Still Just a Geek, page 49
* I told you there was a dance!
* If I hadn’t been moved to that table, I would have been entirely cut out of the movie. As it is, you can still see me in the wide-screen version if you have a DVD player with a really good freeze-frame.1
1 Oh. Spoilers. Berman cut me out of the movie. If my life was a movie, would you be shocked after all you’ve read?
* So here’s how I remember it: The main cast was sitting at the head table, Riker and Troi in the center, and I was on the floor, at a banquet table with some background performers. I wish I could remember who said it, but someone who was at that head table, one of my Star Trek parents, called out how it made no sense that I wasn’t sitting there with them. The entire cast rapidly agreed, and before I knew what was happening, a chair had been placed at the end of the table, I was sitting in it.
The writer in me wants to describe this so much more dramatically, but I just don’t remember enough to let him do his thing.
* Also, I didn’t have any of my miniatures with me.
Or my own trailer.
* John also wrote Penny Dreadful and Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. He’s such a talented writer.
* Again, the script was so much more interesting than the final cut of the film.
* And when they do, I tell them what Logan told me: “I’ll let you decide.”
* I knew there was not going to be a sequel—the script pretty much shut down that possibility, and John probably knew that. But why argue with hope when I was trying to seize the day?
* Ashley Judd played Robin Lefler, Wesley’s brief love interest. She was kind and professional, and I enjoyed working with her.
I don’t know why, but she doesn’t talk about, or even like to acknowledge, that she worked on our show.
* Leave it alone, editor. Maybe if you stopped putting a SPOTLIGHT on it, it wouldn’t be such a damn thing!
* I am going to tell you a story now, and I want you to know I am not sure this is true. I have never been able to officially confirm it, but the people involved generally agree that it is true.
According to legend, Next Generation was not expected to last more than a single season. There were lots of reasons that are beyond the scope of my story, not the least of them is how appalling some of our first season episodes were. Like, not just bad, but offensive. “Angel One” and “Code of Honor,” I am looking in your general direction.
So, the story goes, the studio was all set to cancel us after the first season, until Whoopi Goldberg (who was the biggest star on the planet at the time), wanted to work on Star Trek.
The story continues that she told the head of Paramount, or someone equally influential, that she grew up watching the original series, and the representation of Lieutenant Uhura mattered to her so much, it was a lifelong dream to be on the show.
Now, we already had put one or two famous people into cameos. Mick Fleetwood famously played a giant fish, John Tesh was a Klingon.
But when you have Whoopi Goldberg asking to be part of your show, you don’t waste her on a cameo. You write a whole new role for her that also facilitates the financing and construction of a new set.
And because she couldn’t play that character on that set if TNG wasn’t renewed for at least one more season, this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to add Whoopi Goldberg to your cast would vanish.
So we got our second season, Whoopi became Guinan, Ten Forward was built, and Riker grew the beard.
As I said, I can’t confirm any of this on the record. But lots of people from my cast and crew agree that it’s true.
* When Whoopi Goldberg, one of the coolest ladies to ever grace you with her presence, tells you that you look good, even if you’re an insecure nerd like me, you believe it.
* “Oh Mandy . . . you came and you zipped up my spacesuit . . .”
Editor: see, this is fair use, because it’s spoof/satire.
Me: I hate everything about this.
* I feel like I should say more—recount every time I talked to someone again, every little interaction, every memory it dredged up. But the thing is, so much of it is pure emotion, so I will just say this:
The first time any cast is together is always special. For us, it was extra special, more of a family reunion.
* Instead, there was adult paranoia. Growing up is fun!
* BAP BAP BAP
* Reflecting on this moment, I see how (I think understandably) focused I was on how all of this made me feel. Of course everyone else cared. Of course they knew what it meant—what all of it means—to fandom.
I could not have articulated it then, but I know now I was dreaming that these two days on set, being Wesley Crusher again, could exorcise the demons controlling my life at that time. Prove to Everyone would be dispelled. My father would see me. My mother would see me. If I could just embrace being Wesley, if I could just love it and cherish it in a way I wasn’t able to when I was younger, maybe I could have a second chance.
If you’re starting to see a theme here, perfect—now you understand why therapy is important and healing.
Also, you’re starting to see how themes work, which is good if you’re an aspiring writer.
* “Apple. Carburetor. Jackhammer. Wankle rotary engine.”
Dad joke, okay?
* An angry director, his back up against the wall with the studio breathing down his neck to finish the day, yelling at everyone, doesn’t create the most warm and nostalgic environment.
I didn’t convey it in the original text, I don’t think, but I’m trying to say that the part of me that loved being Wesley, the part of me that wanted to drink in every second of this experience, never really got a chance to extract something meaningful from the performance, because this director was harshing my buzz.
But in the moment, I let his issues roll past me, and I did my job to the best of my ability, like I always have.
* “Your turnaround” is the amount of time your union has negotiated for you to have between being released from set, and being called back to set. For most of my life in SAG and now in SAG-AFTRA, we actors have gotten twelve hours between dismissal and call. “Take your turnaround” means “come back in twelve hours.”
And if you have bright eyes, even better.
* When I was on Stage 16 with my cast, when I was in my spacesuit, I could imagine that I’d never left. I could imagine that all the pain, sadness, regret, and turmoil I had inflicted upon myself never happened.
But when I walked down that street, in front of our old stages that were now being used for other productions, the imagined reality collapsed, so I kept my distance.
* I learned from a costumer when I was very young that professional actors always hung up their costumes at the end of the day. To this day, when someone is a pain in the ass on the set, I will say to a costumer, “He doesn’t hang up his costume, does he?” So far, I haven’t been wrong.1
1 I may not hang up my clothes at home (let those of you among us without a floordrobe cast the first hanger) but I always put my costume away at the end of the day on set. It’s a fundamental act of respect and professionalism that’s really important to me.
* I’ve been signing time sheets since I was seven years old. I always love it, because it’s the last thing I do before I get to go home, and it means I get paid.
* Also the director is a dick about it (did I mention he was a dick?) and totally wrecks the mood.
* I never wrote about it because I made a choice to keep it for myself. Like, not everything I do is for public consumption, you know? I didn’t want to give it away, probably to my parents as much as anyone else, so the most significant experience I’d had in a long time was jealously guarded, kept hidden far away from public view.
And, I mean, it was, but now I don’t remember a damn bit of it, and that’s a real bummer.
I wish I’d kept a private journal then, where I would have written about it just for me. I don’t know why I didn’t; it just didn’t occur to me. Consequently, as I’m about to write in the original text, all that’s left is a faded blur, barely an outline of the day. Who knows, maybe it was an unremarkable day on the set, lacking the emotional impact of the day before, and that’s why the only part of the day I remember and wrote about happened after I wrapped.
But I’ll never know for sure, and I wish I remembered half as much about this day as I remembered about the entire Win Ben Stein’s Money thing.
* IMDB says Bronx Zoo ran on NBC from 1987 to 1988.
* Think about this now: Patrick Stewart had to audition to play Picard.
The idea that Patrick ever had to audition for anything feels like something someone made up.
I mean, who else could you possibly see in that role? There’s a memo online that shows who was considered for which role, and it is a road map to a very different twenty-fourth century. Yaphet Kotto turned down the role of Picard. Wesley Snipes was almost Geordi, Jenny Agutter was shortlisted to play Dr. Crusher. Denise Crosby was the favorite to play Troi. J. D. Roth was the only other person listed for Wesley.
What a different show that would have been. What a different life I would have.
* A restaurant that used to be on Melrose, with a back door that opened right onto the Paramount lot. It was bulldozed for “progress” in the 1990s.1
1 I don’t know what it’s like in the rest of the country, but in Southern California, we tend to destroy everything about every twenty years or so, to make new versions of the same hideous strip malls that pollute our landscape.
* Yeah, so about this. This was and is significant.
Well into my thirties, my parents made me believe I had been an awful teenager who made everyone around me miserable. They acted as if I made a series of deliberate choices to just be an insufferable prick, and my entire family had to suffer through it because what are ya gonna do. I internalized that wholeheartedly, and until I was in my forties, I fully believed that my entirely normal, hormonal, complicated, difficult, teenage existence was just . . . wrong and bad. And I had made deliberate choices to make it that way. My parents and my brother (who is their Golden Child) behaved as if I ought to be deeply ashamed of myself for completely normal teenage behavior.
Listen, there were days when I didn’t want to be at work. Gosh, has anyone else in the history of the world felt that way? I am 100 percent confident I was not the only person who didn’t want to be on the bridge when it was a nice July day and all their friends were at the beach. When I was fifteen or sixteen, there was a director who refused to treat me like a person. He literally grabbed me by the elbow and moved me around the set. He called me “the boy” and just treated me like a prop. I got upset about it, and when I complained to my parents, they told me that I was being difficult and unreasonable.
I mean . . . what was I supposed to do? I literally had no support at home, and I was profoundly unhappy most of the time. That unhappiness expressed itself all the time, and not always in the most constructive ways.
The thing is, I didn’t wake up every day and pick from a random page in Wil’s Big Book of Schemes to Make People Miserable. I was a totally normal teenager (okay—I was a little weird, but this is a book about embracing that, so let it go), living in extraordinary circumstances, under a ton of pressure and expectation from my employers and from my parents, all of whom treated me like I was an asset to be exploited.
I honestly don’t know how I avoided drug abuse or other self-destructive behaviors. Thank all the gods, old and new, that I did. But I acted out. I was mercurial. I was an ass. I was sullen at times and didn’t even know why. How did nobody else see that and reach out? Why was all of it put on me, when I was just a child?
But I was so gaslighted, I fully believed—well into my thirties—that I must have somehow made a deliberate choice to be a dick to my loving and supportive family, when the reality was the opposite.
Literally none of it was my fault, and I did the best I could under deeply challenging circumstances. So when Patrick said “we all understood,” it was more than accepting my apology. He was saying the apology wasn’t necessary. He was validating me and my experiences, and he gave me the scissors I needed to cut myself some slack (love you, Ted Lasso).
* British English: never not funny to this Colonist.
* Dear Wil: This isn’t funny. It’s gross and misogynist and reduces a woman to a sex object. Also, it’s disrespectful to your wife and sets a bad example. This whole section is lovely, and you really didn’t need to undercut the sincerity of the moment with a juvenile joke. You’re going to regret this someday.
Like twenty years later, when some editor makes you relive your mistakes . . . you are really, really, REALLY going to regret this.
* A lot of you may know him from his time on Enterprise, but to me, he was Dr. Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap, and that show was awesome.1
1 Another fun fact: The first fan fiction I ever wrote was for Quantum Leap.
I was playing hockey. I was a goalie. I loved it. So I had this idea that Sam jumps into a goalie, in the middle of the game, and he has to learn how to play so he doesn’t get traded or sent down. In my dreams, I played the goalie.
This is also a plot point in the JCVD vehicle, Sudden Death.
* That was Patrick.
This was my internal dialogue: “I’D LIKE TO YES YES YES YES YES.”
* I feel self-conscious calling out my overuse of this phrase, because I want to just rewrite it all now and let the dialogue do the work. The thing I’m hoping to convey is how happy everyone was, how warm and welcoming it felt.
Again, though, I want the warts to be noticed here, especially by me, because I think they help remind me of the growth I’ve made as a writer now, and how much I am always going to want to revise my “finished” writing.
I’m sure pretty much every artist reading this knows exactly what I’m talking about.
* Listen: I know it’s fake. But it’s also very real. Only a handful of people have gotten to sit in That Chair, and it’s special.
Then again, I’m guessing I don’t need to tell any of you this.
* 8,233.
I counted.
* I thought about leaving them on and surprising the kids, but chickened out.
* At that moment, I couldn’t have agreed more.
Have I said how much I love Jonathan?
* I wish I’d been able to see past my own pain and trauma, so that reality could have come into focus. Isn’t that what Patrick said, that I was loved and accepted? And isn’t that what literally every single one of my interactions with any of them demonstrated?
The fact that I felt comfortable asking Frakes for anything, the way you’d ask your friends or family for something, the fact that I felt like I deserved or had the right to ask, was a very big deal for me.
* Editor: A whole chapter . . .
Me: Didn’t we go over this?
* Now “green screen.” Or if you’re REALLY lucky, and you get to work on The Mandalorian, an OLED screen that generates dynamic, interactive, photorealistic backgrounds.
We used XR projection for my show, Rival Speak, and it was like being in VR. I am so incredibly envious of the people who get to work with this technology in a science fiction context, every day.
* I also wanted to have a voice as deep as Michael Dorn, especially when I was a teenager.
This is a balls joke.
* Boy, if they had told me how many awful movies I’d have to sit through with my kids . . . well, I’d do it all again because I love them.
Yes, even Madagascar. I like to move it. Move it.
* This is still trademarked, by the way. Just waiting for a chance to sue and make the big bucks . . .
* It’s so sad that I believed anyone from TNG, but especially Frakes, would make me feel like they were too good for me, or more accurately, I wasn’t good enough for them. It was never true and only existed in my head.
* Strangely, this trademark lapsed. Feel free to use.
* Dorkus. From the Latin for “dork.” Shortened from dorkus malorkus.
* Before Jordan Peele took over, there was a brief Twilight Zone reboot in the early aughts.
* Try to not hear that in Rod Serling’s voice. I dare you.
* To be clear: I expected my friends to call me at home. But to have them call in a professional capacity, as if they were asking if I’d like to have dinner?
Let’s just say it warms all the nice places inside.
* Editor: The most of what? Of all TV shows? Of all things in the world? Of all fans of the show?
Me: Of all the “shut the fuck up.”
* S05E19, “Night Call.” Written by legendary author Richard Matheson. It terrified me when I was a kid.
