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

by Edward Gross

  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 fascinat
ing, 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.

&n
bsp; 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.