by Edward Gross
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 m
ore 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.”