The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, Volume 1

by Edward Gross

  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 th
at 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.”