Rick Berman

Rick Berman says there were three strikes against the job: it was science fiction at a time when nobody made science fiction for television, it was a sequel, and it was going out in syndication instead of on a network. He and his wife Liz talked it over and, by his own count, it took about six minutes to decide to go for it. That decision gave us Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and the films, and it all traces back to an eye roll in a Paramount meeting that got him invited to lunch with Gene Roddenberry. On Dropping Names, Rick tells Brent and Jonny how Bob Justman came back from a reading at UCLA insisting Roddenberry meet an English actor named Patrick Stewart, how Gene declared that no bald Englishman was going to be his next captain, and how Rick decided that was not actually the end of the conversation. Along the way Brent admits he nearly walked out of his own audition rather than play Data as a machine, Jonathan confesses to wearing the same unwashed shirt through seven auditions for Riker, and Rick explains the rule that whoever said a name first set the pronunciation for the whole series, which is how Data became Data.

There is also the studio executive who told Patrick he had the role but had to lose the wig, the reason Colm Meaney could slip away to make features, Marlon Brando wanting the part that went to Malcolm McDowell in Generations, Isabella Rossellini reading for the Borg Queen before Alice Krige got it, and how Jonathan came to direct First Contact. Before any of that, Rick was a young documentary producer catching flies in the basement of a Horn and Hardart automat for a film John Lennon and Yoko Ono were shooting, which is why Yoko later tapped him on the shoulder at Lincoln Center and greeted him as the fly guy. He also worked two days at Groucho Marx's house, stood five seconds from Howard Hughes on a Las Vegas runway while Hughes fired his boss, took phone calls from Lenny Bruce in college, and shared a babysitter with George Gershwin, give or take fifty years. Michael Piller, Ira Steven Behr, Jerry Taylor and the green writers who became showrunners all get their due, and so does the night Elizabeth Taylor ended up face down on a floor two doors from Rick's house.

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