I'm sorry. But you don't "love" someone if you openly and frequently disrespect them the way Gene did.
Phase II Speculation
- Thread starter Mysterion
- Start date
I'm sorry. But you don't "love" someone if you openly and frequently disrespect them the way Gene did.
Whether he loved Majel Barrett or not seems irrelevant to me. What is relevant is that he acted unprofessionally by casting his mistress in a major role, and when NBC rejected her, he created an elaborate fiction (including claims about network sexism against powerful women, as well as, in all likelihood, the stories about Number One being rejected by female test audiences) rather than be honest with her (and the public).
Somehow, we keep talking around the point here. The original assertion was that NBC was the reason we didn't have a female first officer in TOS. That's flatly not true. NBC is the reason that we did not have Majel Barrett as the first officer. Gene Roddenberry, however, made the decision that it was better to go with a male first officer than to recast the Number One role.
And you know what's funny? NBC rejected Majel apparently partly because she was Roddenberry's mistress and partly because they thought she wasn't a good enough actress to carry the role. However, I've re-watched the TNG episodes with Majel as Lwaxana Troi and I've come to realize that, really, she is a damn fine actress. I'm sure Gene didn't cast her for her acting talent, but I think she could have carried the role just fine.
Actually, I think you're talking about a point that is different from mine. My point is simply that NBC wasn't entirely happy with the original pilot and wanted Roddenberry to make some changes for the second pilot. The changes and the reasons behind them have already been discussed, but they ultimately led to a different crew than the one Roddenberry originally had in mind as a result.
I think for Roddenberry, it was the same thing. I think when he came up with the idea of a female first officer, he only had Majel in mind for the role. When NBC told him to get rid of Majel, it was basically the same as getting rid of the character as far as Roddenberry was concerned. I think if he couldn't get the female first officer he envisioned, there wasn't going to be one at all.
That's one of the things Robert Justman notes in Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, too. Based on the one-note "I love you, Mr. Spock" character of Chapel, he had always thought she was a mediocre actress, and was surprised (and pleased) to discover otherwise on TNG.
She was awfully stilted as Number One, though (and, often, as Chapel). She either needed time for her acting talent to develop, or a more flamboyant role like Lwaxana Troi.
You're probably right in that regard. However, the fact remains that that's not how he presented the situation to fans down through the years. He always portrayed it as NBC and test audiences being totally against the idea of a female first officer. He never even mentioned the selection of Majel as factoring into it.
Now, you could say that's because he was trying to protect his wife's feelings or you could say that he was trying to revise history to make himself look better. But regardless of his motivations, the version of the story he told time and again was false.
Which does raise an interesting (if not outright frightening) thought. How might the score sounded, particularly the "Sandy" Courage opening score? I keep thinking about that teeth grating disco edition of the Star Wars theme! BRR!!!
Sincerely,
Bill
What I find far more interesting is the changes that happened as a result of NBC rejecting the pilot. We wouldn't have had the Spock that we know today (and perhaps not even the Kirk-Spock friendship), nor De cast as McCoy.
Nichelle Nichols has recently reiterated that she initially read for the part of Spock, but I kind of doubt that it would have been the same character had they cast her in it. It's also possible that they just had her read the part of Spock to see if she could swing with the sci-fi jargon the series demanded (and especially so if no lines for Uhura had actually been written yet when Nichols was auditioning).
That seems almost certain, considering Roddenberry more or less handed the Spock part to Nimoy without an audition process. Nichols couldn't audition for Uhura because the character was a last minute addition to "The Corbomite Maneuver," who was given some of Bailey's lines.
Battlestar Galactica's themes were a Star Wars clone, and Buck Roger's main theme music was not too wakka-chakka, and in a like vein I rather doubt Roddenberry would have let them take the show's music turn discotheque.
Yep, as Nimoy had been in both pilots and was already signed as the 2nd lead long before Nicholls was added right at the start of series production.
This story is hardly new, so there's no "it's possible" speculation needed. Recent media tried to put a new spin on a very old, well-reported story. Nichelle Nichols was called in to discuss the addition of a new female character. They had no scenes for her to read, so she asked to read the Spock lines. That doesn't mean she auditioned for Spock; she auditioned for Uhura using a page of Spock dialogue.
I think it's still up to speculation because the cast and characters still wasn't written in stone after the second pilot, so my use of "it's possible" was appropriate.
According to Nichols in a 2002 interview:
“They gave me a three-page script to read from that had three characters named,” she said in the interview. “There was Bones, Kirk and someone called Spock and they asked me to read for the role of Spock. When I looked at this great text, I said to myself, ‘I’ll take any one of these roles,’ but I found the Spock character to be very interesting, and I asked them to tell me what she [Spock] was like.”
http://www.accesshollywood.com/star-treks-spock-was-originally-a-woman_article_57738?__source=rss%7Cimdb%7Clatest-originals
Now while do I believe that she was asked to read the part of Spock because no lines for Uhura had been written yet, I don't think I can dismiss the possibility that Roddenberry might have been considering (even briefly) a different kind of role for Nichols at one point. It's interesting that they had her read for Spock rather than for Yeoman Rand. Even if they weren't casting her as Rand, at least it was a female rather than a male role she could have read during her audition, IMO.
Actually, in other places, particularly her book Beyond Uhura, she's addressed the matter much more directly, and said clearly that she knew the part of Spock had already been cast and that the producers were not remotely considering her for the part of Spock, but that they simply were using a page of Spock's dialogue for the purpose of auditioning candidates to play Uhura. There's no ambiguity at all.
Except for what her character was going to be like.
Hilarious. That 70s sound. 70s tv theme music is like its own genre.
Gonna go get me some Ironsides on YouTube right now.
How did we avoid seeing what I call "helmet hair" (over the ears) on the guys in TMP, by the way? Even Stephen Collins shows ears. We dodged a bullet on that one.
Did the writers ever carve out much of a character for Uhura, though? She sings, she speaks Swahili, she announces "hailing frequencies open," and...uh...?
She was originally a blank canvas, but Uhura ultimately became the coolest woman on the ship. She was professional yet sociable, wasn't afraid to voice her opinion, could hold her own against the boys in technical matters, and didn't rely on a man to protect her (which was really a big deal back then).
With Decker in command I would have loved to see them introduce a new Number One, a beautiful, raven-haired, enigmatic woman who would go toe-to-toe with Captain Decker.
Either that or Sulu. Though would he remain a Lt. Commander, seeing as how it was onlt to be a couple years since the end of TOS, would he be promoted again so soon?
Either that or Sulu. Though would he remain a Lt. Commander, seeing as how it was onlt to be a couple years since the end of TOS, would he be promoted again so soon?
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