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

by Edward Gross

  DAVID C. FEIN

  Not only was it tough at the time, but for us to have to take years of knowing him before he would even talk about the movie was very emotional. It was very personal for him. I can’t tell you how important it is in my life to know that this brilliant man didn’t have to go to his grave with such huge, unfinished business. Admittedly the business won’t be finished until the director’s edition is issued on Blu-ray.

  DAREN DOCHTERMAN

  We got a hold of the original files he had donated to the USC cinema school. Boxes and boxes of his original files from that time, including a complete book of storyboards, his shooting script, and all sorts of notes. Notes from Gene Roddenberry, Harold Livingston, and his notes in his script. That was a huge amount of information, and we started to see the storyboards of effects shots they planned to do but never got around to. There just wasn’t any time. We started to pick some moments that could have been made better by that extended postproduction schedule. I did some Photoshop comps, did some screen grabs to show him things we were thinking about attempting. He said, “Wow, I think we can actually do this. Let’s get a message out to Sherry Lansing at Paramount and see if she’ll go along with it.” And that’s what we did: he drafted up a letter and sent it to Sherry Lansing. After several months they said, “Get a budget together,” and that’s how it started.

  DAVID C. FEIN

  The truth of the matter is that Bob’s legacy is the director’s edition. That’s the movie that—as close as possible to what we had; we couldn’t shoot anything new—was the movie that he wants people to look at as Bob Wise’s Star Trek film.

  DAREN DOCHTERMAN

  When he saw the film, he was smiling ear to ear. He loved it and he was so glad that he had a chance to go back. This was a very heartfelt moment when he said, “This is the only one I didn’t get to finish.” That just about brought us to tears; what a great feeling to help him achieve that.

  JON POVILL

  I wish the making of the movie had been a happy experience for him. I remember that when we were in production on the film, every day Bob would have lunch in his office and have one glass of vodka, pretty much straight up. Certainly not to excess. Just one to steel himself for the rest of the day. The overall frame of it was: “Thirty-five years, I’ve never experienced anything like this. Just un-fucking-believable.” He just could not believe how dysfunctional this production was.

  HAROLD LIVINGSTON

  Part of my contract says Paramount has got to give me an extra fifty thousand bucks when the movie goes into profits. Still negative. It’s grossed around five hundred million dollars.

  KHAN GAME

  “I REPROGRAMMED THE SIMULATION SO THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SHIP.”

  Star Trek: The Motion Picture, despite largely scathing reviews, grossed an astounding $11,926,421 its opening weekend on 857 screens, eventually topping $139,000,000 worldwide. Shortly thereafter Gene Roddenberry began work on a treatment for a sequel.

  “We know a little bit more about how to use Trek in motion pictures,” said Roddenberry at the time. “The second run in anything is easier. If you’ve ever played golf, the second try you can always sink the putt. It’s the first shot at the hole … The sequel story is much more intra-crew, intra-character. It has many more of the difficult decisions that Kirk always had in the TV episodes, decisions about morality and ideals. It’s good Star Trek. It would have made a good three-parter on the TV show—if I’d had the money to do it.”

  Stung by criticism of the first film, Roddenberry was intent on revisiting elements of Star Trek that had proved so popular in the past: time travel, the Klingons, and Sarek and Amanda, Spock’s parents. In his sixty-page treatment dated May 21, 1980, Roddenberry proposes an outrageous story, presaging the similarly themed Next Generation film First Contact, in which the Enterprise, returning home to Earth, encounters bodies floating in space, some are naked, others are in space suits. Discovering a survivor, they realize history has been changed by the Klingons and the Federation eradicated. Only those who have traveled at warp speed are immune to the changes in the time line.

  Starfleet doesn’t exist and the Earth is now inhabited by a vicious race of protohumans. The Enterprise conceals itself behind the moon with the arrival of the vicious Klingons, who have used the Guardian of Forever from “The City on the Edge of Forever” to change time. While visiting the former site of Starfleet Headquarters, Amanda is brutally raped and Sarek sacrifices his life to save Kirk and Spock from the Klingons in the hopes they can reverse the changes to the time line. The Enterprise returns to the Guardian planet and follows the Klingons back in time, despite an attempt by the Klingons to block the time gate, to shield a small Klingon scout ship that returned to 1960s Earth. The Enterprise manages to make it through, but is damaged and crashes in northern Canada, where a U-2 spy plane mistakes it for an alien ship. As a result, JFK cancels his trip to Dallas and is not assassinated, prompting a visit to the Oval Office by James T. Kirk himself, who comes face-to-face with the then president.

  Ultimately, the Enterprise is able to repair the time line and return to the twenty-third century, leaving behind a very much alive President Kennedy but with the addition of a newfound wife for McCoy as a result of their interference in Earth’s past.

  HARVE BENNETT (executive producer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

  Gene opposed every one of the Star Trek films on the grounds that they were not good Trek. He now takes credit for having been the spiritual father of the best one, Star Trek IV, because he had told us to do a time-travel story. The fact is we had rejected a time-travel story about coming back to try and stop the assassination of Jack Kennedy, and that story, for good reason, was thrown out years before because it, like going to see God in Star Trek V, was a story with an impossible preconclusion. You knew that even Kirk couldn’t stop that, and if he did, how would we explain that now? And why is Jackie married to Onassis? And on and on, and we said, “No, we don’t want to do that story.” He flooded everybody with reprints of that thing, which he had written, God knows when, and he fought tooth and nail right down to the $110 million domestic gross, and he said, “Well, I told them to do time travel in the first place.”

  SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)

  The proposal was written as a separate story back in about 1980, right after Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released. Basically, the studio was a bit leery of having Gene as a producer on the next Star Trek because they had to find a scapegoat for their failure to hold back costs on the first movie, and it was outright their fault. They ran ten million dollars over budget insisting we stick with Robert Abel and Associates when they failed to produce anything for us. Some people at the studio felt that they would rather not be involved with that producer, they wanted to bring in somebody else rather than Gene Roddenberry, which is basically what they did.

  The story itself had to do with going back in time through the time gate, they are tracked by the Klingons, who go back in time, and they follow them there and they try to rescue the Earth. Somebody thought it had something to do with they had to kill Kennedy, which was not true. It happened around that time in history. As with Edith Keeler, they had to allow history to unfold the way it was meant to unfold, and that was the involvement with the Kennedy thing. I really don’t know why they didn’t do it. It was a damn good story.

  SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)

  After the Klingons go back in time to ruin humanity’s future, the Enterprise goes back to stop that from happening. But they make things worse by accidentally revealing themselves to Earth’s inhabitants, and the problems keep snowballing from there.

  The biggest snowball is that the Enterprise has materialized in November of 1963, just days before President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and in effect prevented this turning point of the twentieth century. So now the Enterprise will have to go back in time again even further, but not before Kirk has a heated exchange wi
th Kennedy, who is then beamed aboard the ship.

  While there is certainly a cool factor in seeing Kirk encounter another U.S. President after Lincoln in “The Savage Curtain,” there’s no power to the punch at the end the way “City on the Edge of Forever” had, and it ends up being a pointless, emotionally uninvolving voyage.

  RONALD D. MOORE (writer, Star Trek: First Contact)

  There were persistent rumors that Star Trek II was going to be a time-travel story about going back to the Kennedy assassination, and Spock was going to be the shooter on the grassy knoll for some reason. There were fans whom were up in arms and writing these really angry letters, “If Spock is the shooter on the grassy knoll, I will never watch again.”

  EDDIE EGAN (unit publicist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

  There was a version written which was more or less the ending of “The City on the Edge of Forever,” but instead of Kirk suddenly stopping McCoy from grabbing Joan Collins’s character, something happened in Dealey Plaza and some aberration in time was causing things not to occur correctly. Spock appeared behind the fence and fired the shot and everything returns to normal. Of course, the attitude of the studio was mostly just horror; that you can’t make a movie like that. Their thoughts about Gene were “It’s just in bad taste and we don’t like you, anyway, so go away.”

  SCOTT MANTZ

  Boy, what a mess. Paramount was wise to toss it to the side in favor of the greatest Trek movie of them all, The Wrath of Khan. Interesting that while Wrath served as a sequel to one of the most popular original-series Trek episodes of all time, so did GR’s treatment. In this case, it was a sequel of sorts to the Citizen Kane of Star Trek episodes, “The City on the Edge of Forever.”

  And just like “City,” the script dealt with Kirk and Spock going back in time to restore the future. As a result, the story seems awfully redundant of “City,” despite all the bells and whistles that a big-budget feature could provide.

  HARVE BENNETT

  Gene is frequently a historical revisionist, and he uses a phrase that is difficult for anybody else to refute: “That is not Star Trek.” When a man of his eminence and his position says that, especially in my early days, I didn’t want to go against the church. But the fact of the matter is he uses that phrase whenever he chooses to. It makes no sense. He fought the character of Saavik savagely, saying you couldn’t intermarry Vulcans and Romulans, that it was not possible. It had never been done, and he would cite everybody from Arthur C. Clarke to Isaac Asimov, who he would always run to and they would always say, “Yes, Gene, you’re right.” I am not a science-fiction writer. I just tell good yarns. You get into a situation where you say, “I’m not Heinlein, I’m not Clarke.” I’m just a pop artist trying to tell a story here.

  When I signed on, the phrase that was in my mind, and that I’ve used a lot, is that the franchise was a beached whale and it was my task to resurrect it, to give it CPR and to return to the central thing that had made people so loyal to the series for decades.

  RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)

  Harve said that Star Trek was a beached whale, one that he had rescued and breathed new life into. That really hurt Gene. When Gene said at one point during a disagreement, “over my dead body!,” Harve had said that that was fine with him. Gene did his best to try to work things out with Harve where and when he could, but Harve made it very difficult for him. Gene did his best not to be a thorn in Harve’s side, but at times found that he had to.

  DAVID GERROLD (writer, “The Trouble with Tribbles”)

  After Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the studio looked at what the picture earned and said, “If we had brought this picture in for nine million dollars, we would have made a lot of money. We have the sets standing, the actors will be available to us. If we could do inexpensive Star Trek movies…” So they call in Harve Bennett and said, “We’re going to have you do a Star Trek movie for TV. If it turns out well, we’ll release it theatrically.”

  After Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Gene had no clout. It was a critical disaster and for a while it looked like it was going to be a financial disaster. I don’t know what the details were, but essentially they looked at the box-office results and said, “Take Gene out of the saddle.” They kicked him upstairs and said, “Gene, you will be executive consultant. We’ll give you an office and we’ll have you approve all of the scripts, but your creative control over Star Trek is over because we can’t afford you.” They were probably a lot more tactful than that, but that’s what they did.

  EDDIE EGAN

  There were some people there who had been on the TV side of things, the Desilu side, which became part of Paramount, and people who had known Gene back then who would roll their eyes anytime his name came up. The reason, and this has been well established, is he was a pain in the ass on the series and was quick to take credit but was rarely around for the hard work. There was a lot of that in evidence apparently during the making of the first movie. Certainly I observed that given his reduced role on the three sequels I worked on. He just wasn’t a producer in the sense that a picture of that size and inherent value needed.

  HARVE BENNETT

  Any time a guy loses a command and is still hanging around, it’s difficult. The fact of the matter was that Gene had already done that during the series; in the third year he had left to do other things. In this instance it began on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where he was superseded and overruled many times during the final stages when the studio took over the massively rising budget, and the problems with the special effects and so forth.

  DAVID GERROLD

  The only success he’s ever had in his entire life was Star Trek, and he likes being the Great Bird of the Galaxy. He believes his own publicity. He’s a legend in his own mind.

  EDDIE EGAN

  When you talked to Roddenberry, he always kind of looked at you with his head cocked, like he was waiting for you to say something wrong or to piss him off. He’s just one of those guys whose mind had an area that was completely brilliant, but the larger part of his mind was his personality and an insecurity that just got in the way all the time. It limited his ability to enjoy his success and feel recognized for the brilliant things he did, and the good things he did for people. His insecurities and his inability to focus seemed, to me, to be his biggest challenge.

  GENE RODDENBERRY (executive consultant, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

  My contract gives me the total right to produce and write all motion pictures. But I did Star Trek seventy-nine times. I just can’t be a creature of Star Trek all my life. I wanted to see bright, new people come in and put a good stamp on it and add certain differences. As the consultant, they sent me everything from the first story idea to the final draft of the motion picture. I also saw dailies and rough cuts and all of that. I made my comments to them. I told them the only time I would say “No, stop, I refuse to put my name on it” is if they should break any of the very basic things about Star Trek. Affection for all life-forms or if they should land on a planet and start zapping creatures there because they’re different. I certainly wouldn’t insist on taking my name off or breaking the contract merely because they don’t have quite the uniform I like or merely because they want to crash the Enterprise. If you’re going to have good people, you’ve got to give good people some latitude to do it their way.

  EDDIE EGAN

  When you’re the creator of the show or the writer of the original concept, you have to be consulted and engaged on a certain level. There are no parameters for that engagement, but when the second movie started, Paramount made it very clear to him that they were declaring the parameters. He would be shown the scripts, he could review dailies, he could comment on a cut, but it was Paramount’s final and absolute decision whether or not to cooperate or ignore.

  He definitely had weird things written into his contract on the movies. I remember seeing an abstract of his rights once, and someone had actually thought of a clause that said the i
ntensity of the musical fanfare, under Roddenberry’s on-screen credit, could be no less than that of the musical fanfare when Shatner’s name was on the screen. I don’t know if that was actually carried through, but he thought of that, and had it papered [into his contract].

  HARVE BENNETT

  I came to Paramount with no anticipation of doing feature pictures at all. I was here to do television. But the second week I got a call from [studio president] Barry Diller, who used to be my assistant at ABC, and Michael Eisner, who used to be a counterpart of mine at ABC in New York, and running the entire operation was the great immigrant, Charlie Bludhorn, who built Gulf & Western and bought Paramount. Barry calls me in and says, “Will you come to a meeting in my office?”

  They asked me what I thought of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I said it was boring. Bludhorn turned to Eisner and Diller and said, “Aha! By you guys bald is sexy.” To me he said, “Do you think you can make a better movie than that?” I said, “Yeah, I could.” He said, “For less than forty-five fucking million dollars?” “Oh,” I said, “where I come from I can make a lot of movies for that.”

  DEBORAH ARAKELIAN (assistant to Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin)

  Star Trek I had been a financial drain on the studio and a drain on the actors, who were none too pleased at the end of it. It just went on forever and it cost a lot of money, so Paramount said, “We’ll make another Star Trek, but it has to be on a television budget and a television schedule.” And that was the mandate that was given to Harve and, ultimately, to Bob Sallin, who was the line producer. Bob Sallin staffed it with people that knew how to work on schedule and on budget. It was brought in as promised, and the amazing thing was that it was the antithesis of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture situation. Everybody had fun.