William Shatner On The Star Trek Books

How did you become the author of ten 'Star Trek' novels?

This forty page treatment they turned down and I turned it into a book, called it "The Return". It became a best seller. And from then on it was like "let's write another book", then I'd do the audio part of the book and it got to be kind of a thing we'd do every year or so, a gathering.

What inspired you to write 'Star Trek Academy - Collision Course'?

I went into the management at Paramount and I tried to sell them on an idea that I had that I called the Academy. It was the young Kirk and Spock in the academy as young soldiers. We would follow their adventures delineating how they became the heroes that they ultimately became. I was in there for an hour long with a pitch meeting for the heads up. The studio, they finally thought about it and said, "No this is not the way we want to go." It took that and turned that into this book.

How difficult was it to get approval to write 'Star Trek Academy - Collision Course'?

So I got permission to write the book because I'm Captain Kirk and they want to be on my good side and you have to sign releases on stuff that they want to merchandise so they wanted to keep me happy. But they didn't want to keep me too happy on this book because, and I'm just guessing at this because nobody ever talked to me about it, I think they thought this might interfere with the new movie that J.J. Abrams is doing.I don't know what his script is but I know it isn't the seventeen year old Jim Kirk and nineteen year old Spock.

Were you a lot like young Captain Kirk when you were growing up?

I was a rebel. I hitchhiked around the United States. I did two week canoe trips down waterfalls. I mean, I did, and have continued to do, life challenging events that you really shouldn't do.

Is it difficult to develop new 'Star Trek' projects?

There was a lot of political stuff, there has been and still is a lot of political stuff going on in the "Star Trek". You can imagine something that has been alive and made for Paramount about two billion dollars, you can image, and several administrations. All of whom, like the government, every four years it seems that the administration at Paramount would change and somebody new would come in and then commit the same mistakes that the previous administration had made because there was no sense of history of what had been accomplished or what steps had been taken. So the same mistakes were repeated time and time again. So there is a lot of politics at "Star Trek", among the management, among the cast and all that kind of thing.

At what point did William Shatner truly become Captain James Kirk?

At a certain point, the actor takes the words, and invests the words with his own personality. So if you played, in this case, Denny Crane, you'd be wonderful in it, but you'd be different from me. So the writers began to see me performing it, and then started to write for what I was doing, and then I would react to what they were writing, and so it became a symbiotic thing, where we fed off each other. And that's how an actor works, I think, with words.