Inglorious lies

[Grant]

Some moron over at Inglorious Trekperts podcast has put forth the nonsensical lie that John Belushi spent his last day on Earth on the set of Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan watching William Shatner act as Kirk so that he could get his impersonation down better.
So if you Google John Belushi & Star Trek Wrath of Khan this nonsense story pops up as if it's a fact. Besides the fact that John Belushi died on March 5th 1982 and the photography was finished for Wrath of Khan on January 29th 1982 it's pretty well documented that John Belushi in the last week of his life was so wasted and strung out that there's no way he would have gotten a courtesy visit to the set of Wrath of Khan.
So now you have people repeating the story as if it's an established fact without a single piece of evidence.
Besides the fact that if it happened to be true it's not a story that would have waited 38 years for someone to repeat.
I guess people will never tire of telling stories that seem completely unlikely but are just too juicy to look into for accuracy.

 

[LAFR]

So you post it here just to perpetuate the crap written by others? Well done.

 

[Grant]

The nonsense story was sadly enough put out there by the Inglorious Treksperts' podcaster Mark Altman.
Cinemablend picked up the story and ran with it as if it was true. That means that people who are not necessarily Big Star Trek fans would see the headline or read the story and assume it was true.
I am confident enough in the fans at this forum that virtually none of them would give such a ridiculous story such as that any credence.
Reporting on a ridiculous story that any Trek fan would know is nonsense is not perpetuating it. Any more than a scientist commenting on the Flat Earth Society would be perpetuating the theory of a flat Earth if he were mentioning it to other scientists.
But nice job in climbing on your high horse and attacking somebody. Your post was so much more valuable than mine.

 

[Firebird]

But nice job in climbing on your high horse and attacking somebody. Your post was so much more valuable than mine.

Continuing the cycle by lashing out and being condescending to another poster doesn't help your case much.

 

[Grant]

Is someone I'm ignoring rushing to my defense? If so I appreciate it.

I am curious though if anybody who is familiar with the production schedule of Wrath of Khan knows what scenes were shot in what order. Where the scenes on the bridge shot first or last? Did they first shoot the Reliant Bridge scenes or did they shoot the Enterprise Bridge scenes first? We're remote locations like the lab or the Genesis cave shot early in the production or later? When you look up individual episodes of the original series they have complete breakdowns over it Memory Alpha of what scenes were shot in what order but I don't see that for the movies. Thanks if anybody knows.

 

[Harvey]

I take it from reading the Cinema Blend write-up that this latest bit of so-called "trivia" came up during last weekend's live commentary with the movie?

I don't have the complete shooting schedule for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but I can confirm that the last day of principal photography was January 29, 1982.

I have script pages for retakes dated March 23, 1982. These include a few pick-ups of Kirk and Carol in the Genesis cave, the revised Kirk/David fight scene, the Spock "remember" line, and a handful of insert shots. It's not even two pages of material. I suspect these pick-ups and re-shoots were done while the cast was present for looping on the film, which happened March 23-30, 1982.

Other than the Genesis planet shoot that was done in Golden Gate Park, I'm not aware of any other re-shoots that happened on the movie. I have a few pages of the schedule from the last few days of principal photography, and they already include some re-takes. It seems they got most of what they needed editorially during principal photography. And having seen the workprint, which was completed sometime before a long trailer was shown during the ShoWest convention (February 15-17, 1982), I don't see what else they had to shoot.

So, while it's possible Belushi was on set watching Shatner the day he died, it seems awfully unlikely.

 

[Grant]

Very interesting as usual!
It really seems like the script was shot as it was written in the final draft except for short reshoots in the tunnel. The workprint sems to confirm how close the film matches the script.
And after hearing people say for many years, " this or that was probably never shot." -- it's nice to know the truth.

 

[Maurice]

So you post it here just to perpetuate the crap written by others? Well done.

There is nothing wrong with pointing out bad reporting, is there?

This kind of rubbish is precisely the reason @Harvey and I started Fact Trek (which we'll be announcing here shortly), because so much utter bullshit has grown up around the show for which there is no factual evidence but is treated as gospel. People just repeat what they heard as if factual, and quite—if not most—often, it isn't anything of the kind. "I heard that he did this" becomes "he did this".

It's really rather appalling and sad in some circumstances. Not everything is Six Degrees of Treksperation.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Wow, I'm surprised that Altman would spread a myth like that. In the past he's been very good about separating ST fact from fiction.

 

[Grant]

I am too. I find it rather shocking. I did not think that he was one of those people that would just start a rumor like that or in this case probably repeat a rumor.
I mean I guess there is a very tiny possibility that the story is true but I just can't see it and the main reason being there is no way something like that would have gone unmentioned in all these years especially by the cast who have been going to conventions hundreds of times and people are always asking them for interesting stories and anecdotes and nobody thought that one was worth telling?
At any rate I'm just going to try not to hold it against him and just chalk it up as a one-off mistake on his part.

 

[Harvey]

Wow, I'm surprised that Altman would spread a myth like that. In the past he's been very good about separating ST fact from fiction.

I...I wouldn't go that far.

A very nice guy, but he's not a historian and has never been prone to checking his facts.

I doubt he made this up out of whole cloth; probably learned of it from a source of questionable veracity and didn't check the facts to see if it fit.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

A very nice guy, but he's not a historian and has never been prone to checking his facts.

Okay... I can't recall any other time that Altman got something this wrong, though, and I've been reading him since his Cinefantastique days. Do you know offhand of another time (or times) he did bad fact checking in a Trek story he's reported?

 

[Harvey]

Okay... I can't recall any other time that Altman got something this wrong, though, and I've been reading him since his Cinefantastique days. Do you know offhand of another time (or times) he did bad fact checking in a Trek story he's reported?

My copy of The Fifty-Year Mission has over a hundred post-it notes in it regarding a variety of specious claims.

Which is not to say that Altman and Gross' reporting in that book is fabricated in any way; I'm sure they're accurately quoting their many sources. But often, their sources say things that, when checked, turn out to be factually wrong. Altman and Gross make no effort in the book to grapple with that.

There are quotes about Roddenberry's Star Trek II (aka "The God Thing"), for example, where things that do not actually happen in that story or script are described. Elsewhere, Altman has claimed to have read this story material, but he leaves these inaccurate descriptions unchallenged in the book.

More egregious are claims like the one David Gerrold makes, in which he suggests Gene's problem on Star Trek was that he had always been the boss and never been an employee on a television show. You don't need archival documents to disprove that one; just IMDb or any Roddenberry biography in or out of print.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

My copy of The Fifty-Year Mission has over a hundred post-it notes in it regarding a variety of specious claims.

Which is not to say that Altman and Gross' reporting in that book is fabricated in any way; I'm sure they're accurately quoting their many sources. But often, their sources say things that, when checked, turn out to be factually wrong. Altman and Gross make no effort in the book to grapple with that.

That just seems to be an inevitable consequence of the oral history format to me. Having written a few oral histories myself (including a 19,500-word oral history on Batman: The Animated Series), I know that you're often going to get two or more people having contradictory recollections on something (the Rashomon effect, in other words). And this effect is often exaggerated when people are recalling events several decades after the fact. In those cases, you typically just quote your sources as accurately as possible and let your readers decide for themselves where the truth might lie.

I do wish that The Fifty Year Mission books cited the sources for their quotes more thoroughly and identified if a quote was from an old interview or from an all-new interview conducted for the book. I know that I recognized a few of the quotes from Altman's 1990s interviews from Cinefantastique and Sci-Fi Universe. I can understand not wanting to disrupt the flow of the book with a ton of footnotes throughout, but some endnotes would've been nice.

 

[Harvey]

That just seems to be an inevitable consequence of the oral history format to me.

I left out the part about Altman and Gross using Marc Cushman as a "historian" to fill in the gaps of their narrative about the original series, frequently with false and misleading claims about the program, the network, and the studio. There has to be some editorially responsibility on their part—they're the ones who selected what interview quotes to use and in what order, after all. Trust me, your oral history about Batman: The Animated Series is better!

@Maurice and I did our best to thoroughly investigate the John Belushi tale as part of our new FACT TREK project (you can read more about that project in another thread in the TOS forum). Read our complete Twitter thread about the whole thing starting here (a blog version with a little more detail will be published next week).

The short version? Marc Altman repeated an anecdote that was told to him by Deborah Arakelian for The Fifty-Year Mission without verifying it.

 

[Vger23]

Lying bastards.

 

[Harvey]

Lying bastards.

Saavik: You lied.
Spock: I exaggerated.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Trust me, your oral history about Batman: The Animated Series is better!

Well, thank you, Harvey. That's very kind of you to say. I'm still very proud of that piece.

The short version? Marc Altman repeated an anecdote that was told to him by Deborah Arakelian for The Fifty-Year Mission without verifying it.

Hmm, yeah. You'd think that he could have double checked that with someone, either from the TWOK production team or from the Belushi estate.

 

[Maurice]

Double check? Fan pundits?

Oh you optimist!

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Saavik: You lied.
Spock: I exaggerated.

OK, exaggerating bastards! Implying bastards maybe?