UNCAGED

“IT’S LIKE NOTHING WE’VE ENCOUNTERED BEFORE.”

The year is 1966. Fans at the World Science Fiction Convention, Tricon, in Cleveland, Ohio, are about to get their first glimpse of “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot for the new NBC science-fiction series Star Trek. Introduced by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, who had already given attendees a taste of the show via elaborate costumes modeled at the convention, the episode unspooled alongside the pilot for Irwin Allen’s The Time Tunnel. Whereas Allen’s was derided, Roddenberry’s was greeted by thunderous applause from the 850 assembled fans.

Much like rock fans demanding an encore at a concert, Roddenberry dutifully complied and screened the first pilot, “The Cage,” as well that weekend to an equally rapturous response. It would be a first look at the television series that would entrance, delight, and obsess fans for the next fifty years.

GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)

I was nervous, particularly when I saw the Tricon audience watching other films that were shown before, and booing, and stomping, and laughing at things. I walked out there thinking, “They’re finally going to show this one.” Then I watched how they accepted this show. I said to myself, “Yes, there are people, if we go this way and try these things, who are going to appreciate them.” I realized then that we would have fans of some sort, and of course, where that went is insanity.

JERRY SOHL (writer, “The Corbomite Maneuver”)

There was what felt like three thousand people watching a new Irwin Allen show, and as soon as they saw his name they started booing. They just booed his name. Then when Gene Roddenberry showed Star Trek, they really loved that. I was really surprised. When Gene and I sat up at the podium answering questions, I was introduced as the “head writer” of Star Trek, which I wasn’t. I just went along with it, because I thought it would be good politics. And it was. It was fun.

This would be the first, but far from the last, taste Gene Roddenberry would get of fan adulation for his groundbreaking series. Born Eugene Wesley Roddenberry on August 19, 1921, the tall but often shabbily dressed Texan had already lived a remarkable life by the time he arrived in Los Angeles with his then wife, Eileen Anita Rexroat, with whom he would have two daughters and on whom he would have an extramarital affair with Majel Barrett before they would eventually be married.

CHRISTOPHER KNOPF (writer, producer)

Eileen Roddenberry was a very quiet woman, totally different from Majel Barrett. She was very happy being a cop’s wife. Hollywood was very hard for her to handle; he had a lot of social commitments, and she wasn’t very comfortable with that at all. He had these two daughters, and when they broke up it was very bitter. She went after him financially and won big-time. The two daughters took their mother’s side, and I think Gene had virtually no relationship with them. Then Majel and Gene had a son, they called him Rod, who is a really nice guy.

ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)

I have very fond memories of Christmas and dinners with the whole family there. Both my grandfathers had passed before I was born, so both grandmothers, my father’s sister, my half sisters, and their two children all having Christmas dinners and stuff like that. None of the history was there, so I got introduced to it after my father passed away because the ex-wife came around. One of my father’s daughters sued the family alongside the ex-wife and I was very upset with that.

The other daughter didn’t, she sided with us and I was kind of confused and distraught. I have sympathy for them, because they were around during the original series. My father even said in one of his interviews that he was focused so much on the original series, he was never there, so I could see why they felt wronged by him. And he had an affair with my mother for ten years before they got married. So, I can’t say I feel what they feel, but I can understand how they would feel betrayed.

ANDE RICHARDSON (Desilu secretary, assistant to Gene L. Coon)

I met Eileen. She wasn’t all that friendly. She wasn’t warm and open to other people. She was quite elitist. People were beneath her, especially after Gene was really doing well. So that was the impression. That wasn’t Gene Roddenberry. Gene was still a pretty cool guy. I remember I came back from Mexico with a whole bunch of joints ready-rolled and he was thrilled. [An assistant] used to sit there at the desk and empty all the tobacco out of the cigarettes and then stuff the pot into the empty cigarette.

A former pilot and second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps and copilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress during World War II, Roddenberry had made the move from military to civilian aviator and narrowly survived the crash of Pan Am Flight 121 in the Syrian desert that he was flying from Calcutta. Joining the Los Angeles Police Department in February 1949, Roddenberry found himself writing speeches for Chief William H. Parker as well as articles for the LAPD newsletter, The Beat.

GENE RODDENBERRY

I was a policeman and learned to write as a speechwriter for Parker. I learned to write long before that, though, with the idea that if you write eight hundred words a day, soon you will be a writer. It took me eight years or so. Once I quit Pan American as a pilot, it seemed to me that, yes, I’m a writer, whether people believe that or not.

Although I suppose you could have called me a science-fiction fan, this certainly was not the alpha-omega of my reading. I think all writers are omnivorous in their reading. I know few writers that I respect that read only science fiction. As a result, when I decided to become a writer, I decided to become a writer, not just a science-fiction writer. But I’ve loved science fiction since I was a child, and I suppose most of the ideas were a combination of things I had read and heard about, although I have a smattering of knowledge in the scientific field. I had been an airline pilot, so I suppose that helped.

Not content to remain a policeman the rest of his life, Roddenberry began to contribute ideas to Dragnet producer and star Jack Webb, who became a fast friend as well as a rival for the affections of actress Majel Lee Hudec, later Majel Barrett Roddenberry.

FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)

Jack Webb, who was a great guy, dated Majel Barrett at the same time as Gene. Gene, who was friends with Webb since he had been a cop—and Webb played a cop—told me years later that Majel was on a date with Jack when Gene sent flowers to the table with a card.

YVONNE CRAIG (actress, “Whom Gods Destroy”)

Majel and I lived at The Studio Club because when I first came out to Hollywood I didn’t have a place to live. It was like the Y for show-business people. I hadn’t seen her for years, and when I saw her at a party for the twentieth anniversary of Star Trek, I said, “Majel Barrett, how are you?” And she said it was “Majel Roddenberry,” and I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that, I don’t keep up with Hollywood gossip.” I didn’t know that she was having an affair with him while he was still married to his wife. And she said, “It is not gossip!” And I thought, “God, what a crab she turned out to be.”

Hired as a consultant to Mr. District Attorney, Roddenberry sold his first script in 1954. Subsequently, he had scripts produced for such series as Goodyear Theatre, The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Four Star Playhouse, Highway Patrol, Dr. Kildare, and Naked City, among others.

GENE RODDENBERRY

I remember myself as an asthmatic child, having great difficulties at seven, eight, and nine years old, falling totally in love with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle and dreaming of being him and having his strength to leap into trees and throw mighty lions to the ground. It was a part of my growing up. It was a lovely dream. It carried me through many a hacking and coughing and sneezing attack.

Then there was a boy in my class who life had treated badly. He limped, he wheezed. I don’t know all the things that were wrong with him, but he was a charming, lovely, intelligent person. He, because of being unable to get on the athletic fields and do many of the things that others were able to do, had sort of gone into his own world of fantasy and science fiction. He had been collecting the wonderful old Amazing and Astounding magazines from those great old days, and he introduced me to science fiction. I started to read them and then discovered in our neighborhood, living above a garage, was an ex-con who had come into science fiction when he was in prison. He introduced me to John Carter and those wonderful Burroughs things. By the time I was twelve or thirteen I had been very much into the whole science-fiction field.

Resigning from the police force in 1956, Roddenberry continued to write for television and sold several pilots as well. Later, he provided a number of scripts to a man who would become a good friend, Sam Rolfe, for Have Gun—Will Travel, the brilliant and groundbreaking TV western starring Richard Boone. In that show several familiar Star Trek-ian tropes would be introduced, including a character named Robert April. Roddenberry also won a Writers Guild of America Award for his episode “Helen of Abajinian.” It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Have Gun—Will Travel in the formative, progressive thoughts of Gene Roddenberry.

CHRISTOPHER KNOPF

Sam Rolfe is really the one who gave him his big shot, on Have Gun—Will Travel. That’s what put him up and made people say “Whoa, this guy can do something.”

In the series, Boone plays Paladin, an erudite bon vivant in San Francisco who supports himself from bounty-hunter work, usually by Paladin discovering their plight through the daily newspaper with the help of his valet, Hey Boy, and sending them his iconic business card by mail or telegraph. Once on his way, the man in black is as skilled with a gun or in a brawl as he is at quoting Shakespeare or Dickens. More important, Have Gun was a morality play in which nothing was usually as it appeared (a rare western that depicted Native Americans sympathetically and not as outright villains), and Paladin often took the side of the underdog, even if it turned out they were not the ones paying his rather exorbitant fee. Paladin had the passion of Kirk, the intelligence of Spock, and the beating, bleeding heart of McCoy.

DOUG DREXLER (scenic artist, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

Paladin is Kirk, Spock, and McCoy fused into one. Gene split Paladin up to make those three guys. Look at Paladin, he’s got all the elements of Spock, he knows about everything. He’s a bon vivant, he’s a humanitarian, and he’s a man of action—he’s all that stuff.

Two of my all-time favorite Have Guns were Roddenberry episodes. One was called “The Great Mojave Chase.” Paladin is at the hotel and he’s sitting reading the newspaper with a friend of his who’s a cavalry colonel, and this guy is stinking drunk. He’s going on and on about how he just got off this awful assignment and he’s glad it’s over with. The army decided to try out camels instead of horses. Now, this is true. Roddenberry, I’m sure, looked at the books and said, “Ah, how can I get Paladin on a camel?” And while he’s going on and on about how bad they smell and they have a bad attitude and stuff, Paladin’s reading the newspaper and there’s the voice-over of him reading about the great Mojave chase. And he gets the idea right then and there to get into the race, but with a camel. He knows he can kick everybody’s butt. And just as he is making this realization, the cavalry colonel says, “Who the hell would want one of those stinking things anyway?” And he goes, “I don’t know. Could be your best friend.” And he goes out and he gets the camel. It is so unique and unusual. It has that gimmick that makes it so special.

And then there was another one that was Roddenberry exercising his love of men romancing women. It was called “Maggie O’Bannion.” He ends up getting robbed by some highwaymen. They take his clothes, they take his horse, they take everything. He comes across this house where there is a woman who has a farm. She’ll help him, but he has to do chores around the house like cook and clean. She falls in love with him because he knows how to make amazing dishes and stuff like that. She is very smart, though. She takes his gun hand and goes, “How did you get a callus like this on your thumb?” There’s this wonderful scene where he brings her food and she wants to have nothing to do with him. And he gets into a conversation about Shelley and Shakespeare and he picks up a book and quotes from it. It’s so wonderful.

Later on, there’s a scene that’s right out of “The Cage.” Paladin goes out riding on the horse and she is following him. He stops and waits for her. They argue and she goes to smack him and he grabs her hand and before you know it, they’re not making out like Kirk would with someone, but they basically sit down under the tree together and she’s leaning against him. It’s the sweetest moment. It’s so Star Trek.

At the very end of the show two women are saying good-bye to him and it’s just like it was almost “I’ll watch the stars.” And instead of beaming out, he rides off as the two girls are looking at him and she says, “I’ll never find help like that again.” And the other one goes, “Never find help like that again. Cook, clean, fight. I get chills just thinking about it.” It’s perfect Roddenberry.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Paladin was as close to being SF as you could get. Richard Boone was a marvelous person as actors go.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN (assistant to Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin)

I always suspected he had a thing about Armenian girls because when I met him he said, “When I was a cop and I was working in Hollywood, I got called out on a loud party call.” And so he and his partner show up and it’s a full-out kef. Big Armenian party; belly dancers, hookahs, the whole nine yards. These guys say, “Hey, come on in. Join us.” His partner says, “No.” Gene says, “I’m down.” Gene stayed and partied with them all night long. He went home and, according to Gene, he wrote the very first thing he’d ever written, “Helen of Abajinian,” which he later sold to Have Gun—Will Travel. I think he had a general like of little dark swarthy women. He would have loved the Kardashians.

GENE RODDENBERRY

I can remember at the beginning of television when many of us were working as screenwriters on even the bad shows that we started with, like Mr. District Attorney, we would always insert in our scripts that to be of a different color or a different creed does not make you bad. Lessons of tolerance and things like that. You had to do it very carefully, the network didn’t want any preaching in it, but I think these things had an effect. I don’t think these things could play every night in Mississippi and places like that around the country and not have an effect on the society and on the people growing up. I think TV has done some good. I just think it’s a damn shame that we’ve had to do it as saboteurs and not with the support of the studios and the networks.

JOSEPH STEFANO (creator/producer, The Outer Limits)

Dealing with the television network is like dealing with a two-headed monster. On one hand, they want high ratings, and on the other, there are people who want to safeguard the hearts and minds of viewers, and they come from the same source. So one half of the network is telling you to cut this or that out, and the other half tells you to give them more. I don’t think it’s as big a problem as it was, because they’ve determined a time when sex and violence should be on TV. We had very little sex in The Outer Limits, and very little violence except in the scary sense, not violence as in shooting eight people.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, The Outer Limits, Star Trek)

In doing The Outer Limits, what the network wanted was not necessarily an intelligent science fiction show. What they wanted was a science fiction show that would return a lot of numbers. Their theory was that to do that you had to have a monster in every show. If you’re an intelligent person and you like monsters, no, it wasn’t a problem keeping science fiction on the air. But if you’re an intelligent person and you don’t think it should be monsters to do an intelligent show, yes, it was difficult.

Somewhat of the same attitude was found in the early days of Star Trek when the network suggested they wanted to open with an episode called “The Man Trap,” because it had a monster. We felt that it wasn’t a very good show compared to some of the others we had already made. We lost the battle, they won the battle, and “Man Trap” was aired first.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Our plan all along was to present drama. Due to postproduction difficulties, our opening show, including a “monster,” was the only one available for air. Our entire concept is and has always been to demonstrate that science fiction is a much broader and more dramatic field of literature than is generally recognized by the public.

JERRY SOHL

There was a lack of true science fiction on television at the time. Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, and myself got together and formed what we called The Green Hand. We were going to knock television dead by doing really responsible science fiction. Certainly the medium could stand better material. We wanted script and quality control. We wanted to breathe something new into the shows, bring the medium up to date and in step with what was happening in SF at the time. We thought at least half of prime time should be devoted to SF and fantasy. We offered a number of scenarios and met with the different networks who said they loved the concepts.

In the end, though, they didn’t buy any of the series we offered. It was too bad for the networks, too bad for The Green Hand, and too bad for the viewing public. The corporation was dissolved and the four of us went our separate ways. But the ironic thing is that all of our series premises eventually became TV shows in one form or another.

In 1963, Roddenberry had his first pilot produced by MGM for NBC, the short-lived series The Lieutenant. Many faces familiar to Star Trek fans would appear in The Lieutenant, ranging from lead actor Gary Lockwood, playing Marine Corps Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice; to Majel Barrett, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and, most memorably, Leonard Nimoy. All of them had been cast by Joe D’Agosta, who would rejoin Roddenberry for Star Trek. The character of Robert April (designated as the first captain of the Enterprise in Roddenberry’s original concept description of the series) would also once again make an appearance in the final episode of the Star Trek animated series.

The Lieutenant was a Marine Corps drama set and shot at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, thanks to the cooperation of the military. Until they pulled their support late in the run, when Roddenberry butted heads with both the military and the network, insisting on producing an episode about racial prejudice in the military, “To Set It Right,” which featured a young Dennis Hopper.

MARC CUSHMAN (author, These Are the Voyages)

NBC didn’t want to air it; the Marines, who had been cooperating with the show, didn’t want them to air it; and the Pentagon even said, “If you air this episode, we’re not going to let you film down on our bases anymore. We’re not going to give you free tanks and trucks and soldiers and uniforms,” and all of the things that made The Lieutenant work. Yet he was determined to put it through; he went to the NAACP and forced them to put the heat on the network to air that episode. The week after that episode aired, NBC canceled The Lieutenant. So his relationship with NBC was bad at the get-go.

JOHN D. F. BLACK (executive story consultant/associate producer, Star Trek)

The network didn’t like him, nobody liked him, and the writers, in particular, didn’t like him because when he had done The Lieutenant he had rewritten everyone on that show just like he had done with us on Star Trek. GR would sit in his chair and look through a writer. I don’t know if you’ve ever had anyone look through you. It’s very disconcerting and a great many of the writers had that feeling.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Writers for the television audience do the same thing as the great sculptors and painters and composers do. When you do say to the world, “Hey, these are things as I see it! These are my comments. This is how I see the world,” you do this with utter selfishness—which is what an artist should always do. All writers should be selfish and say, “This is the way I see it,” and under the voice should say, “Screw you! If you want yours, you can do it, too.”

After The Lieutenant’s cancellation at the conclusion of its first and only season, Roddenberry’s studio on that series, MGM, turned down his pitch for a new series called Star Trek. However, his agents at Ashley-Famous quickly set it up at Desilu Studios, which was looking to produce more provocative television dramas after years of unprecedented success in comedy. Headed up by former CBS executive Oscar Katz, Desilu signed Roddenberry to a three-year development deal. After being rebuffed by CBS, which already had Lost in Space in development, Roddenberry and the Desilu team set up their pilot at NBC, and “The Cage” (originally entitled “The Menagerie,” which would become the title of the two-part first season episode that would reuse footage from this first pilot) was born.

OSCAR KATZ (vice-president of programs, Desilu)

If I had to pick the three people who had the most to do with getting Star Trek into reality, they would be Gene Roddenberry, myself, and an agent at Ashley named Alden Schwimmer. I had problems signing creative people, getting them to pitch projects. Schwimmer said, “Let’s get a couple of guys and make overall deals with them. Let’s not say, ‘I like this property, I don’t like this property.’ Let’s approach them and say, ‘We’d like you to come to Desilu and would like you to make Desilu your home. The way we’d like to do it, don’t tell us your properties. We’ll make a deal for three properties to be determined.’” Roddenberry is the guy he recommended.

I started working for Desilu in April of ’64 and began to develop programs. The first year I did three or four pilots, which means that I might have had fifteen or twenty projects in earlier stages of development, from which the four were selected. They had to be sold to a network in order to get financing. I think all four sailed, but it was hard to attract creative people. Desilu had a reputation for heavy overhead charges, etc. The second year, I did five pilots and of the five, three got sold, which is a pretty good batting average. Especially when you consider that two of them were Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Before Star Trek I had written pilots that were produced by other people, and none of them sold. I began to see that to create a program idea and write a script simply wasn’t enough. The story is not “told” until it’s on celluloid. Telling that final story involved sound, music, casting, costumes, sets, and all the things that a producer is responsible for. Therefore it became apparent to me that if you want the film to reflect accurately what you felt when you wrote the script, then you have to produce it, too. This is why television writers tend to become producers.

OSCAR KATZ

The studio [Desilu] made money two ways. One, by shows which they owned, such as I Love Lucy and The Untouchables. The second way was as a rental studio. For instance, Bing Crosby Productions shot all their stuff there, as did Danny Thomas and Sheldon Leonard. Desilu owned three lots, and the studio probably made money just by having real estate, which was going up in value while they were sitting there. But at the time, the number of shows they owned was declining. Desi Arnaz was a ballsy guy who at one time had seven or eight series on the air that Desilu owned. But now it had declined and they were down to practically Lucy’s show and fourteen or fifteen rentals.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Producing in television is like storytelling. The choice of the actor, picking the right costumes, getting the right flavor, the right pace—these are as much a part of storytelling as writing out that same description of a character in a novel. Although the director plays an important role in this, the director in television comes on a show to prepare for a week, shoots for a week, and then goes on to another show. Unlike the producer, he is neither there at the beginning of the script, nor rarely there for long after you end up with some twenty-five thousand feet of film, which now has to be cut and pasted into something unified. There are immense creative challenges and pleasure in taking all of these things and putting them together into something that works.

DOROTHY FONTANA (writer; Star Trek story editor)

One of the things about Star Trek is that so many of us came to it with no prior knowledge or experience with science fiction. Aside from some of the noted writers who did do scripts, most of us were virgin-fresh as far as science fiction went, and I believe it was one of the things that made Star Trek so good. We weren’t trying to do the hardware, we weren’t trying to do the science-fiction gimmicks, the flash. We were trying to do people stories.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Star Trek came about very slowly, as everyone who was with me at the time can testify. I was so tired of writing about what I considered nothing. I was tired of writing for shows where there was always a shoot-out in the last act and somebody was killed. I do not consider that the “ending” of anything. I would watch a whole show in those early days and, at the end, would feel like I had wasted time on nonsense. Star Trek was formulated to change that.

DOROTHY FONTANA

Most of the villains on Star Trek had personalities. They weren’t necessarily evil, they had goals of their own. Those goals were good for them. On many other shows, they were just villains and they were evil because they were evil. I think the audience responded to that, that you could feel that Kirk and Spock and the others had worthy opponents, people who thought, who had feelings and who had visions and goals in addition to our heroes. Now, we always knew our heroes would win, with the exception of a few red-shirted fellows who lost a lot of blood. But the villains were awfully unique and different persons.

GENE RODDENBERRY

At the time, I had said, “Gee, too much of science fiction is about gadgetry and not about people. And drama is people. If I ever get the chance to write science fiction, I’m going to try to make it scientifically accurate as possible and write them the way they wrote the old Playhouse 90s.” And it worked. I applied the rules of drama to science-fiction writing. There was a great deal of room for drama in science fiction in the time that Star Trek appeared. The stories are about people. And if they aren’t people, they must have some characteristic that is human. When you do a story, you imbue the characters with personality qualities with which you can identify.

CHRISTOPHER KNOPF

Sam Rolfe, who created Have Gun—Will Travel, Gene, and I and a few others had become very good friends in the early 1960s. One day Gene called me up and said, “I have a couple of tickets on first base for a Dodgers day game.” So we went out there, and during that game he told me he had an idea for a series about a blimp. A blimp that goes around the world in the late 1800s and stops in various exotic places, and that there would be a mixed crew. So that was the beginning of Star Trek. While we were talking, one of the Dodgers stole home and neither one of us saw it. Well, the next thing I knew, Gene was developing Star Trek, which was the same basic premise he had told me about, but he put it in the future.

RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)

Gene had been a big fan of 1961’s Master of the World. But less known is that five years earlier, in 1956, Gene had pitched an idea for a new series called Hawaii Passage, which followed the adventures of a cruise ship, her captain, and senior officers. What was different here was that Gene referred to the ship as one of the characters, unheard of at the time.

GENE RODDENBERRY

I had been a freelance writer for about a dozen years and was chafing increasingly at the commercial censorship on television, which was very strong in those days. You really couldn’t talk about anything you cared to talk about, and I decided I was going to leave TV unless I could find some way to write what I wanted to. I recalled that when Jonathan Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels, he wanted to write satire on his time and went to Lilliput in his story to do just that, and then he could talk about insane prime ministers and crooked kings and all of that. It was sort of this wonderful thing.

Children could read it as a fairy tale, an adventure, and as they got older they’d recognize it for what it really is. It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam, and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by, and it did. It apparently went right over the censors’ heads, but all the fourteen-year-olds in our audience knew exactly what we were talking about. The power you have is in a show like Star Trek, which is considered by many people to be a frothy little action-adventure; unimportant, unbelievable, and yet watched by a lot of people. You just slip ideas into it.

JONATHAN LARSEN (executive producer, MSNBC)

Even without introducing us to a single crew member, Star Trek tells us everything we need to know about its core politics. If you accept the premise that Democrats are big government and Republicans are small government, you should also acknowledge that the United Federation of Planets is about as big a government as you can imagine. Where in Star Trek is the free market? Ask Harry Mudd. Ask Cyrano Jones whether he considers himself overregulated in the Tribbles trade.

DOROTHY FONTANA

Gene asked me to read the first bible for Star Trek in 1964. This was the very first proposal; the series presentation. I read it and said, “I have only one question: who’s going to play Mr. Spock?” He pushed a picture of Leonard Nimoy across the table, and I, of course, knew Leonard because he had appeared in my first [script sale], The Tall Man. I thought the proposal had a lot of possibilities and was certainly exciting. Of course you could never tell if it would sell and if somebody else would believe in it, but I certainly did. The captain at the time was Robert April [later James Winter], who eventually became Christopher Pike and the ship was the Yorktown. Mr. Spock was pretty much like the Mr. Spock that appeared in [the first pilot] “The Cage,” and the doctor was Dr. Boyce. The other characters weren’t as settled. Nobody was doing anything like it on television.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Leonard Nimoy was the one actor I definitely had in mind—we had worked together several years previously when I was producing The Lieutenant. Leonard had been a guest star and I was struck at the time with his high Slavic cheekbones and interesting face, and I said to myself, “If I ever do this science fiction thing I want to do, he would make a great alien. And with those cheekbones some sort of pointed ear might go well.” And then I forgot entirely about it until I was laying out the Star Trek characters, and then to cast Mr. Spock I simply made a phone call to Leonard and he came in. That was it.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES (writer, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”)

In the beginning, Mr. Spock as we know him now didn’t exist. He was a red-tailed devil who didn’t eat. He absorbed energy through a red plate in his stomach. This is the way he was laid out in the original concept. I argued with Gene that it should be a humanized character, because I was adamant that it should be straight science fiction without fantasy.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Series are a process of refining ideas. I’d like to say that all the ideas that I get are bright and eternal and right for all time, but they’re not. You do evolve things.

With Spock, originally, I also thought that there were such few choices in doing someone who was of average height. You can do a little with the ears and fake eyes and so on, but actors tend to come in roughly the same size. So I was thinking of making Spock a “little person,” which would at least break some of those things, and make him stand out. Then, it also fit into the feelings I had that size should not be that important.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES

I was one of the first people to see the Star Trek series proposal. Gene Roddenberry and I had known each other from writing Have Gun—Will Travel. He was trying to start a science-fiction series and he knew that I had one of the largest science-fiction collections in the world. At first, I remember he borrowed a copy of Odd John by Olaf Stapledon. Then, to research the show, he asked if he could go through my magazines and get some ideas for the Enterprise. Gene went through all the covers, and that’s really how the Enterprise was born.

GENE RODDENBERRY

With the name Enterprise, I’d been an army bomber pilot in World War II. I’d been fascinated by the navy and particularly fascinated by the story of the Enterprise in World War II, which at Midway really turned the tide in the whole war in our favor. I’d always been proud of that ship and wanted to use the name.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES

Gene and I went through all of my magazines and photographed some of the covers. We discussed every element of what he was doing. I thought it was fascinating and fun, because he was going to try to do what I considered to be science fiction, which was not often done in Hollywood. Most so-called science-fiction movies were horror plays, and similar stuff that dates back to the silent days. Gene actually had an idea, a plan, a dream of making a genuine science-fiction series that would be very much like the better science-fiction magazines.

GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON (writer, “The Man Trap”)

One influence on the creation of Star Trek was Captain Future, which was a pulp magazine which ran for indeterminable damned issues, and was about this guy called Captain Future who was in this spaceship. [He] had this android named Otho, a robot named Grag, and a brain in a glass cage called Simon Wright, and Simon was the Mr. Spock character, and these other characters interchangeably played the other aspects of what was a four-man ship, which then became the great starship Enterprise. Basically any single Captain Future is Star Trek. Read one, read the other, and you can see that one is the direct linear descendant of the other, and merely rethought into a wide screen or video kind of format as opposed [to] a pulp format, but the act of creation is minimal.

STEVEN JAY RUBIN (author/journalist)

I don’t think you can talk about [1956’s] Forbidden Planet’s influence without also talking about the concept of the U.S. Navy in outer space, and I think that obviously Star Trek is a military picture, because even though we’re on a peaceful voyage, this is an armored ship with firepower. Forbidden Planet introduced a crew of spacemen who were essentially a military operation. These guys were armed and they had the ability to fight back, so they were an armed navy cruiser in the twenty-third century.

GENNIFER HUTCHISON (supervising producer, Better Call Saul)

That movie is also very dramatic and shouty, which is sort of the first season of the original. Especially the original pilot. I can see the influence in the idea of exploration and the danger of interfering with other cultures as well as this headstrong captain who knows what’s right—and is a total ladies’ man at the same time.

DAVID GERROLD (author; writer, “The Trouble with Tribbles”)

I have this hunch, which I will never be able to prove, that Gene Roddenberry was sitting and watching Forbidden Planet, and he said, “Let’s do that as a TV series.” Somebody probably said, “Let’s have a disc-shaped spaceship,” and he probably said, “No, that’s too obviously Forbidden Planet.” But if you look at the film, there’s a doctor, a captain, and so on, which I don’t have a problem with.

STEVEN JAY RUBIN

Forbidden Planet gives kind of a military hierarchy to the crew: there’s a captain, there’s a second-in-command, a medic, there are essentially the “blaster” men. The whole concept of a naval ship applied to outer space begins heavily with Forbidden Planet and, to me, is a direct influence on Star Trek. Then there was the use of the uniforms in the film. Of course uniforms for spacemen wasn’t that novel, but I think there was this kind of military aura among the Forbidden Planet crew that, of course, exists in Star Trek as well. Add to that Cruiser C-57D was part of the United Planets, which is similar to the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek.

MANNY COTO (executive producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)

What to me makes the original Star Trek so eye-opening was here is a world, a science-fiction world, as opposed to Lost in Space, which was made so you would actually believe it. Just the naval terminology makes you believe it’s real. It made it grounded by injecting that little simple thing, the naval hierarchy, and the names of the ships and everything, that touched on reality and made you accept it.

DOUG DREXLER

The other interesting thing is that [Have Gun—Will Travel’s] Sam Rolfe went and did The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and there are so many elements from The Man From U.N.C.L.E in Star Trek. For instance, Roddenberry was impressed by the U.N.C.L.E. Special, the pistol that goes together and makes a rifle. It was a huge hit on the show and the gun used to get its own fan mail. Gene hired the guy who built that gun to make the laser rifle from “The Cage.” The Kirk–Spock thing is also very much like Illya and Napoleon Solo. In the mid sixties, the idea of teaming up with a Russian was pretty out there.

JOSE TREVINO (director, Star Trek: Voyager)

When I first saw Star Trek, I thought it was like A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The similarities were so strong between the two because basically the Space Beagle is a ship traveling through space to find different races. Even the captain is very similar. It was a series of short stories put together in novel form told from different points of view. So the narrative voice keeps changing from one chapter to another. I don’t know if Gene Roddenberry ever acknowledged that or not.

GENE RODDENBERRY

I cannot remember a single time during the planning of Star Trek that I looked at another show and said, “I will borrow this.” On the other hand, of course, you have this marvelous thing called a brain that all of your life is storing away information, and sometimes you pull it out and say, “This is Heinlein, this is such and such.” Or even probably what happens more often is your brain, being the marvelous thing it is, will take bits and pieces from three or four things and then meld them together in something you need for a particular show. Most writers who are good writers, or at least care, very seldom borrow things specifically. Hacks do that. On the other hand, most good writers do write things where people can go to them and say, “Ah, this is a bit of this from this and this is a bit of that from that,” but they don’t write it that way.

THOMAS DOHERTY

At the core of the show is something profound, which is teamwork and adventure and tolerance, and that’s why it’s a World War II motif in the space age. It has all those World War II values that are projected into a different era. Even though Kirk and some of the others are privileged, it really is a team, and that was the great message of the World War II film, that you’re making a heroic contribution by doing your bit; the communications officer, the navigator—they celebrate these different roles, and Star Trek is more hierarchical than the air force, whereas in the air force it really is everybody’s equal.

GENE RODDENBERRY

The ship was paramilitary. There were no systems of punishment. No one was ever sent to the brig. A paramilitary system existed for efficiency, especially in times of emergency. It was a system that worked on respect. It was a well-defined system of command.

HERBERT F. SOLOW (executive in charge of production, Star Trek)

Gene was just a young, eager writer who had an idea, who needed help developing that idea and taking it to a network and getting it sold. The story about me refusing to leave [NBC’s Grant] Tinker’s office until he gave us a script commitment is absolutely correct. And then I had to work with Gene on the script, because there was no way that a relatively inexperienced pilot writer could sit down and write “The Cage,” which was the ninety-minute script that Gene wrote. He needed what I refer to as a “script producer,” which is the function that I fulfilled. I oversaw the production of the pilot, acting as executive producer, and Gene produced it. He was an eager, hardworking guy, who for whatever I did for him, he did likewise for me.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Desilu was the only studio that would take it. The reason Desilu took it was because they had gone five years without selling a pilot and they were desperate. They said, “We’ll even try Roddenberry’s crazy idea!” I think we would have had an easier time with it if we’d been at a bigger studio with more special-effects departments and so on, but it probably wouldn’t have ended up much different.

MARC CUSHMAN

Desilu came into existence because Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz owned I Love Lucy. It was the first time someone owned the rerun rights to a show. CBS wanted to shoot it live out of New York; they didn’t want to move to Los Angeles, so they said, “We’ll pay the difference to shoot it in L.A. on film.” Nobody had ever shot a sitcom on film before, and that’s why it still looks so good to this day. It looks like it could have been a movie; it’s clean whereas if you look at The Honeymooners, the faces are kind of stretched because it’s from kinescope, whereas I Love Lucy looks really good for its time period.

So they said they would pay the difference and what Desilu wanted was the rerun rights. CBS said okay; no one had ever rerun anything before. Seems like a no-brainer today, but back then no one had done it. Eventually CBS bought the rerun rights back from Lucy and Desi for a million dollars, which was a lot of money back then. Lucy and Desi take that money and buy RKO and turn it into Desilu Studios and everyone is coming to them and asking them to film their sitcoms the same way they did their own. The company grows, but then the marriage falls apart and Lucy ends up running the studio and by this point they don’t have many shows. Lucy says, “We need to get more shows on the air,” and Star Trek was the one she took on, because she thought it was different.

HERBERT F. SOLOW

I tend to be an optimist about everything. If someone tells us we have to build a bridge from here to Liverpool, I’ll say we can do it, and I’ll find out why we can’t and we’ll do our best to change it. For this little, tiny, dinky studio to go ahead and try to do this kind of show, if I had expressed any doubts or even consciously thought I had any doubts, I don’t think we would have ever done it. I had so many people at the studio, so many old-timers trying to talk me out of it. “You’re going to bankrupt us, you can’t do this. NBC doesn’t want us anyway, who cares about guys flying around in outer space?” The optical guy said it was impossible to do. Everyone said there wasn’t enough time or money, and from the physical production point of view, we can’t attract the talent needed. If you don’t listen to that and stubbornly go into it, that’s the only way we could have got it done.

MARC CUSHMAN

Lucy was trying to do things the way Desi taught her. It was his idea to do I Love Lucy in the way they did. He set up the formula, he created the template. But he wasn’t there anymore. He was drinking at that point; he was not leaving his house and was basically just burned out. So she is asking herself, “What would Desi do?” because she really loved and respected him. “Desi would get more shows on the air that we own, not just that we’re producing for other companies.” So that was her reasoning to do Star Trek—and she felt that this show could, if it caught on, rerun for years like I Love Lucy. And guess what? Those two shows—I Love Lucy and Star Trek—are two shows that have been rerunning ever since they originally aired. The problem was, her pockets weren’t deep enough.

OSCAR KATZ

When we brought the show to the networks, we told them there were four kinds of stories that would represent the Star Trek concept. First, you have to remember that the spaceship is five stories high, it has five hundred people on it. One of the girls, who’s a female yeoman in the crew, it turns out has signed on because she’s having trouble back at home in Boston with either her boyfriend or her parents. She’s getting away from them and she has an emotional relationship problem. Our two leads, unspecified, are the catalytic agents who help her face her problem and solve it. You never see her again, because she’s just one of the crew people. I said, “In that respect, what you have is Wagon Train.” Wagon Train had two leads, the wagon train traveled through the West, although it never got where it was going, and a guest star who was in wagon number twenty-three had an emotional problem which the two leads had to help solve.

The second kind of story is you have to remember that they’re out for five years at a clip. They get a message from Earth that there’s a planet on which there are Earth people doing mining, and there is claim jumping. They have to go to the planet and do a police action. In that respect, it’s Gunsmoke.

The third thing that happens is they go to a planet where everything is pretty much like Earth, and subsequently the people on this planet look and have developed very much like us, except that their Chicago, their Al Capone, is in the future; or their Civil War is about to break out. They’re either ahead of us or behind us. So it’s people that look like us that are going through what we went through or what we will go through.

The fourth type is where they go to a planet where the atmospheric conditions are different than on Earth. Everything is different. The people don’t look like us, they don’t behave like us. They’re fierce-looking animals or whatever.

When we went to NBC, we brought those four story types and they picked number four. They did so because it was the hardest to do. With the Desilu reputation, they wanted to make it as hard as possible, so we could prove ourselves. I tried to talk them out of it, because I knew it was going to be expensive and, even more, I felt that it might not be representative of the series. But they couldn’t be talked out of it. That’s how the first pilot, “The Cage,” came into being.

In “The Cage,” the starship Enterprise arrives at Talos IV to answer a distress signal. Captain Christopher Pike is taken prisoner by the telepathic Talosians, who want him to mate with another human named Vina so that they can repopulate their nearly lifeless world. To accomplish this goal, they use their abilities to plunge Pike from one fantasy into another, attempting to blur his hold on reality. Number One, Mr. Spock, and other crew members work together to free him and stop the Talosians’ seemingly sinister plans.

ROBERT BUTLER (director, “The Cage”)

Gene had finished writing “The Cage” and he asked me to read it, which I did. I remember thinking it was a terrific yarn, but that it was somewhat obscured because it was such a showcase script. “The Cage” showcased solid, good, and fascinating science-fiction disciplines, examples and events, that it was, I thought, a little obscure. The story was somewhat remote, and I discussed whether or not people would get it. I could tell at that point that Gene was a little consumed with it and that he couldn’t have heard any objections.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

Robert Butler was worried about the pacing of “The Cage,” which he thought moved slowly, so he added exclamation points to everything. I wasn’t aware of it, because I was so damned busy just getting stuff ready for him, but that’s very true—television is an exclamation point–type medium. You don’t have that enormous screen, so you have to go a little bit overboard, dramatically speaking, so that by the time it reaches your famished eyes on the television set, there’s something there to react to. That probably did happen on the first Star Trek pilot, and Bob was wise to recognize it.

ROBERT BUTLER

I thought Star Trek as a title was heavy. I tried to get Gene to change the title to Star Track. That seemed lighter and freer. It’s not my business to be able to do that, and yet I was trying to convince him. I believed in it and, you know, water off a duck’s back, which is okay.

GENE RODDENBERRY

When it came to the role of Captain Christopher Pike in “The Cage,” we considered a number of actors, including [Sea Hunt’s] Lloyd Bridges. I remember Lloyd was very much under consideration, except when I approached him with it, he said, “Gene, I like you, I’ve worked with you before in the past, but I’ve seen science fiction and I don’t want to be within a hundred miles of it.” I understood what he meant then, because science fiction was usually the monster of the week. I tried to convince him that I could do it differently, but at the time I wasn’t sure that I would treat it differently.

Among those being considered for the lead role at the time, then still named Captain Robert April, were Paul Mantee, Rod Taylor (The Time Machine), Robert Loggia, Sterling Hayden (The Killing), Warren Stevens (Forbidden Planet), Rhodes Reason, Leslie Nielsen, and Jack Lord (Dr. No), the latter of whom wanted too big a piece of the show in terms of profit participation to make him a viable candidate, but who would eventually go on to big success (and a lucrative financial cut) in Hawaii Five-O.

ROBERT BUTLER

Whether Jeff Hunter was a compromise candidate or whether everyone believed in him at the time, I don’t know. When the eleventh hour approaches, you finally have to take your money and bet it. That’s always the case. Generally he was an extremely pleasant, centered guy, and maybe decent and nice to a fault. A gentle guy. I did not know Jeff, except professionally from a distance, not personally at all. I thought he was a good, chiseled hero for that kind of part. I remember thinking, “God, he’s handsome,” and this was, sadly, the opinion of him at the time. When one is trying to bring reality into an unreal situation, that usually isn’t a wise thing to do, to hire a somewhat perfect-looking actor. You should find someone who seems to be more natural and more “real.” I don’t remember saying those things, but that continues to be my view.

Jeffrey Hunter, who was eventually cast as Captain Pike, described the pilot to the Los Angeles Citizen News at the time: “The idea for Star Trek is that we run into prehistoric worlds, contemporary societies, and civilizations far more developed than our own. It’s a great format, because writers have a free hand—they can have us land on a monster-infested planet, or deal in human relations involving the large number of people who live in this gigantic ship. It has a regular cast of a half dozen or so and an important guest star each week. The thing that intrigues me the most is that it is actually based on the RAND Corporation’s projection of things to come. Except for the fictional characters, it will be like getting a look into the future, and some of the predictions will surely come true in our lifetime. With all the weird surroundings of outer space, the basic underlying theme of the show is a philosophical approach to man’s relationship to woman. There are both sexes in the crew. In fact, the first officer is a woman.”

MAJEL BARRETT (actress, “Number One,” “Nurse Christine Chapel”)

Gene decided he would write something for me and he did. He wrote a part called Number One in “The Cage,” the lady who was the ship’s second-in-command. Well, they thought we were strange with this Star Trek and this space talk, so they sent us out to Culver Studios, which is an old, deserted place; there wasn’t another thing shooting on the soundstage.

LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)

When I was done with The Lieutenant, Gene called my agent, my agent called me, and they asked for a meeting. I went in to see Gene at what was then Desilu Studios and he told me that he was preparing a pilot for a science-fiction series to be called Star Trek, that he had in mind for me to play an alien character. As the talk continued, Gene showed me around the studio; he showed me the sets that were being developed and the wardrobe that had been designed, the prop department and so forth. I began to realize that he was selling me on the idea of being in this series, unusual for an actor.

I figured all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I might end up with a good job here. Gene told me that he was determined to have at least one extraterrestrial prominent on his starship. He’d like to have more but making human actors into other life-forms was too expensive for television in those days. Pointed ears, skin color, plus some changes in eyebrows and hair style were all he felt he could afford, but he was certain that his Mr. Spock idea, properly handled and properly acted, could establish that we were in the twenty-third century and that interplanetary travel was an established fact.

MAJEL BARRETT

You’ll notice when you watch “The Cage” that Leonard as Spock does smile, or has a little grin from time to time. My character was the one who was supposed to be very austere.

ROBERT BUTLER

Spock was an extremely attractive character right off the bat. And I would like to think that he was foreign but still not so foreign that he was inaccessible and uncomfortable for the audience. We could make the jump to his planet without it causing us any emotional discomfort. I think that’s where the success of his character lies. Leonard was always thought to be a very fine character actor, really.

GENE RODDENBERRY

One thing I wanted to do was make Spock half human and half Vulcan. I wanted to have an interesting personality. I wanted part of him to be at war with the other, the human part and the alien part. And half-breeds traditionally on dramas have always been highly interesting characters.

ROBERT BUTLER

John Hoyt was cast as the ship’s doctor, Philip Boyce, in “The Cage.” I’m not really proud of this, but as I was casting the doctor, I was against DeForest Kelley being cast, who was the person Gene Roddenberry wanted. As a younger guy I guess I felt that he was somewhat more of a heavy. At the time, I remember thinking that he was somewhat earthbound. Maybe I thought his youth at the time defied reality somewhat, whereas if we got a seasoned veteran in there, that might bring us a great spread of reality in your main people. I remember Gene stood up for DeForest to the end, but ultimately he backed me and went with John Hoyt.

MAJEL BARRETT

Susan Oliver was playing a green-skinned Orion slave girl, but I had to test her makeup because she was too expensive and I was under contract already; I was cheap, they had to pay me anyway. The makeup they put on me was green as green can be, but they kept on sending out the rushes and we would get it back for the next day, and there I was just as pink and rosy as could possibly be. This went on for three days until they finally called the lab and said, “What do we do? We’re trying to get it green.” And they said, “You want that? We’ve been color-correcting.”

GEORGE PAPPY (director, The Green Girl)

Susan [Oliver] wrote in her autobiography that “it was not easy to be green.” It took two hours in the morning to have the makeup applied, and she couldn’t even sit down or handle anything for fear of rubbing off the green or losing a fake fingernail. And she noted a definite change of demeanor in the men on the set when she came out as the green Orion slave girl—they either “stood back and stared” or else averted their eyes entirely. She wrote that “Gene had touched on something dark in man’s unconscious” with the green girl. Susan’s outfit, makeup, and very demeanor as the Orion girl was really pushing the boundaries of acceptability or propriety—and the men on the set reacted!

MAJEL BARRETT

While this makeup was on, we were really removed from everything, way out in Culver City, and suddenly we were through with one of the tests and somebody yelled, “Lunch!” We looked around and there was nothing there, no restaurant, no commissary, nothing. You had to walk out to the sidewalk, down the street, and over to Washington Boulevard to go into a restaurant. Needless to say, Leonard, who was made up as Spock, and I arm-and-armed it down the street. The cars honked, of course, the tooting, the stopping, the screeching, and so forth. You expect that, because even according to Hollywood standards, we looked strange. When we entered the restaurant, the waitress automatically did a double take, the cast went into hysterical fits of laughter.

GEORGE PAPPY

Gene Roddenberry first approached Susan at the Culver City Studios sometime in 1964 and really sold her on the role of Vina. She indicated that she’d known of him previously because he’d written scripts on other shows she’d been in, and he really drove home the fact that this was an opportunity to play five different women in one role, and on a very high-profile new TV pilot. It’s been indicated that Gene had a fairly long list of potential actresses to play the role, including Barbara Eden and Yvonne Craig, but it’s my suspicion that he was simply keeping this list to make the network and studio executives happy—he really wanted Susan, which makes perfect sense because it’s no exaggeration to say that she was the “go-to” female guest star in 1964 television; a huge name at the time. So who better to play Vina? Also, Gene’s list misrepresented Susan’s dancing abilities—she really was not a trained dancer at all and had to work with a choreographer [Peggy Romans] for a few weeks to learn the Orion slave-girl dance which, obviously, she did successfully.

Other actresses being considered in a casting memo from Gene Roddenberry on October 14, 1964, included Yvette Mimieux (The Time Machine), Jill St. John (Diamonds Are Forever), Ann-Margret, and Carol Lawrence. Of interest is the fact that he also had Lee Meriwether as a suggestion for Number One, eventually played by Majel Barrett, and Jill Ireland for the role of Ensign Colt. Dialogue from the script such as “Don’t let me hurt you. Take the whip … tame me” were deleted at the insistence of NBC’s Standards and Practices Department which also admonished Roddenberry that “the movement of dancers shall be kept within the bounds of decency.”

The late Susan Oliver, who was originally conceived as a red, not green, Orion slave girl, related to Starlog magazine that “there were many experiments in makeup. Fred Phillips, head of the makeup department, couldn’t find any green makeup that would stick to skin, so they tried many, many things on me until they finally got help from New York, where they found out what they wanted. One of the unique things about this job was I wasn’t really a dancer. They had a choreographer work with me a solid week, every day, before I began filming. There were different faces in this role, and the green girl was the most challenging.”

GEORGE PAPPY

For her, this was just another of her many, many guest star roles in what must have been a nameless sea of constant one- to two-week TV acting gigs during those years. I was blown away to find out what an accomplished pilot she was, that at one time she was engaged to Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Sandy Koufax, and yet sadly died alone at just fifty-eight years old due to cancer. I was very saddened to see that such an amazing life had been so forgotten or, perhaps a better term would be “completely unnoticed” since so many, including myself, never even knew about her in the first place.

She attended at least one Star Trek convention, in New York back in 1976. One of her fans, Hank Shiffman, said that she seemed somewhat amused and surprised by the burgeoning Star Trek fan phenomenon at the time, quite possibly her first concrete evidence that this two-week commitment in late 1964 was going to be her cultural legacy, and quite a memorable one at that.

For her part, Oliver told the assembled crowds at the Bi-Centennial-10 convention in New York in one of her rare public appearances, “I think Star Trek has become the success that it has because it is about hopes, dreams, magic, make-believe and love. It was a very happy experience. None of the cast, including myself, ever realized what history Star Trek would become.”

FELIX SILLA (actor, Talosian in “The Cage,”)

I came out to Hollywood in 1962 and I shot “The Cage” in 1964. I was brand-new in the business. As Talosians, we wore these really big heads with the veins sticking out. The problem was, every time we went to lunch—a friend of mine and I—we couldn’t even talk to each other because we couldn’t hear each other, because of the muffled head. So we had to do sign language, even though I didn’t really know how to do it. We were kind of playing around as we tried to understand each other. I did meet Gene Roddenberry; he used to come to the set. We never really had a big conversation; you don’t really want to bother these people. They’re very busy, they’ve got business to take care of. Fifty years ago I never thought that all these years later I would still be talking about it or people would care about it.

The opening establishing shot of “The Cage” is described in very visual detail by Roddenberry in his teleplay, which would make the starship Enterprise unique in the annals of science-fiction history. “Obviously not a primitive ‘rocket ship’ but rather a true space vessel, suggesting unique arrangements and exciting capabilities. As CAMERA ZOOMS IN we first see tiny lettering ‘NCC 1701—U.S.S. ENTERPRISE.’ Aiming for the surprise of the ship’s actual dimensions, the lettering looms larger and larger until it fills the screen. Then, surpassing even the previous illusion of size, we see a tiny opening above the huge letters and realize this is actually a large observation port. CAMERA CONTINUES IN, MATCH DISSOLVING THROUGH OBSERVATION PORT TO REVEAL the bridge, command station of the U.S.S. Enterprise. And as we see crewmen at the controls inside, the gigantic scale of the vessel is finally apparent.”

ROBERT BUTLER

When the first shot kind of goes into the flight deck and we see the crew sitting there in control, and then there’s that subsequent Doctor–Pike scene that’s so good. We’ve seen that scene thirty, sixty, a thousand times, the enervated hero needs a lift confessing to his mentor, whomever, and yet that beckon was in there. Those legs were playing, and in spite of the directorial superiority, the damned thing works! It’s okay.

Roddenberry’s amazing attention to detail even extended to prescient thoughts regarding the ship’s computer at a time when computers were punch card–operated behemoths that filled entire rooms. In a memo on July 24, 1964, to production designer Pato Guzman, Roddenberry suggested, “More and more I see the need for some sort of interesting electronic computing machine designed into the U.S.S. Enterprise, perhaps on the bridge itself. It will be an information device out of which April and the crew can quickly and interestingly extract information on the registry of other space vessels, space flight plans for other ships, information on individuals and planets and civilizations. This should not only speed up our storytelling but could be visually interesting.”

It’s a subject that would continue to fascinate Roddenberry. In May of 1967 he wrote, “We’ve lost some of the wonder of how a giant computer brain operates the Enterprise. Suggest we look for ways of getting back to it, getting more use out of it.”

Roddenberry’s interest in realistic technology led to him hiring his cousin, Harvey Lynn, who worked for the RAND company as an administrative physicist, as a consultant for which he was paid fifty dollars a week.

WALTER “MATT” JEFFRIES (production designer, Star Trek)

Since I was a member of the Aviation Writers Association, I had collected a huge amount of design material from NASA and the defense industry which was used as an example of designs to avoid. We pinned all that material up on the wall and said, “That we will not do.” And also everything we could find on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and said, “That we will not do.” Through a process of elimination we came to the final design of the Enterprise. Lynn’s suggestions included MASER for a microwave weapon, which eventually became phasers.

HOWARD A. ANDERSON (president, Howard A. Anderson Company)

Our work on Star Trek began a full year before the first pilot was made. Gene Roddenberry outlined the concept of the series for us and asked us, aided by the Star Trek art designer Walter “Matt” Jeffries, to design a model of the Enterprise. One of our most difficult assignments for the series was to create the impression that the Enterprise was racing through space at an incredible speed—faster than the speed of light. Other space shows have shown spacecraft more or less “drifting” through space. We wanted to avoid that cliché. The solution did not come easily or quickly. We experimented with dozens of ideas before we hit on an effective solution.

ROLLAND “BUD” BROOKS (supervising art director, Star Trek)

Matt [Jeffries] had worked for me as a set designer and Matt was an airplane nut. His interest in airplanes went beyond all bounds. I was sitting there thinking, “We gotta come up with a lot of stuff here” and I thought of Matt. I can’t think of anybody better to design the original flagship.

HOWARD A. ANDERSON

The spaceship as imagined was larger than a battleship, had eight separate levels or decks and carried a crew over four hundred. The first step was a series of art renderings by Jeffries. When Roddenberry approved his final design, we moved to the next step: translating the renderings into a four-inch scale model constructed of wood. Our next step was the construction of a three-foot model, which, again, was constructed of solid wood. The second model, of course, had far more detail than the first.

WALTER “MATT” JEFFRIES

The first time we had a review, I probably had a hundred different sketches. There were certain elements of some that we liked and certain elements of others that we liked, and we kinda tossed the rest aside and began to assemble things with the elements that had some appeal to us.

HOWARD A. ANDERSON

Once it had been approved by Roddenberry, we were ready to proceed with the large, detailed model. This was an elaborate fourteen-foot model which was made mostly of sheet plastic and required hundreds of man-hours of work. The diameter of the dome—or main body—of the ship was ten feet. The pods were hand-tooled from hardwood. The principal elements in our solution are a space sky and the use of an Oxberry optical printer to make the space sky. We painted black stars on a white background about two and a half feet by three feet, arriving at a suitable design. We then made a series of blackout mattes that we could use later with the sky in the optical printer.

DOUG DREXLER

Star Trek premiered a year after the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York. It was about the world of tomorrow and was kind of like a world’s fair. Look at all the technology we have today that we take for granted, that we first saw on Star Trek or the World’s Fair. I always used to tell [Star Trek graphic designer] Mike Okuda that ground zero for Star Trek design ethic was the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and I think he was always like, “Yeah, sure.” And then one night we went to dinner with Matt [Jeffries] and I brought up the World’s Fair and he said, “Oh yeah! Me and [my wife] Marianne went and we just had a ball and walked our legs off. And when I got home there was a message from a guy named Roddenberry.” And I kicked Mike under the table. You can see the World’s Fair influence on Star Trek. I mean, Starbase 11, really?

RENE ECHEVARRIA

There’s an extraordinary level of creativity. Who would have thought that’s what a spaceship looks like? It was so original and smart and unique. It just grabbed your attention. In my mind, it was almost like the same way you watched the moon launch, which was all grainy and hard to see.

DOUG DREXLER

Have you heard what Neil deGrasse Tyson said about the Enterprise during the Starship Smackdown at Comic-Con? “What did that spaceship look like at the time it came out compared with anything that had been imagined before, like the flying saucer from The Day the Earth Stood Still and its weaponry was the guy in the silver underwear? When you consider that, the Enterprise is the most astonishing, awesome, beautiful, seductive spaceship that has ever graced the screen.” The man speaks the truth. A lot of shows like The Twilight Zone used footage of an old V-2 rocket taking off and have it going backwards and disappearing behind a mountain range. I was mesmerized by the show. It just blew me away.

Equally pleased with Walter “Matt” Jeffries’s work was Gene Roddenberry, who expressed his admiration of Jeffries in an August 9, 1965, memo: “I have already told you personally of my appreciation for your hard work … More than that, I was enormously pleased by your unusual creativity and flexibility in meeting constantly changing problems in time, budget, and dramatic needs of the show.” It was also Roddenberry who suggested that turbo elevators on the ship “go up, down, and sideways.”

Upon completing work on “The Cage,” Roddenberry wrote to his science consultant and cousin, Harvey Lynn at RAND, while filming his next pilot, Police Story: “The Star Trek pilot looks good to me in the present rough cut and those others who have seen it seem elated. They feel it is an excellent job and much more commercial without any sacrifice of quality. And the hallway scenes plus the elevator ride up to the bridge did as I hoped, i.e. gives the feeling of a huge and complex vessel. With our eleven-foot model now improved to be lit from within, with greater detail added, etc., the two should combine to make the U.S.S. Enterprise a real thing. In short, we’re highly optimistic.” Lynn, who had suggested the diagnostic beds in sickbay, also pointed out that “the more information and data I acquire on interstellar flight, the more I keep coming back to the one basic point which you may wish to include in the basic script as well as in the vehicle design. This is the point that flights are likely to be of long duration (years), unless we find a new dimension or something.”

GENE RODDENBERRY

The ship’s transporters—which let the crew “beam” from place to place—really came out of a production need. I realized with this huge spaceship we’d come up with, which is practically the size of an aircraft carrier, that, number one, I would blow the whole budget of the show just in landing the thing on a planet. And second, it would take a long time to get into our stories, so the transporter idea was conceived so we could get our people down to the planet fast and easy, and get our story going by page two.

HOWARD A. ANDERSON

For the transporter effect, we added another element: a glitter effect in the dematerialization and rematerialization. To obtain the glitter effect, we used aluminum dust falling through a beam of high-intensity light. This was photographed on one of our stages at our Fairfax Avenue plant. In addition to making a matte of the figure to be transported, we also made an identically shaped matte of the falling particles of aluminum. Then, using the two mattes, we slowly dissolve the person, leaving only the glitter effect, then slowly dissolve the glitter effect to leave nothing but the empty chamber.

ROBERT BUTLER

Subsequently, after doing the pilot and executing it in the way we thought it should be done, I’d heard that NBC had said, “We believe this. We think there’s a show here, but we don’t understand it.” Apparently the network, at its level, was feeling exactly as I did.

In fact, a July 31, 1964, memo from the network to production prior to filming on the pilot expressed the following concerns that the pilot might already be too erudite for the average TV viewer. “Be certain there are enough explanations on the planet, the people, their ways and abilities so that even someone who is not a science-fiction aficionado can clearly understand and follow the story.” And second, “Can we do a little more to establish the spaceship in the beginning, possibly something which also helps establish the secondary characters a little better, too.”

GENE RODDENBERRY

The reason they turned it down was that it was too cerebral and there wasn’t enough action and adventure. “The Cage” didn’t end with a chase and a right cross to the jaw, the way all manly films were supposed to end. There were no female leads then—women in those days were just set dressing. So, another thing they felt was wrong with our film was that we had Majel as a female second-in-command of the vessel. It’s nice now, I’m sure, for the ladies to say, “Well, the men did it,” but in the test reports, the women in the audience were saying, “Who does she think she is?” They hated her. It is hard to believe that we have gone from a totally sexist society to where we are today—where all intelligent people certainly accept sexual equality. We’ve made progress.

MAJEL BARRETT

NBC wanted some changes after they saw “The Cage.” They felt that my position as Number One would have to be cut because no one would believe that a woman could hold the position of second-in-command.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Number One was originally the one with the cold, calculating, computerlike mind. Spock, at the start, was not quite the character he became. He was the science officer on the Enterprise, but he was sort of satanic. He even smiled and got mad. He had a catlike curiosity. When we had to eliminate a feminine Number One—I was told you could cast a woman in a secretary’s role or that of a housewife, but not in a position of command over men on even a twenty-third-century spaceship—I combined the two roles into one. Spock became the second-in-command, still the science officer but also the computerlike, logical mind never displaying emotion.

LEONARD NIMOY

Gene felt the format badly needed the alien Spock, even if the price was the acceptance of 1960s-style sexual inequality.

GENE RODDENBERRY

The idea of dropping Spock became a major issue. I felt that was the one fight I had to win, so I wouldn’t do the show unless we left him in. They said, “Fine, leave him in, but keep him in the background, will you?” And then when they put out the sales brochure when we eventually went to series, they carefully rounded Spock’s ears and made him look human so he wouldn’t scare off potential advertisers. Once the show had been on the air for six to eight weeks, of course, the audience reaction to Spock was very strong, and a new NBC vice president came to the West Coast and he called me in and said, “What’s the matter with you? You have this great character and you’re keeping him in the background?” And we pointed out the sales brochure and told him what NBC was going to do, and his only answer was, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

LEONARD NIMOY

A new pilot was written and Mr. Spock was in Number One’s place as second-in-command as well as having some of the woman’s computer-mind qualities. Vulcan unemotionalism and logic came into being.

GENE RODDENBERRY

When they initially wanted Spock dropped, it was one of those cases where you go home at night and pound your head against a wall and say, “How come I am the only one in the world that believes in it?” But I said I would not do a second pilot without Spock because I felt we had to have him for many reasons. I felt we couldn’t do a space show without at least one person on board who constantly reminded you that you were out in space and in a world of the future.

TRACY TORME (creative consultant, Star Trek: The Next Generation)

Gene told me how NBC wanted Spock off the original show, until he came up with the idea of a space cigarette that had green smoke and the network loved that. He hoped they would just forget about it, which they did, so he never used it, but he felt that had saved Spock from being taken off the show.

GENE RODDENBERRY

We had what they called a “childish concept”—an alien with pointy ears from another planet. People in those days were not talking about life-forms on other worlds. It was generally assumed by most sensible people that this is the place where life occurred and probably nowhere else. It would have been all right if this alien with pointy ears, this “silly creature,” had the biggest zap gun in existence, or the strength of a hundred men, that could be exciting. But his only difference from the others was he had an alien perspective on emotion and logic. And that didn’t make television executives jump up and yell “Yippee.”

MARGARET BONANNO (author, Star Trek: Burning Dreams)

The idea for Burning Dreams came from Simon & Schuster editor Marco Palmieri, who called me out of the blue and made the offer for me to write the definitive novel about Christopher Pike. I took that to mean a biography, from beginning to end, and that was exactly what Marco wanted. We knocked some ideas around and at some point—whether during that initial conversation or after I’d submitted a first-draft outline—he suggested an environmental theme. Really what he said was “Mosquito Coast,” and it clicked, so that was the frame to hang Pike’s childhood on, as well as what becomes of him once he returns to Talos IV [in the episode “The Menagerie”]. In between, I tried to pick moments in Pike’s career as a young officer that would show why he became, at the time, the youngest starship captain in the fleet, and weave in a personal life that shaped him as a human being.

GENE RODDENBERRY

The Talosian planet’s “ridiculous” premise of mind control annoyed a great many people, and the objection, of course, overlooks the fact that the most serious threat we face today in our world is mind control—such as not too long ago by Hitler, and what’s now exercised by fanatical religions all over the world and even here in our own country. Mind control is a dangerous subject for TV to discuss, because the yuppies may wake up someday and be discussing it and say, “Well, wait a minute, television may be the most powerful mind control force of all” and may begin taking a very close look at television. Most executives would like to avoid that possibility.

MARGARET BONANNO

Watching “The Cage” and “Menagerie” [the season one two-parter that incorporated footage from the former] over and over again, I realized how much of the character’s story was below the surface. I started digging. It seemed as if almost every line of dialogue could be a hook to something in his backstory. There was also something heady about taking a character that Gene Roddenberry had created more or less by the seat of his pants and probably never gave a second thought to once he had created Kirk, and whom other writers had used effectively in several novels and comics, but always in the action-adventure mold, and being able to really get inside his head and ask, “What makes this man what he is?” What was really interesting was what I saw as Pike’s drive for perfection, as well as him distancing himself from his crew, unlike Kirk, who goes way beyond the bounds of any real-life commanding officer, which is part of his charm, but also a bit of weakness in terms of credibility.

I had the same attitude toward Pike that I think a lot of original series fans have: interesting character, interesting performance by Jeffrey Hunter, but good or bad, he’s nothing like Kirk. There’s been a lot written about how Pike was an “intellectual,” as opposed to Kirk, who was a “man of action,” but it didn’t seem quite that simple. Yes, Pike is more apt to think things through than to charge headlong into a situation, but you don’t get to be a starship captain if you’re brooding like Hamlet all the time. There’s also a haunted quality to Pike, a suggestion of something in his past that the Talosians—like all good interrogators—would try to exploit in an attempt to control him initially.

OSCAR KATZ

When they rejected “The Cage,” I asked NBC, “Why are you turning it down?” and I was told, “We can’t sell it from this show, it’s too atypical.” I said, “But you guys picked this one, I gave you four choices.” NBC said, “I know we did and because of that, right now we’re going to give you an order for a second pilot next season.”

HERBERT F. SOLOW

Getting a second pilot was enormously rare. If a pilot didn’t work the first time, the networks said, “Oh, forget it; it’s over.” Television is unlike any other business in that way. But we got the second pilot.

STEPHEN KANDEL (writer, “Mudd’s Women”)

NBC’s attitude was to forget it and to abandon it. So, after much argument and discussion, Gene got the money to write three additional pilot scripts. “The Cage” had been a sample of what the series would be like and that frightened the network. They thought the audience wouldn’t understand it.

ROBERT BUTLER

Gene asked me to direct the second pilot, but I told him I had been there and done it already, and didn’t wish to repeat myself. Another reason I didn’t wish to do it is that science fiction, directorially, is a bit of a chore, because you have to share the reins with graphics, special visual effects, and all the other people who supply the tricks. It’s very much direction by committee, and I was a little impatient with that. I like working on pilots because you’re in on the formulation, and you’re handed fewer givens, so, as a result you direct more. The more control and freedom I have to direct, the more I enjoy it. I will say that we were all praying and doing our best on “The Cage.” The eventual phenomenon was bigger than I expected, not that I really measured it at the time. That wasn’t in the equation. You just roll up your sleeves and decide what the hell it is you’re trying to do. Then you jump in and never look back.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Jeffrey Hunter decided he did not want to come back and play Pike again. I thought highly of him and he would have made a grand captain, except his family convinced him that science fiction was really beneath him.

OSCAR KATZ

When you make a pilot deal with an actor, you can’t tie him up forever. You usually have a hold on him for the following season, so we had no hold on Jeffrey Hunter. And either he or his wife didn’t like “The Cage” and he didn’t want to do the second pilot. I already had the set built—I think it was the largest set in the history of Hollywood, that planet in “The Cage”—we had the interior of the spaceship, the miniature of the outside of the spaceship, etc. We had everything and all we had to do was write a new script. But we didn’t have a leading man.

Business affairs negotiated with Jeffrey Hunter, and we all thought it was the usual actor-network situation. They don’t want to do it for reason XYZ, and it’s a device for getting the price up. We kept increasing the price and he kept saying no. One day I said, “What’s with Jeffrey Hunter?” and I was told he just won’t do it at any price. Finally I said, “Tell Jeffrey Hunter to get lost. Tell him we’re going to do the pilot without him.” And that’s how William Shatner got into it, because Hunter wouldn’t do it.

RICHARD ARNOLD

Gene would not have agreed with me here, but I thought that Jeffrey Hunter seemed a little wooden in the role, as though he couldn’t quite get a grip on the character. I’ve read things since that would seem to disprove that, but he just wasn’t captain material, in my opinion. His turning the series down was probably the best thing for Star Trek. No one could have known how well Bill and Leonard would work together, nor how De Kelley would fit into the picture, but it all turned out, even if by chance, to be just what the show needed.

At the time, Jeffrey Hunter confessed to the Milwaukee Journal, “I was asked to do it, but had I accepted I would have been tied up much longer than I care to be. I have several things brewing now and they should be coming to a head. I love doing motion pictures and expect to be as busy as I want to be in them.”

Ironically, it was only a few years later that Hunter and his agents were lobbying hard for him to play Mike Brady, the paterfamilias of the Brady clan in Paramount’s The Brady Bunch, a part that was instead offered to Gene Hackman (which he turned down), eventually going to Robert Reed, making him a television icon in a role that the actor absolutely loathed.

GENE RODDENBERRY

At that time we were putting Star Trek on, TV was full of antiheroes, and I had a feeling that the public likes heroes. People with goals in mind, people with honesty and dedication, so I decided to go with the straight heroic roles, and it paid off. My model for Kirk was Horatio Hornblower from the C. S. Forester sea story that I always enjoyed. We had a great deal of trouble casting it, many actors turned us down, and later on, of course, wished they hadn’t. But science fiction at that time had a very bad name and many serious actors had made up their minds because what they had seen on TV was so bad they didn’t want their name associated with it. Shatner was available, he needed a show, was open-minded about science fiction, and a marvelous choice because he did great things for our show. I was happy to get him. I’d seen some work he did, and I thought he was an excellent choice, no question of it at all.

JAMES GOLDSTONE (director, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”)

I think Shatner was the choice partly of the network, partly of Desilu, and partly of Gene. I don’t know whether I had approval within contract, though I was a creative partner as the director. I thought he could play it marvelously. I liked him very much and thought he was a marvelous balance for the Spock character.

WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James Tiberius Kirk”)

They showed me the first pilot and said, “Would you like to play the part? Here are some of the story lines that we plan to go with; you can see the kind of production we have in mind. Would you care to play it?” And I thought it was an interesting gamble for myself as an actor to take, because I’ve always been fascinated by science fiction. I liked the production; I like the people involved with the production, and so I decided to do it.

But it was under these peculiar circumstances of having a first pilot made that I did it. I then talked to Gene Roddenberry about the objectives we hoped to achieve, and one of those objectives was serious drama as well as science fiction. His reputation and ability, which I knew firsthand, was such that I did not think he would do Lost in Space. And I was too expensive an actor, with what special or particular abilities I have, to warrant being put in something that somebody else could walk through. So I felt confident that Star Trek would keep those serious objectives for the most part, and it did.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

Gene was very happy that he was able to get Bill Shatner, who was highly thought of in the industry. I had worked with Bill on Outer Limits and he had a good reputation in the television and entertainment industries even at that time, well before the second pilot of Star Trek. He was someone to be reckoned with, and we certainly understood that he was a more accomplished actor than Jeff Hunter was, and he gave us more dimension.

Shatner was hired for $10,000 an episode, as opposed to Jeffrey Hunter who was getting $5,000 for the original pilot. Alongside Shatner was Leonard Nimoy at $2,500 an episode, Paul Fix as Dr. Piper for $1,250, with James Doohan’s Scotty getting $750, and George Takei, a meager $375. Legendary stuntman Hal Needham doubled for Gary Lockwood, who was getting $5,000 for his efforts.

SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)

When you go back and you watch “The Cage,” Pike and Kirk were so different. Let’s say you’re watching “The Cage” and you’re part of a focus group. Which captain would you follow? You watch the scene where your captain, your hero, is telling his doctor, “I don’t want to be the captain. I want to raise a horse or be a slave trader, whatever. I don’t want to be the captain anymore.” And then you see this captain joking around, charming, and you know he looks like he likes being the captain. I’d follow Kirk in a second.

Pike was a stiff captain. He didn’t want to be the captain. He was more like Picard than Kirk. He had more of Picard’s traits than Kirk’s. They lucked out with Shatner. Shatner’s performance as Kirk is the reason I became a Trek fan.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

The network seemed to feel that Jeff Hunter was rather wooden. He was a nice person, everyone liked him, but he didn’t run the gamut of emotions that Bill Shatner could do. Shatner was classically trained. He had enormous technical abilities to do different things and he gave the captain a terrific personality. He embodied what Gene had in mind, which was the flawed hero. Or the hero who considers himself to be flawed. Captain Horatio Hornblower. That was who he was modeled on.

SCOTT MANTZ

Jeffrey Hunter was a dashing guy. He looked a little bit like Elvis. He had a clean, WASPy, Christian look to him. He was a commanding figure but he wasn’t a passionate one.

IRA STEVEN BEHR (executive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

Jeffrey Hunter in “The Cage” was a terrific captain. I remember thinking that Bill was a little too actory as the captain. And I kind of liked the more stoic Jeffrey Hunter. The other thing I will say about Hunter, which was different than Shatner, was I had seen Hunter in The Searchers [with John Wayne], I’d seen him in Disney’s The Great Locomotive Chase with him chasing after Fess Parker, and he was in The Longest Day. So he was kind of like “the movie star” and he had a command to him.

MARGARET BONNANO

Like a lot of people, I asked myself how Star Trek would have been different if the series had focused on Pike rather than Kirk. Not an original thought, but as a less … precipitous leader than Kirk, Pike would have interacted differently with his crew, particularly Spock, and we might have ended with fewer fistfights and more clever dialogue—more or less what we got in the films starring the original series cast. Not necessarily a bad thing, but something, given sixties TV, that might have killed the show in fewer than three seasons.

GEORGE PAPPY

There’s no doubt that the casting of Kirk, the reimagining of Nimoy’s role, and all the other new actors made the crucial difference and guaranteed that Star Trek would become the everlasting phenomenon it is today. Honestly, can you see people watching decade after decade of Star Trek reruns featuring the cast of “The Cage?” I can’t.

LEONARD NIMOY

Bill Shatner’s broader acting style created a new chemistry between the captain and Spock, and now it was quite different from that of the first pilot.

DAVID GERROLD

All of the movies and all of the episodes hold together because Shatner holds it together. Spock is only good when he has someone to play off of. The scenes where Spock doesn’t have Shatner to play off of are not interesting. If you look at Spock with his mom or dad, it’s very ponderous. But Spock working with Kirk has the magic and it plays very well, and people give all of the credit to Nimoy, not to Shatner.

IRA STEVEN BEHR

It’s funny because I actually remember my sister saying to me one night, “Watch Spock. Watch how much he does with so little.” She actually said, “The actor on the show is Spock.” She was my older sister, so everything she said was like the voice of God.

LEONARD NIMOY

During the series we had a failure—I experienced it as a failure—in an episode called “The Galileo Seven.” The Spock character had been so successful that somebody said, “Let’s do a show where Spock takes command of a vessel.” We had this shuttlecraft mission where Spock was in charge. I had a tough time with it. I really appreciated the loss of the Kirk character for me to play against, to comment on. The Bill Shatner Kirk performance was the energetic, driving performance, and Spock could kind of slipstream along and make comments and offer advice, give another point of view. Put into the position of being the driving force, the central character, was very tough for me, and I perceived it as a failure.

SCOTT MANTZ

Starting with the first regular episode they shot, “The Corbomite Maneuver,” so much changed; the uniforms, Spock’s makeup, some of the set designs. All except for one thing. Act one, scene one, the second pilot, Shatner had Kirk down. He was Kirk from the beginning. You watch the first half of the first season you can tell that Nimoy is trying to find Spock. He is kind of a wiseass and loves women. And at the end of “The Enemy Within,” where he is saying, “Oh, the imposter had some very interesting qualities. Huh-huh?” Would mid–first season Spock do that? I don’t think so. But Kirk was Kirk from that first scene in the briefing room in the rec room playing three-dimensional chess. Until he went off the rails a little bit in the third season because he was trying to make up for the shitty scripts.

JOHN D. F. BLACK

There was such a natural balance between William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. There was no way to tell, really, whether they got along or not, because they had an easy relationship off camera, and on camera there was an absolute difference that was writable. You had the advantage in any scene between Shatner and Nimoy where Shatner could take one side and be correct, and Nimoy could take the purely logical side of the situation and also be correct. The scene carried out the conflict which could spark anything along the lines of what was upcoming. I don’t mean to sound like a professor of a screenplay class discussing a script’s structure, but that’s the reality. We know that conflict is the heart of any scene, and the more conflict you have between the characters, the better it is. And it was just built in.

GEORGE TAKEI (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”)

The first time I talked to Gene about Star Trek, it was for the second pilot and it was an exhilarating prospect, because almost every other opportunity was either inconsequential or defamatory, and here was something that was not only a positive opportunity but also a breakthrough for a Japanese-American actor. I was really excited about it, but then reality sets in, the whole struggle for survival of the series itself, and then the struggle for your character to find his spot in the limelight. The initial entry into the project and what happened during the course of its life were two different stories.

JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)

Two weeks before they were actually going to shoot the second Star Trek pilot, my agent sent me to read for the part of a Scotland Yard inspector for a show called Burke’s Law with Gene Barry. I did three British accents for them, and they smiled and said, “That’s very good, Jimmy, but we think you look a little too much like Gene Barry and it would look like nepotism.” I said, “Well, I’m much better looking than he is,” but I said it smilingly and walked out the door. Ten days later, the director, Jim Goldstone, called me and said, “Jimmy, would you come in and do some of your accents for these Star Trek people?” I had no idea who they were, but I did that on a Saturday morning. They handed me a piece of paper—there was no part there for an engineer, it was just some lines, but every three lines or so I changed my accent and ended up doing eight or nine accents for that reading. At the end, Gene Roddenberry said, “Which one do you like?” I said, “To me, if you want an engineer, he’d better be a Scotsman,” because those were the only engineers I had read anything about—all the ships they had built and so forth. Gene said, “Well, we rather like that, too.”

GENE RODDENBERRY

I had never worked with him, but director James Goldstone brought James Doohan in and asked him if he could do a Scottish accent. He did like an hour and a half of accents and had us falling on the floor laughing, so there was never any doubt that he had the job.

JAMES DOOHAN

When I did that pilot, to me it was just another job. You have to understand that I had already done 120 stage plays, 4,000 radio shows, 450 live television shows, and I was what you called a working actor. My instructor, Sanford Meisner, who I give all the credit in the world to, plus my ability to work hard, told me, “Jimmy, in the long run, it’s still going to take you twenty years to be an actor,” and after nineteen years, I started to feel what he was talking about, because it got to the point where I started looking at myself saying, “Wow, there isn’t anything I can’t do.” Besides that, there was my ability to do different accents and different sounds; my vocal cords can do just about anything I ask them to do. To me, it’s fascinating, and my friend Leslie Nielsen said to me while we were coming up, “You lucky bastard, you’re just a natural!” And of course I wasn’t before. I maybe had the talent hidden somewhere, but it took hard work to get it out.

JAMES GOLDSTONE

My vague memory is that there had been several problems with “The Cage.” One of them was that it cost so much money, and the other was that it took so long to shoot. NBC was skeptical that a series could be manufactured, so to speak, on a weekly basis. One of the requisites put on the second pilot was to shoot it in, as I recall, eight days, which would then prove to them that a weekly series could be done in six or seven days. We needed the extra day because we were doing the prototype. The other requisite, I would guess, it being television, is that NBC very much wanted something that could be “commercial” against the police shows and all the other action things that were then on television. The concept of our show was not so much a pilot as it was an example of how we could go on a weekly level.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES

The first pilot Gene did for NBC, “The Cage,” was more fantasy than science fiction. NBC was apparently unhappy with it, so they told him they would commission a second pilot, and they wanted a story. Gene asked me to do it and I did, guessing it would be more of a challenge to me because it’s easy to open up your mouth and criticize somebody else’s concept. Then if somebody says, “Okay, let’s see you do it your way,” you’ve got to prove that you know what you’re talking about.

Gene and I were trying to avoid the space-cadet cliché. We were both very concerned about it being an adult show.

JAMES GOLDSTONE

Gene’s whole concept was of doing the sort of classic storytelling form in which you can tell the same kind of stories that were told in the Elizabethan theater, told in the nineteenth century, that were told in classic novels. The convention with westerns is if you take it out of today and put it in a western setting, people accept these conventions. We would create conventions which people would accept, and you could therefore tell dramatic stories which people would accept because it was not on the streets they lived on, but were projected forward a little. On the same level, the characters and the dramatic conflicts, albeit space fiction, were really human conflicts.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES

One thing, as later episodes proved, was the problem which never should have existed: the bug-eyed monsters. We both discouraged the idea, believing that we should keep things as realistic as possible. If a person was different physically, then explain the reason for that difference. In a particular atmosphere he might have a larger lung. If it were a planet with an extraordinarily bright sun, he would have different eyes. We were actually trying to project reality against an unfamiliar background. In other words, we would deal with reality according to the environmental background we encountered.

The three scripts under consideration for the second pilot were Stephen Kandel’s “Mudd’s Women,” Gene Roddenberry’s “The Omega Glory,” and Samuel Peeples “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” In discussions between NBC and Desilu’s Herb Solow, it was decided to go with the last, because, as Solow noted in a June 10, 1965, memo, as a finished film it would “better complement the first pilot, and would also show the two different ranges in which the series can go.”

In Peeples’s script, the Enterprise comes across a charred metallic “black box” from a long-lost space vessel. Captain James R. Kirk (the middle initial eventually changed to T once the pilot went to series) has the distress beacon beamed aboard. As the starship approaches an energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy, Gary Mitchell and psychologist Elizabeth Dehner are injured while entering the barrier and slowly transformed into godlike beings with powerful esper abilities. Kirk is left with the unenviable choice of killing his best friend or allowing him to destroy the Enterprise.

JAMES GOLDSTONE

Three scripts were written for the second pilot. A combination of NBC, Gene, perhaps other executives at Desilu, and I read all three scripts, discussed them in length, decided on what became “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and then embarked on a great deal of polishing and rewriting on a conceptual and physical level, so that we could make it in eight days. This one just seemed to have the potential to establish those characters on a human level. The only gimmick is the mutation forward, the silvering of Gary Mitchell’s eyes as he becomes more godlike, and it works because it’s simple, as opposed to the growing of horns or something. Ours was a human science-fiction concept, perhaps cerebral, certainly emotional.

It was a theme that Gene Roddenberry embraced immediately in a memo he sent to writer Samuel Peeples: “This story line seems to have the potential of being direct and excitingly dramatic, a straight-line growth of powerful peril and danger to our lead and his ship, leading to head-to-head conflict between the captain and the guest star, and yet containing meaningful themes and points of view which should lift it far out of the ordinary. A tale of absolute power corrupting absolutely, even played as melodrama action, certainly offers splendid opportunities.”

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES

We were intrigued with the corruption-of-power theme manifesting over the ordinary individual. That was the basic premise, and we had to put in extrapolations of known scientific principles. At that time, the radiation belt had been discovered around the Earth and my premise was that galaxies themselves might be separated by this type of barrier.

GARY LOCKWOOD (actor, “Gary Mitchell”)

To tell you the truth, I thought it was a little bizarre and I thought it was kind of embarrassing and I hoped it worked out, because everybody was excited about it. It was a very hard job to do. I’d rehearse and get everything all ready, but I couldn’t see the actors because of the contact lenses that changed my eyes.

They didn’t blind me for the first few days, but after a few days the eyes swelled up and got sore. Then to have them on for just two or three minutes was agonizing. Scenes were rehearsed without them. The other thing about it, people always thought I was kind of egotistical, so when I got to play that part, a lot of people laughed and said, “He’s finally found his niche.” That’s been a joke among my friends.

JAMES GOLDSTONE

My proposal was that from the time Gary suffers the first realization—once he begins to give in to it, to enjoy it even—he moves from his human status toward the status of a god within all and any of the criteria we place on such deities in our Christian-Judaic culture. Specifically, I proposed that he become oracular in the sense of Moses or even Cotton Mather.

I proposed he do this in his stature, his way of using his hands and arms and eyes, silver or normal, his attitude as it applies to the script, aside from specific stage directions, perhaps physical actions that pertain to the dialogue. I didn’t mean to suggest that it become so stylized as to become a symbol rather than a human being. I suggested it happen on a more symbolic level. This could be done by starting him more on the flip, swinging level of articulation so that we wouldn’t even notice at one moment that this drops, but it does, on its way to becoming more formal, then more laden with import, more self-declarative, and, finally, downright miraculous.

GARY LOCKWOOD

That character was tough to reach, because there’s no prototype character to look at. So you create a mental image and try to fill that slot. All I tried to do was downplay the mechanics and not be too dramatic. It’s the same thing I did in 2001. Try to play the part very quietly and very realistically, and later on people don’t think you’re pushing. That’s the way to sustain it. There was a natural progression to the character. In order to do that, you have to think it out. Let me say one thing to you that I can say about American actors I don’t like and who don’t like me. You have to apply a certain amount of intelligence to your role first, and then you can apply the emotion after you’ve made an intellectual decision. With Gary Mitchell, the idea was trying to go to the character and not make the character comfortable to me. I’m not Gary Mitchell.

SALLY KELLERMAN (actress, “Dr. Elizabeth Dehner”)

I knew nothing about science fiction. I didn’t read any of the famous science-fiction writers like Ray Bradbury, and I’d been guest starring on every show in the sixties. I’d just finished Kraft Theatre with Gary Lockwood, and the one time we were shooting our scene and he didn’t know his lines, I thought, “Oh, what an amateur.” Next thing I know, I’m cast in the pilot of Star Trek with Gary Lockwood, The Amateur. When I saw him stage all the fight scenes, I got over that amateur stuff! I was swooning offstage. But, anyway, we had no idea what it was and that awful outfit, with the pants that didn’t quite fit.

I was always playing the hard-bitten drunk or beaten up, and now I’m in this outfit and wondering what the heck it was all about. Of course, Bill Shatner has a great sense of humor, so it was a lot of fun around him. Leonard Nimoy had directed me in a play before this, for which I came late probably more than once to rehearsal. The last time I came there he said, “Please step outside,” and so we went outside and he said, “Why is it that all you talented people are always the ones who come late?” Of course, I didn’t hear anything about being late, I just heard the word talented.

Last year someone came up to me and said, “You are the reason the pilot sold,” and I said, “I always felt that was true. Of course it was me!”

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

As an assistant director in television, you know how long it takes to get a setup shot and the seat of your pants tells you how long it will take. The amount of work you have left to do will just fill up the amount of time you have left to do it in, so we worked as hard as we could on the second pilot, which James Goldstone directed, and on the last day of production, when we were a day over, we did two days’ work in one day.

That’s the day that [Lucille Ball] came on the stage, because we were supposed to have an end-of-picture party and we were still shooting, so in between setups she helped Herb Solow and me sweep out the stage. I think she just did that for effect, because she wanted to get the party started, but we worked hard, and we wouldn’t have done the second pilot in that short a time if Jimmy Goldstone and I hadn’t worked so well together before on The Outer Limits.

JAMES GOLDSTONE

I was very happy with it. From a director’s point of view—or this director’s point of view—you have certain targets and certain problems which have to be overcome in any picture, whether it’s a twenty-million-dollar feature or a television show. A director measures his success in two ways. Obviously, like everybody else, you measure it by whether or not it’s a critical and commercial success, but you also measure it in terms of overcoming obstacles. The obstacles were temporal, budgetary, but they were also conceptual. I was very proud of the work we were able to do. When I say “we,” I don’t mean it in a generous sense. I mean that it was a very collaborative effort, as are all pilots. We, being Gene, especially; Bobby Justman, and the main actors who later became the main stars. Everything was planned in detail, and Bobby and I knew if we didn’t move from one set to another or one scene to another by a certain hour, we were in trouble.

ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

We had a method in our madness. I always knew what setups Jimmy had planned to cover the work we had to do that day, and he’d give me the list of setups and I’d arranged them so that no time would be lost. So if we’d point the camera in one direction and lit in that direction for the most part, we would shoot everything that needed to be shot that day in that direction before we turned around and shot the opposite angle.

On day one of principal photography, Gene Roddenberry received a telegram from Robert Butler, director of the original pilot. “Good luck today. Once again I hope all goes well and it sells.” Oscar Katz and Herb Solow were more to the point in their telegram that arrived at Stage 15 of the Desilu Studios in Culver City that day: “Do us a favor and make it good this time.”

GEORGE TAKEI

That first day of production, and that was at the Desilu Culver studios, not the Desilu Studios in Hollywood, has the same kind of memory of the first day of the first film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Shooting the pilot was exciting, participatory, and a little scary, because so much hope was vested in it.

And as an actor, you have the responsibility for creating this new world, and make it seem as though it’s a normal part of that character’s existence. It was really quite different from, say, getting cast in a detective show where all of the settings are familiar and understood and you’re able to move right into the character. In this case, it’s an entire environment that you have to create, so it was both exciting and a little scary.

I knew when I got cast as Sulu that it was a breakthrough opportunity for me. I never thought he would become a role model, but it was a pioneering effort in that until then any regular series roles for an Asian or an Asian-American character were either servants, buffoons, or villains, so it was a breakthrough.

GARY LOCKWOOD

I guess “Where No Man Has Gone Before” is effective because it sold the series. You’ve got to keep in mind that the Star Trek pilot was made in those days on a very tight budget. I think there was a big fight between the network and Roddenberry over making the second pilot, so there was a lot of pressure on him. They came up with this idea of two characters getting ESP, which I liked. I think they made up for not having an opportunity do a lot of effects by just creating a couple of interesting characters, and that helped sell the show. It was a good creative decision on the part of Roddenberry.

GENE RODDENBERRY

When you get into SF, you’re lucky if 75 percent of your pilot is believable, because you’re creating, in space science fiction, everything new. It was very helpful to be able to do one pilot, take a look at it, and then do a second. The second pilot was really better in many ways because we had a chance to look at the costume work, how the gadgets worked, and all that. And the second pilot seemed to have great concepts; humans turning into gods. But they were nice, safe gods, gods who go, “Zap! You’re punished!” Kind of like the guys you see on those Sunday morning shows. The biggest factor in selling the second pilot was that it ended up in a hell of a fistfight with the villain suffering a painful death. Then, once we got Star Trek on the air, we began infiltrating a few of our ideas, the ideas the fans have all celebrated.

LUKAS KENDALL (editor, Film Score Monthly)

Gene Roddenberry told his composers not to give him “beeps and boops” space music à la Forbidden Planet. He wanted the scoring to emphasize the timeless human drama, not the strange future environment. This was a conceptual leap in sci-fi music—to let the setting take care of itself and score the storytelling. His producers, particularly Bob Justman, did a great job picking the right composers, who were genuinely inspired by what they saw. A lot of 1960s television music is drab and repetitive even some by the same composers—but Star Trek’s music stands out for its quality.

ALEXANDER COURAGE (composer, Star Trek)

Wilbur Hatch was doing music for the original Lucy radio show which was called My Favorite Husband. When that became I Love Lucy, he continued to do it. When Lucille Ball bought Desilu, he came in as head of music. So when Star Trek came on the scene, Wilbur suggested me to Roddenberry and I turned out a theme. Roddenberry liked it and that was it. He said, “I don’t want any space music. I want adventure music.”

LUKAS KENDALL

The Star Trek theme is in two parts. The opening “space, the final frontier” fanfare sums up the entire franchise in just eight notes—the questing nobility of the Star Trek mission. It is recognized worldwide, an extraordinary achievement. Only a handful of TV themes reach that level of awareness—maybe Twilight Zone, Mission: Impossible, The Simpsons. The second part, the wordless female vocal over the jazzy groove, is kind of like what the title Peanuts is for Charlie Brown. Today, everybody knows what Peanuts is, but it has nothing to do with the strip. (It was foisted upon Charles Schulz, who hated it, by the syndicator.) That to me is the second half of the Star Trek theme: it’s kind of lame and doesn’t work, yet it’s forever Star Trek.

On March 6, 1966, Gene Roddenberry dispatched a Western Union telegram to star Bill Shatner at the Hotel Richmond in Madrid, Spain. It read simply “Dear Bill. Good news. Official pickup today. Our Five Year Mission. Best Regards, Gene Roddenberry.”