Interview: Nana Visitor On Star Trek Putting Actresses In The “Female Box” And Going Backwards In ‘Enterprise’

When Deep Space Nine‘s Nana Visitor was approached to write a book about the women in Star Trek, the original idea pitched to her was that she’d do short interviews to work into a picture-filled coffee table book. When she started doing interviews, the concept changed to something deeper: a look at female Trek characters, yes, but also a deep dive into the actresses who played them and the times they lived in. We reviewed the book when it came out, then spoke to her in depth about her experience writing it and how it affected her.

Here is part three of that extended conversation, focusing on the interviews she wasn’t able to get and why, and has been edited for brevity and clarity. (Read part 1 and part 2.)

Are you ready for everyone who reads this book to want to come to you and pour out their hearts with their stories and then ask you a million questions?

Yes! [laughs] Not that I’ll have the answers. And you so want to have the answers. Like what should we do next? What needs to happen? I have my views on that, but what I see, my perspective? I totally want to share, and I want to hear other people’s too. So yeah, I’m ready.

We spoke when you had just started writing the book, and you told me it took some work to get people to go past the sound bites they were used to giving. Obviously you broke through all that. Was there anyone who didn’t?

I always wanted more. But what I realized was that it wasn’t necessarily just them being trained by the franchise that you give sound bites—and good ones, positive ones, because the show’s important to so many people. It was more something that I fell into myself, until I went back and examined, really dissected my experience. I hadn’t thought that I was being compromised, or that I was accommodating so much in my own life that I was becoming a different shape. That took a lot of self-examination. But like I said, I always wanted more.

You said in the book’s conclusion you went through a phase of being so hypervigilant that it was difficult for people to deal with you.

That absolutely happened. I became unbearable, and I had to find a balance that things can, that really calling things and there’s this wonderful activist [Loretta J. Ross] that has this phrase that I’m borrowing right now, but calling people out doesn’t help as much as calling people in.

Before I get into the specifics of the people that you did talk to and some of the stories in the book, I want to talk a little bit about the people that aren’t there. I was looking at your Instagram account and you read some of the stuff that you’d written about Michelle Hurd. Why was she cut from it?

I wasn’t involved in that decision. I know that the book was way longer than they wanted it to be. And certainly what I had turned in was much, much more information. And I did so many interviews with fascinating audience members, that could have been a book in itself. So I wasn’t privy to that decision. I don’t know. I was horrified. I called her immediately, and she was much more calm than I was. But if indeed, we do some kind of documentary, she’ll be there. She is such a force of nature. I so want people to know who she is in her life. She’s quite extraordinary.

She always has so much to say that’s so valuable.

She does. And she says it in a way, there’s such a sweetness. She wants people to know more. It’s not like she’s shoving anything down your throat. She thinks this is what people need to know, and she wants to deliver it. It’s really humanly beautiful.

Instagram video of Nana talking about Michelle Hurd’s interview…

 

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And Linda Park. Did she choose not to talk to you or was she not available?

I asked her and she didn’t know how to fit it in.

Look, here’s the thing, too. No one knew what this book was going to be. No one understood what I was doing, if it was going to be some kind of hit out on men, which it definitely isn’t and was never the intention. But I’m sure that people went, “Well, who are you and why are you writing it?” So there could be a million reasons. A lot of the people I only had agent contacts for and I know from having agents, sometimes those requests go that far and no further, you never hear about it. And also, everyone’s asked to do Star Trek interviews endlessly. It gets tiring at a point, and there could be a million reasons for it.

It did make me wonder why… I loved reading your Enterprise chapter because I’ve always felt that show was Voyager backlash in terms of women. I was impressed when I watched you on The Decon Chamber, I don’t think those guys would have been able to notice that or talk about it if they hadn’t read your book.

I was so impressed, how they responded. It’s not what I expected. I expected to have some backlash from them because of what I wrote about Enterprise, and not at all. They took it in. I thought that was incredibly lovely, and encouraging.

Yes! I was also very surprised watching it, because they didn’t just repeat what they’d read, they said it themselves, so they took it in—which is the beauty of this book, that you just take it in.

I just talked to a young woman. She was interviewing me, and she said, “Really? No one pointed to these characters as important characters for them?” And I said, “I don’t remember any.” And she said, “Well, Jolene Blalock’s character was important to me because she’s an engineer.” If I could remember her whole title, I would tell you, because it’s damned impressive. But she said, “It reminded me of my beginning, being in an all-male workplace and feeling like I wasn’t being listened to, and so I looked to her character, and then loved that she was kick-ass.” And I thought that was very interesting.

I’ve never heard that perspective on T’Pol before. It’s like something you and Terry Farrell said in the first Trek Talks that struck me the minute that you said it, which was that you both talked about how, in some ways, your characters were an escape from the constraints placed on women in the ‘90s.

Absolutely.

Then Enterprise kind of went backwards and just put all those constraints back on the characters, it felt like.

And when I interviewed Brannon Braga, he was so forthcoming and generous, and he said, “Well, we thought we did the work with Voyager”—which is, in itself, a lesson, that you can’t go “Okay, that’s enough. We’re done now. We’re going to focus on…”  You have to keep building the equity in ALL the characters.

Because there should always be progress and not regressions.

Yes. I think they went back to the 1960s ethos instead of the timing of the show, which was still in the future.

It did feel like such a push back. Also, I know they were exhausted and weren’t ready to do another show, and I’m very cognizant of that situation as well.

Right. And I will say for the people who do love Enterprise, don’t forget I was looking through very particular lenses. I was watching for how women were treated and how women were advancing in the show. Only that. So it’s not a condemnation of the show, but just my take on it, it seems to have gone backwards.

And then in terms of other people who didn’t make it in: Rebecca Romijn, I was really looking forward to [hearing from her].

I saw her at a convention, and it was one of those moments where you’re passing each other very quickly. I said, “I’m writing a book! I really want to interview you!” And she said, “I’m down Absolutely.” But I think it was one of those agent situations that I got cut off and I didn’t have any other way of reaching her.

And Celia Rose Gooding, you didn’t speak to her.

I would love to speak to Celia. I would love to find out her perspective on the—I know she comes from Broadway, so that’s another layer of “What’s it like there now?” Now I know what it was like in the ‘80s. I’d love to know what her life has been like, and her experience of playing such an iconic role.

From A Woman’s Trek (Insight Editions)

And then Chase Masterson, was that a scheduling issue also?

I spoke to her. She wrote to me. She was unable to—it was scheduling. So she wrote to me and gave it to me that way, but it’s of course very different to have a conversation.

What you wrote about her helped me see that character [DS9’s Leeta] in a different way.

Me too, because I hadn’t examined it. And my god, at examining things, going back and really looking and really asking yourself, I caught myself with unconscious bias and making snap decisions that I hadn’t actually thought through, that I didn’t actually believe, over and over and over again. So this self-examination that I went through and looking at all these women, it certainly expanded me.

I want to talk about Marina Sirtis for a minute. I think fans really want to hear her point of view. And I’m not sure that she knows that, because she often gets dismissed for her strong opinions. I heard you say on The Decon Chamber that she said it was something about people making money off of her. But do you think that was the real reason that she didn’t want to participate? Or do you think the whole thing exhausts her? What do you think is going on there?

I know that this isn’t the only interview she’s refused. She doesn’t seem to do them anymore, for whatever—I can’t even guess what’s going on or why, but it was no uncertain terms that she would not talk to me.

It’s so interesting. You wrote a lot about the toll of going along with the way that things were, and I worked at MTV in the ‘90s, so I get it. Friends I worked with had to go to a strip club because everybody in the van went to a strip club. And we found ourselves at Hooters, going “What are we doing here?” That’s how I feel about Marina. And take a look at Jonathan Frakes, whose personality was added to his character, and it made him so much better. And had they just done that with her, she would have been phenomenal.

[laughs] I never even thought of that. You’re absolutely right.

It didn’t happen until the movie First Contact, where she got to get drunk and have fun and show that she’s funny.

That’s right. Well, that was the female box at the time, right? Be beautiful. Be reasonable, be soft. Make sure that men aren’t threatened by you. And she, she would probably have threatened some men in the ‘90s, and which would have been great, because then little boys go, yeah, there’s that woman too. And that’s all right.

More to come…

Read  part 1 of our interview, where Nana talks about becoming a Star Trek fan to prepare for the book and working on DS9,  part 2, where talks about Hollywood culture through the Roddenberry era into the Berman era of Star Trek, and part 4, about the new shows and the future of women in Hollywood.

Buy Open A Channel: A Woman’s Trek by Nana Visitor

Nana Visitor’s full-color illustrated Star Trek: Open a Channel: A Woman’s Trek was released by Insight Editions on October 1. You can order it on Amazon in hardcover and  Kindle e-book.

Check out more exclusive interviews at TrekMovie.com.

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