“I NEED YOU … BADLY.”
The transition of Phase II to what would become Star Trek: The Motion Picture was fraught with changes. For starters, although the “In Thy Image” teleplay would still serve as the basis for the film’s story line, writer Harold Livingston was gone and replaced by Dennis Lynton Clark. Production designer Joe Jennings and consultant Walter “Matt” Jeffries (who still had a full-time gig on Little House on the Prairie) were replaced by Harold Michelson; costume designer William Ware Theiss saw his responsibilities taken over by Robert Fletcher; story editor Jon Povill became associate producer; and Robert Collins was replaced by legendary director Robert Wise in the center seat, who in turn ensured that Leonard Nimoy would reprise the role of Spock, thus making David Gautreaux’s Xon superfluous. At control of it all—or so he thought—was Gene Roddenberry.
GERALD ISENBERG (producer, Star Trek: Planet of the Titans)
Michael Eisner and I were very close until the Star Trek event. I dropped out after Planet of the Titans had been canceled and they were doing Phase II. But when I realized they were making a movie, I went back to him and said, “You know, Mike, I have a contract that says if the movie is to be produced, I am the producer,” and he said, “No, you passed.” My response was, “No, Mike, I passed on a TV series, I didn’t pass on the movie.” He said, “No, you’re out and you can’t be involved.” It wasn’t as though I wanted to be involved, it was that I had a piece of the action. I got myself out of Paramount and took my TV company away. That’s how we settled it.
GENE RODDENBERRY (producer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Paramount turned me down a couple of times for a movie, then finally they said, “Write a script and we’ll give you an office on the lot and think about it.” They were not that serious about the movie when we first started it. I think they had in mind a two- to three-million-dollar picture. Star Wars woke them up to the fact that these things I’d been telling them for a number of years were true: There was an audience of millions of people out there who are interested in “message literature.”
They wanted something that was good, staple Americana—like Grease or Saturday Night Fever. They wanted something they could understand and deal with. So after they read my script and turned it down, they called in—over the period of a year—maybe fifteen writers. And none of them did any better, because all these writers were trying to give them science fiction, and that’s the last thing they really wanted.
DAVID GERROLD (author, The Martian Child)
Studio executives are maligned by everyone who works for them. If a studio makes fifteen hit pictures in a year, who gets the credit? The directors, the actors, the executive producers of the picture, but the studio executive who said, “I’ll buy this picture, I’ll finance it,” he’s just lucky enough to be sitting there when they brought the project in? I have to tell you, I’ve spent a lot of time with studio executives, and they can tell the difference between a good story and a bad story. They get excited when they work with exciting people. You don’t get to be the head of a studio by accident, and the ones I’ve met are not stupid men. Admittedly there have been some stupid men as studio executives who can make mistakes, but twenty years at Paramount? Down the line they’re doing all these great pictures like The Godfather films, Saturday Night Fever … and they can’t get Star Trek on the boards? Give me a break.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I would have had the same problems at any other studio, and, indeed, science-fiction writers have all had the same experience. George Lucas fought the same fight. He had the good fortune to have a hit motion picture behind him, and he could say, “I’m sorry, this is the way we’ll do it,” and make it stand. I could do that on a television show; I could not do that on what was, essentially, a first science-fiction motion picture. I had several pictures behind me, but I never had any hits.
JON POVILL (associate producer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Everyone on the show was pretty much thrilled at the prospect of working with Robert Wise. His presence brought an entirely new feeling of stature to the production. We felt like the everlasting cloud of doubt over the project had finally lifted and now it was really going to happen. And that proved true almost entirely thanks to Bob, who held the picture together through a constant stream of crises. He got a ton of blame for the way the picture turned out, but I feel rather strongly that if not for him, there would have been no further incarnations of Trek. If Bob had failed, I think Paramount would have given up. Maybe they’d have gone back to the notion of doing a series, but they sure as hell wouldn’t have thrown any more money at a feature. It’s always bothered me that, through the years, Bob wound up with none of the credit and all of the blame for the issues with The Motion Picture.
RICHARD TAYLOR (designer, Robert Abel & Associates)
Robert Wise was a kind of strange choice for director. He’d done Run Silent, Run Deep but wasn’t really a science-fiction buff. He’d rather do Sound of Music. He was older and he would sit there on sets and drift off and then have a masseuse keeping him awake. I don’t think he was ever very enthusiastic at all about directing this movie, and he was wrangled into it and made good money doing it. He was not passionate about it. It was a job.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN (visual effects supervisor, Star Trek: The Motion Picture—Director’s Edition)
I think that’s a little unfair. Robert Wise is a very quiet man. Very level-toned in his reactions to things, because that was just his nature. All of the guys at Abel were extremely excited to be working on Star Trek. They were jumping all over the place to please everybody and show them all the neat stuff they were doing. Bob Wise was, like, “That’s great, let’s see if that works. You guys carry on.” That could have come across as lack of enthusiasm, but he had so much other stuff to deal with. He had to balance the crew, the actors who hadn’t worked with each other in ten years, the writer who was almost killing the producer. All of that stuff he had to deal with. Honestly, the Abel guys were not very conducive to speedy shooting onstage. The necessities were very taxing on him. They needed to shoot the wormhole sequence two or three times with different cameras and different film stocks, just to have stuff.
ROBERT WISE (director, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
I have always been intrigued by science fiction, even though I have only done two other films in the genre, and I thought it was time that I did a science-fiction picture that took place in space. Both of my other ones were earthbound. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, we had a visitor from outer space coming to Earth in a spaceship, so that really intrigued me more than anything else. From the beginning I liked the idea of doing Star Trek. It was really the fascination and the desire to do a film that dealt with the experience of being in space.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
Robert Wise is a very serious man and there was not much levity on the set. He had a very tough job to do, because this was a big reunion and it had a lot of things built into it of necessity because it was a reunion picture. Things were tough for Robert Wise and, in all fairness to him, that would probably be why his was a more serious production.
ROBERT WISE
I knew of the TV series, but I had not become a Trekkie when the TV series had first come out and I had only seen one or two segments, which I thought were all right, but I didn’t get hooked on it. After the president of Paramount asked me if I would be interested in considering directing the movie, I said, “Well, I just don’t know. I’ll have to read the script, of course, and I would have to see several more of the TV segments.” I had to get familiar with what it was and what had caused it to become so immensely popular. So that’s what happened: I read the script and I saw about a dozen episodes of the series so I could become familiar with it, and make my own judgment.
The other thing is that when I read the script, Spock wasn’t a part of it. I have three Trekkies in my own family. My wife, Millicent, read the script, and she was outraged when she discovered that Mr. Spock was no longer among the crew. “Why?” she asked. “Because,” I said, “Leonard Nimoy was doing the play Equus on Broadway when the last version was written.” Millicent said, rather emphatically, “With no Spock, there can be no Star Trek,” and she was just as emphatically backed up by my stepdaughter, Pamela, and her husband, Robert. Their vehemence impressed and shook me. I went to Paramount and repeated their words: “With no Spock, there can be no Star Trek.” So the studio enticed Nimoy back into the fold with a considerable amount of money.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
Leonard had a beef and it’s a legitimate one. It’s about the merchandising and it’s something that irked me as well. Our faces appear on products all over the country, all over the world, and we’ve not really been compensated fairly for it. Leonard was walking in London, England. He stopped to look at a billboard. The billboard’s divided into three sections. The first section is Leonard’s face with the ears—Spock—the ears are drooping. The second section of the billboard has Leonard, with the drooping ears, holding a tankard of ale. The third section has an empty tankard of ale and Leonard’s face, with pointed ears straight up in the air. So Leonard and I had this battle, with whoever licenses Star Trek, for a long time. So Leonard goes back to the studio and says, “There’s a demeaning billboard of me out there. Did you guys okay it?” So he goes to his lawyer and tries to sue. But at that point, Paramount wanted Leonard, and Leonard wanted fair recompense. It was only reasonable that Paramount meet his demands.
EDDIE EGAN (publicity department, Paramount Pictures)
There was a lot of bad blood between Roddenberry and Paramount because of the vagaries of his merchandising contract through Lincoln Enterprises. Paramount got no split from that, but they were obligated to turn over any film trims and so forth, and that persisted into the movies for a while until someone put an end to it. From what I was told, the contract was so vague for the TV series that it said he could use discards from the series, meaning anything that was thrown away; call sheets, pieces of sets, unused film that was going to be destroyed—which were dailies or alternate takes—and he had the absolute right to them. I think Desilu wrote that contract and at that point there was no foresight to realize that those things could be valuable.
Gene held Paramount to that for years and years and years, which also spun into the bad blood between Paramount and Nimoy and Shatner about their share or royalties, because they had no share in any of those things that Lincoln sold. That was a big part of Nimoy’s settlement with Paramount before he agreed to star in the movie. And then because he and Shatner had favored-nation clauses, Shatner got cut into that also.
GENE RODDENBERRY
They started off wanting to blithely recast. And until six months before we actually began shooting, they were still trying to get Kirk killed off in the first act. “At the very least, Gene, you can promote him to admiral and bring in a new star,” they said. I refused to do this, because I think William Shatner is an extraordinarily fine actor. There was also a whole comedy of errors with Leonard Nimoy, because, at one time, the studio decided that the only way they wanted to do it was as a two-hour movie special and pilot of a new Trek TV series. Leonard Nimoy refused because of Broadway commitments and the time and energy required by a series.
I felt very much the same way. A legend grew that we threw Nimoy out of the show; that was not true. He did not want to do a television show. Nimoy and Spock are very important to Star Trek, but none of us was absolutely essential. There are writers and producers around who can do what I do—just as there are good actors around who could do another kind of Mr. Spock or Captain Kirk. Star Trek would still have been Star Trek. I’m glad we didn’t have to, but I would never hold up a production because any one of us was not able to do it. That wouldn’t be fair to the others.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
We’ve had a long and complicated relationship, Paramount and myself. We had a lot of details to work out. There have been periods of time when the Star Trek project was moving forward and I was not available. I went off to do Equus on Broadway. During that period of time, the concept changed to a TV series. It was difficult then to get together because there was a question of availability. When the project turned around and I was available again, we started talking immediately. It has been complicated; it has been time-consuming. But there was never a question of reluctance to be involved in Star Trek on my part. I’ve always felt totally comfortable about being identified with Star Trek, and being identified with the Spock character. It has exploded my life in a very positive way. The Spock character has always been a part of my life. I have never tried in any way to reject that. I’m very proud of the fact that I’m associated with the character.
JON POVILL
Here’s what the problem was between Gene and Robert Wise: Paramount told Gene that he still had creative control, so he had no reason but to be thrilled this was all happening. But they also told Robert Wise that he had creative control and neglected to tell Wise that Gene had creative control. It was not a good working situation.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON (writer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Gene was supposed to have limited creative control, but he made Bob Wise’s life miserable. But Wise was smart enough not to get into any arguments with him. Instead, he indulged and pacified him. He believed—and rightly, I’m sure—that anything else would have been totally nonproductive. I’m the only one unwise—pun intended—for that. But Wise had a picture to make and he had to keep the peace.
ROBERT WISE
Working with Gene was comparatively easy. Of course, as much as producers and directors are separate entities, you always have little conflicts at times, but by and large, it was fine. When I came on after being asked to direct the film, I said, “What about Mr. Roddenberry? Because it’s his baby,” and they said, “Well, you’ll have to work it out.” So Gene and I talked at some length about how we could work together, how he and I saw the whole thing. We came to reach a working agreement about halfway in our positions, and I think we functioned pretty well on that level.
GENE RODDENBERRY
There were a lot of places we disagreed, but in a friendly, professional way. My taste for costumes was a little different than his, but in the end I went with his taste because he was the man responsible for creating the whole visual image. If it had been more than just a question of taste, if I had thought the costumes violated Star Trek format, then we would have probably had a very serious fight. But we didn’t, because it was just a question of taste. There are some places where we wanted to do something, I can’t remember an example right now, and I would say, “Bob, the Star Trek format has always been this. I don’t want to lock you into format, but let’s not change unless we have some value that makes the change worthwhile.”
DAVID C. FEIN (producer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture—Director’s Edition)
This is my understanding: The project was already overcontrolled by Gene before Bob ever got there. The studio already had a lot of issues with Gene’s absolute control and absolute power over the entire project—and all projects in regards to Star Trek—and this was a big deal, of course. Here’s this guy who absolutely wants to tell great stories—I don’t necessarily disagree with Gene being as protective or even as influential as he wanted to be. He’s had some great successes with all of this. But the studio wanted a movie, and they wanted a movie that could be done on budget and on time without the chaos that was potentially there. One of the executives at Paramount proposed the idea of bringing on Robert Wise to direct the film. You see, Gene’s favorite film of all time is The Day the Earth Stood Still, and what could you say to Gene to get him to be somewhat under control or somewhat cooperative? You needed to get someone that Gene respected. Somebody who would lead Gene to say, “Here’s somebody who could potentially do a better job than me or at least I would love to collaborate with, but I would trust them.” That’s how Bob came on board. I think it was, “How can we control Roddenberry in making a collaborative, fantastic movie?” Gene was at the top of his game, he was Star Trek, so what do you do? You get his idol.
JON POVILL
I think there’s some truth in that. I know Gene certainly did have a lot of respect for Bob Wise, at least in the early going. It became less so the more dissension there was on what to do. When Bob overruled him and the studio stood with Bob, that was a problem.
ROBERT WISE
When I came on the project, they already had the original team of special-effects men, Robert Abel and Associates, at work, and a number of the sets were already done, but there is one area that I did have influence on: I upgraded the sets considerably from what they had originally built. What you saw in the film is not at all what I came on to.
JOSEPH R. JENNINGS (production designer, Star Trek: Phase II)
I was involved with the feature for a time, but when Mr. Wise came aboard, I felt that he really didn’t want anybody who had been involved with the proposed television series. As a result, most of them disappeared along with me. The sets had proceeded to such a degree that they insisted on including my name on the credits. When the second feature was being made, I was brought back.
The sets we had designed for Phase II were a great deal more sophisticated in their mechanics than the ones on the original series had been. The reason for doing so was that the bridge of the Enterprise was designed to go into series, so we were designing to be all things to all people. As a result, all of the devices were practical and they worked off proximity switches. This was not for one specific show. What you’re being asked to do is design a set that will function for three years of shows, so we were being a great deal more sophisticated than perhaps we would have been were it laid out to be a feature picture in which there were a certain given set of actions that had to be performed on that set. Then you only build those things that operate properly. When you talk about going to series, you don’t know down the line what you’re going to need.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Changes within the Enterprise came from outside artists who would bring them to Bob and me for our approval. It was a very involved process. Bob and I began chatting before we had our first sketch. You know, “Make sure it looks like this, and that…” We inherited a bridge that had been designed for a TV show, and I said, “Bob, I don’t want to stick you with something we designed for TV, which is a totally different type of image. I think that now you should bring in your own designer and revise it.”
RICHARD H. KLINE (director of photography, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Robert Wise, Harold Michelson, and I, along with a production sketch artist and several other talented concept individuals, had to constantly put our heads together and try to plan ahead. There was hardly a day that we didn’t meet during lunch to discuss what we were going to be doing after lunch. It always seemed to be “right up to airtime.” That is the sort of pressure we were under in trying to get the project completed properly and on time, in trying to shoot the most sophisticated of all science-fiction films without sufficient preplanning. Our main problems stemmed from not having Doug Trumbull and company aboard earlier, plus the fact that the story was being written as we went along—which made it most difficult to plan ahead.
HAROLD MICHELSON (production designer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
We had what we thought were some really outlandish ideas of the way things would be three hundred years from now. Then I sent out these ideas to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and our ideas seemed old-fashioned. I had to do whatever I could to make it look like something more impressive than just a TV show. The version that appeared on television utilized small sets, and much of the action was played against blank walls. This was due to time and budget restrictions, but it was acceptable on the small canvas of the television tube. However, we were making a big picture for wide-screen presentation, so I had to try to open it up and create an illusion of a tremendous amount of space. This is the reason Bob Wise asked for the huge recreation area in which four or five hundred people appear. It was there to show the audience that this ship was really loaded with people.
RICHARD TAYLOR
When I first walked through the sets I kept thinking, “Haven’t these people seen 2001? Haven’t they seen Star Wars?” Because both of those movies had phenomenal designs, and as you well know, they both still hold up. Those space suits and the design of the Discovery were so beautifully done and well researched and based on real technologies.
Now, it wasn’t our job to design the sets, but the sets and all the continuity of the film had to fit together, and there were parts of the Enterprise model that had to match up to the sets. The engine room, the bridge, the recreation room. And seeing out the windows to the nacelles and all those kind of things had to have a continuity. What I wanted to do initially was to bring as much new technology to the design of all this as possible. I had been to the Lawrence Livermore lab, seeing things they were doing there. I had been reading voraciously about how space structures could be made or would be made in the future. And I wanted to apply as much of that as possible.
HAROLD MICHELSON
When we came on the job, a bridge had been built for what at one time was planned as another TV series. When the decision was made in favor of a big-budget, theatrical movie, everything had to be done over. The bridge had been built in a number of sections, which could be moved in or out according to the scene being filmed.
RICHARD TAYLOR
I looked at the sets that existed and they were just really not the quality that they needed to be. I won’t say they were laughable, but the quarters of the Enterprise looked to me like something from an army base. And, of course, one of the things I had to look at were the models being built. The Enterprise was not at all built with the look or the technology it needed to be for models using motion control and for multiple passes to be made on. This model that was being built was roughly three-and-a-half feet to four feet long. I looked at that model and it just wouldn’t work. When you’re shooting models and you want them to look real on camera, they’re called miniatures, but they’re not, they’re actually quite big. The Enterprise we built was eight feet long.
RONALD D. MOORE (supervising producer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
The Enterprise in The Motion Picture is the best of all the designs. It’s sleek and beautiful and everything is in proportion. It moves really well, it photographs like a dream, and it’s an incredibly detailed model. That’s a fantastic version of the Enterprise. The original is the original, and it will always be a brilliant original creative design, but the movie version takes it to the next level in a way that subsequent iterations of the Enterprise did not do. The subsequent ones all feel like they’re trying to reach for something that they never quite grasp, but the Motion Picture version gets there and it’s a brilliant design.
RICHARD TAYLOR
To do close-ups of things and to have scale, you have to make the model bigger so you can get detail on the surface and the camera can get close to that. Small models you can never get close to and have detail, and they look like toys. So their model just wouldn’t work. And then the sets themselves, including the bridge, looked like they were from the fifties. I won’t criticize anybody for how those designs happened, because I will tell you that Gene Roddenberry had his thumb on a lot of things, and I was very frustrated working with him because he had some constraints that he felt had to be. And they defied logic many times.
HAROLD MICHELSON
Richard Kline likes to film within a set, so the sections of the bridge were virtually welded together. As a result, the seams wouldn’t show and it would look solid. The engine room is greatly expanded. Mr. Wise wanted a feeling of tremendous power, but not with the coloring of fire as we would get today. So we went to different shades of blue going to white. The vertical core, now two and a half stories high, and the horizontal part of the engine, appearing to go off into infinity, were all newly designed and made of Plexiglas. To make room for the horizontal section, we broke through the end of the set and, using forced perspective, gave the exaggerated impression of its length. In the filming, small people, midgets, were used as crew members at the far end, continuing the perspective. What we did was break out from a small set into a lot of size.
RICHARD TAYLOR
The other part of the design things with the Enterprise had to do with the bridge. And we had to do all these effects on the viewscreen. One of the things that drove me crazy about the original show was that here are these people off in the distant future, yet when they get in any emergency situation they are all falling around on the bridge, grabbing on to stuff. It’s like, what the fuck happened to seat belts? I mean, we have seat belts now and this was in 1979. Why were these people so stupid in the future that every emergency they were falling all around the bridge? So I went to Roddenberry and I said, “Can we design seats that have a way of holding them in the seat?” And he finally agreed, so I designed the chairs that folded up over laps.
The other thing that I wanted to do on the bridge that I had seen at Lawrence Livermore was that tactile screens were the way the future was going to be, and not 1950s-era toggle switches and buttons. One of the cool things about a tactile screen is the animations and the things could happen on there. You can touch it and it can configure itself and that could be so visually cool. Roddenberry absolutely rejected that. He said, “No, I want switches, I want buttons, I want stuff that people touch and click and all of that.” To me those were decisions just dating the thing before you even got started.
ROBERT WISE
I insisted on changing the costumes as soon as I came in on the project. The originals looked like pajamas or something. Too much like comic books.
ROBERT FLETCHER (costume designer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
The basic uniform was the most difficult to design, because it had to bear some reference to the original clothes and yet be entirely different. It had to look like the future, but not be so extravagant that it drew attention to itself. That was one thing Robert Wise did not want to happen. He wanted the clothes simply to be there, to be accepted, to look logical—to seem very real. I found that the most difficult part. It’s much easier to do an extravagant and flamboyant costume for some alien prince, something you can really get your teeth into, than trying to tread very delicately on eggshells and not offend the original Trekkers.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
Personally, I thought they were terrific. A real improvement over the pj’s we wore on the series—except that they were uncomfortable. I was impressed. One button was worth more than an entire costume in the old days.
ROBERT FLETCHER
Another thing I changed was the basic color concept. The original Star Trek was brightly colored, but a lot of that came about because color TV had been recently invented and all the networks wanted as much color as they could get for their money, right away. Robert Wise and I felt that the brilliant color was not very realistic, that it seemed distracting. Also, military organizations have the tendency to keep things more utilitarian, and this will probably continue in the future.
I found Gene Roddenberry great fun to work with. He very definitely said what he liked and didn’t like.… It was give-and-take; he was not inflexible. If I had a good reason for something, he’d listen. Sometimes, though, I didn’t understand what he meant and it was difficult for him to read a sketch, so I was careful to show as many samples as I could so that he saw the thing in the flesh, as it were.
Obviously when it came to “surface” details, things went fairly smoothly, but if anything threatened—it did on more than one occasion—to shake Star Trek: The Motion Picture to its core, it was the battle for the proper screenplay and the war waged over the film’s visual effects. In both cases, the situation stemmed from the fact that the script and the effects house (Robert Abel & Associates) had been designed to launch Phase II and not serve as the basis of a multimillion-dollar feature film.
When Star Trek: The Motion Picture was officially announced by Paramount on March 28, 1978, via press conference, Susan Sackett wrote of the script in her Star Trek Report column in Starlog: “Dennis Lynton Clark is doing the final rewrite and polish of the script, which was written by Harold Livingston and Gene Roddenberry, based on a story by Alan Dean Foster and Gene Roddenberry. Dennis recently wrote the screenplay for United Artists’ Comes a Horseman, from his own novel.”
DENNIS LYNTON CLARK (writer, Comes a Horseman)
The whole situation was very frustrating. Gene Roddenberry’s a very nice man, but he became very strange about Star Trek; it was like his child. The problem with Gene is that his heart was never in the right place at the right time. It’s a good heart, but he puts it aside at the wrong times. I was the subject of an awful practical joke, and it was right at the beginning of our relationship, so it set things off badly. I really don’t know how to describe him. He’s a nice man … unless you give him some power. That practical joke was the beginning of the end. I got pissed off, Gene got pissed off, and the only mediator was Bob Wise, who looked at me and said, “I’m going to have to fire you, aren’t I?” And I said, “Yes.”
ROBERT WISE
I had as much influence on the script as I possibly could. It was one of those situations where we started with an incomplete script—we knew the story, of course, but the actual final parts of the script were being worked on constantly as we were shooting. When we actually started early on in 1978, we only had the first act of the script written. From there on the second and third act we were changing and rewriting. I had some influence on the first act as it went, I tried to have as much as I could on the rest of the film, but it is a very sloppy way to make a film by any means.
GENE RODDENBERRY
We took some losses because of the decision to shoot the TV script, but not because the studio was foolish. Costs were mounting up. They had to keep this actor on and that stage ready … so the studio didn’t have the option to say, “Take three months and then take another start at it.” They felt they just couldn’t do it from the viewpoint of sound management and economics. These are the kinds of decisions those people must face and it’s very easy for an artist to say, “Well, I won’t sell out to you.” But it’s not that simple. They have their problems, too, these people over in the front office. Do they do idiotic things? Yes, of course they do. So do we, at our typewriters, in front of cameras—although we prefer to think everything we do is golden.
WALTER KOENIG
I was rather in awe of Robert Wise. We started the picture with only two-thirds of a finished screenplay, though. You cannot back yourself into a corner like that. The whole idea behind screenwriting is rewriting and we didn’t have the luxury of rewriting because we were writing with the camera and reshooting was enormously expensive. So we started out with a story about an antagonistic, omnipotent being that was this great threat, and somewhere in the middle of the story we decided it’s not really that at all. It’s this awe-inspiring entity that’s trying to achieve another level of consciousness. What happens to the conflict? We didn’t have a tension-filled conflict, we had people with wide eyes marveling at the enormity and strangeness of this thing. It’s great for a travelogue, but it’s not great for good storytelling and it failed in that regard.
DENNIS LYNTON CLARK
I guess I was involved with the project for about three months, two of which were spent hiding out from Nimoy and Shatner, because they didn’t want me to talk with them. I’d have to leave my office when they were on the lot, because actors want to tell you, “This is how I perceive the character,” and Gene didn’t want their input. He didn’t want me to have their input. He didn’t even like Bob Wise’s input.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Our area is pure science fiction. Star Wars was a science-fiction cartoon. Great science fiction is an illumination of the human condition in a future environment under different terms. We always had a quality of believability going for us as well as a certain chemistry. I felt a tremendous obligation not to let down the reputation of the old series while we were filming the movie.
JOSHUA CULP (assistant to Dennis Lynton Clark)
Dennis cranked out twenty or twenty-five pages, taking the really kind of limp-wristed opening that the movie has and injecting it with some great stuff. Including some wonderful scenes of Spock on Vulcan talking to one of the high priestesses about his double nature and how to deal with it all. They had the big press conference with all of the actors and Paramount brass, Robert Wise and Gene and everybody else. Once that had happened, the next day Roddenberry came into Dennis’s office with, like, thirty pages of notes on the first twenty-five pages of new screenplay. This continued for the next several weeks until Roddenberry had stalled the rewrite process to where Bob Wise had to shrug his shoulders and say, “I guess we’re going with Roddenberry’s script, because, clearly, we’re not going to get a new script in time to do the work that’s necessary to prep it.” A week or so later, Dennis was cut loose and we went off to work at Fox.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
On a Saturday night, I get a call at ten o’clock at night. I pick up the phone. I knew it was Roddenberry. “Hello! How are you?” he asked. I answered, “What the fuck do you want?” He says, “Listen, I got a problem.” I said, “I know you have a problem. So what do you want from me?” He said, “I want you to read a script.” I said, “Whose script? Yours? I won’t read it.” “No, this is Dennis Clark’s.” Not ten minutes later the doorbell rings and there is a messenger with the script. Gene asked me to read it and get back to him no matter what time that night.
I read the script. My script, rewritten a number of times. Total shit. So I call him up and I said, “Forget it.” He said, “Listen, will you meet me and Bob Wise tomorrow morning?” So I agree. It’s the first time ever I met Bob Wise, the revered director. My first words to him were, “Mr. Wise, you better take a gun and shoot yourself.” Which went over good. And Gene, of course, laughed. The upshot of that is they hired me back—so now I got him by the balls. I go back to work for ten thousand dollars a week and I’m rewriting my own script.
SUSAN SACKETT
What people don’t understand is television does not always translate into feature-length motion pictures. This was one of the first TV shows to become a motion picture. There were so many attempts at the story that had started out as the beginning of what was going to be one of many TV episodes, and then they chose this particular story and everybody had a finger in the pie and it grew. What we ended up with was pretty good considering everybody had input. It was story by committee, although Gene took it and finalized it. It probably suffered from that.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
Nimoy was a tremendous help to me. He used to come to my house every night and we would have to fix what Gene did, because Gene would rewrite it and give it to the production people. Nimoy had good character sense. Shatner did, too. But I didn’t work as closely with Shatner as I did with Leonard because he lived nearby. And he knew characterization because he was more Star Trek than I was. He helped me in that respect.
LEONARD NIMOY
One of the things that Star Trek fans always enjoyed a lot about the series was the humor. There was always something tongue-in-cheek if not flat-out comedy. There was always some wry look, a line, an eyebrow raised, something that let them in on the joke. On Star Trek I it was forbidden. I mean it was forbidden! It was decided that we were doing a very serious motion picture here, we would not do funny stuff.
At the end, in fact it was the last day of filming, we were shooting the tag scene on the bridge. The adventure is over. The world has been saved. Everybody is safe. Kirk had brought together this crew after a hiatus for this one special mission. He has taken McCoy out of retirement, called Spock off Vulcan. Now it is time to take everybody back. He says to McCoy, “I can have you back on Earth in two days.” McCoy says, “Now that I’m here, I might as well stay.” Then he says to Spock, “I suppose you want to go back to Vulcan.” Spock’s line, as written, was “My business there is finished.” Final rehearsal before the take, Kirk says, “I can have you back on Earth…” McCoy says, “No, I’ll stay here . .” and he says, “I suppose you’ll want to go back to Vulcan.” And I said, “If Dr. McCoy is to remain on board, then my presence here will be essential.” Everybody roared—which I knew they would. But then I saw the command group gather. They really huddled. Bob Wise came to me and he said, “Seems inappropriate to be doing humor at this point.” I said, “I offer it to you. I can’t make you take it.” They wouldn’t let me do it. They were really adamant about it. That picture had a very classy look, but it was not a lot of fun—either to do or to watch.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I had an understanding with young Mr. Katzenberg and Mr. Wise and Gene that I would do it as long as Gene didn’t write. I didn’t want Gene to put pen to paper. You want me to write it? I will write it. I’ll do all the rewriting you want, but I will do it. I had a certain style I wanted to do the script in and I had directions I wanted the characters to explore.
The first thing that happened was that I rewrote X number of pages and they were to be pouched to Eisner and Katzenberg in Paris. Eisner called up and said, “What kind of shit is this?” I said, “What are you talking about?” “This script you sent me?” “It’s a good script. I didn’t send it without Bob’s approval.” So I went to Bob Wise, and we find out that Gene’s secretary got the script, put it aside, and sent Gene’s script to Eisner. That’s the kind of shit that went on. Gene would be very remorseful and contrite: “I was just trying to help.” I said, “Listen, Gene, I’m not going to do this if you’re going to keep this up.” Well, I quit three times. I resigned. I’m talking about ten thousand dollars a week.
WALTER KOENIG
We didn’t have a finished screenplay and know exactly where we were going with it. And then halfway through the picture the clause on Bill and Leonard’s contracts kicked in that they had dialogue or story approval if the picture went beyond so many weeks. So those meetings in the morning between Gene Roddenberry, Livingston and Jon Povill and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Bill and Leonard and Bob Wise were seven people deciding what they were going to shoot that day, and many with vested interests that it would be shot a certain way.
JON POVILL
Probably Nimoy and Shatner had been given certain latitude in respect to their own situation. Nimoy had a certain amount of control of what and how Spock was going to be portrayed. There were a lot of different controls out there and, not surprisingly, that resulted in a lot of dissension. It was not that anybody was trying to steer the project wrong. Yes, Shatner’s always trying to do the best thing for Shatner, but by and large everybody was trying to do the best that they could for the project. It’s just that it was being pulled in a lot of different directions.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
As we began shooting, we would get to a point where I would send in pages and then Gene would send in different pages and Wise would get two different versions. Sometimes I would write it and put my initials on them and Gene would put “G.R., 4PM” under mine, as though that’s what should count and my pages should be ignored. This was the way the picture was made. For the third time I quit, I said, “Screw it, nothing is worth this.” Gene has a brilliant story mind for this kind of thing, but he’s a bad writer. He’s clumsy.
JON POVILL
The dueling drafts! Harold at four, Gene at five. And I had pages in there as well. I swear, my blood pressure went up forty points, essentially because part of my job was trying to find common ground between Gene and Harold, and try to mediate their drafts. And that was what killed my relationship with Roddenberry, because I was supporting Harold far more than I was supporting him. That was very definite, and because of it I became a traitor in Gene’s eyes, and our relationship collapsed. It was still cordial, but it was never actually confronted because Gene never really confronted anything. He was passive-aggressive. But it was never the same after that. Even if I had sided with Harold a total of 50 percent of the time, that still would not have been enough for Gene. Gene would have needed, like, 90 to 95 percent, and that just wasn’t going to happen. I was doing the best I could for what was best for the project. That’s what I always do and it’s bitten me in my ass my entire career. To some extent, the people that Gene considered “interlopers” were trying to save him from himself, and to some extent they weren’t. There were things that Harold wanted to throw out—I can’t remember what—that were good or probably would have been good had they made it in.
Bob was looking to make the project as good as it could be. He was out for what was best for the project. Bob was more than happy to support the 20 percent of Gene’s ideas that were good. More than happy to. He actually would look for things. He would say to me, “Is there a way to make this work?” That was something he couldn’t say to Harold, because Harold would say, “No! It’s just fucking shit.” So I would be tasked with finding a way to make something Gene did acceptable to Harold. Bob was not in competition with Gene at all. Gene was in competition with everybody. Look, the movie had enough problems as it was. Gene’s ideas would have made it worse.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I get a call from Jeff Katzenberg to come to the office at seven p.m. He has to go out for a phone call. His secretary comes in and says, “Can I get you a drink?” It’s seven p.m. and I always have a drink, so I said, “Yeah, I’ll have a shot of gin.” She walks out and locks the door. I’m locked in! Twenty minutes later Katzenberg comes back, and I’m whacked out of my head, and I make a deal with him to come back for more money, and I also got a fifty-thousand-dollar script commitment out of him.
They started to shoot the film and Gene just kept rewriting. Driving everybody nuts. Somehow we finished the movie. Gene got the last word anyway.
GENE RODDENBERRY
During the same period I was novelizing the script into a Star Trek novel. So I’ve had sort of the unusual experience of watching us cut scenes and finding myself, later on, sitting at the typewriter and writing the scene, and having the opportunity to see and study what it is there that you get with a camera that you’ve got to do with words in a novel and what are the differences. Now, do the two compare? For me, it was like a college course in cinematography and writing.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
What he did was he had made a deal with Pocket Books to novelize my screenplay for four hundred grand. And boy, did he enjoy telling me that!
One addition that Roddenberry undeniably made to the screenplay was the notion that to ultimately stop the returning, marauding space probe—identifying itself as V’ger, and revealed to be the ancient NASA probe Voyager 6—it releases all of its accumulated data. In later drafts, the data release would be into Commander Will Decker before he and Ilia—who has been killed and replaced by a robot probe in her image—transcend this dimension. Livingston’s original version had the probe merely recognizing humanity’s positive qualities and departing the galaxy.
GENE RODDENBERRY
The script started off a bit simpler, because it had been written as a two-hour television program. It got more and more complex as it got to be a bigger and bigger movie, and we started adding things on to make use of the wide-screen, big-vision, like the wing-walk, where they go out on top of the Enterprise saucer section. I put that in. I put the climax of the show inside V’ger, where the original script did not.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
Back on Phase II, Robert Goodwin theorized that I just pissed away the ending, because I was so disgusted with the situation. I think the truth is that I couldn’t come up with an ending. I just couldn’t do it. The problem was that we had an antagonist so omnipotent that to defeat it, or even communicate with it, or have any kind of relationship with it, made the concept of the story false. How the hell do we deal with this? On what level? Everything pretty much worked in the story until we got to the ending. We tried all kinds of approaches, including aesthetic, theological, and philosophical. We didn’t know what to do with the ending.
JON POVILL
We knew we had to have a big special-effects ending. The problem of what was going to happen at the end and why it was going to happen was one that plagued the script from the very start. Then Gene came up with the idea of the machine dumping its data into Decker, with a light show of all the information it had accumulated. We were going to get all this amazing, incomprehensible stuff that V’ger had accumulated in its travels across the universe, and of course, nobody could come up with these images, so that didn’t work. It was pretty much my contribution to say that the reason for what was happening was that this thing needed to go on to the next plane of existence. That it was transcending dimensions and going on to the next. It then became logical that the machine would need that human element to combine with. It was the only thing that could have made sense.
Harold was not enthusiastic about this idea, but he accepted it because there was no choice in the matter as we were writing as we shot. To the “whole capture the creator, join the creator thing,” he said, “what the fuck are you talking about?” But the idea was in advance of the singularity that now people are talking about for real in terms of the time when it will be possible to capture human consciousness in a computer, keeping a person’s thoughts, memories, and ideas and going forward forever and expanding upon it. In the computer setting, the mind can think in infinite dimensions. This is now a possibility, and I was there, sort of anticipating it, which is something I’m kind of proud of.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Right down to the last day of filming, I would get strange looks from people who would say, “That fellow over there is the one who thinks a machine really can be alive.” As if I invented that thought, rather than it being something that very serious scientists have talked about and speculated about for years. Paramount was so convinced that the things I was talking about were such total nonsense that it was worth some money to hire an expert to back up their belief that it was nonsense. That expert was Isaac Asimov, and of course he didn’t back up their beliefs. The funny thing is, I’ve been an Asimov fan for more years than I care to think about, and I learned many of my ideas from him.
JON POVILL
Throughout we were trying to figure out what was it that made Star Trek special. How to identify the key elements of Star Trek that made it unique, and how do we translate those for the big screen? A lot of it is the intimacy of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy relationship, and the intimacy of that on the small screen. But you don’t get that on the big screen. Are people in love with space? Are they in love with the concepts that the best Star Trek episodes dealt with, the philosophies, the ideals that it embraced? What made Star Trek Star Trek? There was great dissension about how to bring that to the screen. Everybody had different ideas. I felt that we had to do something philosophically special, and Gene was in accord with that. That was one area that we agreed upon. Harold not so much. Harold didn’t give a shit about that. Harold gave a shit about the action and the drama. He wasn’t crazy about the time that had to be spent reintroducing everybody, because from his perspective it slowed things down.
ROBERT WISE
After I had made the film, I learned that the story line was similar to two of the old episodes, “The Changeling” and “The Doomsday Machine.” I was in New York after the opening of the movie in Washington, DC, and my wife was with a friend in Bloomingdale’s where they had a big display of Star Trek merchandise. There was a young girl there who turned to my wife and said, “Why didn’t they do a fresh story?” That was the first time I heard of that problem.
GENE RODDENBERRY
After having done seventy-nine episodes covering a fairly wide field, it would have been hard to do anything and not have it bear some resemblances. I think the film appeared to resemble certain episodes more at the end, because many of the things that made the script different were, bit by bit, sliced out of the movie. They were the “talky” things. The personal stories were excised from the script or the shooting schedule. Then it became more and more like things we had done before.
JON POVILL
Through it all, Bob Wise was doing a balancing act. Bob had so many problems in so many directions between the physical demands of shooting the thing, the need for pages—because there were days we would go to set without them—and the insane personality differences. The demands of Shatner and Nimoy, who were coming in with their own ideas. Roddenberry coming in with his ideas. Harold coming in with his ideas. Me coming in with my ideas. If this was an elephant by committee, it was Bob who was trying to piece the thing together. A lot of strong personalities and a lot of very different opinions. And on top of all of that, he had the special-effects people saying, “We can do this, we can do this, we can do this, and we can do this. It’s going to look great … but we can’t deliver anything yet. However, here’s the drawing of what it’s going to be.… We just need more floppy drives,” or something.
Another pitfall involving the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was that it had been “blind-booked” into theaters for December 7, 1979. This meant that theaters guaranteed a minimum cash payment—in this case a total of about thirty-five million dollars—provided it made that release date, sight unseen. In other words, as far as Paramount was concerned, absolutely nothing could delay its release … though the film’s special-effects debacle was the one thing that could have imperiled the studio being able to release the film on time.
GERALD ISENBERG
The whole production got away from them. They hired a guy named Bob Abel to do the special effects. I knew Bob and he was a codirector of a movie I’d made on fifties rock and roll. He was a documentary and commercial director at the time and now, seven years later, he’s sold himself as a special-effects guy, so they invested another five million dollars in him and had nothing. It was a complete waste, it was a nightmare, and they were now locked in to a release date and there was nothing they could do.
ROBERT WISE
On Star Trek I had so much to deal with which was not even done yet. Scenes in which my actors had to play and react to that screen. All that came in months and months later. The best I ever had for them to react to was a projection of a sketch or a picture of what the effects men were planning to achieve. That’s all I had for them. I had to remind them of what was going on in terms of the action, to describe the best I could from the script and my own ideas of the sketch what they were supposed to be looking at. It takes some very professional actors to respond to something like that, and that made it very difficult—in fact, it was perhaps the most difficult part of the film. And then we had, of course, the big problem of having to change the special-effects people after a year.
RICHARD TAYLOR
Bob Abel had produced some feature-film documentaries like Mad Dogs & Englishmen and the documentary Making of the President 1968. But as far as a dramatic theatrical film, it was the first piece that the studio worked on. And of course, this was all pre-CG. So the studio was noted for its graphics and it had opened the Pandora’s box for a whole new form of advertising. Very extreme visual stuff, very psychedelic. When we got involved, Paramount was pretty well down the trail on creating a television feature of Star Trek. And they had built sets to a particular point. There was an Enterprise model that was being built and a dry dock, a V’ger, and some other things. As a knee-jerk reaction to the success of Star Wars, they decided to turn it into a theatrical feature.
And somewhere along the line, they knew that it was time to relook at the whole thing and to bring a contemporary visual-effects company in to try and upgrade the whole visual aspect of the film. I don’t think that they really analyzed the Abel studio in terms of Did we have a model shop? Did we have a matte-painting department or any of that kind of stuff?
SUSAN SACKETT
The production itself wasn’t as rushed as the special effects were rushed, and that was because of the screwup by Robert Abel. When suddenly we were given a date for this movie to premiere in theaters, and told it must be ready because they went out and presold the movie and taken blind bids for December 7, we had to have special effects and we had almost none.
RICHARD TAYLOR
It wasn’t in Bob Abel’s nature to say “I fucked this up,” but he really did overextend us and overpromised. He really went into these meetings and would kind of take over. Bob Abel was a talented man and he really knew talent and how to hire it. He was a glib, rapping, Jewish salesman. He had a film background from UCLA and had directed some documentaries, some good ones. But he just would go in and dominate a meeting. I remember during the meetings thinking, Jesus, Bob, shut up. You’re not directing this movie. But he would make commitments for us to do something and then turn around and say, “Okay, Richard, go get her done.”
ROBERT WISE
I want simply to say that they were very creative people and they had excellent ideas, but the big concern that we had was whether they would be able to execute all of the effects in time so the film would be ready for its release date of December 7, which was absolutely imperative. That was what made us decide to change. It wasn’t lack of creativeness or abilities or anything like that. They were very good, had very good ideas, but I don’t think they were equipped yet to execute fast enough such a big amount of very sophisticated effects. That was a giant picture in terms of effects and work involved.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN (assistant to Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin)
They showed thirty seconds of footage to Bob Wise, and one of the producers told me it was the only time he saw Wise look angry. He walked out of the screening. It was a potato on the motion-control device, because the Enterprise had not been built yet.
JON POVILL
I didn’t see Bob go into that screening, but saw him shortly after he came out and he was angrier than I’d ever seen him. This was a man with seemingly endless patience—certainly not a man prone to flying into rages—but he was fuming. Said he wanted Abel and his company off the picture immediately and never wanted to see the SOB again.
Abel had been working on the film for longer than Bob had, and this was the first time he’d shown any test footage. After stalling and stalling and stalling for months. I never saw the footage, but Bob clearly thought it was absolute crap. Abel had been hired off the strength of a famous and visually groundbreaking commercial he’d done for Levi’s jeans. But we later learned that the commercial, though beautiful, was very late and very over budget. He kept showing us amazing conceptual drawings that would have been great, except he actually had no clue how to deliver them. It would have been a trial-and-error process that might have worked eventually or might not—but we sure as hell would have had no chance whatsoever of opening on December 7 if he’d stayed on.
JOSEPH R. JENNINGS
On Phase II, I had objected strenuously to the hiring of Abel and company, because I felt they were incapable of doing the job. Paramount spent a great deal of money on them and wound up with nothing. They were very good salesmen. That’s it. And their record was plain to be seen. They had been doing commercials, all of which had gone radically over budget. They had one, a Levi’s commercial, which everybody was all hopped up about. And he came on with a presentation you wouldn’t believe. Mr. Wise was very attracted to young people with new ideas. I was about his age. I was not the age of Abel and company, and we certainly did not see eye to eye. That you can write in great big bold letters.
I had one or two illustrators part time, and with the money that Paramount was giving Abel, they had five or six of them, all of whom were turning out very finished airbrushed illustrations of circumstances that really had nothing to do with the script but were very impressive. I feel that the creative people were definitely suckered in by that, because they thought they were getting something that no one had ever heard of—very art deco. And I said, “Who the hell wants an art deco spaceship?” Yet it apparently all looked very attractive. As I say, they sold very well. When they got the chance, all they did was continue selling. It was a very costly error.
SUSAN SACKETT
In a very short time, Doug Trumbull and his crew were hired. They did a lot of beautiful special effects, some totally superfluous, and all of them were included because Paramount said we bought and paid for them, so we are going to put them in the film. It became a big special-effects and light show, and a lot of that should have been trimmed. We would have done that had we had the time. The long ride around the Enterprise looks really nice, but doesn’t do much to advance the story. But on the other hand, some people love that. They think the Enterprise is the star of the show. Shatner would have you believe differently.
RALPH WINTER (postproduction supervisor, Star Trek II)
By July, Abel had only delivered one sixteen-millimeter high-speed blowup of the wormhole. He was trying to pioneer with his very smart team a new level of visual effects and he couldn’t deliver. In that sense, Star Trek V was exactly parallel to that. That’s why Doug Trumbull took over. Barry Diller said to him, “It doesn’t matter what you spend. We already presold this movie to theaters. You have to deliver this thing. Spend whatever it takes.” A lot of people made their careers and built companies based on Star Trek. You could track the credits of people in Star Trek: The Motion Picture for the next twenty years. They were all in the effects business of every major motion picture from there on out. So it was groundbreaking in what they did in six months. But there was a price to be paid.
EDDIE EGAN
At Paramount, there was absolute panic and fear of lawsuits. It was one of the broadest releases of all time at that point and they had extracted very, very strict terms from the exhibitors for the privilege of playing the movie. There were many people who thought there would be no movie to deliver based on what happened with the visual effects. It also presented practical problems for advertising and publicity. There was no film to show. There were no materials to cut TV spots from that featured special effects until very late. Later, there would be a lot of vendors put on to cut TV spots on a wing and a prayer, with slugs in them that said, “This shot will show Enterprise moving left to right toward camera.” Those were very worrisome days.
RICHARD TAYLOR
The original budget that we had to do the effects for the movie was twelve million dollars, and we had a good plan going. We started down that trail and would be designing shots and things and they kept changing the script. Every time you change the script, we had to reboard it and refigure out stuff. We hadn’t shot any scenes for the film yet, because the fucking script kept changing. So we were just beginning to start principal photography on the models, and because they kept changing the script, our budget started going up. It was fourteen and then it got to like sixteen and then they said, “Hold it. You don’t know what you’re doing and we want to bring in Doug Trumbull,” who had done Close Encounters and has made science fiction. “We want him to take an objective look at this and see if he thinks you can really finish it.”
ANDREW PROBERT (concept designer/production illustrator, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
I started on the project with Abel and then went through the painful process of changeover to Trumbull. Trumbull took me on as one of several people that were pulled through that, so in a way I feel kind of lucky by that and certainly complimented by it. Initially when the studio brought Abel on to the film, they were very excited by the possibilities that could happen by using Abel for the special effects, because Bob had done a lot of really nice things up to that point, not to mention some nice things since, so everyone was very optimistic. Bob’s main concern in doing Trek’s effects was to give the audience something that they’d never seen before, and consequently, this entailed a lot of research and development, which ran the budget way over what he had expected.
Obviously when you’re doing research and development work, there’s really no useable footage because most of it deals with testing and wedging—which is testing light exposure. And Paramount sort of set up an ultimatum that if there wasn’t any workable footage by a certain date, Abel would be taken off the project. We scrambled to get something going, but it just wasn’t there in time, so there was a big blowup between Robert Wise and Bob Abel. Then they just turned to someone who was more or less within their sphere of influence, and that was Trumbull, and he indicated that he could “save” the picture for them.
RICHARD TAYLOR
While we were building these models, Trumbull came over several times and I could see he was lusting on these things. He was like, “Holy fuck, those models are really good. I didn’t have anything to do with them.” And so when it came for the objective review of what we were doing, there was no objectivity at all. It was like he basically said, “No, they aren’t going to be able to get this done. The only way it’s going to get done is if I do it, and I’ll do it if you’ll let me direct this movie Brainstorm after.” So he threw that into the pot. And he came in and took over and a bunch of my people got taken by him from Abel’s. Then he realized he couldn’t get all this shit done either, so he recruited Apogee with John Dykstra and gave them a percentage of the work. And time was running out, so all of the sudden people are working golden time. And triple golden time. It cost forty million dollars in the end. Frankly, I didn’t believe it when they told us we were off the picture. I had about a hundred and some people working for me one day and the next day I don’t have anybody working for me.
I was actually in the camera room shooting a shot when they came in and said, “Richard, we’ve got to talk to you.” And I said, “What?” and they said, “You’re not on the movie anymore.” I said, “What?” And they said, “Trumbull is taking over the picture and we’re off the show.” And I said, “I don’t believe it. I’m going to keep shooting.” And I kept shooting until they finally came in and unplugged the camera and said, “No, it’s over. It’s all fucking over.” I left Abel’s shortly after that, because I’d worked there from ’73 to ’79 and I’d helped create this studio. I thought we had worked our ass off to this point and we had done some great stuff and we were on track and he kept dragging us into more stuff.
JON POVILL
If we had six months longer to finish the effects the way they could have been done, if we’d had good special-effects personnel from the beginning instead of having to start over in January or February of ’79, it would have been a very different movie. It still wouldn’t have been good, but it would have been vastly better.
ROBERT WISE
Extra time would have made a difference, and I think that both Doug and John would admit that. By saying this, I don’t want to imply that I don’t think they did a fantastic job. The two of them did, and their people did a fantastic amount of excellent work to get the picture ready by the date, especially considering the fact that they had started behind schedule. I can’t give them enough credit or praise for the job they did. However, given more time, let’s say another three or four months, I think they would both agree that there are areas which could have been improved or done slightly differently.
One aspect of the film that is an indisputable triumph is composer Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated soundtrack (for the record, it lost—incomprehensibly—to Georges Delerue’s score for A Little Romance) which helped define what Star Trek music was for the next generation, literally and figuratively.
JERRY GOLDSMITH (composer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
The problem was I didn’t have a theme. We recorded thirty minutes of music and everybody says, “Wow, that’s wonderful.” A couple days later I got a call from Bob Wise and he said, “I want to talk to you.” He came over and said it wasn’t working, because there’s no theme. So once I got my ego under control, I agreed that he was absolutely right! So for two weeks I sweated that one out, and the rest is history: the Star Trek theme was born.
LUKAS KENDALL (editor, Film Score Monthly)
The best score of the movie series still has to be Jerry Goldsmith’s for The Motion Picture. It’s a magnificent achievement—modern, timeless, and unforgettable, with the definitive theme for the franchise. The movie, for all its faults, is still a towering piece of cinema, and the score a major component. But it was chaos to create: Goldsmith couldn’t write without a finished film, and they were feeding him scenes and VFX sequences piecemeal. They’d book the 20th Century–Fox scoring stage not knowing whether they’d have music to record; sometimes they had a ninety-eight-piece orchestra sitting there with nothing to do, so they’d record umpteen takes of the main title.
JERRY GOLDSMITH
If it wasn’t for Jeffrey Katzenberg, it would have never gotten done. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he was really like a high-school coach. He pushed everybody and got ’em going, and gave us pats on the back and cheered us on. He was fabulous. And I said after that, “Boy, this kid’s going to go a long way,” and I was right on that. In hindsight it was a lot of fun, but the actual doing of it wasn’t so much fun.
The drama of the behind-the-scenes production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was so all-encompassing that it can sometimes be forgotten that the entire cast from the original series was reunited and attempting to capture what had so successfully worked before. Additionally, Persis Khambatta, cast as Ilia in Phase II, was brought over to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with Stephen Collins joining the production as Commander Will Decker.
ROBERT WISE
When Paramount held the press conference announcing the film, they set up a large table with Roddenberry, all the cast, etc. When my turn came to speak, I said, “You know, I’m the alien here,” because I was the only one who hardly knew anything of Star Trek. They all knew more than I did. But it worked very well. They’re all very good actors, very professional. I found all of them, and particularly Bill and Leonard, to be professional and very good actors.
WALTER KOENIG
A highlight for me was the first day, when I was at my console and Nichelle was at hers and George was at his, and Bill, the captain, walked onto the bridge for the first time, and I said, “Kep-tin.” We all jumped up and ran over to him. I got such a high, such a rush at that moment that it took all my self-control not to embrace him. It was such a lovely moment. I should have embraced him.
WILLIAM SHATNER
It was a strange feeling, full of complex, even conflicting emotions. Ten years in my life suddenly had been swept away just as though they never had existed. I knew it was 1979, but it seemed like 1969 was just yesterday. Time seemingly stood still since I had last taken my place on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise and uttered those now familiar words, “Captain’s log, stardate…” I felt exhilarated, gratified, nostalgic. At the same time, there was a tinge of disbelief and a bit of concern. I guess each of those feelings was traceable to the fact that all of us had waited so long for this to happen. It was difficult, after so many false starts over a number of years, to realize Star Trek was really back.
DeFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy”)
The whole thing has been remarkable, an incredible experience. From the beginning. When we were all brought together again, for the first time in ten years, it was hard to realize it was really happening. Yet we also had that strange feeling that the last decade had never existed. The family was just picking up right where it left off.
LEONARD NIMOY
I was looking forward to reprising the character, because I certainly wouldn’t want either one of two things to happen—anyone else playing it, or Star Trek happening without me.
JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)
The only thing I can remember thinking at that time—because to me, work was work, and I had to work to make a living—all I could think of when they were going to start a movie again was, “Thank God, maybe we’ll make a living out of this show!” Because it was ten years later and we knew what the fans thought. I went to 250 universities and received standing ovations all the time.
GEORGE TAKEI (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”)
The characters were all good friends and compatriots, and the context was of course Star Trek, so there was the feeling of coming home, but there was also that feeling of excitement and of scariness as well. Here we had this distinguished, legendary director, Robert Wise, so there was that sense of moving into another stratosphere in one’s career progression. Then it wasn’t really going home, because there was a whole different feel about that show. The costumes were different; the feel of the set, even though the geometric configuration was still the same, the tone, the color, the steeliness, and the monochromatic look was totally different. There was also this electricity in the air that there was a lot of money, and the buzz was that this was the most expensive movie up to that time. So it was a little bit of going home again, but more than that, it was a new and heady as well as an intimidating and awe-inspiring progression in terms of career and the project.
WALTER KOENIG
Standing on the set for that first shot where Kirk comes in and George [Takei] and Nichelle [Nichols] and I rush up to him and when we were setting up the lighting for that shot I finally believed we were making this movie. I was just caught up in a wonderful sense of euphoria, it’s one of the highlight moments of my involvement with Star Trek. The sense of yes, we are doing this, how neat, how unusual … how extraordinary.
Eric Harrison, a friend of Robert Wise’s, shared his unguarded thoughts about the tenor of the set with his friend actress Katharine Hepburn in a letter he sent to the beloved actress at the time. Harrison mused, “I gave your regards to R. Wise. He was thrilled and hopes when you come out here that you will visit. I think it would do a lot for his morale. The studio belongs to the oil company Gulf & Western and Star Trek is the first film with their own money so they constantly pace the set plus the fact that the technical problems are enormous. One whole week’s film has to be reshot because of a bug in the camera. So what was to finish the 21st of October is now 23rd of December. When I gave your regards to Wise, the first wardrobe lady was there and she did Rooster Cogburn with you.”
WILLIAM SHATNER
By the time we completed five months of filming—we used to do a TV show in one week—I felt we had achieved a galactic jump from our past efforts. What impressed me most, even more than the enhanced physical scope of its sets, costumes, and special effects, was the way the story had been developed. Captain Kirk has meant so much to me, been such an influence on my life as well as my career.
PERSIS KHAMBATTA (actress, “Ilia”)
I was so nervous on my first day, I couldn’t even remember my lines. I had to create a character and wasn’t sure what a Deltan was, exactly. On the second day of shooting I realized that I had to talk to Gene. I said to him, “Gene, you have to tell me what a Deltan is like.” So he gave me four pages of synopsis, which I think he gave to all the actors, even Leonard Nimoy. I read about the character and I really liked her. In some ways she is like me. She comes from a more spiritual world, beyond the material, where people count. Where you read people’s minds through the senses. It was something I felt very close to.
Unfortunately the script didn’t give me ways to express those things in the film. But some of those ideas must have gotten through, because so many people have commented on the sensuality that Ilia had, even though it couldn’t be expressed after she becomes a probe. One can’t express a probe being sensual. The woman’s basic expressions are in the eyes and mouth, and I think I tried to show this in the scenes with Stephen Collins. You see, I am very much like a Deltan in some ways. Ilia is into people and the beauty of everything.
RICHARD H. KLINE
One of the two new major cast members was Persis Khambatta, a very striking woman who had to shave her head completely to play the role. That might sound easy enough, but I must say that it was rather difficult to retain a visual continuity because, just like a man with his beard, she would develop a “five o’clock shadow” on her head. Also, as a result of the constant shaving of her head day after day, she would develop a rash, and a very clever type of makeup had to be applied constantly in order to hide it.
RICHARD TAYLOR
One of the most difficult things that I had to do on the whole film—that was mind-blowingly difficult—is that freaking glowing thing on Ilia’s neck. You couldn’t track it digitally like today, it had to be done practically. She had a shaved head, no hair to hide any wires or anything, and it’s got to glow. So what it was was a prop that we designed, and we had multiples of these things that fit on her neck, and there were two tiny tungsten wires, like a hair, and they went around the back to a battery pack that was behind her. You would get like two takes of a shot before you had to change the whole thing out.
RICHARD H. KLINE
In terms of story point, it was supposed to be a sensor light, a direct feed to what was controlling her. It was about the size of a nickel and twice as thick, and we would have to stick it onto her throat in the cavity above the chest and then run two wires around to her back where there was a battery. That poor girl was taped and untaped more times than a Rams linebacker is before and after games during their entire career. She would stand for hours while we applied these various devices to her.
PERSIS KHAMBATTA
One of the highlights of the film for me was working with Robert Wise. I learned to trust him. He understood that I was a newcomer and that I had a role that wasn’t easy. It was a difficult part for me. Once I became a probe, I couldn’t blink and that jewel in my neck burned me. They had to put a switch up my arm so I could turn it off. I would try not to switch it off until the lines were complete, because I didn’t want to spoil a good scene. Robert Wise was so patient. If the light in the jewel didn’t work, he would have to wait three or four hours to reshoot the scene. It was a delicate little device.
RICHARD TAYLOR
If I was directing the movie, I’d say, “Look, she has the thing but then it turns itself off and falls away and it goes under her skin—some way she doesn’t have to wear this the whole time.” Because to make that thing on her neck glow was slowing the production down like crazy, and they’re, like, “Taylor, have you got that fucking thing working?” And I’m like, “Fuck me! Who came up with this idea?”
WALTER KOENIG
Persis had a very refreshing narcissism. She was very candid about it. She thought she looked beautiful and she was the first to mention it. That was okay, she did look great.
DOUG DREXLER (special effects makeup, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
When we snuck on the lot during production, my friend and I were coming around the corner, and she walked right by us with that real short white dress, with these amazing legs, and she just looked at us and smiled and said, “Hi, boys.” We almost melted; she looked so beautiful.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
The only thing I remember about her is why the hell did they shave her head? What a stupid thing to do! That was Roddenberry’s idea.
STEPHEN COLLINS (actor, “Will Decker”)
When I was auditioning, I asked them if they could send me a script and they said they couldn’t. “We can’t let it out of the studio.” They took me to Paramount and ushered me into a sort of cell where I was allowed to read the script. It was like one of those scenes in All the President’s Men where they say, “Okay, you can look at that, but only for half an hour and we’ll be watching.”
I was completely unfamiliar with Star Trek. Not out of antipathy, but just because I had somehow missed it. I was not among the devoted, but I had heard it was going to be a big movie. I was just curious about it as I would be about anything that comes to my attention. I liked Gene Roddenberry so much immediately. He’s a wonderful combination of being remarkably articulate and well-spoken and yet he has the kind of innocence of a three-year-old. He’s just like talking to a big kid.
Gene did not work closely on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, although he did work very hard on it. There was a difficult political situation where I felt that Gene was being kept outside the reach of the film. There was a feeling like, “Okay, now we’re making a movie and the people who made the TV show can only help us so much.” Gene was professional about it. He was absolutely wonderful to work with, but he didn’t have final say on many things. Television is an executive producer’s medium, but on a film it’s the director’s medium, and Bob Wise was really calling the shots. Gene was around most of the time, but things were taken out of his hands.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
It was really dumb of Collins to say that Gene wasn’t involved enough. He was involved too much and that was the problem.
STEPHEN COLLINS
What I didn’t know when I signed on for the movie was that Bill Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had script approval. They had the power to bend the story however they wanted. The story had to end with Decker merging with Ilia, but the original scenario was much more centered on Decker. I’m not saying that it weakened the final product—there were other reasons for that—but it weakened my role in it considerably. Decker was not very well-rounded and became sort of two-dimensional and uninteresting.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
That stuff about Nimoy and Shatner having script control is totally inaccurate. As for Mr. Collins, I know that I went out of my way to make him comfortable. I asked for his suggestions concerning his part, because it was his big break and I liked him. He forgets, I suppose, that he made a point of telling people how helpful I was to him and how much he appreciated me for it. So I don’t know where he gets off making those remarks. Either his memory fails him or he finds it expedient for his career to sound off in that thoughtless manner.
At the center of the story of the film were significant arcs for Kirk and Spock. Kirk, who feels he is disappearing into a Starfleet desk job, is desperate to get back in a command seat, and so obsessed with doing so that he makes some glaring mistakes upon retaking command. Spock—who, when we meet him early on, is back on his home world of Vulcan—is attempting to purge himself of the remnants of human emotions within. Sensing V’ger, and the belief that it holds the key to his metaphysical search, he rejoins the Enterprise crew and, over the course of the story, actually learns to embrace his human half. Both are significant character stories, but focusing on those characters—and the interactions that were a hallmark of the original television series—was difficult given the nature of V’ger and the film’s focus on visual effects.
DeFOREST KELLEY
I was worried when I saw the script, because the characterizations were not there, and the relationships were not there. I was disturbed, and so were Bill and Leonard. We had to put up a great fight. I think anyone will tell you that if the actors hadn’t fought like hell to reestablish those relationships, they never would have been there. We would have had a special-effects war. So there was a great deal of difficulty with the script, which was finally resolved to a certain extent. I still don’t think there’s enough of the interpersonal relationships in there, and I regret that some of them were lost. But Paramount didn’t believe that the characters were as important to the public as they really were, and we couldn’t tell them.
There was a scene where Spock, McCoy, and Kirk meet to discuss Spock’s strange behavior. To me, that was the closest thing to a real Star Trek confrontation that there was in the picture. Here the three of us came together, Spock comes in to talk about his problems and what’s going to happen to him, and I have the line, “Well, you’re lucky we just happen to be going your way.” The three of us were actually very natural; that’s where we should be, and what we should be doing. It was somewhat like going back in time.
LEONARD NIMOY
That was a tough time. It was complicated, it was somewhat schizophrenic for a while, and it was not an easy jump back into Spock’s skin. Particularly because there were writing issues. The script that I read for the movie did not even contain the Spock character, so it was a case of them describing to me what Spock would be doing in the next draft of the script. That took a little time, and a little fine-tuning to finally get it to fruition. I was never totally satisfied with that movie.
JON POVILL
In truth, part of the blame for this goes to Harold, because he didn’t really know the characters. The interaction between the characters was, I think, more rigid than it had been in the series. Harold’s military background and military perspective was such that it was more clipped and military and less personal than it had been in the show. I think that that rests on Harold.
ROBERT WISE
It wasn’t as if somebody sat down at the beginning and said, “Listen, we want to get a lot more special effects.” It was not a deliberate move to shift the emphasis from one area to another. That was really because of the story. That was the script, or the story we had to tell, and we didn’t try to put more special effects in it. I didn’t try. None of us tried. We had people reacting to things that were happening on the screen, so we had to show these things. So if there is a valid criticism coming from those Trekkies who really love these characters with all their heart, there still wasn’t anything we could do about it. We would have had to have a totally different story.
LEONARD NIMOY
Star Trek I—which filmed for six months—was really a trial for the actors, because we were not very much in it at all. We were, much of the time, looking off camera at things that would later be done by Doug Trumbull or his crew. We were looking in wonderment and awe and saying things like, “What do you think it is?” “I don’t know” “What do you think it is going to do next?” “I don’t know!” Very exciting stuff.
GENE RODDENBERRY
This is the first time a television show ever became a major motion picture, and Robert Wise did a remarkable job in adaptation from one medium to another. Many people don’t seem to be aware that they’re two entirely different mediums. You strive for different values in television. It’s a more intimate medium, where you can get into multiple characters and character conflict that can be very exciting. With motion pictures the trend has been to make it a sensory experience with stereo sound and bigger screens. Television cannot create that illusion, so it goes for other things. It intellectualizes rather than sensorizes the product. And a major motion picture spectacle doesn’t lend itself easily to Mr. Spock’s cute little remarks with Captain Kirk. The conversion of a two-hour television show into a movie was much more difficult than anyone could’ve believed.
And the difficulties regarding the script continued right to the last moment, when a battle erupted between Livingston and Roddenberry over credit, with Alan Dean Foster caught in the cross fire.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
The writing credits for the film proposed to the Writers Guild by Paramount was “screenplay by Harold Livingston and story by Alan Dean Foster.” They left Roddenberry out, so he protested. He’s the one who launched the protest. I knew he couldn’t win an arbitration, because it wasn’t his script. Anything he’d done was tossed out, or most of it. In any case, I blackjacked Foster into splitting the story credit with Gene. He agreed to do it and Gene wouldn’t accept it. On that basis, I said, “Okay, Gene, screw you. We’ll go to arbitration.” When I said that, he withdrew and he withdrew in a funk. He was mad.
GENE RODDENBERRY
It was my policy all through Star Trek: If a writer felt he wanted credit and wanted it badly enough to have a Guild action on it, I’d withdraw.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I said to Gene, “If you felt you deserved credit, then you have a system for determining this. Why didn’t you use it?” He said, “I don’t want to lower myself to that.” At that point, I guess, he decided to withdraw and assume this injured pose. But he would have lost this arbitration, because he didn’t write any script. All he did was rewrite, patch up, fool around, and screw everything up.
JON POVILL
Gene didn’t deserve coscreenplay credit. The credit arbitration procedure is that they heavily favor the writer of the first draft, and Harold wrote the first draft. Unless you drastically change something, you’re not going to get credit.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
The first thing they did was try to deny me screen credit. When the credits came out to be filed with the Guild, they read, “screenplay by Gene Roddenberry and Harold Livingston, story by Gene Roddenberry.” I’m a very low-key guy. I’m a handshake-is-my-bond kind of guy. I called my agent and said, “What’s going on?” And she said, “Oh, that’s nothing.” “What do you mean, that’s nothing?” “Nobody’s mad at you or anything, that’s just the business.” I said, “Well, it’s not my business.” My agent then suggested I file for solo story credit. I said, “Sure,” because I did 98 percent of the writing on the treatment.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I told Foster, “Just because Roddenberry is being a son of a bitch doesn’t mean that you have to be one, too.”
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
I thought about it and said, “You’re right.” I called and said, “Look, all I’m interested in here is having it read the way it read on the earlier script, which is ‘story by Alan Dean Foster and Gene Roddenberry,’” because it was, as I freely admit, based on his one-page idea. I then get this very strange letter back saying that Gene Roddenberry is off in La Costa someplace recuperating, he’s very tired, very busy, and he really doesn’t have time for this. I just laughed. Is this real life or kindergarten? I just threw up my hands and said, “Fine, whatever,” and that’s why I have sole story credit on the movie.
JON POVILL
I had miscalculated tremendously by not going for a story credit on the film. Harold was telling me that I absolutely should, but I was trying to salvage my relationship with Gene by not going for it. I felt badly for Gene that he had originally wanted coscreenplay credit with Harold, and Harold assured him that he would fight him to the death on it. So Gene was in for story credit and Harold said that was okay. I didn’t want to apply for story credit and have any chance of fucking up that credit for Gene. Then, of course, he took his name off of it. That would have been a lot of residuals over the years.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
By then I’d worked with Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas [on Star Wars novels]. In a nutshell, Roddenberry was standard Hollywood and George Lucas was anti-Hollywood. I never got the feeling from George that he particularly cared whether he received any great critical acclaim or even if he made a lot of money. I got the feeling that Star Wars was based on something he loved seeing as a kid and that’s what he wanted to make and he hoped he could make it so he could see it on the screen. I don’t think he cared about the fame or the money. Dealing with Lucas was like dealing with the quiet kid in the back of the class who hardly ever speaks up. Gene was, like, “I’M STAR TREK!”
On December 6, 1979, one day before its official debut, the forty-four-million-dollar Star Trek: The Motion Picture had its world premiere in Washington, DC, at the K-B MacArthur Theater, followed by a black-tie reception at the National Air and Space Museum. There had been no previews and, as a result, Wise, who began his career as the editor on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, considered the film’s release version nothing more than a “rough cut.” The following day, the vast majority of critics would attack the film for its—according to many—listless pacing and overreliance on visual effects over character interactions.
EDDIE EGAN
I was sent along with many other people from the New York and L.A. offices of Paramount to Washington, DC. One of my duties there was to ride in a limo to pick up Robert Wise and his wife at the airport and to bring them to a hotel and get them settled in for the premiere the next night. He actually got off the plane with two cans of film under his arm.
He was a very kind man, but I could tell he was troubled and frustrated and just exhausted from the process. I was with him the next day when he did a round of interviews and then went with him and his wife to the premiere and stayed with them at the party afterwards.
WALTER KOENIG
Gene had just seen the cut and it was literally still wet. We were flying to Washington, DC, and I asked, “What do you think of the picture?” He answered, “It’s a good picture.” It was a death knell. As soon as he said that, I knew it wasn’t going to work. He didn’t put it down, he didn’t denigrate it, but I heard it in his voice. I absolutely knew. Then you hope against hope that it’s going to be good, and you see the limousines and the red carpets and the spotlights. Then you see those first five minutes with the music and you see V’ger and the destruction it causes. I got very excited, but shortly thereafter I began to become aware of time, that time was passing. That I wasn’t involved in the picture. I was sitting in the audience and my heart sank.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
At the premiere, Roddenberry got up onstage and thanked Bob Wise and virtually everybody, but never once mentioned my name. Bill Shatner got up and said, “Listen, let’s not forget Harold Livingston, who wrote this fine picture,” which got me a nice round of applause. It was a very nice and big thing of him to do.
DOUG DREXLER
I remember Roddenberry and Harold Livingston at the premiere sitting together very quietly. Roddenberry was sweating. He literally was sweating. He looked very uncomfortable and knew that he had a problem. The print, I had overheard somebody say, was flown in wet. The movie was never really finished.
SUSAN SACKETT
The only thing I remember from the premiere in Washington was a little display case that had actual moon rocks in it and being fascinated by them. It was everybody’s dream come true to come to a premiere and be treated like royalty.
EDDIE EGAN
My most vivid memory of the night of the premiere was when the picture ended, Leonard Nimoy went down the aisle to Todd Ramsay, the editor, and said, “I need to speak to you,” in a very certain tone that he was unhappy about something. I found out later from my dealings with Leonard that he was unhappy that the scene where Spock cried, which was put back in for the director’s edition, had been taken out of the movie. That was what had really ticked him off that night, because all of them were seeing the movie for the first time, including the director.
I had never heard of—and certainly never in my experience later have I ever known of—a film to hold press screenings at a theater that was commercially showing the movie on the same evening of the day it opened. That wasn’t to hide the picture from bad reviews—no one had seen it to know whether it would get good or bad reviews. It was a practical thing.
DOUG DREXLER
Jerry Goldsmith was sitting right behind me. His wife coughed all the way through the movie. We went to the Air and Space Museum for the big party afterward, which was the entire bottom floor of the museum. And they had a full orchestra with the music. It was a big deal. I remember coming out and hearing women going, “That was just perfectly awful.” And the dry-dock sequence in particular, if you weren’t a fan. But to me, it’s one of the greatest moments in science fiction ever. When reviews started coming in, they were pretty much chopping it up. And it was hurting me. It was as if it was my own child. I remember how upset I was. Joel Siegel reviewed it on ABC. He was a Star Trek fan, but I remember his review wasn’t that kind, although it was diplomatic compared to some of the others. Then he said, “But the Enterprise … it was made for the big screen.” I’ll never forget it as long as I live. I’m getting chills thinking about it. It was made for the big screen. And it really was.
RONALD D. MOORE
I thought it was a beautiful film, and at the time I was struck by the message of the movie, and it felt very much in keeping with the show. I did sort of feel at the end that this was a retelling of “The Changeling,” but I was very excited. When I saw generally it was getting negative reviews, I was very defensive of the movie for quite a while. In fact I wrote a letter to Trek magazine and they printed it. It was the first and only letter I’d ever written to a publication and they actually printed it and it was me defending the film. Many years later when I was working on Next Generation, Eric Stillwell brought in a copy of that Trek magazine to embarrass me in front of the entire writing staff.
MANNY COTO (executive producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)
I was one of those guys who was in denial. I was running around saying it was great. It wasn’t until Star Trek II came around that I realized I didn’t much like the first one, but we were so excited about it, we couldn’t leave it. We were fanatical, and we convinced ourselves that it wasn’t as bad as it really was.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (co-executive producer, Futurama)
I saw it in White Plains, New York, at a theater near where I grew up. The audience was really into it. They cheered every time a cast member showed up on-screen. Spock first and then Shatner and then whenever you’d see everyone else on the bridge. You didn’t hear the dialogue for a lot of the movie because there was so much cheering going on. Showing the Enterprise in dry dock was just this incredible experience, because I’d been watching reruns so many times, seeing the same special effects over and over again, so the idea that the Enterprise responded when Kirk said “Take us out” was such a crazy, exciting moment. As a Star Trek fan, that was the most amazing moment of Star Trek: The Motion Picture for me.
MANNY COTO
I sympathize with the guys who went to go see The Phantom Menace and convinced themselves that it wasn’t as bad as it was. Phantom Menace is worse, I would argue, than Star Trek ever was, but we were kind of in denial. There were some beautiful shots of the Enterprise and we got to see some Klingons, so it wasn’t a total disaster, but in large part it was pretty boring.
CHRIS GORE (founder, Film Threat magazine)
Why does Kirk’s Starfleet uniform make him look suspiciously like a dentist? And what’s the deal with Kirk’s obsession with Vulcans? He wants a green-blooded science officer badly: “I’d still like a Vulcan there if possible.” Kirk sounds like a bachelor with a fetish for blondes. And like Godzilla’s affection for Tokyo, the Enterprise is, of course, the only ship in range of … whatever.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
They made a stiffer, more 2001-type of science fiction, which I don’t think is what Star Trek was. Obviously, The Wrath of Khan ended up being closer at least in spirit—to me—to the original Star Trek and not just because it was a sequel to the original show. It was more colorful, the costumes and the characters; there was more humor. Also, I saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture so many times that by the time Wrath of Khan came out, I could identify all the stock footage they used.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
A lot of people were disappointed when the movie came out because it was boring, there wasn’t enough action, and the characters were not the same characters that people were familiar with from the original series. I was not one of those people. I liked it the first time I saw it, because of the scope of the film and seeing the Enterprise on the big screen with all the detail. The special effects were cool. What really struck me about the movie was the music. Jerry Goldsmith’s score was and still is one of my favorite music scores of all time.
WALTER KOENIG
What Star Trek I had was a true science-fiction story. It was innovative storytelling as far as it went. This was not simply a story that we pulled from a horse opera and made into a science-fiction movie. It was indigenous to the genre … and it should have been since it was borrowed from other Star Trek stories.
EDDIE EGAN
It was not the emotional, character-driven, serious, funny, interplay-between-the-characters that people know and we know to be the heart of what makes Star Trek work, but it had elegance and an intellectual concept that can stand right up there with the best science fiction movies ever produced.
CHRIS GORE
I saw the film in 1979 with my dad, who was also a huge Trek fan. We would watch the original series together and discuss episodes in detail. The first Star Trek movie was what got me reading magazines like Starlog, Fantastic Films, and Cinefantastique. I sought out any shred of information about the upcoming Star Trek movie. This was before the Internet, when a trip to the corner store was for buying comics and movie mags. From the opening overture, I was transported to another time in a familiar galaxy with an optimistic view of the future. Much has been discussed about the flaws of The Motion Picture, but it has actually aged the best of the old Star Trek films. Try watching Star Trek III without cringing multiple times.
JAMES DOOHAN
It got boring getting to V’ger. Who wants to see a bunch of clouds, which aren’t terribly interesting after the first thirty seconds anyway?
DAVID GERROLD
The fans had come off this two-year high with Star Wars, and the audience wanted more Star Wars, but there wasn’t any more. So they went to see Star Trek and they were hungering for more, so Star Trek benefitted from the Star Wars phenomenon. They went and they saw it over and over again, but it was embarrassing to watch the fans because they were all apologists for this picture: “Well, it’s not that bad. It’s a different kind of Star Trek.” Instead of really just acknowledging that it was a bad movie, they tried to explain that it was wonderful and you were an idiot for not understanding it. It was wonderful to watch them fuck their minds over to explain away a bad movie. The truth was that there was this movie that they wanted to love and they were so disappointed, but they wouldn’t dare say that they were disappointed.
BRYAN FULLER (executive producer, American Gods)
It’s a really interesting, very rich film. Most people dismiss it as dull, but I think they’re not paying attention. Khan is much more rock and roll. It is much more of a cowboy picture. It has such drive and momentum. There’s no chance to stop and pontificate, which Star Trek: The Motion Picture allowed the audience to do. But I think during that time a lot of them had their eyes roll in boredom, but not me.
I understand it’s a colder, more intellectual film, particularly when you compare it to The Wrath of Khan, which was “let’s Moby Dick this son of a bitch.” Whereas The Motion Picture was filled with a lot of ideas and the notion of bringing Star Trek into a Kubrickian universe where we can explore intellectual ideas.
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
Bob Justman said my father wasn’t a great writer, he was a great rewriter. That doesn’t bother me too much, because I think I might believe that. Not that he was a bad writer, but the stories that my father put his weight behind were often slow. The Motion Picture is an example. Now, you may love it and I have respect for it and I appreciate what it is, but it’s slow-moving. I’ll use the word thoughtful. It’s more about ideas and less about action. I’m not sure my father should have done the movies. It was his show, if he’d done them all like The Motion Picture, they’d be more Star Trek, but would they have been good movies? Would they have made the money they made? I don’t know.
WALTER KOENIG
There are myriad reasons for the lack of success, including setting a release date for the picture in advance. According to Gene, he fought that, because it really did back him into a corner and made the picture that much more expensive. They had to go on double time, golden time, and at one point they were shooting around the clock in postproduction. So I guess it was a cursed project from the start.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Rushing costs money in this business. When there are only two or three people in the world who can do a certain optical and only one is available, you’re not in a good bargaining position. But these are the kinds of problems that are dealt with in the real world of picture-making, which are very seldom talked about in fan magazines, or are understood by those who make dramatic comments or criticism.
RALPH WINTER
We watched the movie as reference on Star Trek II. It came to the end of the movie and I got the squawk box from the projectionist, and he goes, “I’m really sorry. I made a mistake. I left out one of the reels.” And I go, “No worries.” Twenty minutes of the movie we missed, and no one noticed.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I was upset with the film. It just wasn’t what I wanted. I can’t honestly say this wasn’t my fault, because in the end I took the rap for it anyway. But if I do a poor job, I’ll tell you it’s bad.
ROBERT WISE
Do I like the film? That’s awfully hard to answer. Often we directors generally like our latest film best … I like it. I don’t think it’s everything I hoped it’d be and certainly I had no idea it was going to cost the tremendous amount of money it cost. None of us did. I am sure Paramount would not have gotten into it had they realized at the beginning it was going to cost that much.
EDDIE EGAN
No one at Paramount was happy about the way the film came together, because of the ugly dynamic between Roddenberry and the studio, and the script problems and the actors all getting involved with the script. Too many cooks in the kitchen always leads to disaster, and that was a big part of the problem.
I also rememember Nimoy saying to me years later that he was very fond of Bob Wise, but he got an uneasy feeling the first time he met him. He said when he went to his house, the house was very severe … it wasn’t homey at all. It was very antiseptic, cold and orderly. He said it gave him pause. He had great affection for him though and thought that he and many other people would have lost their shit or had a nervous breakdown making that movie under those conditions and he apparently never showed it to anyone on the set.
GENE RODDENBERRY
My attitude on the movie is this: While the film failed in a number of areas where I would have liked it to have succeeded, it was a successful adaptation of the television story to the screen. We could have done more—and we could have done a lot less—but we did what we could under the time, conditions, and circumstances, and the fact that God double-crossed us by making us fallible. The film has some failures … it also has some remarkable successes in it. I think, considering the way it all happened, we came out with a remarkably good film, and I’m very pleased to have been a part of it. It could have been better—yes! I don’t ever expect to make a film where I don’t look back and say to myself, “Ah, I’d like to change this and this.”
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
When I was submitting stories to Phase II and everything was all hunky-dory and chatty, one day Gene put his arm around me—he was a tall guy—and he said, “You remind me of me when I was your age.” That’s an exact quote. I thought, “I’m nothing like you, what are you talking about?” He said, “I’m going to teach you everything I know.” At that point I’d written something like twenty books and I thought, “That’s very nice, but I don’t think there’s that much you can teach me.” I kept quiet, because he was being nice. But Star Trek was the worst experience I ever had. Nobody had ever tried to do to me what they tried to do. But that’s just the way it is, apparently. They put you in the shark cage, you learn how to fight with the other sharks, or you go back in the goldfish bowl. I belonged in the goldfish bowl. My wife and I picked up and moved to Arizona.
In the end, Gene did teach me quite a lot about the business, although I don’t think that’s what he originally had in mind.
NICHOLAS MEYER (director, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
I had a conversation once with Barry Diller, who said that a really sickening moment for him was being in New York and seeing lines around the block for the first Star Trek movie, and knowing that it wasn’t everything that it could be. And I do not knock the first movie. Robert Wise has forgotten more about filmmaking than I’ll ever know, and somebody had to go boldly and try this. You learn from other people, you build on the efforts and the mistakes or the successes of other people. So I am not a person who says, “Oh well, this is a perfectly shitty film.” I’m just grateful that it was there. But for Barry, he said, “Gee, people really want to see this stuff and we’re going to make money off it despite the fact that it was a runaway production and we spent forty-five million dollars. We’re going to make another one of these and we’re going to do it until we get it right.”
ROBERT WISE
This was the first film that I did where I didn’t have time for it. Normally we would see a picture and go back and have time to work on it a little bit more. But we didn’t have any time. I saw it all completely together on Monday before it premiered in Washington on Thursday. One of the reservations I have about the film is that I didn’t have the time to fine-tune it.
In the end, Wise would get that opportunity to fine-tune Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in the form of the film’s director’s edition, which was released on DVD on November 1, 2001. Prior to that, however, in its initial television debut on the ABC Sunday Night Movie, a number of scenes were added that provided some of the character moments fans felt were missing from the theatrical version.
The reedited director’s edition, which featured Wise’s preferred cut of the film along with new computer-generated visual effects, was overseen by Wise himself along with the Robert Wise Productions team of Dave Fein, Michael Matessino, and Daren Dochterman.
SUSAN SACKETT
No one contacted us about the ABC version. It just showed up that way on the tube and on video. We were not consulted, but very pleased over it. We had no idea how it happened or why it happened. This was all the footage Mr. Roddenberry had written a memo about in 1979 when the film was being cut. We went into one of the rough cuts and he wrote about a twenty-page memo saying he would like to see this and could you add this, trim this, put this line in. Someone got a hold of that memo of what he would like to have put in the film. Had they listened to him in the first place, it would have been in the film, and this is what they used as the basis for their reedit for television. Everything that was done was what he had requested in this memo.
WALTER KOENIG
I don’t trust my own feelings sometimes. Everybody seems to think that that extra footage helped the film, and when I saw it I didn’t really see that. Maybe because I don’t have the objectivity. In the reediting they added a scene of mine after I get burned and Ilia heals my burns, but when you have just a few scenes to begin with, it seems like I had more involvement than it might otherwise.
DAVID GERROLD
[The ABC, VHS, and laserdisc version of] Star Trek: The Special Edition is seventeen minutes longer, but it feels seventeen minutes shorter because of that character stuff that was added in. It’s a difficult picture to sit through. The first half of the picture is quite good, but the problem is that the cut is wrong. They left in the special-effects sequences that should have been much shorter, and Robert Wise intended them to be much shorter, and they cut out little pieces of character that said the story was about Kirk and Spock. The reason that Star Trek: The Motion Picture made so much money had nothing to do with the story. It had everything to do with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
DAVID C. FEIN
I would go so far as to say as much as Star Wars was a success and was a massive change to the industry, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a massive hit to Bob’s life and Bob’s career. There was so much attention being spent on this, and there were so many people who were looking for someone to blame. Bob is such a gentleman that no matter who is technically at fault, he was the captain of the ship. It was his project to do. It was his responsibility in the end. It was the only project that didn’t go smoothly in his career. And to not only not go smoothly, but to become the tremendous problem that it was, and have so much riding on it and the studio needing it so much, it was difficult. If you really look at his career, he didn’t do many other films after that. And he had been on a roll.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN
We contacted Mr. Wise and brought up the question of whether he’d like to talk about Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He had never talked about it previously, because he was so upset with the way he was treated by the studio, the way it all came out and the fact he never had preview screenings. It was just a bad experience for him, and, of course, after the movie came out the actors started bad-mouthing it, especially when Wrath of Khan was released. “This is more like it, the Star Trek that we wanted.” C’mon, they didn’t know. So we approached Mr. Wise. At this point the special editions of the Star Wars movies had come out and done really well. This gave us an angle to say, “If you could have those missing weeks from your postproduction schedule, Mr. Wise, what would you have done?” So he started to think. We scheduled a screening of the original movie at the Directors Guild, just for him and us. We sat him down, showed him the movie, and he started to open up a little bit. I guess a lot of memories came back to him because he hadn’t watched it in eighteen years. He hadn’t seen it since the Washington, DC, premiere on December 6, 1979. He started to open up about it and said, “You know, maybe we could at least give it a final cut.”
DAVID C. FEIN
Not only was it tough at the time, but for us to have to take years of knowing him before he would even talk about the movie was very emotional. It was very personal for him. I can’t tell you how important it is in my life to know that this brilliant man didn’t have to go to his grave with such huge, unfinished business. Admittedly the business won’t be finished until the director’s edition is issued on Blu-ray.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN
We got a hold of the original files he had donated to the USC cinema school. Boxes and boxes of his original files from that time, including a complete book of storyboards, his shooting script, and all sorts of notes. Notes from Gene Roddenberry, Harold Livingston, and his notes in his script. That was a huge amount of information, and we started to see the storyboards of effects shots they planned to do but never got around to. There just wasn’t any time. We started to pick some moments that could have been made better by that extended postproduction schedule. I did some Photoshop comps, did some screen grabs to show him things we were thinking about attempting. He said, “Wow, I think we can actually do this. Let’s get a message out to Sherry Lansing at Paramount and see if she’ll go along with it.” And that’s what we did: he drafted up a letter and sent it to Sherry Lansing. After several months they said, “Get a budget together,” and that’s how it started.
DAVID C. FEIN
The truth of the matter is that Bob’s legacy is the director’s edition. That’s the movie that—as close as possible to what we had; we couldn’t shoot anything new—was the movie that he wants people to look at as Bob Wise’s Star Trek film.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN
When he saw the film, he was smiling ear to ear. He loved it and he was so glad that he had a chance to go back. This was a very heartfelt moment when he said, “This is the only one I didn’t get to finish.” That just about brought us to tears; what a great feeling to help him achieve that.
JON POVILL
I wish the making of the movie had been a happy experience for him. I remember that when we were in production on the film, every day Bob would have lunch in his office and have one glass of vodka, pretty much straight up. Certainly not to excess. Just one to steel himself for the rest of the day. The overall frame of it was: “Thirty-five years, I’ve never experienced anything like this. Just un-fucking-believable.” He just could not believe how dysfunctional this production was.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
Part of my contract says Paramount has got to give me an extra fifty thousand bucks when the movie goes into profits. Still negative. It’s grossed around five hundred million dollars.