Reply With QuoteShatner, huh? He's looking... different. Did he have an operation or something?Originally Posted by Tim Yaleman
:)
Take a look at this gigantic crock o' shit, starring WILLIAM SHATNER!:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0283877
Shatner, huh? He's looking... different. Did he have an operation or something?
:)
I thought maybe it was a spoof, but it looks real. Heh.
You gotta admire Shatner. He's taken all the jokes about his being a hack and run with it. He just laughs along with everyone else and cashes the checks.
American Psycho 2: Electric Boog. . . nah
Because there were so many questions left unanswered in the first American Psycho.
He can't be worse than the actor who played the lead in the first american psycho. actually the whole movie can't be worse than that one. Whenever it is on cable I am forced to watch just a little, to prove to myself it wasn't just a bad dream.
Chet
Yeah but he spent about 30 years being a total asshole about it. Nimoy is pretty much his only friend from Trek, the rest loathe him still. This is just him growing old and finally accepting his lot in life (and you do have to admire that). The weirdest thing about Shatner is his early stage reviews. Theater critics called him the next Marlon Brando.
Wait a minute, that guy became a punchline too....
And here I go enjoying American Psycho. I think Christian Bale did an admirable job playing an unsure pretty boy who puts up a front of being an egomaniac so he can fit in with his Wall Street "friends".
It's one of the best black comedies I've seen in the last several years.
But a sequel? This is most likely going to be in the vein of the straight to video Poison Ivy 2. Take a movie with real stars, make a small bit of money, have it become a cult classic, and then butcher the formula with hack actors for the sequel (that should never be made since the first movie tied all the loose ends up).
What did Shatner do to make the cast of Trek dislike him? I don't know anything about the behind the scenes stuff other than Uhura's brother was one of the wackos who cut off his genitals and than killed himself so the mothership could take them.
I haven't read those "autobiographies" in a long time (I had a courier job and they were books on tape from the library - I'm not a geek dammit!). The gist is that he was one of THOSE actors you hear about....
A prima donna. He needed to be coddled. He counted his lines and compared them to everyone else. He fought for other people's scenes and lines. He was Kirk, and he could hold the production for ransom when he wanted to. I think Nichelle Nichols lost a whole scene in Star Trek IV. Jimmy Doohan (Scotty) is by far the biggest Shatner hater. Basically Shatner stepped on people for his own gain every chance he got.
Nimoy was more popular and had a better sense of story (so he didn't take lines to beef Spock up). He was much less insecure. Because of that he got what he wanted as well but he never really pissed anyone off. Nimoy is a gentleman still.
One cool story is how Nimoy and Shatner had a deal. They put in their contracts that neither one could be paid more than the other. Each film they'd alternate good cop/bad cop with one of them stalling negotiations and asking for more money with the other guy saying: "I'm sorry, I want to do it but I can't do the film without 'the other guy'"
The recent guys? With the sneakers and Hale Bop? Wow. I didn't know that.
Cool Uhura story. She was going to quit, not enough screen time or lines, and she was at a party. Martin Luther King Jr. walked up to her and told her not to quit the show. He said it was very important that people look at the screen and see a female black officer in the future. Even if the part was small, she was Lt. Uhura. Imagine what that must have felt like.
Yeah, it was the Hale Bop guys. Her brother was one of them.
King was probably right, too. It was good to have a black officer. There weren't many blacks on TV back then. Cosby in I Spy, that secretary in Mannix, and Julia, the nurse in that sitcom of the same name. Probably others, but I can't think of them.
I wonder if King saw that Frank Gorshwin Trek episode with the half-white, half-black aliens? That was a silly one.
"King was probably right, too. It was good to have a black officer."
I agree, but did you see that one Trek episode where Uhura's brain is completely erased? I couldn't believe it. Her brain is completely erased by a malevolent robotic space probe, and she is reduced to the mental level of a child. At the end of the episode all that happens is that Kirk shrugs it off (perhaps even with a chuckle), remarking on how they will be able to retrain her to do her job in "no time."
Whaaaaaa?
So, the Uhura in all episodes and films after that one has no memory of most of her life, and has been retrained on how to be an adult by Kirk, et al. Riiiighht.
>A prima donna. He needed to be coddled. He counted his lines and compared them to everyone else. He fought for other people's scenes and lines. He was Kirk, and he could hold the production for ransom when he wanted to
Brett "Data" Spiner and Patrick Stewart are apparently even worse.
I can see Brett Spiner acting like that. In every interview I've read, he comes off as a complete prima donna.
Really surprised at Patrick Stewart though. I can see him being a complete dick when he first started on Next Gen, being as he was a Shakespearian actor and probably thought he was better than Lavar "Reading Rainbow" Burton et al. But recently he has seemed down to Earth when promoting his films, doing interviews, and in his choice of fun roles.
But I am so completely unknowledgeable about Hollywood that he could gun down the cast of Lavern and Shirly and I wouldn't know about it until half way through his trial.
"Brett "Data" Spiner and Patrick Stewart are apparently even worse."
With any luck this will be the last Next Gen movie. I think the entire Star Trek industry should shut down for a few years -- no new episodes, no re-runs, no movies, no games, no books, no comics, etc. It'll never happen, though. Paramount will keep squeezing until all the blood is gone and the bones are pulped.
Patrick Stewart completely rewrote the last Star Trek movie to make himself the focus of it, and transformed it into a terrible movie in the process. With him and Brett Spiner arguing for increased roles, there's very little left for the other actors.
As if to live up to everyone's lowest expectations, they not only took control of the script of the next movie and gave themselves the most prominent roles (again), they actually [spoiler] gave themselves two characters each, to even further exaggerate that imbalance.
I agree with Mark - that's definitely a franchise that should be left alone for a while.
"they actually [spoiler] gave themselves two characters each, to even further exaggerate that imbalance."
oh... my... god...
yechhh.
I hear Wil Wheaton is pretty cool about being in Star Trek... I think. And hes a gamer! supposedly.
Here's his website, his own words too!
http://www.wilwheaton.net/
etc
NO! NO! NO! NO!
Mark, I beg of you - delete the wil wheaton post. Please!!!
Do not let this site become another - we love wil wheaton site. Trust me, delete the post, otherwise others will come.
I am so amazingly sick of everyone's fascination over wil wheaton. If Ozzie is over exposed on TV, wil is on the net. I had no idea who he was a year ago, now all I know is he is a super whiny little bitch child actor who can't find work as an adult because he sucks - but boy do the geeks eat it up and love him for it.
Chet
It is too late, but now I know the truth. I looked at the Wil Wheaton site out of morbid curiosity (My eyes...the goggles do nothing!) and saw that Wil has a Royal Tenenbaums banner up. Qt3 was clearly subsumed by him long ago. We await his command. He has the con.
Wil is the co-host of Arena on the G4 cable video/computer gaming network. It's the show where two teams face off in games like Counter Strike, Mechwarrior 4 and Unreal Tournament. I think it sucks too.
--Dave
What? Watching gamers play games isn't fascinating! Someone better alert the CPL!
It's the format of the show. You can barely tell what's going on in the games as the people play. The commentary by Wheaton and his annoying, stereotypical nerd sidekick is useless. It doesn't work on TV because I can't control the camera and watch what I want to watch. If I'm able to spectate a game of Quake, etc. between top players where I can move where I want to in order to watch, then yes, watching others play works.
--Dave
I had to check out Wesley's site too. I was amused to see this from Wheaton on his message board:
"Now the bad news: I just got my bandwidth bill from logjamming, and it's just over 500 dollars.
"That's right. 500 dollars, American, and I can so not afford this."
He then goes on to ask for donations. Made me laugh.
What is this world coming to when a minor, minor celebrity can only land roles on a network that reaches 15 people, 14 if the network's secretary calls in sick, and he can't pay his bandwidth bill. WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO!!?!
Does he have enough to feed himself!?! I MUST KNOW!
And how come begging on the street is looked down on, but virtual begging is all the rage. I hate virtual beggers.
Chet
I know you're just trying to be funny, but G4 probably reaches a lot more than 15 people. Anyone on Comcast cable service that's paying for digital cable has the station. One of the benefits of a cable company backing a station is that it gets added immediately.
That doesn't make Wil's show any better. Just means that a lot of people can watch it.
--Dave
I worked with the old series cast when I was producing Star Trek: Judgment Rites CD for Interplay. All but Nimoy had stories to tell about Shatner talking to directors to have scenes refocused on himself, even to the extent of having lines written for others transferred to him between takes. One story told by several of them was how George Takai (Sulu) was supposed to be promoted and get his own ship in either movie 2 or 3 (I forget which, but I think it was 2). According to the stories, Shatner first tried to get the director to drop the scene and, when that wasn't successful, then intentionally read the promotion scene completely deadpan for several takes, until the director got the message and cut the scene. Sulu didn't get his ship until the sixth movie.
The stories were told with humor (all of them are great raconteurs, Walter Koening and Jimmy Doohan especially had us rolling in the aisles), but with a biting undercurrent that let you know there was still anger. Some of the cast is definitely bitter, for a number of reasons. Most people don't know that only Shatner and Nimoy received royalties on merchandise and the like, because of the aforementioned agreement between the two of them re: negotiations with Paramount. They well understood they weren't as marketable as Nimoy and Shatner, but the fact they they weren't even tossed a crumb by either Paramount or their cast-mates left a bitter taste in their mouths, especially as most of them ended up type-cast and without steady on-screen work for a long while.
To Nimoy's everlasting credit, most of the supporting cast had at least one tale to tell of how Nimoy went out of his way to recommend them for a part or keep their name in front of a producer or director. He was also a joy to work with, the compleat professional without being an arrogant prick. If you ever want to feel chills run up and down your spine, find the CD version of ST:JR and listen to the scene where Spock mind-melds with a dying German soldier on a WW One battlefield, a young boy who, at the end of his life, is questioning the values he held dear and which brought him to fight.
It was written for the text version of the game and is a huge block of text, full of em-dashes, wandering thoughts, lonliness for loved ones and a sense that he'd been all wrong about the war. We offered to break it down into smaller bits for the recording, but he simply read it silently to himself a couple times, made a couple notes on the scripts, said "No, I can go with this," then proceeded to do an utterly mesmerizing 60-90 second performance that nailed it in one. Bear in mind that the average 'take' for a voiceover is less than 10 seconds and only rarely does a take exceed 30 seconds.
When he was finished, we sat stunned in the director's booth; it was that powerful. The hair on my arms was literally standing on end; someone behind me was choking back sobs, literally. I know this sounds like an exaggeration for effect, but I am not making this up. Finally, Nimoy looked up from the script, saw our faces and said concernedly, "Oh, was it off?" At which point, we all rose from our seats and began clapping. He couldn't hear us from the sound booth, of course, but he got the idea and smiled.
We took an immediate break and ran off two duplicates, to guarantee we wouldn't lose that amazing performance.
Thanks very much for that anecdote Jessica.
Nimoy is a complicated and very talented guy. He's got some great stories about playing heavies in old 50's Westerns and Mob flicks. His autobiographies are by far the best to read, if only because he doesn't gloss over his own warts like Shatner does.
You don't mention him directly, but, based on what I've read I'd be surprised if DeForest Kelley dished on Shatner (he also had a career as a heavy in Hollywood prior to Trek). He didn't have Shatner/Nimoy's deal, but I heard he made off better than the rest, overall. There was a definite hierarchy there, and aside from the childishness it isn't surprising. They could have gone without Chekhov, Uhuru, and Scotty. Though I like him, they could even go without Sulu. But that McCoy, Kirk, Spock dynamic was just golden.
Speaking of Sulu, I still wish they'd canned this silly Enterprise TV show idea and just made a spin-off featuring Sulu and the Excaliber from the ST movie era. Takai is a good enough actor, that's for sure and the original series cameos they love to do would be easier to stomach. Plus I love those red uniforms... they're perfect for showing blood on the white part.
Amen. We worked with Nimoy for three days (he also did our Making Of... video for ST:JR), and he had some great stories. For example, during the first day of voice-overs, during a pause, he asked if there was any news in the Nicole Simpson/Ron Goldman murder case, which was a week old at that time. He then went on to say that, on the night of the murders, he, his family and friends ate at Mezzaluna and they all wondered who that beautiful woman was at the next table. They asked the waiter, who told then it was OJ Simpson's wife, Nicole.
The next day, when he read about the murders in the paper, he realized that the waiter was Ron Goldman. Gave me chills, I tell ya.
During the filming for the Making Of..., he had his stepson Adam at the studio, coaching him for his Bar Mitzvah during breaks and at lunch. Turns out Adam's natural father is John Schuck, whom ST fans will recognize from various small roles in the ST movies. Nimoy urged us to use him if we had a role for him, saying he was a good talent and underused. Now, that's class.
I didn't get to work with Dee Kelley, actually. By the time he was available, the budget for Interplay Online Services was approved and I moved off to head that up and Ken Allen was moved in to complete the ST:JR project. Ken told me that Kelley was the perfect Southern gentleman and came in prepared and ready to rock, so you are probably correct about his not dishing on Shatner. Kelley's final performance in any medium before his death, by the way, is sitting on tape somewhere at Interplay, part of a cancelled ST game. I'd kill to get a copy of that tape.
It's true, any old series game or project can probably live without the supporting cast; the dynamic of the lead trio was the key to the series. I will say this; after working with all but Kelley, I'll work with the supporting cast any time, on any project. All that I worked with are professional and pretty easy to work with and gave everything to the performance, sometimes insisting that we record several versions of bits, because they wanted to get it perfect.
Contrast this with Shatner, who shoved two days of work into one day by basically phoning in the performance; most of his 2,000 some-odd lines were read in a complete monotone. We couldn't even give him voice direction, for fear he'd get pissed and exercise his 'asshole clause,' as Hollywood calls it ("I can be an asshole and walk and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it."). The one time we tried, he blew up and that piece ended up on Howard Stern when someone involved sent him the tape (my 15 minutes of fame; I was the one he blew up at. I think one of the engineers at the studio did it; they were all pretty ticked off that they weren't allowed to ask for an autograph). To Shatner's defense, at the very next break, he apologized profusely and sincerely, and spent time with each of us the rest of the day making it right. I was left with the impression that he was sincerely bothered that some of his coworkers didn't like him and couldn't understand why.
I agree perfectly with you. Enterprise is better than the other alternative, though, a show about the Academy in an attempt to snare a younger audience. When we thought Paramount was actually going to give us ST for an MMOG in 1994, we were allowed to see the treatments for proposed new series and asked which one would tie in best with the game. The Academy one was one of the choices; Voyager was the other. I told them I'd rather have the Next Generation/Deep Space Nine timeline over either of them and work the Academy in as the training simulator. I also told them I thought the Academy would alienate their core audience, which was slightly older than the age 15-21 demographic they were aiming for.
Then Paramount was bought by Viacom, who licensed the rights to ST to Microsoft exclusively for four years and the opportunity was gone. Again; that was the second time I had the license in my hand and Paramount pulled it away at the last minute. Dammit.
That last was me, by the way. Another forgotten login.
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