[Regarding] Kirk’s voiceover during battle -- obvious why you had to go this direction. Good voiceover; well handled. But let’s discuss a couple other possibilities, i.e., a) the Gorn can speak English after some effort, b) Kirk and the Gorn try to communicate, fail, but attempt breaks up some of the possible monotony of voiceover, c) the Enterprise bridge personnel are shown the battle on the screen and their spoken comments, their excited suggestions to the unhearing Captain far below, does what our voiceover has been doing for us. (GR18)
Robert Justman had notes for Coon, as well, writing:
As I started to bring out the other day, having had some experience with ambulatory creatures [on The Outer Limits], you must realize that whatever creature we use with a stunt man inside of it will necessarily have a certain limitation as to physical movement. For instance, undoubtedly the creature won’t be able to move faster than a normal walking pace, and that only for a very short distance…. Another problem that I have had in the past… is that when you see one of these creatures full figure, it is apparent that there is a man inside no matter how clever you have been in disguising it…. In scenes 80, 81 and 82, Kirk delivers some Narration over action. I think this would be a good time to sell in dialogue the fact that the injury caused by the rock striking his leg has slowed him down to such an extent, that he is doubly vulnerable to the Gorn. His mobility has been cut down quite a bit and he certainly cannot get around with sufficient speed to continually escape the Gorn. (RJ19)
NBC Broadcast Standards had their own notes. Jean Messerschmidt wrote: Page 1: Please keep to a minimum the number of bodies seen in the destroyed area. Page 2: Caution on the makeup used on the wounded Lt. Harold [the survivor of the alien attack], so that his injuries are not unduly alarming. here: Caution on the death by ray of the Security Guard, so that his disintegration is not grotesque. here: I assume Dr. McCoy will be using your air-hiss device for the injection; if the needle-type is used, please do not show this on camera. Page 28: Please use restraint when filming the results of the sudden stop [of the Enterprise] so that the action of being thrown to the floor and the pain is not unnecessarily alarming. Page 32: Please make sure there is nothing offensive in the Gorn’s appearance. Page 46: I realize the necessity of establishing that the spear cannot penetrate the Gorn’s hide, but please be especially cautious when filming this sequence. (NBC B.S. 19-1)
The body count was reduced; the radiation burns on Lt. Harold toned-down; and Kirk’s attempt to penetrate the Gorn’s hide with a spear was struck from the script. As for the “death by ray” that frightened Jean Messerschmidt, the script played it like this: “EXT. ANGLE ON LANG AMONG RUINS, slithering forward, his phaser ready, careful. He comes around a pile of rubble, looks out, reacts in what is plainly shock and revulsion. He picks up his communicator, flips it open. Alarm and distaste are written all over his face. He says, ‘Lang to Captain!... I see them! Captain, they’re...’ As he says his last word, a ray SLASHES INTO FRAME, catching him squarely. He throws up his hands, freezes, glows red, disappears.” Coon took all this out and replaced it with a line of dialogue from Crewman Kelowitz, reporting to Kirk, “They got Lang, sir.”
These changes, among others, constituted Coon’s Final Draft script, from October 28. He had wanted to make an impression on Fredric Brown. This was the draft sent to the famed writer.
Brown liked what he read and a deal was made on November 2, giving the sci-fi author both money and screen credit, as “story by.”
Later that day, more notes arrived from the ever-fastidious Kellam de Forest (or his staffers, Joan Pearce and Peter Sloman). And this meant more changes for Coon’s script. Regarding the two space vessels being forced to stop suddenly, de Forest Research said:
The stresses of a sudden stop in space from warp speed would cause the ship to disintegrate. Any object inside the ship that was not a part of the structure, including the crewmen, would continue traveling at warp speeds right through the hull. These are the “impossible” things that should be commented on. (KDF19-2)
Concerning Kirk’s makeshift cannon, described in the script as “a hollow shaft about three feet long, three or four inches across the mouth,” with Kirk “thrashing his arm down it,” de Forest wrote:
It would be difficult for Mr. Shatner to get his arm down a tube of this size. Suggest he poke inside with another stick.... That this primitive cannon would fire and not blow up would be more believable if Kirk did something to strengthen the bamboo tube, either binding sticks to the outside, or slipping two pieces together, or inside the other. (KDF19-2)
There were many more notes -- many pages worth -- not uncommon from de Forest Research. Coon went along with the ideas about the cannon. He had Kirk wrap it in vines to help shore up the makeshift weapon. And then he had the cannon blow up anyway, knocking Kirk back and momentarily stunning him, as it sends out a blast of diamond missiles into the Gorn. But Coon wasn’t going to lose his “sudden stop” in space. Sulu reports the situation, saying, “It’s impossible.” Kirk goes one further, telling Sulu, “From Warp 8? Have you lost your mind?” As far as Coon was concerned, that was enough -- impossible for us to understand and accomplish, not so for the Metrons.
Two sets of page revisions soon followed, as “Arena” sped toward production, passing by many other scripts which had been in development for months. This was the shortest trek that any episode in the series had taken from story outline to final shooting script. And the results were outstanding.
Under Gene Coon’s guidance, Star Trek was rapidly becoming faster-paced. Coon felt that Star Trek could remain adult and, at the same time, be a bit more fun. Care, however, was still taken to keep the series believable. To this end, it was agreed among the creative staff that the Gorn would not speak English. Instead, to honor a suggestion made by Roddenberry, a translator device was introduced to allow the two combatants to communicate.
“Arena” was the first episode to refer to the Earth space alliance as the “Federation,” a contribution from Coon. The script for the upcoming “A Taste of Armageddon,” having been around for a while and going through various revisions by Coon, would be more specific, identifying the alliance as The United Federation of Planets. “Arena” was also the episode which introduced the photon torpedoes, another Gene Coon invention.
Pre-Production
October 28 & October 31, and November 1-4 & November 7, 1966 (7 days prep).
“Joseph Pevney was an ex-actor turned director,” Robert Justman shared. “Some former actors became good directors; some former actors became directorial hacks. Pevney was the former. [He was] more than just ‘good.’ He directed ‘Arena.’” (94-8)
Bill Blackburn, one of the men to take a turn inside the Gorn suit, said, “My favorite director, who I absolutely adored, was Joe Pevney. He was outgoing, and kind of typical ‘old show business.’ He was fun. And he wasn’t a ‘yeller.’” (17a)
Jerry Finnerman had great respect and fondness for Pevney, as well. But his first impression, and the beginning of their association with one another, was not good. Finnerman said, “The first time I met Joe he said to me, in front of Production, ‘How fast are you?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m fast, and we’re going to get this show done on schedule.’ Like the cameraman is holding it up! Okay. So I thought, ‘I’ll get this sonofabitch.’” (63-3)
Finnerman was becoming more confident and less willing to be intimidated. After his recent experience with Marc Daniels on “Court Martial” and “The Menagerie,” where the director struck Finnerman as “pushy,” Star Trek’s gifted Director of Photography was determined not to be pushed around.
Ted Cassidy, hired to provide the voice of the Gorn, had also been the voice of Balok’s alter-ego in “The Corbomite Maneuver.” He was seen in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” as Ruk.
Vic Perrin provided the voice for the Metron. This was his first job with Star Trek, although many sources wrongly credit him as being involved in two previo
us episodes. Gene Coon and Joe D’Agosta knew exactly who they wanted: Perrin -- the “Control Voice” from The Outer Limits. Perrin later returned to do more voiceover work for Star Trek (“The Changeling”) and appeared on camera in “Mirror, Mirror.”
Carole Shelyne as a Metron male (Unaired film trim courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Carole Shelyne played the boyish-looking Metron. She was working regularly on Shindig!, and followed this with a recurring role as Fanny on Here Come the Brides. Star Trek had cast a woman to play an alien man before, in “The Cage,” looping in a male voice. It worked again here -- beautifully.
Jerry Ayres, 30, played Ensign O’Herlihy, the crewman in the red shirt who dies on the planet, the result of a disintegration beam. He would be resurrected to play Ensign Rizzo in “Obsession,” where he again donned a red shirt and, again, perished.
Grant Woods, 34, was the blue-shirted member of the landing party. This was his second of three episodes. Woods and his character Kelowitz were last seen in “The Galileo Seven.” Still ahead: “This Side of Paradise.”
Tom Troupe, at 38, played Lt. Harold (also referred to as Lt. Hadley in early drafts of the script), the sole survivor of the attack on Cestus III. Troupe worked often on television. He had just played doctors for episodes of Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare and The Fugitive, as well as a medic on Combat!
Sean Kenney (sitting) as Lt. DePaul (Unaired film trim courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Sean Kenney, who resembled Jeffrey Hunter enough to win the role as the crippled Captain Pike in “The Menagerie,” made his first of two appearances as Lt. DePaul, the navigator on the bridge. Next for DePaul: “A Taste of Armageddon.”
Wah Chang, responsible for the monsters on The Outer Limits, designed the Gorn costume.
Stuntman Bobby Clark began his relationship with Star Trek here, as the man who spent the most time in the Gorn suit (Gary Combs alternated, with Bill Blackburn taking a few brief turns for pickup shots). Of the casting, Joe Pevney said, “I talked Roddenberry into using a stuntman. An actor would have been worn out in nothing flat, and I would not have been able to get enough footage without building a fan into the suit. I said, ‘We’d better get a guy accustomed to roughing it out there,’ somebody who would be able to go without water for the length of time in order to get enough footage, or we’d be stopping all the time to allow someone to put the suit on and take it off, over and over.” (141-3)
Another Wah Chang contribution to Star Trek -- the Gorn (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)
Bobby Clark remembered, “Joe Pevney called me and he says, ‘Bobby, I got a good job for you. Are you busy such and such?’ I says, ‘No, I’m just working on the ranch here.’ He says, ‘Good. It’s really a nice part; you don’t have a whole lot of dialogue in it but it requires some physical stuff that I know you’re capable of doing, so I want you to go to Desilu and go to the wardrobe man and he’ll handle you for the costume.’ I said, ‘Well, what am I suppose to do in this?’ And he says, ‘I don’t have time to tell you now; just go and get into your wardrobe.’ And that was it. So I go to Desilu and into wardrobe and I said, ‘I’m Bobby Clark and I’m here for a fitting for Star Trek, whatever that is.’ And the guy there says, ‘Okay, yeah, we’re expecting you, Bobby. Go into dressing room whatever number.’ So I go in and there is a curtain to close behind me, which I do, and there’s a rack, which is suppose to have my wardrobe on it. And there’s all this strange stuff on it but nothing that I can see that I’m suppose to put on, so I yelled out, ‘Hey, there’s no wardrobe in here for me!’ The guy yells back, ‘It should be in there, Bobby.’ I yell out, ‘There’s no wardrobe in here’ So he comes in and points to the stuff on the rack and says, ‘That’s your wardrobe.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, what is it?’ He says, ‘It says here on our sheet that you’re doing the Gorn.’ I says, ‘The Gorn? What’s a Gorn?’ He says, ‘It’s that thing in front of you.’ Well, how was I to know; I’d never watched Star Trek. I watched the shows I was doing -- westerns! So I put it on, which was no easy thing. It was all rubber. It was a base wet suit and then they put all those muscles and shit on top of it, and then the gauntlets for the hands and the big feet on top of tennis shoes. The feet were maybe 16, 17 inches long. And then a tunic went on, and the hood over that. If I wanted to see down I’d have to lower my head, because I could only see what was right in front of me. Well, I suppose that’s why Joe Pevney didn’t have time to tell me what the part was.” (31e)
Production Diary
Filmed November 8, 9, 10, 11, 14 & 15, 1966
(6 day production; total cost: $197,586).
Production began on November 8, 1966, a Tuesday. This was election day across America. Edward W. Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, became the first Black elected to the United States Senate. And movie actor Ronald Reagan was elected as Governor of California. The two top selling albums in record stores were the soundtrack to Dr. Zhivago and the début of The Monkees. Songs getting the most radio play across the Nation were “Last Train to Clarksville,” by the Monkees, “96 Tears,” by Question Mark & the Mysterians, and “Poor Side of Town,” by Johnny Rivers. The Monkees TV series was a winner, too, according to A.C. Nielsen. It held the top-spot for its time period on NBC the night before, grabbing 31.4% of the TVs in use across the country. The big winners for that Monday night, however, were Desilu’s own Lucille Ball, who’s Lucy Show attracted a 43.1 audience share at 9 p.m., and Barbara Stanwyck, over at ABC, whose one-hour western, The Big Valley, had the 10 to 11 p.m. slot locked up, with a 43.4 audience share, at its peak. Odds were most of the Star Trek cast and crew were “hitting the hay” before The Big Valley cleared the air. They all had an early morning call.
Makeup went to work at 6:15 a.m. The lighting and camera crew were on set a little past 7. Filming started at 8. Joseph Pevney chose to do the easy stuff first, starting with the bridge set on Stage 9. There were many sequences to film, including that sudden stop in space that Broadcast Standards was worried might alarm the audience.
Pevney, having been offered a $500 bonus if he could stay on schedule and finish the demanding episode in just six days, was determined to hit the field running. And this resulted in him bruising Jerry Finnerman’s ego when he told the young cinematographer in front of his entire crew that this episode would stay on schedule and the camera/lighting department was not going to slow things down.
Bobby Clark said, “I worked with Joe Pevney on westerns before then, and Joe and I got along very well. But he could get a little nasty with the cameramen if he wasn’t getting what he wanted.” (31e)
Jerry Finnerman said, “So, we go into the first shot, and we started to get the people in. They’re not even in makeup [and only] half-dressed.... And I said, ‘Joe, you want a little light to work with?’ And he said, ‘That would be nice.’ So, I had a 10k over there [a large stage lamp used to flood a set with light]. It wasn’t my style, but I said, ‘Let me hit this light.’ So, we hit the light.... And Joe rehearsed them, and he said [to me], ‘Well, that’s your shot.’ And these guys aren’t even in wardrobe, and I said, ‘Ready.’ And he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘Ready.’ So, I did this for about half a day, and he took me aside and said, ‘Hey, you know, I like you. Let’s be friends. Let’s not go through this.’ And I said, ‘Okay. But I’m fast.’ And he said, ‘I know you are. Just calm yourself down.’... Joe and I were good friends after that.... Joe Pevney was a good director.” (63-3)
As Finnerman and Pevney were figuring out how not to push each others’ buttons, Sean Kenney was cautiously pushing some buttons of his own. Stationed at the helm as Lt. DePaul, Kenney recalled, “When I sat at the console and pressed the buttons, sometimes they would get so hot my fingers would stick to the melting plastic. This was before the days of low-voltage bulbs. I couldn’t yell out; I would just have to pull my fingers off as quickly as I could and hope the camera didn’t pick it up.” (100)
Even though Pevney was new to the series, he got everything he needed, and then some, a
nd wrapped early, at 5:25 p.m.
Day 2 took the Star Trek company back to Vasquez Rocks. William Shatner, along with Bill Blackburn (standing in for Shatner’s regular lighting stand-in, Eddie Paskey), and stuntmen Gary Combs and Dick Dial, along with Pevney and the production crew, left Desilu at 6 a.m. for the hour-plus drive to the location. Bobby Clark said, “I lived in Saugus then – and that was only seven miles from Vasquez Rocks, so I just went out there and met up with them.” (31e)
Clark had been given instructions about how to approach his role, and they had nothing to do with acting. He remembered, “After I had my fitting, a couple days before the shoot, I get a call from the wardrobe guy and he says, ‘Bobby, do you drink a lot of coffee in the morning?’ I said, ‘Not a lot, but I do drink coffee.’ He says, ‘Good. Drink a little coffee; don’t drink a whole lot of coffee. And, if you can, we’d appreciate it if you could go to the bathroom before you get into that suit. We’d rather not take you out any sooner than we have to.’ They told me this because the bottom part of the wetsuit came up to here [the rib bone], and there were no zippers and I had to cornstarch my ass off to get into the costume. You can imagine what it was like to have to pee.” (31e)
Clark relieved himself and Pevney began filming promptly at 8, shooting Kirk’s first encounter with the Gorn, and many of the scripted action sequences to follow.
Being November, it was nippy at Vasquez Rocks and Shatner wore thermal underwear under his costume. If you look close, you can see the sleeves of the long-johns peeking through the sleeves of his Star Fleet uniform. The men who took turns inside the thick rubber hide of the Gorn did not find the climate to be as cool.
Bobby Clark, minus the Gorn head and with black makeup around his mouth, takes a break and chats with a member of the wardrobe department (Courtesy of Bobby Clark)
These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One Page 75
