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.

He goes back to the early days too, to live television in New York when he was the twenty three year old with theatre training who could hit a mark and knew his lines while a camera the size of a bookcase rolled into his face, to Queens with a wife and a baby and a subway ride into town, to Harold Clurman nearly firing him from a play until Julie Harris intervened, and to Judgment at Nuremberg, where he sat at the lawyers table watching Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster and Spencer Tracy work. He talks about Yul Brynner on The Brothers Karamazov, Lorne Greene and Bonanza killing his series For the People in the ratings, Christopher Plummer coming back as a Klingon, and Brent remembering the Stephen Hawking poker game on The Next Generation. Then it turns to what he is chasing now, a podcast with his daughter, a Brad Paisley album, a heavy metal record, and a long conversation about feeding artificial intelligence the whole of human writing and what happened the night it wrote him a poem and he started to cry.

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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.

There is also Katharine Hepburn in her Turtle Bay brownstone, talking freely about twenty seven years of never being seen in public with Spencer Tracy while an NBC publicist fumed off camera because nobody was discussing the television movie. Leonard describes being thirteen and finding Buster Keaton reading a newspaper in the back of a car near the Brooklyn Bridge on the Samuel Beckett shoot, getting a still signed and learning it was from Parlor Bedroom and Bath. He explains the strange on again off again decades with Burt Reynolds, who was convinced the bad reviews of Stroker Ace and Cannonball Run were personal, and Jessie remembers Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman shouting at Clint Eastwood through a junket door because he would not stop talking. Dale Evans came to Jessie's bat mitzvah in a wheelchair, Gloria Stuart came too, Fayard Nicholas taught her to dance, and the two of them close by talking about their new book, Family Movie Night, the first one credited to Maltin and Maltin.

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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.

There is a lot more here from a career that runs from Wings with Tim Daly and Tony Shalhoub to Chicago Med with Oliver Platt and S. Epatha Merkerson. Steven talks about playing opposite Julianne Moore on As The World Turns when she was winning an Emmy playing her own twin, taking a gay lead in Jeffrey with Patrick Stewart in a pink beret and the moment a New Yorker on Christopher Street yelled Kirk at him, playing a Bajoran on Deep Space Nine, and watching Klingons smoke cigarettes on the Paramount lot. He performs the entire Tchaikovsky patter song from Lady in the Dark from memory, delivers his Burt Lancaster impression, the one that fooled Kevin Pollak into thinking he had found real archive tapes, and reads out the John Simon review that called him too comically homely for The Seagull.

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