karen black star trek

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Assignment: Earth

Episode aired Mar 29, 1968

While back in time observing Earth in 1968, the Enterprise crew encounters the mysterious Gary Seven who has his own agenda on the planet. While back in time observing Earth in 1968, the Enterprise crew encounters the mysterious Gary Seven who has his own agenda on the planet. While back in time observing Earth in 1968, the Enterprise crew encounters the mysterious Gary Seven who has his own agenda on the planet.

Marc Daniels
Gene Roddenberry
Art Wallace
William Shatner
Leonard Nimoy
DeForest Kelley
39 User reviews
14 Critic reviews

Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in Star Trek (1966)

Captain James Tiberius 'Jim' Kirk

Mister Spock

Mister Seven

Roberta Lincoln
(as Terri Garr)

Col. Nesvig
First Policeman

Second Policeman
Security Chief

Beta 5 Computer
(uncredited)
Lieutenant Hadley
Lt. Clifford Brent
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Did you know

Trivia While at the launch base and showing his ID to the security person, Mr. Seven shows a National Security Agency credential card. The NSA was one of the worst kept government secrets, but was not publicly acknowledged until nearly 25 years after this episode originally aired.
Goofs When Spock is trying to subdue Roberta, he apparently forgets the Vulcan neck pinch.

Roberta Lincoln : [indicating Isis] Would you mind telling me who that is?

Mister Seven : That, Miss Lincoln, is simply my cat.

Alternate versions Special Enhanced version Digitally Remastered with new exterior shots and remade opening theme song
Connections Featured in The Best TV Shows That Never Were (2004)
Soundtracks Theme Music credited to Alexander Courage Sung by Loulie Jean Norman

User reviews 39

Jan 16, 2021
March 29, 1968 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA (Stock Footage)
Paramount Television
Norway Corporation
See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

Runtime 50 minutes

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Karen Black

Actress • Writer • Singer • Songwriter

Birth date: july 1, 1939, death date: august 8, 2013, birth place: park ridge, illinois.

A key female performer of the American film renaissance of the 1970s, Karen Black was known for her warm smile, sturdy-yet-fraught quality and imperfectly set eyes. In 1965, Black won a Drama Critics Award nomination in for her Broadway debut in the short-running "The Playroom," but subsequent work in films limited her stage appearances. After earning praise as the small-town waitress who falls for upper-class drifter Jack Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces" (1970), Black lent her versatility and unconventional beauty to a number of both offbeat and mainstream films, including Nicholson's "Drive, He Said" (1971), Robert Altman's "Nashville" (1975), in which she sang and earned a Grammy nomination for her efforts, and Alfred Hitchcock's swan song, "Family Plot" (1976). She did well as the sluttish Myrtle in "The Great Gatsby" (1974), but that same year found herself the object of parody for her silly role as a flight attendant forced to try to fly an airplane in "Airport 1975" (1974). She was the party girl who dreams of stardom in "The Day of the Locust" (1975), and memorably portrayed various characters in the cult-classic TV movie "Trilogy of Terror" (ABC, 1975). Although her Hollywood career had petered out by the end of that decade, she remained a cult favorite, and her 2013 death was widely mourned by fans.

Whereas others might have thrown in the towel or become women in jeopardy in TV movies with regularity, Black instead turned to independent films. While some were of downright horrendous quality, others offered her a wider range of roles than Hollywood might have. Among the best was Robert Altman's screen adaptation of "Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" (1982), in which she portrayed a transsexual. At the other end of the spectrum was her embarrassing role as an overprotective mother in "The Invisible Kid" (1988). In the middle of the decade, she had a recurring role as Elliott Gould's ex-wife on the sitcom "E/R" (CBS, 1984-85), and, in 1989, joined the parade of actors making guest appearances on the popular cop series "Miami Vice" (NBC, 1984-1990). She also appeared in "Invaders from Mars" (1986) with Hunter Carson, her son by screenwriter/actor L.M. Kit Carson. Black seemed never to turn down a part and was often available for low-budget films by first-time directors. As a result, her output did not diminish with her salary "quote," and, during the mid-1990s, she had numerous films in the can awaiting release, ranging from the comedy "Plan 10 from Outer Space" (1995) to the sequel "Children of the Corn: The Gathering" (1996) to the indescribable "Dinosaur Valley Girls" (1996).

In the new millennium, Black was largely relegated to getting by on her status as a cult favorite, though she did appear in occasional notable productions, including the offbeat computer-obsessed movie "Teknolust" (2002), starring Tilda Swinton, and she gamely embraced her horror roots as Mother Firefly in Rob Zombie's gory creep-fest "House of 1000 Corpses" (2003). Featured in low-budget films and occasional TV shows during her final years, Black died of cancer in 2013. One of her final public appearances came earlier that year, when she sang a duet with alt-folk singer-songwriter Cass McCombs on his song "Brighter!" from the album Big Wheel and Others.

Bunker of Blood 2 Deadly Dolls: Deepest Cuts

Karen black: the actor's life, orf iii - spezial, wild in blue, she loves me not, letters from the big man, some guy who kills people, maria my love, mommy's little monster, nothing special, meet the eye, a single woman, irene in time, double duty, the blue tooth virgin, contamination, one long night, wamego strikes back, ghost writer.

Hollywood Dreams Stream

Read you like a book, the straun house, my suicidal sweetheart, america brown, firecracker.

House of 1000 Corpses Stream

Curse of the forty-niner, summer solstice, a light in the darkness.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent Stream

The independent, the underground comedy movie, bury the evidence, fallen arches, invisible dad, my neighbor's daughter.

Conceiving Ada

Un angelo a New York

Sister island.

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering Stream

Plan 10 from outer space, the wacky adventures of dr. boris and nurse shirley, dinosaur valley girls.

Party of Five Stream

Ralph s. mouse, jonas in the desert, bound & gagged: a love story, tuesday never comes, hotel oklahoma, children of the night, the double o kid, final judgement, the double 0 kid, auntie lee's meat pies, the return of the rollerblade seven, movies money & murder, fatal encounter, encuentro fatal, rubin and ed, the roller blade seven, espíritus diabólicos, twisted justice, justicia errónea, the children, night angel, blood money, mirror, mirror, haunting fear, overexposed, evil spirits, la vita leggendaria di ernest hemingway, los estudiantes se divierten ii, out of the dark, homer & eddie, la próxima víctima, the invisible kid, malveillance éternelle, it's alive iii: island of the alive, dixie lanes, flight of the spruce goose.

Invaders from Mars Stream

Venganza salvaje, eternal evil, savage dawn.

Murder, She Wrote Stream

Miami Vice Stream

Full circle again, bad manners, martin's day, le crépuscule sauvage, can she bake a cherry pie.

Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean Stream

Seperate ways, the grass is singing, chanel solitaire, te llevamos en el corazón jimmy dean, where the ladies go, confessions of a lady cop, separate ways, the last word, killer fish, les femmes de trente ans, america 2night, in praise of older women, because he's my friend.

Capricorn One Stream

The strange possession of mrs. oliver, le grand coup.

Family Plot Stream

Burnt offerings, crime and passion.

Saturday Night Live Stream

The Day of the Locust Stream

Nashville Stream

Trilogy of Terror Stream

An ace up my sleeve.

The Great Gatsby Stream

Airport 1975 Stream

Law and disorder.

Police Story

Little laura and big john, portnoy's complaint, narcotráfico en nueva york, drive, he said, born to win.

Five Easy Pieces Stream

Hard contract.

Easy Rider Stream

Mannix Stream

The Carol Burnett Show Stream

Judd for the defense, the second hundred years, you're a big boy now.

The Big Valley

The prime time.

Karen Black at arrivals for AFI FEST 2012 Opening Night Premiere of HITCHCOCK, Grauman''s Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles, CA November 1, 2012. Photo By: Dee Cercone/Everett Collection

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Karen Black

Highest Rated: 93% Family Plot (1976)

Lowest Rated: Not Available

Birthday: Jul 1, 1939

Birthplace: Park Ridge, Illinois, USA

Highest rated movies

Filmography.

Karen Black

American actress, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter (1939–2013) / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

Can you list the top facts and stats about Karen Black?

Summarize this article for a 10 year old

Karen Blanche Black (née Ziegler ; July 1, 1939 – August 8, 2013) was an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter. She rose to prominence for her work in various studio and independent films in the 1970s, frequently portraying eccentric and offbeat characters, and established herself as a figure of New Hollywood . Her career spanned over 50 years and includes nearly 200 credits in both independent and mainstream films. Black received numerous accolades throughout her career, including two Golden Globe Awards , as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress .

A native of suburban Chicago, Black studied theater at Northwestern University before dropping out and relocating to New York City. She performed on Broadway in 1965 before making her major film debut in Francis Ford Coppola 's You're a Big Boy Now (1966). Black relocated to California and was cast as an LSD -tripping prostitute in Dennis Hopper 's road film Easy Rider (1969). That led to a co-starring role in the drama Five Easy Pieces (1970), in which she played a hopeless waitress, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress . Black made her first major commercial picture with the disaster film Airport 1975 (1974), and her subsequent appearance as Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby (1974) won her a second Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress.

Black played a glamorous country singer in Robert Altman 's ensemble musical drama Nashville (1975), also writing and performing two songs for the soundtrack, for which she received a nomination for a Grammy Award . Her portrayal of an aspiring actress in John Schlesinger 's drama The Day of the Locust (also 1975) earned her a third Golden Globe nomination, this time for Best Actress . Black subsequently took on four roles in Dan Curtis ' anthology horror film Trilogy of Terror (1975), followed by Curtis' supernatural horror feature, Burnt Offerings (1976). The same year, she played a kidnapping accomplice in Alfred Hitchcock 's final film, Family Plot .

In 1982, Black played a transsexual in the Robert Altman-directed Broadway debut of Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean , a role she also reprised in Altman's subsequent film adaptation . She next starred in the comedy Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1983), followed by Tobe Hooper 's remake of Invaders from Mars (1986). For much of the 1990s and 2000s, Black starred in a variety of arthouse , independent, and horror films, as well as writing her own screenplays. She had a leading role as a villainous mother in Rob Zombie 's House of 1000 Corpses (2003), which cemented her status as a cult horror icon. Black continued to star in low-profile films throughout the early 2010s, as well as working as a playwright before her death from ampullary cancer in 2013.

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Karen Black, Versatile Character Actress, Dies at 74

By Bruce Weber

Aug. 8, 2013

Karen Black, an actress whose roles in several signature films of the late 1960s and ’70s included a prostitute who shared an LSD trip with the bikers played by Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider” and a waitress unhappily devoted to the alienated musician played by Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 74.

The cause was complications of cancer, her husband, Stephen Eckelberry, said. Ms. Black’s battle with ampullary cancer, a rare form similar to pancreatic cancer, became public in March when she and Mr. Eckelberry sought contributions on a fund-raising Web site to pay for an experimental treatment.

Ms. Black began her career as a stage ingénue but was never really the ingénue on the screen. A rangy, imperfect beauty — her eyes were set ever so slightly off-kilter — she spent the better part of a decade as one of the movies’ most vivid character actresses. At a time when the women’s movement was surging, she rarely played the self-liberating woman — as did, say, Ellen Burstyn or Jill Clayburgh — but she was often a brassy, attention-grabbing presence in films whose main characters were men.

In “Drive, He Said” (1971), Mr. Nicholson’s directorial debut, she played a faculty wife in an affair with a college athlete (William Tepper). In “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1972), based on Philip Roth’s dark comedy about the libidinous life a young Jewish lawyer (Richard Benjamin), she played his sexually voracious gentile girlfriend, known as the Monkey. In “The Great Gatsby” (1974), the generally dismissed version of Fitzgerald’s novel that starred Robert Redford, she was Myrtle Wilson, the crass, pathetic and doomed paramour of Tom Buchanan (Bruce Dern).

In “Nashville” (1975), Robert Altman’s witty riff on celebrity, politics and country music, she played Connie White, a veteran singer with a cynical competitive edge, a role for which she wrote and performed her own songs. And in “The Day of the Locust” (1975), John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Nathanael West’s Hollywood-as-hell novel, she was a central character, Faye Greener, a tough, slatternly, aspiring star.

“Black brings to all her roles a freewheeling combination of raunch and winsomeness,” Time magazine wrote about her in 1975. “Sometimes she is kittenish. At other times she has an overripe quality that makes her look like the kind of woman who gets her name tattooed on sailors.”

Her other credits in that period included the disaster film “Airport 1975” (1974), in which she was a stewardess who took over the controls of a disabled plane; “Family Plot” (1976), Alfred Hitchcock’s final film, a wickedly comic murder mystery, in which she played a kidnapper; and, somewhat anomalously, “Rhinoceros” (1974), the screen adaptation of Ionesco’s absurdist play.

Ms. Black was nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actress for her performance in “Five Easy Pieces” as a tenderhearted woman who was out of her intellectual league with her boyfriend, a gifted but angry and restless pianist, and his highbrow family.

That film was released in 1970, just a year after her brief but provocative turn in “Easy Rider” as a companionable hooker who swings between agony and ecstasy after she’s fed a tab of acid by Mr. Fonda in a New Orleans cemetery during Mardi Gras. Together, the films made her something of an “it” girl, a favorite of critics and reporters determined to identify the character of an elusive free spirit.

“She could be a Mount Holyoke senior intent on saving the whooping crane,” Tom Burke wrote in The New York Times in 1970, describing his first impression of her at her home in Hollywood. “What she really is, of course, is a splendid actress who literally turned herself into the tough, acid-tripping New Orleans whore of ‘Easy Rider,’ and then became Rayette Dipesto, the loving, mediocre and totally unforgettable waitress of ‘Five Easy Pieces,’ and if she is not those characters, not super-hip, neither is she just what she appears to be, waiting on this sunny terrace like a ripening apple. Oh, she is warm, accessible; she is also shrewd, worldly, changeable, a subtle comic, and something of a freak, a beautiful freak.”

Karen Blanche Ziegler was born in Park Ridge, Ill., on July 1, 1939, to Norman Ziegler and the former Elsie Reif, the author of a few novels.

She studied drama for two years at Northwestern University before decamping for New York City, where she appeared in a pair of Off Broadway revues — she composed the music for one of them — and took classes with Lee Strasberg, though the two did not get along.

She was hired for the role of Philia, the virgin courtesan (and the ingénue lead), in the Stephen Sondheim musical “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” but was replaced (by Preshy Marker) during a pre-Broadway tryout. She did land on Broadway in a 1965 thriller, “The Playroom,” starring as a youthful kidnapper, and in 1967 she appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s early film “You’re a Big Boy Now.”

By the time the 1970s turned to the ’80s, her career had taken a sideways turn. She never stopped working — her list of credits, largely in independent films, is extensive — but her roles in ambitious, groundbreaking films were largely behind her.

Her best-known later title was “Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” about the reunion of a James Dean fan club in a small Texas town 20 years after his death. Directed by Mr. Altman, it was perhaps his most grievous misfire; he had also directed the stage play, by Ed Graczyk, on Broadway, and both were roundly panned. The film and the play starred Sandy Dennis, Cher and Ms. Black, who played a transsexual.

Otherwise, after starring in a 1975 television movie, “Trilogy of Terror,” in which she played the lead role in three different tales of creepiness, she seemed to specialize in horror movies and thrillers, appearing in films like the 1986 remake of “Invaders From Mars” and Rob Zombie’s “House of 1,000 Corpses.” On television, she made guest appearances on series including “In the Heat of the Night,” “Profiler,” “Party of Five” and “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

Ms. Black was married and divorced three times before marrying Mr. Eckelberry in 1987. In addition to him, survivors include a son, Hunter Carson; two daughters, Celine Eckelberry and Diane Koehnemann Bay; a sister, Gail Dugan; a brother, Peter Ziegler; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Over the years Ms. Black became known for candid, if sometimes loopy, responses to interviewers’ questions.

“Rafelson thought I might be too complex for Rayette, but I told him I’m essentially simple, that really everybody is essentially simple, that we are all just beings who, uh, be ,” Ms. Black said in 1970, referring to Bob Rafelson, the director of “Five Easy Pieces,” and her character.

“Certainly Rayette can just be,” she said. “I dig her, she’s not dumb, she’s just not into thinking. I didn’t have to know anybody like her to play her. I mean, I’m like her, in ways. Rayette enjoys things as she sees them, she doesn’t have to add significances. She can just love the dog, love the cat. See? There are many things she does not know, but that’s cool; she doesn’t intrude on anybody else’s trip. And she’s going to survive. Do you understand me?”

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‘She was just frickin’ brilliant, you know?’ ... Karen Black in Nashville.

‘Odd, free and uninhibited’: Karen Black, Hollywood’s great singer-actor

She worked with Jack Nicholson, Robert Altman and more – and had a sideline in spectral, beautiful songwriting. As her lost songs are released, those close to Karen Black remember her

“I first met Karen Black in 1970 in New Mexico, on a film called The Gunfight, with Johnny Cash and Kirk Douglas,” says actor Keith Carradine , 71, calling from his Dodge Charger on a warm California afternoon. “I was 20, not old enough to drink, too young to vote, a young man with typical interests and I was stunned. Here was this beautiful, beautiful woman. I was intimidated. I was shy. I shut up and I paid attention.”

She would soon be directed by Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Nicholson, John Schlesinger and more, and earn three Golden Globe nominations, but at 30 years old, with a decade of theatre and TV roles behind her, Black was only just establishing a name for herself in New Hollywood cinema in 1970. The Illinois-born actor had helped Francis Ford Coppola with the making of his first film, You’re a Big Boy Now; and played the flame-haired hooker in Easy Rider , tripping on acid in a New Orleans cemetery with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Toni Basil. Most importantly, she had just starred opposite Nicholson as singing waitress Rayette in Bob Rafelson’s meandering 1970 picaresque Five Easy Pieces – a role that would earn her first Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.

With Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces.

“That must have been the film Robert Altman saw that convinced him to cast Karen in Nashville ,” says Carradine of Altman’s 1975 music industry satire in which the pair both star as country singers. “She was just frickin’ brilliant, you know? She’s acting, improvising and when she sings, she’s doing it on a level that is legitimate , and would have been acceptable at the Grand Ole Opry. First time I heard her sing I said, ‘Oh yeah. She’s got it.’ I mean, I got a record deal with Asylum Records after Nashville but I’m only hearing now, from you, that Karen went down the same path.”

I’d been telling Carradine about Dreaming of You , a collection of song demos that Black recorded with producers Elliot Mazer and Bones Howe in 1971 and 1976, now unearthed by her husband Stephen Eckelberry and California singer-songwriter Cass McCombs .

“I’d become aware of Karen Black in high school,” explains McCombs, 43. “I worked at a video store and I was obsessed with her movies. Then I met her through some film-maker friends in 2009 and asked her to sing on one of my songs, Dreams-Come-True-Girl. ”

The pair stayed in touch and started collaborating on an album. “When she was singing she was really self-deprecating but in a charming way,” says McCombs. “She created this casual space where you could just let go of all your egos and assumptions. It was fun. The vision was to make a complete studio album. She told me that she’d been trying since the early 70s.”

“She’d done some demos with Elliot Mazer in Nashville in 1971,” explains Eckelberry, “and the next thing you know she’s filming in New York opposite Richard Benjamin in Portnoy’s Complaint, she can’t turn that down. She’d do the [recording] sessions then forget about them. I mean, she loved singing but she was an actress first.”

But if the acting came naturally, the networking did not. “She’d call up people in the industry just to say hi,” says Eckelberry, “Which is weird in Hollywood, where everybody wants something. It worked against her in some ways, because she’d just follow her interests. I remember the after-party for [Jack Nicholson’s 1990 Chinatown sequel] The Two Jakes. A chance to network, right? Karen literally spent the night having an animated conversation with the doorman. She wasn’t built for business.”

As a result, the 90s and 00s saw Black working primarily in little-seen independent projects, and low-budget thrillers and horror movies such as Steve Balderson’s Firecracker (2005, starring opposite Faith No More singer Mike Patton) and Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses (2003).

“She was never generic,” says Rob Zombie. “There was always something odd, free and uninhibited about her. When I cast her as Mother Firefly in House of 1,000 Corpses, she was someone outside the normal thought process. She was kooky, eccentric; you’d be talking to her off camera and thinking, what the fuck is she talking about? And then boom, action! And she would nail her lines perfectly every time. She’s just terrifying in that film: overly friendly and completely insane at the same time; totally inviting and totally demented.”

Zombie and his wife, the actor Sheri Moon Zombie, both stayed friends with Black after the film finished. “We’d go for dinner or go see a new movie she’d made,” he says. “I mean, the industry had changed a lot from the 70s and 80s and you saw that. She was from a time when people cast Dustin Hoffman or Michael J Pollard as leading men. Not Vin Diesel. But if Karen wasn’t getting the same kinds of roles it wasn’t for lack of talent.”

“What never went away was that she loved being on camera,” says Eckelberry. “I filmed her for the last three years of her life as much as I could. I filmed her while she was dying of cancer. Somebody asked me, ‘Isn’t that kind of cruel?’ I said no, because to Karen when you’re making a movie things aren’t so bad.”

When Black died in 2013, McCombs dedicated his album Big Wheel and Others to her and set about trying to put together a posthumous collection of songs.

“The original plan had been for [late American record producer] Hal Willner to work with Cass,” says Eckelberry, “and bring together all the songs Karen had sung in movies throughout the years, but nothing came of that. Then I’m moving house in 2015 and I’m confronted by boxes in the garage. Karen was a pack-rat and she boxed up everything, and there were boxes and boxes of tapes full of songs.”

“The tapes were completely mouldy and degenerated,” says McCombs. “Not everything was salvageable.” Luckily, the songs from her two 70s album sessions were saved. “My original idea was to adopt the Beatles’ Free As a Bird approach,” explains McCombs, “you know, playing over the top of these old songs. But listening back, living with them, meditating on them, I grew to love them the way they were, just so intimate and real. I couldn’t improve on them.”

If you’ve seen Karen Black in any of those early-70s films such as Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Born to Win or Cisco Pike, you’ll have heard her songs, self-penned for each film and delivered in a hypnotic, beguiling voice that moves with uncanny ease from warm and intimate Dolly Parton soprano to a haunting falsetto.

“Karen sang all the time,” explains her friend, the choreographer Toni Basil, who first met Black when the pair were filming Easy Rider in New Orleans in early 1968. “So directors would hear her on set and suddenly they’d want to add a scene to include her singing. I assumed she was a professional singer. I didn’t feel as though it was something that she was hesitant about. She approached songs from an actor’s point of view. She’d perform each song as a character. She’d inhabit these songs.”

Inhabit is a good word. Whether on her self-penned tracks or her startling acoustic cover of the Moody Blues’ Question, there is an eerie intimacy to the songs on Dreaming of You. While her movie voice could be gentle, inviting, here it can also suggest something a little more unsettling, an attenuated spirit cry with just a little dash of folk horror at the edges. A good comparison might be Broken English-era Marianne Faithfull, Appalachian folk singer Hedy West, or the early-70s home recordings of German actress Sibylle Baier; spellbound female voices possessed of an uncanny emotional honesty.

“To me, those songs just sound like Karen,” says Eckelberry. “She was like that in real life. She couldn’t help but mean everything. I think Cass saw that in her. He just loved her, and I think that’s what made him want to persevere with this project, and for that I’m so grateful.”

When I put the same question to McCombs he initially says he just wants people to watch more Karen Black movies. “You know,” he avers, “have a Karen Black film festival, check out Five Easy Pieces, and the songs. It can only enlighten us, give a little bit more insight as to who she was.”

Who was she, I ask. “A shapeshifter,” says McCombs. “I mean, there were a lot of different emotions going on. But on a basic level, she was always sensitive to what she was doing within the musical space. She’s was attentive. That’s rare. Even professional musicians don’t always have that quality.”

As for where next, both Combs and Eckelberry say that they haven’t ruled out a second volume, depending on what tapes are unearthed next. “It’s a rights thing,” says Eckelberry. “It’s complicated. We’re still trying to license all the songs she recorded for various movies. Also, we only allowed one cover on the album, which was Question by the Moody Blues, but you need to hear her cover of Paul McCartney’s Junk. Wow, that’s so good.

“But who knows. There was also an empty box we found that just said, ‘Karen Black – Randy Newman’. Maybe Randy has those tapes. Do you know Randy Newman? Could you maybe ask him if he remembers recording with Karen Black?”

Pop and rock
Cass McCombs
Robert Altman
Jack Nicholson
Drama films

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Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (episode)

View history
1.2 Act One
1.3 Act Two
1.4 Act Three
1.5 Act Four
2 Log entries
3 Memorable quotes
4.1 Reception
4.2 Production timeline
4.3 Syndication cuts
4.4 Video and DVD releases
5.1 Starring
5.2 Also starring
5.3 Guest stars
5.4 Uncredited co-stars
5.5.1 Retconned references
5.6 External links

Summary [ ]

On an urgent decontamination mission to the planet Ariannus , the USS Enterprise encounters a Federation shuttlecraft reported as stolen from Starbase 4 . The vessel's life support systems are failing and the pilot may be suffocating in the lack of atmosphere . Captain Kirk orders the shuttlecraft to be brought aboard.

When the pilot emerges and subsequently collapses in front of Kirk and Spock , he displays a unique appearance: black on one side of his face and white on the other.

Act One [ ]

In sickbay , Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy surmise the alien's skin coloration to be a rare mutation of some kind. McCoy revives the pilot, who identifies himself as Lokai from the planet Cheron . Although grateful for the Enterprise 's rescue, he is combative when Kirk questions him about the theft of the shuttlecraft. Kirk plans to return him to Starbase 4 to face serious theft charges once the important Arrianus mission is completed.

En route however, Chekov reports that sensors have detected a highly sophisticated (and invisible ) vessel on an apparent collision course with the Enterprise . At the last moment before impact, the ship appears to disintegrate, but deposits its pilot on the bridge – similar in appearance to Lokai but with opposite skin-tone coloration. " Explain, Spock, " Kirk asks. " One of a kind? "

Act Two [ ]

The alien identifies himself as Commissioner Bele , the "Chief Officer Of The Commission on Political Traitors ," from Cheron, and informs Kirk that he has come to apprehend Lokai.

When Bele is brought to sickbay to see Lokai, the crew learns that Bele has been pursuing Lokai for a very long time: 50,000 Earth years as it turns out. Bele charges that Lokai led a revolt against the ruling order, but Lokai counters that Bele's people enslaved his on Cheron and continues to oppress them. Bele demands that Kirk surrender Lokai, while Lokai requests political asylum with the Federation . Kirk ends the bickering, giving Bele quarters and states his intention to fulfill his mission, then hand both of the aliens to Starbase 4 to have the matter settled. Bele is clearly not satisfied, but leaves sickbay. Kirk advises that Lokai get some rest, especially his vocal cords , as he will get a chance to practice his oratory when they arrive at Starbase 4.

Suddenly, the Enterprise is commandeered by an unknown source. Soon, Bele reveals on the bridge that he is controlling it, by using his mental powers to direct the ship to Cheron. When Bele proves impervious to phasers, Kirk, Spock, and Scott, are forced to activate the three-part self-destruct sequence in order to force Bele to relinquish control of the ship. The timer starts counting down from thirty seconds, and Kirk points out that once the countdown passes five seconds, the self-destruct sequence cannot be countermanded in any way.

Act Three [ ]

With only six seconds left before the Enterprise destroys itself, Bele reluctantly releases control of the starship, and Kirk issues the abort command to the self destruct at the last possible moment. With force having ceased to be an option, both Bele and Lokai attempt instead to enlist the sympathies of the crew while en route to Ariannus; Bele tries to win over Kirk and Spock, and Lokai appeals to the junior crew. Kirk submits a report to Starfleet Command for a resolution.

Starfleet's answer to Bele's request is received while he speaks with Kirk and Spock – and it is to deny that request. Since Cheron has no diplomatic treaties with the Federation, Starfleet cannot extradite Lokai without due process. Uhura also adds that the decision from Starfleet notes that they are confident that Bele will be allowed to return to Cheron with Lokai after the hearing is over. Bele fumes that Lokai has again deceived outsiders about his people's obvious inferiority to Bele's people. He explains that his people are black on their right sides, while Lokai's people are white on their right sides. Kirk and Spock try to persuade him that this difference is not significant, but he dismisses the suggestion.

The Enterprise arrives at Ariannus and begins the decontamination procedures. Once the decontamination mission to Ariannus is complete, Kirk orders to head to Starbase 4; however, Bele sabotages the self-destruct mechanism as well as directional control, rendering both of them inoperable, regains control of the ship, and forces it back onto course for Cheron.

Act Four [ ]

Lokai begs for the Enterprise crew to intervene, and Bele berates him, for he believes he has finally caught him. They fight, but Kirk tries to defuse the situation for fear of destroying the ship, saying the bridge will be their "last battlefield." Bele returns control, since their fighting will destroy themselves with the ship.

The crew realizes that the Enterprise is near Cheron; but its sensors – much to Bele's and Lokai's shared horror and rage – reveal massive destruction of all Cheron's major cities and huge piles of unburied corpses – the entire population of Cheron has apparently mutually annihilated itself in a civil war . Consumed with mutual insane hatred and blaming each other for the resulting holocaust, Bele and Lokai fight on the bridge, despite Kirk's offer for them to live with the Federation. Kirk implores them to give up their mutual hatred of one another, since that destroyed their planet and their people. Lokai derides Kirk, accusing him of being an "idealistic dreamer," and flees the bridge, with Bele in pursuit. The pair then chase each other through the ship's corridors , each eventually finding their way to the transporter room and returning to the planet's surface to continue their fight…the last two sapient life forms on a dead planet. In Lokai's case, no Cheron native remains to try the accused criminal; his judges are all dead. In Bele's case, he has no fellow Commissioners remaining to report to; his superiors are also all dead.

Kirk sadly notes that, in the end, all they have left is their hatred of each other, answering in the negative to Uhura's question about whether Kirk believes the two last natives of Cheron's hate for each other was all they had ever had. Kirk decides to leave them there and orders that Sulu set course for Starbase 4.

Log entries [ ]

Captain's log, USS Enterprise (NCC-1701), 2268

Memorable quotes [ ]

" We must therefore conclude that this alien is that often unaccountable rarity. A mutation, one of a kind. "

" When in doubt, the book prevails, Mr. Spock. "

" I'm grateful for your rescue. " " Don't mention it. We're pleased to have caught you. "

" You monotone Humans are all alike. First you condemn and then attack! "

" I'm very tired. " " And very evasive. Or, at least, not… fully responsive. "

" Explain, Spock. One of a kind? "

" You can no more destroy this ship than I can change color. "

" Begin thirty second countdown. Code zero-zero-zero-destruct-zero. "

" 30 seconds… 29… 28… 27… 25 seconds… 20 seconds… 15 seconds… 10… 9… 8…7…6 – " " I AGREE!!! "

" Mr. Spock, is this ship headed for Ariannus? " " Negative, Captain. The Enterprise is now moving in a circular course. " " And at warp 10, we're going nowhere mighty fast. "

" Disgusting is what I call them. "

" There was persecution on Earth once. I remember reading about it in my history class. " " Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century. There's no such primitive thinking today. "

" It is obvious to the most simple-minded that Lokai is of an inferior breed. " " The obvious visual evidence, Commissioner, is that he is of the same breed as yourself. " " Are you blind, Commander Spock? Well, look at me! Look at me! " " You're black on one side and white on the other. " " I am black on the right side. " " I fail to see the significant difference. " " Lokai is white on the right side. All of his people are white on the right side. "

" Change is the essential process of all existence. "

" I once heard that on some of your planets, people believe they are descended from apes. " " The actual theory is that all lifeforms evolved from the lower levels to the more advanced stages. "

" Yes, he will delay, evade, and escape again. And in the process put thousands of innocent beings at each others throats, getting them to kill and maim, for a cause which they have no stake in. But, which he will force them to violently espouse by twisting their minds with his lies, his loathsome accusations, and his foul threats. "

" What do you do? Carry justice on your tongues? You will beg for it, but you won't fight or die for it! " " After so many years of leading the fight, you seem very much alive. " " I doubt that the same can be said for many of his followers. "

" You're finished, Lokai! Oh, we've got your kind penned in on Cheron into little districts, and it's not going to change! You've combed the galaxy, and come up with nothing but monocolored trash, do-gooders, and bleeding hearts. You're DEAD, you half-white! " " You useless pieces of bland flesh… I'll take you with me, you half-black! "

" My people… all dead? " " Yes, Commissioner. All of them. " " No one alive? " "None at all, sir. "

" You band of murderers did this… " " You pyromaniacs! "

" Listen to me. You both must end up dead if you don't stop hating. " " You're an idealistic dreamer. "Bele. The chase is finished. " " He must not escape me! " " Where can he go? "

" Shall I alert security, sir? " " No, Lieutenant. Where can they run? "

" It doesn't make any sense. " " To expect sense from two mentalities of such extreme viewpoints, is not logical. " " But their planet's dead. Does it matter now which one of them was right? " " Not to Lokai and Bele. All that matters to them is their hate. " " Do you suppose that's all they ever had, sir? " " No… but that's all they have left. "

Background information [ ]

The original story concept did not depict the aliens with bi-colored skin. Fred Freiberger recalled, " Gene [Coon] originally had a devil with a tail chasing an angel. " ( Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , p. 74) Episode director Jud Taylor came up with the idea of bi-colored skin shortly before the episode began filming. His original suggestion was that they be half-black/half-white, one color from the waist up and the other from the waist down, but each wearing reversed color schemes. The central idea stuck, but the colors were finally separated along the vertical axis, rather than along the horizontal. ( Inside Star Trek: The Real Story , pp. 399-400)
This was the last episode Robert H. Justman worked on as co-producer. He resigned from the show's production team because of the program's declining quality and NBC 's harsh treatment of it. He was also disappointed that instead of making him the new producer, Gene Roddenberry hired Freiberger instead. Justman felt burned out and eager to get out of the show. ( Inside Star Trek: The Real Story , These Are the Voyages: TOS Season Three ) He and Robert Sabaroff subsequently became joint producers, for NBC, of Then Came Bronson , which starred Michael Parks as James Bronson; the show lasted one season.
Bele and Lokai both have brown hair on their heads, but their eyebrows are black and white to match their faces.
This episode represents the last on-screen appearance of the hangar deck in the original series. The shuttlecraft itself makes one last appearance on the planet set of " The Way to Eden ".
Effects footage from " The Galileo Seven " was re-used for all of the original episode's shuttlecraft shots. As a result, despite dialogue stating that the shuttlecraft had been stolen from Starbase 4 , the shuttlecraft tractor-beamed into the hangar deck was labeled Galileo NCC-1701/7. In the remastered version of the episode, the stolen shuttlecraft's front and sides markings were corrected to show Starbase 4 as its post. This CGI version of the shuttlecraft was labeled Da Vinci , after the noted Renaissance artist/scientist Leonardo da Vinci , and it had SB4-0314/2 as its new registry number.
Gene L. Coon 's association with the series also ended with the production of this episode, as Robert Justman's did. As with all of his contributions to the third season, for which he was unable to use his real name due to contractual obligations elsewhere, the story was credited to one of his pen names, Lee Cronin .
The reference book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (pp. 197 & 399) attests that this episode was originally a first season story outline from August 1966 , titled " Portrait in Black and White ". The book additionally states that, by 1968 , NBC and Paramount were keen on using every available story idea, so Coon's outline was "taken out of the trash bin" and Oliver Crawford based a teleplay on it. However, documentation from the making of TOS reveals that these two episodes actually were, from a production standpoint, significantly different. A first draft script of "Portrait in Black and White", never mentioned in the book, was issued on 28 September 1966 , and was entirely different from the storyline of "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield". (Gene Roddenberry Collection at UCLA, Box 19, Folder 10.) They had different story numbers too – "Portrait in Black and White" was story #28, and "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" was #93. Also, in the writers' report dated 29 March 1968 , the latter was listed as a new story assignment in progress, whereas the former had been listed among TOS' few shelved teleplays in the writers's report dated 1 March 1968. (Gene Roddenberry Collection at UCLA, Box 35, Folder 15)
This episode was filmed in early October 1968 .
This episode features a close-up of the Enterprise model. Zoom shots from below and above the saucer section are used, representing some of the rare 'beauty shots' of the ship filmed during the series. (Episodes " Operation -- Annihilate! " and " Metamorphosis " have unique shots of the Enterprise as well). During the opening credits in the first scene, for example, the camera glides underneath the saucer to an extreme closeup of the saucer's phaser section and light. " That Which Survives " uses the same shot briefly when the Enterprise is shaking at warp.
The self-destruct sequence from this episode is repeated exactly in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock ; however, in Search for Spock , it is Scott who gives the second command in place of Spock , and Chekov who gives the third command instead of Scott. ( The Star Trek Compendium 4th ed., p. 123) In this episode, the self-destruct is set for a 30-second countdown, whereas the film has a 60-second countdown.
In this episode, the automatic double doors to the room where Lokai is talking to the junior crew members do not function as expected, but are held partially open, allowing Mr. Spock to eavesdrop from the corridor.
The final chase scene depicting Lokai and Bele running through the corridors of the Enterprise is mixed with stock footage of burning cities filmed after World War II aerial bombing raids, as each visualizes the destruction of their shared home planet. Fred Freiberger stated, " We ran a little short on that show which is why it ended with a chase that went on forever. I thought it was a hell of a creative solution. " ( Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , p. 74)
The remastered version shows Cheron cities still burning from space.
Bele 's totally "invisible" ship perhaps is the most noticeable effect of the biggest budget cut in the original series. ( The Star Trek Compendium , 4th ed., p. 123)
The close-up of Chekov's hand operating the decontamination of Ariannus is a recycled shot of Kirk's hand from " The Doomsday Machine ". (It was also used as Spock's hand in both " Obsession " and " The Immunity Syndrome ".)
The episode's director, Jud Taylor, included a unique effect in this episode. During the "red alerts," the camera zoomed in and out quickly on the blinking red alert signal, and moreover, it was tilted at an angle. According to several sources, among them The Star Trek Compendium , this effect allegedly paid homage to Frank Gorshin's role as the Riddler in Batman , even though Taylor never directed any episodes of Batman .
In the third season blooper reel, several sequences from this episode are featured. In one, Frank Gorshin, who was also a talented impressionist, does a James Cagney imitation while on the transporter pad. In another, he and Lou Antonio collide forcefully as they are running through the corridors. ( The Star Trek Compendium , 4th ed., p. 123) In yet another, Gorshin initially pronounces his character's name "Belly," before correcting himself and pronouncing it as it was pronounced in the finished episode. Finally, footage of nude swimmers in a pool was inserted at the point where Kirk asks, " Could it be a Romulan ship , using their cloaking device ? " ( citation needed • edit )
Both Bele and Lokai wear gloves throughout the entire episode, which freed Fred Phillips of the burden of having to make up the hands of actors Frank Gorshin and Lou Antonio .
In some editions of Allan Asherman 's The Star Trek Compendium , this episode is incorrectly titled "Let This Be Your Last Battlefield."
In the 1970s, the Mego toy company created a "Cheron" action figure doll, but unlike both Bele and Lokai's makeup and costuming, the doll had no hair, and its costume was entirely half-black and half-white, right down to the boots.
The Sci-Fi Channel , the DVD, and the remastered version added some new scenes that were not in the original and VHS version. After Kirk makes his first log entry at the beginning of this episode, he asks Chekov about estimated time to Ariannus, tells Uhura to contact them to tell them that decontamination is to begin on arrival, and asks Scott if it will it present any danger. Then after the shuttle is brought to the hangar deck, there is a shot of the shuttlecraft docking with the Enterprise . Sulu then calls Kirk in the turbolift to inform him that hangar doors are closed. Finally, there is a shot of Kirk and Spock in the hallway before they meet with the guards.
Several shots of the main viewer from the rear of the bridge are recycled shots that show Hadley in Chekov's position, but we hear Chekov's voice and see him in the closeup.
The Cherons' names approximate the names of fire deities: Logi (not to be confused with Loki) in Norse myth and Pele in Hawaiian myth.

Reception [ ]

Harlan Ellison thought this episode a terrible one with a weak message: " Roddenberry may have been a big-deal progressive, but I never heard of him giving a dime to the civil rights movement. Now I don't know what his personal attitude was, 'cause he was always talking about the perfectibility of mankind – which is bullshit – and talking about equality, but it was a very awkward kind of liberalism, as evidenced by that stupid episode where people are painted half white and half black – the kind of heavy-handed, wannabe liberal thing that embarrasses anyone who has true feelings about racism ". ( Vibe , Feb 1997)
Producer Fred Freiberger stated that this was one of the episodes of which he was most proud. ( citation needed • edit )
Armin Shimerman commented, " Most of Star Trek , whether it’s our show or the other shows, was intended to be a metaphor for social evils. In Gene Roddenberry’s first show, every episode was addressing some social inequality, racism being one of them. "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" with Frank Gorshin was one of the most powerful episodes of that series. Two sets of races were living on one planet, and their faces were each divided between white and black. One had black on the right side of their face, the other had white on the right side. It made no sense that one race should dominate over another simply because the colors were reversed. I remember being enormously affected by that episode as a young man. " [1]

Production timeline [ ]

Story outline by Lee Cronin , titled "Down from Heaven", 11 March 1968
Revised story outline, 22 March 1968
First draft teleplay by Oliver Crawford , titled "Down from Heaven, Up from Above", 2 September 1968
Second draft teleplay, 23 September 1968
Final draft teleplay by Arthur Singer , titled "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", 2 October 1968 , 3 October 1968 , 4 October 1968 , 5 October 1968 , 7 October 1968 , 8 October 1968
Revised final draft script by Fred Freiberger , 10 October 1968
Additional page revisions by Freiberger, 11 October 1968
Day 1 – 4 October 1968 , Friday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Bridge
Day 2 – 7 October 1968 , Monday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Bridge
Day 3 – 8 October 1968 , Tuesday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Bridge , Sickbay
Day 4 – 9 October 1968 , Wednesday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Sickbay , Bridge
Day 5 – 10 October 1968 , Thursday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Engineering , Corridors , Transporter room , Bele's quarters
Day 6 – 11 October 1968 , Friday – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Bele's quarters , Turbolift , Bridge
Day 7 – 14 October 1968 , Monday (Half Day) – Desilu Stage 9 : Int. Recreation room (redress of Briefing room ), Bridge
Original airdate: 10 January 1969
Rerun airdate: 12 August 1969
First UK airdate (on BBC1 ): 27 January 1971
First UK airdate (on ITV ): 1 July 1984

Syndication cuts [ ]

During the syndication run of Star Trek , the following scenes were typically cut from broadcast:

Extra discussions about Bele's ship being invisible, followed by Kirk asking Chekov for magnification, to which Chekov replies that there is still no visual contact.
Extended pause and reaction shots to Bele announcing his name when he appears on the bridge.
A slightly longer exit of Bele, Kirk, and Spock exiting the bridge for the first time.
An extra line spoken by Kirk, where he says that the conflict between Lokai and Bele is settled "at least for the present".
An extended scene of McCoy examining Lokai in sickbay.
More dialogue between Scott and Kirk about the ship being off course, Scott switching to auxiliary power , then Kirk calling him again to see if the ship is back on course.
A more lengthy scene of Bele explaining that he has control of the ship, followed by reaction shots from the bridge crew.
As a prelude to entering the destruct sequence, Kirk asks the computer if it is ready to copy the destruct order and then orders the computer to standby to verify the destruct order.
The computer counting down from twenty five to twenty in the destruct sequence scene.
An establishing shot of the Enterprise approaching Ariannus.
Additional shots of the Enterprise orbiting Ariannus during the ship's "crop dusting" scene.

In an additional rare syndication cut, shown only on the Sci-Fi Channel , the destruct scene was heavily cut to show Kirk entering the codes and activating the sequence entirely by himself, without dialogue from Spock and Scott entering and confirming their own destruct codes.

Video and DVD releases [ ]

Original US Betamax release: 1988
UK VHS release (two-episode tapes, CIC Video ): Volume 36 , catalog number VHR 2432, 7 January 1991
US VHS release: 15 April 1994
UK re-release (three-episode tapes, CIC Video): Volume 3.5, 24 November 1997
Original US DVD release (single-disc): Volume 35, 23 October 2001
As part of the TOS Season 3 DVD collection
As part of the TOS-R Season 3 DVD collection

Links and references [ ]

Starring [ ].

William Shatner as Kirk

Also starring [ ]

Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock
DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy

Guest stars [ ]

Frank Gorshin as Bele
Lou Antonio as Lokai
James Doohan as Scott
Walter Koenig as Chekov
Nichelle Nichols as Uhura
George Takei as Sulu
Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel

References [ ]

50,000 years ago ; 20th century ; ability ; accusation ; alien ; " all hands "; anger ; animal ; answer ; ape ; apology ; apprehension ; Ariannus ; Ariannus Ministry of Health ; army ; authority ; bacteria ; battlefield ; benefactor ; billion ; black ; " bleeding heart "; blood ; bluff ; " Bones "; breed ; brig ; brother ; brown ; cargo ; case ; cattle ; chain ; Cheron ; Cheron cities ; Cheron native ; Cheron scout vessel ; chief engineering officer ; Chief Officer ; choice ; circular course ; Civil Rights Movement ; Class F shuttlecraft ; cloaking device ; Coalsack ; collision ; collision course ; color ; comb ; combat ; command frequency two ; commercial lane ; Commission on Political Traitors ( traitor ); commissioner ; conclusion ; Constitution -class decks ; contact ; cooperation ; coordinates ; corpse ; countdown ; course (aka heading ); courtesy ; creature ; crewman's lounge ; crime ; criminal ; cross-examination ; danger ; Da Vinci ; day ; deal ; death ; death warrant ; decontamination procedure ; deflector shield ; destination ; destruct sequence (aka self-destruct or destruct mechanism ); dignitary ; dignity ; directional control ; disciple ; discipline ; discussion ; district ; do-gooder ; due process ; Earth ; education ; enslaver ; equality ; estimated time of arrival ( ETA ); evasive action ; evidence ; evil ; evolution ; existence ; experience ; explanation ; extinction ; extradition ; fact ; family ; father ; fear ; Federation member ; flesh ; fool ; freedom ; frequency ; friend ; frustration ; genocide ; green ; grievance ; guest quarters ; guilt ; hailing frequency ; hangar deck ; hangar door ; hate ; hearing ; heart ; history ; history class ; home ; hospitality ; hour ; home ; hull breach ; Human ; humanoid ; husband ; idealistic dreamer ; image ; imagination ; individual right (aka right ); information ; instruction ; intergalactic treaty ; interrogation ; judge ; judgment ; just ; justice ; knowledge ; land ; lava ; " let her rip "; liar ; lie ; living creature ; logic ; love ; lower animal ; madman ; madness ; magnification ; maim ; "make one's case" ; malfunction ; maneuvering control ; master computer ; master race ; mercy ; memory bank ; Mendel, Gregor Johann ; Milky Way Galaxy ; million ; mind ; minute ; mission ; mission of mercy ; motive power ; murder ; mutation ; name ; natural disaster ; nostril ; nucleotide ; opportunity ; oppressor ; oratory ; orbit ; order ; organ ; oxygen ; peace ; permission ; persecution ; phaser ; planet ; plea ; pleasure ; " point of view "; political asylum ; potion ; pressure door ; prison ; problem ; product ; prognosis ; property ; punishment ; quality ; question ; race ; racism ; readout ; recreation room ; recuperative powers ; red alert ; regret ; representative ; rescue ; research ; result ; revolutionary ; Romulans ; sabotage ; sanctuary ; sapient lifeform ; savage ; scanning range ; science officer ; scope ; scout vessel ; security team ; self-discipline ; sensor ; sensor failure ; sentience ; shields ; skin ; skin pigmentation ; slave ; solution ; space ; space vehicle ; specimen ; speed ; spray tank ; spouse ; stakes ; Starbase 4 ; Starfleet Command ; Starfleet regulations ; stealth ; stimulant ; suffering ; suffocation ; suicide mission ; sun ; tear ; theft ; theory ; thief ; thing ; thinking ; thought ; thousand ; threat ; throat ; toast ; tongue ; " touch and go "; tractor beam ; traffic ; traffic system ; transfer point ; transporter mechanism ; transporter room ; trash ; treason ; treaty ; United Federation of Planets ; United Fleet of Planets ; universe ; utopia ; value ; vegetation ; viewing screen ; vindictive ; violence ; visual range ; vocal cords ; voice ; volcano ; Vulcan (planet) ; Vulcans ; week ; white ; will ; word ; year ; yellow

Retconned references [ ]

External links [ ].

"Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" at StarTrek.com
" Let That Be Your Last Battlefield " at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
" Let That Be Your Last Battlefield " at Wikipedia
" Let That Be Your Last Battlefield " at MissionLogPodcast.com , a Roddenberry Star Trek podcast
" Let That Be Your Last Battlefield " at the Internet Movie Database
2 ISS Enterprise (NCC-1701)

Anniston/Gadsden

5 things to know about Karen Black, from Oscar nomination to cult classic 'Trilogy of Terror' (with video)

Published: Aug. 13, 2013, 3:04 p.m.

In this Sept. 11, 1970 file photo, Jack Nicholson, right, and co-star Karen Black appear together at New York's Philharmonic Hall to attend the premiere of their new film "Five Easy Pieces." (AP File Photo)

Kelly Kazek | [email protected]

Following her death Thursday at age 74, bloggers have been buzzing with tributes to the quirky actress, who was as effortlessly effective as Rayette in “Five Easy Pieces,” for which she was nominated for an Oscar, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Family Plot.”

Black was particularly beloved by fans of cult horror films, including 1975’s “Trilogy of Terror,” in which she played four roles.

1. Her favorite role was as the transsexual, Joanne.

She told Huffington Post interviewer Xaque Gruber in 2011: "I'm so proud of my work in Robert Altman's 'Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.' It was a very difficult role, and it's almost a miracle that I accomplished what I did in that film."

The poster from 1975's "Trilogy of Terror" (Contributed by Wikipedia Commons)

To fans of cult films, she is best known for the four characters she played in "Trilogy of Terror."

More recently, she starred as Mother Firefly in Rob Zombie's "House of 1000 Corpses." She told Huffington Post interviewer Xaque Gruber : "That felt real in all of its insanity. As an actor, I have great fun diving into that."

3. She left a huge body of work .

Black's entry on Internet Movie Database (imdb) lists 194 film and TV appearances beginning in 1959 and including two independent films set for release this year. She also appeared in "The Great Gatsby" in 1974, for which she won a Golden Globe, "Airport 1975," "The Day of the Locust," and "Nashville."

Karen Black (AP File Photo)

In 2006, Black was featured in an ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The PETA ad, released at Halloween, showed Black reclining against a tombstone with the inscription “I Wouldn’t Be Caught Dead in Fur.”

5. She was a singer and songwriter.

Black wrote the songs "Memphis" and "Rolling Stone" which she performed in character as country singer Connie White in the movie 1975 film “Nashville.” She was one of the songwriters nominated for a Grammy award for “Album of Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television Series.”

Watch "Amelia" from "Trilogy of Terror" here.

Call al.com reporter Kelly Kazek at 256-701-0576 or find her on Facebook.

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‘Five Easy Pieces’ star Karen Black dead at 74

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Karen Black, the prolific actress who appeared in more than 100 movies and was featured in such counterculture favorites as “Easy Rider,” ’'Five Easy Pieces” and “Nashville,” has died.

Black’s husband, Stephen Eckelberry, says the actress died Wednesday from complications from cancer. She was 74.

Known for her full lips and thick, wavy hair that seemed to change color from film to film, Black often portrayed women who were quirky, troubled or threatened. Her breakthrough was as a prostitute who takes LSD with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in 1969’s “Easy Rider,” the hippie classic that helped get her the role of Rayette Dipesto, a waitress who dates — and is mistreated by — an upper-class dropout played by Jack Nicholson in 1970’s “Five Easy Pieces.”

Cited by The New York Times as a “pathetically appealing vulgarian,” Black’s performance won her an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award. She would recall that playing Rayette really was acting: The well-read, cerebral Black, raised in a comfortable Chicago suburb, had little in common with her relatively simple-minded character.

“If you look through the eyes of Rayette, it looks nice, really beautiful, light, not heavy, not serious. A very affectionate woman who would look upon things with love, and longing,” Black told Venice Magazine in 2007. “A completely uncritical person, and in that sense, a beautiful person. When (director) Bob Rafelson called me to his office to discuss the part he said, ‘Karen, I’m worried you can’t play this role because you’re too smart.’ I said ‘Bob, when you call “action,” I will stop thinking,’ because that’s how Rayette is.’”

In 1971, Black starred with Nicholson again in “Drive, He Said,” which Nicholson also directed. Over the next few years, she worked with such top actors and directors as Richard Benjamin (“Portnoy’s Complaint”), Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (“The Great Gatsby”) and Charlton Heston (“Airport 1975"). She was nominated for a Grammy Award after writing and performing songs for “Nashville,” in which she played a country singer in Robert Altman’s 1975 ensemble epic. Black also starred as a jewel thief in Alfred Hitchcock’s last movie, “Family Plot,” released in 1976.

“We used to read each other poems and limericks and tried to catch me on my vocabulary,” she later said of Hitchcock. “He once said, ‘You seem very perspicacious today, Miss Black.’ I said, ‘Oh, you mean “keenly perceptive?” 'Yes.’ So I got him this huge, gold-embossed dictionary that said ‘Diction-Harry,’ at the end of the shoot.”

The actress would claim that her career as an A-list actress was ruined by “The Day of the Locust,” a troubled 1975 production of the Nathanael West novel that brought her a Golden Globe nomination but left Black struggling to find quality roles.

By the end of the ‘70s, she was appearing in television and in low-budget productions. Black received strong reviews in 1982 as a transsexual in Altman’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.” But despite working constantly over the next 30 years, she was more a cult idol than a major Hollywood star. Her credits included guest appearances on such TV series as “Law & Order” and “Party of Five” and enough horror movies, notably “Trilogy of Terror,” that a punk band named itself “The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.”

Black was married four times. She is survived by Eckelberry, a son and a daughter.

AP Entertainment Writer Sandy Cohen contributed to this report.

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, karen black.

Find on IMDB

Find on Wikipedia

Letters from the Big Man (2011)

Roger ebert.

Sean's Colleague

Irene in Time (2009)

Firecracker (2005)

Eleanor/Sandra

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1984)

Burnt Offerings (1976)

Crime and passion (1976).

Family Plot (1976)

Day of the Locust (1975)

Nashville (1975)

Connie White

The Great Gatsby (1974)

Myrtle Wilson

The Outfit (1973)

Bett Harrow

Portnoy's Complaint (1972)

Born to Win (1972)

Cisco Pike (1972)

Book Excerpt: Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper by Scout Tafoya

An excerpt from the new book by our very own Scout Tafoya.

Charles Taylor on His New Book, "Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You"

An interview with author Charles Taylor about his new book.

"Wild Canaries": A Manhattan Murder Mystery

An analysis of Lawrence Michael Levine's "Wild Canaries" and its ties to classic rom-com capers.

Robert Altman’s Lost Classics Finally on Blu-ray

An appreciation on the release of four Robert Altman films on Blu-ray.

A free man: L.M. "Kit" Carson, 1941-2014

An appreciation of filmmaker, writer and actor L.M. "Kit" Carson, a singular talent.

"Dark Blood": Death and the Maiden

Twenty years ago, promising actor River Phoenix died at 23. His last, unfinished film was "reconstructed" and shown at festivals earlier this year. The making of that film was already difficult before his death.

Bernadette Lafont: The French New Wave's First Leading Lady Hardly Ever Played "Lady-like"

French New Wave star Bernadette Lafont passed away July 25th. Lisa Nesselson writes about this bold, amazing actress.

Karen Black, 1939-2013: a ravenous appetite for pretending

Karen Black, who died Aug. 7 at 74, was the “what the hell?” emblem of the American New Wave, its most extreme, improvisational player, its most unusual, unaccountable, unstable presence.

Thumbnails 8/7/2013

An Orson Welles film thought to be lost forever is discovered, Karen Black's husband writes movingly about her battle with cancer, a pink planet rocks scientists' theories of planet formation, our very own Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has been keeping busy reviewing for other sites (we're cool with that) and Mark Millar is becoming themost powerful person in comic books.

#119 June 13, 2012

Marie writes: Next door, across a long narrow drive and beyond the row of cedar hedges which run parallel to it, there resides an elementary school dating back to 1965, along with an assortment of newer playground equipment rendered in bright, solid primary colors...I'm sure you know the sort I mean...

Far Flungers

Before "airplane" there were the airport movies.

There's nothing quite like the movies if you want to learn what people's hopes and dreams were during the period in which they were made. Take for instance the recent "Up in the Air". In the present when air travel has turned into something to be endured, George Clooney's Ryan Bingham showed us how it can become an enticing way of life. The same subject was also portrayed extensively, under a very different light, some forty years as the "Airport" movies dealt with our fears of dying in new and horrible ways, while glamorizing our dreams of flying first-class, surrounded by a movie star in every seat. As the trailer for one of these features once put it: "on board, a collection of the rich and the beautiful!" They also marked the advent of a new genre (the Disaster Film) as well as the "Ark movie" which Ebert's Little Movie Glossary defines as "mixed bag of characters trapped in a colorful mode of transportation". How many films can claim to this kind of impact?

Hitchcock's Family Plot Photo Album

I've been enjoying reading Dave Kehr's book, When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, a selection of pieces he wrote between 1974 and 1986. One of them, his choice for best film of 1976, is a review of Alfred Hitchcock's 53rd and final feature, "Family Plot," which I hadn't seen since the 1970s. Boy, did I enjoy the re-visit. The structure (screenplay by Ernest Lehman ["North by Northwest"], based on a 1972 novel, The Rainbird Pattern, by Victor Canning) concerns two couples: a "spiritualist" and her taxi-driver boyfriend (Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern), amateur sleuths trying to track down the lost heir of a rich client; and a pair of slick jewel thieves (Karen Black and William Devane, who sounds -- and sometimes looks -- so much like Jack Nicholson it's scary!). Their plots intersect at a point involving a case of... not mistaken identity, but concealed identity.

Kehr wrote: "There are things in 'Family Plot' that we haven't seen in an American film in a long time; things like care, precision, and detail. 'Family Plot' is probably the most beautifully crafted, thematically dense film that we're going to see this year."

Also, there are some fun Hitchcockian puns/jokes (DK has a lovely account of the spilled white "blood" that becomes a clue). Here are a few of them, just for the enjoyment of it:

#34 October 27, 2010

Welcome to a special Halloween edition of the Newsletter! Marie writes: the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris is considered one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world, in addition to being the final resting place of many a famous name. From Édith Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt and Chopin to Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and Georges Méliès, the well-known sleep on the tree-lined avenues of the dead and which you can now explore in a virtual 360 degree tour...

ENTER Père-Lachaise

Faces in the crowd: Here's looking at you, Nashville

For some reason I have the notion that the guy with the camera, getting the low-angle shots of Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakley) against that American flag that stretches across the Parthenon from sea to shining sea, is the cinematographer Paul Lohmann. Is that right?

I didn't know it at the time, but 35 years ago the course of my life was set into motion. It began, no doubt, the previous summer with Roman Polanski's "Chinatown," followed the next June by Robert Altman's "Nashville." If those two movies -- seen at the impressionable ages of 16 and 17 -- don't thoroughly transform your world, then I don't know what would. I'd always loved the arts, but from that moment on I knew for certain that movies were the art form of the century -- my century -- because never before could such vibrant, kinetic masterpieces have been born. They made me feel fortunate to have come into the world just at the moment in human history when, at long last, such miracles became possible.

String of Pearl: The Lady of Altman's "Nashville"

Remembering Robert Altman (February 20, 1915 - November 20, 2006). This piece, revised and expanded from a Scanners post, was published in the German film magazine steadycam in a 2006 tribute issue, "Der Spieler Robert Altman: Zocker, Zyniker, Provokateur, Bluffer, Genie."

Well, we must be doing something right To last... two hundred years! -- Haven Hamilton, "200 Years"

It begins with a cheesy, hyper, K-Tel-style TV commercial for itself, segues into a libertarian political spiel by the presidential candidate for the Replacement Party, and then into a rousing Bicentennial anthem sung by a toupeed country-western singer in a white rhinestone-studded outfit.

Pearl of the South: A tale of two reviews

John Fitzgerald Kennedy's early cameo appearance in "Nashville," at Lady Pearl's Old Time Picking Parlor.

Please consider this my initial contribution to Andy Horbal's Film Criticism Blog-a-Thon -- happening all weekend at No More Marriages!

View image Inside Pearl's Parlor: Red, white and bluegrass. Kenny Fraiser (David Hayward) enters from behind the flag at center.

How can two critics see (or remember) the same movie, and have such contradictory interpretations of how it works and what it means? And what better case-in-point than Robert Altman's 1975 "Nashville" -- now being remembered in the wake of Altman's death last week, and seen through the prism of Emilio Estevez's recent release about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, "Bobby"?

View image Lady Pearl: "The only time I ever went hog wild, 'round the bend, was for the Kennedy boys. But they were different."

From two reviews of "Bobby":

View image "... and the asshole got 556,577 votes."

Watching the movie, I kept thinking of "Nashville." And not just because Robert Altman's 1975 masterpiece remains the most politically and psychologically astute big-ensemble/where-America's-at movie ever made (it's got a presidential campaign and ends with a beloved public figure gunned down, too). There's a minor character in it, played by Barbara Baxley, who's a Kennedy-loving Yankee married to a country music star. In one boozy monologue, she expresses all that was both hopeful and delusional about what the dead Kennedys represented for progressive citizens. I've never forgotten that speech, while the more simplistic and diffuse "Bobby" is already starting to fade from memory.

-- Bob Strauss, LA Daily News

View image Alone at Mass.

Despite its reputation as an exuberant classic, "Nashville" knows zip and cares even less about country music or the city of Nashville (where it was shot) -- which doesn't prevent it from heaping scorn on both. It even ridicules a dowager who tearfully reminisces about John and Bobby Kennedy, and it shamelessly encourages viewers to share its contempt for the rubes. The relentless cynicism that Nashville brandishes as proof of its hipness ultimately gives way to glib, high-flown rhetoric in the climactic repeated shots of an American flag filling the screen while a nihilistic pseudocountry anthem, "It Don't Worry Me," builds to a crescendo, asserting the concert audience's unembarrassed cluelessness.

-- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

First, I want to point out the obvious: Bob Strauss is right even when he's wrong (I don't think Baxley's character is minor or a Yankee) and Jonathan Rosenbaum is wrong even when he's right (Altman admitted he wasn't interested in making a movie about the real Nashville or country music; after all, he let the actors write their own songs). Rosenbaum's preoccupation with his own perception of "hipness" (which he deems extremely uncool) appears to have obscured his view (or his memory) of what's happening on the screen in Altman's movie. As I said in a comment over at The House Next Door, using "Bobby" to bash "Nashville" makes as much sense as using "Neil Simon's California Suite" to bash "Short Cuts" -- or "The Towering Inferno" to belittle "Playtime." Yes, there are superficial similarities (as Bob points out), but in terms of ambition, complexity, vitality and sheer movieness, there's no comparison.

Altman: Life beyond the frame

"Nashville" 25th reunion. (photo by Jim Emerson)

When the doctor says you're through Keep a'goin! Why, he's a human just like you -- Keep a'goin!

-- Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) in "Nashville"

View image 24 of your favorite stars.

Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld so I can sigh eternally

-- Kurt Cobain, "Pennyroyal Tea"

It's true that all the men you knew were dealers who said that they were through with dealing every time you gave them shelter

-- Leonard Cohen, opening lyrics for "McCabe & Mrs. Miller"

View image "Nashville" 25th reunion. Note gigantic Oscar at right; Altman got his own, regular-sized one six years later. (photo by Jim Emerson)

"However, the cortex, which is dwarfed in most species by other brain areas, makes up a whopping 80 percent of the human brain. Compared with other animals, our huge cortex also has many more regions specialized for particular functions, such as associating words with objects or forming relationships and reflecting on them. The cortex is what makes us human."

-- John J. Ratley, M.D., "A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain"

I'm not sure what, if anything, meaningfully connects these fragments to the passing of Robert Altman -- or his films, as alive now as they ever were -- but they were all things I encountered during a day spent thinking about Altman and, to my surprise, not wanting to speak out loud about him to anyone. I talked to my mother on the phone. She asked hesitantly, "Have you heard any news today?" "Yeah," I said, and changed the subject. What can I say that isn't trivial? (Rhetorical question, please.)

In this state of grief, nothing I'm writing or thinking about Altman is adequate, or even makes much sense, in large part because a whole moviegoing lifetime of engagement with his movies (beginning at age 15) has so profoundly shaped who I am and how I experience the world. Like hundreds, thousands (millions?) of cinephiles and cinephiliacs, I found life (and, paradoxically, shelter) in Robert Altman's movies. "Nashville" is my church, to which I return again and again for joy, insight, inspiration and sustenance. (I haven't written about it for years, but I also know that I'm almost never not writing about "Nashville.")

To this day, I am in some deep but irrational sense convinced that the characters in "Nashville" (even though I know they're played by 24 of my very favorite stars!) continue to exist outside the parameters of the movie itself. I've met and interviewed, for example, Ned Beatty, but there's Ned Beatty the actor and then there's Delbert Reese, who is someone else entirely. Delbert exists, imaginatively independent of the great actor (one of my all-time favorites) who inhabited him in "Nashville." (This is most unlike the other most-influential movie in my life, Roman Polanski's "Chinatown," made just the year before "Nashville," which is as "closed" a film as "Nashville" is "open." "Chinatown" ends so definitively that, "Two Jakes" aside, any life beyond the final frame is unthinkable.)

Right now I just want to share another fantastic memory: In 2000, I heard there was going to be a 25th anniversary reunion screening of "Nashville" at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. I'd moved back to Seattle by this time, but I bought tickets the moment they became available (for five bucks apiece) and went to LA for the event: My favorite movie, in a pristine print, in one of the finest movie theaters in the world, with most of those 24 favorite stars in attendance. It was... transplendent (as a Shelley Duvall character once said). I'll post an update with IDs later, but for now, see if you can identify the people onstage (taken with a now-primitive, but still beloved, Canon Digital Elph)

Pauline Kael's famous, ebullient review of "Nashville" here reminds us how exciting and innovative the movie was in 1975.

Principal population of "Nashville" after the jump:

Movies on a Plane

Do you like them on a boat?

Interview with Warren Beatty (1975)

HOLLYWOOD - Warren Beatty in sunglasses and a Mercedes sports convertible provides a presence that is not a million miles removed from the image of George, the libidinous hairdresser he plays in "Shampoo." And that is perhaps part of the reason for the film's enormous success (it is now being projected as one of the 20 top-grossing movies of all time, and in the Chicago area alone has played to more than half a million people). Beatty the person has inflamed the imaginations of the readers of movie fan magazines for so long that Beatty the actor can bring a conviction to George's desperate bedroom escapades that few other actors could approach without unseemly narcissism.

Interview with Karen Black

HOLLYWOOD - There is a new Hollywood and an old Hollywood, but always there is the timeless Hollywood that murmurs in the sequestered Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Interview with John Schlesinger

The kinds of films he likes to make are just the ones the studios are most wary about, John Schlesinger was complaining. And so he spends too much time turning down nice, tidy commercial subjects and trying to get, his latest dreams off the ground. He's made three movies in the last six years, and each one has borne the stamp of his temperament and successfully dealt with unlikely subject matter.

Ann-Margret: Still cracking that whip

LAKE GENEVA, WI -- There is just no keeping up with all the new Ann-Margrets. Last year's new Ann-Margret abandoned her image, as the press releases say, to play a committed graduate student in "R.P.M." Her quandary: Should she still shack up with Anthony Quinn after he stops being a radical professor and becomes a moderate administrator? That's a dicey quandary, believe me, because Ann-Margret was playing a liberated woman even if she didn't have her own motorcycle and had to ride on the back of Anthony Quinn's.

‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Star Sonequa Martin-Green Looks Gorgeous While Celebrating 5 Seasons as 1st Black Female Captain

Sonequa Martin-Green broke ground in 2017 as the first Black female captain in the beloved Star Trek franchise. Now, she’s making the rounds to promote and celebrate her fifth and final season as Captain Michael Burnham. See the 39-year-old’s gorgeous style and how she’s honoring her groundbreaking character.

On April 29, Martin-Green chatted with Zakiya Carr Johnson during a screening of Star Trek: Discovery in Washington, D.C. The Russellville, Alabama native spoke with the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer about the end of the hit Paramount+ series and how race influenced her experience .

Earlier in April, Martin-Green explained how she first navigated internalized racism regarding her role. “At the time, I thought, ‘This is all about hope.’ Hope is at the center of this franchise,” she said, according to CBS News . It’s our responsibility to keep that moving forward. People can think what they want to think, but they need a chance to grow.”

The Walking Dead star elaborated on being the first Black female captain : “It was overwhelming at the time. And it was heavy, but God really blessed me with it, and I learned so much from it. I learned so much about who I am as a Black woman. And I learned that I don’t have to fight for my value or my worth because I definitely felt that way.”

Another element of being a Black woman in such a groundbreaking role involved the appearance of Martin-Green’s character . The Space Jam: A New Legacy actor knew she wanted her hair to be “1,000%” natural. With the showrunners in complete agreement, they created a plan to transition Martin-Green’s gorgeous hair from a straight “Vulcan bowl” to a “short ‘fro” to braids, according to her conversation with Ashley & Company . “We all understood, this is a big moment; this is the moment that you know television history is made,” Martin-Green explained.

Karl Urban Opens Up About ‘Star Trek’ Co-Star Anton Yelchin’s Tragic Death

Martin-Green took control of Star Trek: Discovery in more helpful ways than one. She eventually became an executive producer, helping shape the series to its conclusion in late May. Trekkies are eagerly anticipating the rest of season five. Martin-Green gave a hint to CBS News. She stated that the final season will be “bigger than we had ever done before.” She explained, “We love these characters. We love the people. We love the story,” perhaps implying a possible movie extension of the Star Trek: Discovery universe.

Sonequa Martin-Green attends the Star Trek: Discovery special screening event in DC at MPA Theater on April 29, 2024 in Washington, DC | Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Paramount+

COMMENTS

Karen Black
Karen Black. Actress: Five Easy Pieces. Karen entered Northwestern University at 18 and left two years later. She studied under Lee Strasberg in New York and worked in a number of off-Broadway roles. She made a critically acclaimed debut on Broadway in 1965 in "The Playroom". Her first big film role was in You're a Big Boy Now (1966), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
List of Karen Black performances
Karen Black was an American actress whose career spanned over 50 years, and included over 200 credits across film, television, and theater. She made her Broadway debut in 1965 before making her major film debut in Francis Ford Coppola's You're a Big Boy Now (1966). She subsequently appeared as an acid-tripping prostitute in Dennis Hopper's road film Easy Rider (1969), which she followed with ...
Karen Black
Karen Black. Actress: Five Easy Pieces. Karen entered Northwestern University at 18 and left two years later. She studied under Lee Strasberg in New York and worked in a number of off-Broadway roles. She made a critically acclaimed debut on Broadway in 1965 in "The Playroom". Her first big film role was in You're a Big Boy Now (1966), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Karen Black
Karen Blanche Black (née Ziegler; July 1, 1939 - August 8, 2013) was an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter.She rose to prominence for her work in various studio and independent films in the 1970s, frequently portraying eccentric and offbeat characters, and established herself as a figure of New Hollywood.Her career spanned over 50 years and includes nearly 200 credits in ...
Karen Black Death: Remembering Her Life and Career
In 1969's Easy Rider, Black memorably played a New Orleans prostitute who romped with bikers Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda and new friend Jack Nicholson near the end of their cross-country trek.
"Star Trek" Assignment: Earth (TV Episode 1968)
Assignment: Earth: Directed by Marc Daniels. With William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Robert Lansing. While back in time observing Earth in 1968, the Enterprise crew encounters the mysterious Gary Seven who has his own agenda on the planet.
Karen Black, 1939-2013: a ravenous appetite for pretending
The synopsis says: "A bored young girl looking for excitement gets involved with nude modeling, drugs and a rock band.". Black was born Karen Blanche Ziegler in 1939 in suburban Chicago (her mother wrote popular children's books), so she would have been twenty years old in her film debut.
Karen Black
Karen Blanche Black was an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter. She rose to prominence for her work in various studio and independent films ... Star Trek: Discovery; Halo; Wild ...
Karen Black
Explore the filmography of Karen Black on Rotten Tomatoes! Discover ratings, reviews, and more. Click for details! ... Link to All Star Trek Movies Ranked by Tomatometer. 100 Best Netflix Series ...
Karen Black
Karen Blanche Black was an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter. She rose to prominence for her work in various studio and independent films in the 1970s, frequently portraying eccentric and offbeat characters, and established herself as a figure of New Hollywood. Her career spanned over 50 years and includes nearly 200 credits in both independent and mainstream films.
Karen Black, Versatile Character Actress, Dies at 74
Aug. 8, 2013. Karen Black, an actress whose roles in several signature films of the late 1960s and '70s included a prostitute who shared an LSD trip with the bikers played by Dennis Hopper and ...
Karen Black obituary
Karen Black obituary. Actor with a talent for conveying her characters' rich and troubled inner lives. Ryan Gilbey. Fri 9 Aug 2013 13.20 EDT. The New Hollywood movement was primarily a male ...
'Odd, free and uninhibited': Karen Black, Hollywood's great singer
Last modified on Mon 19 Jul 2021 08.38 EDT. "I first met Karen Black in 1970 in New Mexico, on a film called The Gunfight, with Johnny Cash and Kirk Douglas," says actor Keith Carradine, 71 ...
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield
List of episodes. " Let That Be Your Last Battlefield " is the fifteenth episode of the third season of the original American science fiction television show Star Trek. Written by Oliver Crawford (based on a story by Gene L. Coon, writing under his pen name "Lee Cronin") and directed by Jud Taylor, it was first broadcast January 10, 1969.
The talent, and the eyes, of acting powerhouse Karen Black
Karen Black, in Toronto to premiere her new show "My Life For a Song" on July 21, 2009. Aaron Harris / Toronto Star; In this Dec. 29, 1981 photo, director Robert Altman, right, poses with ...
Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (episode)
The reference book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (pp. 197 & 399) attests that this episode was originally a first season story outline from August 1966, titled "Portrait in Black and White". The book additionally states that, by 1968 , NBC and Paramount were keen on using every available story idea, so Coon's outline was "taken out of the ...
Karen Black Obituary
Karen Black passed away. The obituary was featured in Legacy on August 8, 2013. ... I was working as a Movie Checker, and this movie was double-billed with "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home". Good ...
5 things to know about Karen Black, from Oscar nomination to cult
In this Sept. 11, 1970 file photo, Jack Nicholson, right, and co-star Karen Black appear together at New York's Philharmonic Hall to attend the premiere of their new film "Five Easy Pieces."
Karen Black
Karen Black (July 1, 1939 [1] - August 8, 2013) was an American actress, screenwriter, singer and songwriter. She has acted in many movies. These include The Great Gatsby, Airport 1975 and Easy Rider. Black has won 2 Golden Globe Awards for "Best Performance by an Actress In A Supporting Role in a Motion Picture". [2]
'Five Easy Pieces' star Karen Black dead at 74
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Karen Black, the prolific actress who appeared in more than 100 movies and was featured in such counterculture favorites as "Easy Rider," ''Five Easy Pieces" and "Nashville," has died. Black's husband, Stephen Eckelberry, says the actress died Wednesday from complications from cancer. She was 74.
Watch Separate Ways
Separate Ways. Karen Black stars as Val, a neglected wife who must leave her husband and find herself before attempting to reconstruct her marriage. With new-found dignity and a fresh perspective, Val and her husband vow to try again. 4 IMDb 4.6 1 h 32 min 1981. X-Ray R. Drama · Sensual · Serious. Watch with a free Prime trial. Watch with Prime.
Karen Black movie reviews & film summaries
Interview with John Schlesinger. Roger Ebert | 1975-05-18. The kinds of films he likes to make are just the ones the studios are most wary about, John Schlesinger was complaining. And so he spends too much time turning down nice, tidy commercial subjects and trying to get, his latest dreams off the ground.
'Star Trek: Discovery' Star Sonequa Martin-Green Looks ...
Sonequa Martin-Green broke ground in 2017 as the first Black female captain in the beloved Star Trek franchise. Now, she's making the rounds to promote and celebrate her fifth and final season ...

Assignment: Earth

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Actress • Writer • Singer • Songwriter

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Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (episode)

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5 things to know about Karen Black, from Oscar nomination to cult classic 'Trilogy of Terror' (with video)

‘Five Easy Pieces’ star Karen Black dead at 74

Separate Ways

Cast and Crew

Movie Reviews

Letters from the Big Man (2011)

Irene in Time (2009)

Firecracker (2005)

Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? (1984)

Burnt Offerings (1976)

Family Plot (1976)

Day of the Locust (1975)

Nashville (1975)

The Great Gatsby (1974)

The Outfit (1973)

Portnoy's Complaint (1972)