Nathan Fillion & Alan Tudyk

Colin Hanks sits down with Brent Spiner and Jonny Frakes on Dropping Names and starts where it started, on a sidewalk on the Fox lot in the late nineties, terrified before his Roswell screen test, when a passing Jonathan Frakes told him to do well and somehow made the whole day survivable. From there he opens up the parts of that story nobody knows: getting asked to test for two roles at once to double his odds, spending the day auditioning alongside Heath Ledger, sitting in a cast meeting about people not showing up while William Sadler quietly modeled how a professional behaves, and learning off camera eyelines from Julie Benz. Then comes the reveal about The Great Buck Howard, the film he made with John Malkovich, Emily Blunt, Steve Zahn and Adam Scott. His father Tom Hanks produced it and campaigned hard for a completely different actor in the lead, and the name is William Shatner. Colin also explains why a George Takei joke had to survive every draft, and why one small scene with Jack Carter still lands as the saddest moment in the picture.

When Terry Matalas first walked into Alex Kurtzman's company, the show about bringing Jean Luc Picard back was already spoken for, and he was politely told to go away, kid. He ended up running Star Trek Picard season three anyway, and on Dropping Names he tells Brent and Jonny how it came together in about eight weeks, why the character we know as Data was very nearly called Datum until somebody worked out that data is already plural, and what Brent said to him on the phone that changed his mind. Jonathan Frakes remembers being asked if he was ready for a lot more Riker and answering that he would need to lose thirty pounds first. Terry also explains the last shot of the poker game, where he asked the cast to stop acting and simply deal, ran the cameras and let the credits roll over the real thing. Mary Howard, the producer who hired him as a production assistant and became his first boss, sat in the room for part of this one, which makes his stories about Rick Berman, firing shoes with tassels and the last Star Trek that ever came in on budget land even harder.

William Shatner sits down with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes on Dropping Names and opens with the moment he still cannot let go of, the time Neil deGrasse Tyson answered him on camera by putting a hand in his face and pushing, hard enough that Shatner went backwards. From there he gets into the kidney stone a Canadian gambling company called him about a week after it was removed, the doctor who handed it back over, the seventy five thousand dollars it fetched at auction and the Habitat for Humanity house in Louisiana that money helped build. There is also the fresh cigar in Cabo San Lucas that put him on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, a full body scan at half past seven that morning, and a cardiologist telling him that two more years of medical advances buys him another ten.

Leonard Maltin once walked Red Buttons over to say hello to Paramount's goodwill ambassador AC Lyles at Spago, and Red looked up and asked if he hadn't just been wondering whether AC was still alive. That is the register of this whole conversation, which finds Leonard and his daughter and podcast partner Jessie Maltin on Dropping Names with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes, trading stories that only a man who reviewed films on Entertainment Tonight for thirty years and put his name on Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide could actually have. The centrepiece is the night Sammy Davis Jr. invited the Maltins up to Tower Road after a charity dinner, the gate swung open, a man at the door told them to let themselves in, and Leonard spent hours alone in Sammy's den studying the autographed photos, the Pac Man machine and the hole cut for the projection booth while the house stayed empty until nearly midnight.

Steven Weber joins Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes on Dropping Names to tell the story of taking over Leo Bloom from Matthew Broderick in The Producers on Broadway, opposite the acclaimed British actor Henry Goodman, who was abruptly fired about two weeks into the run for wanting to do something other than what Nathan Lane had done. Steven admits he was probably on the bubble himself, that he was doing an imitation of Broderick instead of finding his own Gene Wilder, and that the show was such a juggernaut you could have put two bowls of manure on that stage and the audience would have cheered. He also recalls Mel Brooks giving notes, sitting at the feet of Harvey Korman on Dracula Dead and Loving It with Leslie Nielsen and Amy Yasbeck, and Richard Kind currently grinding through Max Bialystok in London.