The great Patrick Stewart gets himself a schooling.

What is the reason that Patrick Stewart didn’t like working with Jonathan Frakes on set during his time on Star Trek: The Next Generation?
It wasn’t just Frakes. Patrick Stewart had problems with everybody in the cast at one point or another.

When he first started working in TNG, Stewart felt like an outsider and didn’t really expect the show to last; so, he conducted himself in a strictly professional manner and didn’t really bond with any of the TNG cast, including Frakes. Stewart was rather appalled, actually, that the younger castmembers didn’t seem as focused and serious about the job as he was. It irritated him immensely that Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner and the others frequently broke character and joked and pranked on the set. To the theatre-trained Stewart, this behavior was unacceptable.

By the end of the first season, however, when he saw the growing fan base and realized that this show with its undisciplined cast was going to work and was going to last, Stewart relaxed and began to embrace the mischievous TNG group, even enjoying and taking part in the on-set hijinx that persisted all day and into night-time shoots.

Little did the others suspect that Stewart’s unleashed humor could be quite barbed and insulting, as when he loudly criticized the shallowness of the Deanna Troi character and called actress Marina Sirtis a “stupid cow” to her face…which was a mistake. Sirtis was already insecure (thinking they hired her only for her ample cleavage) and she, also, felt her role was one-dimensional, always parroting the insipid line “Captain, they’re hiding something.”

His mean wisecrack hit a nerve, and Sirtis angrily jumped up in Stewart’s face and read him the riot act in front of everyone on the set – an outburst that ironically brought the two (and the whole cast) closer. They all had their conflicts with Stewart, and he with them, and the airing of grievances was cathartic, I think, helping to fuse them into one of the great ensemble casts in television history.

Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner became among Stewart’s closest friends on TNG and in real life; they learned much from him regarding stage discipline, and he learned much from them about letting loose and having fun. In fact, by the time TNG ended in 1994, Frakes said that Stewart was the silliest one on the set.

The pic at the end of the post, of Riker and Picard enjoying an on-set laugh together, is totally priceless. Great show, great cast, great writing, great acting; for my money as a lifelong Star Trek fan, ST-TNG was and always will be far and away the best of the entire franchise, including the movies.

After a rocky, barely-mediocre first season, then a mostly-agonizing second season with the insufferable CMO Pulaski (played by Diana Muldaur, an alumnus of ST-TOS) inexplicably supplanting the winsome and eminently likable Dr Beverly Crusher, the show really found its footing with Season Three, and from there it was off and running. Episodes such as The Inner Light; The Defector; Yesterday’s Enterprise; Q Who?; Relics, wherein James Doohan reprises his TOS role as Engineering Officer Montgomery Scott; the taut, exquisitely gripping Borg cliffhanger; Darmok; these and many more are solid-gold classics of the sci-fi-on-TV pantheon. The two-part finale of the series, All Good Things, can to this very day make me puddle up at the end, as many times as I’ve seen it. This, from S3’s Deja Q, remains one of my verymost favorite scenes of all, from ST-TNG or anything else:

“You weren’t like that before the beard”—now THAT’S good squishy right there. Then, when Data erupts into his Q-granted fit of uncontrollable laughter, Brent Spiner gives a crash-course in capital-A Acting that’s as fine as has ever been presented anywhere, in any timeline or universe. Note also gifted actor John de Lancie’s subtle, ever-so-slight eyebrow-lift just before his Q character departs the Enterprise D’s bridge forever—another display of acting prowess, all the more noteworthy for its understated nonchalance.

Yes, yes, Guinan was annoying as all hell, albeit far less so than that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Mary Sue asswart, Wesley Crusher, Galactic Wonder Boy™. But still.

I can only say again: this Quora Digest email list I somehow ended up on is a real gem. I really don’t recall signing up for the thing myself, but I owe a debt of gratitude to whoever must have done it for me.

Raymond Chandler is one of my all-time favorite writers, a man as skilled and precise with the written word as the best neurosurgeon is with a scalpel. Along with another of my faves, Dashiell Hammett, he was not only a pioneer in the detective-noir genre, he elevated it from mere pulp fiction to high art. As is also true of Hammett, the creator of the cynical, jaded private dick Philip Marlowe never wrote a word that I didn’t just fall completely in love with upon reading it.

Well, okay, up until he went Hollywood and started churning out eminently forgettable screenplays, that is—a move which ended up destroying him, deepening by orders of magnitude the severe depression and excessive drinking he lapsed into following the death of his wife Cissy, a loss that left him heartbroken, utterly despondent, and suicidal. Even his thoughts on his predecessor Hammett, from Chandler’s magisterial treatise on detective fiction The Simple Art Of Murder, ring with poetry and élan:

Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway. Yet for all I know, Hemingway may have learned something from Hammett, as well as from writers like Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and himself….Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish…He is said to have lacked heart, yet the story he thought most of himself (The Glass Key) is the record of a man’s devotion to a friend. He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.

Good, juicy stuff, no?

So after coming across a truly amazing free ebook-download site, I was delighted to snag a copy of The Collected Works Of Raymond Chandler, a compendium of all Chandler’s published fiction, novels and short stories both. One doesn’t just mosey over to gutenberg.org to obtain such treasures, mind. Oh, no; as with the peerless Robert Heinlein, whose descendants are extremely protective of his work, replacing my extensive dead-tree Chandler library with ebook versions would be nothing as effortless a quest as that.

ANYHOO. Chandler had one of those fairly typical love-hate relationships with the City Of (Fallen) Angels, which glares through like a beacon in his writing; with him, the “local color” is as colorful as it gets. To wit:

I drove east on Sunset but I didn’t go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down on to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast boys in stripped-down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired men in dusty coupés and sedans winced and tightened their grip on the wheel and ploughed on north and west towards home and dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives. I drove on past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed carhops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad. Great double trucks rumbled down over Sepulveda from Wilmington and San Pedro and crossed towards the Ridge Route, starting up in low-low from the traffic lights with a growl of lions in the zoo.

Behind Encino an occasional light winked from the hills through thick trees. The homes of screen stars. Screen stars, phooey. The veterans of a thousand beds. Hold it, Marlowe, you’re not human tonight.

The air got cooler. The highway narrowed. The cars were so few now that the headlights hurt. The grade rose against chalk walls and at the top a breeze, unbroken from the ocean, danced casually across the night.

I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed ’em and throw ’em out. Lots of business. We can’t bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You’re using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They’re just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants.

Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs. More tufted beds. More Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind-blown hair and sunglasses and attitudes and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals. Now, wait a minute. Lots of nice people work in pictures. You’ve got the wrong attitude, Marlowe. You’re not human tonight.

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.

So I went to a picture show and it had to have Mavis Weld in it. One of those glass-and-chromium deals where everybody smiled too much and talked too much and knew it. The women were always going up a long curving staircase to change their clothes. The men were always taking monogrammed cigarettes out of expensive cases and snapping expensive lighters at each other. And the help was round-shouldered from carrying trays with drinks across the terrace to a swimming pool about the size of Lake Huron but a lot neater.

The leading man was an amiable ham with a lot of charm, some of it turning a little yellow at the edges. The star was a bad-tempered brunette with contemptuous eyes and a couple of bad close-ups that showed her pushing forty-five backwards almost hard enough to break a wrist. Mavis Weld played second lead and she played it with wraps on.

She was good, but she could have been ten times better. But if she had been ten times better half her scenes would have been yanked out to protect the star. It was as neat a bit of tightrope walking as I ever saw. Well it wouldn’t be a tightrope she’d be walking from now on. It would be a piano wire. It would be very high. And there wouldn’t be any net under it.

See what I mean? The above soliloquy is from The Little Sister, one of Chandler’s very best works, later bowdlerized into yet another execrable stage play and movie—the novel’s rough, jagged edges clumsily filed away with a wood rasp so as to make the thing more palatable for mass-market consumption.

But I do declare, the good, juicy stuff just don’t come any good-er or juicier than that, if you ask me. Writing that deft—that thrilling, that expressive, that smoothly flowing, always seeming to spring from out of thin nowhere and without much effort to seize you by the throat and give you a good, rough shaking—is always and forever a joy and a wonder to behold, for all who care enough about such things to go looking for them. Aesop, my friend, I hope you liked it. And if you didn’t…well, sorry, son, I really can’t help you, I’m afraid. Your malady is most likely incurable, or so I suspect.