Free Leonard by William Shatner Page B

relationship problems the audience dealt with every day. But after viewing that pilot, I told Roddenberry I thought the characters were taking themselves much too seriously. Every line seemed meaningful. There was no sense of fun or playfulness. The characters seemed to be talking at each other rather than relating to each other. Ironically, just about the only person who smiled in the entire episode was Spock.
    Roddenberry agreed with me and offered me the role of James Tiberius Kirk.
    A lot of changes were made before the second pilot was shot. As Variety reported on November 5, 1965, the only two members of the original cast to be retained, Majel Barrett and Leonard Nimoy, had been signed for the pilot of “an hourlong color science fiction adventure series to be produced by Desilu for NBC.” That brief item actually was wrong—the series was shot in black and white. When that item appeared, Leonard was doing exactly what an actor should be doing—working. He was costarring with the beautiful Juliet Prowse in a Valley Musical Theater production of the show Irma la Douce .
    In addition to a new script in which Barrett’s role was reduced and replaced by a relationship between Spock and Kirk, fundamental changes were made to the character of Mr. Spock. Spock was the result of all the work Leonard had done in his career. While he made Spock so realistic, it was easy to believe he was based on a living being; in fact, he started from very little. Because Leonard did such a remarkable job bringing Spock to life, I’m not sure he ever got all the credit he deserved for the creation of this iconic character. As Joe D’Agosta remembered, “Spock was not on that page. The whole character, other than the physicality that was described by Gene, was created by Leonard. He embodied that character with its essence.”
    But initially, at least, Leonard hadn’t gotten a good hold on the character; he was experimenting to see what fit. After that first pilot, Spock never smiled again. “I knew it was a mistake after the fact,” Leonard told me. “When I saw it, I thought it destroyed the mystique. It destroyed the design of this person. This person smiling is not appropriate. This person is not necessarily a negative or dour person, but this person is not a frivolous person. This person must be played as a scientist and a student of what’s going on.”
    The appearance of Spock also continued to evolve. Initially, when the show was going to be in color, Fred Phillips, who did his makeup, tinted his skin a reddish color. It was supposed to suggest a Martian heritage. But when it was tested on black-and-white sets, it just looked black. The character was not a black person. So Fred substituted a Max Factor makeup called “Chinese Yellow,” which gave Spock’s skin a slightly yellowish tone. It was enough to emphasize that he wasn’t Caucasian, but much better than the Martian red.
    Leonard initially thought Spock should have a crude look, with a jagged haircut and bushy eyebrows. He had his eyebrows shaved and then drawn in. But Spock’s quite-famous ears always were an issue. Roddenberry wanted him to have pointed ears, which instantly would inform viewers that he was from another planet. Leonard had some trepidation about those ears, wondering if they looked too comical. But Roddenberry insisted on it. The studio contracted a company to produce the original prosthetic ear pieces, and they were terrible. “Grotesque and funny,” Leonard called them. It took some time and a lot of effort before he was satisfied.
    There continued to be considerable debate about Spock’s appearance. After we shot the second pilot and NBC picked it up, the publicity department began promoting it. One afternoon, Leonard got a copy of the brochure announcing the show in the mail. It was taking place in the twenty-third century, would go where no man had gone before, blah,