A Matter of Shatner's Perspective

My read of Shatner's "reality checks" is of a man who is honestly sick of all the BS - he's literally too old for this shit. Maybe the series meant something to him at the time or maybe it was just a steady job as a leading man. You'd have to go back in time and read his mind to find out. He probably resented it in the 70's when he couldn't get arrested and lived out of his camper doing community theater to pay his alimony. Then he loved it when Star Trek films brought him back to the casting table. Who the hell knows? Humans change lanes without signaling all the time. Shatner is fun to watch at any rate. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Shatner and Takei get on the phone and plot their feud every Monday.

 

He's right, of course; the role did not consume the majority of his life and career, no matter how much some fans what that to be the case. He's not Lon Chaney, Jr., who--when he grew older / the roles dried up--resorted to telling endless Wolf Man stories, howling, etc., forever trapping himself with that one role, and dumping the rest of his career.

 

I saw Shatner in Richmond, VA when he was touring with TWOK. Funniest part of the show, by a wide margin, was when somebody asked "If you couldn't have played Kirk, who would you have wanted to play?"

Answer: "Sulu, so I wouldn't have to listen to Takei's bitching."

 

I think Chaney's problem was his drinking. After the 1940s, he put on a lot of weight, and did character roles in some bad horror movies but also westerns and the like. He actually has a a small but effective supporting role in High Noon in 1952. Her also starred as Laurel Goodwin's father in the 1964 western drama Stage to Thunder Rock. https://www.standard.net/entertainm...cle_a21ff97e-8eee-5a19-ba41-373e1007c1b1.html

 

Sure, he had other roles post his Universal contract (notably the part in The Defiant Ones), but due to his no longer being taken seriously / past his prime, he began to go the route of end-years Bela Lugosi--referring to / acting out his signature role, which is the opposite of Shatner. He (Shatner) recalled living in a camper / thin days post-TOS, but he was a fixture as guest star on many of the most popular TV series of the 70s, often referred to a "special guest star" (a nod to an accepted status about him as an actor), so he was seen as someone more than Captain Kirk, even though he was universally identified with the character. Getting so much work past a signature role was not the case with Chaney.

 

He used the same line when I saw him appear before a TWOK screening in Morristown, NJ. I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of his regular repertoire for those shows.

 

I'm not really an expert, but as far as I know the only Chaney reprises of the Wolf Man type character (both unofficial) are the 1960 Mexican film La Casa del Terror (part of which was incorporated into the 1964 Face of the Screaming Werewolf) and the 1962 episode of Route 66 "Lizard's Leg and Owlet's Wing". Don't know how much he 'acted out' the role in interviews and personal appearances.

 

For some reason that first link isn't working. Here's the tweet:
https://twitter.com/WilliamShatner/status/1368753357876125697?s=20

 

The tweet seems to be in the middle of something. "He didn't. He loved me..."

Huh? Who didn't? And... who didn't what? What is this about?

 

Roddenberry. Like Jeopardy, the answer precedes the question

 

Shatner quoted the tweet he was responding to. Can you not see it?

 

This makes me think about Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill.

I remember years ago Barbara Walters interviewing Ford on one of her prime time interview shows. She asked Ford if he was open to ever playing Han Solo again. This was before episodes 7-9 of the Star Wars movies came out. Ford said that no, he felt he was beyond that, but he would do Indiana Jones again "in a New York minute." This was before the last Indiana Jones movie, the Crystal Skull one came out. In that interview Ford also said that when others were running around saying "May the Force Be With You", he was saying "Force yourself."

Okay, I get it. If you want to accomplish something in life, you need to work at it. But I felt like Ford could have had some fun with it, couldn't he?

Ford reportedly wanted Han Solo to be killed off. Ford is reported to have said during an interview "I don't know what a Force Ghost is and I don't give a fuck."

Ford comes across to me like he is dismissive and flat out disdainful of anything Star Wars and Han Solo related.

Then there's Mark Hamill. He enjoys tweeting with fans about Star Wars. He says he is deeply honored when fans say that Luke Skywalker was influential for them. He is happy to talk about the making of the movies, seems willing and eager to play Luke Skywalker any chance he can, is interested in and has opinions about what movie directors do to the character. He is knowledgeable about Star Wars lore and seems like a fan himself.

I think Shatner clocks in somewhere between these two extremes when it comes to Star Trek and Captain Kirk. He doesn't come across to me as disdainful of Kirk and Star Trek as Ford does of Solo and Star Wars, but neither is he a fan like Hamill. It was just a job to him, he's pretty neutral about it and that's it.

It's just disappointing when you're a fan. I LOVED Star Trek growing up, I LOVED Kirk, I LOVED Shatner's portrayal. It was more than just a show to me. I wish Shatner was a fan too. But he's not, and he's allowed to have his feelings about it. It's just that as a fan myself I wish he were one too.

Oh, well, maybe I'll see what Hamill is tweeting about...

 

Now I see it, thanks. I happen to despise Twitter and Facebook, and their formats are not familiar.

 

I don’t happen to care what the actors think. You don’t have to love something to do a good job. And you certainly don’t have to love the love some have for that job you did, especially when those enthusiasts become something you cannot eacape. The quality of the work is what matters.

 

James Franciscus.

 

For some reason, I've never had much of a desire to meet celebrities, I'm not sure why. I guess one reason why is because I know actors are only playing characters that really has nothing to do with who they are as individuals and I don't expect them to be anything like the characters they play. Not that I think they're assholes, just regular people.

Sure, I like to read about them but I don't assume that means I know who they really are.

There's only one celebrity I've met and she's not all that well known either, the lead singer for one of my favorite musical group "The Cowboy Junkies", Margo Timmins. Very nice person.

Having said all that, my step mother was an actress, she's pretty much retired now. She's not a celebrity, if I tell her name, it would be unusual if any of you recognized it. But if you're a regular watcher of movies and TV shows, it is 99.9 percent certain that you've seen her. She's one of those actors and actresses that never have a major role but is often used for minor roles. After they got together, she even got my dad a small role on a local TV commercial.

No, she never was on TOS or any other show or movie from the '60s, she did radio and a little TV in the '50s but retired to raise her own children and didn't get back to acting until the mid '70s.

I've never been able to see her face in person, I was pretty much completely blind by the time she and my father got together about 12 years ago and I could only very vaguely remember her in productions I had seen before going blind.
My stepmother is a very nice person and she was wonderful for our dad in the last ten or so years of his life and all of us in my dad's family love her. She's talked once in a while about working with celebrities and she has nothing but nice things to say about them, that's the kind of person she is. The only celebrity she's talked about whose name i remember is Carrol O'Connor although she may have said something about Brad Pitt but I think that could just be because I know she was in one of his movies.

One time we had a big family get together and while we were all eating dinner at the table, I told my stepmom that I used to wath the Tv series "In The Heat Of The Night" on which she had had a few minor roles. She squeezed my arm and said thank you for watching that show. And then I told her I couldn't remember her being on the show and everybody started cracking up.

Truthfully, I was being serious, I was trying to be honest with her but when everybody started laughing, I realized how funny it was and no one laughed harder than she did. She then went on to talk about her appearances on the show and said Carrol O'Connor was pretty nice to her while she worked with him.

My stepmother did have a few more prominent roles in certain lesser known productions like at least one ten minute mini movie. After I had known her a few years, I found that mini movie on youtube and listened to it. Wow, it was pretty weird hearing that familiar voice of hers playing someone else..

So that's the closest I get to mixing with celebritiedom,, an actress stepmom everyone has seen but whose name no one remembers.

Robert

 

Ford-at times--seemed rather petty. In May of 1983, NBC ran a week-long series of cast interviews leading up to the release of Return of the Jedi, and although Ford said he was grateful to Lucas, he also said (to paraphrase) that he would not be sad not to see the Han costume again. Although Ford starred in Blade Runner while in the SW films, he always came off like one of those actors with a less than pleasant opinion of science fiction, almost as if he wrote it off as some kiddie crap. Perhaps it was the kind of films the SW trilogy were (in his view), or whatever, but he's always had this bitter opinion of the films. That, and he was also a bit self-centered (shocker) in that he's always said the SW films were "Luke's story." Yes, that was true, but that did not wipe away the importance of other characters, or the actors behind them, which his statement would imply.

Either way, if Ford had an issue with sci-fi, I just ignore it, as film history has witnessed many actors--some considered among the greatest (IOW...not Ford) star in sci-fi with no complaints. I think of Charlton Heston, a true legend (waaayyy obove and beyond Ford as an actor) who saw the potential in Planet of the Apes, and pursued other sci-fi films after that film (before someone says he did not want to star in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, that was due to his view that sequels were usually inferior, and that there was no story left to tell after the events of the original). This can be chalked up to a "to each his own" view of actor behavior / desire, however, if Ford never thought SW was worthy as a concept, or of his time, again, I look to other actors who took on roles in sci-fi, and were not complaining about it.

 

^^^^^
And here's the thing about that tweet linked above:

William Shatner is making a joke there. However I'm sure some fans will take great offense and state that somehow he's dissing Sonequa Martin-green, and the current Star Trek on the air.

He's not. He's just making a joke.