William Shatner Wants the Lead in Star Wars Episode VII

After appearing at San Diego Comic Con International's TV Land Legends of Comedy panel yesterday, science fiction icon and Big Giant Head William Shatner held court with reporters, telling a roomful of journalists about his animal rights work, Star Trek novels and Star Wars Episode VII, in which he says that director J.J. Abrams ought to let him replace Harrison Ford. "The lead!" Shatner answered enthusiastically when asked what role he would give himself in the new Star Wars movie if he could cast himself as anybody, setting off a round of laughs in the room. "Harrison Ford, progressed!" Asked whether he foresaw doing any more Star Trek novels, though, or whether we might eventually see a director's cut of Star Trek V, which changed radically throughout production, he said that it seems those ships have sailed.

"I haven't been asked to do [the director's cut]. There hasn't been a demand. You and I lead that group of people," he said to the reporter who asked about such a project. "My one-line idea was 'Star Trek goes in search of God.' Then I ran into flak: 'Whose God? What God? We're not going to alienate people.' Somebody came up with the idea, 'Well, what happens if it's an alien who thinks he's God? And then an alien who thinks that he's the Devil by projection that there's a God? And in order to get that movie made, I agreed to it, and that was a compromise." He added that, in the books he's written, many of the events that happened to Kirk were things that had happened to Shatner in life, just taken into a Star Trek context. He added, "The difference between making a compromise and being political or standing on your standards? Where do you do that? The editor says, 'Cut that line,' and you say, 'That's my whole story!' do you say, 'No, I'm not going to do it,' do you say 'Okay, I'll do it?' So we're making political judgments or standing on our standards all our life--everything we do is that How do you make those decisions? That's what I had to learn on Star Trek V." Shatner, who counts Dancing With the Stars as his favorite current TV show and The Life of Pi as his favorite movie of last year, told reporters that he didn't think science fiction was being aggressively developed for network television anymore. "What is on television that's science fiction? I don't think there is anything. There is no real series that's on television that I know of," Shatner said when asked what he thought of the state of it. "What's happened is that computer graphics are reaching such an extraordinary point that they've taken over the magic--or they are the magic--of movies. And great! We can do things in the movies just by imagining, and some wonderful artist draws it and it comes alive. That's the magic of science fiction. And yet having said that, the other part of the magic of science fiction is the word and your imagination about what that is without seeing the pictures." Shatner said that he's in the midst of writing a science fiction comic book titled Man o' War through Bluewater Productions, which will pick up themes from his late, lamented TekWar series, which he hopes to film to "make it come alive." It wasn't clear whether he meant he wanted to make movies set in the same universe as the comics, as he did with TekWar, or if he hopes to dabble in motion comics.