by Edward Gross
LOST IN SPACE
“LET ME DO SOMETHING!”
When looking back at the history of Star Trek from today’s perspective, it’s hard to believe that the cast and crew ever enjoyed anything less than immense prosperity due to their long-term association with the franchise. The reality, however, was dramatically different. When the series ended in 1969, over the next few years there was a genuine financial struggle for most of them. The show was booming in syndication, but due to the way residuals were structured at the time, Screen Actors Guild payments were made for only the first five reruns of each episode. So while Star Trek was providing a financial windfall to Paramount, which had scooped up the show as part of their acquisition of Desilu, few others benefited.
Prior to Star Trek, William Shatner had carved an impressive niche for himself as an actor, having scored quite successfully on stage, screen, and television. But his most difficult time came immediately after his three-year-stint as Captain Kirk, following a divorce which left him in a precarious financial position. First up was his ubiquitous work as a commercial spokesman for Promise margarine, a less than auspicious career segue from the command seat of a starship. He followed with episodic television guest appearances, a starring role in the short-lived ABC series Barbary Coast, and a number of forgettable low-budget films, including The Devil’s Rain and Roger Corman’s Big Bad Mama.
“There was a time, before Star Trek, when I wouldn’t accept a role that I didn’t think worthwhile enough to play. Then, because things are so cyclical in show business, I needed to take those roles,” Shatner explained in his biography, Shatner: Where No Man. “There even came a point when I thought, ‘I don’t know whether I’m ever going to break through, to get those roles that I think I should be playing.’ That was just before Star Trek. Star Trek hit. And after Star Trek I had the opportunity to play a few of those things that I thought should be coming my way. But I was in a financial bind and had to accept a lot of things that I wouldn’t have done in an earlier day.”
Leonard Nimoy, who would have seemingly been the most typecast from Star Trek, actually went on to the most successful career of all the cast members during the ten-year period between cancellation and revival. He immediately shifted from Spock to a costarring role in the hit series Mission: Impossible, on which he played makeup genius Paris. He quit the series after two seasons to pursue other roles. “Quitting the show was kind of a dangerous thing to do, but I felt confident,” he admitted. “But ’71 was the first year out of six years of TV series and it turned out to be a perfect year with a mix of all the things I wanted to do.” Among them was the film Catlow and the lead in the national touring company of Fiddler on the Roof. Eventually his career led him to tackle another “logical” character, that of Sherlock Holmes, onstage.
In addition, he began directing episodic television, narrated the syndicated series In Search Of … (having been hired after the first choice, Rod Serling, passed away), and received acclaim for his one-man show, Vincent, based on the life of Vincent van Gogh, as well as for the books of poetry he wrote and his starring Broadway role in Equus.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
One of the reasons I was rather excited when I first made the move from Trek to Mission: Impossible was because Mission was the opposite of a radio drama [like Star Trek]. You had to watch the show. I was intrigued by that. It wasn’t about dialogue, it was about images. But I very quickly became bored and I left after two years because there was no substance. I had a four-year contract. At the end of two years I felt I had made as much of a contribution as I could to the series, and it was getting redundant for me. I asked the studio to let me out of my contract and they agreed.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON (writer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
I used to play golf with Bruce Geller, and one day we’re on our way to the golf course on a Saturday morning and he tells me that he just sold this series, Mission: Impossible. But he said, “I want to tell you I’m not going to hire you, because your forte is character and this isn’t a show about character.”
CHRISTOPHER KNOPF (friend of Gene Roddenberry)
Bruce Geller and Gene had offices one floor on top of each other. And they each were very competitive, and they made their offices almost like a throne room—big long offices that you sort of had to march up to the throne to meet either one of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if they compared notes on how to do an office. Both of them also loved the ladies. Gene was very much a devotee of a free flow of passion. I think that there was no woman he would say no to. I remember Bruce’s wife told him, “Look, it’s either them or me,” and Bruce backed off. But then he got killed. He was flying with a guy from ABC, who was a former navy pilot, going to Santa Barbara, and they didn’t realize they were on the east side of a mountain. They thought they were on the west side and they flew right into it.
DeForest Kelley, who had the most successful pre-Star Trek career, conversely had the shortest and most inauspicious post-Trek career of any of the cast: he did a feature film called Night of the Lepus, about giant killer bunnies, and retired, with the exception of future Trek projects.
DeFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy”)
The stuff offered to me after the series ended was crap, and I thought, “I’ve done so much crap I don’t need to do that again.” Fortunately I learned a long time ago in this business that when you make some money, you had better put a little bit of it aside. I’m not talking about living in Bel Air; I’m talking about living a nice normal life.
James Doohan earned a living for himself throughout the seventies via the Star Trek convention circuit, as well as roles in such films as Pretty Maids All in a Row (written and produced by Roddenberry) and as a regular on the CBS Saturday-morning series Jason of Star Command, which he left after one season. “They really didn’t give me anything to do so I said good-bye,” he explained of his decision.
George Takei certainly diversified following Star Trek, not only appearing on a variety of television series but writing a pair of science-fiction–swashbuckler novels and throwing his hat into the Los Angeles political arena. Nichelle Nichols parlayed her Star Trek success as Lieutenant Uhura into a singing career and a position with NASA and its astronaut recruitment drive. “When I began,” she pointed out, “NASA had fifteen hundred applications. Six months later, they had eight thousand. I like to think some of those were encouraged by me.” Walter Koenig, like his costars, did his fair share of episodic television work following his two seasons as Chekov, and even costarred in the Gene Roddenberry television pilot The Questor Tapes. Additionally, he served as an acting teacher, directed plays, wrote novels, and penned the scripts for such prime-time television fare as Family and What Really Happened to the Class of ’65? It’s unlikely that the ensemble could have known in 1969 that their lives would continue to be drawn together over the next several decades.
Faring the worst of everyone in those days was Gene Roddenberry. He wrote and produced the disastrous feature Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), which more or less sealed his fate as a television producer-writer. Despite being lauded by the likes of Quentin Tarantino, this absurd sexploitation film stars Rock Hudson as a promiscuous high-school gym teacher who sleeps with many of his female students and may possibly be a serial murderer.
IRA STEVE BEHR (executive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
Pretty Maids All in a Row was one hoot of a movie. That’s an amazing film on a lot of levels. That’s a movie that’s almost beyond good and evil.
Shortly thereafter, he created a pair of pilots—Genesis II (1973) and Planet Earth (1974)—which postulated a future following a devastating global war in which twentieth-century scientist Dylan Hunt (Alex Cord in the former, John Saxon in the latter) works with a scientific organization, PAX, to rebuild society. “It’s important to know that I wasn’t saying that Star Trek’s future, which would occur several hundred years after Genesis II, never happened,” Roddenb
erry explained. “I’m saying that humanity has always progressed by three steps forward and two steps back. The entire history of our civilization has been one society crumbling and a slightly better one, usually, being built on top of it. And on mankind’s bumpy way to Star Trek’s era, we passed through this time, too.” Although both came close to being picked up for series, the networks ultimately passed on them and, in the case of Genesis II, CBS ordered the short-lived Planet of the Apes as a TV series instead.
The best of Roddenberry’s seventies pilots was 1974’s The Questor Tapes, written with Gene L. Coon shortly before his death, in which Roddenberry conceived of an alien race that had spent eons helping mankind’s progress by placing humanlike androids within society to help guide the species. This television pilot presented Dr. Jerry Robinson (Mike Farrell), who ultimately teams up with an android named Questor (Robert Foxworth), who is on a quest to meet with his creator, Professor Vaslovic, and discover the truth about himself as well as his ultimate destiny. While NBC commissioned additional scripts, they ultimately decided to pass on taking the show to series, after the familiar creative differences with Roddenberry arose. Unfortunately, creative differences of another kind arose between Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy after the Star Trek creator implied to Nimoy that he would star in the pilot. When he reneged on that promise, it contributed to the strained relationship that would typify their mutual dealings for the rest of their lives.
RICHARD COLLA (director, The Questor Tapes)
It was a wonderful experience for me. We were kind of reinterpreting Spock and Kirk, because that’s really what it was, the emotional side of man and the intellectual side of man, and they come into conversation with each other. So what you really have is a character talking to himself, and that’s delightful. I thought Questor’s going off to find his creator was meant to be strong. It was meant to be moving. I’m sorry it never got made into a series.
Roddenberry’s last attempt at creating a new TV series not connected to Star Trek was Spectre (1977), in which renowned criminologist and occult investigator William Sebastian (Robert Culp) and his old friend Dr. Hamilton (Gig Young) find themselves in England for a case involving the black arts. There was absolutely no talk of this pilot going to series.
Unfortunately, it would seem that Roddenberry’s well-documented battles with—and disparaging remarks regarding—the networks during Star Trek’s run and in the years immediately following it, when appearing at conventions or earning a living by doing college lectures, didn’t help in securing him any new long-term work.
DAVID GERROLD (story editor, Land of the Lost)
During the early seventies NBC was the villain, because they had canceled Star Trek, and Gene made sure that everybody knew that NBC was the villain. Gene was this man who wanted to change the world for the better, and NBC wouldn’t let him.
JOEL ENGEL (author, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek)
Gene Roddenberry was, first and foremost, an ambitious salesman whose primary talent, I believe, was verbal. I admire that he flew during the war and afterward. That he made a good impression on [LAPD] Chief Parker [who he was a speechwriter for], I know from my last book, L.A. ’56—which takes place during Parker’s reign and makes him a fleshed-out secondary character—shouldn’t be considered a small feat. He knew how to tell Parker everything he wanted to hear. And when he saw an opening to get into TV, where a lot of hustlers were doing well, he took it. Good for him.
He obviously had talent; those without it couldn’t sell more than one script, and he sold a lot of them. And when he did, and saw guys like Sam Rolfe hitting it big, he wanted a piece of that, too. Good for him there, as well. It wasn’t easy getting a series on the air, which he did with The Lieutenant. Then, good for him for trying to get Star Trek on the air. Terrific idea: Wagon Train to the stars. The problem was that he basically couldn’t write well enough to carry it off. Lucky for him, and I do mean lucky, NBC broke protocol and allowed Desilu to shoot a second pilot, at which point Roddenberry knew enough not to argue that a bona fide writer needed to be brought in. Thus began his career as a producer rather than a writer-producer.
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
I started reading my father’s speeches and then I actually read a couple books about him, the good and the bad. Joel Engel did a book that kind of trashed my father and it was really good to get that perspective, too, since I knew my father as a real man. I knew his flaws, his weak points, but I knew he was a man. No matter how great someone is, they are flawed and fucked up in their own ways. So, it didn’t bother me at all. I accept that of anyone. It bothers me now because I hear it so much.
JON POVILL (associate producer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Gene’s issue was that he was more of a producer than he was a writer. His skill set was better suited to that, mostly because he was desperate to prove that he was a writer. He was not secure at all about it. He would fall back on “I was the creator of Star Trek, I know what I’m doing,” but like any writer, 80 percent of his ideas were crap. Eighty percent of my ideas are crap. But 20 percent of his ideas were really, really good. The issue was that he was sufficiently insecure to where he fought as hard for the 80 percent as he did the 20 percent. It wasn’t a matter of quality control, it was a matter of control. It was a matter of exerting his will. It was a matter of being the one. Like George Bush: “I’ve got to be the decider.” He needed to be in control of the script, of the idea, of the concept, to the greatest degree possible.
Gene’s personality was all “It’s got to be my way, because I’m right and I have to prove that I’m right.” To some extent Star Trek proved that he was right, except to the extent that there were other people involved that may or may have had important roles. I heard that Gene Coon was essentially responsible for keeping the show on an even keel and maintaining the quality of it. If you look at the episodes Gene wrote, you start to get the picture of somebody who was very up and down. You can look at those scripts, and there are bits and pieces of scripts that are exactly what I said—20 percent of a script like “The Omega Glory” is good, but 80 percent isn’t. He couldn’t let go of anything, because it all had to be good because he had to prove it was good.
JOEL ENGEL
It’s always worth remembering that the Star Trek universe we know today, with the Klingons and Romulans and Spock’s family, etc., were introduced one element at a time by freelancers and Gene Coon and the great Dorothy Fontana. When the series went off the air, Gene had to reinvent himself again, which he tried to do by buying the talents of other writers—for instance, Jon Povill.
LARRY BRODY (cocreator, The New Mike Hammer)
I was a very successful working writer-producer in the seventies. I had a lot on my plate, so my first reaction to the growing Star Trek phenomenon was “Good for Gene.” I felt invested in Roddenberry on a personal level, because whenever he had a deal somewhere, he would call me and talk to me about what the new shows were going to be and ask me to write for them. I felt flattered as hell by the attention, which was, I think, one of the big secrets of his success. He had so much energy and was so excited about whatever he was doing that the feeling transferred right into everyone around him.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)
He was the “Great Bird,” a name Bob Justman had given him during the production of the original series. His generosity, sense of humor, and brilliance were all there for anyone to see. Yes, Gene was human, but I found him to be a better man to me than my own father had been, and he showed me more personal friendship than I could ever have asked for.
ED NAHA (producer, Inside Star Trek LP)
Gene had been treated very shabbily by Paramount all during the initial run of Trek, especially during the final season, and his TV movies were never viewed with a lot of enthusiasm by the “suits.” Yet Gene kept plugging away. He had views he wanted to spread, dreams he wanted to share, and so he played the corporate game i
n order to keep those ideas in the spotlight.
JON POVILL
Shortly after I came out of school, I tried to get in to see Roddenberry about Genesis II and Questor, which he had going and were in their early stages. I had done a script for Ron Shusett. The first thing I did when I got out of school was write a script for him. It never got made, but that became a sample script. I gave it to Gene’s assistant and it took about a year to get the fucking script read. When he finally did read it, it was because he had given it to D. C. Fontana. She liked it and recommended that he read it, which he did. By that time Genesis II was already gone, and Questor was still going, so I got to pitch episodes to Questor. I’d pitched to Larry Alexander, who was the story editor. He liked it and we were just getting ready to give it to the producer, Michael Rhodes, when Questor died.
LARRY BRODY
Gene was also a big user of the “we” word whenever he and I were together, including me in all his thoughts and plans and making me feel a part of whatever team he was putting together. During this time I was often invited to hang out with Gene and listen to his stories of how he was surviving—barely, he said—now that Star Trek was off the air. He’d kept the rights to all the paraphernalia used on the show, and a large part of his income, he told me, came from selling scripts, communicator pins, phasers, etc. All genuine and used in the production. It seemed to me that he was selling a lot more of that stuff than ever could’ve been made for the actual series, but I never said anything about that to him.
JON POVILL
I got a call some weeks later from Gene, who mentioned that he was moving off the Warner Bros. lot and back into his house, and he was going to do a book. He asked if I wanted to do research for him at some minimal, god-awful salary and I said, “Absolutely.”
It was the period of time that I was closest to Gene in that year from about July of ’74 to about May of ’75. May of ’75 is when he moved back into his Paramount offices to do the new Star Trek movie. It was a great period of time. The most personal. He was not doing well financially, but he was a real person. He did not see himself as the Great Bird of the Galaxy yet. He was running Lincoln, and he and Majel were making money from Lincoln Enterprises, and he was making money from Star Trek conventions, but there was less bullshit and more honesty. And despite the age difference and the obvious career difference, we were relating in many ways as equals. One of the more uncomfortable aspects of that is that he and Majel would fight constantly; they would drink and they would fight. The two of them would pull me into their arguments to try and mediate those. I was having dinner there practically every night. I would play with Rod.