Well, then he had to open his script to pull out the pages and put them on the console, right--?
Where did you hear he did that--?
Here are some quotes from Beltran’s interview with Star Trek.com in 2012. He does talk about going to the producers, and their response. They had their own ideas about the show. What he says here is similar to what I remember him saying in past interviews. I get it, that his comments bother you on principle, but it just doesn't bother me that an actor explains when he sees things going wrong and why.I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I can only go by what I've read in interviews and hear at conventions. He never said he went to producers to talk about his character. Robert Picardo, Robert Duncan McNeil, Roxann Dawson, Kate Mulgrew DID talk about going to producers and their characters had much more growth and development. And personally, if I was a writer and an actor was trashing my work, I wouldn't be writing great things for that actor....as his badmouthing the show became more frequent, his screentime decreased...I wonder if that was related
All I'm saying is that I think that badmouthing the show he was on was disrespectful and in poor taste.
What he said resonated with the frustration of how I was feeling as a viewer, as I was finding a number of episodes and storylines boring in the later seasons.There’s more, a part 1 and 2 if anyone wants to read the whole thing
http://www.startrek.com/article/catching-up-with-robert-beltran-part-1
Beltran: I think the first three seasons there were a lot of interesting storylines, and then I think a shift happened in the series after Jeri Taylor left. I think any time that a character has an interpersonal relationship that shows growth, and you could say that clearly about Chakotay and the captain. But after Seska left, it was only that relationship with the captain that had depth to it. Chakotay and Tuvok didn’t have much. Chakotay and Paris didn’t have much. Chakotay and the other characters, there wasn’t much of a relationship there. I always regretted that because there was a lot to explore.
Interviewer: You were always honest and open at the time about your displeasure with how Chakotay was utilized on the show. When you raised your concerns, did the powers that be listen?
Beltran: No. No. During the Michael Piller-Jeri Taylor years, they listened intently. It was after that… I guess when Brannon Braga took over, when the Seven of Nine character made her entrance, the focus changed. That was fine with me. That was fine with me, but I think writers have an obligation to fill out all the characters if they’re regular characters on a series.
I think several of the characters were diminished – Chakotay and Tuvok and Kim and Neelix. I think it was just easier for these new writers that came on to write stories about the captain and about characters that weren’t really human, like Seven of Nine and the Doctor. Those three characters were kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, omnipotent, and I think a lot of the tension and drama that was available was lost because you have to really dig hard to find tension in all-knowing, all-seeing characters. They know everything, right? They have all the answers. Or else you have a redundancy of the same scene written over and over and over again, with slight variations.
