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Sets, Props, Costumes, Makeup, and Special Effects
The brilliant work of Star Trek’s screenwriters, actors, and directors would have been forfeit if not ably supported by the artisans and technicians who built the show’s sets and props, designed its costumes and makeup and created its special effects. Establishing a believable futuristic milieu for the program was essential. Over the years, countless science fiction films and TV series have been ruined by hokey-looking sets and costumes, and laughable visual effects. The devoted and often ingenious efforts of unsung heroes like Matt Jefferies, William Theiss, Fred Phillips and Ed Milkis made sure that such a fate never befell Trek. Although the classic Trek series looks (charmingly) dated today—most of the show’s visual effects were redone using computer animation for the series’ release on HD-DVD and Blu-ray disc—it was a cutting-edge production in its day, as evidenced by the show’s eight Emmy nominations in various technical categories.
Star Trek presented peculiar difficulties not shared by most of its competitors (the Westerns, detective shows, spy adventures, and other dramas of the era). You couldn’t simply buy a Gorn suit off the rack or order a spare tricorder from the usual prop rental agencies. These items had to be individually crafted. Yet Star Trek was shot on the same six-day schedule as every other hour-long TV drama and on a budget only (at first) slightly higher than average ($193,000 per episode during its first season, declining to $187,500 during Season Two and a meager $178,500 for Season Three). The cast’s salaries rose as the budgets decreased, putting ever-increasing pressure on the show’s technical crew to do more with less.
Sets
Designing and constructing the interior of the starship Enterprise, as well as the “strange new worlds” the ship explored each week, was one of many responsibilities for Walter M. (Matt) Jefferies, who served as Star Trek’s production designer and art director. (He shared art direction duties with Rolland Brooks for a season and then took over both roles full-time for the remainder of the series.) Like many of the show’s leaders, Jefferies was a World War II veteran, a former bomber pilot who flew missions over Europe and North Africa. After the war, he hired on as a set decorator at Warner Brothers. Jefferies hired his brothers, Philip and John, to assist him on Star Trek. He remains best known as the designer of the revolutionary Enterprise, which looked nothing like any spaceship seen before on film or television, and of the ship’s instantly recognizable bridge, transporter, and engine room sets. Jefferies also designed the hand phasers and Klingon battle cruiser.
More than any other individual, Jeffries created the look of the Star Trek universe. Some of his most memorable productions include “The Trouble with Tribbles,” for which he built both the exterior and interior of Space Station K-7, and “Amok Time,” which gave viewers their first (and for many years only) look at Vulcan, Mr. Spock’s rugged, red desert home world. (Spock’s cabin and McCoy’s office also debuted with this episode.) But perhaps Jefferies’s most striking creation was the eerie, surreal Western town featured in “Spectre of the Gun,” with obvious facades set against a blood-red sky. In this episode, the Melkotians force Captain Kirk and his landing party to participate in a re-creation of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral—with the Starfleet officers standing in for the doomed Clanton gang. Gene Coon’s teleplay called for this episode to be filmed on location, but Season Three budgets were so tight that location shooting was no longer feasible. Jefferies devised a visually arresting yet thrifty solution. The otherworldly look of the place is explained by having the Melkotians create the fragmentary Tombstone out of “bits and pieces” from Kirk’s memory and imagination.
After Trek, Jefferies worked on many more movies and television shows, including Little House on the Prairie, where he served as art director from 1974 to 1983, working on 193 (out of 204) episodes of the classic family drama. Jefferies died of congestive heart failure in 2003, following a long battle with cancer. The cylindrical, instrument-crammed crawlspaces frequently seen on all Starfleet spacecraft are referred to as “Jefferies Tubes” in his honor.
Props
The iconic Starship Enterprise (pictured on this 1976 Topps trading card sticker) was designed by ingenious production manager Matt Jefferies.
As a cost-cutting measure, all the props for Star Trek (and other Desilu series) were supposed to be built by the studio’s in-house prop shop. As the start of shooting for the show’s first season drew near, however, it became apparent that Desilu’s in-house staff could not produce communicators, phasers, and other specialized equipment in the necessary quantity or time frame required to meet the schedule. So associate producer Bob Justman turned to old friend Wah Chang of Project Unlimited, a renowned maker of specialty props, monster suits, and other sci-fi accoutrements. Chang had supplied many of the props and creature prosthetics used on Justman’s previous series, The Outer Limits, and had created the original phasers, communicators, and Talosian makeup prosthetics used in “The Cage.” In short order Chang developed high-quality working models of the communicator and phaser, and designed and built the first tricorder. However, when Desilu’s unionized prop makers learned Justman had gone to Project Unlimited, they filed a grievance, arguing that Chang’s creations couldn’t be used because Chang was not a union member. (Somehow, Chang’s nonunion status hadn’t come up during production of “The Cage.”) To circumvent the labor issue, Justman told Desilu that the equipment in question wasn’t made especially for Star Trek; they were original Chang creations that the associate producer had purchased for use on the show. (In his book Inside Star Trek, Justman refers to this gambit as “a little fib.”) The purchase of prefabricated props was permissible under union rules.
Chang went on to provide a great many more “ready-made” props and equipment for Trek, including the Gorn suit from “Arena”; the Salt Vampire suit from “The Man Trap”; Balok, the imposing-looking alien puppet from “The Corbomite Maneuver”; the original Romulan Bird of Prey spacecraft from “Balance of Terror”; Spock’s Vulcan lute, seen in several episodes; the neural parasites from “Operation—Annihilate!”; and, most famously, the tribbles. Due to budget constraints, Chang’s association with Star Trek ended midway through Season Two. The Outer Limits was just one of Chang’s many notable pre-Trek credits. He had worked extensively with producer George Pal and won an Academy Award for his contributions to The Time Machine (1960). Later, Chang would create the dinosaurs seen on TV’s Land of the Lost (1974–76) before retiring from the movie business to pursue a successful career in fine art sculpture. He died in 2003 at age eighty-six.
Justman’s other go-to resource for specialty equipment was Irving Feinberg, the show’s Desilu-assigned prop master. Feinberg wasn’t an artist like Chang, but he had a keen eye for items that could be repurposed. It was Feinberg, for instance, who found the snazzy-looking Swedish salt shakers that passed for Dr. McCoy’s diagnostic tool and laser scalpel. Feinberg, who had worked previously on Desilu’s The Untouchables, served as prop master for all three seasons of Star Trek. His services became even more valuable once Chang was no longer available. Feinberg, who apparently left the industry after Star Trek’s cancellation, died in 1991 at age eighty-two.
Costumes
Costume designer William Theiss undertook the unenviable task of designing flattering yet unearthly-looking costumes for the show’s many guest performers from week to week, along with the even less enviable task of making sure his creations were realized on time and on budget. Toward this end he scoured fabric outlets for flashy or futuristic material that could be purchased on the cheap, and, according Herb Solow and Bob Justman in their book Inside Star Trek, he supervised a secret “Star Trek sweat shop.” He reportedly rented an apartment near the studio where nonunion seamstresses often worked through the night piecing together the show’s attire in blatant disregard of union rules. Theiss designed the iconic gold, blue, and red Starfleet tunics but remains best known for the revealing outfits he created for Star Trek’s female guest stars. Although he rarely gave interviews, Theiss’s “Theory of Titillation” has been frequently quoted: “The degree to which a costume is considered sexy is directly proportional to how much it looks like it is about to fall off.”
For “What Are Little Girls Made Of?,” Theiss contributed two of his most famous designs. The first was the daring pantsuit worn by Sherry Jackson as Andrea, featuring a top consisting entirely of two criss-crossed strips of fabric that barely covered the actress’s breasts. The second was the imposing outfit worn by Ted (“Lurch”) Cassidy as the murderous android Ruk, including an oversized three-quarter-length jacket with giant shoulder pads that made the 6-foot-9 Cassidy seem truly giant. For “Is There in Truth No Beauty?,” Theiss designed a jewel-covered gown for Diana Muldaur to wear as the blind Dr. Miranda Jones. This garment was lovely but also functioned believably as a cleverly camouflaged censor web that enabled Jones to “see.” And for “The Cloud Minders,” Theiss created widely disparate costumes that expressed at a glance the chasm between two cultures in conflict. The idle, artistically inclined dwellers of Stratos, the cloud city, wear soft, pastel-colored garments designed for beauty: The men appear in silky, elegant robes, the women in flowing skirts and bikini tops with dainty capes. Everyone’s hair is carefully coiffed. The worker class “Troglytes,” who labor in brutal conditions in the mines beneath the planet’s surface, wear strictly utilitarian attire. Men and women both dress in grubby red and blue jumpsuits, with their shaggy, unkempt hair held back by sweaty-looking bandanas. The episode contains a lot of dialogue about the cultural gulf between the cloud-dwellers and the Troglytes, but Theiss’s costumes tell viewers everything they need to know.
Roddenberry remained loyal to Theiss, who worked on the producer’s only feature film, Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), as well as his failed pilots Genesis II (1973) and Planet Earth (1974). In 1987, Theiss returned to serve as costume designer for Star Trek: The Next Generation and redesigned Starfleet’s uniforms for the twenty-fourth century. He continued with Next Gen until his death, from AIDS, in 1992. In all, Theiss worked on 29 different movies and TV shows, including the classic films Spartacus (1960) and Harold and Maude (1971).
Makeup
Makeup artist Fred Phillips worked hand in hand with both Theiss and the show’s cinematographers (usually Jerry Finnerman) to ensure that the cast looked their best. He also created the appearance of the Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, Orions, and other alien species featured on Star Trek (except for those that required full-on monster suits, like the Gorn and the Mugato). But Phillips’s most important contribution to the success of Star Trek may have been in making sure that Spock’s ears didn’t look ridiculous.
Prior to the filming of the series’ original pilot, “The Cage,” both Phillips and Leonard Nimoy were gravely concerned about Spock’s ears. The company Desilu had hired to make the ears had delivered several unacceptable attempts and seemed unable to produce the kind of detailed, natural-looking appliances that were essential to sell Spock as a dignified, intellectual character. Nimoy, already plagued by misgivings about appearing in alien makeup, feared he would become a laughingstock if he had to work with the goofy-looking, Desilu-purchased ears. But studio bean counters refused to grant Phillips the $600 it would cost to acquire the ears from a reliable alternate source. Just days before shooting on “The Cage” was set to begin, Phillips defied his superiors and ordered a freshly molded set of prosthetic ears from a friend in the makeup department at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. “To this day I am most grateful to Fred Phillips for saving the day and insisting on doing the job properly,” Nimoy wrote in his memoir I Am Spock. “Fred put his own job on the line; he could have been fired for spending the money without authorization.” And Star Trek could have bombed if the Enterprise’s first officer came off looking like some overgrown leprechaun.
While almost every Star Trek episode features excellent makeup, “Journey to Babel” remains, arguably, Phillips’s greatest triumph. For this installment, he created two new alien species—the blue-skinned, antennae-topped Andorians and the furry, pig-snouted Tellarites. Of no less importance was the subtle artistry Phillips displayed in “aging” Mark Lenard, who passed as Spock’s father even though the actor was less than seven years older than Nimoy. Jane Wyatt, who played Spock’s mother, was twenty-one years older than Nimoy and fourteen years older than Lenard. Yet Amanda looks younger than Sarek! Phillips later devised much more extreme old age makeup for “The Deadly Years,” in which the cast ages rapidly due to an alien disease.
As Andrea and Ruk from “What Are Little Girls Made Of?,” Sherry Jackson and Ted Cassidy model two of costume designer William Ware Theiss’s most striking creations.
Phillips was another Outer Limits veteran Justman brought on board to work on Star Trek. The makeup artist’s prior credits stretched all the way back to The Wizard of Oz in 1939 and included more than thirty other films and TV shows, including director Roger Corman’s House of Usher (1960), with Vincent Price, and the offbeat horror film Incubus (1966), shot in Esperanto and starring William Shatner. Phillips’s post-Trek work included twenty-seven more movies and television programs, highlighted by the classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). He returned to the franchise for Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Phillips—who had created the “classic” Klingon makeup, bronzing actors’ skin and giving them Fu Manchu mustaches—invented the “modern” Klingon makeup, complete with ridged forehead, for The Motion Picture. (The first actor to appear in the new-look Klingon makeup was Mark Lenard.) Phillips declined an offer to work on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan due to failing eyesight. He died in 1993. Phillips’s daughter Janna followed in his footsteps, working alongside her father on the first Trek feature film and later serving as a makeup artist during Season Two of The Next Generation (where she earned an Emmy nomination) and Season Three of Deep Space Nine.
Special Effects
Several different special visual effects houses worked on Star Trek, but that wasn’t the original plan. Once again Desilu had locked the program into an exclusive deal, this time with the Howard Anderson Company, which had produced visual effects for “The Cage” and “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Anderson was a well-established operation—founded in 1927, it had furnished titles and special effects for scores of movies and TV shows—and it had created outstanding visuals for Trek’s two pilots. For “The Cage,” Anderson created the transporter “beam in/beam out” effect, which became a signature of the series. But the pilots had been produced on timelines very different from the merciless grind of an ongoing weekly series. (“Where No Man Has Gone Before” took ten months to complete.) By August 1966, with the show’s September 8 premiere looming, it became clear that Anderson would be unable to produce acceptable footage in the quantity and with the speed necessary for Trek to meet its airdates. When the firm was unable to deliver the shots ordered for the planned title sequence Roddenberry and Justman were forced to cobble together the show’s now-famous opening– with the Enterprise whizzing by from various angles—out of scraps and trims left over from the two pilots.
Although Star Trek continued to work with Anderson, Roddenberry contracted with several other visual effects shops to share the workload. These firms included Van der Veer Photo Effects, which had provided visuals for The Outer Limits; Cinema Research, a recently founded company whose first motion picture (The Wizard of Mars, a low-budget sci-fi semi-remake of The Wizard of Oz) didn’t inspire confidence; and the Westheimer Company, a more established outfit (founded in the early 1950s) but with no science fiction experience. Overseeing and coordinating the work of these various companies was a vital task. Roddenberry hired Ed Milkis, who had worked as a film editor on The Lieutenant, to manage all postproduction activities, including editing, scoring, and sound effects in addition to visual effects. Milkis’s work day began with a 5:30 a.m. daily conference with Justman and sometimes stretched until midnight with nightly check-ins at Anderson, Van der Veer, Cinema Research, and Westheimer. But the grueling work paid off handsomely. Star Trek’s visual effects earned Emmy nominations for each of the show’s three seasons—although it lost three years in a row. And Milkis was promoted to associate producer for the show’s third season.
Visual effects became increasingly important as the series progressed. With budgets tightening, the creative team began developing teleplays that could be shot using only regular cast members and entirely on existing sets, saving the expense of hiring guest stars and constructing new sets or shooting on location. As restrictive as this approach sounds, it produced some outstanding episodes, including “The Changeling,” about a homicidal space probe; “The Immunity Syndrome.” in which the Enterprise encounters a giant, energy-sucking space amoeba; and “The Tholian Web,” in which Kirk is lost in an interdimensional rift while his ship is trapped in an energy web created by the inscrutable Tholians. Both “The Immunity Syndrome” and “The Tholian Web” earned Emmy nominations for special visual effects. “The Tholian Web” remains a fan favorite.
Milkis went on to a long and successful career producing situation comedies, enjoying his greatest triumph as executive producer of the smash hits Happy Days (1974–84) and Laverne and Shirley (1976–83). He passed away in 1996 at age sixty-five. Both the Westheimer and Anderson companies remained in operation into the 2000s. Westheimer went on to produce effects for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), and Anderson created visuals for Star Trek: Nemesis (2002).