“AREN’T YOU DEAD?”
With plans to develop a feature film now abandoned, preproduction began in earnest on the development of a new TV series, dubbed Star Trek: Phase II. Under the creative aegis of Gene Roddenberry, the new series—announced on June 10, 1977—was intended to serve as the cornerstone of a Paramount/Hughes TV network, which would launch with a two-hour premiere, to air on February 1, 1978. Among those joining the project were story editor Jon Povill; producer Bob Goodwin, who would oversee physical production; and Harold Livingston, who would handle the development of thirteen scripts for the first season.
Harold Antill Livingston, like Roddenberry, had lived a remarkable life prior to arriving in Hollywood, having served as a pilot in World War II, a commercial airline pilot for TWA, an advertising copywriter, a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force in 1948, and an acclaimed author of several novels.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON (writer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
I produced a show for ABC called Future Cop. He was a manufactured robot that couldn’t be hurt and he had a mechanical computer brain. Ernie Borgnine was his mentor. It was a good show and I was very close to the head of production at Paramount Television, Arthur Fellows. As far as I know, they were very down on Roddenberry, and so Arthur brought me in when they decided to do this Phase II in which Paramount would launch their own network. I never saw Star Trek in my life, and my first meeting with Roddenberry was a total disaster. He said, “What do you know about Star Trek?” I said, “Nothing.” Well, that went over very well.
ROBERT GOODWIN (producer, Star Trek: Phase II)
A guy named Gary Nardino came in and took over as president of Paramount Television, and made the decision to start a fourth network. The plan was that every Saturday night they were going to do one hour of Star Trek and then a two-hour movie.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
The objective of the new series was very vague. All they knew was that the studio had some kind of arrangement with what was then going to be a fourth network. I suppose it would take the form of some kind of syndicated program. So thirteen episodes plus a pilot were ordered, and it was then my job to develop these stories, which I set upon doing.
JON POVILL (story editor, Star Trek: Phase II)
I think Gene was more comfortable doing Star Trek as a TV series than he had been when it was being developed as a film. He liked the idea of Phase II. Again, it was sort of “Fuck you, NBC, we’re back!” And the control he wouldn’t have had on the Jerry Isenberg–Phil Kaufman version, he would have on the TV series, so he was back in the driver’s seat. That was to his liking. Keep in mind that Star Trek was one of the first TV shows to be remade as a feature. The previous attempts were shitcanned largely because nobody could figure out how to extend this to two hours and make it work. “What kind of story do we tell? It doesn’t feel big enough.” It seemed to lose its Star Trek flavor as soon as you got it that big. So I think Gene felt more comfortable with hour episodes. It also had to be something of an honor to be the flagship of the Paramount network, which was the intention. Of course, it happened ten years later with The Next Generation.
Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, commented at the time: “We considered the project for years. We’d done a number of treatments, scripts, and every time we’d say, ‘This isn’t good enough.’ If we had just gone forward and done it, we might have done it quite well. In the case of the Isenberg–Kaufman version, it was the script. We felt, frankly, that it was a little pretentious. We went to Gene Roddenberry and said, ‘Look, you’re the person who understands Star Trek. We don’t. But what we should probably do is return to the original context, a television series.’ If you force it as a big seventy-millimeter widescreen movie, you go directly against the concept. If you rip Star Trek off, you’ll fail, because the people who like Star Trek don’t just like it, they love it.”
In sharing his feelings with Starlog magazine, Roddenberry confessed, “The worst that can happen is someone would say that Roddenberry couldn’t do it a second time. That doesn’t bother me, as long as I did my damnedest to do it a second time.”
ROBERT GOODWIN
My interest had always been more in the long form rather than the series side of television. Gary Nardino decided that he was going to put me in charge of all these two-hour movies, which was great for me. But then it turned out that they were looking for someone to come on as producer, and Gene Roddenberry had heard about me. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t anxious to do it. My real interest, as I said, was the long form, and I was supposed to supervise those movies. I was pretty much strong-armed to do it and not given too much of a choice. Paramount said, “Forget the two-hour movies, you’re doing Star Trek.”
So I went over to see Gene, and initially I got kicked out of his office. His assistant, Susan Sackett, thought I was an agent or something. She didn’t know I had an appointment to see him and wouldn’t let me in. I said, “Fine,” and walked out. I was about a half a mile away at the other side of the studio when Gene Roddenberry came running after me. To make a long story short, he wanted me to go in as one of the two producers. They were going to hire a writing producer and a production producer. It was kind of a strange situation.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I had never met Roddenberry, but I think I was working at Paramount at the time. Bob Goodwin and I were both going to work under Gene. If I remember correctly, there were a lot of interviews and bullshit that went on, but Gene and I kind of hit it off. We had similar backgrounds. We had both been in the air force during the war and we both worked for civilian airlines after the war, so I think that’s one of the reasons that Gene, in the beginning, liked me.
Roddenberry said, “You’ve got to read the Star Trek bible.” So he gives me this unintelligible pamphlet, which I never read. I had to sit through seventy-nine episodes of Star Trek, at which point I decided that this was Wagon Train in space. So what am I going to do with it? I had no idea.
Star Trek: Phase II was intended to be set during the Enterprise’s second five-year mission. Led by Captain Kirk, the entire rest of the original crew was back … except for Spock. Gene Roddenberry has often said that Nimoy did not want to do television at that time. For his part, Nimoy claimed he had only been offered the pilot and the possibility of a recurring role, and had no interest in being a part-time Spock.
In addition, considerable acrimony remained over Nimoy’s failure to receive a piece of the burgeoning Star Trek merchandise being sold as well as Roddenberry failing to cast him in the Questor Tapes pilot three years earlier, for which Nimoy had been told he would be starring. Then, through secondhand sources, he discovered that Robert Foxworth had actually been cast as Questor, and when he confronted Roddenberry about it, the Great Bird once again blamed the studio.
DAVID GERROLD (author, The World of Star Trek)
You have to ask yourself why Gene Roddenberry never got any other series on the air except for Star Trek. It’s like he is the source of the problem. He was able to sell Genesis II and Questor, and Universal was actually willing to buy thirteen episodes of Questor, but Gene got angry and wouldn’t do the series.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)
At about the time the Star Trek movie was canceled by Paramount, I had a meeting with Leonard Nimoy in which we discussed Star Trek and television. At that time, he told me that he might consider long-form television specials, but “under no circumstances” would he return to play Mr. Spock again on a weekly hour television series basis. He explained that the pressures of weekly television would interfere with his career goal of stage, film, and other things. I still hoped he would change his mind, but could not ignore reports that he continued to reject any Star Trek television possibilities in newspaper columns and in television interviews.
Then when Nimoy finally became part of a successful play on Broadway, I had to accept that his rejection of Star Trek television was final. Convinced that no terms I could arrange would bring a willing and enthusiastic Leonard Nimoy into the role of Mr. Spock on television again, I had no choice but to get on with the difficult job of inventing a new science officer.
In the pages of his second autobiography, I Am Spock, Nimoy painted a slightly different version of the situation: “I’ll confess that when I first heard about the new show, I had major reservations. I was still very concerned about being perceived as a one-character actor, and still war-weary from the unpleasant struggles from Trek’s third season. But I was at least willing to hear what Paramount and Gene Roddenberry had to offer. And here it was: a recurring role wherein Spock appeared in two of every eleven episodes. Quite honestly, the offer confused and startled me. Only two out of every eleven? I was being offered a part-time job. It made little sense for me to be technically tied up with a series and having to be unavailable for other challenging work, while at the same time making such a small contribution to the show. I passed.”
JON POVILL
I don’t think Gene was worried about Leonard not being on the show. Leonard is an example of someone he could demonstrate “revenge” on. You know, “I can show everyone that we didn’t need Spock.” Gene was pissed off at him. They were kind of feuding for most of that period. I don’t know exactly what the bug up his ass was about Leonard. Leonard was complaining that he wasn’t getting money from merchandising, including merchandising that was coming from Lincoln Enterprises, so there were arguments over things like that. Gene was just pissed off at him. I think there was more of a “Fuck him!” attitude. In retrospect, even though I didn’t know Leonard really well, I have to say that in all of my dealings with him, I really liked the guy. He was very genuine.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I wanted Jon Povill to be my story editor and Gene wanted him to continue cleaning his garage or something, so we had a big thing about that. I eventually got my way.
JON POVILL
Harold was primarily responsible for getting me the story-editor job. Gene was reluctant to move me “that far, that fast,” to use his words. Harold was adamant that I was doing the job of a story editor and, by God, I should be getting paid as one. Also, Harold had not been very familiar with the old series at all and kind of relied on me to be the monitor of whether something fit with Star Trek or not. Once everything got rolling, and we were in a lot of writers’ meetings, I sort of took over as the person who pointed out where there were holes in the stories, and where they did not conform to what Star Trek was supposed to be.
One of the keys to me becoming story editor was that one of the stories we’d received, “The Child,” had to be written in a week. I had Jaron Summers, who wrote the story, do a first draft. And then I had to do a pretty complete rewrite. It had to get into shape for shooting, and the way that script came out would determine whether or not I could be the story editor.
The staff put together a writers’ and directors’ bible for the series that was completed on July 15, 1977. The series bible was a guide for potential writers about how the ship would function, potential stories, and bios of the characters, emphasizing three new additions to the crew.
Lt. Xon is a full Vulcan, designed to take the place of Spock as ship science officer. The primary difference between the two is that Xon has virtually no knowledge of the human equation and realizes that the only way he will be able to equal Spock is by making an effort to touch his repressed emotions, thus allowing him to more fully relate to the crew. The bible notes that “we’ll get some humor out of Xon trying to simulate laughter, anger, fear, and other human feelings.” Interestingly, the Spock-McCoy feud would have carried over to Xon and the doctor, with the difference being that McCoy believes their “feud is a very private affair … and McCoy has been known to severely chastise in private those crewmen who have been unfair to the Vulcan in comparing his efforts to Spock’s.”
First officer Commander Will Decker was designed to be a younger version of Captain Kirk. He comes close to worshipping the captain and would “literally rather die than fail him.” Essentially Decker is a captain in training, and the idea was that the audience would watch his gradual growth during the five-year mission. In many instances he would lead landing parties, thus alleviating the perpetual logistical flaw of the initial Star Trek TV series: a ship’s captain would never beam into potential danger as often as Kirk did.
The final new addition to the crew was Lieutenant Ilia, the bald Deltan, whose race is marked by a heightened sexuality that pervades every aspect of their society. Additionally, Ilia has heightened intelligence, second perhaps only to Xon, and gifted with unique esper abilities. As noted in the bible, “Unlike the mind meld of Vulcans, it simply is the ability to sense images in other minds. Never words or emotions, only images … shape, sizes, textures. On her planet, sexual foreplay consists largely of lovers placing images in each other’s minds.”
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
The idea was to bring in a new generation. I think those characters would have developed well. Obviously you couldn’t have a geriatric crew there; you have to have new people, and these were them. Gradually, Kirk would become an admiral and Decker would become captain. I thought on that basis we could develop some new directions with these people.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER (author, Star Trek Log series)
I loved the character of Lt. Xon. I loved the idea that there would be a full Vulcan on board. It was a change. It gives you different personal and interpersonal conflicts and relationships. I’m not saying they’re better than a half Vulcan gives you, but they would have been different. Particularly Xon on board with Kirk, because Kirk would have been thinking—and this is in the original treatment—that Xon is fully aware that he is taking the place of the legendary Commander Spock, and even though he doesn’t feel emotions, from a logical standpoint it presented all sorts of interesting dramatic possibilities. Kirk thinking, “This kid’s good, but he isn’t Spock.” So a whole different relationship and all kinds of interesting and new interpersonal dynamics to explore there.
JON POVILL
We were helped out tremendously by the new characters. We wanted characters that could go in new directions, as well as the old crew. I particularly liked Xon. I thought there was something very fresh in having a nice young Vulcan to deal with, somebody who was trying to live up to a previous image. To me, that was a very nice gimmick for a TV show that was missing Spock. But we never wanted Xon to be a Spock retread. We wanted him to be somebody who definitely had his own direction to go in, and he had different failings than Spock. Xon’s youth was also very important and he would have brought a freshness that people would have appreciated.
LARRY ALEXANDER (writer, Star Trek: Phase II: “Tomorrow and the Stars”)
Xon may not have been Spock, but I considered him Spock from a character point of view. I had a moment in the script where something has happened to Kirk, and the captain says, “Xon, what have you done to me?” So there was a little bit of resentment there that he wasn’t Spock, which was fun to play with. It seemed like the “logical” thing to do.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
When I wrote for the show, my idea with Xon was to have a lot of fun, because the old crew was back and they had this young squirt and everybody is looking over their shoulder, thinking, “This is the plebe we have to put up with instead of the great Mr. Spock,” who was supposed to be off meditating someplace. Meanwhile, the Vulcan character has to think, “Talk about having burden dumped on your shoulders.”
JON POVILL
Ilia was sort of an embodiment of warmth, sensuality, sensitivity, and a nice yin to Xon’s yang.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
One aspect of Ilia that didn’t get utilized when she did show up in the first movie was the sexuality aspect of her. It barely got touched on. Deltans are sexually irresistible people and they cause a lot of trouble wherever they go. They unsettle guys.
JON POVILL
Decker, of course, was a young Kirk. He would have been the least distinct. He would have had to grow and the performance probably would have done that, bringing something to Decker that the writers would have ultimately latched on to for material.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
The original idea was to have more conflict between Kirk and Decker. He’s supposed to be equal to a younger Kirk, but he comes across as kind of a postgraduate nerd when the character eventually showed up in the movie. It’s like everybody is sitting around wondering how this guy could get command. You weren’t supposed to think that when the character was conceived.
JON POVILL
Xon and Ilia were concept characters. They would have developed, too, I’m sure, because characters grow when they’re performed much more than they do from just the writing. In the early writing, you don’t realize the full potential. You don’t know who’s going to play the character, how they’re going to play it, and what the characteristics of their performance are going to be. If you look at “The Cage,” for example, Spock laughs.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I wanted to make Star Trek more universal. I felt that success notwithstanding, the show had a restrictive audience. There was a greater audience for this. I felt that almost all of the stories seemed to be allegorical, and I wanted to make them a little harder and a little more realistic. My broad intention was to create a series that would attract a larger audience by offering more. We would still offer the same elements that Star Trek did—i.e., science fiction and hope for the future—and do realistic stories.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
When they were thinking of reviving the TV series, a number of writers were called in to submit treatments for hour-long episodes. Roddenberry had gotten in touch with me, because of the Star Trek Log book series. He felt that I was comfortable with the Star Trek universe, and comfortable and familiar with the characters. So I submitted three story ideas. Then Roddenberry gave me a page-and-a-half outline, or notes, for “Robot’s Return,” a proposed episode of Genesis II. He thought that could be developed and wanted to see what I could do with it.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
There was a young man named Alan Dean Foster brought in to me to write something. I wanted to see something he had written and he brought me two screenplays, which I thought were terrible. And I didn’t want him to write, that’s all. I didn’t think he could do it, and this is obviously a subjective judgment. That’s what they were paying me for, and it was my judgment that they should get someone else. In any case, we made a deal with Alan to do a treatment for the pilot, which was this business of the old machine coming back to Earth and assuming a kind of life-form. I don’t think I knew this was similar to an episode of the original show. I thought I saw all seventy-nine episodes, some of which I liked and some I thought were just dreadful. Anyway, I made a deal with Alan’s agent, Paul Kohner, that he would write a treatment and agree not to do the script.
ROBERT GOODWIN
The decision was made to do a two-hour premiere for the series, and I suggested to Gene that since it had never been done in the series before, that we should come up with a story in which Earth was threatened. In all the Star Trek episodes before, they never even came close to Earth. There was this guy named Alan Dean Foster who had this story that became “In Thy Image,” which fit the bill perfectly.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
After my treatment was turned in based on Roddenberry’s page, it was decided to open the series with a two-hour movie for TV, which is fairly standard procedure when they can manage it. It was decided that of the treatments they had in hand, mine was the best suited to carry two hours. So I went home and developed what became an expanded thirty-two-page outline.
In many ways, “In Thy Image” is Star Trek: The Motion Picture sans Spock. The newly refitted Enterprise sets out to combat the mysterious energy cloud that has been destroying vessels and is on a direct heading for Earth. Kirk and the rest of his crew, plus Xon, Ilia, and Decker, encounter the approaching object, discovering the truth behind it: it’s actually an ancient Earth space probe en route to its home world in search of its creator.
This story would prove highly significant to the next stage of Star Trek’s existence. In July 1977—a month after its announcement—the decision was made to cancel the fourth network, because projected advertising revenue would be insufficient to cover the anticipated production costs.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I’m already gun-shy because of the animated series, and I was more than a bit skeptical and concerned that I would not be involved with so many aborted starts from B-movie to a new series. Then incredibly, the series thing happened. I went in for a costume fitting of the old costume and came home and about an hour later they said the whole project was put on hold.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
I remember at one point giving a party at my home for the cast and production staff to celebrate the impending start of a new Star Trek TV series. Plans for it were canceled the day after my party.
After abandoning its plans for a fourth network, Paramount’s initial idea was that “In Thy Image” would be filmed as a two-hour movie that would be shopped to the three networks as a backdoor pilot for a new series. Studio executives were concerned, however, that the networks would pass on the pilot in retaliation for Paramount attempting to launch their own network. As a result, the studio chose once again to mount a motion picture. Anxious to avoid another embarrassing failure to launch, work on Phase II would continue—set construction, scripts, etc.—until all the deals for a reconstituted feature film could be finalized.
ROBERT GOODWIN
At that point they had spent about four years trying to get a script for a feature, but they couldn’t come up with anything that Michael Eisner liked. One day we went into a meeting in the conference room in the Paramount administration building. There was Michael Eisner, Jeff Katzenberg, Gary Nardino, me, and Gene. In the course of that meeting, I got up and pitched this two-hour story. Michael Eisner slammed his hands on the table and said, “We’ve been looking for four years for a feature script. This is it. Now let’s make the movie.” And that was basically it.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I began looking for someone to write the script based on “In Thy Image,” but we were starting to come up against a production date. I couldn’t find anybody I liked, and I just decided with five weeks to go I would have to write it myself.
While Livingston worked on the screenplay between September and October, director Robert L. Collins—whose previous credits included Police Story, Medical Story, and the TV version of Serpico—was brought on to helm “In Thy Image,” and became part of the already turbulent and contentious creative process.
ROBERT L. COLLINS (director, Star Trek: In Thy Image)
They originally made me an offer to direct what was essentially a television movie to regenerate the Star Trek series. So we negotiated on that for a while, and then shortly after I came on board Paramount decided to make a feature of it instead. So it went the route of a feature, and we had a budget of about eight million dollars.
JON POVILL
As the summer of ’77 wore on and the box office for Star Wars continued to build, Paramount brass became more and more convinced they wanted to do a feature. I think they were waiting, to some extent, to see the development of “In Thy Image,” which, as a two-hour script, they felt showed promise but clearly wasn’t ready yet. So, probably to hedge their bet, they continued to develop the series while being mostly interested in the “pilot.” In the end I suspect greed took over and they decided to go all-in with the feature—even with Robert Collins—but then bringing in Robert Wise, who really made it happen.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I sat down and wrote this script. I delivered it and Gene said, “Great, you’ve done your job. Now just relax and I’ll write the second draft.” He wrote it in two days. Seriously, it was that fast. Then he brought it in, gave it to us in a bright orange cover, and there it is: In Thy Image, Screenplay by Gene Roddenberry and Harold Livingston. He took first position. We all read it and I was appalled, and so was everyone else. There was Povill, Bob Goodwin, myself, and Bob Collins, who was the director. We sat around looking at each other and somebody said, “Who’s going to tell him it’s a piece of shit?”
In Roddenberry’s draft of the “In Thy Image” script, dated November 7, 1977, the film opens with Kirk and his girlfriend (an aide to Admiral Nogura), Alexandria, swimming nude. Notes Roddenberry in the scene description, “we limit to PG since we are using nudity to illustrate twenty-third-century natural attitudes.” Hailed by Starfleet on his wrist communicator, Alexandria pulls him down underwater. When he pops back up, he tells Starfleet that “I was attacked by an underwater creature.” San Francisco in the twenty-third century is a gorgeous and bucolic paradise with all industry and transportation now underground. With the Enterprise the only ship in the quadrant with an experienced captain and powerful shields, the vessel is dispatched to confront a mysterious probe that is on a heading for Earth. Alexandria is killed in the same transporter malfunction that would later be depicted in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, while, on the bridge, two “shapely female yeomans check out the young and inexperienced Xon, straight out of the Academy, and the new science officer, and ask him about pon farr.”
As in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, we are also introduced to the characters of Decker and Ilia—although in a far more clunky way. Decker acknowledges his lineage as the son of Commodore Will Decker from the original series episode “The Doomsday Machine,” while Kirk assures Ilia, “I know that Deltan females are not wanton, hairless whores.” Ilia laughs delightedly, prompting her retort, “On my world, existence is loving, pleasuring, sharing, caring,” leading Kirk to ask Ilia, “Have you ever sexed with a human?”
Many familiar elements in Star Trek: The Motion Picture can already be seen in the In Thy Image script, although the V’ger probe is nicknamed Tasha by Chekov and the Ilia–Tasha probe takes a special interest in the irresistible Captain Kirk. “Kirk, let us make sex. In a few hours, Ve-jur will arrive. I will return to my original form.”
Unlike The Motion Picture, however, both Decker and Ilia survive unharmed from their encounter with V’ger after Kirk screens a sixteen-millimeter print from NASA of the creator, which they uncover in San Francisco. In previous drafts the mysterious space probe was called N’Sa, which is discovered to be an abbreviation for NASA.
ROBERT L. COLLINS
After Gene gave us the script, Harold and I sat across from each other and asked which one was going to tell him that it wasn’t quite right. I said, “Hell, I’m the director,” and walked out [leaving the unenviable task to Livingston].
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
He kept the structure I’d created, but I don’t know what he did to it. Just crazy shit. So I said, “I’ll tell him.” I went in and I said, “Gene, this doesn’t work.” Well, his face dropped to his ankles. Then I got myself wound up and I told him why it didn’t work. I said, “Why’d you do it? When something works, you don’t piss in it to make it better!” In any case, he was pretty stubborn about this. He thought it was good and said, “Well, we’ll give it to the front office.”
Well, about three days later we have a meeting in Michael Eisner’s gigantic white office. We sat around this huge table. Michael had the two scripts. My version was in a brown folder and Gene’s version was in an orange cover. Michael had one script in one hand and one in the other, balancing them in his palms. And he said, “Listen, this is the problem. This,” Gene’s orange script, “is television. This,” the brown script, “is a movie. Frankly, it’s a lot better.” Well, holy shit! Everybody was clearing their throats. The great man had had his feathers ruffled. Anyway, after some heated discussion, it was decided to let Collins write a third version using the best elements of both.
ROBERT L. COLLINS
I did a couple of drafts and I had what I thought was a wonderful, spectacular idea for the end. Decker sacrificed himself at the end of the picture and unleashed a history of mankind. It would be a ten-minute sequence where we would flash images of mankind since the dawn of the apes up till the present. These flashes of images would be all over the ship and then, of course, all over the theater. All of this would be accompanied by a musical montage of Beethoven and Bach. It was a grand idea and very ambitious, and I think it would have set off the end of it in a very spectacular manner. I remember that I wrote something to that effect. Not particularly well, I imagine, but that was my thought on how the picture should end. I was trying to deal with what this animal known as man really is, and essentially I was saying that man was pretty good.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
Collins’s version was a total disaster. About that time, Roddenberry and I really began to get at each other’s throats. I don’t remember when I began to pierce the Roddenberry myth, but he and I suddenly started to have creative differences. I resented his interference and he, apparently, wanted someone to carry his lunch around, and that wasn’t me. We became socially friendly for a while, but we started to have various difficulties.
ROBERT L. COLLINS
We eventually cast the part of Xon. I found an actor named David Gautreaux to play the part. He was a nice young man, a nice actor, and all of that would have worked. Though there was still considerable concern over how much box office we would have without Spock. But we proceeded.
DAVID GAUTREAUX (actor, “Xon”)
I personally was never a fan. I never watched the show. I bought a television two weeks after I was signed for the role, because I was given an advance large enough to actually do something like that. Studying the episodes I got what I thought was a firm grasp of what makes a proper Vulcan. One of my big inspirations came from the In Thy Image script, where Xon is described as smelling rather strongly, having just beamed aboard from a meditative monastery in the Gobi Desert.
I actually went on a meditative trek and fasted for ten days. I allowed my hair to grow long, I started researching to be a Vulcan with no emotion. For an actor, that’s death. I was looking at it from an actor’s point of view, which is how do you appear as having no emotion without looking like a piece of wood? I went to several acting coaches. Jeff Corey [Leonard Nimoy’s former acting coach and a guest star on the original series] is the one who gave me the key of how I could actively play the pure pursuit of logic as being my primary action. Then I felt I needed a physical equivalent, and I followed the teachings of Bruce Lee, who taught about dealing with emotion and a freedom from emotions that allowed you to live in a nonviolent world. That’s really what he was all about, despite the impression he gave.
I was looking forward to playing Xon. His actions were tremendous. His strength without size, and the aspect of playing a full Vulcan. When I say that, I mean somebody who had a larger presence than, say, Spock’s father, who was [also] a full Vulcan. By presence I mean a more involved presence on the show and in the running of the ship. It was a very exciting premise to be playing. But to me, it was a potentially good gig that didn’t work out.
ROBERT GOODWIN
Bob also cast Persis Khambatta in the role of Ilia, despite the fact that Michael Eisner said, “There will be no bald-headed woman in this show.” He thought it was an unattractive look and would turn people off. So we did a screen test with a bunch of ladies in bald-head caps and Persis, for some reason, looks great with no hair. The rest of them didn’t look so gorgeous, but she was still pretty. Eisner took one look at the test and said okay. He didn’t even call me personally. He just sent the word out that it was all right.
PERSIS KHAMBATTA (actress, “Ilia”)
I was told that the girl, Ilia, was supposed to be bald, so I went and bought a bald cap from a drugstore for a dollar. I walked in to see Gene Roddenberry and I was wearing this cap—I wasn’t even wearing it perfectly, just enough so he could have an idea of how I looked without hair. I said to him, “I’m sure you’re going to test girls for this part. Would you give me a chance?” I’m good in front of a camera, but if I have to do a cold reading … well, a lot of actors can just take a script and start reading and acting immediately. I feel more confident having a screen test done, because then I’m more prepared for it. Also, the director can see how I look, because my personality changes a lot on camera.
Gene did give me a screen test. I felt very excited when I was told that of all the girls, I was the one who got it. I always loved Star Trek. I watched it in London and thought it was a fantastic show, it had a lot of class. But I’ll tell you, I was even more pleased when they decided to make it into a feature film instead of a TV series.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
December came along and my contract was coming up. Before they could fire me, I quit. We had too many problems there. If I do a poor job, I’ll tell you it’s bad and I’ll welcome help. I’m certainly not infallible. None of us are. But Roddenberry would never admit that he wrote a bad line or couldn’t write.
ROBERT L. COLLINS
Roddenberry had a purist approach. This was his life. Star Trek and Roddenberry are synonymous. He would continually say, “This is not Star Trek.” One could argue that it may not be Star Trek, but it’s good. And at the same time you had to realize that on a human level, on a personal level, that he was all wrapped up in it. His whole way of defining himself was involved with the series and with this project. We all wanted to help him realize his ambition, and we wanted to make a good picture, too. Paramount was kind of holding a gun to his head, saying that they were going to do it, and then that they weren’t going to do it. That tension, I think, flowed through all of us. I’m not sorry about calling people assholes if I think they are, but I liked Roddenberry and I always felt sympathetic toward him and the project.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
Gene’s made an industry of Star Trek and he’s done nothing else. Everything else he’s done—the few other things—are just shameful to watch. It’s a disgrace. Gene’s values lay in his knowledge, his experience … if he had just imparted that and let the professionals do their job, you’d have had a picture.
The film was in preproduction and they had gone back to basically what I wrote, with Collins as a writer, restoring much of what he left out, but little of Gene’s.
ROBERT L. COLLINS
Somewhere around that time we were talking about special effects. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was just about to open, and the word around town was that it was spectacular. So Roddenberry and I went down to the Pacific Theatre and sat down for what I think was a noon performance. We came out and were both pretty blown away by Close Encounters. I turned to him and said, “There goes our low-budget special effects.” After Star Wars and Close Encounters, you couldn’t do those kinds of special effects anymore. That means a whole new thinking and a whole reorganization of the production and concepts. They needed a great deal more money and time, and there were only a few people who could do the effects.
We spoke to John Dykstra and Robert Abel. Abel is an irritating asshole, but he came on board and decided that he would make it into a Robert Abel Production. His budget, which had been one or two million dollars, suddenly jumped between seven and ten million dollars. The budget kept rising and Paramount was getting more nervous. In the meantime, we were all sitting around trying to think of the number of Trekkies in the United States and the dollar admission that would result from the film. It was a little like McCarthy trying to figure out how many communists were in the State Department. Everybody had a different number every day.
As plans for a movie version of In Thy Image continued to move forward, and the scope of the film continued to grow, it was becoming obvious that what was conceived as a small, low-budget film was going to be anything but. Eventually this would result in Robert Wise coming aboard as director, who in turn would insist that Leonard Nimoy reprise his role of Spock for the movie.
ROBERT L. COLLINS
We were preparing to make this picture, but the writing was on the wall. I was a television director who had not done a feature film at that time. It was evident that they were going to hire somebody who was used to working with big-budget special effects. Paramount wasn’t brave about such things, so I called up Jeff Katzenberg and said, “You’re going to replace me, right?” He said, “No, Bob, never. Take my word for it, Bob. Trust me.”
Then my agent, who at that time handled Robert Wise, called me and said, “Look we’ve got an offer for Robert Wise to replace you on the picture.” Apparently Paramount couldn’t remember that we both had the same agent, so I called up Jeff again and said, “Look, are you going to replace me?” He said, “Absolutely not. Never. You’re absolutely staying with the project.” I pointed out that Robert Wise and I had the same agent, so he said, “If Robert Wise doesn’t do it, then you are absolutely going to do it.” I kind of laughed about that for a while. I knew it would happen sooner or later. They wanted to get somebody in place before they fired me. So they got Wise, and the first step was to redecorate my office.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
Obviously the real reason the Star Trek film finally got the go-ahead was because of Star Wars and Close Encounters. After that, and this is supposition on my part, everybody started running around like crazy. I think that after being told, “Yes, we’re doing a series; no, we’re doing a movie; yes, we’re doing a movie,” everybody hears money. Everyone ran around trying to find something so that they could get started right away with budgeting and casting. Unfortunately, once it became a big-budget movie, I didn’t get so much as a phone call or an invitation to come down to the set.
DAVID GAUTREAUX
I was doing a play at the time, trying not to think that I was going to be playing an alien for the rest of my life. Then I spoke to Gene Roddenberry and said, “What’s the story? Did you see that Leonard Nimoy is coming back to play his character? What’s going to happen to Xon?” He said, “Oh, Xon is very much a part of the family and you’re very much a part of our family.” I responded, “Gene, don’t allow a character of this magnitude to simply carry Mr. Spock’s suitcases on board the ship and then say, ‘I’ll be in my quarters if anybody needs me.’ Give him what I’ve put into him and what you’ve put into him. If he’s not going to be more a part of it and more noble than that, let’s eliminate him.” They continued with the idea of Xon for quite a while.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
After I left, they hired me on Fantasy Island as a producer. They’d already shot five or six episodes in Burbank and everybody hated it. The producer was a kid named Michael Fisher. Everybody hated him. So ABC had me come on, there was even a whole story in TV Guide at the time about bringing me in to save it. So they bring me in, but the idea is not to tell Michael Fisher because I’m in Beverly Hills at the 20th Century–Fox lot and Michael is in Burbank. So what do I care? I start to develop thirteen scripts and I even rewrote one of his. So mine are not ready to be filmed yet and they’ve got to go on with his because of the schedule.
And the first show goes on and it’s a fucking runaway hit! It’s a fluke. Second week goes on to bigger numbers. I drive into my office on the lot and my parking spot is blanked out. I go up to my office and my office is empty, the secretary is gone, all my possessions, cigars, boxes, are on the fucking pavement. So I go in and Aaron [Spelling] ducks me. I finally corner him about two days later and he says, “These things happen. I’ll make it up to you. What do you want?” I said, “You have a show called Vega$ that hasn’t sold yet. If it sells I want it.” He said, “You got it.” I said, “Call my agent right now, in front of me.” Calls my agent and Aaron says, “If I sell Vega$, Harold is the producer. Harold gets the show.”
So I still have a contract and every Thursday afternoon at two o’clock the doorbell rings and there’s Aaron’s chauffeur who hands me an envelope with a five-thousand-dollar check for the four or five weeks that are left on my contract. Anyway, it’s a good thing for Vega$ that I went back to Star Trek when Roddenberry called, because I’d have changed the whole goddamn thing.
JON POVILL
It was [Jeffrey] Katzenberg who courted and brought in Wise, though if you ask [Robert Wise’s wife] Millie Wise, she will readily tell you that Jeff threw Bob under the bus pretty much as soon as the project was “done”—quotation marks appropriate considering that we released what was essentially a rough cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In point of fact, as I was under contract as story editor, I continued working with writers and bringing in commissioned scripts until my contract ran out, even though we were told that they were going to feature sometime in the middle of my story-editor tenure.
ROBERT GOODWIN
When they went with Robert Wise as director, Gene and I were never really informed of what the steps of the deal were. It turns out that Robert Wise is used to getting directing and producing credit. Apparently he would not accept a producer, so Gene Roddenberry was moved to executive producer and I was asked by Gene and the studio if I would stay on as associate producer. But I didn’t want to spend a minute of my life doing that. I was an associate producer ten years earlier, and it was taking a step backward, especially facing two years of production. I came to work one day and they had taken my name off the door. My stuff was packed in boxes in the hall and the janitor told me I had to be off the lot in twenty minutes.
JON POVILL
For me personally, I had very mixed feelings about it becoming a movie. I was the story editor of Star Trek: Phase II and my shows and my credit were gone. They weren’t going to be made. I was kept on as production coordinator as we went to the Robert Collins version, which was a low-budget feature. At the same time, when Robert Wise came in, that generated fresh enthusiasm for sure. There was nobody involved who didn’t think that this was the big time.