Hollywood Heyday by David Fantle

Author:David Fantle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2018-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

“Bones” cracking up

“That episode was awesome television,” Kelley admitted. “We worked awfully hard on that show. We were supposed to film episodes in six days. The studio, of course, would have loved to have us do them in five, which was impossible. But mostly, we took seven or eight days. We had a lot of laughs because we were under constant pressure.”

Although the series was canceled after three seasons, Kelley knew that his association with Star Trek was far from over. “The thing that took the show off the air was low ratings, but we broke every fan mail record at NBC,” he said. “The Nielsens (ratings) just didn’t add up to the amount of mail we received.”

After cancellation, Kelley took parts that he said were unfulfilling but well paying. As a self-described lazy actor, he just stopped working when he found that he could make more money doing personal appearances than acting on television.

Kelley’s first exposure to “Trekmania” came in the early ’70s when he was invited to speak at a Star Trek convention in New York City. “They expected between 3,000 and 4,000 people,” he said. “It turned out that there were 12,000. I walked out on stage and saw people hanging from the rafters and screaming and carrying on like you wouldn’t believe. I thought, what the hell, we’d been off for a few years. I told them that something has to happen. I knew it wasn’t over.”

When the series ended its run, a worldwide group of avid fans kept the franchise alive until Paramount reunited the cast in 1979 for the big-budget, bloated and boring Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Under the direction of Sound of Music veteran Robert Wise, the film was successful only because of the pent-up audience demand to see the franchise resurrected.

“It’s absolutely beyond me how they could arrive at a script like that on a comeback motion picture,” Kelley said. “I felt that the relationships were not there. We fought, yelled and tried to tell them.

“Star Trek is very difficult to pull back into its original framework,” he added. “When we did the film we were all asked what we would like to see done. I told Gene that I would like to see a simple science fiction story with a minimum of special effects used only when needed. I told him I thought it would be a breath of fresh air. I tried to tell them that, but I knew it would just be a special effects extravaganza with Paramount.”

In 1982, the next incarnation, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, was a hit. The film franchise and the many TV series’ that the original show spawned found an anchor point by bringing back one of Kirk’s biggest nemeses, “Kahn Noonien Singh” (Ricardo Montalban), from the original series (“Space Seed,” Ep. 22). That movie sequel successfully launched the nascent film franchise into space where “no movie studio had quite gone before.”

And the original cast went along for a wild ride at warp speed that none of them could have predicted back in the 1960s.

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