by Edward Gross
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.�
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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.”
