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Authors: William Shatner

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BOOK: Leonard
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Few of those small roles gave Leonard a chance to really apply his talents, so he found other ways to exercise his skills. In 1962, he and his good friend Vic Morrow optioned the movie rights to a play they had done in a small theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, Jean Genet's
Deathwatch
. It wasn't exactly a hot commercial property. Rather it was a complex, highly emotional story that takes place in a jail cell in which two prisoners are fighting over the affections of the third inmate, who happens to be a killer. He had gotten wonderful reviews in that play and often credited it with getting him noticed in the industry, and after that, he began working a lot more often. It marked the first time he was able to earn enough as an actor to cut back on his other jobs. Following that, his performance onstage in Genet's better-known play
The Balcony
consolidated his growing reputation as a talented young actor.

Leonard and Morrow somehow raised $125,000 from small contributors to shoot the film. Just think about that: Leonard was working several jobs and barely earning a living, yet his respect for his profession and his passion for honest and emotional storytelling was so profound that he spent his energies—and probably most of his money—getting this project completed. I can't imagine that anyone believed this film was going to be a commercial blockbuster. They began filming
Deathwatch
in 1964 with Morrow directing and Paul Mazursky and Michael Forest costarring with Leonard, while Gavin MacLeod played a minor role. They couldn't find a distributor, so they booked into select theaters themselves. It opened in San Francisco in 1966. Two years later, after Leonard began to get some recognition, they managed to get limited distribution in art houses nationally.

As it turned out, one of the people who saw that play in Santa Monica was a young actor named George Takei. He was so taken with the performance that he remembered the names of the actors, and when Roddenberry cast him in the role of Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, he immediately recognized the name Leonard Nimoy.

I had also started working regularly on television, making guest-starring appearances in many of them. Live drama was very popular and even a little prestigious at that time, and initially, I appeared regularly in shows presented by a single sponsor like
The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Alcoa Premiere, Goodyear Playhouse, Kraft Theatre, The United States Steel Hour,
and
The DuPont Show of the Month,
as well as legendary programs like
Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents,
and two classic episodes of
The Twilight Zone.
While I continued making movies, television was where the work was, and as a new father, I needed to keep working. Eventually, I worked at least once on practically every memorable show from that period, among them
Naked City, 77 Sunset Strip,
and
Route 66
. On
The Outer Limits,
I was an astronaut returned from orbiting Venus who can't seem to get warm. I appeared regularly on
The Defenders
and actually was offered the leading role. On
The Fugitive,
I played a former police officer running a youth program, who also may be a serial killer responsible for several murders that Richard Kimball is accused of committing. I appeared on medical shows like
Dr. Kildare.
On
Gunsmoke,
I played a wanted man pursued by Marshal Dillon hiding out among the Quakers. None of us had the slightest idea we were in the middle of television's Golden Age.

When you worked as often Leonard and I did, eventually you would cross paths with many different people. You never knew when one of them might be in a position to make a difference in your career. In 1960, for example, Leonard guest-starred as a deputy sheriff on western writer Sam Peeples's show,
The Tall Man.
It starred Barry Sullivan and Clu Gulager as Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. That episode was the first one written by a twenty-one-year-old woman named Dorothy C. Fontana, and she was so excited, she went to the set to meet the actor. She recalled, “I told Leonard this was the first thing I had ever sold, and he asked me some questions and was very encouraging and polite. The producers liked his character and the way he did it, so they brought him back for a second episode. But then they killed him, and he was off the show.”

The magic struck Leonard's friend from Jeff Corey's classes, Vic Morrow, who starred in the successful World War II action series
Combat!
Morrow helped Leonard get a nice role in an episode entitled “The Wounded Don't Cry.” He was cast as Private Neumann, a GI who translates German—thank you, Yiddish—when his battalion finds an enemy aid station. Among the viewers when the show was broadcast was a casting director named Joe D'Agosta, who really appreciated Leonard's performance. D'Agosta kept good notes about who was being hired to do what, his way of finding talented young actors. Not too long afterward, D'Agosta was doing the casting for producer Gene Roddenberry's first show,
The Lieutenant
.
The Lieutenant
was the story of a Marine infantry battalion stationed at Camp Pendleton during peacetime. The title character was platoon leader and training instructor Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice.

Tiberius? What an interesting middle name for a character. But where have I heard that name before? Oh, I remember—a great Roman emperor.

In the episode entitled “In the Highest Tradition,” Leonard played a slick Hollywood producer who wants to use the facilities at Pendleton to shoot a film about a Marine hero—who turns out to be somewhat less than heroic. Also appearing in that hour-long show were Gary Lockwood as the lieutenant and Majel Barrett. It was directed by Marc Daniels, whom Leonard had met previously when Daniels was directing an episode of
Dr. Kildare
featuring Leonard's acting student Fabian. This kind of flamboyant producer was not normally the type of part Leonard played, but his agent, Alex Brewis, was known for his persistence. D'Agosta once described him as “a likable bulldog.” No matter what D'Agosta was casting, Brewis would show up in his office telling him, “That's the perfect role for Leonard. You got to bring him in for it.” It didn't matter what it was. “That's perfect for Leonard.” D'Agosta remembered being impressed with Leonard's work in
Combat!
and brought him in to read for the part. While initially Marc Daniels didn't think he was right for the role, Leonard's audition convinced Daniels to give Leonard the part. Leonard said that this turned out to be the most important audition of his life. It was a small decision that had enormous ramifications.

The Lieutenant
turned out to be the stepping-stone to
Star Trek
for several people
. Star Trek
was the next program Gene Roddenberry produced, and he asked D'Agosta to help him with the casting. Majel Barrett married Roddenberry and appeared in every version of
Star Trek,
both on television and in the movies, often both as a character and the voice of the computer. Gary Lockwood costarred in the second
Star Trek
pilot and several years later appeared with me in my series
T.J. Hooker
. Marc Daniels eventually directed fifteen episodes of
Star Trek;
in fact, after the two pilots were done, while we were all waiting to see if the network picked it up, Daniels directed Leonard in an episode of
Gunsmoke
called “The Treasure of John Walking Fox,” in which once again Leonard played an enigmatic Native American.

D'Agosta also cast several other actors who appeared in episodes of
The Lieutenant
in
Star Trek,
including Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols, whom he'd discovered in an acting workshop. Actually,
The Lieutenant
episode in which Nichelle appeared was never broadcast, but perhaps more than any other episode in this series, it demonstrated what Gene Roddenberry intended to do with
Star Trek
.

Gene Roddenberry had a quiet vision of what television could be at its finest. He understood the impact it could have on society, but he had to spend a lot of time trying to sneak his social message past studio executives and the censors. This episode, entitled “To Set It Right,” was shot while America was in the midst of the civil rights movement. Nichelle Nichols played the girlfriend of a white Marine, and Dennis Hopper played a Marine who objected to white men dating black women. It was a very controversial subject, and NBC decided it was too controversial to put on the air. I've spent considerable time with network executives. They think in bottom-line numbers, so it would be fascinating to have heard the discussions that must have taken place. It was extraordinary for a network to absorb the cost of producing an hour-long show and not broadcast it. The pressure from affiliate stations in different parts of the country must have been enormous. Knowing Roddenberry, I suspect he fought hard for this show, and though he lost the battle, he kept fighting his war. Setting
Star Trek
three hundred years in the future allowed him to focus on the social issues of the 1960s without being direct or obvious. The fact we were doing future fiction enabled him to film the first interracial kiss in American television history, when Captain Kirk is forced through telekinesis to passionately kiss Nichols's communications officer Lieutenant Uhura. The fact that Kirk had no control of his actions is demonstrated by the fact that Spock sings, dances, laughs, and also shares a passionate kiss with Barrett's Nurse Chapel, so clearly none of the crew members were acting of their own free will. Kirk was forced to kiss the beautiful Uhura!

Clearly that was fiction on many levels.

Joe D'Agosta was responsible for Leonard being cast in the role of Mr. Spock. Although D'Agosta was working at another studio when the
Star Trek
pilot was being cast, Roddenberry was unhappy with the actors he was seeing and asked him to help. He wasn't paid, although Roddenberry sent him a check for $750 when the series was picked up. “When I told Gene I didn't have time to do the casting,” D'Agosta remembered, “he told me to just give him a list of names, and they would bring them in and make their deals through business affairs.”

Roddenberry provided D'Agosta with a ten-page document that included only some broad character outlines. “There wasn't a lot of description of Spock in the script other than he was a half-human, half-alien Martian,” he continued. “But what Gene wanted was a tall, lean Lincoln-ish character, who conveyed a sense of serenity. He had more of a physical image than a personality in his mind. He wanted an actor whose mostly humanlike appearance conveyed that he was a man of few words but had firm conclusions and thoughts. He was looking for someone who appeared to radiate a higher level of intelligence. Leonard fit that physical description but also projected that aura of intelligence. I eventually recommended three or four actors to Gene Roddenberry, and Leonard was one of them.”

In Roddenberry's original outline, Spock was an alien member of the crew of the spaceship USS
Yorktown,
serving under Captain Robert April, as it traveled throughout the universe trying to offer assistance to civilizations in need. While Roddenberry always described it as the successful western series
Wagon Train
in space, for me it was more like the novelistic adventures of Captain Horatio Hornblower in space. There certainly wasn't anything quite like it at the time. The audience loved westerns and detective shows; the only science fiction was being done on episodes of anthology series like
The Twilight Zone
and
The Outer Limits.

Richard Arnold, the acknowledged expert of
Star Trek
who worked on several of the movies and TV shows, as well as organizing conventions, knew Roddenberry well. “
Star Trek
was a chance for him to tell the kind of stories he desperately wanted to tell. The timing was perfect because we were in the middle of the Cold War and the nuclear scare. He got his chance to do it in a science-fiction series because it went right over the heads of the censors. They didn't get it. He'd distracted their attention with a female character looking too sexy while telling stories about Vietnam, about sexual equality and racial issues, subjects you were not allowed to touch. Normally the censors would cross that all out, but because Gene used to say it all took place on purple planets with polka-dot people, they simply didn't get it. The role of Spock was pivotal; he was to be the representative of an intelligent society.” In fact, in later interviews, Roddenberry described him as “the conscience of
Star Trek
.”

There had never been a character quite like Mr. Spock. In most movie or TV portrayals, aliens from other planets were monsters either in being or deed, but whatever they were doing, it turned out to be bad for Earth. Spock was unique. Gene Roddenberry was creating a truly interracial and interspecies crew for the
Enterprise
. And Spock was half-human and half-alien, meaning he wasn't completely comfortable in two worlds. He actually wasn't identified as a Vulcan until the fifth or sixth episode. But the real function of Spock was to serve as an observer of human behavior and to comment on human variables, tendencies, habits, and beliefs. He was to be unfettered by normal human emotions.

Leonard learned he was being considered for a leading role in some new space show from his agent, who told him Roddenberry had liked his work on
The Lieutenant
and had him in mind for a character on a science-fiction series in development. I have no doubt how Leonard reacted; this was the kind of call agents make to clients to reassure them they are out there pounding the pavement on their behalf. While he must have been flattered, as apparently this was the first time he was considered for a leading role in a network series, he probably didn't take it very seriously. Calls like this one, and today e-mails, happen quite often in the life of a working actor. No one gets excited about them. It wasn't as if Leonard realized that this was going to be his big break and so fought to get the job. Sometimes these calls go a few steps further, but only rarely do they even progress to an audition, much less being cast in the role. I'm sure Leonard dismissed it before even hanging up the phone: a producer who was developing a pilot that might never get shot had him in mind for a role he might never get. Even if he got the role and the pilot was made, it had only a small chance of being picked up by the network.

BOOK: Leonard
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