One other change -Roddenberry’s idea to have the creature, while appearing as a black crewman, speak to Uhura in Swahili. De Forest Research provided the actual lines, for which the translation is, “How are you, friend. I think of you, beautiful lady. You should never know loneliness.”
George Clayton Johnson and John D.F. Black have frequently expressed their belief that there could have been more to Star Trek, and in fact there was more to this Star Trek, before Roddenberry’s rewrite. It really comes down to taste. In the end, despite some of the clunky lines of dialogue that Roddenberry added -- about chasing an asteroid, being space happy, and the Great Bird of the Galaxy -- and an ending which is more action-adventure and less tragic, the final shooting script smudged in Roddenberry’s fingerprints is faithful to and certainly as good as the last draft by Johnson. But it is not better.
It was Roddenberry’s version that was sent to NBC, and to good result. Stan Robertson was happy. Still bothered over “The Corbomite Maneuver,” which he believed was a stagnant script, Robertson sent Roddenberry a back-handed compliment, writing:
Dear Gene: This is a superior script because it contains one ingredient which we both realize must be an essential element in our series -- interest. “The Man Trap” locks our interest right from the beginning and, as each succeeding tangent of the plot is exposed, our interest grows and grows. And when we’ve told our story and there is no more, we are left with the same feeling a man has when he’s savored something extra-special. A craving for more, whetted by an appetite which has been stimulated but not satisfied. If we can leave our viewers each week with a feeling of wanting more, we’ll be home free! (ST5-2)
Roddenberry’s rewrite -- his June 16 Final Draft, with additional page revisions from June 17, 18, 20 and 21 -- was more in line with what NBC was asking for, putting emphasis on action/adventure ... with a monster. Johnson’s version had just a bit more heart.
Pre-Production
June 16-17 and June 20-21, 1966, and June 22, for ½ day (4 ½ days prep).
With Marc Daniels in the offices during the six days that Leo Penn filmed “The Enemy Within,” preparation for “The Man Trap” began.
Jeanne Bal, at 38, was cast to play McCoy’s former flame, Nancy Crater. Her work in TV began several years earlier with appearances on Thriller, among other series, and multiple episodes of Perry Mason and Bachelor Father. She also co-starred with William Demarest in a short-lived sitcom Love and Marriage.
Alfred Ryder, as Professor Crater, was a familiar face on TV and in films. He was 50 and, among a hundred jobs, he’d made two visits to The Wild, Wild West and one each to The Outer Limits and One Step Beyond. He played the ghost of a Nazi U-boat captain on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and the leader of the alien invaders on The Invaders. Ryder was also a busy stage actor and director.
Michael Zaslow, 23, played Darnell, the first Enterprise crewman to die at the hands and suction cups of the Salt Vampire. He would return as a crewman with a different name (Jordan) for “I, Mudd.” Zaslow was best known to daytime TV audiences and fans of the soaps where he enjoyed recurring roles on Search for Tomorrow, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, and One Life to Live. His biggest success was as the villainous Roger Thorpe on The Guiding Light from 1971 to 1980. He received numerous Emmy nominations and one win -for Thorpe. His on-screen death was voted the top scene in the series by fans when The Guiding Light celebrated its 50th anniversary. This prompted Thorpe being resurrected and Zaslow returning to the series for another long run -- 1989 through 1997. The gimmick: Thorpe had faked his death and was in hiding for nine years. Thorpe’s “death” may have been bogus on Light, but Zaslow’s character in “The Man Trap” did indeed die, and this was the first time McCoy exclaims the now famous line: “He’s dead, Jim” regarding a crew member (he said “it’s dead” it in the previous episode – “The Enemy Within” – about a dog).
John Arndt played Sturgeon, the second of the three victims of the Salt Vampire on Planet M-113. Despite dying, Arndt, easy to spot with his distinctive looks, returned as a crewman in four more episodes. Arndt worked sporadically in TV for more than two decades. Joe D’Agosta also cast him in a two-part episode of Mission: Impossible.
Bruce Watson, 25, played Green, the third to die on the planet and the crewman whose appearance the creature uses while beaming aboard the Enterprise. Watson worked often in TV and films throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, including two appearances each on Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, and Adam-12.
The Salt Vampire required some creative casting. George C. Johnson said, “When I first saw the costume, it was in Robert Justman’s office, laying over a chair. He said, ‘This costume is not very tall, it’s only about five feet. We’ve hired this little tiny dancer to fit inside of it.’ And I’m saying, ‘Oh no, Bob,’ because I had pictured something like a refugee from a concentration camp, kind of ashen-colored, hair all completely lifeless, gray skin, and tattered gunnysack clothing. I had seen it as something really, really pathetic to look upon, something really sad. And that, for me, had worked in the writing. So now, I’m being faced with this thing with all the teeth. But I must say, the way it photographed, really, the heart goes out to this thing.” (93-1)
Wah Chang was the designer. Sandra Gimpel was the tiny dancer turned stunt performer in the Salt Vampire suit. Johnson said, “She was incredible. She got the whole spirit of the damn thing. For some weird reason, at the end of the show, the creature really did look sad. It had that haunted look, and you thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s like killing a helpless dog or something.’” (93-1)
While Johnson fretted over the salt vampire, Justman worried about the salt shaker called for in the script. Of this, he wrote to John Black:
I think we had better discuss what a salt shaker of the future looks like. Do we have salt shakers a couple hundred years from now? And, if we do, do they look like what we have today? And if they don’t, how can we let the audience know that this device is a salt shaker so that the audience will recognize it every time it comes up in the picture? Because it comes up a number of times. And they had better know it is a salt shaker or else we are in deep trouble. (RJ5-4)
It was Star Trek’s prop man Irving Feinberg’s job to conjure up the salt shaker of the future. He scoured Los Angeles shops looking for the perfect salt-and-pepper set before finding a pair of oddly shaped Swedish chrome-plated shakers. Roddenberry, however, rejected them because, as Justman had worried, they looked too unusual to be recognized for what they were. Some sources say that, with the addition of a small rotating light in the top, Feinberg turned the shakers into McCoy’s pocket scanners. If right, the doctor uses one in this episode while examining Crater. Others say that these salt shakers were converted into McCoy’s laser scalpels, and that his medical scanner was fabricated out of aluminum with the grip coming from a Sears’ Craftsman screwdriver handle.
So what did get used as the futuristic salt shakers? Word has it Feinberg found a set of cheap but stylized plastic ones at J.C. Penney that fit the bill fine.
Production Diary
Filmed June 22 (¼ day), 23, 24, 27, 28, 29 & 30 (¾ day), 1966
(6 day production; total cost: $185,401).
Daniels with Shatner and Jeanne Bal, filming in McCoy’s Quarters on Day 3 (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Wednesday, June 22, 1966. The Beatles had the No. 1 song on U.S. Top 40 stations with “Paperback Writer.” Frank Sinatra was chasing them up the charts with “Strangers in the Night.” You could hear both playing hourly from the A.M. radio in your new Ford Mustang convertible -with a sticker price of $2,600. You could fill that car up for 32 cents a gallon and that got you a smiling service station attendant who would wash your windows, check your oil and add air to your tires. And the cast of Star Trek were arriving at Desilu to begin work on “The Man Trap.”
Due to “The Enemy Within” finishing late, the start of production was delayed until 3:20 p.m.. Marc Daniels, having waited patiently, jumped into four hou
rs of filming on the bridge, keeping the company until 7:10 before releasing the cast to have their makeup removed and the crew to wrap set.
Day 2, Thursday. The first full day of production was also spent on the bridge, with the camera rolling between 8 a.m. and 6:50 p.m. Daniels was one-quarter day behind when he took his last shot. Two scenes had been postponed and would be filmed during production of the next episode -- “The Naked Time.” One was the brief shot in the teaser, of Spock in the command chair and the unusual placement of Lt. Uhura and Lt. Leslie at the helm -- the plot for “The Naked Time” explaining why. With the addition of the Captain’s log entry that opens the episode -- not in the shooting script, but written and recorded later -- Roddenberry felt the audience needed to see Spock on the bridge when Kirk refers to him. He was right.
Day 3. Bill McGovern, with Shatner (hidden behind clapboard), and the Salt Vampire, Sandra Gimpel (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Day 3, Friday, saw the filming of the many corridor shots, as well as the climactic ending in McCoy’s quarters with Sandra Gimpel, the Salt Vampire. A nice touch of direction by Daniels, seen many times in the footage from this day, is how the creature, whether manifesting itself as Nancy, Green, or McCoy, has a tendency to put a hand to its mouth when trying to contemplate its next move, almost appearing to nervously suck on the knuckle of its index finger. This not only helps the audience realize that the character we’re seeing is actually a doppelganger, it also conveys that this “monster” is a living thing that, like us, worries. After stopping the camera at 7 p.m., Daniels was one-third of a day behind.
Beauregard and Grace Lee Whitney (Unaired film trim courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Day 4, Monday, took the production crew into the botany lab, with that shrieking plant Robert Justman was not so sure belonged in this story, and looked more like a man’s hand in a pink floral glove. The hand, by the way, belonged to Bob Baker, a famed maker of marionettes who had his own theater in downtown Los Angeles.
Day 4: Filming in the briefing room (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Next: the briefing room and then sickbay. It was here where we first see that Vulcans have green blood... almost. Marc Daniels said, “The green blood was my idea. If Spock was going to have a yellow complexion, he ought to have green blood.” (44-2)
The green blood on Spock’s forehead is very subdued and can easily be missed. There is even a little red mixed in. The film developing lab was again trying to right a wrong, as they had done with the green-skinned dancing girl from “The Cage.” This time, their tinkering was allowed to get by. Daniels said, “I think Gene thought that idea [of green blood] was going too far.” (44-2)
Daniels took his last shot at 7:15. He was back to being a quarter day behind.
Day 5, Tuesday, was spent on Stage 10 with the set for the “Interior Living Quarters” of Professor Crater and his “wife.” Daniels had caught up to the original schedule and finished only 30 minutes late, at 6:45 p.m.
Day 6, Wednesday, was also spent on Stage 10, this time on the outdoors set. George C. Johnson had made some specific requests for the look of planet M113. His note read:
This is the only exterior set in the script and will be used a number of times so give me a real creepy alien environment here, please. It is a limited set and can be built on a stage for a grand effect.... The terrain is desert but let it be layered in great slab surfaces like tilted and heaped tiles. The few sparse growths jag up like drunken lightning. Come on, fellows. Nobody else has ever tried a green sky! [I] know this end of it is none of my business but if I was only interested in things that were my business I’d be a pretty dull fellow. (GCJ5)
Bill McGovern, with slate, and the boxes and gummite (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Cinematographer Jerry Finnerman, with his colored gels, chose instead to give the desert planet a “dreamsicle” orange sky. Otherwise, Johnson got what he wanted in this regard -- no other science fiction production had ever presented an alien world with such a striking unearthly atmosphere. As for the ground and sparse vegetation, it didn’t turn out exactly as Johnson had described, but he didn’t mind. He later said, “The ancient ruins and all of that stuff that was there, that was just a corner of the sound stage. A bunch of boxes caked together to form a structure and then covered with gummite -- like you would for a swimming pool. They would take this wet concrete and spray it over the outside of these cardboard boxes to make this weird looking, broken up temple. And it really worked well against the painted sky.” (93-1)
Daniels remained on schedule, although running a bit late in the evening with his last shot at 6:40 p.m.
Day 7, Thursday, June 30. Four more hours were spent on Stage 10, finishing sequences needed for the “Ext. Excavation” set before a noon time move back to Stage 9 to get additional camera coverage in the sickbay. Daniels wrapped at 2:55 p.m., essentially on schedule, considering his 3:30 p.m. start six production days prior.
Post-Production
July 1 through August 29, 1966.
Music score recorded on August 19, 1966.
Even though production had wrapped, the writing hadn’t. Justman sent Roddenberry a memorandum, saying:
After viewing “The Man Trap” with Sandy Courage this afternoon, I am of the opinion that we need narration for the opening of the teaser. The teaser starts out with a shot of the Enterprise orbiting about a planet and then we dissolve from that to an establishing shot of planet surface and then from that to a shot of Kirk and his companions materializing on the surface of that planet. These three shots take quite a bit of time on the screen. And since this is liable to be our first or second show on the air, I think it would be wise to establish where we are and what we are doing over these shots. (RJ5-7)
Roddenberry’s response: “RJ, Agree. Am writing it.”
Composer Alexander Courage, heralded by Roddenberry for his work on the two pilot films, strayed from the action-adventure-type music requested and turned in a moody and eerie score, gaining much of its flavor from electronic keyboards, electric violin and other techniques designed to give the music otherworldliness. Roddenberry hated it.
On August 24, with less than a week left before the NBC’s delivery deadline, Roddenberry sent a letter to William Hatch, head of Desilu’s Music Department. He wrote:
The music for ‘The Man Trap’ was most disappointing. It was ethereal, very science-fiction-ish, if not outright fantasy in quality, often very, very grating on the nerves, as it whined on and on. Was this a failure in communication? Or are we in trouble with a composer who will not, or is unable, to follow the expressed format directions of the producer? (GR5)
Of the series theme song, recorded the same day and also written by Courage, Roddenberry added:
I like the theme. If the music had followed that direction, we would have been well off. (GR5-2)
Interviewed in 1982, Roddenberry said, “My feeling was this -- that for the first time on television, I was going to have situations and life forms that were totally unlike what the audience was accustomed to. And I thought, my God, I had better keep as many things as possible very understandable to my audience. I was afraid that if, on top of bizarre alien seascapes, I had beep-beep-beep music, then I would be in trouble. And so I wanted music that said adventure, courage, boldness -- all the things we talked about, as a matter of fact, in the opening words of, you know, ‘To boldly go,’ and so on…. I wanted very Earthlike, romantic music. Almost -- and I think I used the term with Sandy [Courage] -- Captain Blood; a seagoing feeling of adventure; human adventure. And he responded, and seemed to understand, and seemed to be enthusiastic to do it. Music, to me, is where the inner you – your guts and so on – come in contact with a show.” (145-25)
Howard Anderson Company provided the optical effects. Of the first batch of episodes to be filmed, “The Man Trap” took the least amount of time in post -- two months instead of three to six. As it turned out, fewer new optical effects were needed for this episode than most and the cost f
or those was therefore kept on the low side -- only $8,680. The price paid in stress and sweat, however, was much higher -- with delays (detailed later) jeopardizing not just other photographic effects, but entire episodes.
Since it was now known that either this episode or “Charlie X” -- the only two episodes ready, other than the second pilot film -- would be the first to air, Roddenberry arranged for the opening title credit on both episodes to read “Created by Gene Roddenberry.” After these two programs, and some pressure from the studio, his name did not appear in the opening title sequence ... until the next season, when this became the norm.
“The Man Trap” came in $8,099 under the studio per-episode allowance, for a total cost of $185,401.
Release / Reaction
Only NBC air date: 9/8/66.
The network premiere on September 8, 1966, was an anxious night for many of the series’ writers. Richard Matheson and Jerry Sohl, with their wives, joined George Clayton Johnson at his home to watch the premiere. Also in attendance were Charles Beaumont, one of the regular writers for The Twilight Zone, and William F. Nolan, Johnson’s collaborator on Logan’s Run.
These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One Page 34
