William Shatner Still Can't Get His Mind Around the Idea Of A Shat-Less 'Star Trek'
Apparently still suffering from a paralyzing cognitive dissonance each time he tries to envision a Star Trek project that won't feature his name somewhere on the call sheet, William "They Can Have My Tricorder Back When They Pry It From My Cold, Dead Hands" Shatner reached out to a sympathetic Extra camera crew as he signed copies of his new novel at Book Soup last night, baffled that director J.J. Abrams persists in denying him even the tiniest of pity-cameos:
"How could you not put one of the founding figures into a movie that was being resurrected? That doesn't make good business sense to me!" Shatner said at a signing for his book, "Star Trek Academy: Collision Course" in Hollywood.
Director JJ Abrams has offered Leonard Nimoy and several past cast members the chance to make a cameo in the sci-fi spectacle.
Shatner told "Extra" that he would have been great for the film, insisting, "I've become even more popular than I was playing Captain Kirk. I'm good box office and I get publicity....But, they are going in a different direction and it'll be a wonderful film."
Even though it seemed that Shatner's grudging endorsement of the new film's "different direction" indicated that the actor was making slow progress towards accepting his confounding rejection, the inscription the Extra reporter found inside the copy of the book he pressed into her hands belied any such breakthrough: "To Whom It May Concern: Please, if you have any way of contacting J.J. Abrams, the man who's stopped taking my hourly calls, let him know that if he doesn't change his mind about putting me in his goddamn movie, any blood spilled will be on his hands. Wouldn't it be easier to give me a tiny walk-on part than to show up on the set one day and find me on the Enterprise bridge, clutching the still-smoking 'phaser'—haha—I used to pick off the the punk I found sitting in my captain's chair? Something to think about. Love, James T. Kirk."
