Her first speaking role in a motion picture was a brief appearance as a damsel in distress in the Monkees film "Head" (1968), written by Jack Nicholson; Garr obtained the role after meeting Nicholson in an acting class. "He wrote the script for "Head", so all of us in the class got little tiny parts in the movie," she recalled. "I was… Who was I? Oh yes, I was the girl dying of a snakebite, who falls off the conestoga wagon and says, "Quick, suck it before the venom reaches my heart!"" Earlier in that year she landed her first significant TV role, featured as secretary Roberta Lincoln in the "" episode "", designed as a backdoor pilot episode for a new series which was not commissioned. ""Star Trek" was the first job where I had a fairly big (for me) speaking part," Garr related in her memoir, "I played Roberta Lincoln, a dippy secretary in a pink and orange costume with a very short skirt. Had the spin-off succeeded, I would have continued on as an earthling agent, working to preserve humanity. In a very short skirt." This led to her being, in her words, "cast as birdbrained lasses," in episodes of other TV shows.