity, you show a strange lack of understanding of it in your fellow actors. And an appalling lack of gratitude for the good fortune which has swept you almost overnight into a prominence.”
Roddenberry drove home the point that he wasn’t actually expecting anything in return, except perhaps that, given his rising popularity, Nimoy could have for a moment taken Shatner’s feelings into consideration, to recognize the personal pain it would cause his costar to see all of the media attention focusing on Spock.
“Let me tell you what people you respect are saying … A growing opinion is that Leonard feels that he has now broken the anonymity barrier via the Spock character. And thus with the world waiting, certain there can be cruel disappointments such as has happened to a long list of others who charged on at the first blush of popularity, he has no real need now to inconvenience himself in order to protect our joint enterprise or fulfill express or implied or even moral obligations.… There is no reason to not apply pressure in any way that makes the Spock role stronger or more pleasant for him to play, and nothing lost if this rocks the boat to the point where it sinks.
“True? Any portion true? We know this—whereas Shatner, for all his incredible mistakes, will sometimes blow and get it out of his system, sometimes even apologize and try to make up to people, any wrongs or inequities to Leonard Nimoy, real or fancied, seems to result in an image of unshakeable, surly, and eternal unforgiveness. Not true again? Let’s repeat what you said at one time or another … ‘I’ve got so much personal integrity I’ll leave if the role isn’t what I think it should be, if it fouls up the future of my fellows who invested in this, if they starve, too, that’s tough.’ According to my dictionary, Leonard, that describes selfishness.
“Although I’ve blasted Shatner on his foolish and self-destructive insecurities, let’s take a look at what he faces in you. This not Shatner’s description but one by a former studio fan of yours—‘I see a growing image of a shrewd, ambition-dominated man, probing, waiting with emotions and feelings masked, ready to leap at the right moment and send others broken and reeling when Nimoy thinks he can finally take what he’s been waiting to take.’ Wrong? Unfair? That’s how it looks to some.
“A paradox in this—the above seems to be your very image of Shatner. And others wonder, too, whether under his more jovial exterior, the same beast doesn’t lurk. Funny if it turned out you’re both right. Now, I’ve told Shatner that Spock won’t become Star Trek’s lead. I’ve also made clear to Shatner that although Kirk is the lead of the show, he will be my concept of the lead, not his. I’ve also made it clear that you are and will remain a strong, effective, and integral second lead. Perhaps he believes despite that that you have secret agreements or strange devilish plans that will make you the star despite all I do. Forget the wisdom of such doubts, forget even common decency. It would still seem to me that a man of intelligence and sensitivity would have by now found ways to make it abundantly clear that this simply isn’t so.
“Yes, it’s affected your image on the screen, too. No actor under TV’s week-to-week pressure can totally hide from camera his real feelings about a fellow he works closely with. The audience will ultimately realize that Spock’s great ‘loyalty’ is a facade; the viewers will begin to say that maybe this isn’t a warm love-oriented Earthman trying to break out of a Vulcan body but maybe instead there is alien Vulcan in there and maybe that Vulcan wouldn’t be so pleasant if he got out.”
At that point he more or less removed DeForest Kelley as an addressee—deciding the letter should more or less serve as a cautionary warning for him—and concluded, “For as long as I stay with the show, starting Monday, there will be no more line switches from one to another. The directors will be instructed all such changes they wish must be made during their preparation week. No more of the long discussions about scenes which lose us approximately a half day of production a show—the director will permit it only when there is a valid dramatic story or interpretation point at stake which he believes makes it necessary. The director will be told he is also replaceable and failure to stay on top and in charge of the set will be grounds for his dismissal.”
Roddenberry concludes by saying, “All right, my three former friends and ‘unique professionals,’ that’s it. In straight talk, not just my opinions but a summation of feelings held by almost all your fellows. Maybe everybody’s wrong and you three are right. Nothing I’ve seen yet leads me to believe that won’t be your opinion. Again, I don’t want to talk about it. If I’m wrong, show me!”
The Great Bird of the Galaxy had spoken. Whether his message would be heard remained to be seen.…