Shatner Talks Trek, Kirk and Roddenberry

Shatner has been busy in the last few weeks promoting his new book "Up Till Now" which leads to lots of Trek related questions. I yanked out a few quotes from the Associated Press and TrekMovie.com articles on the legend. The TrekMovie article is worth the full read.

After watching the TOS episode "Piece of the Action":

"I haven't seen myself playing Captain Kirk in a long, long time," he says. "And I watched it now, from my perspective of 40 years later, and I thought, 'You know, that's rather good.' It's a starship captain trying to do the accent, the Noo Yawk accent, trying to play tough, trying to be one of the guys. It's not quite right, but it's what a starship captain would have done -- a decent imitation, enough to fool those guys but not the audience."

"That was a good hero," Shatner says. "He made decisions. He was forceful. He was compassionate. He was the instigator. He fought hard and long physically and emotionally. He carried the dilemma of whether to intrude or not to intrude. It was all the classic forms of good Greek playmaking: The hero has the dilemma and resolves the dilemma."

On Roddenberry:

He was a chiseler who wanted a cut of outside money his cast earned, demanded to be called ‘master,’ and prohibited poor Nimoy from using a company pencil.

After the first thirteen episodes writer/producer Gene Coon was brought in and Roddenberry became the executive producer, meaning he was more of a supervisor than working on the show day -to-day. After that his primary job seemed to be exploiting Star Trek in every possible way.

On not being in Star Trek XI:

I find it peculiar that I wasn’t asked. It was a great role that was written for me and as I aged, they aged the captain. I know that the director and producer JJ Abrams is a nice guy. I wasn’t hurt, but I was puzzled. I didn’t need the movie as a crutch professionally because I have so much to do but I’m amazed they didn’t solve the storytelling problems to incorporate me.