by Edward Gross
I had never heard of—and certainly never in my experience later have I ever known of—a film to hold press screenings at a theater that was commercially showing the movie on the same evening of the day it opened. That wasn’t to hide the picture from bad reviews—no one had seen it to know whether it would get good or bad reviews. It was a practical thing.
DOUG DREXLER
Jerry Goldsmith was sitting right behind me. His wife coughed all the way through the movie. We went to the Air and Space Museum for the big party afterward, which was the entire bottom floor of the museum. And they had a full orchestra with the music. It was a big deal. I remember coming out and hearing women going, “That was just perfectly awful.” And the dry-dock sequence in particular, if you weren’t a fan. But to me, it’s one of the greatest moments in science fiction ever. When reviews started coming in, they were pretty much chopping it up. And it was hurting me. It was as if it was my own child. I remember how upset I was. Joel Siegel reviewed it on ABC. He was a Star Trek fan, but I remember his review wasn’t that kind, although it was diplomatic compared to some of the others. Then he said, “But the Enterprise … it was made for the big screen.” I’ll never forget it as long as I live. I’m getting chills thinking about it. It was made for the big screen. And it really was.
RONALD D. MOORE
I thought it was a beautiful film, and at the time I was struck by the message of the movie, and it felt very much in keeping with the show. I did sort of feel at the end that this was a retelling of “The Changeling,” but I was very excited. When I saw generally it was getting negative reviews, I was very defensive of the movie for quite a while. In fact I wrote a letter to Trek magazine and they printed it. It was the first and only letter I’d ever written to a publication and they actually printed it and it was me defending the film. Many years later when I was working on Next Generation, Eric Stillwell brought in a copy of that Trek magazine to embarrass me in front of the entire writing staff.
MANNY COTO (executive producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)
I was one of those guys who was in denial. I was running around saying it was great. It wasn’t until Star Trek II came around that I realized I didn’t much like the first one, but we were so excited about it, we couldn’t leave it. We were fanatical, and we convinced ourselves that it wasn’t as bad as it really was.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (co-executive producer, Futurama)
I saw it in White Plains, New York, at a theater near where I grew up. The audience was really into it. They cheered every time a cast member showed up on-screen. Spock first and then Shatner and then whenever you’d see everyone else on the bridge. You didn’t hear the dialogue for a lot of the movie because there was so much cheering going on. Showing the Enterprise in dry dock was just this incredible experience, because I’d been watching reruns so many times, seeing the same special effects over and over again, so the idea that the Enterprise responded when Kirk said “Take us out” was such a crazy, exciting moment. As a Star Trek fan, that was the most amazing moment of Star Trek: The Motion Picture for me.
MANNY COTO
I sympathize with the guys who went to go see The Phantom Menace and convinced themselves that it wasn’t as bad as it was. Phantom Menace is worse, I would argue, than Star Trek ever was, but we were kind of in denial. There were some beautiful shots of the Enterprise and we got to see some Klingons, so it wasn’t a total disaster, but in large part it was pretty boring.
CHRIS GORE (founder, Film Threat magazine)
Why does Kirk’s Starfleet uniform make him look suspiciously like a dentist? And what’s the deal with Kirk’s obsession with Vulcans? He wants a green-blooded science officer badly: “I’d still like a Vulcan there if possible.” Kirk sounds like a bachelor with a fetish for blondes. And like Godzilla’s affection for Tokyo, the Enterprise is, of course, the only ship in range of … whatever.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
They made a stiffer, more 2001-type of science fiction, which I don’t think is what Star Trek was. Obviously, The Wrath of Khan ended up being closer at least in spirit—to me—to the original Star Trek and not just because it was a sequel to the original show. It was more colorful, the costumes and the characters; there was more humor. Also, I saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture so many times that by the time Wrath of Khan came out, I could identify all the stock footage they used.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
A lot of people were disappointed when the movie came out because it was boring, there wasn’t enough action, and the characters were not the same characters that people were familiar with from the original series. I was not one of those people. I liked it the first time I saw it, because of the scope of the film and seeing the Enterprise on the big screen with all the detail. The special effects were cool. What really struck me about the movie was the music. Jerry Goldsmith’s score was and still is one of my favorite music scores of all time.
WALTER KOENIG
What Star Trek I had was a true science-fiction story. It was innovative storytelling as far as it went. This was not simply a story that we pulled from a horse opera and made into a science-fiction movie. It was indigenous to the genre … and it should have been since it was borrowed from other Star Trek stories.
EDDIE EGAN
It was not the emotional, character-driven, serious, funny, interplay-between-the-characters that people know and we know to be the heart of what makes Star Trek work, but it had elegance and an intellectual concept that can stand right up there with the best science fiction movies ever produced.
CHRIS GORE
I saw the film in 1979 with my dad, who was also a huge Trek fan. We would watch the original series together and discuss episodes in detail. The first Star Trek movie was what got me reading magazines like Starlog, Fantastic Films, and Cinefantastique. I sought out any shred of information about the upcoming Star Trek movie. This was before the Internet, when a trip to the corner store was for buying comics and movie mags. From the opening overture, I was transported to another time in a familiar galaxy with an optimistic view of the future. Much has been discussed about the flaws of The Motion Picture, but it has actually aged the best of the old Star Trek films. Try watching Star Trek III without cringing multiple times.
JAMES DOOHAN
It got boring getting to V’ger. Who wants to see a bunch of clouds, which aren’t terribly interesting after the first thirty seconds anyway?
DAVID GERROLD
The fans had come off this two-year high with Star Wars, and the audience wanted more Star Wars, but there wasn’t any more. So they went to see Star Trek and they were hungering for more, so Star Trek benefitted from the Star Wars phenomenon. They went and they saw it over and over again, but it was embarrassing to watch the fans because they were all apologists for this picture: “Well, it’s not that bad. It’s a different kind of Star Trek.” Instead of really just acknowledging that it was a bad movie, they tried to explain that it was wonderful and you were an idiot for not understanding it. It was wonderful to watch them fuck their minds over to explain away a bad movie. The truth was that there was this movie that they wanted to love and they were so disappointed, but they wouldn’t dare say that they were disappointed.
BRYAN FULLER (executive producer, American Gods)
It’s a really interesting, very rich film. Most people dismiss it as dull, but I think they’re not paying attention. Khan is much more rock and roll. It is much more of a cowboy picture. It has such drive and momentum. There’s no chance to stop and pontificate, which Star Trek: The Motion Picture allowed the audience to do. But I think during that time a lot of them had their eyes roll in boredom, but not me.
I understand it’s a colder, more intellectual film, particularly when you compare it to The Wrath of Khan, which was “let’s Moby Dick this son of a bitch.” Whereas The Motion Picture was filled with a lot of ideas and the notion of bringing Star Trek into a Kubrickian universe where we can explore intellectual ideas.
Bob Justman said my father wasn’t a great writer, he was a great rewriter. That doesn’t bother me too much, because I think I might believe that. Not that he was a bad writer, but the stories that my father put his weight behind were often slow. The Motion Picture is an example. Now, you may love it and I have respect for it and I appreciate what it is, but it’s slow-moving. I’ll use the word thoughtful. It’s more about ideas and less about action. I’m not sure my father should have done the movies. It was his show, if he’d done them all like The Motion Picture, they’d be more Star Trek, but would they have been good movies? Would they have made the money they made? I don’t know.
WALTER KOENIG
There are myriad reasons for the lack of success, including setting a release date for the picture in advance. According to Gene, he fought that, because it really did back him into a corner and made the picture that much more expensive. They had to go on double time, golden time, and at one point they were shooting around the clock in postproduction. So I guess it was a cursed project from the start.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Rushing costs money in this business. When there are only two or three people in the world who can do a certain optical and only one is available, you’re not in a good bargaining position. But these are the kinds of problems that are dealt with in the real world of picture-making, which are very seldom talked about in fan magazines, or are understood by those who make dramatic comments or criticism.
RALPH WINTER
We watched the movie as reference on Star Trek II. It came to the end of the movie and I got the squawk box from the projectionist, and he goes, “I’m really sorry. I made a mistake. I left out one of the reels.” And I go, “No worries.” Twenty minutes of the movie we missed, and no one noticed.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I was upset with the film. It just wasn’t what I wanted. I can’t honestly say this wasn’t my fault, because in the end I took the rap for it anyway. But if I do a poor job, I’ll tell you it’s bad.
ROBERT WISE
Do I like the film? That’s awfully hard to answer. Often we directors generally like our latest film best … I like it. I don’t think it’s everything I hoped it’d be and certainly I had no idea it was going to cost the tremendous amount of money it cost. None of us did. I am sure Paramount would not have gotten into it had they realized at the beginning it was going to cost that much.
EDDIE EGAN
No one at Paramount was happy about the way the film came together, because of the ugly dynamic between Roddenberry and the studio, and the script problems and the actors all getting involved with the script. Too many cooks in the kitchen always leads to disaster, and that was a big part of the problem.
I also rememember Nimoy saying to me years later that he was very fond of Bob Wise, but he got an uneasy feeling the first time he met him. He said when he went to his house, the house was very severe … it wasn’t homey at all. It was very antiseptic, cold and orderly. He said it gave him pause. He had great affection for him though and thought that he and many other people would have lost their shit or had a nervous breakdown making that movie under those conditions and he apparently never showed it to anyone on the set.
GENE RODDENBERRY
My attitude on the movie is this: While the film failed in a number of areas where I would have liked it to have succeeded, it was a successful adaptation of the television story to the screen. We could have done more—and we could have done a lot less—but we did what we could under the time, conditions, and circumstances, and the fact that God double-crossed us by making us fallible. The film has some failures … it also has some remarkable successes in it. I think, considering the way it all happened, we came out with a remarkably good film, and I’m very pleased to have been a part of it. It could have been better—yes! I don’t ever expect to make a film where I don’t look back and say to myself, “Ah, I’d like to change this and this.”
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
When I was submitting stories to Phase II and everything was all hunky-dory and chatty, one day Gene put his arm around me—he was a tall guy—and he said, “You remind me of me when I was your age.” That’s an exact quote. I thought, “I’m nothing like you, what are you talking about?” He said, “I’m going to teach you everything I know.” At that point I’d written something like twenty books and I thought, “That’s very nice, but I don’t think there’s that much you can teach me.” I kept quiet, because he was being nice. But Star Trek was the worst experience I ever had. Nobody had ever tried to do to me what they tried to do. But that’s just the way it is, apparently. They put you in the shark cage, you learn how to fight with the other sharks, or you go back in the goldfish bowl. I belonged in the goldfish bowl. My wife and I picked up and moved to Arizona.
In the end, Gene did teach me quite a lot about the business, although I don’t think that’s what he originally had in mind.
NICHOLAS MEYER (director, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
I had a conversation once with Barry Diller, who said that a really sickening moment for him was being in New York and seeing lines around the block for the first Star Trek movie, and knowing that it wasn’t everything that it could be. And I do not knock the first movie. Robert Wise has forgotten more about filmmaking than I’ll ever know, and somebody had to go boldly and try this. You learn from other people, you build on the efforts and the mistakes or the successes of other people. So I am not a person who says, “Oh well, this is a perfectly shitty film.” I’m just grateful that it was there. But for Barry, he said, “Gee, people really want to see this stuff and we’re going to make money off it despite the fact that it was a runaway production and we spent forty-five million dollars. We’re going to make another one of these and we’re going to do it until we get it right.”
ROBERT WISE
This was the first film that I did where I didn’t have time for it. Normally we would see a picture and go back and have time to work on it a little bit more. But we didn’t have any time. I saw it all completely together on Monday before it premiered in Washington on Thursday. One of the reservations I have about the film is that I didn’t have the time to fine-tune it.
In the end, Wise would get that opportunity to fine-tune Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in the form of the film’s director’s edition, which was released on DVD on November 1, 2001. Prior to that, however, in its initial television debut on the ABC Sunday Night Movie, a number of scenes were added that provided some of the character moments fans felt were missing from the theatrical version.
The reedited director’s edition, which featured Wise’s preferred cut of the film along with new computer-generated visual effects, was overseen by Wise himself along with the Robert Wise Productions team of Dave Fein, Michael Matessino, and Daren Dochterman.
SUSAN SACKETT
No one contacted us about the ABC version. It just showed up that way on the tube and on video. We were not consulted, but very pleased over it. We had no idea how it happened or why it happened. This was all the footage Mr. Roddenberry had written a memo about in 1979 when the film was being cut. We went into one of the rough cuts and he wrote about a twenty-page memo saying he would like to see this and could you add this, trim this, put this line in. Someone got a hold of that memo of what he would like to have put in the film. Had they listened to him in the first place, it would have been in the film, and this is what they used as the basis for their reedit for television. Everything that was done was what he had requested in this memo.
WALTER KOENIG
I don’t trust my own feelings sometimes. Everybody seems to think that that extra footage helped the film, and when I saw it I didn’t really see that. Maybe because I don’t have the objectivity. In the reediting they added a scene of mine after I get burned and Ilia heals my burns, but when you have just a few scenes to begin with, it seems like I had more involvement than it might otherwise.
DAV
ID GERROLD
[The ABC, VHS, and laserdisc version of] Star Trek: The Special Edition is seventeen minutes longer, but it feels seventeen minutes shorter because of that character stuff that was added in. It’s a difficult picture to sit through. The first half of the picture is quite good, but the problem is that the cut is wrong. They left in the special-effects sequences that should have been much shorter, and Robert Wise intended them to be much shorter, and they cut out little pieces of character that said the story was about Kirk and Spock. The reason that Star Trek: The Motion Picture made so much money had nothing to do with the story. It had everything to do with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
DAVID C. FEIN
I would go so far as to say as much as Star Wars was a success and was a massive change to the industry, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a massive hit to Bob’s life and Bob’s career. There was so much attention being spent on this, and there were so many people who were looking for someone to blame. Bob is such a gentleman that no matter who is technically at fault, he was the captain of the ship. It was his project to do. It was his responsibility in the end. It was the only project that didn’t go smoothly in his career. And to not only not go smoothly, but to become the tremendous problem that it was, and have so much riding on it and the studio needing it so much, it was difficult. If you really look at his career, he didn’t do many other films after that. And he had been on a roll.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN
We contacted Mr. Wise and brought up the question of whether he’d like to talk about Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He had never talked about it previously, because he was so upset with the way he was treated by the studio, the way it all came out and the fact he never had preview screenings. It was just a bad experience for him, and, of course, after the movie came out the actors started bad-mouthing it, especially when Wrath of Khan was released. “This is more like it, the Star Trek that we wanted.” C’mon, they didn’t know. So we approached Mr. Wise. At this point the special editions of the Star Wars movies had come out and done really well. This gave us an angle to say, “If you could have those missing weeks from your postproduction schedule, Mr. Wise, what would you have done?” So he started to think. We scheduled a screening of the original movie at the Directors Guild, just for him and us. We sat him down, showed him the movie, and he started to open up a little bit. I guess a lot of memories came back to him because he hadn’t watched it in eighteen years. He hadn’t seen it since the Washington, DC, premiere on December 6, 1979. He started to open up about it and said, “You know, maybe we could at least give it a final cut.”