Star Trek: The Motion Picture was perhaps the purest expression of what Gene Roddenberry wanted Star Trek to be, and also of the strengths and weaknesses of the man himself.
Despite almost certainly being the most expensive single film ever made to that point, and despite the fact that it cost the studio around three times the initial estimates, Star Trek: The Motion Picture did not go over budget. This was for one simple reason: it was impossible to plan the cost of bringing its script to life, because the film went into production before the script had been completed. The film never went over budget because a budget had never been set.
A number of reports of the press conference at which it was announced, held on March 28, 1978, stated that the first Star Trek movie would cost $15m. This seems to be based on an over-literal interpretation of a light remark from the president of Paramount Pictures, Michael Eisner, when he said the film would be made “at a cost at least equal to all the original seventy-nine episodes put together.” That would add up (not allowing for inflation) to around $14.5m. Early in the process, the studio would tell the director, Robert Wise, they had allocated “between fifteen and eighteen million dollars,” but “they didn’t exactly expect we’d be able to actually spend that much.”1 No one, including the studio’s accountants, ever knew exactly what the first Star Trek movie ended up costing, and estimates range from $25m to nearly twice that.
The film was an extravagant production. The studio was complicit in this. Following the success of Star Wars (1977), Paramount promised investors and distributors early in 1978 that a Star Trek movie would be in cinemas the following year. This was an extremely tight deadline, and it quickly became clear that original plans to release the movie in April or June 1979 weren’t viable. Soon, the premiere was set for December 7, and the studio struck deals with distributors that meant, if the date was missed, they would have to repay at least $30m (some reports suggest that there were also penalty clauses which would have raised the payout to $75m). December 7 became the absolute, non-negotiable release date.
Star Trek had predated Star Wars, of course. Even the idea of bringing back Star Trek had predated Star Wars. While it clearly felt to fans like Star Trek endured a long time in the wilderness, in fact the show had quickly become a major cultural force, a valuable studio asset. Paramount had started talking about making a movie or TV series within a couple of years of the show going off the air. The only delay was because they weren’t able to find the best way to bring it back. A number of different ideas for major movies were pitched, without involvement from Gene Roddenberry. The rumor that Paramount would recast Kirk and Spock (the names of Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman came up) seems to have originated from Roddenberry. He understood that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were hero figures to Star Trek fandom, that both actors had fervently devoted fans. Roddenberry wanted to be involved in the remake, and felt that riling up the fans into writing letters would scare the studio back into line—and make it clear to them that only Gene Roddenberry truly understood what made Star Trek tick.
In early 1977, the first serious attempt to make a Star Trek movie was underway. This was Planet of the Titans, directed by Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff). The sets were to be designed by Ken Adam, designer of the most memorable James Bond supervillain lairs. Ralph McQuarrie, an artist who’d done so much to establish the “look” of Star Wars, redesigned the Enterprise. A fair amount more design work was done, but the studio didn’t like the first draft of the script.
The plug was finally pulled in the early summer. Paramount had a new plan: they were going to set up a fourth American TV network, and Star Trek was to be the centerpiece. Roddenberry returned to his old job as executive producer, and a two-hour pilot and thirteen episodes were commissioned. He brought back as much of the team from the original series as he could, including D.C. Fontana, William Ware Theiss, and Matt Jeffries. The studio called it Star Trek, the fans would come to call it Star Trek: Phase II. To Roddenberry, it was Star Trek II.2
Leonard Nimoy would not be returning as Spock. Although Spock was the character featured most heavily on the covers of comics, books, and magazines, Nimoy received no money for this use of his image, nor for the constant syndicated repeats. He was particularly affronted to find a British billboard ad which featured Spock’s limp ears perking up when he drank a pint of a particular brand of lager. Bernie Francis, his business manager, investigated, and learned that Paramount had lost the rights to use his client’s likeness when they’d canceled the show. When Gene Roddenberry’s promise he would be playing Questor failed to materialize, it confirmed Nimoy’s growing sense that Roddenberry was not to be trusted. Ever since Roddenberry had tried to take a cut of his proceeds from the Mr. Spock’s Music From Outer Space album, Nimoy had been wary. He felt a little swindled by his involvement with Star Trek as he noted how others—the studio, Roddenberry— were exploiting Spock.
Nimoy was aware that Gene and Majel were selling Star Trek merchandise through Lincoln Enterprises (and he almost certainly overestimated by some way how much the couple were making). Bernie Francis and Paramount were unable to agree a figure to compensate Nimoy for their unauthorized use of his likeness. As Nimoy said, “I wound up having to file a lawsuit . . . perhaps you can understand why I wasn’t champing at the bit to get involved with Paramount and Star Trek again.”3 That said, it seemed Nimoy might possibly be a series regular. He did sit down to discuss terms. Nimoy was more offended by the proposed compromise whereby he would appear in only a couple of episodes as a “guest star,” than by the prospect that he would not appear at all.
There was little secret that Roddenberry was lukewarm about Nimoy’s involvement. William Shatner sums it up best:
Whatever the sometimes difficult dynamics of their relationship, without question, Roddenberry and Leonard both lived long and prospered because of it. They needed each other—we all needed each other—and looking back, it is far more important to focus on Gene’s creative genius than the family fights we endured.4
Neither Roddenberry nor Nimoy held that opinion in the late Seventies. This was the perfect opportunity for Roddenberry to prove that there was more to Star Trek than Mr. Spock.
The studio were a little concerned that William Shatner would prove too old to be a dashing action hero, and they also wanted a new female character to add to the show’s sex appeal. Roddenberry created three younger characters: Xon would take Spock’s place as science officer, Decker would be a young first officer who could handle some of the running and fighting, and there would be an exotic new navigator, Ilia. The rest of the regular cast—McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and Chapel—would return, all with more experience and added duties.
The pilot episode was to be “In Thy Image,” by Harold Livingston, based on a story by Alan Dean Foster, in which the newly refitted Enterprise was sent to intercept an immensely powerful spacecraft that was on a direct course to Earth. Scripts were written, sets built. A start date for filming the series was set for November 28, 1977. And then, in late July, Paramount’s plans to set up a fourth television network collapsed.
Star Trek bounced back almost immediately. Production was never halted, but the plan for a few months was simply to produce a one-off TV movie—mainly as a way for Paramount to recoup some of their investment. In September, the former Miss India, Persis Khambatta, was cast as Ilia, David Gautreaux as Xon. (Decker proved harder to cast.) The test footage that was shot looked like a mild Seventies update of the original show.
The success of Star Wars made something obvious to Paramount’s executives: the return of Star Trek should be “like Star Wars.” On October 21, 1977, they decided that the project would be upgraded to a full, big-budget cinematic release.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978) proved Star Wars was no fluke—there was a huge audience hungry for science fiction movies. Even James Bond got in on the act, taking a space shuttle to the villain’s orbiting lair in Moonraker (1979). The studio wanted, if anything, a movie bigger than Star Wars, and were happy to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money. They were not the only studio trying to do this. Disney was pouring vast amounts into The Black Hole, a movie that would eventually come out two weeks after Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Star Trek was an existing science fiction franchise, and was immensely popular with a broad audience, in America and abroad. This was exactly the right time to make a Star Trek movie.
This was part of a pattern. The industry was changing, and a new approach to making movies was developing. Instead of producing a lot of medium-budget ($5m–$10m) movies that nearly all made modest profits or modest losses, with the occasional smash hit, studios now planned to spend $25m to make $200m. Such movies would be spectacular, crowd-pleasing, and designed to be blockbusters. Moonraker, in production at the same time as the Star Trek: The Motion Picture, cost $34m, well over twice as much as the previous entry in the James Bond series, The Spy Who Loved Me, but it made $210m worldwide. Every other movie budget was dwarfed by the period’s most expensive film, Superman: The Movie (1978), which was made back-to-back with Superman II (1980), the two together costing about $95m.
Spending so much on a single project was a risky strategy for a movie studio—a flop could bankrupt them. In 1980 this happened to United Artists, who bankrolled Heaven’s Gate, a Western made at the same time as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and possibly costing as much. When it was released in November 1980, it made a mere $3.5m at the box office, bankrupting the studio.
In the late Seventies and early Eighties, Paramount was on a winning streak, with a team of rising star executives like Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dawn Steel, and Don Simpson, all of whom had a hand in bringing Star Trek to cinema screens, and all known for a swaggering, confident approach to the business. The studio had recently put out hits such as The Godfather, Saturday Night Fever, and Grease, and would soon go on to make American Gigolo, Airplane!, and the Friday the 13th and Indiana Jones series.
As Paramount knew, Star Wars, Close Encounters, and Superman showed that audiences wanted spectacle, movement, striking visual effects. The Star Trek movie couldn’t just look like a TV episode . . . and the original sin of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the root cause of almost every single one of its subsequent problems, was that it started out as a TV episode.
To meet the release date, it was felt there was no time to start a new script from scratch. The pilot episode of Star Trek II already had many of the features any new script would need. “In Thy Image” was two hours long and gave an in-story reason for getting the gang back together. It included the launch of a refitted, modernized USS Enterprise, explaining why it didn’t look exactly like the ship from the TV show. The story reintroduced the characters (and a couple of fresh faces) and conformed to the basic format of a brave crew of space explorers heading out to face the unknown. The threat was greater than Captain Kirk and his crew had faced on television, with Earth itself in direct and immediate jeopardy, a plotline never used by the original series. The “high concept” of the antagonist—an augmented NASA probe, returning to judge its creator—was timely, as the Voyager missions were underway. Voyager 1 sent back images of Jupiter from January to April 1979, Voyager 2 arrived in late April and beamed back images until August. The movie would go on to include a sequence where the Enterprise flew past Jupiter, created with the cooperation of NASA using data from the real Voyager probes. All in all, the potential was there for an epic adventure, and plenty of visual spectacle.
At a practical level, the script was a known quantity, one that had been discussed, worked on, and reworked. Gene Roddenberry redrafted Harold Livingston’s script himself—to the point that copies of it circulating when The Motion Picture was announced bore only his name.
The script had problems. No one had ever thought any of the drafts had a satisfying ending. The story started by establishing that the vast alien ship (at this point, it was a giant spaceship, not the vast energy cloud it would be in the finished film) could easily annihilate Klingon battlecruisers, that it was an unstoppable force . . . and this painted the story into a corner, as the only way it could possibly be defeated would be by contriving some form of deus ex machina. Roddenberry further limited the story’s options by insisting that the solution could not rely on violence. This would become a pattern with the Star Trek movies: Roddenberry was dead set against “space battles,” often in the face of demands from the studio, director, actors, and other writers. Roddenberry liked Star Wars, saw it four times at the cinema, and saw its box office success as proof he’d been right all along that there was a market for science fiction movies. The Star Wars movies, of course, were—as the name suggests—packed with thrilling sequences of dogfights in space, large ships bearing down on small ones, and chases through asteroid fields. That was Star Wars, it wasn’t Star Trek. Roddenberry wanted Kirk and his crew to prevail using brains instead of brawn, he wanted the characters to have rich inner lives, not to be action heroes.
While the movie began production without a usable third act, everyone was optimistic that a solution would be found. The lack of an effective ending was seen as an opportunity—they could start with a blank page and go wild, with none of the limitations of the small screen. These limits were, as Roddenberry saw it, not simply those of special effects technology. Unbeknown to the studio, the version of Star Trek that Gene Roddenberry had started to talk about at conventions and in lectures was an exercise in philosophy, in ethics, in depicting a human race that had developed from the awkward adolescence of the twentieth century. Finally, he thought, he’d get to make that Star Trek without having to listen to TV executives and their silly demand that Kirk’s life should consist of a procession of love interests and fist fights.
The switch from a TV pilot to a Hollywood movie necessitated a huge culture shift. A fairly large number of British TV shows had been remade as movies in the Sixties and Seventies—everything from Doctor Who and Thunderbirds to a host of sitcoms like Rising Damp, Porridge, and Dad’s Army. There were very few precedents for American TV shows that became movies, though. In the US, there had been Dragnet, Batman, and Dark Shadows, all films made while the TV shows were in production, using the existing casts and sets. There had been a handful of TV reunion movies, including Gilligan’s Island and Peyton Place. There had been television spinoffs of movies, such as Planet of the Apes and Logan’s Run. There had never been a movie intended for cinemas which was a revival of a canceled TV show.
Since the dawn of the television age, studios had maintained an iron curtain between television and movie production. Movies were seen as the superior form. This operated on every level. Actors and directors might start off in television: Clint Eastwood, say, appeared in eight seasons of Rawhide (1959–65). But once he had moved up to movies like A Fistful of Dollars, that was it: if he returned to television, it would be an admission that his career was over (regardless of the fact that he earned ten times more per episode of Rawhide than he did for starring in A Fistful of Dollars). The same was true in reverse, as when Rock Hudson found himself “demoted” to television when his box office appeal diminished (as we’ve seen, Roddenberry played his part in this). Many of the new breed of Paramount executives had started out in television and success there had seen them “promoted” to movie production.
By definition, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was going to bridge the divide. The movie would use the original cast of television actors but the studio was pragmatic—they would be cheap, they were (with the exception of Leonard Nimoy) already under contract, they were the familiar faces of Star Trek. In any case, it was to be a spectacular special effects adventure, not something driven by movie stars or the need for particularly nuanced performances. The fans would object if Kirk, Spock, and so on were recast . . . and which movie stars would be both available immediately and interested in playing characters from a TV show? The success of Star Wars reassured Paramount that they didn’t need “big name” actors in their science fiction movie.
Having tried and spectacularly failed to make the leap into cinema with Pretty Maids All in a Row, Roddenberry understood that his poor track record would normally mean he had no clout at all with the movie studios. But this seemed to be different. The way he saw it, hiring him was an admission that Paramount needed the existing Star Trek fanbase on side. For years, Trekkies had been writing letters and running campaigns in which they pledged to see a Star Trek movie many times over, and promising to drag their friends and families along. If the television show’s creator was unwilling to give the movie his imprimatur, the Star Trek fans would boycott the movie, ruining its chances. Gene Roddenberry gleefully told his friends the studio were paying him half a million dollars, and that he’d finally been vindicated.
Roddenberry was to be the producer of the movie. He clearly went into The Motion Picture thinking that his role hadn’t changed since the television series, that he would be in charge of making a version of “In Thy Image,” but on a budget of $15m instead of $8m. He already had a script, he had his cast and production team, he even had sets and props built.
In the film, Admiral Kirk convinces his boss that he should return to active duty because he is the one man with the experience and leadership qualities needed to deal with the massive challenge they face. The most powerful entity in the universe believes the most important being in existence is “the Creator.” It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Roddenberry seeing this as semi-autobiographical. But his rude awakening would come quickly.
One of the young Turks at Paramount, Jeffrey Katzenberg, was appointed Vice President in Charge of Production for the Star Trek movie, the studio executive whose role was to oversee the project. Katzenberg would go on to a ten-year stint (1984–94) as chairman of Walt Disney Studios. During his tenure what had been a moribund company would achieve a massive revival of fortune, before he left to become CEO of DreamWorks Animation. He was twenty-seven when he joined the movie, less than half Roddenberry’s age at the time.
The moment Star Trek became a motion picture, Katzenberg wanted experienced movie makers behind the camera. The original director, Robert Collins, who had only ever worked in television, was replaced by Robert Wise. Editor on Charles Laughton’s Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and on Citizen Kane (1941), Wise had subsequently enjoyed a long career as director of movies like West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965), as well as science fiction movies such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Andromeda Strain (1971). He was not a Star Trek fan, although his wife and daughter were. What appealed to Wise was that new movies like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, and The Black Hole were using innovative ways of combining optical and model effects with live action. Wise was intrigued by the challenge of telling a story using new special effects technology like computer-controlled cameras.
Gene Roddenberry was not consulted about the hiring of Wise—Katzenberg drew up a shortlist of people he felt could handle the project and whose schedule was free. Roddenberry had met Wise at a science fiction seminar at Arizona State College. “So when I saw Bob’s name on the list, there was no doubt in my mind that he was the one.” Wise, for his part, recognized that the show’s creator knew the heart of the show and its characters. Roddenberry was “elated” that someone of Wise’s stature was on board,5 and there was none of his customary jostling to establish himself as the alpha male. It would take Roddenberry a while to understand that this wasn’t TV, where directors are “brought in” to film a script, and to add a few distinctive touches. The studio trusted Wise and considered him to be the person in charge of the day-to-day running of the project.
Wise’s friends and family told him, “You can’t possibly think about about doing Star Trek without Spock. I mean, that would be as bad as trying to tell it without Kirk. It’s impossible, it’s crazy to make the film without him.”6 Roddenberry told Wise he had spent three or four years failing to overcome Nimoy’s reticence to return to the role. The actor had fears of typecasting; he had internalized the character of Spock; he wrestled with his relationship with the character; he took himself very seriously as an artist; he was a man of integrity; he felt the studio had exploited his image, limiting his opportunities as an actor while not giving him a fair share of the proceeds. And he distrusted Roddenberry.
Robert Wise cut the Gordian knot, and he did it in a few hours. Nimoy had not wanted to be a regular on a TV show, but being co-star of a big budget movie was an entirely different proposition. Although he was diplomatic about it, Nimoy had far more respect for Robert Wise than he did for Gene Roddenberry. This was evident when Roddenberry, Wise, and Katzenberg visited Nimoy at his home on a Saturday afternoon. Nimoy recalled: “Gene and I greeted each other cordially, and the tone of our conversation remained pleasant, but in all honesty, he appeared agitated, haggard, and preoccupied. I got the impression that he had only come reluctantly, at Katzenberg’s insistence.”7
Nimoy had been sent a copy of the script, and was asked what he thought. His response was a masterpiece of passive-aggression: “Well, is this the screenplay you plan on shooting?”8 Spock, of course, wasn’t featured in the script as he hadn’t been due to appear in the Star Trek II TV show. Roddenberry’s idea was that Spock had returned to Vulcan and had a nervous breakdown, which didn’t appeal to Nimoy in the slightest. Katzenberg ushered Roddenberry out of the room. An hour later, Wise had persuaded Nimoy to come onboard.
Leonard Nimoy did not engage in lengthy negotiations, he simply asked for the same contract as William Shatner, knowing it had a “favored nations” clause that meant no actor could be paid more for appearing in the movie. “This meant that they were co-leads, each receiving equal treatment, equal dressing rooms, and equal salaries.”9
With so much money on the line now, Paramount were able, literally overnight, to conjure up a check that matched the figure Nimoy’s agent had put on a fair cut of past merchandising revenue. Nimoy reportedly received $2.5m in total, including his fee for the movie. Shatner, safely under contract, might have been upset to have gone from lead to co-lead, except that the “favored nations” clause instantly triggered the same payout for him. Now the studio had finally admitted they were making money from Star Trek merchandise, there was also a windfall for Roddenberry.
Nimoy signed his contract as soon as the legal department sent it over, on March 27, 1978. A press conference was held the very next day. Wise, Roddenberry, Michael Eisner, and the full cast were assembled at Paramount studios. Adverts were taken out in the trade press. Roddenberry wrote to all the major fan groups and fanzines. Both the banner at the press conference and the ads used concept art of the Enterprise as redesigned for Star Trek II.
The production team now had twenty-one months to make a movie. Robert Wise set to work. He watched old Star Trek episodes in a screening room. He toured the sets and reviewed the costumes and props, to see what had already been built for the Star Trek II television series/TV movie and what he could use. He instantly decided he had to start again from scratch. One of his first decisions was to dismiss Roddenberry’s long-term associate, costume designer William Ware Theiss. He quickly replaced the television production team with his own people, including the production illustrator Maurice “Zuby” Zuberano, whom he’d worked with for nearly thirty years, and the production designer Hal Michelson. Most people brought in had worked with Wise before at some point.
The director would later complain that the “$45m” figure touted as the final cost of the movie included the money which had already been spent on the Star Trek II series. But it was his decision to ditch what had already been built. That said, it was almost certainly the right thing to do, technically and artistically. The photos we have from Star Trek II make the sets look a little creaky, even for television, and their limitations would have been immediately obvious on the big screen. The movie was coming out weeks before the 1980s began, and anticipating the new decade, fashion had shifted away from the flowing fabrics and bright colors of the early Seventies to far more austere palettes and clean lines. Star Trek II’s future already looked a lot like the past.
Wise had identified the same problems with the script as everyone else. Rewrites were needed anyway to accommodate Spock, and Gene Roddenberry would not be doing those rewrites. When Harold Livingston learned that the studio were making a Star Trek movie, he managed to acquire a copy of the script. He believed that what he read was his work, with a series of alterations by Roddenberry which consistently weakened the story. Livingston complained to the studio; the studio took his side, and rehired him to strip the script back and rework it as a feature. Livingston had assurances from Katzenberg and Wise that Roddenberry would not be allowed to interfere with his work. Tellingly, Leonard Nimoy started spending evenings at Livingston’s house. There would be a new draft of the script by July 19, 1978.
The fixed release date meant it wasn’t possible to wait for the script to be completed before designing and building replacement sets, props, models, and costumes. Although not everything had been locked down, the basic storyline of the film was set and it was clear that, once the Enterprise launched, almost every scene of the movie would take place on the ship. The studio wanted a spectacular movie, so the Enterprise needed spectacular interiors. The Star Trek II sets were almost identical in size to those of the old TV show. Wise set his new team to work on designs that were generally faithful to the basic layouts established in the original series, but on a far grander scale.
The best example of the scale of the upgrade was the recreation area, the place crew members of the USS Enterprise relaxed when off duty. Mike Minor had painted concept art of a “recreation room” for Star Trek II: a square set with about half a dozen comfy chairs, a few exotic potted plants and a couple of electronic games. For The Motion Picture, this was transformed into the “recreation deck,” or rec deck, a vast communal space on various levels with a panoramic view of space. The set that was built had walls twenty-four feet tall, and was large enough to accommodate 300 extras for a scene where Kirk gave the entire crew a pre-launch briefing. It took up the whole of Paramount Stage 8, a hangar-like soundstage that would later hold standing sets for The Next Generation.
At this early stage, Roddenberry and Wise were on the same page. Wise was acclimatizing himself to the project, the cast and crew, the script, and Star Trek more generally. There’s the distinct sense that Roddenberry reveled in getting the Enterprise looking just the way he wanted. The subdued color scheme of both the new Enterprise and the uniforms is noticeable similar to the Enterprise of the first pilot, “The Cage,” rather than the primary colors of the broadcast series and Star Trek II.
But, unconsciously or not, Gene Roddenberry was still making a television pilot. The script had been structured in a very canny way, in those terms. It ensured that characters visited various rooms in the ship we would have seen week after week in a television series: the bridge, the transporter room, sickbay, Captain Kirk’s living quarters (which could be re-dressed to serve as anyone else’s room), main engineering, a set of corridors, the recreation area. This tour of the Enterprise wasn’t done purely for story reasons, it was financial: if this had been TV, the first episode would be very expensive, but every one which followed would be able to make use of sets that had already been built and paid for. It’s exactly what Roddenberry would later do with Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first episode of which featured new crew members exploring the Enterprise-D and spending time in such out-of-the-way places as the holodeck and battle bridge.
Over the course of a TV series, the recreation deck, the transporter room, Kirk’s quarters, and sickbay would have ended up appearing hundreds of times, shot from every angle. This approach made very little sense for a one-off movie. Huge and elaborate sets were built. They’re solidly made, interesting spaces, packed with little details. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, most areas of the ship are only in a couple of scenes each. The huge rec deck appears in the scene early on where the whole crew is assembled (and the mass of people obscure the set), and in a single later scene, when Decker shows the robot Ilia around and explains the concept of “recreation.” If a television writer had put that in a script for the original show, Roddenberry would have scolded him and told him to relocate it to Decker’s quarters or even a corridor.
Across the whole project, a great deal of time, money, and effort was spent on things that either don’t appear on screen, or which barely appear. The table in Kirk’s quarters has four chairs stowed in it, each on a rail that allowed it to glide out and lock into place. At some point in a running TV show we’d see someone use it. They don’t in The Motion Picture. (Roddenberry perhaps expresses his own frustration in his novelization of the movie, when he has Kirk decide to have the thing removed at the earliest opportunity.)
As the props people began their work, it was a similar story. It was assumed that the crew would need phasers. Dozens of prop phasers were built using state-of-the-art electronics (few props at the time contained printed circuits). They lit up, the exact color and configuration of the lights depending on whether the phaser was set to stun or kill. As with the TV phasers, a smaller unit about the size of a bar of soap could be detached from the “gun” part of the device, to act as a more discreet weapon. In the movie, the guns hang from the belts of the security guards. No one ever draws their weapon—the two scenes where that happened were both edited out.
An ingenious seam was designed for the tricorders, so that no hinge was visible when the prop was opened. We never see anyone open a tricorder in the movie. A beautiful “computer clipboard” was designed and an etching technique was used that meant when lights were played over its plastic surface, it appeared to be a sophisticated animated computer display. This is never seen on screen. In all, 1,200 phasers, tricorders, clipboards, and similar tools and gadgets were created. The designers were told not to skimp by using dummy wood or rubber props, even if they were to be held by background characters, but to cast them all in fiberglass or plastic. Almost every prop had some sort of lighting feature or clever trick.
Again, this would make perfect sense if a TV pilot were being made. The phasers would have been used at some point. Replacement props would have been needed for those lost or damaged over the course of filming a whole season. Many of the props built for The Motion Picture would end up being reused in the sequel movies, and in the four TV shows that followed (the most prominent example was that the corridors were repainted to become those of the Enterprise-D in The Next Generation). At this point, though, it represented a vast amount of expenditure of precious time and effort, and therefore money, for very little screen time.
The irony was that Star Wars had been made on the cheap. The special effects were state-of-the-art in places, George Lucas’s movie pioneering computer-controlled cameras which allowed very complicated composite model shots to be accomplished, but the models used in those shots were “kitbashed”—made by putting together pieces from existing model kits. Virtually all the iconic Star Wars props are existing items with a few pieces of junk glued on to them. Luke Skywalker’s light saber was made from the handle of an old flash gun, bits of a broken calculator and four strips of rubber (the bits kept falling off, so are different from scene to scene). The sets were rarely much bigger than what was seen in shot. Lucas’s technique was very simple: move things along so fast you don’t have time to spot that C3PO’s leg is falling apart as he walks, or that they were forced to use a take where one of the Stormtroopers banged his head against a door frame, or that there are at least two places where members of the production team have wandered into shot. Lucas was acutely aware just how ramshackle his final movie was. Audiences, though, didn’t care—indeed perhaps what’s guaranteed to make Star Wars fans angriest is that every time the movie is re-released, Lucas has fixed things and improved the special effects.
One place where The Motion Picture’s extravagant approach was justified was the bridge set. About half the scenes of the movie were set on the bridge, and the story called for extensive use of controls, computer displays, and so on. A great deal of planning went into building a set that allowed Wise flexibility in framing his shots. A flaw with the design of the television series bridge set was that the stations were positioned so all the characters had their backs to Captain Kirk. For the new bridge, consoles were moved around, placed at subtly different angles. The floor was given different levels, a vaulted ceiling was constructed.
A lot of thought was put into background displays and into making the controls and screens and other instruments visually interesting. Instead of the old random arrangements of flashing lightbulbs and rocker switches, each station on the bridge of the movie Enterprise was given a set of ergonomic controls, all carefully labeled. It had been designed by a team with experience in laying out control panels for submarines and aircraft. This was actually a pared-down version of the original plans. Gene Roddenberry was keen that the controls should be elegant and minimalist. Even on the bridge, though, the design went far beyond what could be seen on screen. When the ship went to red alert, headrests would emerge from the back of the chairs, a system that required a dozen pieces of sophisticated hydraulics and a computer-controlled system to synchronize them. How many viewers even noticed?
By the end of July, all the key personnel had been hired and there was a shooting script of a sort, albeit without a workable third act. Stephen Collins was cast in the role of Commander Decker, the young commander displaced from the captain’s chair by the return of Kirk. Persis Khambatta’s initiation as Ilia came on July 26, 1978, when her head was finally shaved for the role. The occasion was filmed and photographed, and was reported in the press at the time.
Most of the actors were a little bemused to be handed manuals explaining what each button on their control panels did. Most conceded, though, that the elaborate sets immersed them in their role. Walter Koenig was delighted to discover that pressing a button would often activate a row of lights, a display of some kind, or even cause a new device to emerge from a side panel.
Following the fanfare of the press conference, and having been told how tight the deadline to deliver the film was, the cast had been essentially sat on their hands for ten weeks, waiting for the new sets and costumes to be made. There had been a reading of an extremely unfinished script, costume fittings and makeup tests, and very little communication. Morale was high, though, with each of the regulars thinking the gaps in the script would be filled by the expansion of their own role (they all had suggestions).
It didn’t hurt that checks from Paramount started showing up. The cast had all been bought out of their Star Trek II television contracts—James Doohan claimed that this was his biggest Star Trek payday. The studio had originally wanted to fold that payment into the fee for appearing in the movie, but the cast had successfully revolted over the issue: they would be paid for the television series and get a fair rate for appearing in a big Hollywood movie. For all the talk of “the show that wouldn’t die,” this was the first money any of them had received from the studio in almost ten years.
Gene Roddenberry was present when filming began on August 7, 1978, with scenes involving Sulu and Chekov, then later Kirk and Uhura, on the bridge. As scripted, the crew of the Enterprise were rushing to prepare the starship for launch, and these scenes showed technicians frantically fitting components to the bridge. Art mirrored nature, as the set wasn’t quite completed when the first scenes were filmed.
The cast’s initial enthusiasm quickly began to dissipate. The new shooting script still lacked a workable ending but the main objection was that, in the completed pages, most of the returning cast had very little to do. Once again, promises that Nichelle Nichols would get a meatier part were broken. A subplot explaining that Uhura was now Head of Starfleet Communications, a very senior officer, and on Kirk’s mission as a favor to him, were dropped. Walter Koenig felt Chekov’s first appearance on screen was important enough that it deserved a closeup. Robert Wise quietly disabused him of that. James Doohan was given more scenes, but one of his favorites was cut out.
It escaped no one’s notice that Stephen Collins and Persis Khambatta, playing new characters, had plenty of lines, a little backstory and character progression. Both were involved in the climax of the film, and Ilia appeared on the posters with Kirk and Spock. A lot of the publicity concentrated on the striking image of a bald alien woman—a former Miss India—in a very short kimono. Shatner was later dismissive: “Khambatta, a stunningly beautiful model, was also a stunningly bad actress, once proving that assertion by requiring a whopping nineteen takes of a single line, ‘No.’”10
But Khambatta was able to assert at the time that “everybody was so nice and helpful to me.”11 Whatever her merits as an actress—and a role in which she was transformed from a navigator reporting what her instruments were saying into a stiff, monosyllabic robot possibly wasn’t the best way to assess those—Khambatta suffered for her art. Having already had her head shaved, she burned her throat on the dry ice used in a shower scene, and almost fell fifteen feet through a gap in the set. Most horrifically of all, the xenon lights used in her final “ascension” sequence were so bright they seared off a layer of her eyes, blinding her for a few days.12
It was less harrowing for most of the cast—indeed their main issue probably was staving off boredom. Every scene, except for a couple of shots where geysers in Yellowstone National Park were used to stand in for Vulcan, was filmed on the Paramount soundstages. Most of the actors spent the vast majority of their time on the bridge set. Every shot required elaborate rigging of lighting and electronic gear. Apart from Ilia, the crew were dressed in virtually identical uniforms that were, by general consent, uncomfortable and unflattering. There were many technical glitches— the actors could give a great take, but if a lightbulb blew, the footage couldn’t be used. Some of the mechanisms proved so noisy that the voice track had to be redubbed.
The bridge scenes were shot for the most part in script order, but it was slow going. All the cast had worked on movies before, but not on such a long shoot. They were used to filming television:
The pace of making films is startlingly, amazingly slow in comparison to television. It all has to do with the lighting. On television, the shots are designed for a small screen, and you can get away with a great deal of cheating in lighting a scene. Block the scene, string up some lights, bring the actors in and shoot that sucker. Get an hour show out every week.13
They were completing about two scenes a day, on average. Making what was essentially a TV script at the pace of a movie was the worst of both worlds, and William Shatner complained that “our production schedule became a work of fiction, and our already turtle-esque pace became downright snailian.”14 At least Kirk was the center of attention. For people like George Takei, Walter Koenig, and Nichelle Nichols, who were in every bridge scene but with barely anything to say or do, the days dragged on and on. Koenig started keeping a journal and struck deals with Starlog magazine and Pocket Books to publish it.
The scenes were repetitive—slight variations on staring at a viewscreen and reporting what they were looking at. Early on, there wasn’t even any concept art to guide the actors, so they literally didn’t know what they were meant to be looking at. The last act of the script was still being written. The cast assumed the pace and spectacle would emerge in the finished film, that the live footage would be snappily edited and intercut with amazing visual effects, but they had all noticed that every revision seemed to edit out a joke or trim a few lines of banter.
The actors’ ire focused on one scene in particular: the wormhole sequence. Ironically, this is one of the few scenes in the finished film where there’s a sense of urgency or imminent jeopardy. The first time the Enterprise goes to warp speed—almost an hour into the movie—a problem with the engines traps the ship in a wormhole, subjecting the crew to time distortions. It’s a sequence that lasts exactly three minutes on screen, with less than twenty lines of dialogue. To achieve their vision of the scene, the special effects people needed a great deal of footage, from a variety of angles, filmed with different lighting and on different film stock. Stephen Collins remembers it being composed of “48 set ups, but each set up was shot four different ways: at regular speed, and then again in slow motion, and then with a 65mm camera, and then again in 65mm slow motion.”15 Which meant two hundred shots, before taking into account retakes necessitated either by an actor forgetting a line or by a technical problem. According to various reports, it took between two and three weeks to shoot. The performances had to be identical every time, and the scene required the cast to be thrown around, so all of the actors were soon covered in bruises. The scene was to be overlaid with swirling lights (painstakingly animated by hand, a process that would take many weeks), the soundtrack was to be loud and electronically distorted. Without any of that, the raw footage was of actors jiggling themselves about and shouting. Nichelle Nichols has said, “everyday we would look at the dailies and cringe; it was awful.”16
Even after breaking free of the wormhole, filming dragged on. There still wasn’t a completed script. Harold Livingston had stormed off the project after finding that on multiple occasions Roddenberry had edited his work before passing it on to Wise and Katzenberg. The dispute between Roddenberry and Livingston meant that multiple, conflicting script pages would appear, bearing the initials GR or HL, often specifying to the minute when they’d been written. At one point Livingston rewrote a scene not knowing it had been filmed three weeks before. Each rewrite had the potential to change the production schedule or add a special effects shot and this all cost money. By November, Roddenberry was the sole writer, and the budget stood at $24m.17 One extra, Billy Van Zandt (nowadays an established playwright), was hired for a single day to play an alien crew member (he wore contact lenses and a wig). By the end of filming, he’d been there twelve weeks and been paid $16,000.18
Everything about the movie was becoming stiff, slow, and joyless. Even the title had caught the disease—it shifted from Star Trek, to Star Trek: The Movie, then changed again, because of Superman: The Movie, to the rather pompous Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The model for a “serious” science fiction movie was 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek was following its template: a first act defining the problem, the spaceship launched at the start of the second act and then settling into a routine, an encounter with an alien leading to transcendence at the end. The novelization made the link explicit, with Kirk talking about a mysterious monolith being discovered centuries before on the moon.
Roddenberry had a tendency to lapse into long, philosophizing speeches in his work and the various pressures and deadlines were bringing out the worst in him. He was determined to make something more morally worthwhile than Star Wars. Meanwhile, Wise was keen to avoid the colorful camp of the original television series.
Other hands would have given a lighter touch to the twist that the great threat turns out to be a returned Voyager probe. It’s a concept that’s easy to understand: quirky, a little reminiscent of the reveal of the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes; and it links the world of the future with the NASA missions of our own. V’Ger turns out to be simultaneously mundane and utterly weird. The fact that it sends its own probe to scout out the interior of the Enterprise, “disguising” it as a remarkably beautiful woman, is an idea, in however deadpan a manner the characters have to treat it, that is funny. Roddenberry was determined to treat the reveal with utter solemnity, as a way to ponder the nature of god and creation, and the limits of knowledge.
When they saw the movie, fans were quick to note that the twist was the same as the episode “The Changeling” from the second series of the original run, in which an ancient space probe from Earth, Nomad, was driven mad after being repaired by aliens. One reviewer felt the movie should have been called “Where Nomad Had Gone Before.” That story was light on philosophy, featuring a robotic probe stalking the corridors of the Enterprise and casually killing anyone who interfered with it (including Scotty at one point, although Nomad resurrects him). The twist is not integral to the story but, because Nomad mistakes Kirk for its creator, it puts the resolution in Kirk’s hands in a way that’s concrete and direct.
Roddenberry’s heart may have been in the right place. He wanted the movie to be a good example of science fiction tackling big ideas, to create something epic, thoughtful, deep. It’s far more constructive to view Star Trek: The Motion Picture as a conceptual sequel to 2001, and not a remake of “The Changeling.” Ultimately, though, the big difference was that Stanley Kubrick worked with Arthur C. Clarke and masterfully used some jarring cinematic techniques. Star Trek’s DNA was in seafaring romps, in the character-driven narratives of network TV—the fans had declared “optimism” and “emotion” to be key to the appeal. In 2001 the dialogue was kept sparse and the audience were allowed to try to piece it together. Roddenberry’s script often feels more like Gene Roddenberry’s own monologues about the nature of the universe, broken up and divided between the characters.
Roddenberry was feeling the pressure. George Takei noticed that his boss was gaining weight. Susan Sackett reports that Roddenberry was smoking more pot, and— for the first time—was seeing a therapist in Beverly Hills because of “his obvious stress and mounting depression.”19 Roddenberry was also, for the first time in his life, using cocaine.
More to the point, he hadn’t produced an ending, and filming—even as far beyond schedule as it had fallen— was about to run out of pages to shoot. The studio had finally lost patience. Robert Wise was tactful, but consistently came down on the other side whenever Roddenberry argued a point. Roddenberry found himself outvoted on something as basic as how to pronounce the name of the antagonist. It was spelled “Veejur” in the script (most of the time), and Roddenberry said it with emphasis on the second syllable: “Vay-JAW.” Nimoy and Shatner decided “VEE-juh” was better. The official spelling changed to “V’Ger.” Roddenberry’s novelization retained “Vejur.”
Roddenberry was hardly Robert Wise’s only headache. It gradually dawned on members of the cast and crew that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were both taking their “favored nations” clause so literally that they were counting lines and insisting on having the same number in any given scene. Ironically, this tension was eased in early October, when another clause was activated that allowed them a say in the script once filming had reached a certain number of days. This led to an uneasy truce between the two leads, and they began suggesting lines and whole scenes. Nimoy effectively imposed a character arc on Spock, one in which the Vulcan gradually came to understand the emptiness of V’Ger’s reliance on pure logic. Shatner, for his part, toned down Kirk’s bickering with Decker.
Together, Shatner and Nimoy came up with a scene where Kirk treats V’Ger like a child, ordering his officers off the bridge. Wise liked it. Roddenberry hated it, and was angry that he was being overruled. Wise took the dispute to Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Katzenberg rehired Harold Livingston—who demanded $10,000 a week and the promise of future work from the studio. The official reason given for Roddenberry’s disappearance from the set was that he needed time to write the novelization.
Virtually the last part of the shoot Roddenberry attended was the filming on October 16 and 17 of the “briefing session” scene, where Kirk gathers the entire Enterprise crew on the rec deck to explain the nature of the threat to the Earth. The scene involved 300 extras in Starfleet uniforms, around 125 of them long-term Star Trek fans and friends and family of the crew, such as Susan Sackett and Robert Wise’s wife Millicent. After that, Roddenberry was rarely, if ever, seen on set. By the end he “was in terrible physical shape, and was drinking more than ever.”20
Filming caught up with the finished script pages in early November and production was put on hold for a couple of days. The final script was only ready on November 29—to put this in perspective, about a week after Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, and George Takei had completed filming. The scenes from the climax of the film, featuring just Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Collins, and Khambatta, were filmed after a short Christmas break with principal photography ending on January 26, 1979. The original plan had been for filming to be complete three months earlier, by the end of October. A number of sequences that didn’t feature the main cast had yet to be filmed—scenes on the Klingon ship, the Federation space station destroyed by V’Ger, and some background crowd scenes for the San Francisco sequence. Freed from the pressure of movie production, a New Year’s resolution led Roddenberry to quit smoking and take up jogging.
The worst was yet to come. The live action filming had dragged but everyone had been assuming that, once the special effects were added, the movie would come alive. The studio had paid Robert Abel’s effects house $6m, about twice Star Wars’ special effects budget, and the script required twice as many effects shots as any previous film. By February, Robert Wise had become extremely concerned that he’d not seen any effects footage. Around February 20, he insisted Abel show him everything his team had produced. A screening was arranged. Wise had dealt with every problem so far with a calmness and professionalism that had impressed the cast and crew and steadied a lot of nerves. All reports have him emerging from the screening of the special effects footage incandescent with rage.
There was nothing usable. Millions of dollars had been spent but so little had been produced by Abel’s team that there’s some debate whether a single frame of theirs appears in the final movie (it’s thought that, if there is anything, it’s the shot of the asteroid exploding at the end of the wormhole sequence, a test explosion that no one had intended to make it to the finished movie).
Because the movie was locked into the December 7 premiere date, and had been promoted to the studio, distributors, licensees, fans, and the general audience as a special effects spectacular, this represented a major crisis for the movie. There were some in the studio who sought to write it off at this point. Instead, Douglas Trumbull, who’d worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, arrived in early March to take control of the film’s visual effects. He was given $10m, and soon brought onboard his protégé John Dykstra, who had worked on Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. Trumbull would shoot the Enterprise and the interiors of V’Ger, Dykstra would create sequences from early in the movie, including the V’Ger cloud, the Klingon battleships (the same model, filmed three times), and the Federation space station destroyed by V’Ger.
It was all hands on deck. Anecdotes abound. Surely it’s apocryphal that footage shot of one large model was carefully framed to crop out the two model-makers, who were frantically painting the other end? Other props were held out of car windows as they were driven to the studio, in the hope that the paint would dry in time. The studio paid for hotels by the model-makers’ workshops so the technicians didn’t waste precious minutes commuting. By the end, hammocks were set up in the studio itself.
All of this cost money. When custom decals were needed overnight for one set of props, the supplier demanded and received $50,000 for work that would normally cost a few hundred.
There had been an ambitious plan for the interior of V’Ger. In Concept art from Abel’s group, the scene looks like a prog rock album cover: a trippy, claustrophobic space, the Enterprise surrounded by a rippling field of screens that show it from every angle; giant eyes, cutaways of the ship, closeups of individuals. The crew would be in a nightmare environment where they were being scrutinized by an alien intelligence. It was nearly impossible to bring to life before the age of computer generated imagery. In the event, the final film shows the Enterprise in a vast, almost featureless space—a vast black cavern with a few distant lights . . . something that didn’t feel claustrophobic at all, and wasn’t that visually distinct from shots of the Enterprise traveling through space. The Marvel comic and novel versions portray the interior of V’Ger much more vividly and dramatically.
As Trumbull handed over footage, Wise edited each new sequence into the working print of the movie. The model work was technically some of the best ever seen in the movies. But there was no time to integrate the material with any subtlety, and obviously there was no time to reshoot or add sequences. Wise had to use what he was given and, perhaps because he knew the time and effort that had gone into the work, he seemed loath to cut a frame of it. The result is that the movie often rather crudely switches between long scenes of live action, to model work, and back to live action. The special effects shots take up over twenty-five minutes of the running time. There are almost five minutes’ worth of footage of the Enterprise in spacedock, a series of long panning shots that seem designed to show off every angle of the model. But once the ship is underway, what we see isn’t very varied or imaginative—the Enterprise flies though space, from the right of the screen to the left, almost always filling the screen, with little or nothing else to interact with.
Perhaps the ultimate indictment of the new work was that, when these new special effects shots were edited with the live action, Wise decided he needed to bring some of the main cast back for reshoots because their original horrified, awestruck performances now seemed like ludicrous over-reactions.
The last effects shot was delivered on November 29, 1979, a week before the premiere. Douglas Trumbull spent early December in hospital with nervous exhaustion. Things came down so close to the wire that Paramount had to charter planes to get the prints to some cinemas.
Roddenberry bears some blame, because a special effects team has to work from a script and the script had been subject to countless rewrites. But he’d warned Wise as early as July the previous year that he was skeptical that the effects could be achieved with the time and money allowed. And by the time things hit crisis point, Roddenberry had vanished from the set.
He was writing the novelization of the film and found some measure of revenge doing so. Harold Livingston did not receive an extra penny for the book rights, Roddenberry was paid $400,000. Roddenberry’s name was prominent on the cover; Livingston’s and Alan Dean Foster’s names appear in a typeface less than half the size. Roddenberry starts the book with an introduction by Captain Kirk saying how wonderful Roddenberry is, and then another under his own name saying much the same thing. Knowing the production history of the movie gives an interesting slant to this line from the foreword, ostensibly written by Kirk himself: “While I cannot control other depictions of these events that you may see, hear and feel, I can promise that every description, idea, and word on these pages is the exact and true story of Vejur and Earth as it was seen, heard and felt by James T. Kirk.”21
The book was written quickly and completed at 3:00 a.m. on the day before it had to go to the typesetters.22 Even with a tight deadline, writing the book allowed Roddenberry a degree of freedom he’d never had before; he could allow his imagination free rein without worrying about the effects budget. The book starts very strongly, with Kirk on holiday in Alexandria (at a museum run jointly by Egypt and Israel, who had spent much of the Seventies either at war on or the verge of it). There’s some world-building— the Mediterranean of Kirk’s time has been dammed at the Straits of Gibraltar, the water used to irrigate the Sahara. Kirk receives a top priority alert and heads back to Starfleet HQ. The novel is peppered with details either cut from the script or dreamed up by Roddenberry to address shortfalls in the movie’s story. A significant detail restored from an earlier draft is that Loni Ciani, the woman killed in the transporter accident alongside Mr. Sonak, was Kirk’s ex-wife. Roddenberry clarifies that by Kirk’s time, marriages are conducted on a fixed-term basis. Unlike the movie, the novel allows for inner monologues that flesh out the characters’ thought processes and add new spins on the material. It makes for a much more dynamic, engaging story.
It is perhaps surprising that Gene Roddenberry would never complete another Star Trek novel. He started adapting an earlier story idea, “The God Thing,” at one point roping in Walter Koenig to help. This was slow going and went on the backburner once The Next Generation started.
Roddenberry’s absence was noted, but few in the cast and crew were clamoring for his return. The cast had received word that the special effects weren’t going to save the movie. The film was edited together so hurriedly that Robert Wise had to carry the only existing print to the opening. It received a gala premiere in the MacArthur Theater in Georgetown, just outside Washington DC, and was attended by NASA officials and politicians as well as the cast and crew—including, of course, Roddenberry. The studio had prepared for three thousand Star Trek fans to be outside the private screening but only a couple of hundred showed up.
It was the first time even Wise had seen the completed film. Roddenberry had not been involved in the editing process—he’d accepted that there wasn’t time for them to implement any changes he might have suggested. The reaction was not good. William Shatner fell asleep. Other cast members emerged baffled. The consensus afterwards was that the movie was a major misfire.
One studio executive described it as a “$35m turkey”— although, as we’ve seen, that probably underestimates what was spent by at least $10m. How much the movie cost depends on what you count. When asked, Robert Wise only counted what he’d spent, which didn’t include the money spent on the Star Trek II sets, costumes, and salaries. Nor did he include the five million dollars or so paid to Shatner, Nimoy, and Roddenberry for merchandising royalties, a condition of Nimoy signing up for the movie. These were choices he and the studio made as part of the price for making Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
A more persuasive argument for reducing the price tag is to note that the Star Trek sequels (the movies and TV shows) saved a lot of money by using sets, props, costumes, and models built for The Motion Picture. While the studio say that the sequel, The Wrath of Khan, was far cheaper to make, they don’t, as far as we can tell, take into account that the second Star Trek movie saved millions by reusing the massively expensive bridge set, the giant model of the USS Enterprise, and various props and other items. It’s standard accountancy practice to amortize the cost of the sets and props when they’re reused in other projects, but Paramount appear to have chosen not to do that, exaggerating the difference in cost between the first and second movies.
Any discussion of the huge budget should take into account the enormous guaranteed earnings: before the movie was completed, the distributors had paid Paramount $30m, ABC had paid at least $10m for the television rights, and a similar amount had been raised selling licenses for tie-in merchandise.
Fueled by the reaction of the cast, by Roddenberry himself, by the fact that the sequel saw a big change in direction for the series, and—yes—because it’s a film where very little happens very slowly, Star Trek: The Motion Picture has gone down in fan lore as a flop. However, this is not the case.
Many more people saw it at the cinema than any other Star Trek movie until 2009’s relaunch of the franchise. The Motion Picture was the fourth highest-grossing movie of the year and earned more than the smash hits Alien, Apocalypse Now, 10, and The Muppet Movie. It did better in the US than Moonraker—the highest grossing entry in the James Bond franchise to that point. The Motion Picture opened at number one at the US box office. It earned $12m in its first weekend, a record at the time (although the movie industry placed nothing like same the emphasis on the opening weekend that they do now, with hit movies staying in circulation for many months). It went on to rake in $50m by the New Year, $82m in America and almost $100m more worldwide. Star Trek: The Motion Picture finished its first run in cinemas by scraping into the top thirty highest-grossing movies of all time.23
The movie appeared at the dawn of the home video cassette era and did exceptionally well in that market too. It was released in October 1980 on VHS and Betamax, and is one of very few films to be continuously available on home video for over thirty-five years. It did spectacularly well abroad. It received three Oscar nominations (Art Direction, Special Effects, and Original Score, losing to All That Jazz, Alien, and A Little Romance respectively). It made a lot of money. But the studio wasn’t happy.
The main issue, of course, was that the movie had been ferociously expensive. Only three movies released in 1979 earned more than Star Trek, but they cost a fraction to make: Kramer vs. Kramer (which cost $8m), The Amityville Horror (with a budget of less than $5m), and Rocky II (around $7m). Star Trek couldn’t even use the excuse that science fiction movies were always very expensive: Alien had cost $11m, and the sequel to Star Wars, in production at the time, was budgeted at $18m (although it too would go massively over budget).
Paramount had survived and Star Trek: The Motion Picture had pulled a profit . . . but the production had wasted vast amounts of money to produce a movie that no one involved liked very much.
The sheer scale of the box office success of The Motion Picture demonstrated a demand for Star Trek, but it also demonstrated just how insignificant the TV series’ fan base was. It’s impossible to define a “Star Trek fan” but, adding up every fan club member, everyone who attended a convention, or even owned a Star Trek book or toy, and assuming they saw it in the cinema more than once, and dragged a different set of friends and family members along each time, it’s impossible to get anywhere near the thirty to thirty-five million tickets that were sold in the US. Star Trek could reach a far greater audience than the people obsessed with the old TV show.
The hardcore fans would be more likely to buy the novelization, the comics and toys, and this wasn’t lost on Paramount or the comics or toy industries. The novelization stayed on The New York Times’ bestseller list for six months. Its legacy was a series of Star Trek novels published by Pocket Books that continues to this day and now runs to several hundred volumes.
Star Wars had demonstrated that, for some movies, the box office was only one source of revenue. Star Trek merchandise was already a proven seller, but massive sales for Star Wars toys, books, and comics showed that the market for such things was orders of magnitude greater than the wildest dreams of Lincoln Enterprises. A December release tied The Motion Picture into the lucrative holiday season and the studio had flooded stores with Star Trek toys, games, models, comics, and books. After an energetic presentation from Dawn Steel, Vice-President of Marketing and Licensing, licensors queued up. Pocket Books planned to publish fifteen books tying directly into the movie. Marvel Comics would publish an adaptation. A range of action figures carefully modeled on the scale of toymaker Kenner’s immensely popular Star Wars line would be released. Star Trek: The Motion Picture has the distinction of being the very first movie to tie in with a McDonald’s Happy Meal. One of the commercials McDonald’s aired has the distinction of being the first place the Klingon language was ever heard. Steel later estimated that $250m of Star Trek merchandise was sold.24 Her achievement was all the more impressive because she didn’t have a single clip of the movie to show potential licensors.
The novelization sold “close to a million copies.” Marvel Comics’ adaptation did well. The first movie generated more merchandise than the next five combined—but stores had dramatically underestimated the demand for Star Wars merchandise and, not wanting to be caught out again, they overcompensated with Star Trek. Many items didn’t sell as well as expected, the action figures proving a particular disappointment. Pocket Books dropped a couple of the titles they’d announced and the planned second and third waves of toy lines were also scaled back.
The Motion Picture, then, produced a series of paradoxical results: it was a huge commercial success that the studio considered a financial disaster; it catapulted Star Trek from being a creaky old TV show with a vocal fan following into a fully-fledged state-of-the-art movie, even if one that few people liked. It proved the Star Trek name could sell toys, books and fast food . . . but the market had been flooded with stock that would take years to clear.
It also demonstrated Gene Roddenberry’s limitations as a storyteller and manager. The studio were looking for a scapegoat, and Roddenberry had made very sure that his name was plastered all over the credits and the novelization. The studio concluded that they needed a radical change of direction if there was going to be a sequel. And that meant one thing: Gene Roddenberry could have no meaningful involvement.