Author Archives: Tom Crippen

Wiki Trek: “Arena”

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… A 1970s tv movie called The Alpha Caper had Leonard Nimoy, Victor Taback, and James Sikking.

Also this guy, who in “Arena” plays an ensign. He gets offed or put out of commission early on. I think he gets to talk, has some sort of moment where he croaks out a warning or a few words, but basically he’s this close to being screen Kleneex, someone there to be got rid of. Meanwhile, offscreen, he was writing and putting on a stage adaptation of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman.

The guy’s wife was “a singer/comedienne” in the court of Lucille Ball, a “close friend and protege” of Ball’s, and he had studied with Uta Hagen, so you get a collision of different show-biz worlds there. Also, the Lucy connection probably helped get him the “Arena” part, since Desilu still owned the series at that point.

He had a career, Wiki says, with him and his wife doing a lot of plays, presumably in LA because they were “jointly honored with the 2002 L.A. Ovation Award for Career Achievements.” Seems all right. LA is a good-size city and I bet it’s doing all right for theater.

Here he is:

 

Wiki Trek: “Squire of Gothos”

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William Campbell was “the first actor to sing with Elvis Presley in a film,” Mem Alpha says. Campbell played the alien/little kid Trelane, who was “in part a parody of Liberace,” Wiki says. The resemblance does seem obvious when pointed out. Also Wiki: Campbell “married Judith Exner.” That bowled me over, because Exner was the woman who slept with Sam Giancana and John Kennedy. Campbell was the lead in Coppola’s first feature, Dementia 13. Apparently he was never much for the Trek convention circuit, couldn’t be bothered, so I guess he managed to save some money along the way. 

To look at him, Campbell seemed like a second-hand Tony Curtis, the way the woman in “Catspaw” seemed like a second-hand Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe these hand-me-down types still show up among tv actors. When you’re watching the old shows, they’re not hard to spot: a guy who looks like Brando but isn’t, or like Tony Curtis but isn’t.

Campbell’s Trelane (the child-alien) is one of the few really good, spirited performances by a Star Trek guest star. The guy had pizzazz. Then again it helped that the role had pizzazz: Anthony Caruso and Victor Tayback were good too in “A Piece of the Action.”

There’s an embarrassing moment in “Tribbles,” where Campbell played the chief Klingon, where he turns on his heel and struts to the door and you see his plump buttocks bouncing. He was in his 40s by then and men of the time didn’t expect to keep their figures, a fact that shows up often enough in old tv shows.

Campbell became pals with Roddenberry and Doohan, who was also a Roddenberry pal, and the three of them played poker.

And here he is:


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Another movie title: The Gallant Hours (1960). … And Never Steal Anything Wet, the variant title of “the ’60s beach movie Catalina Caper.“

The actress who played the yeoman who dances with Trelane “was queen of the 1962 May Festival in Orange, California. Later that year, she was named Miss Orange County Press Club. In 1967, she appeared on the cover of the July issue of Playboy. Wolf abandoned her acting career after her 1968 marriage to Lawrence Taylor Tatman III, aka Skip Taylor. Taylor was co-manager of The Kaleidoscope, a short-lived LA psychedelic nightclub.” Venita Wolf, another great name.

Wiki Trek: “Shore Leave”

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… TV series of the late ’50s and early ’60s: The Man from Blackhawk, Sam Benedict, The Farmer’s Daughter. One from the late ’60s, a favorite title of mine: Bracken’s World. A boy who had a regular role on that show killed himself, something that shows up in What Really Happened to the Class of ’65.


… Jubilee Trail, a Western from the 1950s. Here’s another: Drum Beat.
Ensign Rodriguez, the young fellow with the girlfriend, was also Lt. Escobar in Chinatown. … Kirk’s long-lost love interest starred in an attempt to make a sitcom of My Sister Eileen. I like the earrings, which I assume William Theiss hunted down somewhere.

… as Ruth
The man who played Don Juan was named James Gruzal, which just hits me as an unusual name to have.

Susan Oliver and others: more Star Trek Wiki

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“Menagerie,” 1 and 2. … Vina the dancing girl, who was painted green and caused other green-skinned women to pop up thru decades of Trek continuity, was played by Susan Oliver. Oliver’s last role appears to have been in 1988 on Freddie’s Nightmares, which was a syndicated horror anthology spun off from the Elm Street films. She appears as “a mysteriously gloomy maid who arrives at the young title character’s home and reveals herself to Judy as seemingly her own gray-haired future self. In Oliver’s final scene, she turns away from Judy and leaves the house, disappearing into the fog.” From green dancing girl to “gray-haired future self”: Hollywood has a brutal life cycle.


Memory Alpha says: “Oliver was also a passionate pilot, winner of the 1970 Powder Puff Derby air race and the fourth woman to fly a single-engined aircraft solo across the Atlantic. She attempted to become the first woman to fly a single-engine plane from the United States to Moscow; she made it as far as Denmark but was denied entry into Soviet airspace. ” …    

…  A ’60s film called Codename: Heraclitus, Ricardo Montalban in the cast. 

… There’s an episode of Time Tunnel with Machiavelli “lost in time at the Battle of Gettysburg.”

 … Clint Reynolds was going to play Two Face in the campy ’60s Batman show! But it never happened. 

The episode uses footage from Trek‘s first pilot, when the cast was all different. For instance, the medical officer was John Hoyt, who went to Yale and joined Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. Memory Alpha: “Perhaps Hoyt’s best-remembered TV role, however, is that of Grandpa Stanley Kanisky on the Nell Carter series Gimme a Break! Hoyt joined the cast of this series in its second season in 1982 and stayed with it until its cancellation in 1987, after which he retired from acting. He passed away just four years later.”

… There’s a play called Absence of a Cello, which sounds like it could be a Peter Cook line (“The problem, glaringly,  is that no cello would appear to be involved in the operations of your string quartet.”)

Laurel Goodwin played the first of three cute yeomen whom Gene Roddenberry shoved into the series; they were meant as a starship captain’s equivalent of a good-looking secretary. The first two were rather Bambi-ish; the third (Grace Lee Whitney as Yeoman Rand) was older and not played as a dipsy-doo, but she got written out pretty fast. Anyway, Goodwin quit acting at 29, and years later she and her husband somehow wound up producing a wheels-and-beer movie that starred Burt Reynolds. Wiki says the film, Stroker Ace (1983), was “a commercial and critical bomb.” To do the film Reynolds turned down the drunken-old-astronaut part Jack Nicholson took in Terms of Endearment, the role that made Nicholson a star again.

… There was a 1953 version of The Jazz Singer!

One of the aliens (“Talosians”) in the episode’s first-pilot footage also played Cousin Itt in The Addams Family. … Here’s a guy who played a spare Starfleet officer. I think his face looks like it was drawn in the manner of Dan Clowes’s Lloyd Llewellyn, retro-’50s phase.


Elisha Cook Jr., Earl Grant Titsworth, others; or, The Star Trek Wiki tour continues

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“Galileo VII.” 


…  There is a 1964 movie called Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’. … The black ensign guest-starred on Roddenberry’s first series, The Lieutenant. Nichelle Nichols also did a Lieutenant guest spot, and something tells me it was the same episode. The two definitely co-starred in Great Gettin’. Later he was a reg on Land of the Giants. … Celia Lovsky and Mark Lenard, who both played Vulcan elders on Star Trek, also appeared in The Greatest Story Ever Told. … The woman who played the yeoman in “Galileo VII” now “sells recreational vehicle lots in Palms Spring, California.” … One of the episode’s extras, a 35-ish blueshirt, died in a motorcycle accident two years later. His real name was Earl Grant Titsworth, but for credits he used “Grant Woods” and “Grant Lockwood.”


“Court Martial.”

… The base commander is the “first black actor to play a flag officer on Star Trek,” per Mem Channel. Afro-Portuguese, born in Montreal, the St.-Henri district. The actor, Percy Rodriguez, was a Peyton Place reg for the show’s last season: “A Doctor’s Role for Negro Actor,” the LA Times said in a headline. He narrated the trailer for Jaws, and when he was 89 he came out of retirement to narrate the trailer for a documentary about Jaws-the-phenomenon, The Shark Is Still Workin’. (Wiki says he was interviewed for the film and the interview was his last appearance.) … 

… Cogley the lawyer was Elisha Cook Jr., of course — Wilmer from The Maltese Falcon. To tell the truth, I didn’t think his Cogley was that good; he really did not sell the “Books, Captain! Books!” speech. But he does have a nice moment as the charges are being read out and he frowns down at his elbow in an impatient, manly way. (Here‘s Mem Alpha.)

From Wiki:  “He lived in Bishop, California, typically summering on Lake Sabrina in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” Wiki quotes John Huston: “[Cook] lived alone up in the High Sierra, tied flies and caught golden trout between films. When he was wanted in Hollywood, they sent word up to his mountain cabin by courier. He would come down, do a picture, and then withdraw again to his retreat.” …

… Joan Marshall played the prosecutor/Kirk old flame. She did a lot of TV work from 1958 to the late ’60s, then married Hal Ashby. Her last film was Shampoo (1975), which Ashby directed, but her part doesn’t make the Wiki cast list. (Mem Channel here.)

Star Trek actors in wiki: married to David Ogden Stiers

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“Miri.” … The girl in the title was supposed to be 12 or 13, but the actress was 19. A few years later she played the girl in True Grit, who was supposed to be 14. She got married five times. “After she starred in True Grit, film critics predicted that she was at the beginning of a long career as a great actress. In fact, she has made almost no films of note since.”  Still, she was John Cusack’s mom in Better Off Dead (1985); David Ogden Stiers played her husband. … Michael J. Pollard played the teen who was stirring up trouble among the kids. But he was 27. I give his name because I never saw True Grit but I did see Bonnie and Clyde, where he played the second second banana, right after Gene Hackman. He got a Supporting Actor nom for that, not bad. One of his later films was Melvin and Howard (1980).


With a face like Pollard’s, a real pulped masterpiece of boyish oddity, you’d think he would have been all over the place, in any goofy-guy role that came up, and it appears that he did at least work. … One of the little kids, a kid with an army helmet that has a net on it, is the son of Greg Morris, who was a Mission: Impossible regular. This same kid grew up and played Jackie Chiles on Seinfeld. … There’s a movie called Homeboys in Space. … One of Roddenberry’s daughters has a former schoolmate named the Rev. Peggy Pearl-Kirkby.


“Conscience of the King.”  The villain, Alto Karidian, is played by a guy who did Shakespeare from the 1930s to the late ’50s, then started doing Hollywood. His son helped start Sesame Street. … The character’s daughter, or the actress playing her, was voted Miss Memphis in high school and went on to do okay as a cool-blond type on tv. For instance, she played the police-woman sidekick on Ironsides, a crime-drama vehicle that ran for years (Raymond Burr’s in a wheelchair and he solves crimes). In the 1980s and ’90s “she worked frequently as a costume designer for a number of B movies.” Her first season of Ironsides, she had won an Emmy for best supporting actress. …

There was an episode of Mission: Impossible called “Cocaine” and it guest-starred William Shatner.  … Great movie title: Twenty-Three Paces to Baker Street. … The guy playing one of the ensigns is a Canadian doo-wop singer and “co-wrote the theme song for the hit TV series The Fall Guy.” 

Special notice: Bruce Hyde, a long-faced, distinctive guy in his 20s who was charming as the goofy Irish ensign, Lt. Riley. He showed up here and in “Naked Time” (he was the guy driving Kirk nuts by singing). Wiki just says he wound up teaching at St. Cloud State in Minnesota. Memory Alpha fills in this: Hyde did 9 tv guest shots in 13 months, then played Hair in San Francisco and was converted by his role into being an actual hippie. “I was going to get a Volkswagen bus and a big bag of brown rice and go find God. And that’s what I did.” Then he got his doctorate and now he’s chairman of Theater, Film Studies and Dance at St. Cloud. To me that’s not a bad way for things to work out.

… as Kevin Riley