bosArt | Print: Star Trek Shoe Loss

Posted by grizzletoad1 on 12-22-2023 at21:13:

Star Trek Shoe Loss

In perhaps the greatest episode of the classic science fiction television series Star Trek, The City On The Edge Of Forever, gorgious Joan Colins has a very brief one-shoe moment. In the episode, she becomes romantically involved with William Shatner's iconic Captain Jim Kirk. I'm not going to get into the particulars of the story as they are just to complex and time consuming for this post. In the episode, she stumbles on a flight of stairs, almost falling to her possible death, but Kirk catches her. After thanking him for saving her, she climbs back up the stairs and you can clearly see she has lost her right shoe. You never see it come off, nor does she comment on the fact she has lost her shoe, but it's definitely off as she climbs the stairs and turns out of site at the top. I don't have a screen capture but the incident happens near the end of the episode, best estimate about the 50 minute mark, maybe a few minutes earlier. You have to watch closely because it only lasts a second or two.

Posted by Nopperabo on 12-22-2023 at23:34:

There's a reason you don't see it. It wasn't on purpose, and they did multiple takes of that scene, then spliced together the best bit from each one. Literally no one noticed the disconnect until the episode made it to air. I assume Harlan was furious (Harlan Ellison, who wrote that episode (and got awards for it as the all time best written episode of the original series) was famous for being both a perfectionist and an enfant terrible when dealing with producers (since he wouldn't "sell out" and just blindly say yes to whatever they wanted to change while letting them use his name to gain legitimacy).

Posted by grizzletoad1 on 12-23-2023 at03:37:

Yes they probably pieced the best takes together since the low budget the show had to work with wouldn't allow much else. It would be neat to see if the loss of Collins' shoe was supposed to be the catalyst of her trip and fall in the scene and that they used her walking one-shoed up the stairs from that take in conjunction with a non-shoeloss sequence as she trips. Wonder if the shoe loss sequence survies somewhere as it seems anything Star Trek was saved and archived by its extensive and dedicated fanbase. Would be neat to see the "footage" of Collins tripping and losing her shoe just as Shatner catches her to keep her from falling. Of course what happend to her shoe afterward? About Harlan fighting with the producers over any changes, I back him. As a supposed "writer" myself, I understand fully how he would feel after putting his heart and soul into a project only to see someone with no skin in the game come along and change things to suit their "vision" of the story. There was a big change that I agreed with, however. The ending where Shatner has to let Collins get hit by the truck. Harland wrote it to have Nimoy stop Shatner from saving her, but it was changed to the more impactful having Shatner stop DeForrest Kelly from saving her, leaving Nimoy to say his iconic line, "He knows, Doctor. He knows." Fantasitic episode.

Posted by Nopperabo on 12-23-2023 at15:43:

If you can find it (I don't remember which collection of his it was in) you should read his account of trying to do the Sci-Fi show "The Starlost" for CBC, and how it basically put him off doing screenwriting unless he was guaranteed full creative control. Some of the things they tried to do were ridiculous like filming what was supposed to be a fifty mile across area as two miles (to save budget) and then deciding to re-write the script so it was two miles there as well (which would make the premise of the scene ridiculous) or deciding to reveal the Maguffin of the whole show (the Engine and Navigation Room) by episode 2 and say it was okay because "they still need to find the backup engine", because they thought a backup engine meant an engine in the back of the ship.

No wonder Ellison grew to mostly hate TV (and wrote the two "Glass Teat" books to show it.)

Posted by grizzletoad1 on 12-23-2023 at17:12:

I remember Starlost. It was aired here in the States, but I think it was early, before Prime Time started about 7:30 or so. Didn't know Ellison was behind that. Honestly, they did him wrong. That show was not good an was off the air pretty quickly.

Posted by Nopperabo on 12-23-2023 at23:57:

Worse than you think. The original "bible" he wrote for first episode, Phoenix without Ashes, later won an award as one of the BEST screenplays of the decade.

And you don't know because he got so sick he insisted his name get taken off. If you see anything credited to "Cordwainer Bird", that means Ellison did it, and didn't like the results.

Posted by grizzletoad1 on 12-24-2023 at02:57:

Yes. From what I've learned about film, I understand that, according to union rules, if a director does not like a project the way the studio execs interferred or edited it, he can take his name off the project. But the union rules for writers are different. Even if a writer's script is so changed by a director, producer, or other studio wonks so that not one word he wrote is spoken on film by the actors, no matter how much the writer protests, he CANNOT take his name off the project. It's forever associated with him, which could be crippling to his career. How Ellison was able to change his name is a new wrinkle to me. He must have had more juice than the regular writer. I tell you, Starlost was as I remember it pretty bad. It was even done on video tape, which gave it a real cheesey look and gave the show a kid's show appearance. Sad to hear the original concept was so much better.

Posted by Nopperabo on 12-24-2023 at15:41:

Oh, he pulled that trick a LOT. He also did it when he wrote an episode of "The Flying Nun" for some quick cash.
Not that he's the only noted writer to dip into that. Gore Vidal did an episode of McHale's Navy, Ingmar Bergman did some soap commercials and so on.

It is, of course, also super common in book writing. Henry C' Tubb used the name Lewis Padgett , since he thought people would look down on a noted astronomer doing sci-fi writing for the "pulps" (I imagine this idea changed after Fred Hoyle, the British Astronomer Royal, wrote "The Black Cloud") . Stephen King put some of his stuff out under a pseudonym because his publisher thought he'd lose revenue if they oversaturated the market with books by him.