In September and October, with the fall TV season, Shatner was seen in five consecutive episodes of 77 Sunset Strip as a recurring character, more segments of The Doctors and Nurses, Alfred Hitchcock, The Defenders, and a second trip into The Twilight Zone, with the famous “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” again written by Richard Matheson. He also made appearances in episodes of Channing, Route 66 and Arrest and Trial, the latter a precursor of Law and Order, with series’ lead Roger Perry, later to be top guest on a Star Trek.
Shatner’s second trip into The Twilight Zone for “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (1963)
Shatner was working relentlessly, gaining attention and respect. He was also earning a fair wage now that episodes of TV series were filmed and repeated rather than aired only once as a live broadcast. But being a professional guest star does not make for a secure future. He later said, “Sooner or later your string of luck is going to give out, and then, if you haven’t saved any money, you’re in trouble.” (166-19)
Reconsidering the pluses and minuses of having his own series, Shatner decided in favor of the steady pay a series could offer. His agent at Ashley-Famous put the word out. In November 1963, Shatner traveled to Utah for the title role in the expensive “Alexander the Great” TV pilot, working under Selig J. Seligman, the creator/producer responsible for the hit ABC series Combat! It was big, it was splashy, it was expensive -- and it was a joke. Even its dynamic star admitted that this “Alexander the Great” lacked greatness, and was little more than “Combat! in drag.” (156-8)
Although a TV series was proving elusive, the successful film roles continued. On the heels of “Alexander the Great,” Shatner flew off to appear in the MGM motion picture The Outrage, starring Paul Newman. Next up in 1964: the Shatners had their third daughter, Melanie.
ABC gets Shatner in space first, for “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” on The Outer Limits (1964, UA TV)
Meanwhile, dad was on the wish-list in the offices of Desilu and NBC regarding casting for the Captain of the Enterprise. Unaware that this thing called Star Trek was even considering him, the busy actor took a prominent guest role in Burke’s Law, followed by an episode of The Outer Limits (“Cold Hands, Warm Heart”), as an astronaut who returns from a trip to Venus with unexplainable problems. That episode also featured yet more Star Trek foreshadowing, with actor Malachi Throne alongside Shatner in the cast.
In November, Shatner appeared with Leonard Nimoy in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. for director Joseph Sargent (later to direct the Star Trek episode “The Corbomite Maneuver”). In December, he appeared on Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater. Already in the can for airing in January 1965, his fifth top-billed guest stint on The Defenders, this time with yet another future Star Trek guest performer: Madlyn Rhue. He was now also filming his first series, For the People, for a mid-season premiere in January.
For the People was another law drama by the producer of The Defenders, with a district attorney as the protagonist this time. On February 2, Daily Variety said:
William Shatner, a youngster with looks and talent... whose dedication to the job is admirable... is the main prop of the series and should hold up his end with the proper support and meaty stories.
The following day, the critic for Weekly Variety added:
In For the People, producer Herb Brodkin has come up with a series which crackles with reality, which focuses on people caught in the storm of crime, and which grabs and holds viewer attention.... William Shatner appealingly [plays] the young assistant district attorney, pinched by a strain of impracticability. He [is] the young man out to become a hero, chopped down to human proportions by outside forces.… It’s a pity that this midseason hour-long replacement is up against NBC-TV’s Bonanza powerhouse. Judging from the pre-em, it deserves a better chance to vie in the network sun.
Terrence O’Flaherty of the San Francisco Chronicle called Shatner “a big new star.” Rick Du Brow of United Press International, wrote, “William Shatner is real hero material and a strong actor, a young veteran.” Win Fanning, for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said, “Shatner is a handsome, exceptionally capable actor who manages to convey exactly the right balance between dedication and the facts of life.” And Hank Grant, for Hollywood Review, added:
Shatner is an unusually fine actor who makes his role a living thing. When he portrays anguish for instance, it’s not scenery-chewing, but the real emotion.
Despite the good notices, the ratings were not supportive. For the People, scheduled not only against Bonanza but opposite the popular ABC Sunday Night Movie, was off the air by May after just 13 episodes. Shatner felt the failure had to do with more than strong competition. He told Dave Kaufman of Daily Variety, “We preached too much. We dealt with subjects such as drug addiction, abortion, crime-in-the-streets, and people don’t want to see these on a week-to-week basis.” (166-12)
Once again, Roddenberry’s bad fortune -- trying to shoot a pilot while the entire TV industry was already in production for the coming fall -- turned out to be good timing. Within days of losing his first series, Ashley-Famous called Shatner with news that he was wanted for the lead in a science fiction pilot. Being a sci-fi enthusiast, Shatner was happy to meet with Roddenberry, who arranged for a screening of “The Cage.” Shatner later said, “I remember as I watched it I was impressed by a number of things -- the green girl, and Leonard, and Majel Barrett as Number One, and I thought it was extremely innovative and extremely inventive.” (156-8)
Finally, Roddenberry had found someone who liked his green-skinned dancing girl. With this, the two men bonded. Producer and actor then discussed how the new Captain should be portrayed. By the end of the day, Shatner agreed to play James Kirk. He was 34. Just as For the People was leaving the CBS prime time schedule, on May 4, 1965, Daily Variety reported:
NBC-TV has okayed production of a second seg of Star Trek, hour-long sci-fi series, and William Shatner will replace Jeffrey Hunter as the lead in this projected series. Web [Variety-speak for network] has also okayed three more scripts and is interested in Trek for a mid-season or 1966-67 start.
“As an actor, Bill was of a higher echelon, and hiring him was really a coup,” casting director Joe D’Agosta said. “Everything he was doing, whether it was on stage, on film or on television, was highly prestigious. I couldn’t believe we got him.” (43-2)
Bob Justman added, “Gene was very happy that he was able to get Bill Shatner. I had worked with Bill on The Outer Limits and he had a good reputation in television. He was someone to be reckoned with and we certainly understood that he was a more accomplished actor than Jeff Hunter was, and he gave us more dimension.... [Hunter] didn’t run the gamut of emotions that Bill Shatner could do.... [Shatner] had enormous technical abilities to do different things and he gave the captain a terrific personality. He embodied what Gene had in mind, which was a flawed hero, or the hero who considers himself to be flawed. Captain Horatio Hornblower.” (94-14)
Shatner’s deal for the pilot was $10,000 (comparable to $75,000 in 2013) plus a contractual guarantee that, should the pilot go to series, he would receive profit sharing -- the same arrangement Jack Lord had asked for, but not as “Lordly” a chunk.
The captain was on board. However, the science officer was considering jumping ship. Like the character of Spock, Leonard Nimoy was experiencing great internal conflict. After the ordeal of making the “The Cage” and the embarrassment over the makeup, he again feared that playing such a character on weekly TV could hurt his career. Like Jeffrey Hunter, Nimoy’s contract allowed for an escape clause. If a series had been ordered, he would have been stuck. But he wasn’t obligated to appear in a second trial run.
Nimoy visited his friend Vic Morrow to discuss the dilemma. Because of Morrow’s attention-grabbing debut as a young hoodlum in Blackboard Jungle, followed by numerous other bad guy roles in popular films like King Creole (making trouble for Elvis Presley) and Cimarron (shooting it out with Glenn Ford), he knew all too well what it meant to be
typecast. It took a concentrated effort between Morrow and his agent to change this, which meant turning down roles, working less and holding out for the parts which might reestablish him as something other than a villain. It was a gamble and took more than a few years to play out, but now the role of Sgt. Chip Saunders on the hit series Combat! had made Morrow famous as a brooding hero.
Morrow considered his friend’s problem and then advised Nimoy to take a chance, to do the second pilot and commit to the series. If Star Trek even sold, it was likely to be cancelled in a year or less, and with all the makeup Nimoy would be wearing it was unlikely he would be recognized as the actor who had played that strange alien on a short-lived TV series. All he really had to worry about was if Star Trek was a hit.
With Nimoy’s new contract, Spock would now be a more important character in the series -- not merely the ship’s Science Officer (as in “The Cage”) but also First Officer, taking over that position from the departing Number One. The promotion also came with a raise -- for the pilot, anyway, his paycheck would be $2,500. The extra money was certainly a factor in Nimoy’s decision. “I was raised in a tenement neighborhood where you couldn’t have a dog,” he said for a 1967 TV Guide article. He added, “The first time I bought a house, I bought a dog.” (128-21)
With the two series’ leads locked in, Roddenberry set about assembling his production people. James Goldstone, 33 at this time, was already slated to direct. He had met Roddenberry on Highway Patrol. Other notches on his director’s chair included dramas in nearly every locale: drama in the courtroom (Perry Mason), drama in the West (Rawhide), drama on wheels (Route 66), drama on the run (The Fugitive), drama with monsters (The Outer Limits) and, working under producer Roddenberry, drama at a boot camp (The Lieutenant). Now he would add a notch for “drama in space.”
Goldstone said, “There had been several problems with ‘The Cage.’ One of them was that it cost so much money and the other was that it took so long to shoot. One of the requisites put on the second pilot was to shoot it in eight days, which would then prove that a weekly series could be done in six or seven days.... The other requisite was that NBC very much wanted something that could be ‘commercial’ against the police shows and all the other action things that were then on television. [This] was not so much a pilot as it was an example of how we could go on a weekly level.” (75-3)
Next, Roddenberry needed a line producer, and it would not be Byron Haskin. Robert Justman had been his first choice for “The Cage” and remained so now. Goldstone, the one who had recommended Justman to Roddenberry in the first place, also wanted him.
This time, knowing that a post-effects company was already in place, Justman agreed to take the more demanding job of associate producer. He said, “I imagine the reason I worked as frequently in television as I did was because I occasionally said no. I tried to never accept a position I was not ready for; not when I knew of someone who was better suited for it. This is why I turned down associate producer on the first pilot. And this is why Gene was so sure he had to have me doing that very job in the second pilot. Sometimes playing hard to get can work out, especially when you’re not so sure you want it to work out. It was going to be a great deal of work. I knew that going in. And I was right.” (94-1)
Stepping in as assistant director was Greg Peters, who knew Justman from The Outer Limits. He was now an employee of Desilu and assistant director on The Lucy Show, and would become an important behind-the-scenes Star Trek production person, eventually advancing to Justman’s job as associate producer. Eddie Paskey, who was soon to join the cast, and referencing Peters’ resemblance to an iconic advertising character, said, “We used to call Greg ‘Mister Clean.’ He was a big man, I mean probably 6’3, and he had a shaved head. He was intimidating to look at, but a very sweet guy.” (135-2)
George Merhoff came aboard, replacing Bob Campbell as gaffer. Merhoff would become very important to the series, in charge of the lighting unit for every episode produced and helping to create the look for Star Trek under the direction of the cinematographer. Prior to this he had only worked as a lighting assistant, known as a “grip.” In that capacity, he served Alfred Hitchcock on Psycho.
Robert Dawn, hired to temporarily replace Fred Phillips, who had a scheduling conflict, was the new head of makeup. Dawn had also worked on Hitchcock’s Psycho, as well as the famous director’s Marnie and TV’s Thriller. His Mister Spock had a look more extreme than the one Phillips designed, with Spock’s eyebrows swept sharply upward and his shorter bangs adding to the stark, alien look of his face. Dawn also added more yellow to Spock’s complexion.
Matt Jefferies, the man who built the Enterprise inside and out was back, “Refurbishing, redesigning, and restructuring.” He said, “The bulk of the sets from the first pilot were set up so that they could only be shot from one angle. We had to broaden those aspects, so that if the second pilot sold, the same sets could work for the series.... That’s when we made them ‘wild,’ but we also had to add more to them, so that they could be shot from a number of different directions. What [is enough] for a pilot is far from adequate for a series. There had been so much money spent, we knew that if it sold they wouldn’t give us anything with which to build additional sets, so we had to make sure the things would work series-wise when we did the second pilot.” (91-7)
Bill Snyder, the director of photography on “The Cage,” had returned to his chores at Disney and would not be available as cinematographer, so Robert Justman immediately checked with the cameramen’s union for a replacement. He was told that the “list was empty” and there were no qualified lead cameraman available. When given this news, Herb Solow was mortified. How was he going to call Mort Werner at NBC and tell him Desilu had so little clout that it couldn’t even find a qualified director of photography in all of Hollywood to shoot their pilot for the network?
Before that call could be made, James Goldstone came to the rescue, again. He knew of someone who was no longer on the union’s active list but would be well worth having. He explained, “I wanted a real old pro, since we were doing some radical things with color, attempting some things that were not conventional. I wanted a cameraman who could deal with depth and things of that kind.” (75-2)
Solow, Roddenberry and Justman knew nothing about the “old pro” Goldstone called in to meet with them. They expected he would bring in his resume. He didn’t. They expected he would be in his 40s or 50s. He wasn’t. In fact, the 69-year-old had recently retired. They expected he knew TV production, but, when asked what shows he had worked on, he said he hadn’t. When asked what experience he did have, the humble reply was, “I did a little thing called Gone with the Wind.”
Ernest Haller had been filming movies since the 1920s, including Captain Blood with Errol Flynn, Dark Victory with Bette Davis and, much later, Rebel Without a Cause with James Dean. Haller had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography six times, for Jezebel (1938), All This and Heaven Too (1940), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Flame and the Arrow (1950), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Lilies of the Field (1963) and that “little thing” called Gone with the Wind, in 1939, for which he took home the Oscar.
Solow, Roddenberry and Justman could never have expected someone of Haller’s status would nonchalantly wander into Desilu, willing to come out of retirement to shoot a mere TV pilot. But he did, as a favor to James Goldstone. The grey-haired Director of Photography who had never done television was hired on the spot. Haller couldn’t have known it, but he was about to go where no cinematographer had gone before.
6
Episode 1: WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE
Written by Samuel A. Peeples
(with Gene Roddenberry, uncredited)
Directed by James Goldstone
Sally Kellerman with William Shatner in NBC press photo (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
NBC press release, issued August 31, 1966:
Gary Lockwood and Sally Kellerman are guest stars in the story of two
spacecraft crew members who are transformed into superior beings following a collision in space on the NBC Television Network colorcast of Star Trek Thursday, Sept. 22. Costarring regulars in this episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” are William Shatner as Captain James Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock. As the first manned spacecraft to venture beyond the limits of the Earth’s galaxy, the U.S.S. Enterprise is severely damaged after passing through the totally strange and unfamiliar elements of an outer galaxy. Not until the craft makes its way to a friendly planet for repairs is it revealed that Lt. Commander Mitchell (Lockwood) and psychiatrist Elizabeth Dehner (Miss Kellerman) are possessed of powers of a master race after their exposure to the new atmosphere.
Mr. Spock becomes convinced that the Captain’s friend, Mitchell, and Dr. Dehner -both of whom possess abnormally high ESP ratings and are rapidly mutating into something more than mere human beings – are increasingly becoming a threat to ship and crew. His recommendation to a resistant Kirk: abandon them on a desolate planet and try to escape the danger they present before it is too late.
In 1966, there was much concern over the ultimate power that was in the hands of a few ambitious men. The episode’s true message lies in a line of Kirk’s: “Beware a god with human frailties.”
SOUND BITES
- Kirk, to Elizabeth Dehner: “You were a psychiatrist. You know the ugly, savage things we all keep buried -- the things none of us dare expose. But he’ll dare! Who can stop him? He doesn’t care. Did you hear him joke about compassion? Above all else, a ‘god’ needs compassion!”
These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One Page 16
