William Shatner likes to keep busy. When he’s not trying to get people to use Priceline.com – no one deals like we do! Or preforming as Denny Crane in the long running Boston Legal. Or writing one of a zillion books. Or appearing at a Star Trek Convention. William Shatner does a pretty job as an interviewer on the Biography Channel. The list of people that have agreed to go on Shatner’s Raw Nerve includes such people as Valerie Bertinelli, Tim Allen, Jenna Jamison, Jimmy Kimmel, and Leonard Nimoy.
To be honest I have only seen the Leonard Nimoy episode, though I did watch a couple of minutes of the Jenna Jameson show on the website. William Shatner has a kind of love seat setup where two armchairs are offset and he and his guests face each other across the arms of the chairs. These shows are pretty rough in their editing, at least the ones I watched had a lot of jumps and splices. But it was still fun seeing Leonard Nimoy. He talked about his youth and how his Grandfather influenced him and how he came to be obsessed with fat woman.
As a Trekkie it is always fun to see Shatner and Nimoy together, though they didn’t have much to say on the topic of Star Trek. I am also a portrait photographer, so I found Leonard Nimoy’s work with oversized models to be both interesting and strange. I photograph a lot of fat women and none of them seem to be at all happy with being fat. Maybe they should read Nimoy’s Full Body Project and put a different twist of their self image.
Or maybe not. The Herb Ritts image has always been one of my favorites, the Leonard Nimoy image, well, not so much. Maybe as a portrait photographer myself I can look at Leonard’s image and think of a couple of ways to improve it, while looking at Herb’s image it appears to be near textbook perfect. In fact, I’m sure that Herb Ritt’s photo is in a number of textbooks. There is every possibility that Leonard Nimoy’s image will be in a textbook one day as well.
Leonard Nimoy talked with William Shatner about his experience with the large models, and how when he did his first show with these kinds of images, fans of the models outnumbered fans of the photographer. It was a fun interview, with Shatner being Shatner and hamming it up once in a while just to remind us who’s the host of the show.
Shatner’s Raw Nerve is not the worst thing I’ve seen Shatner do, that honor goes to Shatner’s reality show Invasion Iowa. As far as interview shows go, Shatner’s Raw Nerve is as good as most of them, though I think it might be a better syndicated radio show than a TV Show.
