The Unauthorized History of Trek. James Hise van
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problem, it seemed, was that it was too intelligent. NBC execs were afraid that the story would go over the heads of most of the audience. Something a bit more action-oriented would perhaps be better, they mused—and, in an unprecedented move, they gave Roddenberry a shot at a second pilot.
They also wanted to get rid of the guy with the pointed ears. There was always the possibility that religious groups might be offended by such a demonic-looking character.
Roddenberry set out to revamp the entire show, but he was determined to keep Spock. He discarded the character of Number One, who hadn’t gone over too well, and promoted Spock to second-in-command, bringing him closer to the forefront.
This time, NBC wanted three complete scripts for consideration. All three had plenty of action: “Mudd’s Women,” by Stephen Kandel; “Omega Glory,” by Roddenberry; and “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” by Samuel A. Peeples. The network chose the Peeples script; the second Star Trek pilot was under way.
Despite the network’s misgivings, Roddenberry was determined to stick with Spock. He was also determined to maintain the Enterprise’s multiethnic crew despite the network’s concerns that this might affect ratings in various areas of the country.
As for Spock, Roddenberry worked with the character a bit; the now-discarded Number One left a vacancy for the second-in-command, and Spock fit the bill perfectly. Spock also inherited Number One’s cold, dispassionate logic. This all gelled to provide a fascinating amalgam of intelligence, restraint, and a certain attractive aura of mystery, all admirably brought to life by a highly capable actor, Leonard Nimoy.
Leonard Nimoy was born in Boston in 1931, the son of Jewish immigrants from the USSR. He showed an early interest in the theater, making his stage debut in a production of Hansel and Gretel at the age of eight.
After high school, he studied briefly at Boston College. With only six hundred dollars to his name, he took a three-day train trip to California in pursuit of an acting career. Studies at the Pasadena Playhouse did not lead to much movie work, however, and he was obliged to work at a variety of menial jobs: theater usher, ice cream counterman, pet shop clerk, vacuum cleaner salesman, and many others.
A fluke break landed him the lead in a Z-grade boxing picture, Kid Monk Baroni, but this and a few much smaller roles in such forgettable pictures as Francis Goes to West Point, where he was billed far below the picture’s talking-donkey star, were all the film work he could obtain at the time.
After marriage and a stint in the army in Georgia, Nimoy returned to Los Angeles in the late fifties and began to get more roles in episodic television, frequently as a heavy. But he was far from being a household name.
In fact, although it was too early to realize it, it was his fortuitous encounter with Gene Roddenberry and The Lieutenant series that would save him from a career as one of those all-too-familiar faces whose name the audience can’t quite place. Star Trek would soon preclude this possibility from ever coming true.
With Nimoy the sole holdover from “The Cage” pilot, Roddenberry was obliged to create an entirely new cast from scratch. Of course, the most important character on any ship is the captain. Inspired by C. S. Forester’s heroic Horatio Hornblower character, Roddenberry created a new leader for the Enterprise, James Tiberius Kirk.
Kirk, a Midwesterner, is a driven officer with great faith in himself, who is not afraid to take a stand; apart from his senior officers, he confides in few, and bears the full responsibility for his command. Yet he is not without humor and he has a highly developed sense of adventure. For this all-important lead role, Roddenberry cast actor William Shatner.
William Shatner, thirty-eight at the time he started playing Captain Kirk, was born in Canada and was, like Leonard Nimoy, involved in the theater quite early. By the time he graduated McGill University in 1952, Shatner had already done extensive radio acting work.
He then joined the National Repertory Theater of Ottawa, where he earned the massive sum of thirty-one dollars (Canadian) a week. After years of hard work he received excellent reviews in a New York production of Tamburlaine, but he turned down a seven-year, five-hundred-dollar-a-week (American) contract with Twentieth Century-Fox in order to return to Canada and star in a television drama that he had written himself.
Soon afterward, he returned to New York and became extremely active in live television. He also played in the movie The Brothers Karamazov, which starred Yul Brynner. Work in westerns soon followed. He settled in Los Angeles, determined to make his fortunes in Hollywood.
Roles on The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits feature prominently in his resume from this period. He starred in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” and in the Outer Limits episode “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” he delivered, at one point, a passionate declaration about the importance of space exploration which sounds like a paraphrase of the opening narration of every Star Trek episode.
For the technical end of things, Roddenberry came up with the character of the chief engineer, Montgomery Scott. A regular shirtsleeves kind of guy, with an unbending devotion to his captain superseded only by his devotion to his ship, Scott would often be called upon to do the impossible, in as little time as he could manage. His ethnic background was suggested by the actor who played Scott. He was gifted in the area of dialects, and since there was a long tradition of Scotsmen in nautical and military engineering, his suggestion was approved.
Star Trek’s other Canadian, James Doohan, was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and flew an artillery observation plane in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. Like many other actors of his generation, he did extensive radio work. He arrived in the United States in 1946 and remained until 1953, performing and teaching acting.
In 1961 he came back to the United States and worked on such television shows as Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Bewitched, and The FBI. Doohan had been offered the role of the chief engineer on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea right after he auditioned for Star Trek, and only a call from the Star Trek offices at just the right time decided him on which series he would take. Of Scotty, Doohan once surmised that perhaps his accent was not natural, but was actually learned, possibly in a time when people would re-create archaic modes of speech in order to reduce the monotony of an ever-more-homogeneous language. An intriguing theory, indeed!
For the helmsman, who also doubles as weapons officer, Roddenberry created a character of Asian background, Sulu, who is primarily Japanese but also has Filipino blood. Sulu was portrayed by George Takei.
George Takei was born in Los Angeles but spent the World War Two period in Arkansas where, as a child, he lived with his family in a Japanese/American detention camp. He studied architecture at U.C. Berkeley and earned a bachelor’s degree at UCLA in 1960.
In the few years between this and the debut of Star Trek, he managed to appear on a number of shows, including Perry Mason and I Spy. He also acted in The Green Berets, The Brothers Karamazov, and other movies.
He appeared in The Twilight Zone episode “The Encounter,” an episode no longer included in the syndication package for reasons of anti-Japanese prejudice expressed in the script.
At a time when the networks were still dubious about the use of black characters in television (Bill Cosby’s equal billing with Robert Culp on I Spy was definitely the exception, not the rule), Roddenberry pushed the envelope by creating the black communications officer Uhura.
Things were thrown more out of kilter when he made the character a woman as well. Even after the loss of the Number One character, he was determined to have a woman in a responsible position on the Enterprise bridge. In this, he was years ahead of our own military.
Uhura,