Yearly Archives: 2009

Wiki Trek: “Elaan of Troyius”

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Some production facts from Mem Alpha, just because they interest me:

… Similarly to “The Corbomite Maneuver“, this episode was filmed early in the season, but aired much later because of the many, newly created special effect shots which took lot of time to be filmed and added in post-production.

… more costume changes than any other TOS character with the exception of Barbara Anderson (Lenore Karidian) in “The Conscience of the King.” Guest star France Nuyen’s costumes are far more revealing, however: the purple halter top, the silver flowered thing on black mesh, the orange dress, and the blue wedding gown with no sides.

This episode marks the first appearance of the Matt Jefferies-designed Klingon ship ... The new emblem of the Klingon Empire is seen on the model …



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War vessel. Like people say, Matt Jefferies did great work. He designed the Enterprise and the bridge, both of which are magnificent, then followed himself with the Klingons’ war ship, also a triumph. The ship is oddly beautiful: kind of scary and off looking, like an alien warship should be, but in subtle ways, and at the same time it draws the eye: the ship is uncomfortable to look at but also pleasing to look at. I think it outclasses everything else about the old-series Klingons: the make-up, the dumb names (“Klingon” itself is kind of dumb). In fact I’d say it was better than the show’s Vulcan stuff, even better than Mr. Spock’s ears. The Klingon ship is old Star Trek‘s best go at representing alienness, a pretty fundamental mission for the series. 

Shatner’s enemy.  MemAlpha mentioned France Nuyen‘s outfits. She was born 1939, Marseilles; original name: France-Nguyen Van-Nga. The wig is copied off the cover painting of a science fiction magazine from a good ways back.

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Per Wiki, Nuyen’s father was Vietnamese, mother was a French gypsy. When she was a teen somebody photographed her on the beach and she became a starlet.

In 1958 Nuyen and Bill Shatner starred in the Broadway adaptation of a hit novel, The World of Suzie Wong. Shatner says the play was sold out for months in advance because of mass theater parties booked from out of town. He claims that the result was a disaster because Nuyen was incompetent and impossible, a temperamental brat, somebody who couldn’t be trusted even to deliver her lines or do what the stage directions said.

The play would just fall apart, night after night, and Shatner had to stay alive up there somehow. So he began bending his lines; he twisted their delivery, sent the emphasis where it wasn’t expected. That way he could give the audience something to pay attention to. This is the origin story for the famous Shatner delivery, the crosswire rat-a-tat-tat everyone parodies. (“Man … was meant … to try,” and on “to” his voice goes up, and on “try” it goes down, throws the word away.)  He learned those tricks so he could survive France Nuyen. Sources: Up Till Now and Neal Pollack’s comments during Shatner’s Comedy Central roast, though I don’t advise watching the roast unless you’re some kind of moron. ( update, Not Neal Pollack. It was Kevin Pollak. )

Eyerolling.  In “Elaan,” Nuyen is just fine. Every big scene has got her in it, she has to carry the episode, and she comes thru. Moues, eye rolling, bellowing, cooing: she puts some life into the business, and it’s not just noise, there’s a performance. Some people you are really happy to see when you’re watching old Trek, and she’s one of them. (This effect, I mean brightening at the sight of competence, gets stronger if you’re watching a lot of episodes in a row. Now that I’m a few weeks into doing this rundown, I have to remind myself that I’m not really a James Doohan fan, that I’m just very grateful whenever he shows up.)

Nuyen was a reg on St. Elsewhere, got a master’s in clinical psych in 1986 and started counseling battered women, women inmates. After three years someone gave her a “Woman of the Year” award. 

Ambassador, others.  The green ambassador (Petri), b. 1930, NYC. Wiki says he did a lot of “summer stock and repertory companies,” then Shakespeare on Broadway, first movie was The Robe (1953), played Caligula.

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Mem Alpha: “After recovering from a drug addiction and a career-ruining jail sentence, Robinson returned to acting on television in the late 1960s, … Besides TOS, other TV series on which he has made guest appearances include Mannix, Bewitched, The Wild Wild West, Kolchak: The Night Stalker (with fellow TOS guest actor John Fiedler), The Waltons, Barney Miller (with another TOS guest star, Lee Meriwether), and Murder, She Wrote.” Movie parts listed for 1970s to ’90s. In 1997-2000, hosted Beyond Bizarre for the Discovery Channel.

 Orange shoulders.  Big alien flunky, b. 1937, NYC. Married to the woman who played the pretty historian who falls for Khan, 1962-70, had a kid. First credits mentioned are movies in 1964, including Taggart, in which he starred. Last role was in Quantum Leap, decades later.

 During 1960s, Mem Alpha says, “guest appearances on such television series as The Virginian, Mannix, and Mission: Impossible, as well as Fantasy Island …”

 

Black redshirt. He has a couple of lines, pops up in a couple of scenes, though he doesn’t get to do anything useful. Was also Greg Morris’s stunt double on Mission: Impossible.

 Did a lot of small parts over the years, latest being a judge on Boston Legal.


 

Swamp Thing.  Alien bodyguard #1. He was born 1938, started as stunt double on Lost in Space in 1965, would eventually have speaking part on the ’70s Battlestar Galactica.

He was the guy in the Swamp Thing costume in Swamp Thing, The Return of Swamp Thing, and the Swamp Thing tv series. Mem Apha mentions movie credits in ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, in most cases decently budgeted films.

 



Viewscreen role. The Klingon, b. 1922. Mem Alpha: “Guest appearances on numerous television series, includingGunsmoke, Rawhide, The Untouchables, Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Virginian, and Gene Roddenberry’s The Lieutenant. … last appearance was in the 1972 pilot movie for the short-lived series The Delphi Bureau …”



Only known appearance:  The other alien bodyguard, another soul killed by Star Trek‘s wig deptartment:

 

Strange encounter

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This happened last night. It’s a story only because I lead a quiet life; there’s no special payoff at the end.
I was sitting in Cafe Nuit and a large man came in followed by two others. The three of them were square, solid and big: you noticed their neck size, the table got crowded fast when they sat down, that kind of thing. 
I was sitting over by the window, doing a Star Trek post. My table was the third of three small tables lined up to the window. The men took the first two tables but left me the chair at table two where I had stowed my windbreaker and bag. That sort of thing is standard in cafes: you split up areas.
The men were dressed in jeans and open neck shirts with collars, polo shirts maybe. Not the same make of shirt, but the same type. My guess is they were security for one of the clubs. They had neatly cut hair and kept it short — that’s my impression from side glances, since you don’t look people over directly at a cafe.
They talked in French and I did my post. But I felt someone looking at me. This happens in cafes: you see someone and for whatever reason you look, but not when they know. If the other person looks up, the first person glances away and they both reset and go about their business.
In this case I looked up. The man sitting across the table from me, diagonally across, was giving me a hard once-over from the corner of his eye: his face to his buddies, one eye turned my way. The surprise was that he looked so mad, like somehow I really got under his skin. Which is not an expression you find a lot at cafes. People don’t go there looking for fights. 
When I looked at him, he almost fell into the normal routine of look away and reset. His eye flickered back to his buddies. But I kept looking at him, because I was surprised, and his eye held. He had tiny features hanging off a mountain slope of a profile, little baby lips.
I went back to my laptop. I felt pretty sure no one was going to hit me at Cafe Nuit, so at least I could stay where I was.
A minute later my friend Elezar saw me thru the window, waved hello and then rolled in thru the cafe’s door. Elezar is immense: “A gentle giant,” as our mutual friend Henri likes to call him. He’s from Ghana and very black, with what I take to be tribal scars here and there on his face. Elezar used to work in a warehouse, but that was 20 years ago and then he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Since then he’s been on medication and has padded about from church to cafe to cafe to his room in the subsidized housing. People like him: he’s not especially cheerful, but he’s got a kind heart.
Elezar always gives me a big hello, so he called my name from the doorway and reached out over the men for a handshake. I saw them take him in. He was black and he was their size, maybe a bit larger, and they took special notice of that. Such was my read, anyway.
I got up from my table and walked a few feet from the group so Elezar and I could talk without crowding them. He gave me a second, proper handshake, because for him the moment has weight.
In the next minute or so the men finished their food — pizza slices, that kind of thing — and got up and left. Elezar and I sat down at my old table and we talked a while before I went back to my Star Trek post.
So that’s the story. As I said, it’s remarkable only because not much goes on in my life. I don’t think the truculent guy would have hit me. At worst he might have muttered something and I would have taken it. 
But it’s interesting how the story plays out. It’s such an ’80s teen-movie scenario. What do you do if a big white guy is making trouble? You get a big black guy and he’s the hero’s best friend! He just has to show himself and the white guys are scared! From that point of view, the incident played out very neatly.
The catch is that, in my life’s version of the episode, all the elements are de-weighted. The guy was not going to hit me; Elezar is not my best friend, he’s a character I bump into. And I didn’t get any girl, I just wrote my Star Trek post. So I lived a movie moment, but it had shrunk by the time it got to me.
Names were changed in this post.

Easy laugh

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I told Griffy, my building’s janitor, that traditional Chinese medicine abhors masturbation on the grounds that the practice drains yang without an influx of yin (I think).

Griffy:  “Fuck traditional Chinese medicine.”
I’m still a sucker for that kind of line: “fuck” vehemently attached to some Margaret Dumont of a subject.

You talking about Chappaquidick, son?

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Huck memorializes Ted Kennedy:

He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.

Ed Kilgore at TNR is mad because of what Huck alleges in the runup to that sentence, namely that President Obama wants sick old people like Ted Kennedy to go home and die so the government won’t have to pay for their operations. 
All right, but about my favorite sentence. Huck is gifted with words and has a good churchgoer’s streak of cattiness, so I suspect that the remark quoted above was designed to bounce off the one Ted Kennedy memory that his audience holds dear above all others.

Horrors of Malformed Men

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This has got to be about the most fucked up thing I have ever seen in my life. A 1969 Japanese film directed by Teruo Ishii, it starts out with the protagonist in an insane asylum…then he escapes and meets a circus girl who shares a strange past with him, until she’s weirdly knifed…then he sees his picture in the paper, but it’s not really him, but some guy who just died…so, naturally, he digs up the corpse, put on the grave clothes, and takes the guys place, sleeping with his wife and mistress…till the wife dies…and he goes off to this island where his web-fingered father has collected monstrosities, keeping his wife in a cave where she eats crabs off the corpse of her dead lover…and then the detective solves everything, except for the fact that the protagonist has committed incest with his sister…so her throws himself on top of fireworks and in the end we see his severed body parts falling out of the skywhile he and his sister/wife shout “Mother! Mother!”

And no, I haven’t even come close to describing how weird it is. It sounds like an art movie, obviously, and it’s got a lot of arty touches; much of the movement, especially of the insane web-fingered father, seems like it must be taken from traditional Japanese drama. But it’s also got pulpy exploitation instincts; as I mentioned, there’s a detective savior right out of the pulps, and the twisty suspense plot keeps trying to pry itself out of the aesthetic morass. It’s weird to say about a Japanese film, but it’s so Freudian; the family seems like this inescapable twisted mound of flesh, that is constantly being forgotten and constantly consuming; passion is all turned inward, and every character seems more or less constantly engaged in stumbling upon various primal scenes. The detective who supposedly solves all with lucid rationality at the end actually only casts a harsher light on the ongoing perversions. The main character never so much develops a personality or a past as he is husked out, revealed to be nothing but a pallid vessel for other family members psychodrama.

What’s maybe weirdest, though, is that it reamains banned in Japan. I mean, yes, there’s some bare breasts and some disturbing imagery and it’s affecting — but it’s hardly X-rated. Why ban this and not Tetsuo the Iron Man?

Ah, well…I can’t really understand my own culture; guess there’s no reason why I should understand theirs.

Pauline Kael and Charles Murray

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She’s the stooge for a rhetorical gimmick that is one of the right’s second-level favorites. Charles Murray hauled the gimmick out during a recent discussion when he referred to “Pauline Kael Syndrome.” The idea is that she was the movie critic for The New Yorker, so therefore in 1972 (the year of Nixon’s great landslide) she must have said the following:


“How can Nixon have won? No one I knew voted for him”


But she didn’t. She said the following:

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.” 


“Sort of the same thing, I know,” Charles Murray says hopefully. Sort of exactly not. Yes, either way you get somebody who doesn’t know too many people who voted for Nixon. But in the true quote, she realizes that this is not a normal state of affairs. In the doctored quote, the one the right has been batting around all these years, she’s living in a fool’s paradise — “How could Nixon have won?” She comes across as ditzy and conceited, off in her own little world of insular vanity. Which pretty much sums up the right’s view of liberals and “cultural elites.” As a gimmick Kael Syndrome is only one item amongst the right’s arsenal, but the gag grows from a key element of their world view. 

I know the true text of the quote because Murray was good enough to quote and cite Prof. John Pitney, who sent him an email to straighten him out.

Next-to-last point: Kael did a lot of sensing of Middle America while she sat in theaters and screening rooms; I always liked that side of her, and the baiting of respectable liberal opinion. In some cases I think she was on to something, in some cases it was just fun to watch her. But that business cut no ice with anyone who wasn’t reading The New Yorker. For all the rest of the world knew or cared, Kael might as well have been some well-meaning soul with big earrings and a long turquoise scarf.

To sum up. Anybody who knows anything about Kael knows that she realized the world was not the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She spent decades reminding the Upper West Side of this fact. Of course, most people don’t know much about Kael, but they’re willing not to talk about her. The exceptions are either undergrad film students or fellows of the American Enterprise Institute.

So, reflecting on Charles Murray and the rockhard integrity of his mental processes, I will now introduce my final point:

If you’re going to quote somebody — especially to make a point about that person— you ought to know something about her. 

Overheard

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“Look, I’m a first-time director …”

This is at Cafe Depot. I look over and there’s a boy in his early 20s, I guess, talking to a man of about 30, I guess. Boy: “… whoever gives us money … I wouldn’t be sitting here right now … To a certain extent, I mean, the language …” And so on. Those are the bits I get.
He’s got curly brown hair, a striped jersey, blue windbreaker. Man has closely cut hair. [update,  I got up, stretched, and took a good look. The boy might be late 20s, and he’s got a suede button vest over a shirt of close black-and-white checks. I got the hair right, though. ]
The boy’s speaking with a lot of authority, but I have no idea what point he’s proving. Sounds like he’s trying to talk the man into something or other. 
update,  To tell the truth, his voice is getting on my nerves. “Right, understood. But these guys,” etc., etc.
update 2,  “I did a workshop over in LA with this lady, Joan Schechner, she’s a like a guru in …” Don’t know if I got the name right, of course.