An Oral History of Galaxy Quest

Great article from MTV.

There's just so much here, from the various people offered all the roles (Alec Baldwin was offered Peter Quincy Taggart; many people had doubts about Tim Allen, who turned in a heroically Kirkian performance) and stuff being made up on the fly (such as Fred Kwan winding up making out with a space octopus).

Worth reading if you like the movie, and seriously, who doesn't?

The two quotes I'll post are both from Sigourney Weaver.

Sigourney Weaver (Gwen DeMarco/Lt. Tawny Madison): I heard about it from my agent. He said they won’t consider anyone who has done science fiction. I insisted on being seen.

This is odd, because Weaver doesn't even like science fiction (and you'll see her reason for that next).

And they specifically barred sci-fi actors, and she doesn't like sci-fi, but she insists on being seen.

I guess she really saw some dynamite in the script, which shows a good eye, because never in a thousand years would I have guessed this script would turn out to make a classic movie.

Anyway, here's why she doesn't like science fiction.

She's completely right about all of this. This always bothered me about Star Trek.

Weaver: It's funny, considering my background, but I was never into science fiction. I liked "The Twilight Zone," that’s as close as I ever got. I thought "Flash Gordon" was stupid. I think "Star Trek" happened and I missed it. I was in the theater, and then suddenly I did "Alien." Suddenly I was straddling two very different worlds.

I'll watch "Star Trek" once in a while -- look at those cheap sets! But I also love to watch it as a "Gwen," watching actors giving dignity to an absurd situation, speaking Klingon. But every time I see "Star Trek," I just see a lot of people dressed as shepherds. They’re always medieval or something. I can’t get by it. Whenever I flip past, that’s the episode I see -- a bunch of shepherds. It's the reason I never wanted "Alien" to go to Earth! You'd see the culture -- a bunch of shepherds, ugh! The closest you get to Earth is in "Aliens" at the beginning, on the space station. And poor Burke, Paul Reiser, he’s wearing that absurd collar. It just says FUTURE and it doesn’t work.

I always liked that collar.

Well, if you can't dress them as shepherds and you can't give them funky futuristic collars, just how can you dress them, Weaver?

Weaver explains why she was interested in Galaxy Quest: because it was about actors in doomed projects who nevertheless really, really tried:

But I just felt "Galaxy Quest," as a comedy, was such a love letter to all the insecure actors in the field who have done so many wonderful and somewhat under-appreciated projects, and even though "Star Trek" is very popular, it was very...specific.

She means "silly," but she's trying to be nice.

posted by Ace at 08:14 PM

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