by Edward Gross
JOEL ENGEL
What I can say with sincere admiration about Gene Roddenberry is that when the festival circuit reached critical mass, he knew enough to remake himself yet again as the Great Bird. It was a persona and, from what I could tell, until I took his words and boasts and compared them to the actual record, no one had publicly called him out on it. By then he’d become Machiavellian, sitting on a lucrative brand with millions of fans willing to do his bidding.
JON POVILL
Gene and I would sit around, we’d talk, bullshit, we’d speculate. We were pretty much just hanging out all of the time. We’d smoke pot. We’d swim. That was part of the most magical time to me. I really loved that period of time. He had all sorts of issues and was feeling insecure, but he was open about it. And he was not enthusiastic about Star Trek at the time. He really wanted to do something else. It was, again, the idea of trying to prove himself, not that he was aware he was proving himself. He was sort of desperate to show he could do something besides Star Trek. That came out as “I don’t care about Star Trek, I want to move on.”
Anyhow, while I was doing the research and while we were talking, he discovered that prior to this I was making my living doing part-time carpentry and contracting. Handyman stuff. At that point, when he decided he didn’t want to write the novel anymore, he wanted me to baby-proof the house. I did that so that he wouldn’t have to say no to Rod all of the time, and then there were other things that I did. I painted fences and repaired stuff on an ongoing basis.
Despite being busy on the convention and college-lecture circuit, Roddenberry had a family to support, and without a regular Hollywood income, it was becoming harder to sustain his lavish lifestyle. As a result, he was forced to leverage his fame as the creator of Star Trek into a succession of high-paying, albeit oddball, gigs that all eventually went nowhere.
One of them was The Nine, which came about in 1975 when Roddenberry was approached by a British former race-car driver named Sir John Whitmore. Whitmore claimed to be associated with a strange organization called Lab-9, dedicated to the research of paranormal phenomena that also claimed to be in contact with a group of extraterrestrials called the “Council of Nine,” or simply “The Nine.” Whitmore, along with channeler Phyllis Schlemmer, wanted to hire Roddenberry to write a screenplay based on the Council of Nine’s imminent heralded return.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
This was a time when he was broke and was sort of a writer for hire. A very eccentric Englishman had an idea for a project that aliens really had contacted us and that they were from the Pleiades. And he wanted Gene to write a fictional story about this based on what he called “facts.” Gene said he will write what he finds. He had to do all of this research. Gene went around and talked to all these different people, and they were experimenting with plants and asking whether or not they had feelings, and things like that. Gene was trying to keep an open mind.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)
I had been through harsh times. My dreams were going downhill, because I could not get work after the original series was canceled. I remember I was really devoted to the fans at colleges when they voted that they wanted me to come and lecture. One of my first speeches—I got all of six or seven hundred dollars, which included the cost of the trip. I felt lucky to net the four or five hundred that they paid for me. I was stereotyped as a science-fiction writer, and sometimes it was tough to pay the mortgage. They said, “You’re a science-fiction type.” I said, “Hey, wait a minute. I used to write westerns, I wrote police stories,” and they said, “No, you’re now science fiction.” I don’t feel bitter about that. That’s the way Hollywood is and that’s the way mediocre people think.
Roddenberry handed in his first draft in December 1975, and the results were not what anyone expected. The story focused more on his fictionalized alter ego and his marital and financial worries than on the Nine themselves. Whitmore requested a rewrite and Roddenberry handed the task of doing so to Povill. In his revision, Povill posited that the hit sci-fi TV show that Roddenberry’s alter ego had produced in the sixties was not actually his work but had been channeled through him by the Council of Nine.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
This was a script that Roddenberry was very proud of. It dealt with a man who developed a television series for a big network. It had gone off the air and he was depressed. He had kind of gone insane. I read this script and the hair began to rise on the back of my neck, because that’s his story. He was totally unaware of what he was writing. He was also writing his various sexual perversions, which I certainly don’t hold a grudge against, because I’ve got my own problems. But there’s something very, very amiss there.
JON POVILL
When I read Gene’s first draft, I thought, “This is not what needs to be done here.” I thought it was embarrassing, John Whitmore thought it was embarrassing. It certainly didn’t suit what they needed, but it was very typical Roddenberry stuff. I changed it substantially in my second draft and continued to evolve it. I thought the last draft was eminently workable. We had a script that people would be interested in, and it served the purposes of fandom and commerciality and The Nine, from the Schlemmer-Whitmore perspective. They approached Gene because The Nine told them to.
One of the more intriguing projects Roddenberry became involved with at the time was a collaboration with music legend Paul McCartney, who was not only a former Beatle but a major Star Trek fan.
SUSAN SACKETT
I have no idea whatever happened to that. It’s probably stuck in a file, like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Paul contacted him and was a Star Trek fan. He invited us to a concert, which was great, and we met him backstage, which was fun. Paul hired Gene to write a story about the band, which was Wings at the time, and it was a crazy story. Paul gave him an outline and Gene was supposed to do something with it. It was bands from outer space and they were having a competition. Gene was open to things at this point; Star Trek wasn’t happening and he wasn’t getting his scripts produced and he had a family to feed. It’s kind of fun when Paul McCartney contacts you. Gene began working on it and it was about the time they started talking about bringing Trek back, so he never got to complete anything for Paul.
JON POVILL
In May of 1975, Paramount expressed interest in developing a Star Trek film, so Gene moved back into his old office on the lot. He brought me in to carry boxes down from the garage. All of the old crap from the original series he wanted back in the office. I brought boxes from his garage to Paramount. Interestingly, one of my friends came to help as well. Gene would diet from time to time and he had just lost a bunch of weight. He was hauling a box out of the garage and up into the house to go through them. My friend was carrying a box behind Gene, who was carrying a box, and Gene’s pants fell down [laughs] and there he was, bare-assed.
Another idea for a Star Trek motion picture that was briefly announced and abandoned ironically presaged J. J. Abrams’s 2009 film by several decades (as well as Harve Bennett’s ill-fated The Academy Years, which had met with much derision from Roddenberry as well as the original cast), in which the show’s iconic ensemble would be united for the first time.
Roddenberry, who had been talking about the idea in public since the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention, described his idea for the prequel to Circus magazine in 1975. “Most of it is in my head now,” he offered. “People have been asking me for years how the whole thing came about. How did Spock meet Kirk and Scotty? How did the whole crew get together and reach the point where the television series began?”
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
In a conversation with George, Jimmy, or Nichelle they mentioned having received a letter from Gene saying, “Welcome aboard, we’re going to go forward and do this new movie.” I didn’t receive a letter. I called up Susan Sackett, who said I was worrying unnecessarily and that even though Gene was out of town, she woul
d speak to him by phone and he would reassure me. Well, he didn’t call me until he got back to town, and he told me that this idea he had was going to take place three years before the five-year mission and since six years had transpired since the series and my character to begin with was already nine years younger than I was, they thought that I was too old to play myself. Then he said something that they would try to use me as Chekov’s father, which would have been a kick. But, again, it was kind of a painful situation realizing that there were no concrete plans for using Chekov in that movie.
Abandoning the prequel idea, Roddenberry began work on a treatment for what would eventually be called The God Thing, in which Admiral Kirk would reassemble the crew to stop an entity on course for Earth that claims to be God. The ship turns out to be a living computer programmed by a race that was “cast out” of its own dimension and into ours. The story ends with the “God” entity miraculously granting our crew newfound youth and returning them back to the original five-year mission.
While many vestiges of The God Thing can be found in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it’s even more surprising to see how similar many elements are to William Shatner’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a film Roddenberry vociferously denounced throughout its production.
JON POVILL
The fact that The God Thing never got produced could have been the reason Gene hated the idea of Star Trek V.
SUSAN SACKETT
There was an entirely different story in which there was going to be some kind of creature that was going to claim to be God and turn out to be the Devil. It was a morality play. It was very esoteric and the studio turned it down. At one point it was going to be novelized, but it didn’t come about.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
I was working on the series Barbary Coast at the time, which was done at Paramount. It was on one end of Paramount, and Star Trek had been filmed at the other end of Paramount. I had never, for the longest time, revisited the stage area where [we had] filmed. So one day I decided to go there, [and] as I’d been walking and remembering the times, I suddenly heard the sound of a typewriter! That was the strangest thing, because these offices were deserted. So I followed the sound, till I came to the entrance of this building. And the sound was getting louder as I went into the building. I went down a hallway, where the offices for Star Trek were … I opened the door and there was Gene Roddenberry!
He was sitting in a corner, typing. I hadn’t seen him in five years. I said, “Gene, the series has been canceled!” He said, “I know, I know the series has been canceled. I’m writing the movie!” So I said, “There’s gonna be a movie? What’s it gonna be about?” He said, “First of all, we have to explain how you guys got older. So what we have to do is move everybody up in a rank. You become an admiral, and the rest of the cast become Starfleet commanders. One day a force comes toward Earth—might be God, might be the Devil—breaking everything in its path, except the minds of the starship commanders. So we gotta find all the original crewmen for the starship Enterprise, but first—where is Spock? He’s back on Vulcan, doing R & R; five-year mission, seven years of R & R. He swam back upstream. So we gotta go get him.” So we get Spock, do battle, and it was a great story, but the studio turned it down.
JON POVILL
The novel Gene had hired me to do research on was The God Thing, but it wasn’t a Star Trek novel. I was researching stuff that would later appear in Close Encounters: How would the planet react? How would the military react? What would the interaction likely be at this stage in terms of if we discovered a ship and extraterrestrials in orbit around our planet? How would we deal with it? I was trying to ascertain that kind of stuff.
It was an original novel using all different characters, but the premise of it was that this big starship—shades of V’ger!—comes back to Earth and it hadn’t been here since Christ’s time, and it turns out that the starship interacts with planets by ascertaining the level society is at and providing a prophet that suits that level of development. Then it can interact and advance society in some way or another, contrary to the Prime Directive. But now this spaceship malfunctions and instead of ascertaining where we are now, it delivers us Christ again.
RICHARD COLLA
Gene showed me that script, which was much more daring than Star Trek: The Motion Picture would be. The Enterprise went off in search of that thing from outer space that was affecting everything. By the time they got into the alien’s presence, it manifested itself and said, “Do you know me?” Kirk said, “No, I don’t know who you are.” It said, “Strange, how could you not know who I am?” So it shift-changed and became another image and said, “Do you know me?” Kirk said, “No, who are you?” It said, “Strange, how could you not know who I am?” So it shift-changed and came up in the form of Christ the carpenter, and says, “Do you know me?” and Kirk says, “Oh, now I know who you are.”
JON POVILL
It probably would have brought Star Trek down, because the Christian Right, even though it wasn’t then what it is now, would have just destroyed it. In fact, he started the script under one Paramount administration and handed it to another, to Barry Diller, who was a devout Catholic. There was no way on Earth that that script was going to fly for a devout Catholic.
RICHARD COLLA
Really, what Gene had written was that this “thing” was sent forth to lay down the law, to communicate the law of the universe, and that as time went on, the law was meant to be reinterpreted. And at that time two thousand years earlier, the law was interpreted by the carpenter image. As time went on, the law was meant to be reinterpreted and the Christ figure was meant to reappear in different forms. But this machine malfunctioned, and it was like a phonograph record that got caught in a groove and kept grooving back, grooving back, grooving back. It’s important to understand the essence of all this and reinterpret it as time goes on. That was a little heavy for Paramount. It was meant to be strong and moving, and I’m sorry it never got made.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Actually, it wasn’t God they were meeting, but someone who had been born here on Earth before, claiming to be God. I was going to say that this false thing claiming to be God had screwed up man’s concept of the real infinity and beauty of what God is. Paramount was reluctant to put that up on the screen, and I can understand that position.
JON POVILL
He jumped at the chance to do this Star Trek film, because he needed the money. It was also always about proving something, so he was going to prove that it was no fluke. He was ambivalent about Star Trek at the time and grew to be enthusiastic, and became ambivalent when they threw it out. It was a love-hate relationship he had with the project, because it was his only big success.
Over the decades there were reportedly a number of attempts to novelize The God Thing, among the potential authors Susan Sackett and Fred Bronson, Roddenberry official biographer David Alexander, Trek star Walter Koenig, and in the version that came the closest to fruition, Michael Jan Friedman’s adaptation for Pocket Books.
DAVID STERN (former Star Trek editor at Pocket Books)
We definitely wanted to make The God Thing part of the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations in 1991, and had been talking to Gene about doing that. My first memories of The God Thing really date to the period after Gene’s death. Gene’s lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, and I had several meetings, including a couple with Majel Barrett, regarding the manuscript.
The manuscript existed as a very long treatment, much more of a film treatment than a book. I had proposed Mike Friedman as the person to expand that treatment into a novel, because Mike was not only a good writer, but someone very, very used to the approvals process at that point. He could take a no and work with it. Which is what happened a couple times.
MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN (author)
Gene had written a script for the first Star Trek movie. Certain elements showed up in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but most did not. So there was this myster
ious script floating around that people talked about as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls.
After I had written several successful Trek novels, Trek editor Dave Stern asked me to turn Gene’s efforts into a novel called The God Thing. To the best of my recollection, I received both the script and a short narrative version of it. Naturally I jumped at the chance to translate and expand it. Gene was—and still is—one of my heroes, for God’s sake, no pun intended. As he had already left the land of the living, this was a unique opportunity to collaborate with him. But when I read the material, I was dismayed. I hadn’t seen other samples of Gene’s unvarnished writing, but what I saw this time could not possibly have been his best work. It was disjointed—scenes didn’t work together, didn’t build toward anything meaningful. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy didn’t seem anything like themselves. There was some mildly erotic, midlife crisis stuff in there that didn’t serve any real purpose. In the climactic scene, Kirk had a fistfight with an alien who had assumed the image of Jesus Christ.
So Kirk was slugging it out on the bridge. With Jesus.
DAVID STERN
We worked up an outline, Leonard [Maizlish] and Majel looked at it, and said the things Friedman added here (subplots, etc., necessary to expand the treatment to novel length) are not reflective of what Gene intended. And that got frustrating, because we weren’t getting specific enough feedback to know which direction to go in. And the manuscript—Gene’s treatment—definitely needed more. There was the added complication—though I suspect this wasn’t as much of a worry at the time—that a lot of themes in that treatment Gene had subsequently addressed in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and in his TNG work, and that Star Trek V had touched on some similar themes as well.
