In memoriam: Kellam de Forest, who gave us Stardates and the Gorn

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4110/1

 

Terrible to hear he died from Covid complications. Kellam was incredibly generous with his time when I was a graduate student—I recorded two long interviews with him, including a lot of material that’s unpublished. He remained sharp well into his 90s and worked on so many great films and TV programs, almost always without credit.

 

RIO. Unfortunate to die that way.

 

This is tragic, especially since he obviously had a lot more life in him if not for covid.

If anybody is interested in what it was like to run a Hollywood research business in those days, there's a good documentary about one of Kellam's colleagues, Lillian Farber. She was married to Star Trek: TMP Production Designer Harold Michelson, and the film is called Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story. I enjoyed it. Her little research company was extremely similar to de Forest's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Michelson

 

Sad to hear this. An interesting thing for me from the linked article - as an advisor he was paid $50 an episode for his work. That works out to about $405 in 2021 dollars. IE - He worked pretty cheap considering the money spent on each episode.

 

RIP. Always sad to lose someone who helped make the show great.
Out of curiosity from the similarity of the names, I just did a bunch of googling to see if Kellam de Forest and DeForest Kelley were related in any way...and it turns out that de Forest's great-great-great-great grandfather was the great-great-great grandfather of the guy Kelley was named for. Which means I have too much time on my hands.

 

RIP. Thanks for your contributions to Star Trek.

 

I'll ask because most here may not remember the man: was Calvert DeForest (Larry 'Bud' Melman on Letterman's show) related to him in any way?

 

Related to my post above, Calvert DeForest was a cousin once removed of Lee de Forest (DeForest Kelley's namesake), who was himself a very distant cousin of Kellam de Forst.

 

We Tweeted about this here (link).

In those tweets we pointed to this article about de Forest (link).

 

The rate went up for part of season three ($100, I think). But you have to remember that he was also getting library space on the lot and working on all of Desilu’s shows at once (not to mention film and TV productions for other studios). It was a lucrative business for a while.

 

From The Making of Star Trek all the way up to the Internet era, a long time, I considered DeForest Kelley / Kellam de Forest to be an opaque mystery, just a little too weird to be a coincidence. Then, in recent years, I found that both men were using their real birth names, and it had to be a coincidence.

Now it emerges that there was a connection, summarized as follows:
- DeForest Kelley was named after Lee de Forest.
- Kellam de Forest was a distant relative of Lee de Forest.
- Larry "Bud" Melman was a cousin once removed of Lee de Forest.

Do we know if DeForest Kelley was related to Lee de Forest? That's the missing piece.

 

Because there's so little out there about Kellam de Forest, but @Harvey had interviewed him at length some years ago and had written a post about him for UCLA, we decided to republish that piece on Fact Trek. The original 2012 text is intact, but the item now features a brief new introduction and I dug out some newspaper clippings and a couple of memos to illustrate the kinds of things de Forest Research did for movies, TV, and Star Trek.

At the end of the article are multiple links to other pieces about Mr. de Forest. RIP

de Forest, Kellum on FACT TREK (link)

 

Doesn't seem so. Kelley was from Georgia while Lee de Forest lived in California and New York (by way of Iowa, Alabama, and Massachusetts). One Internet source (unverified beyond that) says that Kelley's father, Reverend Ernest David Kelley, named his son after Lee de Forest simply because de Forest was the Father of Radio and that was a pretty impressive invention in 1920.

 

My condolences to the great man who helped bring Arena to the screen! RIP
JB

 

I thought DeForest Kelley was originally called Jackson DeForest Kelley?
JB

 

^^^He was. I assume that his father gave him his middle name for Lee de Forest.

Sir Rhosis

 

He was. The Jackson was from Stonewall Jackson, the great Confederate General we all know and love. He went by his middle name.

 

Ummm...no.