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Executives Who Played Pivotal Roles in the Star Trek Story
Although creator-producer Gene Roddenberry envisioned Star Trek vividly, preparing a sixteen-page outline that described the program’s setting and characters in meticulous detail, and even provided thumbnail story ideas, the concept continued to evolve as it journeyed from scenario to screen. Along the way, a handful of studio executives and network programmers changed the course of the series’ development, some through their support of the program and others by their lack of interest in it. If any of these behind-the-scenes power brokers had reached a different decision, Star Trek might have emerged as a very different show—if it emerged at all.
Norman Felton
Roddenberry’s first attempt to sell Star Trek was unsuccessful but instructive. Norman Felton (whose Arena Productions developed Roddenberry’s first series, The Lieutenant, in conjunction with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) not only rejected Trek but provided a litany of reasons why the idea would never work—complaints Roddenberry would hear time and again from other executives. Felton and his working-class parents had emigrated from London to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929. The then-sixteen-year-old Felton found work driving a delivery truck but dreamed of becoming a playwright. Seven years later he won the Rockefeller Fellowship in Playwriting, which allowed him to attend the University of Iowa, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1940 and a master’s the following year. After college Felton hired on with NBC radio in Chicago. With the dawn of television, he moved to New York to pursue opportunities in the new medium and won his first Emmy Award in 1952 for directing an episode of Robert Montgomery Presents. After forming Arena Productions, he created the highly rated medical drama Dr. Kildare, which ran from 1961 to ’66. At the time Roddenberry pitched Star Trek to Felton, the producer was on the cusp of his greatest success, launching The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which ran from 1964 to ’68, earned Felton a second Emmy, and spawned the short-lived Girl from U.N.C.L.E. spin-off.
Roddenberry approached Felton even before The Lieutenant was officially canceled, but Felton became the first of several executives to pass on Star Trek. He was concerned about the production demands and potential costs of the show, which from the beginning Roddenberry pictured as an hour-long, full-color program. Felton also questioned whether adult audiences would embrace an outer space adventure series. While the sci-fi anthology The Twilight Zone had met with success, as of 1964 the only shows with spaceships, ray guns, and other elements that featured prominently in Roddenberry’s proposal were kiddie fare like Captain Video, Space Patrol, and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Many other executives, Roddenberry would soon learn, shared Felton’s trepidation. Had Felton backed Roddenberry’s idea, Star Trek might have had a much quicker route to the screen, but it wouldn’t be the Star Trek we know today, which was shaped by the input of Herb Solow at Desilu and the demands of executives at NBC.
As it happened, Star Trek and Norman Felton parted ways and followed different trajectories. Although he worked through the 1970s, none of the series Felton produced following The Man from U.N.C.L.E. survived more than a season. He is a past president of the Producers Guild of America, which bestows the Norman Felton Award annually to the year’s Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television Drama.
Herb Solow (and Oscar Katz)
The well-connected Roddenberry continued to shop Star Trek around town, earning rejections from MGM’s Alan Courtney and other executives before Oscar Katz and Herb Solow at Desilu Productions finally expressed interest in the proposal. Katz, the Executive in Charge of Production for Desilu, and Solow, his assistant, were tasked with finding worthwhile investments for the studio’s meager development funds, money supplied primarily by CBS as part of Desilu owner Lucille Ball’s contract for The Lucy Show. When Katz, a former vice president at CBS, left Desilu in 1965, Solow ascended to the position of Executive in Charge of Production.
Solow, a graduate of Dartmouth College, began his career as a talent agent and later served as head of daytime production at CBS and later NBC, where he made contacts that proved beneficial to Star Trek. One of the first projects Solow convinced Katz to gamble on was Star Trek. (Katz and Solow also used Desilu’s resources to help Bruce Geller develop Mission: Impossible. Later, Solow worked with Richard Levinson and William Link to create the long-running detective series Mannix.) In his book, Solow admits that he signed Roddenberry to a script development deal without even reading the complete sixteen-page prospectus for the series.
Although Solow recognized all the same potential pitfalls for the series that had scared off Felton, Courtney, and others, he also saw Star Trek as cutting-edge television and a potential breakout hit. One of the most important things Solow did was to solidify Lucille Ball’s support for Star Trek, despite objections from skittish Desilu board members. Then he worked alongside Roddenberry to try to sell the series to the networks. In this effort, Solow’s enduring friendships with programming heads at NBC proved invaluable. He remained intimately involved with Trek throughout its first two seasons, often running interference for Roddenberry with NBC’s programmers and Standards and Practices department (the censors). Solow’s position became untenable in 1968 after Ball sold Desilu to industrial conglomerate Gulf + Western, which turned the studio into a division of Paramount Pictures. Solow left prior to Trek’s third season for a vice presidency at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In 1973, he left that post to enter independent film and TV production but met with limited success. He and former Trek associate producer Bob Justman cowrote the definitive account of the series’ production, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (1996). Solow’s wife, Yvonne Fern, wrote the in-depth interview book Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation (1994).
Lucille Ball
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz pose outside the gates of Desilu Productions during their I Love Lucy heyday. After the couple divorced, Ball purchased the studio and, as president and CEO of Desilu, green-lighted the development of Star Trek.
The unsung hero in the Star Trek saga is Lucille Ball. While she wasn’t directly involved in the development, casting, or day-to-day production of the show, nothing happened at Desilu without Lucy’s blessing, and Star Trek was an extremely ambitious project for her production company.
Ball, born in Jamestown, New York, in 1911, began modeling and acting in her late teens but struggled to find (and keep) theatrical roles until she signed on as an RKO Radio Pictures contract player in 1933. Working for RKO and later for MGM, the vivacious redhead appeared in scores of B-budget programmers—musicals, melodramas, noir films, and comedies—but failed to achieve major stardom. That changed when she and her first husband, Desi Arnaz, developed I Love Lucy. The legendary sitcom, chronicling the antics of dizzy housewife Lucy Ricardo (Ball) and her Cuban bandleader husband Ricky (Arnaz), ran on CBS from 1951 to ’57, never finishing lower than third in the Nielsen ratings and earning five Emmy Awards (with seventeen other nominations). The show was succeeded by The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, a series of occasional specials that appeared on CBS until 1960. These programs made Ball the most famous and perhaps most beloved woman in television history.
Together Ball and Arnaz founded Desilu, which produced I Love Lucy and other hits like The Untouchables. But Ball and Arnaz divorced shortly after The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour left the air, and Ball borrowed heavily to buy out her ex-husband’s interest in the company. Without Arnaz’s business savvy, the studio’s fortunes declined. By 1964, the only Desilu series in production was The Lucy Show, a simplistic sitcom that relied on Ball’s star power to overcome shopworn storylines. Most of the studio’s soundstages were rented out to other production companies (The Andy Griffith Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show, among many other programs, were shot there). Star Trek represented a major investment of resources for the cash-strapped company. Initially, networks were skeptical that Desilu could meet the production demands of an hour-long weekly series that required extensive visual effects and specialized wardrobe and set designs. Some members of Desilu’s board of directors shared those concerns and warned Ball that the venture was too risky. Nevertheless, Ball threw her support behind Solow and Star Trek. Now it was up to Solow and Roddenberry to find a network willing to get on board.
James T. Aubrey Jr.
The colorful, controversial James T. Aubrey Jr. entered the Star Trek story shortly afterward, when, as president of CBS, he offered Roddenberry the opportunity to pitch Star Trek. Aubrey, the son of a successful advertising executive, grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb and attended Princeton University. After serving in the Air Force during World War II (he was Jimmy Stewart’s flying instructor), Aubrey found work on the sales staff of a CBS television station in Los Angeles and began his rapid ascent of the corporate ladder. Working in ever-higher capacities in the production and programming departments at CBS and briefly at ABC, Aubrey helped develop hit series, including Have Gun—Will Travel, Maverick, and The Donna Reed Show. He took over as president of CBS in late 1959 when his predecessor, Louis G. Cowan, resigned in the wake of the quiz show rigging scandal involving The $64,000 Question. As president, Aubrey introduced long-running, highly profitable shows such as Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Andy Griffith Show. Despite his tremendous success, the arrogant, dictatorial Aubrey was not well liked. Some of his network’s biggest stars couldn’t stand him. These included Lucille Ball, who habitually referred to Aubrey as “that S.O.B.”
After his Star Trek pitch to CBS, Roddenberry joined the ranks of those who despised the executive. Aubrey and members of his staff grilled Roddenberry for nearly two hours (an extraordinarily long time for a pitch meeting), only to later notify the producer that CBS was passing on Star Trek because the network had already scheduled another sci-fi drama, producer Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space. Roddenberry was livid and feared that ideas he had laid out for Aubrey and his staff (including strategies for controlling costs and other details) would be used to benefit the rival series. However, Aubrey probably took the meeting with Roddenberry not to steal the producer’s plans but to placate Ball, who remained the face of his network.
It’s interesting to speculate what the results might have looked like had Aubrey taken on Star Trek instead of Lost in Space. CBS was more generous with production funds than NBC (both Lost in Space and the Desilu-produced Mission: Impossible had higher per-episode budgets than Star Trek), and Roddenberry and his writers often felt constrained by cost limitations. However, CBS pressured the producers of Lost in Space to steer that series toward camp following the meteoric success of ABC’s Batman in 1966. Such an approach was anathema to the Star Trek creative team, who to a person disdained the juvenile Lost in Space as substandard sci-fi.
In early 1965, a few months before the second Star Trek pilot was shot, Aubrey was fired by CBS amid allegations that the executive was taking kickbacks from producers in exchange for scheduling their shows. In 1969, after a few nonproductive years as an independent producer, he assumed control of the flagging MGM studio. In typically iron-fisted fashion, he restructured the company, canceling projects and firing personnel mercilessly. Within a year, Aubrey had returned the studio to profitability and reduced its debt by $27 million. He resigned from MGM in 1973 and spent the final years of his career as an independent producer of (mostly forgettable) TV movies.
Grant Tinker
In its final, broadcast form Star Trek represents a compromise between Roddenberry’s soaring vision of a utopian future and Grant Tinker’s Midas-touch instinct for attracting viewers.
Grant Tinker, born in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1926, first joined NBC in 1949 as an executive trainee fresh out of Dartmouth. He left just two years later to pursue opportunities in independent production (he would help develop The Dick Van Dyke Show, among other programs), but returned to the Peacock Network for two far more productive tenures. The first of these was during the early 1960s, when he served as NBC’s chief West Coast programming executive. It was in this capacity that Tinker and his associates, Jerry Stanley and Mort Werner, accepted then rejected and finally purchased Star Trek.
Roddenberry and Solow first met with the NBC brain trust in May 1964. Tinker was intrigued by the creative possibilities of the concept but less enthusiastic about its commercial potential and, given the daunting scale of the production, dubious of Desilu’s ability to deliver a credible product. He warily agreed to order the development of a script, but it took several more meetings before Tinker was confident enough to approve “The Cage,” Star Trek’s unusually ambitious and extravagant original pilot. Although “The Cage” proved that Desilu was up to the technical challenges of the series, executives were dissatisfied with other aspects of the show. “The Cage” was rejected. But rather than abandoning the project altogether, Tinker and Werner took the extraordinary step of ordering a second pilot, while stipulating major changes to the cast and characters that they believed would make the show more appealing to a wide audience.
Tinker’s development savvy—already demonstrated when he green-lighted smashes Bonanza, I Spy, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. for NBC—would be affirmed in the years ahead. After leaving NBC in 1970, he cofounded MTM Enterprises with his second wife, actress Mary Tyler Moore. MTM scored a long series of hits during the 1970s, including highly rated sitcoms such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and WKRP in Cincinnati, as well as critically acclaimed dramas Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, and Lou Grant. Following his divorce from Moore in 1981, Tinker returned to NBC as CEO. He took the then-last-place network to the top of the ratings with a combination of now-iconic sitcoms (The Cosby Show, Cheers, Family Ties) and lighthearted action shows (The A-Team, Remington Steele, Miami Vice). He left NBC following its sale to General Electric in 1986, but his efforts set the stage for the network’s “Must See TV” dominance in the 1990s. It was, to say the least, an impressive rise. Yet during those same years, Star Trek would make an even more astonishing ascent, rising phoenixlike from the ash heap of network cancellation to become a cultural touchstone and a multimillion-dollar revenue engine.