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

by Edward Gross

  HAROLD LIVINGSTON

  I had an understanding with young Mr. Katzenberg and Mr. Wise and Gene that I would do it as long as Gene didn’t write. I didn’t want Gene to put pen to paper. You want me to write it? I will write it. I’ll do all the rewriting you want, but I will do it. I had a certain style I wanted to do the script in and I had directions I wanted the characters to explore.

  The first thing that happened was that I rewrote X number of pages and they were to be pouched to Eisner and Katzenberg in Paris. Eisner called up and said, “What kind of shit is this?” I said, “What are you talking about?” “This script you sent me?” “It’s a good script. I didn’t send it without Bob’s approval.” So I went to Bob Wise, and we find out that Gene’s secretary got the script, put it aside, and sent Gene’s script to Eisner. That’s the kind of shit that went on. Gene would be very remorseful and contrite: “I was just trying to help.” I said, “Listen, Gene, I’m not going to do this if you’re going to keep this up.” Well, I quit three times. I resigned. I’m talking about ten thousand dollars a week.

  WALTER KOENIG

  We didn’t have a finished screenplay and know exactly where we were going with it. And then halfway through the picture the clause on Bill and Leonard’s contracts kicked in that they had dialogue or story approval if the picture went beyond so many weeks. So those meetings in the morning between Gene Roddenberry, Livingston and Jon Povill and Jeffrey Katzenberg and Bill and Leonard and Bob Wise were seven people deciding what they were going to shoot that day, and many with vested interests that it would be shot a certain way.

  JON POVILL

  Probably Nimoy and Shatner had been given certain latitude in respect to their own situation. Nimoy had a certain amount of control of what and how Spock was going to be portrayed. There were a lot of different controls out there and, not surprisingly, that resulted in a lot of dissension. It was not that anybody was trying to steer the project wrong. Yes, Shatner’s always trying to do the best thing for Shatner, but by and large everybody was trying to do the best that they could for the project. It’s just that it was being pulled in a lot of different directions.

  HAROLD LIVINGSTON

  As we began shooting, we would get to a point where I would send in pages and then Gene would send in different pages and Wise would get two different versions. Sometimes I would write it and put my initials on them and Gene would put “G.R., 4PM” under mine, as though that’s what should count and my pages should be ignored. This was the way the picture was made. For the third time I quit, I said, “Screw it, nothing is worth this.” Gene has a brilliant story mind for this kind of thing, but he’s a bad writer. He’s clumsy.

  JON POVILL

  The dueling drafts! Harold at four, Gene at five. And I had pages in there as well. I swear, my blood pressure went up forty points, essentially because part of my job was trying to find common ground between Gene and Harold, and try to mediate their drafts. And that was what killed my relationship with Roddenberry, because I was supporting Harold far more than I was supporting him. That was very definite, and because of it I became a traitor in Gene’s eyes, and our relationship collapsed. It was still cordial, but it was never actually confronted because Gene never really confronted anything. He was passive-aggressive. But it was never the same after that. Even if I had sided with Harold a total of 50 percent of the time, that still would not have been enough for Gene. Gene would have needed, like, 90 to 95 percent, and that just wasn’t going to happen. I was doing the best I could for what was best for the project. That’s what I always do and it’s bitten me in my ass my entire career. To some extent, the people that Gene considered “interlopers” were trying to save him from himself, and to some extent they weren’t. There were things that Harold wanted to throw out—I can’t remember what—that were good or probably would have been good had they made it in.

  Bob was looking to make the project as good as it could be. He was out for what was best for the project. Bob was more than happy to support the 20 percent of Gene’s ideas that were good. More than happy to. He actually would look for things. He would say to me, “Is there a way to make this work?” That was something he couldn’t say to Harold, because Harold would say, “No! It’s just fucking shit.” So I would be tasked with finding a way to make something Gene did acceptable to Harold. Bob was not in competition with Gene at all. Gene was in competition with everybody. Look, the movie had enough problems as it was. Gene’s ideas would have made it worse.

  HAROLD LIVINGSTON

  I get a call from Jeff Katzenberg to come to the office at seven p.m. He has to go out for a phone call. His secretary comes in and says, “Can I get you a drink?” It’s seven p.m. and I always have a drink, so I said, “Yeah, I’ll have a shot of gin.” She walks out and locks the door. I’m locked in! Twenty minutes later Katzenberg comes back, and I’m whacked out of my head, and I make a deal with him to come back for more money, and I also got a fifty-thousand-dollar script commitment out of him.

  They started to shoot the film and Gene just kept rewriting. Driving everybody nuts. Somehow we finished the movie. Gene got the last word anyway.

  GENE RODDENBERRY

  During the same period I was novelizing the script into a Star Trek novel. So I’ve had sort of the unusual experience of watching us cut scenes and finding myself, later on, sitting at the typewriter and writing the scene, and having the opportunity to see and study what it is there that you get with a camera that you’ve got to do with words in a novel and what are the differences. Now, do the two compare? For me, it was like a college course in cinematography and writing.

  HAROLD LIVINGSTON

  What he did was he had made a deal with Pocket Books to novelize my screenplay for four hundred grand. And boy, did he enjoy telling me that!

  One addition that Roddenberry undeniably made to the screenplay was the notion that to ultimately stop the returning, marauding space probe—identifying itself as V’ger, and revealed to be the ancient NASA probe Voyager 6—it releases all of its accumulated data. In later drafts, the data release would be into Commander Will Decker before he and Ilia—who has been killed and replaced by a robot probe in her image—transcend this dimension. Livingston’s original version had the probe merely recognizing humanity’s positive qualities and departing the galaxy.

  GENE RODDENBERRY

  The script started off a bit simpler, because it had been written as a two-hour television program. It got more and more complex as it got to be a bigger and bigger movie, and we started adding things on to make use of the wide-screen, big-vision, like the wing-walk, where they go out on top of the Enterprise saucer section. I put that in. I put the climax of the show inside V’ger, where the original script did not.

  HAROLD LIVINGSTON

  Back on Phase II, Robert Goodwin theorized that I just pissed away the ending, because I was so disgusted with the situation. I think the truth is that I couldn’t come up with an ending. I just couldn’t do it. The problem was that we had an antagonist so omnipotent that to defeat it, or even communicate with it, or have any kind of relationship with it, made the concept of the story false. How the hell do we deal with this? On what level? Everything pretty much worked in the story until we got to the ending. We tried all kinds of approaches, including aesthetic, theological, and philosophical. We didn’t know what to do with the ending.

  JON POVILL

  We knew we had to have a big special-effects ending. The problem of what was going to happen at the end and why it was going to happen was one that plagued the script from the very start. Then Gene came up with the idea of the machine dumping its data into Decker, with a light show of all the information it had accumulated. We were going to get all this amazing, incomprehensible stuff that V’ger had accumulated in its travels across the universe, and of course, nobody could come up with these images, so that didn’t work. It was pretty much my contribution to say that the reason for what was happening was that this thing needed to go o
n to the next plane of existence. That it was transcending dimensions and going on to the next. It then became logical that the machine would need that human element to combine with. It was the only thing that could have made sense.

  Harold was not enthusiastic about this idea, but he accepted it because there was no choice in the matter as we were writing as we shot. To the “whole capture the creator, join the creator thing,” he said, “what the fuck are you talking about?” But the idea was in advance of the singularity that now people are talking about for real in terms of the time when it will be possible to capture human consciousness in a computer, keeping a person’s thoughts, memories, and ideas and going forward forever and expanding upon it. In the computer setting, the mind can think in infinite dimensions. This is now a possibility, and I was there, sort of anticipating it, which is something I’m kind of proud of.

  GENE RODDENBERRY

  Right down to the last day of filming, I would get strange looks from people who would say, “That fellow over there is the one who thinks a machine really can be alive.” As if I invented that thought, rather than it being something that very serious scientists have talked about and speculated about for years. Paramount was so convinced that the things I was talking about were such total nonsense that it was worth some money to hire an expert to back up their belief that it was nonsense. That expert was Isaac Asimov, and of course he didn’t back up their beliefs. The funny thing is, I’ve been an Asimov fan for more years than I care to think about, and I learned many of my ideas from him.

  JON POVILL

  Throughout we were trying to figure out what was it that made Star Trek special. How to identify the key elements of Star Trek that made it unique, and how do we translate those for the big screen? A lot of it is the intimacy of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy relationship, and the intimacy of that on the small screen. But you don’t get that on the big screen. Are people in love with space? Are they in love with the concepts that the best Star Trek episodes dealt with, the philosophies, the ideals that it embraced? What made Star Trek Star Trek? There was great dissension about how to bring that to the screen. Everybody had different ideas. I felt that we had to do something philosophically special, and Gene was in accord with that. That was one area that we agreed upon. Harold not so much. Harold didn’t give a shit about that. Harold gave a shit about the action and the drama. He wasn’t crazy about the time that had to be spent reintroducing everybody, because from his perspective it slowed things down.

  ROBERT WISE

  After I had made the film, I learned that the story line was similar to two of the old episodes, “The Changeling” and “The Doomsday Machine.” I was in New York after the opening of the movie in Washington, DC, and my wife was with a friend in Bloomingdale’s where they had a big display of Star Trek merchandise. There was a young girl there who turned to my wife and said, “Why didn’t they do a fresh story?” That was the first time I heard of that problem.

  GENE RODDENBERRY

  After having done seventy-nine episodes covering a fairly wide field, it would have been hard to do anything and not have it bear some resemblances. I think the film appeared to resemble certain episodes more at the end, because many of the things that made the script different were, bit by bit, sliced out of the movie. They were the “talky” things. The personal stories were excised from the script or the shooting schedule. Then it became more and more like things we had done before.

  JON POVILL

  Through it all, Bob Wise was doing a balancing act. Bob had so many problems in so many directions between the physical demands of shooting the thing, the need for pages—because there were days we would go to set without them—and the insane personality differences. The demands of Shatner and Nimoy, who were coming in with their own ideas. Roddenberry coming in with his ideas. Harold coming in with his ideas. Me coming in with my ideas. If this was an elephant by committee, it was Bob who was trying to piece the thing together. A lot of strong personalities and a lot of very different opinions. And on top of all of that, he had the special-effects people saying, “We can do this, we can do this, we can do this, and we can do this. It’s going to look great … but we can’t deliver anything yet. However, here’s the drawing of what it’s going to be.… We just need more floppy drives,” or something.

  Another pitfall involving the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture was that it had been “blind-booked” into theaters for December 7, 1979. This meant that theaters guaranteed a minimum cash payment—in this case a total of about thirty-five million dollars—provided it made that release date, sight unseen. In other words, as far as Paramount was concerned, absolutely nothing could delay its release … though the film’s special-effects debacle was the one thing that could have imperiled the studio being able to release the film on time.

  GERALD ISENBERG

  The whole production got away from them. They hired a guy named Bob Abel to do the special effects. I knew Bob and he was a codirector of a movie I’d made on fifties rock and roll. He was a documentary and commercial director at the time and now, seven years later, he’s sold himself as a special-effects guy, so they invested another five million dollars in him and had nothing. It was a complete waste, it was a nightmare, and they were now locked in to a release date and there was nothing they could do.

  ROBERT WISE

  On Star Trek I had so much to deal with which was not even done yet. Scenes in which my actors had to play and react to that screen. All that came in months and months later. The best I ever had for them to react to was a projection of a sketch or a picture of what the effects men were planning to achieve. That’s all I had for them. I had to remind them of what was going on in terms of the action, to describe the best I could from the script and my own ideas of the sketch what they were supposed to be looking at. It takes some very professional actors to respond to something like that, and that made it very difficult—in fact, it was perhaps the most difficult part of the film. And then we had, of course, the big problem of having to change the special-effects people after a year.

  RICHARD TAYLOR

  Bob Abel had produced some feature-film documentaries like Mad Dogs & Englishmen and the documentary Making of the President 1968. But as far as a dramatic theatrical film, it was the first piece that the studio worked on. And of course, this was all pre-CG. So the studio was noted for its graphics and it had opened the Pandora’s box for a whole new form of advertising. Very extreme visual stuff, very psychedelic. When we got involved, Paramount was pretty well down the trail on creating a television feature of Star Trek. And they had built sets to a particular point. There was an Enterprise model that was being built and a dry dock, a V’ger, and some other things. As a knee-jerk reaction to the success of Star Wars, they decided to turn it into a theatrical feature.

  And somewhere along the line, they knew that it was time to relook at the whole thing and to bring a contemporary visual-effects company in to try and upgrade the whole visual aspect of the film. I don’t think that they really analyzed the Abel studio in terms of Did we have a model shop? Did we have a matte-painting department or any of that kind of stuff?

  SUSAN SACKETT

  The production itself wasn’t as rushed as the special effects were rushed, and that was because of the screwup by Robert Abel. When suddenly we were given a date for this movie to premiere in theaters, and told it must be ready because they went out and presold the movie and taken blind bids for December 7, we had to have special effects and we had almost none.

  RICHARD TAYLOR

  It wasn’t in Bob Abel’s nature to say “I fucked this up,” but he really did overextend us and overpromised. He really went into these meetings and would kind of take over. Bob Abel was a talented man and he really knew talent and how to hire it. He was a glib, rapping, Jewish salesman. He had a film background from UCLA and had directed some documentaries, some good ones. But he just would go in and dominate a meeting. I remember during the meetings thinking, Jesus, Bob, shut
up. You’re not directing this movie. But he would make commitments for us to do something and then turn around and say, “Okay, Richard, go get her done.”

  ROBERT WISE

  I want simply to say that they were very creative people and they had excellent ideas, but the big concern that we had was whether they would be able to execute all of the effects in time so the film would be ready for its release date of December 7, which was absolutely imperative. That was what made us decide to change. It wasn’t lack of creativeness or abilities or anything like that. They were very good, had very good ideas, but I don’t think they were equipped yet to execute fast enough such a big amount of very sophisticated effects. That was a giant picture in terms of effects and work involved.

  DEBORAH ARAKELIAN (assistant to Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin)

  They showed thirty seconds of footage to Bob Wise, and one of the producers told me it was the only time he saw Wise look angry. He walked out of the screening. It was a potato on the motion-control device, because the Enterprise had not been built yet.

  JON POVILL

  I didn’t see Bob go into that screening, but saw him shortly after he came out and he was angrier than I’d ever seen him. This was a man with seemingly endless patience—certainly not a man prone to flying into rages—but he was fuming. Said he wanted Abel and his company off the picture immediately and never wanted to see the SOB again.

  Abel had been working on the film for longer than Bob had, and this was the first time he’d shown any test footage. After stalling and stalling and stalling for months. I never saw the footage, but Bob clearly thought it was absolute crap. Abel had been hired off the strength of a famous and visually groundbreaking commercial he’d done for Levi’s jeans. But we later learned that the commercial, though beautiful, was very late and very over budget. He kept showing us amazing conceptual drawings that would have been great, except he actually had no clue how to deliver them. It would have been a trial-and-error process that might have worked eventually or might not—but we sure as hell would have had no chance whatsoever of opening on December 7 if he’d stayed on.