Alaina Huffman: I adore Nichelle Nicholls. […] I’ve had dinner with her several times, and she’s told me so many great stories. […] Two of my favorite stories that she told me, one was how these things [conventions] started.
Lynn Zubernis: Oh right, because she was there.
Alaina: She was. The first real conventions were Star Trek. And what happened was, it was off the air and fans were really distraught and they wanted to get together, and they’re like, we’re gonna get together because we all really connect and we’d love it if you would come. I don’t know how many of them there were, but they wrote letters – this was back in the 70’s…And I don’t have all the details, though she tells the story beautifully, but they wrote letters back and forth to Nichelle and said look, we’re gonna have a little get together. It wasn’t a convention, it was at some hotel in NY, it was a ‘get together.’ […] And they said, if we can get enough people, we’d like to send you an airplane ticket and put you up in a hotel if you would come and meet us. And her and a few castmates were like of course! And then there were tons of people who ended up showing up.
Lynn: Because it was really popular, and didn’t they get it back on the air for a while?
Alaina: Yeah, with letters! And so that happened and that sort of created this fan world that happened, and then Gary and Adam were a part of that.
Lynn: They were really young too, they were like teenagers when they started this.
Alaina: Yeah I think like 14, it’s fascinating. And then my other side note on fangirling over Nichelle Nichols – my other favorite story she told me was about the kiss between her and Shatner. […] Do you know the story? From what I was told by her, the network at the last minute wanted to pull the plug on it. They got nervous, and they were like, no, let’s do a hug.
Lynn: Um, yeah, not the same…
Alaina: Right? We’re gonna make this really big social movement, this civil rights movement…or maybe not. And so the story she told was that Shatner said ‘okay, we’ll get to the hug, let’s do the kiss first though, we’ll just get it out of the way. Okay, you got it? Then we’ll do any version of the hug that you want.’ So this was back in the day before video village, before any of that technical stuff. There was the camera, film; you had to check the gate. Young readers may not understand that we had film. I remember when I started my career, we had film. And you’d have to re-roll sometimes, batteries died or whatever. So the story goes that they did the kiss, and then every take after that, Shatner went to hug her and leaned into the camera and crossed his eyes.
Lynn: So they couldn’t use it!
Alaina: [nodding] So that made all the takes unusable.
Lynn: OMG that’s amazing.
Alaina: Can you imagine how nervous that poor camera guy must have been? He must have been like I’m gonna get fired!
Lynn: What guts that took. I guess he was the star; he was the only one who could have done that – but he did it.
Alaina: Even when the network didn’t want to do it. So I’ve met Shatner several times, and I have yet to verify that story with him, but that’s the story she told me and I love it, it’s one of my favorite stories ever.
Excerpted from:
Alaina Huffman talks Directing, Fandom, Social Change and 'Supernatural,’ of course