Free Leonard by William Shatner Page A

him? Lloyd Bridges, James Coburn, Patrick O’Neal, and Jeffrey Hunter were all considered, but Hunter, who had appeared in numerous television series and movies—although he had played Jesus Christ in the movie King of Kings —got the part. In the first pilot episode, entitled “The Cage,” Captain Pike is lured to a planet by a society with an amazing ability to, as Dr. Boyce, who would be replaced by Bones, explains, “create illusions out of a person’s own thoughts, memories, and experiences, even out of a person’s own desires—illusions just as real and solid as this tabletop and just as impossible to ignore.” Their intent is to mate him to and produce children with a deformed human female who had crash-landed there. To make it incredibly difficult for Pike to resist, they transform this survivor into the women of his deepest desires.
    Even in that initial voyage of the Enterprise, Roddenberry was using futuristic societies to tell relevant stories. In the pilot, one of the aliens lays out the simple rule that would govern many of the planets the crew would visit, as well as the communist nations then existing on Earth: “Wrong thinking is punishable; right thinking will be as quickly rewarded. You will find it an effective combination.”
    It was the most expensive pilot NBC had ever produced, and the network didn’t like it. Basically, it was too intellectual, and there was not enough action. But the executives still liked Roddenberry’s concept and made the almost unheard-of decision to make a second pilot. This is where I came in. I’ve been told that Jeffrey Hunter’s wife started making extraordinary demands, and as a result, Roddenberry fired him. The first choice to replace him was Jack Lord, who asked for 50 percent ownership of the show. That’s when Roddenberry called me. I’ve never known why he offered the role to me. Perhaps it was because I’d played leading roles in several major TV series. I’d played major roles in several motion pictures, including Judgment at Nuremberg and Incubus, the first motion picture made entirely in the universal language of Esperanto.
    Or, it also might have been that he was getting desperate, I was available, and I was the right type. Leonard was dark and brooding; I was blond and bright-eyed. Leonard displayed little emotion; I was a walking mood ring. As I have often explained to audiences at Star Trek conventions, I suspect Roddenberry felt I was the perfect choice for the lead role in a show because I wasn’t too intelligent for the audience and he didn’t have to pay me a lot of money.
    I was in a New York hotel room when he called. I had just finished doing a legal series called For the People . He explained that he’d made a pilot for a science-fiction show called Star Trek, and NBC hadn’t bought it, but they liked the project enough to make a second pilot with a different cast.
    He asked me to come to Los Angeles to see it, with the idea of playing the captain. I don’t remember his precise words, but I presume he’d said something like, “It’s the leading man. He gets the girl. He fights the villains. He runs, and he jumps. And he gets first billing.” However, I am quite certain during that first conversation he did not mention that I would be playing against a half-man, half-alien with, as Leonard later described them, “Dumbo ears.”
    I thought the pilot was magical, and even with all its problems, the potential was obvious. These many years later, after all the amazing space movies and special effects that have made us all feel as if we are in space, it’s absolutely impossible to accurately convey how innovative this concept was at that time. These were normal people hundreds of years in the future, and when they weren’t otherwise occupied saving the universe and their own lives, they were dealing with the same issues and