Though it was dropped before the final writers’ guide was issued, one new development—a landing-envelope forcefield for away teams on inhospitable planets—was suggested at one point as a Wesley creation to help explain why he holds such a unique position. Coming up with a reason for Wesley’s special status that viewers would accept proved difficult for writers and producers alike.
Although it was not mentioned in the casting announcement, Justman and the staff had worked out the story of Wesley’s father Jack being killed under Picard’s command and the dilemmas that posed for the captain, Wesley, and his mother. In fact, Beverly Crusher at first was referred to only in relation to Wesley and didn’t rate her own page of background notes until the final writers’ guide edition.
Only a few other role changes were made by the time of the February 4 revision: Geordi has the rank of ensign and Troi is promoted to lieutenant commander, though she is still referred to as the chief psychologist.
The cocky yet insightful Lieutenant (j.g.) Geordi La Forge was named for a quadriplegic fan, George La Forge, who died in 1975 after having endeared himself to Gene Roddenberry and much of fandom. The character’s eventual rank was established later on.
Though her alien roots are not explained in detail on the call sheet, presumably for simplicity’s sake, Troi was described in the very first bible as a quarter-blood Betazoid who possessed some telepathic powers due to her “Starfleet officer grandfather having lived on Betazed with one of its humanoid females.” In the final draft (most likely with the first-season script for “Haven” in progress) her heritage was changed to half-blood Betazoid, her Starfleet father having lived with her mother on Betazed.
The new female security chief’s name evolved from Macha Hernandez—inspired by Jenette Goldstein’s tough space marine Vasquez in 1986’s Aliens—to Tanya (for two days around March 13) and finally to Natasha “Tasha” Yar, coined by Lewin from the Balkan battle of Baba Yar. (The inspiration would come full circle after Goldstein appeared in the first TNG movie.)
Of all the new regulars it was probably the android Data whose premise changed the least. A Starfleet graduate and the highest scorer ever on the Turing Test of Sentience, he is on an eternal quest for the impossible goal of knowing what it is to be human. Roddenberry admitted that this character sprang from Questor, a similar android seeking its creator in his well-received yet unsold 1974 TV pilot movie, The Questor Tapes. From the beginning, Data and Geordi are said to be close friends—a virtual “walking library” (Data) and a “walking tricorder” (Geordi).
There were a number of unrealized details in these early character bios that now seem curious:
• Data was assembled by an alien race, his name rhymes with “that-a,” and he “usually” avoids the use of contractions.
• Riker “doesn’t fully appreciate the female need to be needed.”
• Macha-Tasha considers Wesley-Leslie “the childhood friend she never had.”
• Picard has visited Tasha’s homeworld, which failed due to “environmental disasters and fanatical leaders.”
• Riker is privately called William by Picard and Bill by “female friends.”
• Geordi’s shipboard specialty is listed as “the starship school for children.”
Interestingly enough, the evolution of the regular characters went hand in hand with that of the bridge layout, as Justman and Milkis wrote GR that perhaps some of the regular characters needed more efficient on-screen development time. On the eve of the February 4 revisions, Data was to occupy the command circle with Picard and “Ryker,” but the two producers realized that Troi would be strengthened both in her shipboard role and as a character if she took the third central seat. From there she could also advise Picard during Riker’s absence on away missions.
A second point concerned Tasha (then called Macha) and Geordi, who also were homeless as to duty station. To remedy that, Tasha was made tactical officer and given one of the two forward seats, placed similarly to those in the original series, apparently before the new bridge’s tactical horseshoe console was conceived. Geordi is suggested as her partner up front, allowing him character-development exposure that might be lost if the conn and Ops positions were staffed by extras only.
Justman, with Milkis, also proposed that Data be allowed to roam from one aft console to another as an information provider. The android was later stationed at forward Ops to fulfill this function, however, and the rear bridge duty appears to have been Worf’s original assignment once he was added to the cast. During the ongoing brainstorming, two ideas were suggested but not adopted: that Data remain aboard during away missions, and that Geordi serve as an ombudsman who would speak to the captain about the concerns of the thousand-plus aboard—a duty eventually and informally seen as Troi’s.
Worf, the lone Klingon in Starfleet, almost suffered from Gene Roddenberry’s insistence that “no old races”—that is, alien races that appeared in the original Trek—be featured at first in order to distinguish TNG from its predecessor. As noted, Justman was among those lobbying for a “Klingon marine,” a concept the Great Bird finally agreed would show in the most obvious way the difference between this generation and the last—detente and even alliance with the Klingon Empire.
Still, Worf is absent throughout the evolving first-season bible and, though the character was written into the April 13 final draft script for “Farpoint,” he is not present in the initial cast portrait that was taken on the Planet Hell set on June 1. Perhaps the first published word of his existence appeared in Gerrold’s July 6 Starlog column only a month before the series debut.
Faces for the Names
As preliminary casting began in March 1987, one of the earliest of the inevitable staff shake-downs occurred, one that would have long-term implications for the series: producer Eddie Milkis was replaced by Rick Berman.
Having begun in the fall of 1986 as the studio’s TNG liaison, Berman came aboard early in 1987 to take over for Milkis, who had decided to check out early on his one-year contract. “By that time I’d decided I had to get back to my other commitments,” Milkis said. “But it was a very, very easy transition. Rick was very up-to-the-minute; he was in total sync with us.”
Berman had come to Paramount from Warner Brothers in 1984 and performed a succession of studio roles: director of current programming, executive director of dramatic development, and finally vice president of “longform and special projects”—miniseries, TV movies, and then “the new Star Trek.” He shared the title of supervising producer with Justman as “Encounter at Farpoint” prepared to shoot.
“I had been Paramount’s ‘studio guy’ for the series for about two weeks when Gene Roddenberry asked me to lunch, and it was love at first sight,” Berman recalled. “He went to the studio and said, ‘Can I have him?’ and they said yeah.” And that, he added warmly, was the beginning of a relationship with GR that was “very special,” although at the time Berman had no idea he’d end up as the “new” Great Bird in a few years.
Berman’s track record for quality work and a caring attitude had already been established. He had produced informational projects for TV such as HBO’s What on Earth and the award-winning PBS special The Primal Mind. He was also an Emmy-winning executive producer of ABC’s The Big Blue Marble from 1977 to 1982.
“He was just perfect,” Justman recalled in an interview on March 20, 1992. “We couldn’t have found someone better to do the show. He’s a perfect executive producer, and a perfect hands-on producer at the same time. My only fear is that he’s going to overwork himself!”
So now it was Justman and Berman who set to work casting the regulars, screening their choices with Paramount casting agents before presenting them for GR’s approval and eventually a final nod from the studio.
Finally, on May 15, Paramount announced the cast of largely unknown actors who would become “The Next Generation.” Most news accounts emphasized LeVar Burton in the role of Geordi La Forge, thanks to his high-p
rofile role in the landmark miniseries Roots.
The news reports also mentioned a longtime member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and occasional movie actor, Patrick Stewart, as the new Captain Picard, and Jonathan Frakes, best known for his role in the two North and South miniseries, as Riker. The main Associated Press dispatch didn’t mention the remaining cast members but did note that the show had been sold in 150 markets and would reach 90 percent of U.S. viewing households.
The story of how Stewart landed the center seat was quick to take its place in TNG lore. As Justman loves to tell it, only weeks into the show’s development Justman and his wife attended a dramatic reading at UCLA in which Stewart took part. Inspired by the Englishman’s performance, Justman suddenly turned to his wife and said, “I think we have just found our captain!” Later he would say, “I’d never thought of him before, but once I saw him, that was the captain in my mind. I just couldn’t shake it. I’ve never been so sure of anything as I was with that.”
Still, Roddenberry had his heart set on a French actor for the role, and Justman knew it. He set up a meeting among Stewart, Milkis, and GR soon after “discovering” the actor, urging that he be included in the cast somehow—and even wrote in an October 17 memo that Stewart at least be considered for the part of Data! After that, the audition process went on, with Justman and later Berman persisting in the campaign to cast Stewart as captain.
“We couldn’t find anyone who would satisfy Gene—or ourselves, really—who was good enough,” Justman went on. “And finally at the end Gene relented and said, ‘Well, let’s go with Patrick. He’s our best choice.’ See, Patrick didn’t fit his concept, but once he decided that Patrick was the character, he wrote the character for Patrick!”
Stewart, known in the United States mainly for his role as Sejanus in the highly acclaimed BBC-PBS miniseries I, Claudius and for supporting roles in the films Dune and Excalibur, has said that his naïveté about Trek’s impact allowed him to avoid any apprehension about tackling the new show—that is, until a friend floored him by asking how it felt to be playing “an American icon.”
Frakes, whose TV credits also included Bare Essence, Paper Dolls, Falcon Crest, and The Doctors, survived seven auditions in six weeks to finally claim the role, and has credited GR with making him his favorite and doing a little coaching on the side. At the time he was ironically linked with another up-and-coming genre TV star. “I had just finished a stage play with Ron Perlman called My Life in Art,” Frakes said in an interview. “I played a goat who became a man and ends up starring on Broadway; Perlman played a theater director. We both got something good out of it—I got Star Trek and he got Beauty and the Beast.”
Unlike those of any of the rest of the cast, the background stories on Deanna Troi and Tasha Yar came to be inexplicably intertwined with the actors who would play the roles. Londoner Marina Sirtis had been denied meaty roles in her native land because of her good looks. She had been in America barely five months when she tried out for TNG as the security chief, while Denise Crosby—Bing Crosby’s granddaughter—was reading for the Troi role.
At first, Marina Sirtis read for the role of Macha Hernandez, not the Betazoid counselor Deanna Troi.
Berman and Justman liked both actresses in those roles, but eventually GR switched them, deciding Sirtis’s appearance was better suited to the empathic alien counselor than to the Latino security chief. “Once we had an ‘exotic’ for Deanna Troi, it seemed logical that we should have a different physical type for the head of security,” Justman recalled. “We didn’t want to have another brunette.” At that point Macha Hernandez became Natasha Yar, who was given a Ukrainian background to match Crosby’s blond hair. The final decision came in early May—just as Sirtis was packing to return home to England to restock her nest egg.
Sirtis’s prior credits included The Wicked Lady with Faye Dunaway and Death Wish 3 opposite Charles Bronson and TV guest spots on Hunter and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Along with numerous TV guest-star credits and a role on Days of Our Lives, Crosby, a Hollywood native, had film roles in 48 HRS., Desert Hearts, and The Man Who Loved Women, and she makes no apologies for a funky 1979 pictorial layout in Playboy during her “rebellious period.”
Brent Spiner, who became Data, grew up in Houston, Texas. He moved up through the off-Broadway and Broadway ranks, winning roles in such musicals as Sunday in the Park with George, The Three Musketeers, and Big River. He appeared in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories and, perhaps most memorably for sitcom fans, as a luckless hick in a recurring role on Night Court.
When Denise Crosby was cast as the Enterprise’s security chief, the producers changed the character’s name to Tasha Yar.
LeVar Burton auditioned largely because of the suggestion of Justman, who had once worked with him in a TV movie pilot called Emergency Room. Included in its cast was Gary Lockwood, star of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the original Trek’s second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Along with his Roots credentials, Burton had hosted the PBS youth series Reading Rainbow for five years and in August 1988 would devote a segment of the PBS show to a peek behind the scenes of his famous “other job.”
Gates McFadden came to the role of Dr. Beverly Crusher as a New York-based world veteran of the stage, mime, dance, and improvisation. She had also been on Another World and The Edge of Night and had served as choreographer and director of puppet movement for Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. A student of mime and theater with Jacque LeCoq in Paris, she later served on several university faculties for theater arts.
Thanks to his exposure in the miniseries Roots, LeVar Burton was the most recognizable “name” in the new cast
Wil Wheaton had been best known as Gordie in Stand by Me before becoming young Wesley Crusher.
Despite a disastrous first callback that convinced him he’d lost the part, Wil Wheaton, a veteran of film since he began appearing in commercials at age seven, was asked back for another try and wound up landing the role of Wesley Crusher. Highly acclaimed by moviegoers and critics alike as Gordie in Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me, Wheaton had also appeared in The Last Starfighter, The Buddy System, and the telefilm The Young Harry Houdini. His voice was heard in The Secret of NIMH, and he was a guest on numerous series.
Casting delays didn’t help clarify the early unsure status of Worf. Justman recalled that one trim black actor after another was auditioned—blacks being considered mainly to simplify the application of the dark Klingon makeup—before finally settling on the stage-trained Michael Dorn, who was free of any so-called street accent. The part was first conceived as a recurring role in seven of thirteen episodes for a couple of years, according to Berman, but was expanded after filming and editing of “Farpoint” began and the producers decided that Worf had presence.
Micheal Dorn brought so much presence to the character of Worf that the Klingon was soon made a regular.
“I did not wear makeup,” Dorn said of his audition, “but I took on the psychological guise of a Klingon. I walked into Paramount in character. No jokes. No laughing with the other actors. I sat by myself waiting for my interview. When my turn came, I walked in, didn’t smile, did the reading, thanked them, and walked right out.”12 And eventually got the job.
A native of tiny Luling, Texas, Dorn was raised in Pasadena, California, and played in rock bands when he was in college, where he became a fan of the original Trek and drifted into acting. He was previously best known for his three years as a costar on CHiPS. On the big screen he played a small part as Apollo Creed’s bodyguard in Rocky. The sash he would initially wear on the new series was the original Trek Klingon prop, explained as an heirloom.
Countdown and Launch
As work began shifting from an emphasis on the show’s background to the specifics of the pilot episode, which was due to begin filming on May 29, 1987, members of the creative staff that would make this Trek fly were quickly getting their feet wet. One of the miracle workers who’d come aboard to crank out the magic unde
r TV’s many limits was makeup designer Michael Westmore, the 1981 Academy Award winner for Mask. On the Monday after his Thursday interview, when Westmore had to decide in an hour’s time to give up his lucrative features work to take on TNG’s challenges, he hit the ground running and plunged into not only screen tests but such crucial basics as Worf’s Klingon look and Data’s android appearance.
“Data’s went through about twenty-four makeup tests over three days before the camera,” Westmore said. “We went through all colors—pink, green, blue, different metallics. The choice got down to the color he is now, and battleship gray”—Justman recalled it as “bilious bluish gray.” The makeup designer preferred the gold look that emerged but recalled: “Gene was leaning toward gray, but in talking with him, and Rick Berman, we kinda swayed him in the other direction.” It remained relatively unchanged: the famous gold-beige contact lenses, an opalescent base, gold powder, and dyed black hair with a penciled-in hairline that requires an hour in all to apply.
In contrast, the original design for Worf’s makeup, a two-and-a-half-hour application that dropped to almost two hours over time, would become only the first step in a search for the best look that subtly evolved over the life of the series; by Season 2 Westmore had broadened his forehead so it would not look so “busy.” GR initially wanted Worf’s hair short to reflect the no-non-sense military look of Starfleet, Westmore recalled, but from hair designer to hair designer it gradually lengthened over the years until actor Dorn finally got his wish for something different in Season 6 (“Face of the Enemy”/234).
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion: Revised Edition Page 4