So that was that: Star Trek was over.
The studio salvaged all they wanted from the show, which was Leonard Nimoy. Without missing a beat, the actor moved from playing Spock in the third season of Star Trek to Paris in the fourth season of Mission: Impossible. The rest of the cast and crew started looking for their next jobs, and most were entirely pragmatic about it—the writing had been on the wall for months.
The standard accounts of the history of Star Trek portray the Seventies as a decade-long struggle. Gene Roddenberry tirelessly led the fans through the wilderness, and eventually the rest of the world caught up with a show which was ahead of its time. Stories need villains who can throw obstacles in the way of our hero, and in this case it’s the Philistine “television executives.” Bob Justman explains,
Gene set about making NBC the heavy, the villain with regard to everything: schedule, ratings, programs practices (censor), publicity, etc., thus playing to the fans. He felt that the fans were more important than the network. He cast himself as the god and NBC as some demonic force from the other side.1
The more generous fans forgave “the suits” for not being smart enough to see the profound message of Star Trek, but thought that surely they were being perverse and malevolent when they claimed there was no appetite for more adventures with Kirk and Spock. These were the monsters who’d tried to dumb down Star Trek when it was being broadcast, and let it be canceled. Those suits were proved wrong when the show’s popularity exploded after its cancelation. The story had a happy ending, culminating with 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for which Gene Roddenberry was triumphantly reinstalled.
It’s a nice story, and no doubt that’s exactly how it felt in the Seventies for those at the forefront of the fanzine and convention scene, the letter writers and authors of fan fiction. Gene Roddenberry regularly stood in front of crowds of fans giving a version of events that matched this account, and he would receive huge cheers.
However, most of the story is demonstrably untrue. What happened to Star Trek next came about without any involvement from Gene Roddenberry, to the point where he was barely aware at first that it was happening.
It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that television used to be ephemeral. Star Trek fans have been able to put copies of all seventy-nine episodes on their shelf for thirty years, upgrading from VHS, to DVD, to Blu-Ray. Even the idea of a boxset is beginning to look antiquated, as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and other streaming video services expand their catalogs. Viewers can press a few buttons now and watch the beginning of “Charlie X,” one of the first Star Trek episodes to be shown in 1966, and it’s almost quaint when Kirk asks the captain of a small cargo ship: “Is there anything we can do for you, Captain? Medical supplies, provisions? . . . We have a large supply of entertainment tapes.”
The earliest fanzines often included very simple lists of episodes, plot summaries, and similar aides-mémoire, with fans scrambling to make notes or—in rare cases— jam the microphone of a tape recorder against their television’s speaker. For the average Star Trek fan, a library of “entertainment tapes” containing every episode would have seemed an impossibly futuristic, immensely desirable prospect in 1966. It wasn’t entirely without precedent in the real world, even then—military bases and larger ships had film libraries, and these could even include television series. The busiest room in many early conventions was the screening room, where episodes rented from the studio were projected onto a big screen. For the vast majority of viewers when Star Trek was first shown, though, a television episode was broadcast, possibly repeated once, then it was gone.
The studios sought ways to eke out as much money as possible from the television shows they made, but in the late Sixties almost all their revenue was derived from the original network broadcast and the first repeat. Money came from direct sponsorship of a show, and from the sale of advertisements. New episodes attracted the most interest from sponsors, and the highest advertising rates. Over the summer, people tended to go out more in the evenings, and networks would show repeat runs of returning shows—it was cheap to do, and the episodes were still relatively fresh. In an era before home VCRs, even avid viewers would miss the odd episode or two of their favorite show (early fanzine contributors would often relive the trauma of a family outing denying them the chance to see a particular Star Trek episode). The more general viewer might come to a show later in its run, or not be so committed as to tune in religiously every week. It meant that a lot of people who liked a show caught some episodes for the first time when they were repeated. The first repeats tended to do well—when Star Trek went into reruns after the end of the first season in April 1967, it won its timeslot.2
After that, studios saw any revenue as a bonus, as money for old rope. Contracts for television drama typically reflected this. Many actors and members of the crew would get a single payment based on the number of days they’d worked on an episode. The lead actors, the writer, director, producers, and a few others would typically be paid for the first showing and the first repeat. In theory, these key personnel were entitled to a cut of the profits from a show. In practice, the studios usually found inventive ways to assert that the show hadn’t quite yet made its production costs back. This mentality—and pay scheme—explains why Roddenberry, Shatner, Nimoy, and everyone else involved with Star Trek thought the series was dead once it wasn’t renewed for a fourth season. They had, they thought, received their last check for the series. William Shatner had a 20 percent profit participation, and Roddenberry had around 30 percent—but this appeared worthless, as Paramount calculated the show was between $3m and $5m away from recouping its production costs, stating in 1969 they “believed it would never show a profit.”3 The studio were proved wrong, but not until fifteen years later. Star Trek finally went into the black in 1984, and regular profit payments began for those entitled to them. In 1969, though, none of the cast or crew had anything to gain by promoting it. Indeed, if they became too closely associated with Star Trek, it might limit their future opportunities. Whether they had enjoyed working on Star Trek or not, whether they’d liked the final product or not, was irrelevant. They were all keen to move on.
The entire cast struggled with this. James Doohan, for example, found himself in an invidious position. He hadn’t been paid much for being on Star Trek—$850 an episode for the first season, and that was a better deal than most of the regular cast—but he’d become identified with the role to the point that casting directors routinely joked about his lack of a Scottish accent.
In the early days of television, no one imagined much of an afterlife for shows beyond that first repeat showing. Times were changing, though, and Leonard Nimoy believed he had cut a particularly smart and forward-looking deal because he would be paid up to the fifth repeat.
The studios did have two markets for their old TV shows. The first was that American shows were sold abroad. While Hollywood movie studios were starting to look to the international potential of their product, little effort had been made by the television industry. There was rarely very much money in foreign sales—TV channels usually bought series in bulk as a cheap way to fill their schedules. It’s worth remembering that while color television was on the horizon, most countries had not yet adopted it. Even in the UK, the first time viewers saw Star Trek (or, for that matter, Adam West’s Batman, Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, and The Monkees), they’d have seen it in black and white. There were shows made in Britain with an eye on the American market—The Avengers being by far the most successful— but the American studios were content with their huge domestic market, and the vast amount of control they had over it.
There was a secondary domestic market. American viewers could tune into two categories of channels: there were the three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) which broadcast nationwide, and the local channels—many covering one city, or even just a part of one city. There were hundreds of local channels, although each household could only receive one or two, except in a few major cities. They made their own programs, usually local interest, but filled up their schedules by buying old shows from the studios and repeating them. This was called “syndication.” Shows were bought as job lots in “syndication packages,” and the received wisdom was that a series had to run for 100 episodes (four seasons) before there was enough to syndicate. This was never a hard and fast rule, and Star Trek’s tally of seventy-nine episodes was close enough. If you worked out how much each station paid for an individual episode, it was a tiny amount of money—but by selling a hundred episodes at a time to hundreds of small stations, it all added up.
Local stations “stripped” the show—showed it every weekday evening in the same timeslot. If a series had run for 100 episodes, a local station would have shown them all in five or six months. With Star Trek, it took sixteen weeks to get through the three seasons, and then many stations would just start again at the beginning. Stations could be quite careless, airing episodes out of order, or not showing the advertised episode. They would often ruthlessly edit the episodes down to fill the timeslot, or drop particular episodes if they’d ever had complaints about them. Local events—most often sports—would take priority over Star Trek. Two families in the same large city might sit down and watch Star Trek on the same evening, but they’d be watching different episodes at different times.
The nature of the process meant that some stations picked Star Trek up quickly while others were slower off the mark. Syndicated reruns of the show began in Boston, Cleveland, and Detroit in the autumn of 1969 (the last episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” had been shown in June). More and more local stations discovered that a well-made, colorful show did fantastically well when it was scheduled to run against the networks’ early evening news programs. By February 1970, Paramount were running trade ads boasting that Star Trek was being shown by sixty-one stations, and outlining the improved audience share achieved by those showing it in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Providence, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, and Salem.4 In March 1972, it was reported that “about 125 stations” ran it in the US.5 By the time The World of Star Trek was written (it was first published in May 1973), the tally was up to 143 markets.6
There was for many years a conspiracy theory among fans that the audience for Star Trek’s original run had always been huge, and had only appeared low because of the way the ratings were collated. With the methods used to collect the ratings skewed towards families, the argument ran, the system rewarded shows aimed at the lowest common denominator and failed to register the legions of smart single people, people living alone, or college kids watching cerebral stuff like Star Trek. The show had therefore been popular all along and the networks were just too old-fashioned and foolish to see it. The idea was held as gospel throughout the Seventies and repeated by former cast and crew on the show. It fitted Gene Roddenberry’s narrative perfectly. Majel Barrett summed it up: “We found out that the people who were actually watching us during the third season were the young marrieds, the intellectuals, scientists, astronauts, those kinds of people. So, while we never had huge ratings, we had absolutely incredible demographics: eighteen to forty with above-average intellect.”7
The Roddenberrys probably thought that was correct. They were certainly willing to repeat it under oath. After Gene Roddenberry’s death, a document prepared by Majel Barrett’s legal team asserted: “It had low ratings and was a financial disaster . . . The series was finally cancelled in 1969, after finishing third in its time slot for each of its three seasons . . . Star Trek was considered a failure.”8
More recent scholarship shows that this wasn’t the case. Commercial television is set up, dispiriting though it is to point this out, to deliver audiences to advertisers. The system used by Nielsen was central to the networks’ planning (although they drew data from other sources) and was a carefully designed, constantly refined statistical model capable of producing astonishingly precise information. Then, as now, the networks wanted to have shows that appealed to all sorts of different demographics. It was hugely in their interests be able to go to advertisers and tell them which shows people with disposable income liked. Not every advertiser wanted only to reach families. Many would have been keen to know about shows that attracted a loyal, attentive audience. As Michael Kmet at the blog Star Trek Fact Check puts it:
renewing the series might have made sense because of the overall younger demographic it appealed to, which even in the late 1960s was becoming more important to advertisers. Paul Klein, the vice president of research for NBC, told Television Magazine in 1967 that “a quality audience—lots of young adult buyers—provides a high level that may make it worth holding onto a program despite low over-all [sic] ratings.” He went on to tell the magazine that “‘quality audiences’ are what helped both Mission Impossible and Star Trek survive another season.” In a later TV Guide interview, Klein specifically mentioned Star Trek again, telling the magazine that the series was renewed in spite of weak ratings, “because it delivers a quality, saleable audience . . . [in particular] upper-income, better-educated males.”9
The network knew who was watching when it made its decision to cancel Star Trek. The fact of the matter is that neither was the show’s performance catastrophically bad, nor was it secretly being watched by millions of viewers the networks couldn’t detect. It just didn’t do particularly well. If it had been cheaper to make, the ratings it was getting would almost certainly have meant it was renewed, but it was the second most expensive drama on television. There were many at Paramount glad to see the back of it, as it had lost them a lot of money. Syndication simply suited Star Trek better than being networked on NBC. Ironically, it made it utterly impossible to calculate how many people were watching.
Two things about syndication in particular allowed Star Trek to blossom. The first was that it was shown a lot more often. Casual viewers now put the show on in the background, and became aware of its iconography: Spock’s ears, the phasers, photon torpedoes and transporters, Kirk’s opening monologue, the catchphrases. Star Trek became a familiar part of the TV landscape. At the same time, because each episode went where no man had gone before, it didn’t look as samey as a lot of television. As William Shatner said: “We were in many situations that were not the standard police story of ‘get the bad guy.’ There were variations. I think that was a large reason for Star Trek’s popularity.”10
Fans could now rewatch their favorite stories, or start watching an episode and realize “this is the one where . . .” If they missed an episode, they didn’t have to wait very long before it came around again. The hodgepodge of local stations mapped almost perfectly onto the hodgepodge of local Star Trek groups, and the fan community quickly realized that it was far easier to lobby a small, local station than a group of New York network executives. Star Trek was a big deal for the local stations, whereas for NBC it had just been another show. Rather than see fans as an annoyance, local stations tended to quickly embrace and recruit a set of articulate, passionate viewers.
Of course, when a local station bought a syndication package it was a far less troublesome, risky and expensive process than when Desilu were making it for NBC. No one at local stations in Boston or Cleveland had to approve a budget overrun to cover some new optical effect, juggle the egos of the cast and writers, or argue whether a particular line or costume was suitable. With the show canceled, there was none of the pressure or anxiety that had come to characterize Star Trek when it was in production.
Harve Bennett, a television producer in the Seventies who would go on to oversee the Star Trek movie franchise, sounded a note of caution:
In those days, in order to succeed with a series, you had to deliver twenty million people. Star Trek never did that so it got canceled. But it delivered fifteen, fourteen, ten. Well, that was enough to support it in syndication during the Seventies. You could find your favorite Star Trek on every channel off network. Great. All the same people who loved it stayed with it.11
Many new fans started watching Star Trek when it was shown in syndication, but Bennett’s broad point—that the show now looked bigger because the pond it was in was smaller—is clearly correct. Almost everyone with a television could watch NBC, but the reach of the stations that showed Star Trek in syndication was much more patchy. The potential audience was far smaller, far fewer televisions were on at five than were on at nine. While Star Trek became “more popular” in syndication, it doesn’t mean that suddenly vastly more people were watching every time it was on. It means that cumulatively, over the next few years, a vast number of people would end up seeing Star Trek.
The way it was shown uniquely suited Star Trek and, while most shows withered away after cancelation, Star Trek flourished. Whatever the total audience tally, syndication sustained a set of viewers who were extremely engaged and supportive of the show and allowed this audience to be heard by the stations showing it.
The second change syndication brought was far more significant, but has tended to be underplayed by people studying the phenomenal rise of Star Trek: it was shown much earlier in the evening than it had been when it was first broadcast. NBC had scheduled the first two seasons at 8:30 p.m. (the first season was shown on Thursdays, the second on Fridays), and for its third season, Star Trek was shoved to 10:00 p.m. The timeslots were inconvenient for anyone wanting to go out in the evening (particularly when it moved to Fridays), but crucially, it was simply on too late for younger potential viewers. In syndication, the show was typically put on at 5:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. (some stations had it as early as 4:00 p.m., others as late as 7:00 p.m.). For the first time, very young kids got the chance to see Star Trek.
Older Star Trek fans were clearly important. It was they who started organizing clubs and conventions and publishing fanzines. It’s worth noting that even these “older” Star Trek fans tended to be young. Looking at photographs of early conventions, it’s striking that the vast majority of the attendees are teenagers or in their very early twenties. Few of the prominent fans—the fanzine editors, or members of the “Committee” who organized the first conventions—were all that old. Bjo Trimble, author of the Star Trek Concordance, was a “veteran”—thirty-six when the original run of Star Trek ended. Two of the co-authors of Star Trek Lives!, a book by fans about the Star Trek phenomenon, were twenty-seven, and the eldest, Joan Winston, was thirty-eight. Allan Asherman, like Winston one of the “Committee,” was twenty-two. Gene Roddenberry, James Doohan, and DeForest Kelley, who all turned fifty in 1970 or 1971, look so much older than anyone else in the room. The Roddenberrys were keen to emphasize the seriousness and intelligence of the show, but when they talked of older viewers, they were referring to the fact it was popular with undergraduates—a 1972 article stated that “every campus” was full of Star Trek fans. Of course parents and professors watched—but the organized fans were in their late teens or twenties. David Gerrold could say in 1973 that “generally Trekkies are adolescent or post-adolescent girls.”12
This indicates that NBC did miss at least one trick. The demographic data was telling them Star Trek scored well with “upper-income, better-educated males,” and this might conform to the stereotypical image of “Trekkies” as nerdy guys. Bjo Trimble was told that the network had tried to conduct a demographic survey of Star Trek fans, based on the data they could glean from the protest letters during the 1967/8 campaign, but even using computer analysis couldn’t tell “what kind of people were watching it.”13 The evidence would seem to suggest that Star Trek resonated most with young women. If NBC had seen that, they might have been able to market and schedule the series more effectively.
With Star Trek being shown in syndication much earlier it was reaching even younger people than the teenyboppers. Star Trek was now something the whole family could watch and it was often on during the family meal. Very young children responded to the broad characters, the colorful sets, and the monsters. Their parents could find levels to the show that their younger children would miss, and that included the political allegory, but—like Adam West’s Batman—it also meant the camp performances, the scantily clad women, not taking things that sounded pompous at face value. Fans have tended to cringe at the idea of children loving Star Trek—it cuts against the idea that the show was popular because it was edgy and political and by implication makes those who take Star Trek seriously appear “childish.” But saying that a lot of people liked the sillier aspects of Star Trek is not a criticism. Far from it: it demonstrates that Star Trek appealed to all sorts of people for a wide variety of reasons, including ones the makers of the show didn’t intend, or perhaps even acknowledge or fully understand.
There’s very little evidence that Gene Roddenberry had ever thought about tailoring anything for children who were watching the show—he introduced the younger character of Chekov at the start of the second season because he worried that the cast looked middle-aged to a lot of viewers, but he didn’t do it to appeal to the under-tens. He was making a serious primetime show for an adult audience, as he had with The Lieutenant. He made every effort to distance himself from Lost in Space, the contemporary show most obviously “like” Star Trek. His constant concern when he was making Star Trek had been that it was drifting away from being serious and weighty.
Roddenberry said he saw Star Trek as a way of dressing up weighty thoughts and subjects, almost as if the primary colors and alien belly dancers were the sugar coating for some bitter medicine. In syndication, this flipped around— it became a fun action show which demonstrated, if you were inclined to look, some interesting sprinkles of social commentary or political analogy. As soon as it was out of Roddenberry’s control, it became something far more fun, and more local. When he pitched it, Roddenberry had compared Star Trek to Gulliver’s Travels; in syndication, it suffered the same fate as Swift’s novel—the satirical bite was lost and audiences tended to concentrate on the absurd spectacle, on what we might term the visual effects. Viewers began to shape Star Trek and find things in it that resonated for them.
There’s an interesting period of about three years or so, starting with the cancelation of Star Trek in the first half of 1969 and building to the first major convention in January 1972, which saw an explosion in grassroot fan activity, and about three years after that where this consolidated into a national fan movement. It was here that the foundations were laid for the future of Star Trek. The transition from middle-ranking network show to perennial smash hit in syndication was possibly the most important moment in the history of Star Trek. In those crucial early years, Gene Roddenberry wasn’t around all that much. First of all, he was keen to make the move from television to cinema.
On June 7, 1968, as Star Trek’s third season was barely underway, Roddenberry sent a letter to Tarzan producer Sy Weintraub proposing a revamp of the movie series. Since Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), starring Johnny Weissmuller, there had been a new Tarzan movie virtually every year, with four changes of lead actor. After thirty-five years, the franchise was struggling to keep up with modern tastes. Tarzan and the Valley of Gold (1966) had been a relaunch for the series, with a new actor, Mike Henry, in the lead, and an original story by science fiction author Fritz Leiber. His novel, the first sequel authorized by the estate of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, was published simultaneously. The movie saw a suave Tarzan in a James Bond-style caper fighting an international criminal mastermind in modern-day Mexico. Two movies in the same vein followed, but audiences weren’t keen.
Roddenberry proposed a rethink that concentrated more on the character’s alter ego, Lord Greystoke (in the original books Tarzan was orphaned in the African jungle, his father being an English aristocrat). His version was to be set in the late nineteenth century. Roddenberry didn’t include elements like Jane and Cheetah, and was keen to make Tarzan a smart, resourceful man, the genius of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books. The pitch was successful and Roddenberry was commissioned to write a script. His story had a science fiction element to it—a weapon that could fire a beam of heat was found in the jungle, the technology of the ancient Egyptian gods. The script was completed, but the project went no further, reportedly because of concerns about the budget. That year’s Tarzan and the Jungle Boy (1968) would prove to be the last of the series.14
In August 1968, around the time he was working on Tarzan, Roddenberry moved out of the family home— he’d made the announcement he was finally leaving Eileen two weeks earlier, at his daughter Darleen’s wedding. The separation had been inevitable for a long time, and Gene moved in with Majel Barrett. The divorce came the following year after a financial settlement was reached in a three-day session in early July 1969, involving the couple’s lawyers and accountants.
Gene and Eileen negotiated over their community property, including Norway Corporation, a loan-out corporation which owned all rights to Star Trek. Gene offered to sell his interest in Star Trek to Eileen for $1,000, but she turned down the offer. Finally, Eileen agreed that Gene would receive her interest in Norway—including the right to royalties and rerun fees from Star Trek; in exchange, Eileen retained only her right to a “one half interest in future profit participation income from Star Trek to which the parties are entitled,” and received, among other things, most of the couple’s jewelry and substantial alimony payments.15
Eileen took custody of their younger daughter, Dawn, who was fifteen at the time. Dawn remained close to her father and would live with him for a spell. Their elder daughter, Darleen, was five years older, and had already moved out. Two decades later, the wording of the financial settlement would become the heart of a bitter legal dispute between the couple (and after his death, between Eileen and Majel Barrett). For now, Gene and Eileen went their separate ways, selling the family home and splitting the proceeds.
Herb Solow, Roddenberry’s former boss on Star Trek, had moved on from Paramount and was now Vice President of Worldwide Television and Motion Picture Production at MGM. He remained friends with Roddenberry and continued to socialize with him. Knowing Roddenberry needed a break, he sent him on an expenses-paid trip to Japan, “scouting locations” for MGM. As Gene told People magazine in 1987:
“After I had been there a number of weeks, I discovered I missed Majel a lot. Now, an American bachelor on an MGM expense account in Japan . . . this can be heaven! But I found myself with these pretty little girls in silk kimonos. . .”
“. . . and out of them,” inserts Majel.
“I found myself talking to them about Majel. One night I realized what I was doing. I paid the girl, went back to my hotel and called up Majel to ask her if she would do me the honor of becoming my wife.”16
Roddenberry married Majel in Japan on August 6, in a Shinto ceremony. Neither was religious, but they thought it would be disrespectful to get married in Japan in a Western-style service. It also gave them an opportunity to dress up—their wedding photo shows Majel in an elaborate kimono and headdress, and Gene far from being outdone in traditional Japanese attire. When they returned to the States, shortly afterwards, it turned out that Gene’s divorce hadn’t technically been settled—the final judgement wouldn’t be entered until Christmas Eve that year. To make the marriage official, Gene and Majel had a low-key civil ceremony in the US on December 29, 1969. They would always celebrate August 6 as their wedding anniversary.17
Herb Solow continued to help Roddenberry, assigning him to script and produce Roger Vadim’s first American movie, a job which paid Roddenberry $100,000, a great deal of money. Vadim had made a huge number of films in France and Italy, and was best known in America for And God Created Woman (1956), starring Brigitte Bardot, and Barbarella (1968), starring Jane Fonda. His movies were scandalous in France for their depiction of sexuality, and so were downright notorious in the United States. Vadim was equally famous for his relationships with his leading actresses. He had a child with Catherine Deneuve, had been married to Bardot, and at the time he worked with Roddenberry he was estranged from Fonda.
Anyone who only knew Gene Roddenberry from his CV might have seen him as a natural fit if Vadim was trying to make another Barbarella-style science fiction film, but that wasn’t the plan. MGM believed that American audiences were ready for a European-style sex comedy, and Vadim wanted to adapt Francis Pollini’s 1969 novel Pretty Maids All in a Row, set in an American high school where Tiger McDrew, a middle-aged school counselor, is sleeping with the female students . . . and then murdering them. With that in mind, it’s a little uncharitable to suggest Solow might have seen something of Roddenberry in the character, but when Roddenberry develops Tiger, he becomes more like him—Tiger gains a military background, and a tendency to justify his actions by talking in broad terms about social change. Roddenberry makes the protagonist someone who can go home to a wife he loves, who forgives him his tendency to “dip his wick.” He’s clearly an identification figure—within limits—for the writer.
Roddenberry’s influence stretched as far as the cast. James Doohan (Scotty) and William Campbell (who’d featured in Star Trek as the immortal Trelane and the Klingon Koloth) played a pair of policemen. Dawn Roddenberry was an extra on the movie (she’s credited as “Girl #1”). Rock Hudson—forty-six, and a little past his prime, but still a bankable star—was cast as Tiger McDrew. Roddy McDowall and Telly Savalas were cast as the principal and the detective investigating the murders. Angie Dickinson played a teacher who was the object of desire for a male student, Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson).
The source material is not all that promising. The novel switches between scenes where Ponce de Leon lusts after his teacher, graphic descriptions of Tiger having sex with different schoolgirls (and occasionally his wife)—a typical line being “Her mouth glided, all the while, her tongue was sliding, caressing her Tiger’s hot, huge formidable—the whole while”18—and scenes of the rather literally named detective Surcher as he looks for clues to the murders. Roddenberry sticks to the broad structure of the book, but imposes much more interesting character arcs, and adds a suspenseful—if rather incoherent—ending where Ponce confronts Tiger. It’s not entirely clear if it’s meant to be a twist that Tiger’s the murderer, and in both the book and movie there’s no great moment where he’s unmasked— different characters gradually realize at different times. The movie hurdles the low bar of being funnier and better crafted than the book, and the cast play it as fairly broad farce. When Miss Smith, one of Ponce’s teachers, learns he’s having “problems with erections,” she decides she’ll flirt with him to help him out, not realizing that the problem is he’s permanently aroused. The school counselor advises her to sleep with him and she does.
Roddenberry started off with high hopes. He didn’t like the book, but told one correspondent at the time that Pretty Maids All in a Row “started here as a sex comedy but which I hoped to rewrite so that it also has some meaning and some statement about the world around us today. Specifically, it concerns high schools and my opinion of the way we run high schools is pretty low.”19 In the movie— like the book—the police assume that one of the “Negro” students is responsible (though the book makes more of the fact the school has recently been desegregated). The final film includes a scene that’s not in the book, and in which we hear a tape of Tiger saying:
“In a typical high school it would be difficult to invent a system more destructive of a child’s natural creativity. Only in the most backward penal institutions does one discover equally oppressive rules of silence, restriction of movement, constant examination of behavior. A world in which one must learn to work, eat, exercise and sometimes even defecate by the clock.”
It’s extremely easy to imagine Roddenberry declaring the same thing, word for word, in an interview or as part of a lecture, and it’s hardly woven seamlessly into the film. That, though, is about it for his “statement.” There is a dash of satirical social commentary, in a subplot that clearly appealed to Vadim, who went out of his way to mention it in a Playboy interview: “Despite the multiple murders, Pretty Maids is more satire than serious drama. The only apparent concern of the community regarding the murders is whether they’ll force the cancelation of next week’s football game. Our point: How little importance is placed on human lives today.”20
There is, of course, the problem that this is a movie about high school students lining up to have sex with their teachers. The book hits a consistently seedy note. The movie is more confused. As with a number of Roddenberry projects, there’s a weird single-entendre feeling to it. The movie tries very hard not to think about morality, and sets out to establish that it’s set in a sort of heightened, sunny, carefree world . . . but it’s one punctuated by murders of schoolgirls. In a Sight & Sound poll in 2013, Quentin Tarantino listed Pretty Maids All in a Row as one of his twelve “greatest movies of all time.”21 He’s an aficionado of “grind-house” cinema, the exploitation films that offered 1970s cinemagoers the sort of sex and violence you couldn’t see on TV, and this movie was something of a forerunner of those. If he’d made the movie, Tarantino might just have been able to square the circle, convince the audience that it was being postmodern and playful. Neither Vadim nor Roddenberry is the right man for that job, and Pretty Maids All in a Row is, inescapably, a movie about sexual violence against young women, pitched as a comedy.
The movie received a fair amount of pre-publicity and attention, which centered around the “Pretty Maids,” the schoolgirls Tiger seduced, played by eight young actresses of various “types” and ethnicities: Joy Bang, Gretchen Burrell, Joanna Cameron, Aimée Eccles, June Fairchild, Margaret Markov, Diane Sherry, and Brenda Sykes.
Roger Vadim’s interview for the April 1971 edition of Playboy was illustrated with nude shots of the “Maids” specially taken by the magazine. He didn’t mention Roddenberry there, or in his book Memoirs of the Devil (1975), where he described how the traditional Hollywood system was in such decline that “there was not a single other film being made in any of the six main Los Angeles studios” when he was there,22 and he was astonished how many departments he had to deal with, and how vast they all were: “Only in Russia have I seen such a cancerous bureaucracy . . . I regretted having to take up a budget of three and a half million dollars for a film that should not have cost more than eight hundred thousand.”23
By this point, one of the Maids had objected to the way the nude scenes were being shot. As this was one of the first Hollywood movies to feature nudity, her contract didn’t specify that she had to take part in those scenes. Vadim was annoyed, feeling that she and her agent had known the nature of the role, but the studio president James Aubrey intervened personally, understanding that they shouldn’t force her to film the scenes against her will.24 The actress has never been publicly identified, but Diane Sherry is the only one of the Maids who doesn’t appear nude in the movie or the Playboy shoot, and later publicity photos feature the other seven maids, but not her. She would go on to play Lana Lang, Clark Kent’s schoolboy crush, in a few scenes of Superman: The Movie (1978). When Vadim told Rock Hudson that he was expected to appear full frontal, things were settled far more quickly, with Hudson replying: “If you want to take a look at my dick, that’s fine by me, but I’ll be darned if I’ll flash it for all the fucking world to see!”25
Roddenberry’s main task was to keep Vadim under control, but they fell out and Roddenberry left the set until the movie was filmed, telling a friend “there is nothing worse than writing something you hope is pretty witty and having the director not quite pull it off.”26
Roddenberry was drinking heavily at the time. A couple of years previously, on his return to the States after a fishing trip, customs had impounded the extensive array of pills they’d found in his bag—diet pills, sleeping pills, barbiturates (Seconal, the drug that killed Judy Garland), an antidepressant (Cytomel), and a tranquilizer (Equinil). These were all legally prescribed, but were common recreational drugs at the time.
Once filming was complete, the studio weren’t happy with Vadim’s first cut of the movie. Roddenberry was able to salvage something usable in a re-edit, but no one labored under any illusion that they’d produced great work. Vadim described it as “entertaining without being ambitious. The reviews were fairly good in Los Angeles, dreadful in New York and excellent in other cities. On the whole it was a success.”27 It was not a movie that helped anyone’s career—it was John David Carson’s first and last starring role; Roger Vadim never worked for an American studio again; it was one of Rock Hudson’s last movie roles before he made the move to television. Many of the “Maids” went on to careers in the sort of exploitation movies Quentin Tarantino admires, but none became stars. Amusingly, and presumably entirely by coincidence, Vadim’s Playboy essay ends with a line that’s almost an echo of Roddenberry’s sentiment about the human race still being in its childhood:
“The American fear of sex is gradually diminishing—in motion pictures, in periodicals, on the stage, in private life. That’s one of the most refreshing developments I’ve noticed on my current visit. By going through this experience, perhaps one day Americans will finally become adults.”28
Roddenberry’s loss of control of Pretty Maids All in a Row all but killed his chances of moving from television to cinema. Before its release, he placed all the blame squarely on Vadim, saying, “I wrote it as a comedy but I’m afraid that much of the American quality of the comedy was not understood by the director.”29 When he heard that the movie had made its money back, he briefly thought it might lead to other work. He wanted to write a movie about the police and racial politics, and researched it by riding along with the police. He was “worried over the polarization of the police into a sort of ‘minority group complex’ along with the polarization of blacks and browns into more and more violent directions.”30 It wasn’t to be, and by the beginning of 1972 Gene Roddenberry’s attempt to move from television to cinema was in tatters.