William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge Page #5

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and that's how he found out he was fired and he lasted

about a week. Crosby:

I know that the fans were

always surprised that this wasn't some glamorous,

red-carpeted, money-thrown-at-us affair. - On the first year.

- On the first year. Your trailer was so bad

you didn't want to go

back to it. It had no air

conditioning. No bathroom, no wash basin,

no telephone. They were those little

Jerry Lewis boxes, remember on the steel wheels? Things that they dug out

of some back lot that no one had probably

been in since 1953. You remember those? I do, I used to

look at them from afar. Of course you did. We were a syndicated

science fiction series, we were down the status

ladder at Paramount. I would go to Rick and say, "This is how much money we've

got to spend per episode." They weren't throwing

a lot our way in terms

of any perks. If I was in trouble financially,

I could go to Rick and say, "Rick, I need two million

dollars this year.

Can you find it?" And he said,

"I'll get it for you." I used to go and steal food

from the set of Cheers. You mean there were

no craft services table? Not really. Rick at the end of the year...

on the numbers. We would literally have

sliced tomatoes and Cremora. So this made you think what? Well, you feel like the

illegitimate bastard

in the back lot. Hurley:

Gene at this time in

his life didn't really care about the management

of television, it's a sausage factory. You got to turn

out a sausage every day. He would come up with a story,

say this is the story

we want to do, then when that story was written

out, he'd want to tear it up and throw it away.

"Oh, no. I got a better idea." Gene would read a script

three days before shooting and decide he didn't like it. If you throw this story away

because this one is different, but not better,

the machine breaks down. Because this has to go to

the stage and we have to have

something to shoot on Monday. Meanwhile we had

a production meeting and everything had been set

for this episode and suddenly we were having

to make changes. So, I wanted to leave.

He said, "I'm turning

the show over to you." And I said,

"I'll do the show if you leave." And he said Majel and I were

thinking of going to Tahiti. I said, "I'll buy your ticket

and make your reservation." And he left. This trip that they took

had an enormous effect

on the show. It couldn't have been

at a worse time. And that's where Berman

and I took his idea

and ran with it. Rick Berman and Maury Hurley

were trying very hard to respect Gene's wishes

and perhaps they were doing so a little too literally. If in one instance

Gene said, "No that should be blue."

Suddenly everything had

to be blue. Gene had intended fully

to step away and he found

he couldn't. I don't think he realized things

would get so out of control so quickly. Maury got elevated to sort of

the show runner position I was a little surprised

because he had never written any science fiction

in his life, he had done

mostly cop shows. People questioned Maury's

ability to run a room. Maury didn't like the way

certain people took notes. I don't really care

what people think. I mean, when I'm doing what

I'm doing, I don't care. I'm going to do what

I'm going to do and

that's the way it is. First thing he did was

he took Bob Lewin and he moved him to a tiny little

office on the ground floor and took all of his power away,

and I didn't like that at all. I grew up in a show business

family and I've seen all

of the bull sh*t, and I don't like it. The power pull. The politics and

the back stabbing

and all that stuff. - All for?

- For personal power. Maury was really trying

to stick with Gene's plan, and I think was a lot of

resentment about that too because a lot of people

would come in and they had

their own ideas. And you know Gene

didn't want anybody

to have their own ideas, this was his world. No writer could come in

and give me an idea

that I would accept-- no matter how great

the idea was-- if it broke that concept. I wrote this thing

called Conspiracy and I was intentionally

trying to shake things up and do a different

kind of story. I was the keeper

of the grail and nothing was going

to change it. Maury came back to me

and said it's not Star Trek, it's too dark, it's got a dark

ending, it's unhappy, it's this and that,

and he turned it down. Somebody overruled him and maybe

it was Rick Berman, but somebody loved the script

and that it was exactly what we should be doing, but Maury and I had a very bad

relationship from that point on. Stewart:

In that first season

we'd had Denise go half way through the season

which was just such a screw up. Episodes would go by

and I'd maybe say,

"Aye, aye, Captain." She was such

a popular character. Now Denise Crosby clearly

is not Katherine Hepburn but you know the camera

really loved her. I used to ask them to do

a mock up of my legs and just put them up there

on the bridge. You'd have to

come in for a shot. I was always there,

fifteen hour days just standing on the horse shoe.

The actor inside of me was beginning to chew

on my own arm. And Denise quit after

twenty some odd episodes to become a "motion picture star." When I think about the Israeli

Palestinian negotiations, I think about,

you know, sometimes

they seem to negotiate the way the studio was

negociating with Denise's people and it ended up with her

just going. I don't think

you can sustain a show where the characters are not

accessible to the audience. Where you don't see somebody

over coming a flaw, if there's no conflict and no

tension between people, then there's no relationship

between people and that show

will wither. And that's what

was happening. I tried to make it sustain, I wanted to create

this new adversary, The Borg, I want the Federation

to form allies against this overwhelming,

awesome adversary. At the end of the first season

there's an episode called

The Neutral Zone, which was the arc for the second

season, and the arc for the second season was going to be

here come The Borg. At the end of the second season

they defeat The Borg. Then what happened? Writers strike. End of the first season,

writers strike begins. Couldn't talk

to the writers, couldn't talk to Roddenberry. And the hiatus

dragged on and on and on, it was five and a half months. Stewart:

I remember having lunch

with a couple of executives from Paramount

and they were saying, "It's really bad, and I think

your show will be one of the

first to be canceled it's looking so bad." And I had already adjusted

to the idea that maybe we'd get two or three years

out of this show. Suddenly, the strike

was resolved and we went back and we started the

second season very late, and we started it

without Gates. Shatner:

The end of the first season,

Paramount Studios was more than happy that their

gamble on the rebooted series was paying dividends, but on the inside,

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