Matt Jefferies lamented, “The most difficult thing about doing the show was that we did not have today’s materials to play with. Even fiberglass molding and that kind of stuff was still relatively new and there weren’t many people around who could do it. Nowadays you’ve got all kinds of wide-eyed plastics and molding stuff. None of that was available to us then.” (91-2)
The model Datin built was mounted on a metal pole, elevated off the floor in a stationary position. Behind it was a “blue screen.” The camera did the moving.
Volmer Jensen’s Production Model Shop, Burbank, CA, December 1964 (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
The Howard Anderson Company also provided other optical effects needed for the pilot, including the transporter effect. For this, Anderson turned a slow-motion camera upside down and photographed shiny grains of aluminum powder as they were dropped between the camera and a black background.
Editing came next. Leo Shreve was put in charge of the team. He had worked as a film editor in television on Maverick and, on the big screen, with Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet. The cutting of “The Cage” would take close to a month.
Then came the music. Roddenberry had prepared a wish-list of composers. They were Les Baxter, Elmer Bernstein, Alexander Courage, Dominic Frontiere, Jerry Goldsmith, Lalo Schifrin and John Williams. It was an impressive Who’s Who. Baxter was the leader of a big band and had numerous popular hits. Bernstein’s most famous movie score was The Magnificent Seven. Courage had recently scored the Connie Francis big screen hit Follow the Boys and, for television, episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Frontiere had provided the ominous music for The Outer Limits. Goldsmith wrote the eerie theme to TV’s Thriller series, plus composed the scores for recent big screen big events such as Seven Days in May and Lilies of the Field (he would score five of the Star Trek motion pictures). Schifrin would compose the music for Mission: Impossible. And Williams would soon do the theme for Lost in Space, with Star Wars in his future.
The man who got the job: Alexander “Sandy” Courage. William Hatch, Lucille Ball’s musical director, made the recommendation to Roddenberry. Courage recalled, “Rodenberry told me, ‘Listen, I don’t want any of this goddamned funny-sounding space science fiction music. I want adventure music.’” (37-1)
Roddenberry and company had done a spectacular job, but good work does not come cheap. Post-production costs factored in, the pilot, which had been budgeted at a very expensive $452,000, ended up costing $616,000, or $4.6 million in 2013 -- a staggering amount for a single TV program in 1964. Roddenberry later said, “Yes, it was an abnormal amount to spend on a pilot. But they had to realize that we were building the interior of a spaceship, doing complex opticals of ships in flight and transporter effects and so forth. All props had to be built from scratch; all costumes had to be designed from scratch. To be honest, I don’t think the ‘powers that be’ at the studio were aware of how much we were spending until after it was spent. But we spent it making a good product.” (145-4)
Roddenberry trusted that time would prove him right concerning the worthiness of his expensive venture. What he didn’t know was that excessive spending and derogatory comments about the “powers that be” would, for a very long period of his professional life, take him out of the game.
As for the film he directed, Robert Butler remained pessimistic, saying, “I thought to myself, ‘Well, if they understand it, great, but wow, we should have made it easier for them.’ It would just have been negative to have said that to Gene at that point because he just wasn’t entertaining other thoughts. I was still thinking, ‘I hope they understand it, because it’s a difficult trip to get from A to Z in a straight line on that particular story.’” (26-2)
The story, despite Butler’s harsh words, had just enough cliché and familiarity in the characters to help the audience “get” who they are right away. With an equal amount of unexpected elements and strong central themes, the writing came off as fresh -- and still does, half a century later.
The screen story plays by the rules: a character with a problem (the ship’s captain), tired, guilt-ridden, needing to take a break, reassesses his life and priorities. He is already dealing with inner conflict before the antagonists of the story go to work on him.
Like any good script, there is a message. Vina says it to Pike: “They’ve found it’s a trap. Like a narcotic. When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit, living and reliving other lives in the thought records left behind. Or ... probe the minds of zoo specimens.”
The underlying theme is clear: Man is not meant to be completely unburdened. We need our challenges and setbacks to keep us pushing forward. Pike says: “You either live life, bruises and all ... or you turn your back on it and start dying.”
Vina’s sadness is profound. She lives life alone, without the companionship of her own species. The terror she experiences day in and day out, including the risk of being raped and murdered by the image of a savage Kalar warrior, is best conveyed when she says, “They keep at you and at you, year after year, probing, looking for weakness, and tricking ... and punishing ... and they’ve won. They own me.” A frightening moment, both then and now, comes when we see how the Talosians go about trying to own Pike, as he screams in agony, on his knees in boiling water and brimstone, with flames lapping at him from all directions.
In another line from the script, Vina says of the Talosians, “Since their minds can reach anywhere, most are like cocoons or larvae now. They just sit and let the thought records of some specimen live for them. Some of them hardly move, except to take the blue protein drink once a day. And there are only a few machines left to make that.”
This gives us further clarification as to the motives behind the actions of the Talosians -- they need to breed humans so they will have an endless supply of servants.
Finally, there is the horror of seeing Vina as she truly is. After the disturbing transformation, she tells Pike, “They found me ... in the wreckage ... dying, a lump of flesh. They fixed me. Everything works. But they had no guide for putting me back together.”
With all that works in “The Cage,” the script broods and lacks humor -- as does the Captain. As a stand-alone film, “The Cage” is superb. As the template for a continuing series, it lacks a certain something -- primarily, the energy, the wit and the swagger of William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk.
The Star Trek pilot was delivered in February 1965, almost ten months after NBC had first expressed interest. Nothing like this had ever been seen. NBC execs in attendance were stunned. Herb Solow reported, “The best screening I ever had for network executives was running the first Star Trek pilot for Mort [Werner], Grant [Tinker], Jerry [Stanley] and the others. They were blown away with the production, the scope of the film, the music, the whole physicality and feeling of the film.” (161-3)
Stories have been told they even applauded. Then they rejected it.
5
Double or Nothing: A Second Pilot
Back to the drawing board (NBC publicity photo courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
The official word on NBC’s rejection of the Star Trek pilot: “too cerebral.” For decades, that word was the only one ever mentioned. Roddenberry would be cheered and applauded every time he recalled the story for a crowd of adoring fans. “The Cage” was too smart, too good for TV, too misunderstood by those who should have known better. During a speaking engagement at Rochester Institute of Technology in 1976, he said, “The first pilot was rejected on the basis of being too intellectual for you slobs out in the television audience. It did go on to win the international Hugo Award, but I suppose many things turned down by networks win awards.”
Actually, they don’t. Nor had this one. Something else achieved that honor -- an offshoot of “The Cage,” combining new footage with old to create a story within a story. That hybrid -- “The Menagerie” -- would become
a footnote in the history of both science fiction and of the television medium. But why ruin a good story over technicalities?
In truth, the “cerebral” nature of “The Cage” was not the only concern. From Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, Herb Solow and Robert Justman joined together to lay out the case from NBC’s perspective -- the network was very uncomfortable with the “eroticism” seen in the pilot and what that ingredient “foreshadowed for the ensuing series.” Solow and Justman felt the network’s knowledge of Roddenberry’s attitude concerning sex and his illicit but not-so-secret relationships with a couple of wannabe starlets didn’t help. The NBC sales department was concerned with the Mr. Spock character, fearing he would be seen as “demonic” by Bible Belt affiliate station owners and by important advertisers. Furthermore, Solow said NBC was not happy with some of the casting. The network supported the idea of a woman in a leading role, as proven in recent series starring Juliet Prowse, Barbara Eden, Shirley Booth, Barbara Stanwyck and Loretta Young, but it had reservations concerning Majel Barrett’s abilities to “carry” the show as its costar. They were not saying she lacked talent, merely that she did not have star potential.
In 1968, even while Star Trek was still in the middle of its NBC run, Roddenberry would go on record for the first of many times claiming the network had a problem with the Enterprise’s racial mix and, for this reason, wanted cast changes made. But just as Star Trek was getting its network debut, NBC seemed to be very much in favor of interracial casting, as demonstrated by a 1966 memo from Mort Werner sent to all the network’s program providers. Werner had requested that the producers continue to make strides in this area. In particular, he praised Sheldon Leonard’s I Spy project, with its mix of white (Culp) and black (Cosby). The interracial casting of Star Trek was not the source of NBC’s jitters, nor was the caliber of the production in question.
Oscar Katz said, “[NBC just] didn’t like the type of story we told. I think they selected [this pilot] to test Desilu on the hardest kind of story to produce because of the reputation Desilu had. Then, when they saw it, they were satisfied that Desilu was able to produce quality material, but it was the wrong kind of episode to take around to advertising agencies and sell. It was too off the beaten path.” (96-1)
Roddenberry understood this and said, “I should have ended it with a fistfight between the hero and the villain if I wanted it on television.” (145-4)
In a way, Oscar Katz corroborated this view: “I asked NBC, ‘Why are you turning this down?’ and was told, ‘We can’t sell it from this show, it’s too atypical.’ I said, ‘But you guys picked this one. I gave you choices.’ [Mort Werner] said, ‘I know we did and, because of that, we’re going to give you an order for a second pilot.’” (96-1)
It was an encouraging word but not yet official.
On February 8, 1965, Roddenberry wrote to his agent Alden Schwimmer at Ashley-Famous Agency:
Am writing this without yet hearing anything definite on Star Trek. Whichever way this project goes, sale or no sale, the weekly problem of earning a living continues. Although Star Trek has been expensive for Desilu, it has been perhaps even more expensive to me individually in that I have continued putting week after week into the project far beyond normal production and post-production schedules. No complaints on that score but it is a fact I must see some immediate income either from Desilu or from somewhere else.
One project Roddenberry talked about in his letter to Schwimmer was “Assignment 100,” a TV pilot script that would later evolve into the Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth,” and a second pilot script for a TV version of the western High Noon.
On February 12, Roddenberry again wrote to Schwimmer:
Have just talked to Oscar Katz in New York about present indefinite sales status of Star Trek. I felt that all sides had been heard from but me and I owed it to Oscar that he understood my feelings clearly…. Whether or not this was the right story for a sale, it was definitely a right one for ironing out successfully a thousand how, when and whats of television science fiction. It did that job superbly and has us firmly in position to be the first who has ever successfully made TV series science fiction for a mass audience level and yet with a chance for quality and network prestige too…. We have an opportunity, like Gulliver’s Travels of a century or more ago, to combine spectacle-excitement for a mass group along with meaningful drama and something of substance and pride…. This particular story, whatever its other merits, was an ideal vehicle for proving this point to ourselves. And if the network wants to be partners in such ventures as these, they have to share some of the pain, responsibility and risk of this type of planning. Or they can have copies of other shows, or parallels, breaking no new ground, without any pain or risk at all.
Roddenberry was hoping Mort Werner was going to make good on his word and order a second pilot, even though such a thing had never before been done. The wait was tormenting. Concerned that some of his key personnel might be lured away by other job offers, Roddenberry put his time to good use and began writing letters in hopes of keeping his highly talented team assembled.
On March 5, he wrote to Matt Jefferies, head of the Art Department, and responsible for designing the Enterprise inside and out:
Dear Matt: I’ve owed you this letter of gratitude for some time. Actually, I’ve been waiting in the hope that the future of Star Trek would firm up and this letter could include a call on your services. We’ll let you know the moment anything definite happens… In the meantime, would like to go on record that your combination of creative imagination and practical set design is entertaining and much of the reputation of the production for class and quality was due to your hard work. Working with you was a rare pleasure for me. Sincerely yours, Gene Roddenberry.
He was also hoping Desilu would agree to partner up with the network and gamble further. On March 19, he sent a note to Jeffrey Hunter, saying:
Strangely enough, network interest continues and it sometimes seems they’re caught in the dilemma of being a little afraid to do something this unusual and equally afraid of letting it drop and get away from them. Good. I like to see executives tormented.
The true intent of the note was not to disrespect the “suits” -- that was just Roddenberry having fun -- but to invite Hunter for a screening of the pilot at Desilu.
After filming had ended, Hunter talked enthusiastically about “The Cage.” In a story for the Los Angeles Citizen News, on January 30, 1965, Joan Schmitt quoted him as saying, “The thing that intrigues me most about the show is it’s actually based on the RAND Corporation’s projection of things to come.... It will almost be like getting a look into the future, and some of the predictions will surely come true in our life-time.”
Hunter could not have known how right he was. The coming of the PC, the Internet, the cell phone, Bluetooth, the sensor-operated automatic opening doors, the MRI and CAT-scan, and even CDs, DVDs and e-books were all envisioned on Star Trek first.
But Hunter’s contract called for his participation in one pilot, not two. There had never been two pilots made for any series, so there had been no reason to specify such a provision. If the pilot sold, Hunter would be locked into a “five-year mission.” If the pilot did not sell, he was free to pursue other interests. It had been a standard arrangement. But it was already becoming clear that there would be nothing standard about Star Trek. For Star Trek: The Inside Story, Herb Solow wrote:
In the eyes of the television world, Star Trek was already a failure. Gene and I waited in the Desilu projection room for [Hunter] to arrive. He never did. Arriving in his stead was actress Sandy Bartlett -- Mrs. Jeffrey Hunter. As the end credits rolled and the lights came up, Jeff Hunter’s wife gave us our answer: “This is not the kind of show Jeff wants to do. And besides, it wouldn’t be good for his career. Jeff Hunter is a movie star.” (161-3)
Also present at the screening was actor John Hoyt, who played Dr. Boyce, the ship’s wise and fatherly medical officer. He, too, was underwhe
lmed and said, “It was really a dog. They spent too much time on unimportant scenes. They had Susan Oliver all painted green, doing a long dance. People at the screening departed in silence afterwards and no one thought Star Trek would come to anything.” (86)
Oscar Katz said, “Business Affairs negotiated with Jeffrey Hunter and we all thought it was the usual actor/network situation -- they don’t want to do it for reason XYZ, and it’s a device for getting the price up. We kept increasing the price and he kept saying no. One day I said, ‘What’s with Jeffrey Hunter?’ and I was told he just won’t do it at any price. Finally I said, ‘Tell Jeffrey Hunter to get lost.’” (96-2)
A short while later, after the trade papers starting talking of a second Star Trek pilot, Hunter told J.D. Spiro for his Milwaukee Journal report, “I was asked to do it, but, had I accepted, I would have been tied up much longer than I care to be.... I love doing motion pictures and expect to be as busy as I want to be in them.”
Sadly, Jeffrey Hunter’s fortunes changed for the worse. By the late 1960s, he was dividing his time between “guest star” appearances on shows like Love, American Style and low-budget films shot outside of the country. In 1969, after completing Super Colt 38, a quickie western filmed in Mexico, Hunter suffered a series of minor strokes. A fall after one stroke resulted in trauma to the head, which led to his untimely death. He was only 42.
These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One Page 14
