The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, Volume 1

by Edward Gross

  MARTIN ABRAMS (president, Mego Corporation)

  We had been in the superhero business; we had done all of Marvel and DC. The next thing that became available was Planet of the Apes, so we took that license. From there it was real easy to roll into Star Trek, because we already had the top three key brands in the male action line. Paramount was the next target and they were doing Star Trek, although, interestingly enough, they didn’t have an internal licensing department. They used an outside agent [The Licensing Corporation of America]. Back then the companies with their own licensing department were Disney and Universal, and Universal’s was very, very tiny.

  When we got the Star Trek license, we started with the basic characters like Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura, and a couple of aliens. We had such success with Star Trek that we expanded the action figure line to include different aliens, then there were playsets; a Star Trek calculator that looked like the pads they had on the show. We even had walkie-talkies that were modeled on the communicators.

  DOUG DREXLER

  We spoke to Paradise Press and said to them, “Look, we know everything about the show. We’ve got slides, we’ve got photos, we can write articles.” And they gave us the poster book.

  Some of the articles are actually, I think, considered classic. I did one called “The Smithsonian Report,” for which I went to the Air and Space Museum and they let me in before they opened. They gave me a ladder and I went up and laid hands on the Enterprise model. I took pictures. I met Fred Durant, who was the head of the museum, and he was a real nice guy. And when I was in his office, Michael Collins walked in. And I was, like, “Oh my God! Michael Collins!” He was my favorite astronaut. It was just so amazing to meet him. But you know, we did some really good stuff in that poster magazine that people still refer to.

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER

  I had done a bunch of short radio scripts for an educational radio station out of Oregon on American history. They did eighty or ninety of them with sound effects and everything, but they were quite short. Under ten minutes. That was my only opportunity to do dialogue that would be spoken as opposed to read. And when Power Records came along, I essentially got the chance to write short Star Trek movies. That’s what they were. I feel very comfortable that those could have been filmed, whether for television or anything else. Now that’s a project for some fans—get the film rights to these ancient records and make short Star Trek episodes. I did seven episodes that were spread out over a number of albums. There hadn’t been a Star Trek movie at this point, and I wrote them as filmable Star Trek.

  RUSS HEATH (artist, Star Trek Power Records)

  It came from Dick Giordano, Neal Adams’s partner at Continuity Studios. He had the [illustration] job but couldn’t do all of them, so I did two issues. I put [comic-book artist and Man-Thing creator] Gray Morrow’s face as one of the crewmembers, in the background as a joke. I didn’t like the show. It was just a job. I wasn’t interested in any outer space stuff until Star Wars.

  SUSAN SACKETT

  It was 1974 and I was working with some mailbags from Lincoln Enterprises in Gene’s living room, and one of the friends of the Roddenberrys who was there said these letters were so interesting that somebody should put them together in a book. At the time, they weren’t saving the letters, just taking the orders and throwing the rest out. So I started saving the letters. Most were fan mail or high-level professionals who had written to Gene. I asked for permission to reprint them. Almost everyone agreed except for Carl Sagan. That book sold eighty-five thousand copies in the first year and then it went out of print.

  KERRY O’QUINN (copublisher, Starlog magazine)

  When we started Starlog in 1976, it was kind of an in-between period. Star Trek was only in reruns and it was before Star Wars, Close Encounters, or any of those things.

  The way that Starlog came about is that we used to package magazines for other publishers on whatever subject they wanted to do. A publisher came to us and said, “We want one on Star Trek,” which was great. We put together what was essentially the first issue of Starlog, with a complete episode guide and all of that. It was completely on Star Trek. We gave that to the publisher and a few weeks later he comes back and says, “We’ve discovered that Paramount owns the rights to Star Trek and they won’t let us publish this because it would need to be a licensed product and we can’t afford to do a magazine just on Star Trek. So we can’t pay you and we have to give you back all of these materials.”

  They did, but it was such good stuff, so I said, “Instead of doing a magazine on just Star Trek, let’s do a magazine that I’ve always wanted to do on science fiction, and we’ll just use this material for a few issues. But we’ll do it about the whole world of science fiction.” That’s how Starlog was born.

  RONALD D. MOORE (supervising producer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)

  In the pre-Internet era, and being from a little town in central California, I didn’t have access to any of the stuff that was going on with Star Trek, so I had no idea what was happening out there in fandom. My knowledge of Trek in the seventies was fairly limited to Starlog magazine. I would always go to the drugstore and buy the latest issue, and that’s where I realized there were Star Trek conventions. I remember the first issue of Starlog I saw. I was at the drugstore with my mom or something, and it was on the stand. On the cover they had this cartoon of the actors hanging from a chandelier, and inside I read this article about Star Trek conventions, which I’d never heard of and didn’t know existed until that point. It was just this TV show that I loved, that I didn’t even know anyone else liked but me. Then I read there were these conventions and these people out there who did love the show, and that the actors went. Starlog made me realize that there was this world of fandom.

  KERRY O’QUINN

  The first issue sold better than anyone except me expected, so the distributor let us go from quarterly to bimonthly, and then when Star Wars came out and made the cover of Time magazine and became the biggest thing in Hollywood, we went monthly. Suddenly science fiction was the hot item and just as suddenly we were the voice of science fiction.

  ED NAHA (producer, Inside Star Trek LP)

  I’ve read a few articles concerning the Inside Star Trek record, in which it was opined that this was Paramount’s way of pumping up demand for a reconstituted Trek TV show. Nope. They gave us no cooperation. We couldn’t even get a damned still or slide of the Enterprise for the cover. I should point out that Paramount Studios at the time was not enthused about anything Star Trek creatively. They didn’t get it. Never did. As a result, Gene wasn’t allowed to produce too much at the studio and basically bolstered his livelihood via his speaking engagements.

  The finished album was released and promoted in college markets. The album served as a way to connect with Trek fans that were wondering what was going on with the show. Was it possible to bring it back to the small screen? Could Trek make it to the big screen? The album was recorded before the age of the Internet, where facts and rumors are now dispensed every ten seconds. Back in the seventies you had print, radio, and conventions to disseminate news, and that was tough sledding. There were no Hollywood backstage TV shows giving you scoops, either. The record was an attempt to give voice to the world of Star Trek, and that voice, of course, was Gene’s.

  The album was pretty much what it was intended to be. It was always sort of a “loose” project in that it was like herding cats trying to schedule recording sessions and the like. At the time, Gene was a hot commodity on the lecture circuit. He did a lot of colleges. We figured we’d record a couple of his presentations and then he’d write “sketches” with various cast members to be recorded in an actual studio on the West Coast, and we’d get a nice ebb and flow going through the two angles.

  The origins of this record came about when Crawdaddy! magazine approached me about writing an article celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Star Trek TV series. So I began the dreaded freelance writer task of tracking dow
n various publicists in order to contact the folks I wanted to interview. Gene Roddenberry, of course, was the big kahuna. Susan Sackett scheduled a hookup between Gene and me while Gene was attending a convention in New York. I met a very haggard Gene at his hotel room one morning. The previous night, when he and Majel were attending a convention function, a robber had broken into the room and ransacked the place, telling their son’s nanny that he’d come for the jewels. Of course, there were no jewels. Gene had been up most of the night dealing with the police, jittery nerves, the whole nine yards. The first thing we did after we hit the lobby was hit the hotel bar, which was closed. A couple of rabid Trek fans made a real stink about Gene not getting served, he being the Great Bird of the Galaxy and all, and soon we were quietly drinking and philosophizing about life in the post-Nixon era. We hit it off.

  We did the interview in a few meetings and the article made the cover of the magazine. At some point, Susan suggested that we do a spoken-word album for Columbia. I was all for it.

  RONALD D. MOORE

  I played that record over and over again. What was amazing about it was hearing Gene’s voice directly. I think it was the only time I’d heard his voice—I’d never seen him on TV or heard him on the radio. It was the only time you heard Roddenberry speaking, and speaking at length. Unless you went to one of the conventions, you didn’t have that opportunity, so it was fascinating to me. I remember him talking about his childhood; I think he said something about there being cardboard boxes he used as spaceships and he had a sickly childhood, as I recall. It was a very inspiring kind of talk, talking about the potential of humanity. I remember him saying something about people and sex objects and how he enjoyed being a sex object.

  ED NAHA

  The lecture material on the album was taken directly from Gene’s prepared script. It varied a bit from school to school, but it was pretty much a set routine. It offered a lot of insight into Star Trek, but also of Gene and his creative process. The interviews he conducted were scripted … or started out that way. Susan Sackett contacted the actors and their representatives, and we booked time at a recording studio in Los Angeles. Mark Lenard was a total pro, reprising the role of Spock’s father, Sarek, on the album. He never strayed from character and gave a great performance. DeForest Kelley and Gene tweaked their script during rehearsal. Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury riffed a lot more, with Gene gently nudging them back on topic.

  Bill Shatner was, God bless him, Bill Shatner. He showed up over an hour late in tennis whites, straight off the courts. Mind you, this left Gene and me as well as the sound engineer, staring at the ceilings while the budget meter was ticking for studio rental. Bill sat down and the first thing he did was toss the script. He wanted to talk about something else. I think dolphins or something. Gene had this great, smiling face he put on when things were going south. But Gene also had this teacher-authoritarian aspect to him that he used to slowly get things back on topic. It was a hoot.

  In terms of the content, Columbia Records couldn’t have cared less about what was on it. My immediate boss had been left out of the loop initially and viewed the project as “Naha’s Folly.” We could’ve had the entire cast of Star Trek farting the Russian saber dance and he would’ve shrugged.

  The power of the expanding Star Trek audience as a vocal movement became even more evident in 1976, when America’s first space shuttle was the subject of a passionate letter-writing campaign that would result in the vessel—accompanied by a NASA ceremony that saw Roddenberry unite with most of the cast—being christened with the name Enterprise.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  The project to get the space shuttle named Enterprise actually got started with two men in Washington, DC, and when they could not carry it, it got dropped on us Trimbles. We got a phone call asking if we could use our large mailing list to get the word out that the very first space shuttle should be named Enterprise. We were hesitant, because a mail-in campaign takes a lot of time and hassles, not to mention a great deal of printing and postage. But the idea seemed sound: the naming could generate thousands of letters to President Ford showing public support for our space program.

  We gathered together many Star Trek fans and members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society to put the mailing together by hand. We could not afford a mailing house, and we have never found one willing to donate its time, machinery, and people for such a project. Local fans helped to pay for this mailing, but the Trimbles paid for the bulk of it. The papers were folded, envelopes stuffed, and labels affixed, all by hand. The fans brought their own munchies, which accounted for more than one tortilla chip in, or a greasy thumbprint on, some envelopes.

  We received every-other-day phone calls from Washington, DC, to tell us how the campaign seemed to be going. Then the day came for the president to hold a news conference on the shuttle and its future, and, only minutes before the conference, the world heard that President Ford had decided to name the shuttle Enterprise! NASA officials were stunned; the reporters had a field day about the “crazy Trekkies.”

  ELYSE ROSENSTEIN

  It took a million letters to convince NBC to renew Star Trek for a third season, but it only took four hundred thousand to get the President of the United States to override NASA. What does that tell you about NBC? Star Trek was not there, but the conventions were, and science-fiction or Star Trek fans were absolutely determined that the first reusable spaceship this country—this world—ever saw was going to be named Enterprise. We won! The downside was that it turned out the second shuttle, named Columbia, was the one NASA picked that actually went into space.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  That was the main argument, that this particular shuttle would never fly. It was a test vehicle, so we should go for one of the reusable ones to be named Enterprise. But that “energy” I keep talking about burst forth, and a huge explosion of sentiment carried the day. What we had been scorned for—the idea of going into space—was now a reality. We had been proven right. We can go into the stars, and the Enterprise’s successors will lead us there.

  ED NAHA

  The last project I worked on at Columbia was getting all the necessary clearances and publishing rights for the songs on the Voyager record that was shot into space. I worked with Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. This was quite a challenge in that record companies were loath to have their “product” mixed with another label’s “product.” It didn’t matter that it was being shot into space and wouldn’t receive any Earthly radio time. Rules were rules and lawyers loved rules.

  While this was going on, William Shatner rode to my rescue. He’d been impressed by my work on Inside Star Trek. He called and asked me if I’d publicize his new double album, William Shatner Live. The gig would last the summer. Bingo! I had rent money. I have to confess, I love Shatner. He’s the most affable über-ego I’ve ever worked with. Being with him is almost like being included in an ongoing piece of performance art.

  In between all of this, the resurrection of Star Trek in terms of a new production had already taken its initial baby steps, the first having occurred during the 1972 New York convention.

  JON POVILL (associate producer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)

  Gene had a big part in the conventions early on. Not just in terms of going and speaking there, but they were marketing ploys for him and Majel and Lincoln. It was all fostered to keep it alive and to take advantage, at least to some extent, of the syndication. So he was, I think, part and parcel of developing the phenomenon. He was terrific at marketing. He knew how to work his fans; he knew how to work that part of it. I would be very interested to see if he were in his forties now and had the Internet to work with and social media to work with … Jesus. I have a feeling he would be a monster. There was always the ego, but in terms of what he could do with a Facebook page, drumming up fandom to respond to things … I suspect he would have a huge empire. I think he would have been able to parlay Star Trek into a zillion other things, even starting a Web series or
whatever. He would have been able to generate a whole lot more. Sort of in the way that Majel did with Andromeda and some of the other things from Roddenberry ideas, but to a much higher degree.

  ELYSE ROSENSTEIN

  When the convention first came up and Gene Roddenberry was given an invitation, apparently Oscar Katz had to encourage him to attend. They had been trying to set up a situation where Gene could talk to NBC about possibly bringing back Star Trek. On the one hand, if Gene was in New York it would be good to do that, but on the other he didn’t want to seem too anxious.

  The long and short of it was that Oscar encouraged Gene to come, because it would give him a reason to be in New York that wasn’t directly associated with a meeting with NBC. So there was this going on in the background; it didn’t have anything to do with our creating our convention or putting it together, but it had to do with some of the people who came. It did give Gene that opportunity. And the publicity generated reached California, where it really kind of lit a fire that maybe had been smoldering in the background. It was kind of saying, “You don’t think anything is there, but look at what happened when the fans were given an opportunity.” It showed there was a market out there and that people wanted more. In September 1973 we got it with the animated Star Trek series.

  REANIMATED

  “YOU CAN NO MORE DESTROY THIS SHIP THAN I CAN CHANGE COLOR.”

  Although Gene Roddenberry had floated the idea of a Star Trek motion picture as early as 1969 (while the original series was still in production), the first serious possibility of such a film actually being produced dates back to 1973, when Paramount began negotiations with Roddenberry and former Desilu exec Herbert F. Solow, who was then at MGM, on The Cattlemen, which was intended to be the first Star Trek movie.