“LET ME DO SOMETHING!”
When looking back at the history of Star Trek from today’s perspective, it’s hard to believe that the cast and crew ever enjoyed anything less than immense prosperity due to their long-term association with the franchise. The reality, however, was dramatically different. When the series ended in 1969, over the next few years there was a genuine financial struggle for most of them. The show was booming in syndication, but due to the way residuals were structured at the time, Screen Actors Guild payments were made for only the first five reruns of each episode. So while Star Trek was providing a financial windfall to Paramount, which had scooped up the show as part of their acquisition of Desilu, few others benefited.
Prior to Star Trek, William Shatner had carved an impressive niche for himself as an actor, having scored quite successfully on stage, screen, and television. But his most difficult time came immediately after his three-year-stint as Captain Kirk, following a divorce which left him in a precarious financial position. First up was his ubiquitous work as a commercial spokesman for Promise margarine, a less than auspicious career segue from the command seat of a starship. He followed with episodic television guest appearances, a starring role in the short-lived ABC series Barbary Coast, and a number of forgettable low-budget films, including The Devil’s Rain and Roger Corman’s Big Bad Mama.
“There was a time, before Star Trek, when I wouldn’t accept a role that I didn’t think worthwhile enough to play. Then, because things are so cyclical in show business, I needed to take those roles,” Shatner explained in his biography, Shatner: Where No Man. “There even came a point when I thought, ‘I don’t know whether I’m ever going to break through, to get those roles that I think I should be playing.’ That was just before Star Trek. Star Trek hit. And after Star Trek I had the opportunity to play a few of those things that I thought should be coming my way. But I was in a financial bind and had to accept a lot of things that I wouldn’t have done in an earlier day.”
Leonard Nimoy, who would have seemingly been the most typecast from Star Trek, actually went on to the most successful career of all the cast members during the ten-year period between cancellation and revival. He immediately shifted from Spock to a costarring role in the hit series Mission: Impossible, on which he played makeup genius Paris. He quit the series after two seasons to pursue other roles. “Quitting the show was kind of a dangerous thing to do, but I felt confident,” he admitted. “But ’71 was the first year out of six years of TV series and it turned out to be a perfect year with a mix of all the things I wanted to do.” Among them was the film Catlow and the lead in the national touring company of Fiddler on the Roof. Eventually his career led him to tackle another “logical” character, that of Sherlock Holmes, onstage.
In addition, he began directing episodic television, narrated the syndicated series In Search Of … (having been hired after the first choice, Rod Serling, passed away), and received acclaim for his one-man show, Vincent, based on the life of Vincent van Gogh, as well as for the books of poetry he wrote and his starring Broadway role in Equus.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
One of the reasons I was rather excited when I first made the move from Trek to Mission: Impossible was because Mission was the opposite of a radio drama [like Star Trek]. You had to watch the show. I was intrigued by that. It wasn’t about dialogue, it was about images. But I very quickly became bored and I left after two years because there was no substance. I had a four-year contract. At the end of two years I felt I had made as much of a contribution as I could to the series, and it was getting redundant for me. I asked the studio to let me out of my contract and they agreed.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON (writer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
I used to play golf with Bruce Geller, and one day we’re on our way to the golf course on a Saturday morning and he tells me that he just sold this series, Mission: Impossible. But he said, “I want to tell you I’m not going to hire you, because your forte is character and this isn’t a show about character.”
CHRISTOPHER KNOPF (friend of Gene Roddenberry)
Bruce Geller and Gene had offices one floor on top of each other. And they each were very competitive, and they made their offices almost like a throne room—big long offices that you sort of had to march up to the throne to meet either one of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they compared notes on how to do an office. Both of them also loved the ladies. Gene was very much a devotee of a free flow of passion. I think that there was no woman he would say no to. I remember Bruce’s wife told him, “Look, it’s either them or me,” and Bruce backed off. But then he got killed. He was flying with a guy from ABC, who was a former navy pilot, going to Santa Barbara, and they didn’t realize they were on the east side of a mountain. They thought they were on the west side and they flew right into it.
DeForest Kelley, who had the most successful pre-Star Trek career, conversely had the shortest and most inauspicious post-Trek career of any of the cast: he did a feature film called Night of the Lepus, about giant killer bunnies, and retired, with the exception of future Trek projects.
DeFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy”)
The stuff offered to me after the series ended was crap, and I thought, “I’ve done so much crap I don’t need to do that again.” Fortunately I learned a long time ago in this business that when you make some money, you had better put a little bit of it aside. I’m not talking about living in Bel Air; I’m talking about living a nice normal life.
James Doohan earned a living for himself throughout the seventies via the Star Trek convention circuit, as well as roles in such films as Pretty Maids All in a Row (written and produced by Roddenberry) and as a regular on the CBS Saturday-morning series Jason of Star Command, which he left after one season. “They really didn’t give me anything to do so I said good-bye,” he explained of his decision.
George Takei certainly diversified following Star Trek, not only appearing on a variety of television series but writing a pair of science-fiction–swashbuckler novels and throwing his hat into the Los Angeles political arena. Nichelle Nichols parlayed her Star Trek success as Lieutenant Uhura into a singing career and a position with NASA and its astronaut recruitment drive. “When I began,” she pointed out, “NASA had fifteen hundred applications. Six months later, they had eight thousand. I like to think some of those were encouraged by me.” Walter Koenig, like his costars, did his fair share of episodic television work following his two seasons as Chekov, and even costarred in the Gene Roddenberry television pilot The Questor Tapes. Additionally, he served as an acting teacher, directed plays, wrote novels, and penned the scripts for such prime-time television fare as Family and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? It’s unlikely that the ensemble could have known in 1969 that their lives would continue to be drawn together over the next several decades.
Faring the worst of everyone in those days was Gene Roddenberry. He wrote and produced the disastrous feature Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), which more or less sealed his fate as a television producer-writer. Despite being lauded by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, this absurd sexploitation film stars Rock Hudson as a promiscuous high-school gym teacher who sleeps with many of his female students and may possibly be a serial murderer.
IRA STEVE BEHR (executive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
Pretty Maids All in a Row was one hoot of a movie. That’s an amazing film on a lot of levels. That’s a movie that’s almost beyond good and evil.
Shortly thereafter, he created a pair of pilots—Genesis II (1973) and Planet Earth (1974)—which postulated a future following a devastating global war in which twentieth-century scientist Dylan Hunt (Alex Cord in the former, John Saxon in the latter) works with a scientific organization, PAX, to rebuild society. “It’s important to know that I wasn’t saying that Star Trek’s future, which would occur several hundred years after Genesis II, never happened,” Roddenberry explained. “I’m saying that humanity has always progressed by three steps forward and two steps back. The entire history of our civilization has been one society crumbling and a slightly better one, usually, being built on top of it. And on mankind’s bumpy way to Star Trek’s era, we passed through this time, too.” Although both came close to being picked up for series, the networks ultimately passed on them and, in the case of Genesis II, CBS ordered the short-lived Planet of the Apes as a TV series instead.
The best of Roddenberry’s seventies pilots was 1974’s The Questor Tapes, written with Gene L. Coon shortly before his death, in which Roddenberry conceived of an alien race that had spent eons helping mankind’s progress by placing humanlike androids within society to help guide the species. This television pilot presented Dr. Jerry Robinson (Mike Farrell), who ultimately teams up with an android named Questor (Robert Foxworth), who is on a quest to meet with his creator, Professor Vaslovic, and discover the truth about himself as well as his ultimate destiny. While NBC commissioned additional scripts, they ultimately decided to pass on taking the show to series, after the familiar creative differences with Roddenberry arose. Unfortunately, creative differences of another kind arose between Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy after the Star Trek creator implied to Nimoy that he would star in the pilot. When he reneged on that promise, it contributed to the strained relationship that would typify their mutual dealings for the rest of their lives.
RICHARD COLLA (director, The Questor Tapes)
It was a wonderful experience for me. We were kind of reinterpreting Spock and Kirk, because that’s really what it was, the emotional side of man and the intellectual side of man, and they come into conversation with each other. So what you really have is a character talking to himself, and that’s delightful. I thought Questor’s going off to find his creator was meant to be strong. It was meant to be moving. I’m sorry it never got made into a series.
Roddenberry’s last attempt at creating a new TV series not connected to Star Trek was Spectre (1977), in which renowned criminologist and occult investigator William Sebastian (Robert Culp) and his old friend Dr. Hamilton (Gig Young) find themselves in England for a case involving the black arts. There was absolutely no talk of this pilot going to series.
Unfortunately, it would seem that Roddenberry’s well-documented battles with—and disparaging remarks regarding—the networks during Star Trek’s run and in the years immediately following it, when appearing at conventions or earning a living by doing college lectures, didn’t help in securing him any new long-term work.
DAVID GERROLD (story editor, Land of the Lost)
During the early seventies NBC was the villain, because they had canceled Star Trek, and Gene made sure that everybody knew that NBC was the villain. Gene was this man who wanted to change the world for the better, and NBC wouldn’t let him.
JOEL ENGEL (author, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek)
Gene Roddenberry was, first and foremost, an ambitious salesman whose primary talent, I believe, was verbal. I admire that he flew during the war and afterward. That he made a good impression on [LAPD] Chief Parker [who he was a speechwriter for], I know from my last book, L.A. ’56—which takes place during Parker’s reign and makes him a fleshed-out secondary character—shouldn’t be considered a small feat. He knew how to tell Parker everything he wanted to hear. And when he saw an opening to get into TV, where a lot of hustlers were doing well, he took it. Good for him.
He obviously had talent; those without it couldn’t sell more than one script, and he sold a lot of them. And when he did, and saw guys like Sam Rolfe hitting it big, he wanted a piece of that, too. Good for him there, as well. It wasn’t easy getting a series on the air, which he did with The Lieutenant. Then, good for him for trying to get Star Trek on the air. Terrific idea: Wagon Train to the stars. The problem was that he basically couldn’t write well enough to carry it off. Lucky for him, and I do mean lucky, NBC broke protocol and allowed Desilu to shoot a second pilot, at which point Roddenberry knew enough not to argue that a bona fide writer needed to be brought in. Thus began his career as a producer rather than a writer-producer.
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
I started reading my father’s speeches and then I actually read a couple books about him, the good and the bad. Joel Engel did a book that kind of trashed my father and it was really good to get that perspective, too, since I knew my father as a real man. I knew his flaws, his weak points, but I knew he was a man. No matter how great someone is, they are flawed and fucked up in their own ways. So, it didn’t bother me at all. I accept that of anyone. It bothers me now because I hear it so much.
JON POVILL (associate producer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Gene’s issue was that he was more of a producer than he was a writer. His skill set was better suited to that, mostly because he was desperate to prove that he was a writer. He was not secure at all about it. He would fall back on “I was the creator of Star Trek, I know what I’m doing,” but like any writer, 80 percent of his ideas were crap. Eighty percent of my ideas are crap. But 20 percent of his ideas were really, really good. The issue was that he was sufficiently insecure to where he fought as hard for the 80 percent as he did the 20 percent. It wasn’t a matter of quality control, it was a matter of control. It was a matter of exerting his will. It was a matter of being the one. Like George Bush: “I’ve got to be the decider.” He needed to be in control of the script, of the idea, of the concept, to the greatest degree possible.
Gene’s personality was all “It’s got to be my way, because I’m right and I have to prove that I’m right.” To some extent Star Trek proved that he was right, except to the extent that there were other people involved that may or may have had important roles. I heard that Gene Coon was essentially responsible for keeping the show on an even keel and maintaining the quality of it. If you look at the episodes Gene wrote, you start to get the picture of somebody who was very up and down. You can look at those scripts, and there are bits and pieces of scripts that are exactly what I said—20 percent of a script like “The Omega Glory” is good, but 80 percent isn’t. He couldn’t let go of anything, because it all had to be good because he had to prove it was good.
JOEL ENGEL
It’s always worth remembering that the Star Trek universe we know today, with the Klingons and Romulans and Spock’s family, etc., were introduced one element at a time by freelancers and Gene Coon and the great Dorothy Fontana. When the series went off the air, Gene had to reinvent himself again, which he tried to do by buying the talents of other writers—for instance, Jon Povill.
LARRY BRODY (cocreator, The New Mike Hammer)
I was a very successful working writer-producer in the seventies. I had a lot on my plate, so my first reaction to the growing Star Trek phenomenon was “Good for Gene.” I felt invested in Roddenberry on a personal level, because whenever he had a deal somewhere, he would call me and talk to me about what the new shows were going to be and ask me to write for them. I felt flattered as hell by the attention, which was, I think, one of the big secrets of his success. He had so much energy and was so excited about whatever he was doing that the feeling transferred right into everyone around him.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)
He was the “Great Bird,” a name Bob Justman had given him during the production of the original series. His generosity, sense of humor, and brilliance were all there for anyone to see. Yes, Gene was human, but I found him to be a better man to me than my own father had been, and he showed me more personal friendship than I could ever have asked for.
ED NAHA (producer, Inside Star Trek LP)
Gene had been treated very shabbily by Paramount all during the initial run of Trek, especially during the final season, and his TV movies were never viewed with a lot of enthusiasm by the “suits.” Yet Gene kept plugging away. He had views he wanted to spread, dreams he wanted to share, and so he played the corporate game in order to keep those ideas in the spotlight.
JON POVILL
Shortly after I came out of school, I tried to get in to see Roddenberry about Genesis II and Questor, which he had going and were in their early stages. I had done a script for Ron Shusett. The first thing I did when I got out of school was write a script for him. It never got made, but that became a sample script. I gave it to Gene’s assistant and it took about a year to get the fucking script read. When he finally did read it, it was because he had given it to D. C. Fontana. She liked it and recommended that he read it, which he did. By that time Genesis II was already gone, and Questor was still going, so I got to pitch episodes to Questor. I’d pitched to Larry Alexander, who was the story editor. He liked it and we were just getting ready to give it to the producer, Michael Rhodes, when Questor died.
LARRY BRODY
Gene was also a big user of the “we” word whenever he and I were together, including me in all his thoughts and plans and making me feel a part of whatever team he was putting together. During this time I was often invited to hang out with Gene and listen to his stories of how he was surviving—barely, he said—now that Star Trek was off the air. He’d kept the rights to all the paraphernalia used on the show, and a large part of his income, he told me, came from selling scripts, communicator pins, phasers, etc. All genuine and used in the production. It seemed to me that he was selling a lot more of that stuff than ever could’ve been made for the actual series, but I never said anything about that to him.
JON POVILL
I got a call some weeks later from Gene, who mentioned that he was moving off the Warner Bros. lot and back into his house, and he was going to do a book. He asked if I wanted to do research for him at some minimal, god-awful salary and I said, “Absolutely.”
It was the period of time that I was closest to Gene in that year from about July of ’74 to about May of ’75. May of ’75 is when he moved back into his Paramount offices to do the new Star Trek movie. It was a great period of time. The most personal. He was not doing well financially, but he was a real person. He did not see himself as the Great Bird of the Galaxy yet. He was running Lincoln, and he and Majel were making money from Lincoln Enterprises, and he was making money from Star Trek conventions, but there was less bullshit and more honesty. And despite the age difference and the obvious career difference, we were relating in many ways as equals. One of the more uncomfortable aspects of that is that he and Majel would fight constantly; they would drink and they would fight. The two of them would pull me into their arguments to try and mediate those. I was having dinner there practically every night. I would play with Rod.
JOEL ENGEL
What I can say with sincere admiration about Gene Roddenberry is that when the festival circuit reached critical mass, he knew enough to remake himself yet again as the Great Bird. It was a persona and, from what I could tell, until I took his words and boasts and compared them to the actual record, no one had publicly called him out on it. By then he’d become Machiavellian, sitting on a lucrative brand with millions of fans willing to do his bidding.
JON POVILL
Gene and I would sit around, we’d talk, bullshit, we’d speculate. We were pretty much just hanging out all of the time. We’d smoke pot. We’d swim. That was part of the most magical time to me. I really loved that period of time. He had all sorts of issues and was feeling insecure, but he was open about it. And he was not enthusiastic about Star Trek at the time. He really wanted to do something else. It was, again, the idea of trying to prove himself, not that he was aware he was proving himself. He was sort of desperate to show he could do something besides Star Trek. That came out as “I don’t care about Star Trek, I want to move on.”
Anyhow, while I was doing the research and while we were talking, he discovered that prior to this I was making my living doing part-time carpentry and contracting. Handyman stuff. At that point, when he decided he didn’t want to write the novel anymore, he wanted me to baby-proof the house. I did that so that he wouldn’t have to say no to Rod all of the time, and then there were other things that I did. I painted fences and repaired stuff on an ongoing basis.
Despite being busy on the convention and college-lecture circuit, Roddenberry had a family to support, and without a regular Hollywood income, it was becoming harder to sustain his lavish lifestyle. As a result, he was forced to leverage his fame as the creator of Star Trek into a succession of high-paying, albeit oddball, gigs that all eventually went nowhere.
One of them was The Nine, which came about in 1975 when Roddenberry was approached by a British former race-car driver named Sir John Whitmore. Whitmore claimed to be associated with a strange organization called Lab-9, dedicated to the research of paranormal phenomena that also claimed to be in contact with a group of extraterrestrials called the “Council of Nine,” or simply “The Nine.” Whitmore, along with channeler Phyllis Schlemmer, wanted to hire Roddenberry to write a screenplay based on the Council of Nine’s imminent heralded return.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
This was a time when he was broke and was sort of a writer for hire. A very eccentric Englishman had an idea for a project that aliens really had contacted us and that they were from the Pleiades. And he wanted Gene to write a fictional story about this based on what he called “facts.” Gene said he will write what he finds. He had to do all of this research. Gene went around and talked to all these different people, and they were experimenting with plants and asking whether or not they had feelings, and things like that. Gene was trying to keep an open mind.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)
I had been through harsh times. My dreams were going downhill, because I could not get work after the original series was canceled. I remember I was really devoted to the fans at colleges when they voted that they wanted me to come and lecture. One of my first speeches—I got all of six or seven hundred dollars, which included the cost of the trip. I felt lucky to net the four or five hundred that they paid for me. I was stereotyped as a science-fiction writer, and sometimes it was tough to pay the mortgage. They said, “You’re a science-fiction type.” I said, “Hey, wait a minute. I used to write westerns, I wrote police stories,” and they said, “No, you’re now science fiction.” I don’t feel bitter about that. That’s the way Hollywood is and that’s the way mediocre people think.
Roddenberry handed in his first draft in December 1975, and the results were not what anyone expected. The story focused more on his fictionalized alter ego and his marital and financial worries than on the Nine themselves. Whitmore requested a rewrite and Roddenberry handed the task of doing so to Povill. In his revision, Povill posited that the hit sci-fi TV show that Roddenberry’s alter ego had produced in the sixties was not actually his work but had been channeled through him by the Council of Nine.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
This was a script that Roddenberry was very proud of. It dealt with a man who developed a television series for a big network. It had gone off the air and he was depressed. He had kind of gone insane. I read this script and the hair began to rise on the back of my neck, because that’s his story. He was totally unaware of what he was writing. He was also writing his various sexual perversions, which I certainly don’t hold a grudge against, because I’ve got my own problems. But there’s something very, very amiss there.
JON POVILL
When I read Gene’s first draft, I thought, “This is not what needs to be done here.” I thought it was embarrassing, John Whitmore thought it was embarrassing. It certainly didn’t suit what they needed, but it was very typical Roddenberry stuff. I changed it substantially in my second draft and continued to evolve it. I thought the last draft was eminently workable. We had a script that people would be interested in, and it served the purposes of fandom and commerciality and The Nine, from the Schlemmer-Whitmore perspective. They approached Gene because The Nine told them to.
One of the more intriguing projects Roddenberry became involved with at the time was a collaboration with music legend Paul McCartney, who was not only a former Beatle but a major Star Trek fan.
SUSAN SACKETT
I have no idea whatever happened to that. It’s probably stuck in a file, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Paul contacted him and was a Star Trek fan. He invited us to a concert, which was great, and we met him backstage, which was fun. Paul hired Gene to write a story about the band, which was Wings at the time, and it was a crazy story. Paul gave him an outline and Gene was supposed to do something with it. It was bands from outer space and they were having a competition. Gene was open to things at this point; Star Trek wasn’t happening and he wasn’t getting his scripts produced and he had a family to feed. It’s kind of fun when Paul McCartney contacts you. Gene began working on it and it was about the time they started talking about bringing Trek back, so he never got to complete anything for Paul.
JON POVILL
In May of 1975, Paramount expressed interest in developing a Star Trek film, so Gene moved back into his old office on the lot. He brought me in to carry boxes down from the garage. All of the old crap from the original series he wanted back in the office. I brought boxes from his garage to Paramount. Interestingly, one of my friends came to help as well. Gene would diet from time to time and he had just lost a bunch of weight. He was hauling a box out of the garage and up into the house to go through them. My friend was carrying a box behind Gene, who was carrying a box, and Gene’s pants fell down [laughs] and there he was, bare-assed.
Another idea for a Star Trek motion picture that was briefly announced and abandoned ironically presaged J. J. Abrams’s 2009 film by several decades (as well as Harve Bennett’s ill-fated The Academy Years, which had met with much derision from Roddenberry as well as the original cast), in which the show’s iconic ensemble would be united for the first time.
Roddenberry, who had been talking about the idea in public since the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention, described his idea for the prequel to Circus magazine in 1975. “Most of it is in my head now,” he offered. “People have been asking me for years how the whole thing came about. How did Spock meet Kirk and Scotty? How did the whole crew get together and reach the point where the television series began?”
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
In a conversation with George, Jimmy, or Nichelle they mentioned having received a letter from Gene saying, “Welcome aboard, we’re going to go forward and do this new movie.” I didn’t receive a letter. I called up Susan Sackett, who said I was worrying unnecessarily and that even though Gene was out of town, she would speak to him by phone and he would reassure me. Well, he didn’t call me until he got back to town, and he told me that this idea he had was going to take place three years before the five-year mission and since six years had transpired since the series and my character to begin with was already nine years younger than I was, they thought that I was too old to play myself. Then he said something that they would try to use me as Chekov’s father, which would have been a kick. But, again, it was kind of a painful situation realizing that there were no concrete plans for using Chekov in that movie.
Abandoning the prequel idea, Roddenberry began work on a treatment for what would eventually be called The God Thing, in which Admiral Kirk would reassemble the crew to stop an entity on course for Earth that claims to be God. The ship turns out to be a living computer programmed by a race that was “cast out” of its own dimension and into ours. The story ends with the “God” entity miraculously granting our crew newfound youth and returning them back to the original five-year mission.
While many vestiges of The God Thing can be found in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it’s even more surprising to see how similar many elements are to William Shatner’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a film Roddenberry vociferously denounced throughout its production.
JON POVILL
The fact that The God Thing never got produced could have been the reason Gene hated the idea of Star Trek V.
SUSAN SACKETT
There was an entirely different story in which there was going to be some kind of creature that was going to claim to be God and turn out to be the Devil. It was a morality play. It was very esoteric and the studio turned it down. At one point it was going to be novelized, but it didn’t come about.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
I was working on the series Barbary Coast at the time, which was done at Paramount. It was on one end of Paramount, and Star Trek had been filmed at the other end of Paramount. I had never, for the longest time, revisited the stage area where [we had] filmed. So one day I decided to go there, [and] as I’d been walking and remembering the times, I suddenly heard the sound of a typewriter! That was the strangest thing, because these offices were deserted. So I followed the sound, till I came to the entrance of this building. And the sound was getting louder as I went into the building. I went down a hallway, where the offices for Star Trek were … I opened the door and there was Gene Roddenberry!
He was sitting in a corner, typing. I hadn’t seen him in five years. I said, “Gene, the series has been canceled!” He said, “I know, I know the series has been canceled. I’m writing the movie!” So I said, “There’s gonna be a movie? What’s it gonna be about?” He said, “First of all, we have to explain how you guys got older. So what we have to do is move everybody up in a rank. You become an admiral, and the rest of the cast become Starfleet commanders. One day a force comes toward Earth—might be God, might be the Devil—breaking everything in its path, except the minds of the starship commanders. So we gotta find all the original crewmen for the starship Enterprise, but first—where is Spock? He’s back on Vulcan, doing R & R; five-year mission, seven years of R & R. He swam back upstream. So we gotta go get him.” So we get Spock, do battle, and it was a great story, but the studio turned it down.
JON POVILL
The novel Gene had hired me to do research on was The God Thing, but it wasn’t a Star Trek novel. I was researching stuff that would later appear in Close Encounters: How would the planet react? How would the military react? What would the interaction likely be at this stage in terms of if we discovered a ship and extraterrestrials in orbit around our planet? How would we deal with it? I was trying to ascertain that kind of stuff.
It was an original novel using all different characters, but the premise of it was that this big starship—shades of V’ger!—comes back to Earth and it hadn’t been here since Christ’s time, and it turns out that the starship interacts with planets by ascertaining the level society is at and providing a prophet that suits that level of development. Then it can interact and advance society in some way or another, contrary to the Prime Directive. But now this spaceship malfunctions and instead of ascertaining where we are now, it delivers us Christ again.
RICHARD COLLA
Gene showed me that script, which was much more daring than Star Trek: The Motion Picture would be. The Enterprise went off in search of that thing from outer space that was affecting everything. By the time they got into the alien’s presence, it manifested itself and said, “Do you know me?” Kirk said, “No, I don’t know who you are.” It said, “Strange, how could you not know who I am?” So it shift-changed and became another image and said, “Do you know me?” Kirk said, “No, who are you?” It said, “Strange, how could you not know who I am?” So it shift-changed and came up in the form of Christ the carpenter, and says, “Do you know me?” and Kirk says, “Oh, now I know who you are.”
JON POVILL
It probably would have brought Star Trek down, because the Christian Right, even though it wasn’t then what it is now, would have just destroyed it. In fact, he started the script under one Paramount administration and handed it to another, to Barry Diller, who was a devout Catholic. There was no way on Earth that that script was going to fly for a devout Catholic.
RICHARD COLLA
Really, what Gene had written was that this “thing” was sent forth to lay down the law, to communicate the law of the universe, and that as time went on, the law was meant to be reinterpreted. And at that time two thousand years earlier, the law was interpreted by the carpenter image. As time went on, the law was meant to be reinterpreted and the Christ figure was meant to reappear in different forms. But this machine malfunctioned, and it was like a phonograph record that got caught in a groove and kept grooving back, grooving back, grooving back. It’s important to understand the essence of all this and reinterpret it as time goes on. That was a little heavy for Paramount. It was meant to be strong and moving, and I’m sorry it never got made.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Actually, it wasn’t God they were meeting, but someone who had been born here on Earth before, claiming to be God. I was going to say that this false thing claiming to be God had screwed up man’s concept of the real infinity and beauty of what God is. Paramount was reluctant to put that up on the screen, and I can understand that position.
JON POVILL
He jumped at the chance to do this Star Trek film, because he needed the money. It was also always about proving something, so he was going to prove that it was no fluke. He was ambivalent about Star Trek at the time and grew to be enthusiastic, and became ambivalent when they threw it out. It was a love-hate relationship he had with the project, because it was his only big success.
Over the decades there were reportedly a number of attempts to novelize The God Thing, among the potential authors Susan Sackett and Fred Bronson, Roddenberry official biographer David Alexander, Trek star Walter Koenig, and in the version that came the closest to fruition, Michael Jan Friedman’s adaptation for Pocket Books.
DAVID STERN (former Star Trek editor at Pocket Books)
We definitely wanted to make The God Thing part of the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations in 1991, and had been talking to Gene about doing that. My first memories of The God Thing really date to the period after Gene’s death. Gene’s lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, and I had several meetings, including a couple with Majel Barrett, regarding the manuscript.
The manuscript existed as a very long treatment, much more of a film treatment than a book. I had proposed Mike Friedman as the person to expand that treatment into a novel, because Mike was not only a good writer, but someone very, very used to the approvals process at that point. He could take a no and work with it. Which is what happened a couple times.
MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN (author)
Gene had written a script for the first Star Trek movie. Certain elements showed up in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but most did not. So there was this mysterious script floating around that people talked about as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls.
After I had written several successful Trek novels, Trek editor Dave Stern asked me to turn Gene’s efforts into a novel called The God Thing. To the best of my recollection, I received both the script and a short narrative version of it. Naturally I jumped at the chance to translate and expand it. Gene was—and still is—one of my heroes, for God’s sake, no pun intended. As he had already left the land of the living, this was a unique opportunity to collaborate with him. But when I read the material, I was dismayed. I hadn’t seen other samples of Gene’s unvarnished writing, but what I saw this time could not possibly have been his best work. It was disjointed—scenes didn’t work together, didn’t build toward anything meaningful. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy didn’t seem anything like themselves. There was some mildly erotic, midlife crisis stuff in there that didn’t serve any real purpose. In the climactic scene, Kirk had a fistfight with an alien who had assumed the image of Jesus Christ.
So Kirk was slugging it out on the bridge. With Jesus.
DAVID STERN
We worked up an outline, Leonard [Maizlish] and Majel looked at it, and said the things Friedman added here (subplots, etc., necessary to expand the treatment to novel length) are not reflective of what Gene intended. And that got frustrating, because we weren’t getting specific enough feedback to know which direction to go in. And the manuscript—Gene’s treatment—definitely needed more. There was the added complication—though I suspect this wasn’t as much of a worry at the time—that a lot of themes in that treatment Gene had subsequently addressed in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and in his TNG work, and that Star Trek V had touched on some similar themes as well.
I believe what happened then—after a couple go-rounds—is that the project was simply allowed to die. I don’t know for certain, though, because by that point I had left Trek.
MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN
Gene’s feelings about organized religion had made their way into other Trek episodes and movies. In these other cases, his comments were more measured, more considered; they worked in the context of the story, making a point about our place in the universe. I don’t think that happened in The God Thing. The best Star Trek is about ultimately embracing the alien and unfamiliar. This took the opposite tack. I discussed the problem with Dave Stern. Pocket had already invested in the project, even designed a dust jacket, so we decided I would come up with a coherent novel outline that incorporated as many elements of Gene’s script as possible. I did this. However, Majel, Gene’s widow, wasn’t on board with what I had done. She insisted that Gene’s script be expanded into a novel-length narrative, period. No changes, no substantive additions, no embellishments.
This was, of course, her prerogative. After all, she was Gene’s widow. And I could have tried to do what she was asking—just stretch out the scenes to take up more pages. Certainly, it would have been a healthy payday for me. The print run was slated to be enormous. But public scrutiny of this story in anything approximating its original form would not have put Gene or his legacy in a good light. It would not have put me in a good light. And it would not have put Pocket in a good light. In the end, after discussions with Majel and after entertaining the possibility of using one other writer, Pocket agreed with my assessment and scrapped the project.
I wish it had turned out otherwise. But you know, all things considered, it’s probably better this way.
JON POVILL
Gene went to work on The God Thing in May of 1975, and it was his first attempt at a Star Trek feature. By August it was shitcanned by Paramount president Barry Diller. Gene, who had gotten to know me pretty well by then, suggested that I take a crack at writing a treatment, which I did. Then he and I worked on a treatment together.
Treatment One was a spec story that I did after Gene told me that the studio had turned down The God Thing—which was not the actual title of his script, just what the script has come to be called since then. So, Gene told me it’d been rejected and told me that if I wanted to come up with a Star Trek movie story of my own, he’d be happy to look at it and to pass it along if he thought it was worthy. What I didn’t know at the time was that about seven hundred thousand other writers had been told the same thing and that some of them (I think) were being paid to come up with their ideas. Amongst them … not sure, but I think there was Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, John D. F. Black, Richard Matheson, and Ted Sturgeon. And probably others from outside the Trek universe.
In this story, planet Vulcan passes through an area of space in which they had previously released a “psychic cloud” that—they believed—would fill the enemy with distrust that would break down all military discipline and create chaos within the enemy ranks. They had done this in the final war that they’d fought, a war in which things were going so poorly that they were forced to release the cloud prematurely, without full testing that would have revealed the damn thing only worked on Vulcans. But as with most weapons, it’s only a matter of time before whatever you came up with winds up being used against you—only in this case it was more a matter of the movement of star systems bringing Vulcan into this area of space. Interestingly, in order for Spock to be free of the influence of the cloud, he has to focus himself totally on the human half of his being—and he remains human and quirky for the majority of the story.
Ultimately, the Enterprise must go back in time to the final Vulcan war in an attempt to prevent the release of the cloud. When they fail to do so, Spock uses the equipment to send out a psychic cloud of his own—of logic, trust, restraint, and respect that effectively counteracts the effects of the initial cloud. And the Enterprise turns the tide in the war against the ancient foe so that Vulcan is not conquered or destroyed. I gave it to Gene sometime in late August or early September of 1975. He read it and said it would have made a swell episode, but that he didn’t think it would work as a feature.
In December of 1975, he called me and said he had a new idea for a feature, would I like to work on it with him? I still remember standing in my kitchen and hanging up the phone after I said yes, and then whooping so loudly that my neighbors came running over to see what the hell was going on.
The result of that call was Treatment Two, which certainly seemed at the time to be my “big break.” It was my first work for a studio—yes, I took over Gene Coon’s old office (for the first time; I’d lose it and get it back again many times in the next four years)—and Paramount paid me for my efforts on it. The story has numerous elements in common with Treatment One, which at the time led me to believe that Gene’s “new” idea had been inspired by my spec story, though he never said as much to me and so I have nothing to go on but my own presumption. In this one, rather than Spock being responsible for the change in Vulcan personality from hot-blooded warriors to peaceful beings ruled by logic, Scotty is responsible for wiping the Earth out of the Federation. The Enterprise and all aboard it had been destroyed by a black hole while Spock and Scotty, in smaller research vessels without the gravitational disrupting issues of warp engines, had managed to escape. Scotty, in a desperate attempt to go back in time and prevent his precious ship and crew from slipping into the event horizon, miscalculates, winds up in 1937, and triggers changes with a snowball effect.
His efforts to stop the snowball only make things worse for his original time period, though they do make things considerably better between 1937 and 1964. World War II is avoided, Kennedy is not assassinated, medical science advances substantially and a whole bunch of other boons make it impossible for world leaders to agree to help Kirk set things right for the future by plunging the twentieth century back into the horrors stored in the Enterprise’s history records. Kennedy, however, recognizes the greater good and helps Kirk destroy his world to create the better one. There’s also a cool bit of stuff as Einstein along with Churchill, Kennedy, Hitler, and others tour the Enterprise.
As I read the two treatments, I felt like both of the concepts had merit. Treatment Two had a really great way of reintroducing most of the main characters—who are dead as the movie starts, but are literally resurrected by a mysterious process in some way related to the black hole. Both stories needed a lot of reworking, but there was potential there. If the studio had any real sense of what Star Trek was about and why it worked, they might have shown more patience, but the plug was quickly pulled and Treatment Two was rejected by the studio.
JOHN D. F. BLACK (story editor, Star Trek)
I came up with a story concept involving a black hole, and this was before Disney’s film. The black hole had been used by several planets in a given constellation as a garbage dump. But with a black hole there’s a point of equality. In other words, when enough positive matter comes into contact with an equal amount of negative matter, the damn thing blows up. Well, if that ever occurs with a black hole, it’s the end of the universe. It will swallow everything. The Enterprise discovered what’s happened with this particular black hole, and they try to stop these planets from unloading into it. The planets won’t do it. It comes to war in some areas and as a result, the black hole comes to balance and blows up. At that point, it would continue to chew up matter. In 106 years Earth would be swallowed by this black hole, and the Enterprise is trying to beat the end of the world. There were at least twenty sequels in that story, because the jeopardy keeps growing more intense.
Paramount rejected the idea. They said it wasn’t big enough.
JAMES VAN HISE (editor, Enterprise Incidents)
The story that Harlan came up with was never written down but presented verbally. The story did not begin with any of the Enterprise crew but started on Earth where strange phenomenon were inexplicably occurring. In India, a building where a family is having dinner just vanishes into dust. In the United States, one of the Great Lakes suddenly vanishes, wreaking havoc. In a public square, a woman suddenly screams and falls to the pavement where she transforms into some sort of reptilian creature.
The truth is suppressed, but the Federation realizes that someone or something is tampering with time and changing things on Earth in the far distant past. What is actually happening involves an alien race on the other end of the galaxy. Eons ago, Earth and this planet both developed races of humans and intelligent humanoid reptiles. On Earth, the humans destroyed the reptile men and flourished. In the time of the Enterprise, when the race learns what happened on Earth in the remote past, they decide to change things in the past so that they will have a kindred planet. For whatever reason, the Federation decides that only the Enterprise and her crew are qualified for this mission, so a mysterious cloaked figure goes about kidnapping the old central crew. The figure is finally revealed to be Kirk. After they are reunited, they prepare for the mission into the past to save Earth. And that would have been just the first half hour of the film!
In a tenth-anniversary article on Star Trek that appeared in Crawdaddy! magazine, Ellison elaborated: “My involvement with the film amounted to bullshit,” he said. “It was the kind of bullshit you get from amateurs and independents but you don’t expect from a major studio like Paramount. They don’t know what they’re doing over there. Gene may know, but the studio sure doesn’t. They called me in on four separate occasions and they never paid me a nickel. I did one complete script that Gene liked. It was rejected. We worked on another idea together. We took it up to the executive who was in charge of the film, the head guy who, by the way, has never produced a film in his life. He’s an ex-designer—right away you know where he’s coming from.
“Now, the guy is a complete and utter moron. We’re showing him the script and he’s just read a von Däniken book about the Aztec calendar and how the Aztec gods were from outer space. He looks at us and says, ‘Do you think you can put in something about the Aztecs?’ Agghhh. And we’re saying, ‘Look. This story takes place at the dawn of time. There weren’t any Aztecs then!’ He doesn’t flinch. ‘How about one or two?’ What can you do? These people are schmucks.”
Author Robert Silverberg also wrote a treatment. Titled The Billion-Year Voyage, it was more of an intellectual foray as the Enterprise crew discovers the ruins of an ancient but far more advanced civilization, and must battle other aliens in order to take possession of the wondrous gifts left behind. Gifts which would surely benefit mankind some day in the future when they are ready to accept that responsibly.
ROBERT SILVERBERG (author, Lord Valentine’s Castle)
My Star Trek involvement was minimal. I never wrote for the show, rarely watched it, and was quite surprised when Paramount unexpectedly asked me to take a shot at the screenplay for the first movie. I met with the Paramount executives, pitched an idea based on a book of mine called Across a Billion Years, was asked to write a treatment, wrote it, was paid quite generously for it, and then vanished from the scene when the project was canceled.
Perhaps the greatest “what if” in the history of the franchise is auteur Philip Kaufman’s (The Right Stuff, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) proposed Star Trek feature film, Planet of the Titans, which featured a script from British screenwriters Chris Bryant and Allan Scott (whose credits included the acclaimed Nicolas Roeg film Don’t Look Now), later rewritten by Kaufman himself. While the British screenwriters came to America, Gene Roddenberry was about to leave the country for Britain to shoot his supernatural Spectre pilot.
Despite not even having completed a script, the writing team was already being asked to attend Star Trek conventions, prompting the two writers to ask Roddenberry what to do. His response: “Forget it! Trekkie teenyboppers lurk outside your room at night yearning to meet you and talk about science. If you must go to one of these, our main concern is that you keep your fly zipped up while on platform.”
Star Trek was viewed as a priority at Paramount, particularly after the first space shuttle, originally called the Constitution, was renamed the Enterprise. This prompted Paramount to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times proclaiming, “Starship Enterprise will be joining the space shuttle Enterprise in its space travels very soon. Early next year, Paramount Pictures begins filming an extraordinary motion picture adventure—Star Trek. Now we can look forward to two great space adventures.” Ironically, neither would ever take off.
DAVID V. PICKER (president of motion pictures, Paramount Pictures)
Of all the films I developed, acquired, or green-lit while I was at Paramount, there was just one project that I was simply not interested in: [chairman of Gulf & Western, which then owned Paramount] Charlie Bludhorn’s favorite—a movie based on Star Trek. Obviously, character and story are the main ingredients, and in this show the futuristic but accessible world that was portrayed played an important role. But I disliked sci-fi. I didn’t like sci-fi books, movies, comic strips … none of it. Had George Lucas done American Graffiti for us at UA, I believe I would have passed on Star Wars. Jeffrey [Katzenberg] became Barry Diller’s assistant after my departure, and I told Barry that as my parting gift to him, Jeffrey would get Star Trek made. Of course, he did.
RICHARD TAYLOR (art director, Robert Abel & Associates)
Charles Bludhorn’s valet was Jeff Katzenberg. Somewhere along the way Jeff said, “You know I really want to be in movies.” And he said, “All right, I’ll send you to Hollywood.” This was the first film that he produced and he was really green. He was this young guy and he wasn’t unlikable, but he was learning as he went along and it was a much more complicated film than any traditional live-action film was where he should cut his teeth. Instead, he was thrown into this hydra, this Medusa with all the snakes.
GERALD ISENBERG (producer, Star Trek: Planet of the Titans)
I was brought into Paramount because I made a deal with Barry Diller, and that deal said that if a movie of Star Trek is made, I’m going to be the producer. David Picker, who was the head of the studio at the time, and I hired Phil Kaufman to direct and write. Phil was very taken with the Spock character and Leonard and thought that a lot of the other characters were past their usefulness. We began to develop a script that was a time-travel script that was really influenced by Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, which was a history of human evolution for a billion years going forward.
ALLAN SCOTT (writer, Star Trek: Planet of the Titans)
Jerry Isenberg, who was the producer at that time, brought us in. We came out and met with him and Gene. We talked about the project, and I think the only thing we agreed on at the time was that if we were going to make Star Trek as a motion picture, we should try and go forward, as it were, from the television series. Take it into another realm, if you like. Another dimension. To that end we were talking quite excitedly about a distinguished film director, and Phil Kaufman’s name came up. We all thought that was a wonderful idea, and we met with him. Phil is a great enthusiast and very knowledgeable about science fiction.
PHILIP KAUFMAN (director, The Right Stuff)
I had done White Dawn for Paramount and it wasn’t a big hit, but it was well regarded, so I got the call from my agent who thought I wouldn’t be interested in doing it. But the minute I heard what it was, that they wanted to make a three-million-dollar movie of an old television series they thought would be worth reviving and there was a certain fan base, I knew I was interested. It wouldn’t have ordinarily been something that would interest me if it didn’t have all of these interesting situations, which I didn’t feel were that well executed on the TV show, by necessity.
ALLAN SCOTT
We did a huge amount of reading. We must have read thirty science-fiction books of various kinds. At that time we also had that guy from NASA who was one of the advisors to the project, Jesco von Puttkamer. He was at some of the meetings, and Gene was at all of the meetings.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
I met with Gene and I looked at episodes with him and we talked about all sorts of things. Somehow through the whole process, I must say, Gene always wanted to go back to his script, that he always wanted to really just do another episode with a little more money. Paramount wasn’t interested in that, because they’d already turned it down. But in the process of working with Jerry and Gene, we got them to commit to a ten-million-dollar movie, which was a good amount of money in those days.
GERALD ISENBERG
Phil was thinking 2001. He wanted to make another great movie, like the way 2001 explored the future and alternate realities. That’s where he was going.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
Whatever the requirements of sixties television were, they were really lacking in a visual quality and in all those things that a feature film in science fiction needed to have. I felt that those elements were in there, if properly thought out and expanded, and could be a fantastic event. We knew what the feature films in science fiction had been prior to this: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, a few of these things that were wondrous adventures.
GERALD ISENBERG
David [Picker] believed Phil was a talented filmmaker and he is. He’s made a couple of great movies and won Academy Awards. And a real thinker. We sat in a room and he basically talked to us about the Star Trek audience and who the characters are, who the most important characters are, and who is the center of Star Trek and it’s Spock. You can take any other character out of that series and the series is the same. Even Kirk. You just replace him with another captain. But Spock is the center of that series. That character represents the essence of what that show is about.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
It was an adventure through a black hole into the future and the past, and there were more relationships really developed beyond just the crew relationships. Kirk was to have an important role but not the center. The center was Spock, a Klingon, a woman parapsychologist who was trying to treat Spock’s insanity [he had gotten caught in his pon farr cycles], and there was going to be sex, which the sixties series never had, but we were here at the end of the seventies and we’re in a world where great movies were being made and the times were really ripe for expanding your mind.
GERALD ISENBERG
Leonard’s basic feeling was until he sees a finished script that he wants to do, whatever you want to do is fine. By that time in his life, Star Trek was a source of money for him through the appearances and everything else, but he was refusing to have that be his career and his image and his life. He was into writing. Leonard is a true Renaissance man, he’s a writer and a photographer, a poet, he’s an amazing human being. So with the Spock character, of course, he represents the great conflict between reason and emotion, inherent in that person, so the whole Star Trek cast was a nice add-on, but the central conflict existed completely within Spock.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
Don’t forget, both Nimoy and Shatner were not going to participate in the feature when it first happened. There were some contractual problems they were having. I think I met Shatner briefly, but Leonard Nimoy and I got along great. I thought he was brilliant and after it was canceled I cast him in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and took some elements of Spock for the film. In the beginning, he is the shrink Dr. Kibner, who is warm and trying to heal people, the human side, and then he turns into a pod, which is the Vulcan side. Instead of pointy ears, I gave him Birkenstock sandals.
ALLAN SCOTT
Once we started working on the project with Phil, we were told that they had no deal with William Shatner, so in fact the first story draft we did eliminated Captain Kirk. It was only a month or six weeks in that we were called and told that Kirk was now aboard and should be one of the leading characters. So all of that work was wasted. At that time Chris [Bryant] and I would sit in a room and talk about story ideas and notions, and talk them through with either Phil or Gene.
GERALD ISENBERG
We sent Gene the first draft and he was not happy at all, but neither were we. He thought we were making a mistake in dropping Kirk. He basically took the position that we were not helping this franchise.
ALLAN SCOTT
Without any ill feeling on any part, it became clear to us that there was a divergence of view of how the movie should be made between Gene and Phil. I think Gene was quite right in sticking by not so much the specifics of Star Trek, but the general ethics of it. I think Phil was more interested in exploring a wider range of science-fiction stories, and yet nonetheless staying faithful to Star Trek. There was definitely a tugging on the two sides between them.
One of the reasons it took us so long to come up with a story was because things like that would change. If we came up with some aspects that pleased Gene, they often didn’t please Phil and vice versa. We were kind of piggies in the middle.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
Gene was a great guy, but it was a little bit of the Alec Guinness syndrome in Bridge on the River Kwai. He built a bridge and he didn’t want to be rescued and he couldn’t see anything other than what he wanted it to be. I thought science fiction should go forward and I thought that the order was to go boldly where no man has gone before, but Roddenberry wanted to go back.
ALLAN SCOTT
The difficulty was trying to make, as it were, an exploded episode of Star Trek that had its own justification in terms of the new scale that was available for it, because much of Star Trek’s charm was the fact that it dealt with big and bold ideas on a small budget. Of course the first thing that a movie would do, potentially, was match the budget and the scale of the production to the boldness and vigor of the ideas. We spent weeks looking at every single episode of Star Trek and I would guess that pretty much every cast member came by and met us.
Among those involved with preproduction on the film were visionary James Bond production designer Ken Adam and Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica conceptual guru Ralph McQuarrie. Star Trek continued to remain an obsession for the legendary Gulf & Western chairman, Charles Bludhorn, whose daughter, Dominique, was a devoted fan of the series.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
Ken Adam and I became good friends, and we had that sense of making Star Trek a big event with this sense of wonder and visuals. I got to know Ralph McQuarrie through George Lucas, and Ralph came aboard and started designing things.
I went to London scouting with Ken Adam, looking for locations. They were going to pull the plug on Star Wars. Fox and all the people in London were laughing at what a disaster it was. George and his producer, Gary Kurtz, had gone on with the last couple of days with cameras to hastily try and piece together what they knew they needed to finish the movie.
So there was this mood out there that Star Wars was going to be a disaster. I knew otherwise; I had seen what George was doing and had been to what became ILM in the Valley and had spoken to George about that when we were working on the story for the first Raiders of the Lost Ark together. It was a sense of storytelling of what science fiction could be that George was into. That was brilliant and excited me.
I’d been in touch with him while he was shooting Star Wars, and I think George possibly had tried to get the rights to Star Trek prior to his doing Star Wars. I knew there was something great there. Times were crying out for good science fiction. Spielberg was also developing Close Encounters at that time, but Paramount didn’t really know what they had. It was to Roddenberry’s credit that he and the fan base had convinced them that a movie could be made, albeit on the cheap, and I didn’t want to do that, nor did Jerry.
Chris Bryant and Allan Scott turned in their first draft on March 1, 1977. It was Kaufman’s hope to cast legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune as the Enterprise’s Klingon adversary, which could have been the greatest Star Trek villain in the franchise’s history, exceeding even Khan.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
I had loved the power of those Kurosawa movies and The Seven Samurai. If any country other than America had a sense of science fiction, it was Japan. Toshiro Mifune up against Spock would have been a great piece of casting. There would have been a couple of scenes between the two of them, emotion versus Spock’s logical mind shield, trying to close things off, and having humor play between them. Leonard is a funny guy and the idea was not to break the mold of Star Trek, but to introduce it to a bigger audience around the world.
GERALD ISENBERG
We weren’t thinking, this is a franchise and we’re going to do eight movies, we were thinking we would make one good movie. Star Wars launched as a franchise and nowadays you look back and think that everything is a franchise. What we would have ended up doing is a version that was essentially Star Trek, but not the Star Trek that was the series, because we would have focused on Spock and his conflict and being human and what being human is. And that’s really what 80 percent of the Star Trek episodes are dealing with: being human. We were not trying to perpetuate the Star Trek franchise at that time. No one was.
In the script, the crew searches for Kirk and discovers him stranded on a planet where they must face off with both the Klingons and an alien race called the Cygnans, eventually being thrust back in time through a black hole to the dawn of humanity on Earth where the crew members themselves are revealed as the Titans of Greek mythology.
ALLAN SCOTT
I truly don’t remember anything about the script, except the ending. The ending involved primitive man on Earth, and I guess Spock or the crew of the Enterprise inadvertently introduced primitive man to the concept of fire. As they accelerated away, we realize that they were therefore giving birth to civilization as we know it.
I also know that eventually we got to a stage where we more or less didn’t have a story that everybody could agree on and we were in very short time of our delivery date. Chris and I decided that the best thing we could do was take all the information we had absorbed from everybody, sit down, and hammer something out. In fact, we first did a fifteen- or twenty-page story in a three-day time period. I guess amendments were made to that in light of Gene’s and Phil’s recommendations, but already we were at a stage by then that the situation was desperate if we were going to make the movie according to the schedule that was given to us. We made various amendments, wrote the script, went to the studio with it, and they turned it down.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
I still remember the night when I was getting very close, I was then writing and I stayed up all night, but I knew I had a great story. I remember how shaky I was trying to stand up from my writing table and I called Rose, my wife, and I said, “I’ve got it, I really know this story,” and right then the phone rang. It was Jerry Isenberg saying the project’s been canceled. I said, “What do you mean?” and he said, “They said there’s no future in science fiction,” which is the greatest line: there is no future in science fiction.
They just canceled it, they never saw my treatment, nobody read it. I still have it, but that was the end of the project. Barry Diller was going to start another network and go back to TV and said, “Let’s just do what Gene Roddenberry was pushing for,” which was that same stuff, which I found passé and kind of clunky. Now, people are coming back to TV, but back then everything was the world of features, which was the only way you could make a movie like 2001.
On May 8, 1977, Planet of the Titans was officially shelved. With Bryant and Scott on their way back to England, their parting gift to those who remained behind was a memo wishing everyone well. “Giving birth takes nine months. We’ve only been gestating for seven. So there’s no baby. But there’s an embryo. Look after it.”
SUSAN SACKETT
Robert Redford as Captain Kirk was one thing Gene used to joke about. The studio wanted to recast it with known names. He said this in his college lectures. There was some talk of that, but I don’t think it was serious.
GERALD ISENBERG
Mike Eisner came into the studio and canceled the movie so that he could do Star Trek as a TV series again as part of a projected Paramount TV network. Star Trek was going to be the center of the network, and Gene became the executive producer in charge again, because he was not in charge of the movie. So they set out to do this TV series and about seven months later, after investing about two million dollars in sets, Paramount TV falls apart and they decide to do it again as a movie.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)
The studio never seemed to know exactly what it wanted, which was very exhausting for Gene. He went through so many attempts to get it restarted, and there were times where he was ready to just walk away from all of it. But once Star Wars proved that science fiction could be mainstream, there was no going back. The second attempt at a series, Star Trek: Phase II, ground to a halt and everyone and everything changed so that a major motion picture could be made.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
About two or three months after Star Trek was canceled, Star Wars was released and then shortly thereafter Close Encounters came out. It turned out there was a future in science fiction after all.