Star Trek Movie Memories by William Shatner and Chris Kreski

The conflicts and compromises behind the film franchise

Star Trek Movie Memories was published in 1994, just after actor William Shatner ended his career as Captain Kirk in the Star Trek franchise. This book is the sequel to Star Trek Memories, published the preceding year, in which Shatner recounts the making of the original Star Trek television series. In Star Trek Movie Memories, Shatner provides his behind-the-scenes perspective on the making of the six Star Trek feature films featuring the original cast, as well as the Star Trek: Generations film, in which he made his final appearance as Kirk along side The Next Generation cast. Both books were cowritten by Shatner and Chris Kreski, a former television writer.

Much like the volume that preceded it, Star Trek Movie Memories is not so much a collection of personal anecdotes of Shatner and his costars, but rather a production history of these seven Star Trek motion pictures. In addition to Shatner’s recollections, Shatner and/or Kreski interviewed many of the cast and crew to get their side of the story. Leonard Nimoy’s voice is once again quite prominent in this volume. In many ways, Nimoy had a more active creative role than Shatner in the building of the film franchise, and Shatner gives his old friend credit where it is due.

When comparing the two Memories books sheerly on the basis of subject matter, the making of movies in the 1980s is not nearly as interesting as the making of a groundbreaking sci-fi television series in the 1960s. Much of the text in this Movie Memories volume has to do with battles over script changes, contract negotiations of the actors and writers, and meddling by Paramount studio executives. This second book, however, does include more personal reflections from Shatner, and it reads more like it was written in Shatner’s voice. There is a touching chapter in which he describes the hard times in his career between the end of the television series and the beginning of the movie franchise. He also talks about his marital problems and his relationship with his daughters. Shatner closes the book with a candid examination of his coming to terms with the bittersweet feelings engendered by the death of Kirk and the end of his involvement with Star Trek.

It still feels, however, like Shatner is holding back a bit for diplomacy’s sake, particularly in regards to his castmates. It’s common knowledge that there has been some bad blood between the fictional captain and his crew over the years, but Shatner has a tendency to focus on the bright and sunny side of their relationships. He mentions at one point, for example, that James Doohan and Walter Koenig held a grudge against him, which made their joint participation in Generations difficult, but he never reveals the history behind that animosity. No longer does Shatner hold back on Gene Roddenberry, however, who was duly credited in the first book for his creation of Star Trek but is portrayed as the nemesis of the Star Trek franchise throughout this second book.

Reading Shatner’s first Star Trek Memories book made me want to go back and watch the original television series. Likewise, Star Trek Movie Memories inspired me to binge-watch the six original-cast motion pictures. Like a good DVD commentary, this book proved to be a valuable companion volume to the film series. Star Trek Movie Memories is not always as exciting or as forthright as the reader might hope, but like its predecessor it is a very informative book and a welcome trip down memory lane for even casual Star Trek fans. You don’t have to be a Trekkie zealot to enjoy it.  

Star Trek Memories by William Shatner with Chris Kreski

More of a TV production history than a personal memoir

Star Trek Memories was published in 1993, after the completion of the sixth Star Trek motion picture, the last to focus exclusively on the original Star Trek cast. Seeing his career as Captain Kirk coming to an end, Shatner felt inclined to wax nostalgic by publishing his recollections of the making of the original Star Trek television series. A sequel published the following year, Star Trek Movie Memories, covers the making of the film franchise. I’m not a Trekkie who obsesses over all the trivia on each episode, but I do enjoy the show, and I like Shatner.

Star Trek Memories is packaged like a Shatner memoir, but that’s not really what it is. This is a behind-the-scenes history of the production of the first Star Trek television series. It begins with Gene Roddenberry’s childhood, and ends in 1968 with Star Trek’s cancellation after three seasons. Shatner doesn’t even get involved with the series until a quarter of the way through the book. Although there are plenty of first-person interjections, this doesn’t really read like it was written in Shatner’s voice. One suspects coauthor Chris Kreski had a heavy hand in this. If you are expecting a lot of secrets and gossip about the cast of the show, you’re not going to find much here. The crew actually gets more coverage than the cast. You learn more about the set decorator and the script editor than you do about any of the actors, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy. He gets a fair amount of ink, even more than Shatner himself. The rest of the cast members pretty much get one good anecdote each. There are several tales of practical jokes among the cast and crew that strike the reader as being surprisingly unfunny, and in some cases just mean.

The refreshing thing about this TV memoir is that it’s not just a relentlessly positive lovefest for the show or a pat-on-the-back “look what we accomplished” story. There is a surprising amount of negative criticism of the show and the people involved with it, including some directed towards Shatner himself. It is forthrightly acknowledged that while some of the Star Trek episodes are masterpieces, quite a few are terrible schlock. The book recounts the constant struggles between the Star Trek production team and its parent studio, who demanded that this ambitious science fiction program be made under a paltry budget. The network also often interfered in the creative direction of the show by censoring stories, pushing for dumbed-down content, and trying to shape the characters to their liking. At the beginning of the book, Gene Roddenberry is portrayed as a veritable saint, but by the end of the narrative he has morphed into a sort of villain. His widow was still alive when the book was published, however, so one gets the idea that Shatner and Kreski had to hold back on any unflattering revelations of the Star Trek creator.

This book is kind of like reading a rock and roll autobiography where the star doesn’t talk much about his famous bandmates but instead says more about his manager, publicist, lawyer, and accountant (I’m looking at you, Pete Townshend). This book wasn’t quite what I expected, but I found it all very interesting nonetheless. Star Trek was first broadcast shortly before I was born, but I did grow up on old-school television, back when there were only three networks. This book gave me a good idea of how shows were made in those days, for better or for worse.  

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TekWar by William Shatner

The Rockford Files meets The Jetsons
William Shatner’s science fiction novel TekWar, originally published in 1989, is the first in a series of nine Tek books. It also gave rise to a comic book series, a video game, and a television series. Much of this success, of course, is due to its author’s preexisting fame. It’s easy to take pot shots at actors moonlighting as novelists, but as a fan of the genre I approached this book with every intention of giving Shatner a fair shake. Ultimately, however, even my middling expectations were disappointed.

Jake Cardigan is a former cop who was sentenced to 15 years in suspended animation for dealing in a drug known as Tek. Tek is distributed in the form of computer chips which, when coupled with an apparatus that’s wired to the brain, conjure up tailor-made hallucinations in the mind of the user, somewhat like the virtual-reality drug that Ralph Fiennes peddles in the 1985 movie Strange Days. In the year 2120, after four years of incarceration, Cardigan is awoken from his deep sleep and released from prison, though he’s not quite sure why or to whom he owes his good fortune. This is just one of the mysteries that faces Cardigan as, stripped of his badge, he goes to work for a private detective agency. He soon finds that, no matter how hard he tries to avoid it, he just can’t keep himself from getting drawn into the criminal world of Tek.

The idea of a hard-boiled detective story set in the future is nothing new, of course. Pulp fiction writers have been making Sam-Spade-in-space stories since the days of Dashiell Hammett. Shatner’s vision of the future is remarkably antiquated, like something out of a ‘40s or ‘50s pulp magazine. His efforts at sci-fi speculation don’t stretch much beyond adding prefixes like plas-, space-, and vid- to the front of preexisting nouns. Many common objects are made of lucite, and there are robots everywhere. Back in 1989, mobile phones and the internet were still in their infancy, but given that Star Trek foreshadowed such things, Shatner could have stretched his imagination a bit. Instead, the primary mode of communication is faxing, and everyone has an alcove in their home devoted to a videophone. All this matters little, however, because the novel is not really concerned with the future anyway. It’s just a mediocre detective story dressed up in futuristic trappings.

Not surprisingly, TekWar can’t compare with the science fiction masterpieces of authors like Frank Herbert or Phillip K. Dick, but it could probably hold its own against 90% of what passes for fiction at your typical airport newsstand if it didn’t drag out so long. I thought I was getting a fun piece of pulpy escapism, but what I got was a chore to read. In each chapter, a new character is introduced who provides Cardigan with a little piece of the puzzle. With the exception of name, race, and gender, however, there’s little to distinguish any of these people or androids from one another, so there’s little reason to care about any of them. What’s worse, Cardigan doesn’t really use any detective reasoning to solve the mystery, he simply follows the trail of bread crumbs left for him by this series of nondescript characters until the solution falls into his lap and the plot finally fizzles to a halt.

TekWar isn’t terrible, but at best it’s a marginally competent attempt at science fiction. Were it not for Shatner’s name on the cover, it would have quietly faded into the obscurity it deserves.
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