The Chatner

Share this post

Orson Welles Should Have Played Harry Mudd On Star Trek

www.thechatner.com

Orson Welles Should Have Played Harry Mudd On Star Trek

Daniel Lavery
Sep 17, 2019
19
3
Share this post

Orson Welles Should Have Played Harry Mudd On Star Trek

www.thechatner.com

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Orson Welles. I could never figure it out – is Orson Welles a boy haunted by manhood, or a man haunted by boyhood? Star Trek is a series of television programs about mostly-gay-now sea captains who respect their ex-girlfriends and want to watch aliens do Shakespeare and Orson Welles should have been on it at least once. Not as Riker, mind you; anyone who suggests Orson as Riker is an enemy of mine. I’m perfectly aware Jonathan Frakes has something of the Orsonian carriage, the Orsonian delivery, and I mark it, but Orson Welles is not a featured player.

“Harry” Harcourt Fenton Mudd, swindler and con man (“Entrepreneur!”), liar and rogue (“Did I leave you with that impression?”). Screwed over since the day he was born, probably stole a time crystal, husband to five hundred of the same wife – Orson Welles was meant to play him, and step toe to toe with William Shatner, until Shatner’s faltering boy-heartiness collapsed under the unrelenting earth-weight of Orson’s. Anything La Shatner has – bluster, intuition, empathy, rumors of girdles and other unkind responses to his lovely lush body, women’s eyes, buoyancy, boyishness, a voice for the back row, feline staginess – Orson had first, and in vaster, more honeyed, quantities.

“In the fifteenth century, they didn’t call them swingers, but…he swung…He was a beautiful bum.” The cause that wit was in other men! The transition from Orson’s heavily-drawled “It was Shakespeare’s finest commercial [always defending an artist’s right to go commercial] on the subject of…booze” to “Sherry sack!” clipped and delivered through Sir John Falstaff’s mouth is instantaneous and perfect. (“Again: ‘Here comes SIDEshow Mel. SIDESHOW Mel. Bada-bing, bada-boom, I’m done. Learn from a professional, kid.”)

“Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.”
― Orson Welles, My Lunches with Orson

Bring that energy to the limp-lying “Harvey Mudd flees to space to escape his shrewish, nagging wife” and now we’ve got ourselves a character arc. What Orson can’t admit, can’t exist.

3
Share this post

Orson Welles Should Have Played Harry Mudd On Star Trek

www.thechatner.com
3 Comments
Chris Turner-Neal
Sep 17, 2019Liked by Daniel Lavery

“When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Orson Welles.”

A perfect, polished jewel of a sentence.

Expand full comment
ReplyCollapse
Madeleine
Sep 17, 2019Liked by Daniel Lavery

I LOVE THIS SO MUCH AND I LOVE HARRY MUDD perfection. Also sometimes I just watch Welles' champagne commercial outtakes, it soothes me

Expand full comment
ReplyCollapse
1 more comment…
TopNewCommunity

No posts

Ready for more?

© 2023 Daniel M. Lavery
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing