by Edward Gross
PHILIP KAUFMAN
It was an adventure through a black hole into the future and the past, and there were more relationships really developed beyond just the crew relationships. Kirk was to have an important role but not the center. The center was Spock, a Klingon, a woman parapsychologist who was trying to treat Spock’s insanity [he had gotten caught in his pon farr cycles], and there was going to be sex, which the sixties series never had, but we were here at the end of the seventies and we’re in a world where great movies were being made and the times were really ripe for expanding your mind.
GERALD ISENBERG
Leonard’s basic feeling was until he sees a finished script that he wants to do, whatever you want to do is fine. By that time in his life, Star Trek was a source of money for him through the appearances and everything else, but he was refusing to have that be his career and his image and his life. He was into writing. Leonard is a true Renaissance man, he’s a writer and a photographer, a poet, he’s an amazing human being. So with the Spock character, of course, he represents the great conflict between reason and emotion, inherent in that person, so the whole Star Trek cast was a nice add-on, but the central conflict existed completely within Spock.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
Don’t forget, both Nimoy and Shatner were not going to participate in the feature when it first happened. There were some contractual problems they were having. I think I met Shatner briefly, but Leonard Nimoy and I got along great. I thought he was brilliant and after it was canceled I cast him in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and took some elements of Spock for the film. In the beginning, he is the shrink Dr. Kibner, who is warm and trying to heal people, the human side, and then he turns into a pod, which is the Vulcan side. Instead of pointy ears, I gave him Birkenstock sandals.
ALLAN SCOTT
Once we started working on the project with Phil, we were told that they had no deal with William Shatner, so in fact the first story draft we did eliminated Captain Kirk. It was only a month or six weeks in that we were called and told that Kirk was now aboard and should be one of the leading characters. So all of that work was wasted. At that time Chris [Bryant] and I would sit in a room and talk about story ideas and notions, and talk them through with either Phil or Gene.
GERALD ISENBERG
We sent Gene the first draft and he was not happy at all, but neither were we. He thought we were making a mistake in dropping Kirk. He basically took the position that we were not helping this franchise.
ALLAN SCOTT
Without any ill feeling on any part, it became clear to us that there was a divergence of view of how the movie should be made between Gene and Phil. I think Gene was quite right in sticking by not so much the specifics of Star Trek, but the general ethics of it. I think Phil was more interested in exploring a wider range of science-fiction stories, and yet nonetheless staying faithful to Star Trek. There was definitely a tugging on the two sides between them.
One of the reasons it took us so long to come up with a story was because things like that would change. If we came up with some aspects that pleased Gene, they often didn’t please Phil and vice versa. We were kind of piggies in the middle.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
Gene was a great guy, but it was a little bit of the Alec Guinness syndrome in Bridge on the River Kwai. He built a bridge and he didn’t want to be rescued and he couldn’t see anything other than what he wanted it to be. I thought science fiction should go forward and I thought that the order was to go boldly where no man has gone before, but Roddenberry wanted to go back.
ALLAN SCOTT
The difficulty was trying to make, as it were, an exploded episode of Star Trek that had its own justification in terms of the new scale that was available for it, because much of Star Trek’s charm was the fact that it dealt with big and bold ideas on a small budget. Of course the first thing that a movie would do, potentially, was match the budget and the scale of the production to the boldness and vigor of the ideas. We spent weeks looking at every single episode of Star Trek and I would guess that pretty much every cast member came by and met us.
Among those involved with preproduction on the film were visionary James Bond production designer Ken Adam and Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica conceptual guru Ralph McQuarrie. Star Trek continued to remain an obsession for the legendary Gulf & Western chairman, Charles Bludhorn, whose daughter, Dominique, was a devoted fan of the series.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
Ken Adam and I became good friends, and we had that sense of making Star Trek a big event with this sense of wonder and visuals. I got to know Ralph McQuarrie through George Lucas, and Ralph came aboard and started designing things.
I went to London scouting with Ken Adam, looking for locations. They were going to pull the plug on Star Wars. Fox and all the people in London were laughing at what a disaster it was. George and his producer, Gary Kurtz, had gone on with the last couple of days with cameras to hastily try and piece together what they knew they needed to finish the movie.
So there was this mood out there that Star Wars was going to be a disaster. I knew otherwise; I had seen what George was doing and had been to what became ILM in the Valley and had spoken to George about that when we were working on the story for the first Raiders of the Lost Ark together. It was a sense of storytelling of what science fiction could be that George was into. That was brilliant and excited me.
I’d been in touch with him while he was shooting Star Wars, and I think George possibly had tried to get the rights to Star Trek prior to his doing Star Wars. I knew there was something great there. Times were crying out for good science fiction. Spielberg was also developing Close Encounters at that time, but Paramount didn’t really know what they had. It was to Roddenberry’s credit that he and the fan base had convinced them that a movie could be made, albeit on the cheap, and I didn’t want to do that, nor did Jerry.
Chris Bryant and Allan Scott turned in their first draft on March 1, 1977. It was Kaufman’s hope to cast legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune as the Enterprise’s Klingon adversary, which could have been the greatest Star Trek villain in the franchise’s history, exceeding even Khan.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
I had loved the power of those Kurosawa movies and The Seven Samurai. If any country other than America had a sense of science fiction, it was Japan. Toshiro Mifune up against Spock would have been a great piece of casting. There would have been a couple of scenes between the two of them, emotion versus Spock’s logical mind shield, trying to close things off, and having humor play between them. Leonard is a funny guy and the idea was not to break the mold of Star Trek, but to introduce it to a bigger audience around the world.
GERALD ISENBERG
We weren’t thinking, this is a franchise and we’re going to do eight movies, we were thinking we would make one good movie. Star Wars launched as a franchise and nowadays you look back and think that everything is a franchise. What we would have ended up doing is a version that was essentially Star Trek, but not the Star Trek that was the series, because we would have focused on Spock and his conflict and being human and what being human is. And that’s really what 80 percent of the Star Trek episodes are dealing with: being human. We were not trying to perpetuate the Star Trek franchise at that time. No one was.
In the script, the crew searches for Kirk and discovers him stranded on a planet where they must face off with both the Klingons and an alien race called the Cygnans, eventually being thrust back in time through a black hole to the dawn of humanity on Earth where the crew members themselves are revealed as the Titans of Greek mythology.
ALLAN SCOTT
I truly don’t remember anything about the script, except the ending. The ending involved primitive man on Earth, and I guess Spock or the crew of the Enterprise inadvertently introduced primitive man to the concept of fire. As they accelerated away, we realize that they were therefore giving birth to civilization as we know it.
I also know that eventually we got to a s
tage where we more or less didn’t have a story that everybody could agree on and we were in very short time of our delivery date. Chris and I decided that the best thing we could do was take all the information we had absorbed from everybody, sit down, and hammer something out. In fact, we first did a fifteen- or twenty-page story in a three-day time period. I guess amendments were made to that in light of Gene’s and Phil’s recommendations, but already we were at a stage by then that the situation was desperate if we were going to make the movie according to the schedule that was given to us. We made various amendments, wrote the script, went to the studio with it, and they turned it down.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
I still remember the night when I was getting very close, I was then writing and I stayed up all night, but I knew I had a great story. I remember how shaky I was trying to stand up from my writing table and I called Rose, my wife, and I said, “I’ve got it, I really know this story,” and right then the phone rang. It was Jerry Isenberg saying the project’s been canceled. I said, “What do you mean?” and he said, “They said there’s no future in science fiction,” which is the greatest line: there is no future in science fiction.
They just canceled it, they never saw my treatment, nobody read it. I still have it, but that was the end of the project. Barry Diller was going to start another network and go back to TV and said, “Let’s just do what Gene Roddenberry was pushing for,” which was that same stuff, which I found passé and kind of clunky. Now, people are coming back to TV, but back then everything was the world of features, which was the only way you could make a movie like 2001.
On May 8, 1977, Planet of the Titans was officially shelved. With Bryant and Scott on their way back to England, their parting gift to those who remained behind was a memo wishing everyone well. “Giving birth takes nine months. We’ve only been gestating for seven. So there’s no baby. But there’s an embryo. Look after it.”
SUSAN SACKETT
Robert Redford as Captain Kirk was one thing Gene used to joke about. The studio wanted to recast it with known names. He said this in his college lectures. There was some talk of that, but I don’t think it was serious.
GERALD ISENBERG
Mike Eisner came into the studio and canceled the movie so that he could do Star Trek as a TV series again as part of a projected Paramount TV network. Star Trek was going to be the center of the network, and Gene became the executive producer in charge again, because he was not in charge of the movie. So they set out to do this TV series and about seven months later, after investing about two million dollars in sets, Paramount TV falls apart and they decide to do it again as a movie.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)
The studio never seemed to know exactly what it wanted, which was very exhausting for Gene. He went through so many attempts to get it restarted, and there were times where he was ready to just walk away from all of it. But once Star Wars proved that science fiction could be mainstream, there was no going back. The second attempt at a series, Star Trek: Phase II, ground to a halt and everyone and everything changed so that a major motion picture could be made.
PHILIP KAUFMAN
About two or three months after Star Trek was canceled, Star Wars was released and then shortly thereafter Close Encounters came out. It turned out there was a future in science fiction after all.
THE NEXT PHASE
“AREN’T YOU DEAD?”
With plans to develop a feature film now abandoned, preproduction began in earnest on the development of a new TV series, dubbed Star Trek: Phase II. Under the creative aegis of Gene Roddenberry, the new series—announced on June 10, 1977—was intended to serve as the cornerstone of a Paramount/Hughes TV network, which would launch with a two-hour premiere, to air on February 1, 1978. Among those joining the project were story editor Jon Povill; producer Bob Goodwin, who would oversee physical production; and Harold Livingston, who would handle the development of thirteen scripts for the first season.
Harold Antill Livingston, like Roddenberry, had lived a remarkable life prior to arriving in Hollywood, having served as a pilot in World War II, a commercial airline pilot for TWA, an advertising copywriter, a fighter pilot in the Israeli Air Force in 1948, and an acclaimed author of several novels.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON (writer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
I produced a show for ABC called Future Cop. He was a manufactured robot that couldn’t be hurt and he had a mechanical computer brain. Ernie Borgnine was his mentor. It was a good show and I was very close to the head of production at Paramount Television, Arthur Fellows. As far as I know, they were very down on Roddenberry, and so Arthur brought me in when they decided to do this Phase II in which Paramount would launch their own network. I never saw Star Trek in my life, and my first meeting with Roddenberry was a total disaster. He said, “What do you know about Star Trek?” I said, “Nothing.” Well, that went over very well.
ROBERT GOODWIN (producer, Star Trek: Phase II)
A guy named Gary Nardino came in and took over as president of Paramount Television, and made the decision to start a fourth network. The plan was that every Saturday night they were going to do one hour of Star Trek and then a two-hour movie.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
The objective of the new series was very vague. All they knew was that the studio had some kind of arrangement with what was then going to be a fourth network. I suppose it would take the form of some kind of syndicated program. So thirteen episodes plus a pilot were ordered, and it was then my job to develop these stories, which I set upon doing.
JON POVILL (story editor, Star Trek: Phase II)
I think Gene was more comfortable doing Star Trek as a TV series than he had been when it was being developed as a film. He liked the idea of Phase II. Again, it was sort of “Fuck you, NBC, we’re back!” And the control he wouldn’t have had on the Jerry Isenberg–Phil Kaufman version, he would have on the TV series, so he was back in the driver’s seat. That was to his liking. Keep in mind that Star Trek was one of the first TV shows to be remade as a feature. The previous attempts were shitcanned largely because nobody could figure out how to extend this to two hours and make it work. “What kind of story do we tell? It doesn’t feel big enough.” It seemed to lose its Star Trek flavor as soon as you got it that big. So I think Gene felt more comfortable with hour episodes. It also had to be something of an honor to be the flagship of the Paramount network, which was the intention. Of course, it happened ten years later with The Next Generation.
Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures, commented at the time: “We considered the project for years. We’d done a number of treatments, scripts, and every time we’d say, ‘This isn’t good enough.’ If we had just gone forward and done it, we might have done it quite well. In the case of the Isenberg–Kaufman version, it was the script. We felt, frankly, that it was a little pretentious. We went to Gene Roddenberry and said, ‘Look, you’re the person who understands Star Trek. We don’t. But what we should probably do is return to the original context, a television series.’ If you force it as a big seventy-millimeter widescreen movie, you go directly against the concept. If you rip Star Trek off, you’ll fail, because the people who like Star Trek don’t just like it, they love it.”
In sharing his feelings with Starlog magazine, Roddenberry confessed, “The worst that can happen is someone would say that Roddenberry couldn’t do it a second time. That doesn’t bother me, as long as I did my damnedest to do it a second time.”
ROBERT GOODWIN
My interest had always been more in the long form rather than the series side of television. Gary Nardino decided that he was going to put me in charge of all these two-hour movies, which was great for me. But then it turned out that they were looking for someone to come on as producer, and Gene Roddenberry had heard about me. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t anxious to do it. My real interest, as I said, was the long form, and I was supposed to supervise those movies. I was pretty much strong-arme
d to do it and not given too much of a choice. Paramount said, “Forget the two-hour movies, you’re doing Star Trek.”
So I went over to see Gene, and initially I got kicked out of his office. His assistant, Susan Sackett, thought I was an agent or something. She didn’t know I had an appointment to see him and wouldn’t let me in. I said, “Fine,” and walked out. I was about a half a mile away at the other side of the studio when Gene Roddenberry came running after me. To make a long story short, he wanted me to go in as one of the two producers. They were going to hire a writing producer and a production producer. It was kind of a strange situation.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
I had never met Roddenberry, but I think I was working at Paramount at the time. Bob Goodwin and I were both going to work under Gene. If I remember correctly, there were a lot of interviews and bullshit that went on, but Gene and I kind of hit it off. We had similar backgrounds. We had both been in the air force during the war and we both worked for civilian airlines after the war, so I think that’s one of the reasons that Gene, in the beginning, liked me.
Roddenberry said, “You’ve got to read the Star Trek bible.” So he gives me this unintelligible pamphlet, which I never read. I had to sit through seventy-nine episodes of Star Trek, at which point I decided that this was Wagon Train in space. So what am I going to do with it? I had no idea.
Star Trek: Phase II was intended to be set during the Enterprise’s second five-year mission. Led by Captain Kirk, the entire rest of the original crew was back … except for Spock. Gene Roddenberry has often said that Nimoy did not want to do television at that time. For his part, Nimoy claimed he had only been offered the pilot and the possibility of a recurring role, and had no interest in being a part-time Spock.
