These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One

by Cushman, Marc

  Principal photography commenced on Stage 9 for the bridge scenes that did not involve Lazarus. Janet MacLachlan was present, and given a blue uniform to wear. This was the first of many mistakes -- although a relatively minor one. Lt. Masters was originally written as a chemist; as a member of the medical or science departments, so she would have worn blue. But with the change in the script that had her assigned to engineering, red should have been her new color. Someone forgot to clue-in the wardrobe department.

  Oswald covered 23 scenes and more than 10 pages of script, wrapping at 6:50 p.m., 30 minutes into overtime but otherwise on schedule. All seemed well ... at least, on set. It was a different story in the producer’s office.

  Earlier in the day, a memo from Stan Robertson arrived. It said nothing about the casting but, instead, focused on a plot device used in the script. Robertson wrote:

  This will confirm our telephone conversation of yesterday, in which I again voiced objections to this script which has as its premise another “duplicate character.”... We have gone over this point many times in the past, Gene, and it appears as though we are only continuing to perpetuate the “sameness” which has been one of the continuing criticisms of our series. (SR20-2)

  This was a curious note to send to Coon on the first day of production. Robertson had previously approved “this very fine story,” duplicate character included. But, now, as the cameras were rolling, he was making it clear that NBC could refuse to air “The Alternative Factor.” And that meant NBC would not have to pay for the episode. The network had found its out.

  Within hours, director Gerd Oswald, finishing work on the set, received new script pages for the next day. He later said, “The script was so complicated, it was even hard to interpret for some of us deeply involved with it.” (134)

  John Drew Barrymore was visiting wardrobe on this day for final costume fittings. Before leaving, he was given the revised script. And then he quit the production.

  In a memo from the next day to Herb Solow, Joe D’Agosta wrote:

  Between 4 and 5 p.m., [Barrymore] sent word that he did not want to do the role and refused to accept a work call for filming the following morning, November 17. With the cooperation of his agent and lawyer, I told him that he was committed and had to report to work. Mr. Barrymore then became unavailable and out of reach. His reasons were that the script changes had altered his character. (JDA20)

  D.C. Fontana recalled, “They recast the lead with Robert Brown at eleven o’clock at night, and that poor man had to be on set with makeup and costume the next morning, with the script he had just read the night before. Talk about lack of rehearsal.” (64-2)

  Brown remembered differently. He believed his preparation time was even shorter.

  Robert Brown was 38 when he was tossed a live hand grenade called “The Alternative Factor.” Prior to this, he worked often on the stage, including shows on Broadway. In 1958, he snagged a prominent role in the sci-fi movie The Flame Barrier. In television, Brown found notable guest spots on series such as Perry Mason, Wagon Train, and Bonanza. In 1962, he starred with William Shatner in the unsold TV pilot called “Colossus.” Still in his future, top billing in Here Come the Brides, above Trekker Mark Lenard and future heartthrobs Bobby Sherman and David Soul.

  Day 2, Thursday. Robert Brown remembered it well. He said, “I got a call on my birthday [November 17] and it was from Roddenberry. Shatner and I had gotten along really well while making ‘Colossus,’ and Roddenberry said, ‘Shatner gave me your number; I hope you don’t mind me calling.’ I didn’t know who Roddenberry was. I didn’t know what Star Trek was. It had just started and I hadn’t seen it. But he knew that I lived out in the Malibu colony and he said, ‘Listen, it will take you about an hour to get here. Can you come out?’ So I drove in and Roddenberry greeted me and said, ‘You just follow me back to makeup and don’t worry, we’ll find a place for you to live near the studio.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Well, you got the part. Shatner says you can handle it. So, after I called you, my office called your agent to talk about the script.’ I said, ‘What script? I haven’t heard anything about it. I’m not familiar with this show or the genre, so I don’t think so. Thanks, but no.’ He said, ‘Listen, you’re an actor, you’re from the theater, you can do this. Look, I’ll tell you what we’ll do -- I’ve got a contract with Shatner that says nobody can get more money than he does, but I’ll arrange something. We’ll pay you what he makes and I’ll put in a little extra myself. But you can’t tell him or else I’ll sue you.’ And then he reached in his pocket and gave me five dollars. He said, ‘Here.’ And then he arranged for a motel near the lot. Since I was living so far away from the studio, and with the schedule being what it was from the first shot of the day to the last shot of the night, they didn’t think I’d be able to manage the trip. They were right. It was an hour and a half each way, at least. I would never have gotten any sleep.” (24-1)

  Brown took the five bucks and reported to makeup. He said, “Luckily the costume Barrymore was going to wear fit me. And then the nice guy who did the ears – [Fred Phillips] the head of the makeup department -- said ‘We’ll give you a special who-knows-what kind of a look. Barrymore didn’t have that, but man I’ll do it for you.’ And out came the beard.” (24- 1)

  For this day, in his scenes on the bridge followed by sickbay and the transporter room, Brown’s beard was thin, although not yet completely sparse. This would soon change.

  With all the confusion, care normally shown in the making of Star Trek was now nowhere in sight. For a scene in the transporter room, Lazarus knocks out the transporter technician and beams himself to the planet. One must wonder where he learned to operate the transporter. One must also wonder why the Technician seems fine and dandy a minute later when Kirk races in and asks to be beamed down. Blame the writers(s) and the director. The scene description merely reads: “INT. TRANSPORTER ROOM. Kirk standing on a plate, the technician, recovered now, standing by.” Shouldn’t Coon have at least written into the script that the technician is rubbing his sore neck where Lazarus gave him a judo chop? Shouldn’t Oswald have directed it this way, regardless of whether it was so indicated in the script? Never before on the series had a writer and a director shown such sloppiness in this regard.

  When Oswald wrapped at 7 p.m., he was one-half day behind.

  “The Menagerie, Part 1” was on NBC that night, as the 11th broadcast episode.

  Day 3. On Friday, the company finished the scenes intended for the previous day -sequences on the bridge and in the ship’s corridors. Fortunately, on this day, Brown’s beard matched from the day before. Again, that would soon change.

  The scenes in the alternate engineering set were planned to come next but Oswald barely got started on this before calling for a wrap at 7:15 p.m., a full hour into overtime.

  Brown said, “They broke the rules concerning their timing. They were shooting late every day. So I didn’t get home during that whole time except for the weekend.” (24-1)

  Day 4. Come Monday, filming took place in an area of engineering identified in the script as “Lithium Crystal Recharging Section.” This information was supposed to go on the door outside. The sloppiness continued and the sign by the door merely read “Engineering,” adding to the confusion. Why does engineering suddenly not look like engineering? And where is Scotty?

  As the day progressed, the company moved to the recreation room, followed by a move to sickbay. Again, on the plus side, the beard looked the same and the cast were holding well at learning the new dialogue coming down from the producer’s office. But the work was exhausting.

  Brown vividly recalled, “I was living a nightmare because I was playing catch-up. I was being pushed and chased every day. A lot of times they wouldn’t do reverse shots; they’d just do over-the-shoulder angles, because they were so late. They knew they’d be going into overtime and they couldn’t afford it. And all this rushing created an uncomfortable feeling. Not from Shatner.
He couldn’t have been better. And the rest of the cast was a nice group … except for the morose man with the ears. And the director was always rushing and pushing me. And he said he was going to call SAG and tell them that I was not a good actor if I couldn’t speed up with all this strange dialogue they were handing me. And I tell you I was going day and night.” (24-1)

  Oswald wrapped at 6:50 p.m.

  Vasquez Rocks

  Day 5 took the company to Vasquez Rocks for the third time. All of the scenes featuring Lazarus shaking a fist at the sky, bellowing about wanting to kill the beast, and tumbling off rock formations injuring himself repeatedly, were filmed.

  Brown remembered, “Working out at Vasquez Rocks was actually the easiest part of the shoot. They had to take time to set the camera up and light everything just right, so there was time to study the script and plan things out; planning for the rocks – which ones I would climb and how to land on a mattress. Watching the cameramen do what they do was quite special. It was tougher being at the studio.” (24-1)

  Picture taken by Eddie Paskey - on location at Vasquez Rocks (Courtesy Gerald Gurian)

  While the lighting and camera crew excelled with their work on location, makeup did a horrible job with Brown’s fake beard. It was much thicker than in any of the scenes shot on stage. This had nothing to do with whether it was Lazarus #1 or #2; the beard was the same for both, completely wrong considering what we had seen before.

  Brown said, “The great makeup guy had a couple understudies -- other people who were dispatched out to location and onto the set at times, who were just sticking it on. And I was looking at the lines. I never had a minute to think about anything but ‘What am I supposed to say.’ And I didn’t really have any clue what those words meant, with the description of the stars and the different universes.” (24-1)

  No one else had time to notice the beard either. Oswald, for one, was busy watching the house of cards known as a TV production schedule fall down around him. He was only able to cover four pages of script this day and, plunged into darkness at 5:20 p.m., ended three-quarters of a day behind.

  “Gerd was kind of an old-fashioned director,” Dorothy Fontana said. “The script wasn’t that bad. It was kind of a mish-mash. It didn’t help that the actor was being thrown into a difficult situation. And then the director had problems. ‘Conscience of the King’ was all indoors, it was all on the set. This one was sort of splattered all over the landscape, and it was a more difficult show to do.” (64-2)

  Shatner freezes for the post optical effect to be added later (Unaired film trim courtesy of Gerald Gurian)

  Day 6. The company returned to Vasquez Rocks for a second day of location production, this time at and around the “time ship.” Shatner and Brown were again needed, along with their stunt doubles, Gary Combs and Al Wyatt. Nimoy/Spock led the Security Detachment, comprising of Bill Blackburn, Tom Lupo, Ron Veto, Vince Calenti, and Frank da Vinci. The beard that arrived this day for Robert Brown was again the thick one.

  The sloppiness and illogic continued. One must wonder why Kirk fights Lazarus #1 alone, when Spock and a security team are standing several feet away, watching. The answer: Roddenberry wanted Kirk to do more, to be the hero, and this was the best Don Ingalls and Steven Carabatsos and Gene L. Coon, with their various script drafts, and Gerd Oswald, with his direction, could come up with.

  Again, Oswald wrapped at 5:20, having taken his last shots on close up, where artificial day light could be shined in the direction of the actors from the giant arc lights. The last scene intended to be filmed on location -- the Alternate Universe -- was never even started.

  Day 7 -- an extra, unplanned day of production, back at the studio. Kirk’s journey into the alternate universe was filmed where he meets the “good Lazarus,” working on his time ship. Knowing Oswald was nearly a full day behind, Jefferies and the Art Department had spent the previous day preparing a section of Stage 10 to pass for the area where the time ship had come to rest. This actually turned out to be more effective, since the sky and the surroundings could be painted differently with the huge stage lights. The direction is better here, as is the beard.

  Also filmed this day, also on Stage 10, were the sequences in the “negative/magnetic corridor.” For these effects-driven scenes, Brown wore a fluorescent colored outfit in a blackened room with, as he described it, “black lights on a tilting stage that [they] jostled while the camera rotated around.” (24)

  It was badly done. It seemed as if the director had tossed in the towel by this point. Compare the approach taken in the filming to the description of the action in the script. When Kirk enters the corridor, the script tells us:

  Kirk is spinning through the terrible white and black and slow motion terror! Grabbing at space that comes off in fluffy hunks of nothing! Suspenseful beats of falling, twisting, then: THE SHIMMERING AGAIN -- EVERYTHING FADES, THEN BRIGHTENS!

  Kirk in the “negative/magnetic corridor,” before post-production (Courtesy of Gerald Gurian)

  We got the black and white, and the slow motion and, in the end, Kirk falling. Otherwise, he just slowly runs up the corridor, then turns and slowly runs down the corridor, then turns and slowly falls on his stomach.

  When Lazarus #1 and #2 have their final fight, the script tells us that they are “locked in mortal combat.” The descriptive passage continues:

  One of them leaps away, clawing at the walls, trying to escape. The other Lazarus leaps on him, pulls him back, and they fall away together ... the two of them facing eternity ... and we HEAR A SOUL-SHATTERING HOWL OF ANGUISH.

  What we got was a negative image of Robert Brown and a stunt man wrestling.

  Oswald took his last mediocre shot at 5:30 p.m., and, finally, the production from hell was over -- at least, the writing and filming of it.

  Post-Production

  November 28, 1966 to January 24, 1967. Music score: tracked.

  James D. Ballas, who had been the assistant editor to Robert Swanson, was now running Editing Team #1 (Swanson having resigned after completing “The Menagerie”). Ballas had an impressive resumé -- prior to this, he was nominated for an Emmy in 1961 for his work on Ben Casey.

  With too short a script, due to the removal of the love story, many redundant beats were played up, involving the maddening Lazarus on the planet, with all his running, shouting, shaking his fists, and falling from rocks.

  Film Effects of Hollywood provided the majority of the post opticals, including the “winking out” effect. As described in the script:

  There is a terrible GRINDING sound. At the same moment the entire ship becomes TRANSPARENT. We can see the stars through the ship. All personnel are thrown from their seats, and there is a high wild noise of STATIC, as if some vast interference has ripped through the entire universe.

  This would, of course, have been better than what we got -- a transparency of the galaxy superimposed over the shot of the bridge, pushing in and pulling out. The fault lies with the writers more than the post-effects house. They were placing themselves and their written material at the mercy of what was not technically possible in 1966.

  In the end, inconsistent writing and direction, blaring action music, and the cheesy photo effects, only contributed to a long list of reasons why this episode should have been pushed back in the production schedule, allowing for further story development and planning.

  Robert Brown recalled, “Apparently, if I hadn’t taken the role, they were going to scrap the episode and start filming another one right away.” (24)

  That would have been the better option.

  “The Alternative Factor” cost $210, 879 to make, $25,879 over the per-episode allowance provided for by the Studio. The First Season deficit was now up to $46,266.

  There was one last fight surrounding this production.

  On November 21, 1966, “The Alternative Factor” was in its fourth day of filming and it was clear to all involved that the end results would be disastrous. Herb Solow, writing to Bernie Wei
tzman, a Desilu Business Affairs Executive, said:

  I think it is incumbent upon us to bring every action possible against Mr. Barrymore. The tangible damage he has done to us in terms of dollars is something we can calculate. The intangible damage he has done to us in terms of the resultant picture is impossible to calculate. We have had to bring in a replacement actor in the middle of the night; we have had to force actors into scenes without sufficient rehearsals, etc. If we did not take every action possible, we would be acting in a most selfish manner in that we would be condoning this type of activity that possibly would be felt by other producers as this specific actor and possibly others flex their pseudo-creative muscles and cause damage within our industry. (HS20)

  Desilu filed a complaint with the Screen Actors Guild. A hearing took place on January 4, 1967. Joe D’Agosta, Robert Justman, and Herb Solow attended. Karl Malden headed the Hearing Board, consisting of Charlton Heston, Ricardo Montalban, Jeanette Nolan, and Donald Randolph.

  Joe D’Agosta recalled, “Ricardo, yeah, we were kind of friends with him, because he had done the show or was going to do the show, so he was an ally. Charlton Heston, I remember, really worked to see if we were just being bad-ass producers; he wanted to make sure that the guy deserved some reprimand. I remember he was being very fair to Barrymore, but ended up agreeing with us.” (43-4)