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Post-Trek Projects by Gene Roddenberry, 1970–77
During the years that elapsed between the cancellation of Star Trek and the franchise’s big-screen revival, the restlessly creative Gene Roddenberry developed more than a dozen concepts for movies and TV shows. Most of those ideas went nowhere, and the handful eventually produced met with far less success than Trek—or even The Lieutenant. Yet all these projects—a big-screen sex comedy, three failed sci-fi TV pilots, and an unsold horror series pilot—remain fascinating for the clues they provide to future Star Trek series and for what they reveal about Roddenberry’s personality and artistic impulses.
Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)
Disillusioned by the cancellation of Star Trek, and with no inkling yet of the popular resurgence the program would soon enjoy, Roddenberry turned his back on television and, as the 1960s drew to a close, shifted his focus to motion pictures. A bitter and financially punishing divorce from his first wife, the former Eileen Rexroat, placed Roddenberry in a short-term monetary bind. Fortunately for the erstwhile Great Bird of the Galaxy, an old friend threw Roddenberry a financial and creative lifeline. Herb Solow, who, as Executive in Charge of Production at Desilu, had been instrumental in the sale of Star Trek to NBC, was now working as a vice president at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. When Trek folded, Solow hired Roddenberry to create and develop feature film concepts for MGM. Roddenberry’s first idea—a racy Tarzan movie—never progressed beyond the outline stage. On a trip to Japan in August 1969 to scout locations for another unrealized project, Roddenberry married his longtime mistress, Majel Barrett, in a Shinto-Buddhist ceremony.
Then in 1970, Solow assigned Roddenberry to develop a screenplay based on Francis Pollini’s salacious 1968 novel Pretty Maids All in a Row, a dark comedy about a high school guidance counselor/football coach who seduces female students and then murders some of them (the ones who fall in love and ask him to leave his wife and daughter). Roddenberry’s screenplay transformed Coach Michael “Tiger” McDrew into an exaggerated reflection of the Great Bird himself, a decorated WWII veteran who espouses progressive sociopolitical theories and who possesses an apparently unquenchable thirst for sex.
The project received a green light from Solow, with Roddenberry attached as both producer and screenwriter. Roddenberry hired Star Trek veterans for key posts, including costume designer Bill Theiss and actors James Doohan and Bill Campbell (the Squire of Gothos himself), who appear in minor roles as police officers. MGM stacked the cast list with major stars—including Rock Hudson as Tiger McDrew, joined by Angie Dickinson as a teacher and Telly Savalas as an FBI agent—and hired Frenchman Roger Vadim, maker of saucy hits like And God Created Woman (1956) and Barbarella (1968), to direct. But Roddenberry and Vadim, who was shooting his first Hollywood-made feature, immediately clashed. Appalled by what he considered Vadim’s mistreatment of his script, Roddenberry learned the hard way that, while writers and producers hold sway in the world of television, motion pictures are a director’s medium. When the studio backed Vadim, the incensed Roddenberry stormed off to an undisclosed location (a hotel in La Costa, California), where he remained hidden until the shoot was nearly complete, occasionally sending his secretary to the set for a report on the proceedings. This behavior did not sit well with Solow, who phoned the set daily in search of his missing producer.
During postproduction, Roddenberry oversaw extensive reediting of Vadim’s director’s cut. The result was a muddled film that clearly reflected the vision of neither its director nor its producer. Pretty Maids All in a Row was one of the first major studio films to feature extensive nudity, and MGM took the unprecedented step of promoting it with a spread in the April 1971 issue of Playboy magazine, featuring an article about the picture by Vadim and nude photos of the eight ingénues billed as “the Pretty Maids.” Perhaps as a result, although Roddenberry disdained the movie and MGM execs were less than elated with it, Pretty Maids turned a tidy profit.
Genesis II (1973) and Planet Earth (1974)
The cast of Gene Roddenberry’s failed pilot Planet Earth featured (from left to right) Ted Cassidy, John Saxon, Janet Margolin, and Christopher Cary.
Bruised by his first encounter with feature filmmaking, Roddenberry returned to television, the medium of his greatest triumphs. In May 1972, while Star Trek was defying all odds to emerge as a ratings sensation in syndication, Warner Brothers hired Roddenberry to create a new science fiction TV franchise, hoping he could duplicate the lighting-in-a-bottle genius of Trek. But the prospective series, Genesis II, fell far short of those lofty expectations.
The seventy-four-minute pilot episode (which aired as a Movie of the Week on March 23, 1973) follows the adventures of Dylan Hunt, a NASA scientist awakened in the year 2133 after a suspended animation experiment gone haywire. (Hunt can be revived either by drugs or, in a quintessentially Roddenberrian flourish, by sexual arousal.) During his 154-year hibernation, Earth was devastated by a nuclear war. Now Pax, a group of scientifically advanced, do-gooding pacifists, are attempting to bring progress and prosperity to the scattered, battered peoples of the world. But Pax is opposed by a city-state full of war-mongering mutants bent on global domination.
Roddenberry wanted Lloyd Bridges to star as Hunt, but network executives forced him to accept B-movie regular Alex Cord instead. Roddenberry cast Mariette Hartley and Ted (“Lurch”) Cassidy, both of whom had guest starred on Trek, in key supporting roles. Majel Barrett, who would appear in all of Roddenberry’s TV projects of the 1970s, also played a minor character. Roddenberry engaged the services of cinematographer Gerry Finnerman, who shot sixty of the seventy-nine original Trek episodes, and Trek costume designer Bill Theiss, who helped lend the new series a far darker, more savage look and feel than Star Trek. Unfortunately, Roddenberry’s Genesis II teleplay recreated the primary shortcomings of his script for Trek’s initial pilot, “The Cage”—too little action and a tendency to bog down in pseudointellectual discussions. (It also suffered from some uncharacteristically clunky dialogue and a few hackneyed plot devices.) Genesis II was developed in conjunction with CBS, but the network ultimately rejected the series in favor of Planet of the Apes, a similarly postapocalyptic program spun off from the popular feature film franchise. Although it must have seemed like the safer bet, Planet of the Apes was cancelled in midseason after just fourteen episodes.
Roddenberry was loath to abandon Genesis II, for which he had developed an elaborate proposal, complete with character outlines and thumbnail sketches for more than a dozen projected episodes. He would rework some of this material for future projects, including a story called “Robot’s Return” that eventually became the basis for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). But in the meantime, Roddenberry took another proposed Genesis II episode, “The Poodle Shop,” and expanded it to serve as a revised pilot telefilm. ABC was intrigued enough to provide production funds, and the project moved forward under the new title Planet Earth. John Saxon replaced Cord as the reawakened Dylan Hunt, who this time falls prisoner to a tyrannical matriarchy (“women’s lib gone mad,” according to Hunt) where men are kept drugged and docile to serve as manual laborers and sex slaves.
In Saxon, who was among those originally considered for the captaincy of the starship Enterprise, Planet Earth boasted a more appealing leading man than Genesis II, and its screenplay was far livelier and action oriented. The cast again featured Cassidy and Barrett, this time joined by Diana Muldaur, who had guest starred in two classic Trek episodes and would appear as Dr. Pulaski during the second season of The Next Generation. Cinematographer Archie Dalzell and art director Robert Kinoshita gave Planet Earth a gleaming, futuristic look (in contrast to the ramshackle dystopia of Genesis II), and Theiss designed snazzy body suits for Pax team members not dissimilar to the uniforms later worn by Starfleet officers on Next Gen, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Even though Planet Earth corrected many of the failings of Genesis II, ABC ultimately rejected the series. The pilot ran as a Movie of the Week on April 23, 1974.
After this setback, Roddenberry was ready to move on, but Warner Brothers—who owned the rights to the property—created a third pilot without Roddenberry’s participation (or even a credit). Titled Strange New World, this version starred Saxon as Captain Anthony Vico, one of three astronauts who return to a postapocalyptic Earth after spending 180 years in suspended animation. Like its two predecessors, Strange New World failed to sell. It aired as a Movie of the Week on July 13, 1975. Additionally, some of Roddenberry’s Genesis II/Planet Earth material resurfaced posthumously, incorporated into Robert Hewis Wolfe’s Canadian series Andromeda, which ran five seasons, from 2000 to 2005, coproduced by Wolfe and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. Andromeda, set in the distant future, starred Kevin (“Hercules”) Sorbo as Captain Dylan Hunt, who awakens after spending 300 years frozen in time to help restore the Commonwealth, an intergalactic, interspecies coalition that has fallen into decline during his long absence.
The Questor Tapes (1974)
Mike Farrell and Robert Foxworth (on table) starred in Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes.
Developed simultaneously with Planet Earth, The Questor Tapes was perhaps the most promising of all Roddenberry’s 1970s pilots, and certainly the one of greatest interest to Star Trek historians.
Technician Jerry Robinson (Mike Farrell), working from plans and components created by Nobel Prize–winning scientist Dr. Emil Vaslovic, assembles a fantastically advanced, superhuman android code-named Questor (Robert Foxworth). Then Questor takes off on his own in search of Vaslovic, who has mysteriously disappeared. The android takes Robinson along as an at-first reluctant guide. Robinson’s boss, Dr. Geoff Darrow (John Vernon), believes Robinson has stolen Questor and launches an international manhunt (and robot hunt) to find the duo. Ultimately, Vlasovic is revealed to be an android himself; now near death, Vlasovic informs Questor that he is the last in a series of extraterrestrial robots that have covertly assisted mankind over the millennia. However, due to Darrow’s clumsy attempts to decipher Vlasovic’s programming, Questor has lost the ability to feel love and other emotions. To fulfill his mission, he must partner with Robinson, who will serve as Jiminy Cricket to Questor’s superpowered Pinocchio.
Roddenberry adored this concept, developed at Universal for NBC, which he believed had the potential to be even more successful than Star Trek. The show’s Spock-like, emotionless title character gave the Great Bird a platform for wry commentary on the foibles of the human species. The Questor Tapes stands as Roddenberry’s most overtly philosophical/theological teleplay. When Robinson suggests Vaslovic might be insane, Questor replies, “One’s creator insane? Interesting question. How would you answer that query in your own case?”
Aside from Barrett and Walter Koenig, who have cameos playing lab techs, the only ex-Trek regular who worked on Questor was Gene Coon, who coauthored the teleplay with Roddenberry. But this wasn’t the original plan. Roddenberry had conceived the show, originally titled Mister Q, as a vehicle for Leonard Nimoy. The already strained relationship between Roddenberry and Nimoy further deteriorated when (by network edict) Foxworth was cast in the title role—and Nimoy learned of his ouster from director Richard Colla, not from Roddenberry. NBC paired Foxworth with costar Farrell, who would soon gain fame as Captain B. J. Hunnicut on M*A*S*H.
Initially, the network seemed satisfied with The Questor Tapes—pleased enough with the pilot to order a half-season’s worth of episodes and schedule the series for 10 o’clock Fridays, immediately following another promising rookie series, The Rockford Files. But while Roddenberry assembled his creative team and began preproduction, NBC executives had second thoughts about the concept and demanded wholesale changes to the scenario. The network wanted the Jerry Robinson character written out, and the business about extraterrestrials aiding humankind eliminated, in order to reshape The Questor Tapes as an action-adventure show with a lone robot on the run from the military and law enforcement, a science fictional variation on the theme of The Fugitive. CBS would later score a hit with a similar concept—The Incredible Hulk, featuring a superhero on the lam. But Roddenberry would have none of it. Rather than surrender what he considered the heart and soul of the program, he shut down the entire project. No episodes were produced, although the pilot appeared as a Movie of the Week on January 23, 1974.
Readers by now will have recognized Questor as the forerunner of Data, the android science officer whose popularity would help make The Next Generation an astounding success more than a decade later. (At one point, Questor informs a human female that he is “fully functional.”) The idea of an alien race working secretly for the benefit of mankind also recalls Roddenberry’s proposed Trek spin-off starring the character Gary Seven (from the episode “Assignment: Earth”). In 2003, writer-producer Herbert J. Wright (creator of the Ferengi for Next Gen) announced plans to reboot The Questor Tapes, but Wright was stricken by illness the following year and passed away in 2005 at age fifty-seven. Rod Roddenberry, Gene and Majel’s son (who was born thirteen days after the initial broadcast of The Questor Tapes), announced in early 2010 that Roddenberry Productions would partner with producer-director Ron Howard’s Imagine Television to create a new Questor pilot. As of late 2011, however, no further reports on the project had appeared.
Spectre (1977)
Roddenberry mailed this flyer to his Lincoln Enterprises memorabilia customers, urging them to write NBC in support of his horror series pilot Spectre.
The most offbeat of Roddenberry’s 1970s pilots, Spectre costarred Robert Culp and Gig Young as a Holmes-and-Watson-like pair of criminologists who solve paranormal cases involving witchcraft, demon-conjuring, and other supernatural phenomena. In the pilot film, William Sebastian (Culp) and his sidekick “Ham” Hamilton (Young) become embroiled in the mysterious goings on at the estate of a wealthy Englishman who may have accidentally unleashed an ancient demon—Asmodeus, who corrupts human souls through lust and debauchery (and looks a lot like the Gorn). Spectre’s basic premise was intriguing, its script—cowritten with Samuel A. Peeples, who had penned “Where No Man Has Gone Before”—was solid, and its leads were likeable. The project also offered Barrett a plum supporting role as Sebastian’s enigmatic assistant Lilith, a “good witch” who casts a spell to cure Ham’s alcoholism. The pilot was shot in Herefordshire, England, with a mostly British crew and cast, including featured players Gordon Jackson (best remembered from the BBC’s Upstairs, Downstairs) and John Hurt (before his breakout roles in Alien in 1979 and The Elephant Man in 1980). But Spectre, developed for 20th Century-Fox Television in partnership with NBC, was undone by budget constraints and production problems. Cinematographer Arthur Ibbetson shot Spectre in the flat, overlit style of most 1970s British teleplays, devoid of the shadowy, spooky ambiance a show of this type demanded. And the story’s orgiastic human sacrifice finale was rendered laughable by cut-rate visual effects and shoddy sets and costumes.
The network passed on the series but ran the pilot as a Movie of the Week on May 21, 1977. Roddenberry, who frequently appeared at conventions during the 1970s, both to pad his purse with appearance fees and to promote his new projects, did his best to drum up interest in Spectre prior to its initial broadcast. In a last ditch effort, he sent a mailer to customers of his Lincoln Enterprises memorabilia business, urging fans to write the network. “NBC may consider it as a weekly series if enough show interest in Spectre,” the pamphlet suggested. But this gambit, fashioned after the Save Star Trek letter-writing campaigns of the 1960s, failed. Spectre also received a theatrical release in England, with topless footage cut into the picture’s climactic black mass sequence.
In addition to these projects, the energetic Roddenberry cranked out a fistful of other orphaned television concepts during the 1970s, including Magna I, another dystopian scenario (with peace-loving sea-dwellers pitted against warlike land-lubbers), and the alien invasion epic Battleground: Earth, both of which were briefly attached to 20th Century-Fox Television. Neither project advanced beyond preliminary development during Roddenberry’s lifetime. But Battleground: Earth, which foresaw similar series such as NBC’s hit V (1983–85), was eventually retitled Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and produced posthumously for Canadian television, where it ran for five seasons from 1997 to 2002. Majel Barrett-Roddenberry served as executive producer for the show and appeared in a few first-season episodes as Dr. Julianne Belman. Ironically, of all Roddenberry’s 1970s endeavors, the project that enjoyed the most success at the time was the one in which Roddenberry was least involved, and which he later disowned: The Star Trek animated series, which ran for two seasons Saturday mornings on NBC and won an Emmy.