What a Long Strange Trek It’s Been

Harry Belafonte certainly has a case to answer, Island In The Sun, The Banana Boat Song and now Mr. Spock. “I was a big fan of his,” explains Leonard Nimoy, “and went to see him in concert at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in the early 1960’s . It was dead black on stage and you could see this figure walk out and the spolight fixed upon him, he stood totally still with his hands on his thighs for about ten minutes. The only thing that moved was his mouth, through the applause and everything. Then, during a particular song, he raised his right arm and it was like a thunderclap. He had set up this serenity so that when he made that one single move, it was extraordinary. I was very, very impressed. If you haven’t been doing anything, then you don’t have to do a lot. A little goes a long way. And that’s how I discovered that if I were very passive and serene, and then raised an eyebrow in a close-up on screen, that it worked.”
Spock is sixty-four now, Trekkers, so chances are that all you’re going to be left with are intermittent re-runs of the classic series amid the current barrage of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and The Next Generation., the latter evoking parallels between the characters of Mr. Spock and the android, Data.
“It’s an interesting difference,” Nimoy affirms. “Brent Spiner (Data) is a very talented actor. We had him in my series, ‘Deadly Games’, last season and he is so talented. As for Data and Spock, Spock was continually trying to repress his emotions, whereas Data is looking for emotions, some humanity. Very interesting, a good idea, and Brent played it superbly well.”
It was back in 1975 that Leonard Nimoy penned his controversially titled I Am Not Spock in what was widely perceived to be a dramatic counter to career-threatening typecasting. But the man himself begs to differ.
“I wasn’t actually having any difficulty getting work at the time,” he says. “Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard, The Next Generation) was interviewed a while back in the States and the headline played on my original title because it said ‘Patrick Stewart announces, “I Am Not Jean-Luc Picard.”’ In it, he was quoted as saying that he was choosing roles to give himself as much distance as possible from that character. I wasn’t having that problem. Yet there must have been something in the brain that was saying ‘That’s not me’.
“But I was not protesting when I choose that title, I was trying to be interesting, When I used to teach acting, I used to say that the simplest way to develop a character is to find out the differences between you and the character. Play the difference, as a beginning. Does he walk differently than you? Then play the walk. Does he talk differently to you? Then play the talk. Spock was always different to me.”
The inscrutable Mr.Spock, having achieved mythical status in modern popular culture, it was indeed a brave decision for Nimoy to reject a role in the most recent blockbusting Star Trek movie, Generations.
“I didn’t like it” he recalls. “I didn’t like it on the page when I read it, and I didn’t like it on screen. They asked me to direct it, but I just didn’t like the story. It didn’t interest me.”
With Captain Kirk’s demise confirmed in Generations, does he foresee any further appearances for himself in future Trek movies?
“I doubt it, I just don’t think I’m hearing it from them. I would consider it, but maybe they’re moving off in another direction. Star Trek: Voyager certainly seems to be. My God, there’s even a woman at the helm!”
One wonders, though, if the Star Trek team could cook the proverbial golden goose?
I suppose they could, but it would take a lot of cooking!” he smiles. “The whole think has developed such momentum on its own, and so much size. There was a time in the 1970s when our original series began to become very popular in reruns. It was a cult, small and intense, but that doesn’t apply any more, as it has a massive audience these days . Now, science fiction television, like The X Files and Babylon 5, is huge in the States, but it was Star Trek which educated the programmers to the idea that there was an audience for science fiction. It used to be a very low-level genre, thought of as a sub-genre in literature and films.”
Mr.Nimoy is speaking from considerable experience here.
“The first science fiction that I appeared in was 1950 or 1951 and it was a Saturday serial called Zombies Of The Stratosphere and it was pretty low-level stuff! It was not badly made, the production values were fairly good, but the ideas were silly. There we were in a cigar-shaped space ship travelling very wobbly across the screen leaving behind a trail of smoke. We landed bouncing across the earth, the doors opened, and three guys walked out and they called us Zombies, but we’re from Mars, naturally. The Martians were always the enemy! We were also carrying Colt 38 revolvers! And we get around Earth by stealing a truck! The plot was about us knocking Earth out of its orbit because we wanted that spot!
“Then a show like Star Trek comes along and starts dealing with over-population, ecological problems, racial difficulties, pollution. You’re into something else, and using scientific ideas. Scientists were interested in the show. It opened the door for a different kind of science fiction.”
In his new book, I Am Spock (Century), Nimoy takes the reader on a personal cruise through a career of acting, writing, producing and directing. And Mission Impossible.
“It was a very cinematic television show,” he says. “Star Trek and Mission Impossible went on air at exactly the same time, were sister shows of the same company. We were literally on adjoining sound stages, so we could walk next door and visit each other. I always admired the fact that their writers could find ways to get the story told with a minimum amount of dialogue. In Star Trek we had to learn pages and pages of dialogue every day and a lot of it was very technical. Well, the brain gets tired after awhile! I would wish we could get through a scene showing the audience what was going on instead of telling them. You could walk out of the room and listen to Star Trek and follow the story. You couldn’t do that with Mission Impossible and it was a very lucky break for me because I got to play all those other characters, with a minimum of dialogue to study every night before I went to sleep. However, I found after a short period that there was no interior life to the characters I was playing, so it became very boring to me. The character, Paris, that I played had no personal life at all!”
Although Nimoy directed the films Star Trek III: The Search For Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in the mid-1980s, along with Three Men And A Baby, his more recent work has taken on an altogether more significant tone with The Good Mother (1987) and Never Forget (1991).
“I’m interested in subject matter that has some issues at stake,” he explains. “I think entertainment is terribly important but, at the same time, there has got to be some substance to the material to keep me interested. Otherwise, it just feels repetitive. The people I admired, and who worked for early on, were figures like John Frankenheimer and others like Kubrick, as well as a guy who worked on a lot of Star Trek episodes, Mark Daniels. Not well known, but a plain, simple, uncomplicated director”.
It was with Never Forget, in which he both starred and directed, that Nimoy tackled the serious issue of neo-Nazism and Holocaust denial. Is it as much of a problem in the US as it is in Europe?
“There is a revisionist movement in the States,” he says. “I can’t tell you to what degree it has impacted before you call it a ‘problem’, but it exists. There are Holocaust deniers, but I don’t think neo-Nazism has much of a footing. Yet, there are people who are actually teaching the idea that the Holocaust is not a fact, college professors. It’s one of those issues which comes under the heading of free speech.”
That Spock retains a special place in public affection was underlined at Eason’s bookshops in both Dublin and Belfast recently, when Nimoy signed a phenomenal seven hundred copies of I Am Spock per hour in each shop, as countless well-wishers and voyeurs queued to see the one-time Vulcan.
Doubtless, the bookwill end-up in many a Christmas stocking and,yet, the earth- shattering truth must now be revealed: There was no Christmas on Star Trek!
“You’re right!” he laughs. “Gene Roddenberry (the show’s creator) wouldn’t have any religion in the show or any religious content. He believed that mankind was the be-all and end-all. Mankind isn’t controlled, manipulated or supervised by a higher power. Whatever mankind accomplishes, it does so on its own.”
And Leonard Nimoy’s own favourite memories of Christmas?
“When I was a kid growing up in Boston there was a paper called The Boston Post and it used to advertise around Christmas that if you wrote letters to Santa through them then Santa might come to your house and bring you some gifts. I wrote a letter, never telling my folks and, on Christmas Eve, there was a knock on the door and my Dad answered it and said, “Who is it?” and they said, “The Post Santa!” and he was standing there with a box of toys for me. Boy, did my brother and I have a party! That’s my best memory of Christmas.”
Live long and prosper, Mr.Nimoy.