Extras you won't get on the DVD

[ivyfic]

Here's an interview from 1976 with DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig. It's long, but quite interesting.

Highlights include Koenig bitching about the fans and Harlan Ellison coming on, calling the show [censored], and thoroughly annoying Doohan. Kelley also makes a joke about how in the movie, they should go into space and find God and everyone laughs. Oh, if only...

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I can't even really get past Tom Snyder. Wow, he must be old now, 'cause he doesn't look all that young there, and he only just retired from TV recently. And watching him try to understand this "Trek" thing the kids are talking about is hilarious. I like that Doohan corrects him when he gets his FAKE JOB wrong. Heh.


::goes back to watch::

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Doohan definitely seems to be the most into it. I love that he can say that yes, the show seriously hurt his career in some ways, but he's still glad he did it because it's become so influential. Whereas Koenig seems to have a much more bitter reaction.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Well, it helps that Doohan is older, I suspect. I noticed that DeForest Kelley seemed rather at peace with things, though he did mention how hard it is to live in the shadow of Star Trek. I really liked how candid he was about how, for the fans, the show lives on forever and that's fantastic. But for the actors, the show lives on forever and it really inhibits their ability to live outside of it.

Then he was like, "Aw, shucks, I love this show, shut up, Walter." (Not really because he's like three million times too classy to say that, but that's what I got out of it.)

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Also them pointing out that the only way they're getting money out of this is by going to conventions. (And the movie.) They got very little money to make the show, were forever typecast because of it, so I can understand why they all have mixed feelings about it and have come to terms with it in different ways.

But you're right--you wouldn't get an interview like this now. Studio's are much too much about the united front to let actors be this frank. (Unless it's RPattz, in which case there's little the studio can do.)

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Studios have learned to sell the dreams of fans to them. Harlon Ellison had a point about those conventions--you can love a show all you like, but don't waste your time on cheap crap. To a degree, I concur. I think buying replicas of phasers or scraps of costumes is sometimes silly. But it makes a lot of people far too happy for me to ultimately condemn it even if it exists in the first place to drive profit. Hell, I did it when I went to Riverside, IA. I'm no better.

But because the studios know what money they can make off of the viewer, we have things like tie-in products that have gotten totally out of control. (Remember those Jar-Jar cup-toppers?) In order to protect these profit generators, the studio has to protect the product from criticism. It's a fair question, for instance, what bad advance word-of-mouth can do to a film's gross. Today, however, when a film does poorly, all that ancillary profit is also damaged, and your partners get pissed off. (So it's not just Fox that loses when Wolverine is leaked, but it's also the toy manufacturers, the fast food chains making tie-in happy meal toys, etc.) Anyone less than 100% behind his or her product is a liability.

Which is why I'm still amazed no one has been able to restrain Robert Pattinson. He has the (un?)enviable position of being too valuable to be replaced. For now. If the Twilight films or books fall off the radar before the series is finished, or they diminish in that time, he might be more vulnerable. Seeing as that last novel is still at the top of the book charts, I doubt that will ever happen. And Pattison will find himself, unless he's careful, in the same place as all these guys some day.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Also, Koenig had a funny line about not wanting to feel as though he'd been proselytized to be the show. Twenty-five years later, Futurama makes a "Church of Trek" joke and the resonance is amazing.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I found his answer interesting, cause clearly Snyder was fishing for some sort of "Trek's vision of humanity and the future is so inspiring, yes it influenced, blah blah blah," and Koenig's answer boils down to "I'm not so impressionable that an acting gig I had a decade ago changed my life." Which is really rather a healthy attitude.

He does not seem to happy with the Trek phenomenon over all, it seems mostly because he doesn't think the fame and adulation he got from it was deserved. I wonder if the movies changed his opinion at all.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's so funny that Koenig is the voice of dissent. It, unfortunately, allies him with Harlon Ellison, even though the points he is making are entirely fair. I'm totally behind him going, "No, actually, I had morals before Star Trek and they wouldn't be very good ones if a two-year stint in a studio could change them." It's like despite our interest in the "behind the scenes" stuff, we still want to hear from the players that the show they're doing is the transcendent work of fiction that we believe it to be. I appreciate Koenig puncturing that bubble and resent it, you know?

And again, I think of his role in Futurama where he talked about how great it was to not be on Star Trek: "I had my own friends! And car keys! And an apartment!"

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

It made me realize how used to hearing the "groundbreaking work" speech I am that it was rather shocking when Koenig came back with no, thank you, I already had beliefs. Especially since DeForest Kelley was busy selling the "Star Trek changes (and saves!) peoples lives."

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the "Star Trek fixed my daughter's disability" speech was eye-roll worthy.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

And something else (I should really wait until I've finished before commenting, huh?):

Koenig makes a great point about how translating the show to the movie changes it. You make the world bigger, brighter, more flashy. The budgets allow for that on a movie that isn't longer than two-three episodes. Among a huge load of still-relevant commentary that they're making, that really stands out. Because, obviously, he's right. Once Star Trek became a set of movies, it was so big it managed to support a new series. But they couldn't go back to the old series like they'd thought about doing forever. Because you can't put movie-TOS back in the box.

It's interesting, too, in light of the new movie. Because the studio is obviously holding out for a serial, not a television show, but there are these persistent rumors of using Star Trek's bump to produce another show. The common wisdom had it that a new series would depend entirely on the popularity of the movie, but that it wouldn't feature the movie's cast. Thirty years later, Koenig is still right.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Have you gotten to Harlan Ellison's bs argument that tv is crap and Koenig's attempt to call him on comparing two entirely different mediums as if they were comparable?

It's in some way reassuring to see that, thirty years ago, Ellison was still a dick.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I watched the whole thing. I stopped live-blogging it on your LJ, but I couldn't turn it off. This was one of the most down-to-earth sorts of discussions about acting I've ever witnessed. It helps that this is before Star Trek or any fandom, really, was enshrined as part of our national identity--before fame was the sort of 24-hour business/religion we have now. You could have Tom Snyder talking about how auditions are harder than steady jobs as an actor. You could have Harlon Ellison spouting off about how awful studio heads ruin movies. (Oh, how little has changed!) You didn't have to force the one-hit-wonder actors like the Star Trek cast to kowtow to the greater mythology of the movie. They could actually say they were not always happy with what the results were, and it wouldn't seem like lucky people complaining about winning the lottery. (A great observation from DeForest Kelley and James Doohan on their success.)

So Ellison had lots of good points. The unfortunate thing is he chose to deliver them with a spiteful bitterness. He and Walter Koenig were the only two really dissenting in tone from the "Wow Star Trek was made of awesome, and so are we, amirite?" And yet he even managed to alienate Koenig. Good job, douche.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I love his cheerful "I'm going to screw myself out of a job by running my mouth" attitude. For all his good points, though, I can't get past Ellison's pretentious snobbery about his own genre. "Why does Star Trek get conventions and not Proust!" Because we're not all pretentious fucks like you, Ellison. Some of us do things because they're fun, not because they're art. Suck my balls, Harlon Ellison.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

He hasn't the skill of the others in being able to say, "This thing I was part of was genuinely good, but, yeah, I'm still in it for the money." It's such a hard line to walk, and no one with an ego the size of Ellison's was ever going to manage.

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

I'm just amused that, when asked if Star Trek changed his beliefs, Koenig starts by saying "now this is going to be insightful..." AHAHAHAHA. I've never heard anyone preface anything by saying, "listen, I'm going to be insightful for a minute here..."

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

He reminds me a lot of Paul Simon. I don't know why.