Considering there was a bit of hostility coming in from William Shatner regarding his exclusion from this year’s Star Trek film, TrekMovie.com has an interesting post up showing what might have been.
According to them, William Shatner — the original James Tiberius Kirk — apparently had a scene in one of the drafts of the script, albeit as a holographic recording sent back in time with Leonard Nimoy, or Future Spock.
I won’t give away specific bits of dialogue — you’ll have to check out the site for that — but apparently Shatner’s “no cameos” rule led Abrams and company to scrap the bit and come up with a different ending. Which is too bad, as the whole idea of the duality of the past and future Trekkies — making the passing of the torch more literal than metaphor — was a cool aspect of the film to me.
[Image via the Telegraph]
November 24th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
They mention in the special features doc that they had parts written for both Nimoy and Shatner. Details were not given, but it sounds like Shatner’s version of the story may well have been amended to his advantage. Too bad.
November 24th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Yeah from what i understand from interviews, didn’t Shatner insist that his role either be a full fledged reprisal of Kirk in some form in the actual flesh (most logically as older Kirk in the same vein as older Spock in the movie) or that he wasn’t going to be involved at all? It sounded to me like his narrow demand led to his uninvolvement; you can’t fault the writers for not wanting to twist the story around to include a resurrected Kirk.