Here: Restraint is necessary here so the sight of the boy creature will not alarm or shock the viewer; please avoid the objectionably grotesque in general appearance and makeup.... here: Caution on the sight of the dead boy creature; avoid seeing the open eyes.... Page 24: Please use restraint here and throughout the script to be sure the blemishes are not unnecessarily gruesome to the viewer.... Page 44: As above, caution on the sight of the dead girl creature.... Page 62: Caution here where Janice opens her uniform to check on the progress of the disease; avoid exposure which would embarrass or offend. (BS11)
And on and on.
John D.F. Black wouldn’t be making further changes. His final draft was truly final -- the day of its delivery, Friday, August 12, was Black Friday at Star Trek. Black’s contract was up and he would be leaving the series (more on this later). “Dagger of the Mind” was now in its fourth day of production, with two more days planned for the following week. “Miri” was scheduled to go before the cameras after that, bright and early on Wednesday morning, August 17. But the script needed a rewrite and Roddenberry didn’t have another one left in him. Including “Miri,” there were six episodes remaining in NBC’s order of 16, and it was clear now that Star Trek needed a new producer.
Help arrived a few days earlier, which, as it would turn out for the planned filming of “Miri,” was a few days too late. Gene Coon came into Desilu to sign a contract on Monday, August 8. He would take over as producer starting with the filming of “Miri,” allowing Roddenberry to work a little less obsessively from the chair of the Executive Producer.
Coon spent the balance of the week getting a crash course on Star Trek, a series that had yet to broadcast a single episode. On the weekend, he did his rewrite of “Miri,” bringing his cut-and-paste revised final draft in on Monday.
The overall structure and much of the dialogue was already in place, thanks to Black’s latest polish. But in Black’s draft, Miri knows her days are numbered right from the start. Jahn (Michael J. Pollard’s character) knows he is close to becoming a victim of the disease, as well. Information comes to the landing party quickly and easily, especially in the first act. For example, when the landing party encounters Miri and she first refers to them as “grups,” Spock asks, “What are they?” She immediately answers, “You should know -you’re all grups.” She says she is afraid because grups always hurt others. Spock asks her what it is the grups do? She answers, “What did they ever do in their silly buildings?... Especially the science ones ... mixing things ... making pill things.” She then tells them that the grups all died. McCoy asks, “The children didn’t?” She says, “Of course, the onlies didn’t die.” Kirk and the others look confused and ask if the creature who attacked them outside was a grup. She says, “He became one.... You know, when things happen to an onlie ... the way it’s starting to happen to me.... That’s why I can’t hang around with my friends anymore -the minute one of us starts changing, the rest get ... afraid.... Like the boy outside ... I used to play with him.... Now, pretty soon, I’ll be like him ... first, those awful marks on your skin ... then trying to hurt anybody you see.”
It goes on like this. Too much, too soon, too few mysteries left to solve, resulting in too many redundant beats later. Miri even knows how long it’s been since the grups died, and tells Kirk and company, “Three hundred years -- the onlies mark down all the hots and colds at a secret place.” And now this is one more thing Kirk and his people don’t need to figure out on their own.
This exchange of information through dialogue, mostly between Kirk and Miri, is much more effective in Coon’s rewrite. This is not to say the writing is better -- Adrian Spies lived up to his reputation of being a gifted screenwriter, and John Black’s polish gives Spies’ script the Star Trek stamp -- but the drama is greater in Coon’s reworking of the script, when Kirk forces Miri to admit that she has the disease, making her look at her own arm and see the beginning of a blemish, then pulling the sobbing girl to him and holding her tight. It is more endearing when he asks her, in a rhetorical question, if she ever wonders why she doesn’t spend as much time with the other onlies, and then gives her the answer, telling her it is because she is becoming a woman. The Enterprise people are played smarter by having them figure out what the words “grups” and “onlies” mean on their own, instead of having Miri flat out tell them. Coon’s rewrite is a prime example of small changes making big differences.
As proven again and again by the documents preserved in the series’ files stored at UCLA, the Star Trek creative staff was obsessively driven to make every script -- every episode -- as good as they could possibly be, within the limits of time, budget and censorship.
Mimeographed copies of Coon’s rewrite were distributed on Tuesday, August 16, the day before “Miri” was scheduled to begin principal photography -- at 1 p.m., since “Dagger of the Mind” was running a half day behind. It was enough of a rewrite to require network clearance, however, and production of “Miri” had to be pushed back. For the first time at Star Trek, cast and production crew were sent home for an unplanned paid holiday. Desilu Stages 9 and 10 went dark.
Pre-Production
(Director’s prep: August 18 & 19; total 2 days)
Matt Jefferies and his people now had until Monday -- five days away, counting the weekend -- to build their sets for “Miri.”
Tom Gries, who had produced the science fiction movie Donovan’s Brain and also directed numerous episodes each of Science Fiction Theater, Route 66, and Stoney Burke, was the last of the nine directors Gene Roddenberry signed in early May to handle one Star Trek episode each. Gries had been slated for “Miri,” but, as had been the case with Bernard Kowalsky during the period in which “The Naked Time” was planned and filmed, he had a scheduling conflict. The well-regarded director could not be blamed; it was Star Trek that had fallen behind, resulting in the changing of production dates. A decision was quickly made to hold Vincent McEveety over from “Dagger of the Mind,” giving him only two days instead of the normal six for pre-production.
Gene Coon had until Monday to get notes from the network and feedback from Roddenberry and Justman and do the final polish of the script, with revised pages flying from his typewriter on August 17, 18 and, even as the cameras began to roll, on August 22.
McEveety said, “I thought it was a very involved script, and it was tough putting it together so quickly. I think they cast the quirky guy [Michael J. Pollard] unbeknownst to me, because they wanted to get him and they had to make a deal with him fast or lose him to another job. But Miri herself I was involved in. I just looked at film; she didn’t come in to interview. She had decent film and we were in enough of a hurry, because I never met her personally until we began making it, which is why I had no way of knowing what to expect -good and bad.”
Kim Darby, in a captivating performance, was the shy, love-struck Miri. She was 18 playing 14. Starting in 1963, small roles on television quickly grew to substantial ones as she proved her abilities on Dr. Kildare, Mr. Novak, and The Fugitive. She moved to the big screen and worked with James Doohan in 1965's Bus Riley’s Back in Town. In 1969, she would have second billing to John Wayne in True Grit, and would share top billing with William Shatner in The People, a 1972 sci-fi thriller.
Michael J. Pollard, actor’s headshot, circa 1966 (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Joe D’Agosta said, “Kim Darby was a real coup for us because she was an actress who could do very odd parts. Opposed to Sherry Jackson, who had something else, a kind of sexual heat that looked accessible, Darby delivered these victim-like characters with such ease.... Because it was Star Trek, and the nature of the show, the nature of the kinds of roles, we were able to get her interested.” (43-1)
Michael J. Pollard, as Jahn, was 27 but was also playing 14. Pollard’s big break came in 1958 when Bob Denver, who played beatnik Maynard G. Krebs in TV’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was drafted into the Army. Pollard was brought in to replace Denver as Maynard’s weird cousin Je
rome Krebs. It was a short stay. Denver flunked out of the armed services as 4-F and returned to Gillis. Pollard’s character was quickly written out, but the exposure helped catapult the oddball personality into other TV and film jobs. In 1965, Pollard played another teenager in “The Magic Mirror,” a surprisingly somber and charming episode of Lost in Space. Next came a scene-stealing performance in Carl Reiner’s big screen 1966 comedy The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming. And he was already being considered by Warren Beatty for a prominent role in the 1967 mega-hit Bonnie & Clyde, for which he would receive a Golden Globe nomination and an Oscar nod, both in the category of Best Supporting Actor. (He was in good company; Gene Hackman was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor in that film.)
D’Agosta said, “Michael was one of a kind. You either loved him or hated him, because he was so, for the lack of a better term, quirky. Odd. But interesting; unique. He brought that same performance to every job he did.” (43-4)
McEveety said, “When you’re dealing with actors, any actors, you never know what you’re going to come up with. I mean, they can be the sweetest guy in the world on screen and yet they’re next to impossible when you meet them and attempt to work with them. He [Pollard] is a very quirky fellow. But, after a while, you don’t care how quirky actors are as long as they hit their mark and remember their lines. In his case, he could play it any way he chose because that was the character that they [the writer/producers] envisioned. They wanted that quirkiness and that nuttiness. So it was a very strange take on the character, but by an actor who was absolutely professional.” (117-4)
Cast as the “onlies”: Darlene and Dawn Roddenberry were the ones on set who got to call Gene Roddenberry “daddy.” Steven McEveety was the nephew of the director. Leslie and Lisabeth Shatner were the star’s daughters. And Scott and Jonathan Whitney were the sons of Grace Lee Whitney.
Proud mother recalled, “Jonathan and Scott were 7 and 9. They were the kids who stole the communicators in the show, so we [the landing party] couldn’t get back to the Enterprise. They sent a limo for all the kids, since their day would be shorter than ours. I was driving my Buick, and the kids were in front of me in the limo, and Jonathan and Scott were up in the back window waving at me as we were going down the freeway -- at four in the morning.” (183-6)
The old-pro child actors in “Miri” included John Megna, the toothy “bop, bop on your head” kid. He was the brother of singer/actress Connie Stevens. If he looks familiar, watch 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird. In that movie, his character Dill was based on writer Harper Lee’s childhood friend Truman Capote.
Phil Morris was the son of Greg Morris of Mission: Impossible. This Morris would return to Star Trek as Cadet Foster in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, then as a Klingon Commander and a Ramata Klan warrior in two episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and as Lt. John Kelly in Star Trek: Voyager. Elsewhere, he played Grant Collier, the son of Barney Collier, the character his father played in Mission: Impossible, for that series’ revival run from 1988 to 1990. But today he’s best known for his role as the lawyer Jackie Chiles in several episodes of Seinfeld.
Ed McCready played Boy Creature in one of five Star Trek appearances. He would be seen again most noticeably, as the barber in “Specter of the Gun.”
Jim Goodwin returned as Lt. Farrell, his third and final Trek appearance, this time sitting at communications. John D.F. Black had helped to get Goodman onto Star Trek, but now that Black was exiting, Lt. Farrell would lose his place on the bridge.
John Arndt was back, now as one of the two red-shirted security guards among the landing party. He was given the name Fields here, for one of his four Star Trek appearances. Prior to this, he played Sturgeon in “The Man Trap,” one of the victims of the Salt Vampire.
David Ross joined the cast as “Security Guard 1,” the other red-shirted crewman in the landing party. This was the first of eight appearances.
McEveety managed to complete his preparations by the end of Friday. When he returned to the studio on Monday morning, he had a leg in a cast, the result of a home accident (not a skiing accident as other sources have stated -- McEveety told this author he was accident prone and had never been skiing in his life). The accident-prone director proceeded to call the shots from a wheelchair.
Production Diary
Filmed August 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29 & 30, 1966
(Planned as 6 day production; finished 1 day behind; total cost: $206,815).
Ed McCready with Nimoy and Shatner, NBC publicity photo (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Monday, August 22, 1966. The Beatles arrived in New York City to play Shea Stadium before 44,000 screaming fans. Yesterday … and Today was still top album in the nation. Lunar Orbiter 1, launched by the United States one week earlier, took the first photograph of Earth from the Moon. The space race, in full swing, saw the USSR launch Luna 11 to the Moon. And, on Stage 10, the Star Trek company launched something of its own --“Miri,” for scenes inside Miri’s house, including the closet where she hid from Kirk and his crew. McEveety rolled film from 8 a.m. to 7:06 p.m., into overtime but ending on schedule.
Day 2. Tuesday was spent on Stage 9 where many of the Enterprise sets had been collapsed to make room for the interior of the laboratory and its surrounding corridors. No children were needed this day, only the series regulars with the two adults playing age 14.
Kim Darby recalled, “I was just 18 and it was the first time I didn’t have to have a guardian or a teacher.” (45a)
McEveety felt that he was cast in the role of Darby’s “guardian,” certainly more so than her director. He said, “While Michael J. Pollard was an absolute professional, the opposite was true of Kim Darby. She was extremely strange. She had a neurotic and very, very bipolar kind of personality. She’d do a scene and I was happy with her performance -very happy, I thought she was wonderful in that respect -- and then she’d go off and cry like a baby afterwards. I’d never know why and, after a while, I didn’t care. Total emotional nonsense.” (117-4)
Perhaps, like the character she played, Darby was in love. She later admitted, “I always fell in love with my leading man.” Admitting that Shatner was no exception, she added, “He was great to work with. He was extremely professional and right on target and he was completely there for me in [each] scene.” (45a)
Aerial view of Desilu 40 Acres, Culver City, CA, circa 1966. Clockwise, from center: town of Mayberry (The Andy Griffith Show), Civil War era train station (Gone With the Wind), western street (Rango), Arabian village (“The Cage,” “Errand of Mercy”), Camp Henderson (Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.), Stalog 13 (Hogan’s Heroes), and farm set.
Shatner wasn’t bothered by the schoolgirl crush aimed in his direction, but McEveety, responsible for keeping the production on schedule, had no time for such teenage behavior. He said, “Things like that would slow down the production, because we were trying to move so quickly and there was little time for actresses going off to have a good cry. We were trying to do these in six days, and those were impossible schedules. You worked very late at night and very hard to accomplish it. But she was really off the wall at that time. Getting that type of performance was not difficult because it seemed to be a natural for her. What was difficult was the way she reacted to everything.” (117-4)
Filming on the streets of Mayberry (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Filming stopped at 6:35, on schedule, despite the teardrops on set.
Crewmember Bill McGovern, facing Nimoy, Shatner, Kelley, and Rand (Color image available at www.startrekhistory.com and www.startrekprtopauthority.com)
Day 3, Wednesday. The company traveled to Desilu Culver “40 Acres” for the exterior street sequences. Formerly “RKO 40 Acres” and situated in Culver City, the backlot once belonged to Selznick Studios and had been the location for the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind, as well as the home of Tara, the Southern mansion. In 1966, it served Desilu well for the outdoor filming of numerous television series. Camp Henderson from Gome
r Pyle, U.S.M.C. was located here, as was Stalag 13 from Hogan’s Heroes. This was also the site of Mayberry, as seen in The Andy Griffith Show, and it is this location that serves as Miri’s world. As the Enterprise landing party walk the streets of Mayberry, with buildings appearing abandoned and desolated, Sheriff Taylor’s Court House can be seen in the background, as well as the town’s bank and Floyd’s barber shop.
Cast and crew filmed until 7:05, beating the summer sunset by half-an-hour.
Days 4 and 5 brought the company back to Desilu and Stage 9 for additional shooting in the government labs, this time with the children ... and a social worker to watch over them.
Final appearance by Jim Goodwin as Lt. Farrell (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Lisabeth Shatner remembered the day she and her sister arrived for their first acting job. She said, “[Leslie] accompanied me to the makeup room to visit dad. When we walked into the room, he was sitting in the makeup chair, his back to us. We ran forward, excitedly, relieved to see his familiar outline. When he turned towards us, I caught a glimpse of his arm and saw the skin on the inside of his elbow was covered with a long, bluish-red scab! I blanched, and my dad burst out laughing, and told us to touch the sore. It was made of rubber. At that moment, I realized everything was ‘pretend.’ Once I understood, I relaxed.” (155a)
The camera stopped rolling at 7:10 p.m., allowing the crew to wrap set before 8. Like most days, cast and crew had been working in excess of 12 hours.
Day 6. Monday brought the company back to Stage 10 where the classroom interiors and toy store had been built. The children and their social worker spent another six hours -the maximum allowed by law -- on the set. McEveety, slowed by children, shot until 6 p.m., finishing three-quarters of a day behind.
Day 7. Tuesday, August 30 was the seventh full day of filming, again on Stage 10 for more sequences with the children. After the kids were sent home, the company moved back to Stage 9 to film the opening and ending of the episode on the ship’s bridge, as well as the scenes featuring Lt. Farrell manning communications. There was a memo awaiting McEveety from Roddenberry. It said:
These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One Page 49
