William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge Page #3

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than two weeks. Gene on the other hand,

could write very well

under pressure and he came back the next week

with Encounter at Farpoint,

the two-hour story, which introduced

the Q character who was not in the original

story that Dorothy wrote. Fontana:

Q was so totally different.

It was like he was thrust into that story and

I like John De Lancie, I thought he did

a wonderful job. And Q came back

in other stories. Right, it has nothing

to do with John. Nothing to do with that but,

it was like this is not what the story

was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be about

the mystery of Farpoint and putting this

new crew together. - He wrote the Q character.

- Yes. And fleshed it out

another half hour. Right. And then said it was a script

by Gene Roddenberry. Well, that went to

arbitration, of course, it was a split credit. Gerrold:

What he had done was he had

jumped her credit. He was now getting

half the residuals

for that episode, and that's in perpetuity. Gene did this brilliant job

of turning this one-hour story into a two-hour story

he wrote half of it, she wrote half of it. He came back with a script

and, to this day, I have no idea what

that episode was about. But there was no way

in the world I was going to give any notes

whatsoever to Mr. Roddenberry. Berman:

One story that is one of my

favorites about Gene had to do with the casting

of Captain Picard. We looked at a whole bunch

of people and Bob Justman had seen Patrick Stewart

give a class or a lecture. Bob Justman went by a hallway

where he was teaching at UCLA and heard this voice

reverberating down the hallway. It was Patrick Stewart. Arnold:

Patrick Stewart who was not

Gene's first choice. In fact, he kind of fought

even reading him first, but Bob Justman insisted,

so Gene did. Bob Justman said,

"You got to meet this guy, this is the captain." And Gene met me and

I understood some time, some time later, that Gene

said, "Absolutely not. This guy couldn't be

more wrong." Gene said I'm not going to have

a bald English man playing the new Captain Kirk. And I don't think

he quite understands the nature of my background

and where I'd come from

and what I'd done, except that I was this guy

who had a lot of classical

theatre experience. But Gene respected that. It's final casting

and it's Gene and I, Rick Berman was sitting there.

I had my vision, my vision was,

I want Bill Shatner. I want a good looking guy

who's young and virile. We were down to three actors:

Mitch Ryan, was number two, Roy Thinnes was number three, and the one that

I thought was interesting

was Yaphet Kotto. They were all but despairing

of finding a captain. This is silly.

Patrick is by far the best

person that we've talked about and Roddenberry said I'll have

him read to the studio and this

was John Pike. He said I'll have him read

but he's got to wear a wig. Patrick had a toupee

that was in England. It was FedExed across

to Los Angeles, and it was

sent to me in my office. He went to read along

with one other actor because you never went

with just one actor. Patrick did a really good

reading but he had a British accent and he had a

really, really bad toupee on, and Gene says you know,

that number two guy, that Patrick Stewart guy,

let's bring him back. And they grabbed Patrick

as he was on his way out and he had already taken

his rug off. Bring him in and read him

bald-headed. Well, Patrick Stewart,

one of the baldest heads

in the world, I mean, there's not a hair

anywhere. And he comes in and

he reads it and he nailed it. And Gene said,

"We got him." And I said,

"Gene, he doesn't have any hair, we can't make the Captain

a bald guy." And he looks at me and goes,

"Hair doesn't mean anything in

the twenty-fifth century." ( laughs ) And it was remarks like that

that there was no way

you could counter. And the next thing you know

Patrick Stewart got the job. Stewart:

About two weeks before

we started filming, I say, you know,

"Come on, Gene, give me stuff. I want background..."

and all of this. And he said, "No, there's just

one thing I have for you." And he fished down and brought

up this pile of these Horatio

Hornblower books, and said, "There he is,

that's your man and the rest

he left up to me. It was brilliant

he didn't tie me down to anything at all,

except he said that, "The nature of the man

is in this character." Gerrold:

We were having great fun

until December of '86. And, about February,

Leonard Maizlish moved

in full time, and things started

to go to hell. He came on the lot

and got his own office. When we went into production

the first season. Even though he was

the executive producer's lawyer, he would hand me scripts

saying these were notes

from Gene, but I knew Gene's handwriting

and they were not notes

from Gene. The writers got ahold

of this knowledge that Leonard Maizlish,

who was not a Writers

Guild member, was working on scripts. Here's a guy who'd never

written a word in his life and he was telling writers

how to write Star Trek scripts. And this is very much

against the Writers Guild. My agent took this stuff

to the Guild, and the Guild filed

a grievance and Leonard Maizlish

got banned from the lot. But then he kind

of snuck back in again. We'd gone to lunch,

we'd come back, Leonard Maizlish had snuck

into people's computers. I see that Maizlish

hovering around my room, opening the door,

peeking through like to see

if I was in there. And I just said,

"Is there something I can

help you with, Leonard?" And he leaped

about a foot and a half. I think he thought

he was speaking with

Gene's voice but I don't think Gene

ever heard the way

he spoke to people. Nobody liked him. Gene had these wonderful

relationships with people who had worked on

the original series

like Dorothy Fontana, and Leonard was horrible

to Dorothy. In particular,

I didn't like him. Leonard Mezlish was running

around hiring people: Maurice Hurley, Bob lewin,

neither one of which knew

anything about Star Trek, but were immediately promoted

above me and Dorothy. Why are people being

promoted above us? We are the ones

who should be the show

runners, the producers here. I found him to be

an unsavory character. He's standing right next

to an open window, no screen, no anything, and I'm

thinking it would be so easy to push that bastard

out the window... it would

be so easy. Say it again. "David, go do it. Go push that

bastard out the window, they'll give you a medal." Pike:

I remember there was

this huge screening in the executive conference room

at Paramount Pictures, and all the hitters,

and everybody that was

important, and up we put on the big screen

Encounter at Farpoint. Everybody looked at it and they were visually knocked

out at how stunning the two-hour looked. As I had looked at it

and wondered what is this about, what in the world is that thing

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