by Edward Gross
RICHARD H. KLINE (director of photography, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Robert Wise, Harold Michelson, and I, along with a production sketch artist and several other talented concept individuals, had to constantly put our heads together and try to plan ahead. There was hardly a day that we didn’t meet during lunch to discuss what we were going to be doing after lunch. It always seemed to be “right up to airtime.” That is the sort of pressure we were under in trying to get the project completed properly and on time, in trying to shoot the most sophisticated of all science-fiction films without sufficient preplanning. Our main problems stemmed from not having Doug Trumbull and company aboard earlier, plus the fact that the story was being written as we went along—which made it most difficult to plan ahead.
HAROLD MICHELSON (production designer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
We had what we thought were some really outlandish ideas of the way things would be three hundred years from now. Then I sent out these ideas to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and our ideas seemed old-fashioned. I had to do whatever I could to make it look like something more impressive than just a TV show. The version that appeared on television utilized small sets, and much of the action was played against blank walls. This was due to time and budget restrictions, but it was acceptable on the small canvas of the television tube. However, we were making a big picture for wide-screen presentation, so I had to try to open it up and create an illusion of a tremendous amount of space. This is the reason Bob Wise asked for the huge recreation area in which four or five hundred people appear. It was there to show the audience that this ship was really loaded with people.
RICHARD TAYLOR
When I first walked through the sets I kept thinking, “Haven’t these people seen 2001? Haven’t they seen Star Wars?” Because both of those movies had phenomenal designs, and as you well know, they both still hold up. Those space suits and the design of the Discovery were so beautifully done and well researched and based on real technologies.
Now, it wasn’t our job to design the sets, but the sets and all the continuity of the film had to fit together, and there were parts of the Enterprise model that had to match up to the sets. The engine room, the bridge, the recreation room. And seeing out the windows to the nacelles and all those kind of things had to have a continuity. What I wanted to do initially was to bring as much new technology to the design of all this as possible. I had been to the Lawrence Livermore lab, seeing things they were doing there. I had been reading voraciously about how space structures could be made or would be made in the future. And I wanted to apply as much of that as possible.
HAROLD MICHELSON
When we came on the job, a bridge had been built for what at one time was planned as another TV series. When the decision was made in favor of a big-budget, theatrical movie, everything had to be done over. The bridge had been built in a number of sections, which could be moved in or out according to the scene being filmed.
RICHARD TAYLOR
I looked at the sets that existed and they were just really not the quality that they needed to be. I won’t say they were laughable, but the quarters of the Enterprise looked to me like something from an army base. And, of course, one of the things I had to look at were the models being built. The Enterprise was not at all built with the look or the technology it needed to be for models using motion control and for multiple passes to be made on. This model that was being built was roughly three-and-a-half feet to four feet long. I looked at that model and it just wouldn’t work. When you’re shooting models and you want them to look real on camera, they’re called miniatures, but they’re not, they’re actually quite big. The Enterprise we built was eight feet long.
RONALD D. MOORE (supervising producer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
The Enterprise in The Motion Picture is the best of all the designs. It’s sleek and beautiful and everything is in proportion. It moves really well, it photographs like a dream, and it’s an incredibly detailed model. That’s a fantastic version of the Enterprise. The original is the original, and it will always be a brilliant original creative design, but the movie version takes it to the next level in a way that subsequent iterations of the Enterprise did not do. The subsequent ones all feel like they’re trying to reach for something that they never quite grasp, but the Motion Picture version gets there and it’s a brilliant design.
RICHARD TAYLOR
To do close-ups of things and to have scale, you have to make the model bigger so you can get detail on the surface and the camera can get close to that. Small models you can never get close to and have detail, and they look like toys. So their model just wouldn’t work. And then the sets themselves, including the bridge, looked like they were from the fifties. I won’t criticize anybody for how those designs happened, because I will tell you that Gene Roddenberry had his thumb on a lot of things, and I was very frustrated working with him because he had some constraints that he felt had to be. And they defied logic many times.
HAROLD MICHELSON
Richard Kline likes to film within a set, so the sections of the bridge were virtually welded together. As a result, the seams wouldn’t show and it would look solid. The engine room is greatly expanded. Mr. Wise wanted a feeling of tremendous power, but not with the coloring of fire as we would get today. So we went to different shades of blue going to white. The vertical core, now two and a half stories high, and the horizontal part of the engine, appearing to go off into infinity, were all newly designed and made of Plexiglas. To make room for the horizontal section, we broke through the end of the set and, using forced perspective, gave the exaggerated impression of its length. In the filming, small people, midgets, were used as crew members at the far end, continuing the perspective. What we did was break out from a small set into a lot of size.
RICHARD TAYLOR
The other part of the design things with the Enterprise had to do with the bridge. And we had to do all these effects on the viewscreen. One of the things that drove me crazy about the original show was that here are these people off in the distant future, yet when they get in any emergency situation they are all falling around on the bridge, grabbing on to stuff. It’s like, what the fuck happened to seat belts? I mean, we have seat belts now and this was in 1979. Why were these people so stupid in the future that every emergency they were falling all around the bridge? So I went to Roddenberry and I said, “Can we design seats that have a way of holding them in the seat?” And he finally agreed, so I designed the chairs that folded up over laps.
The other thing that I wanted to do on the bridge that I had seen at Lawrence Livermore was that tactile screens were the way the future was going to be, and not 1950s-era toggle switches and buttons. One of the cool things about a tactile screen is the animations and the things could happen on there. You can touch it and it can configure itself and that could be so visually cool. Roddenberry absolutely rejected that. He said, “No, I want switches, I want buttons, I want stuff that people touch and click and all of that.” To me those were decisions just dating the thing before you even got started.
ROBERT WISE
I insisted on changing the costumes as soon as I came in on the project. The originals looked like pajamas or something. Too much like comic books.
ROBERT FLETCHER (costume designer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
The basic uniform was the most difficult to design, because it had to bear some reference to the original clothes and yet be entirely different. It had to look like the future, but not be so extravagant that it drew attention to itself. That was one thing Robert Wise did not want to happen. He wanted the clothes simply to be there, to be accepted, to look logical—to seem very real. I found that the most difficult part. It’s much easier to do an extravagant and flamboyant costume for some alien prince, something you can really get your teeth into, than trying to tread very delicately on eggshells and not offend the original Trekkers.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
ROBERT FLETCHER
Another thing I changed was the basic color concept. The original Star Trek was brightly colored, but a lot of that came about because color TV had been recently invented and all the networks wanted as much color as they could get for their money, right away. Robert Wise and I felt that the brilliant color was not very realistic, that it seemed distracting. Also, military organizations have the tendency to keep things more utilitarian, and this will probably continue in the future.
I found Gene Roddenberry great fun to work with. He very definitely said what he liked and didn’t like.… It was give-and-take; he was not inflexible. If I had a good reason for something, he’d listen. Sometimes, though, I didn’t understand what he meant and it was difficult for him to read a sketch, so I was careful to show as many samples as I could so that he saw the thing in the flesh, as it were.
Obviously when it came to “surface” details, things went fairly smoothly, but if anything threatened—it did on more than one occasion—to shake Star Trek: The Motion Picture to its core, it was the battle for the proper screenplay and the war waged over the film’s visual effects. In both cases, the situation stemmed from the fact that the script and the effects house (Robert Abel & Associates) had been designed to launch Phase II and not serve as the basis of a multimillion-dollar feature film.
When Star Trek: The Motion Picture was officially announced by Paramount on March 28, 1978, via press conference, Susan Sackett wrote of the script in her Star Trek Report column in Starlog: “Dennis Lynton Clark is doing the final rewrite and polish of the script, which was written by Harold Livingston and Gene Roddenberry, based on a story by Alan Dean Foster and Gene Roddenberry. Dennis recently wrote the screenplay for United Artists’ Comes a Horseman, from his own novel.”
DENNIS LYNTON CLARK (writer, Comes a Horseman)
The whole situation was very frustrating. Gene Roddenberry’s a very nice man, but he became very strange about Star Trek; it was like his child. The problem with Gene is that his heart was never in the right place at the right time. It’s a good heart, but he puts it aside at the wrong times. I was the subject of an awful practical joke, and it was right at the beginning of our relationship, so it set things off badly. I really don’t know how to describe him. He’s a nice man … unless you give him some power. That practical joke was the beginning of the end. I got pissed off, Gene got pissed off, and the only mediator was Bob Wise, who looked at me and said, “I’m going to have to fire you, aren’t I?” And I said, “Yes.”
ROBERT WISE
I had as much influence on the script as I possibly could. It was one of those situations where we started with an incomplete script—we knew the story, of course, but the actual final parts of the script were being worked on constantly as we were shooting. When we actually started early on in 1978, we only had the first act of the script written. From there on the second and third act we were changing and rewriting. I had some influence on the first act as it went, I tried to have as much as I could on the rest of the film, but it is a very sloppy way to make a film by any means.
GENE RODDENBERRY
We took some losses because of the decision to shoot the TV script, but not because the studio was foolish. Costs were mounting up. They had to keep this actor on and that stage ready … so the studio didn’t have the option to say, “Take three months and then take another start at it.” They felt they just couldn’t do it from the viewpoint of sound management and economics. These are the kinds of decisions those people must face and it’s very easy for an artist to say, “Well, I won’t sell out to you.” But it’s not that simple. They have their problems, too, these people over in the front office. Do they do idiotic things? Yes, of course they do. So do we, at our typewriters, in front of cameras—although we prefer to think everything we do is golden.
WALTER KOENIG
I was rather in awe of Robert Wise. We started the picture with only two-thirds of a finished screenplay, though. You cannot back yourself into a corner like that. The whole idea behind screenwriting is rewriting and we didn’t have the luxury of rewriting because we were writing with the camera and reshooting was enormously expensive. So we started out with a story about an antagonistic, omnipotent being that was this great threat, and somewhere in the middle of the story we decided it’s not really that at all. It’s this awe-inspiring entity that’s trying to achieve another level of consciousness. What happens to the conflict? We didn’t have a tension-filled conflict, we had people with wide eyes marveling at the enormity and strangeness of this thing. It’s great for a travelogue, but it’s not great for good storytelling and it failed in that regard.
DENNIS LYNTON CLARK
I guess I was involved with the project for about three months, two of which were spent hiding out from Nimoy and Shatner, because they didn’t want me to talk with them. I’d have to leave my office when they were on the lot, because actors want to tell you, “This is how I perceive the character,” and Gene didn’t want their input. He didn’t want me to have their input. He didn’t even like Bob Wise’s input.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Our area is pure science fiction. Star Wars was a science-fiction cartoon. Great science fiction is an illumination of the human condition in a future environment under different terms. We always had a quality of believability going for us as well as a certain chemistry. I felt a tremendous obligation not to let down the reputation of the old series while we were filming the movie.
JOSHUA CULP (assistant to Dennis Lynton Clark)
Dennis cranked out twenty or twenty-five pages, taking the really kind of limp-wristed opening that the movie has and injecting it with some great stuff. Including some wonderful scenes of Spock on Vulcan talking to one of the high priestesses about his double nature and how to deal with it all. They had the big press conference with all of the actors and Paramount brass, Robert Wise and Gene and everybody else. Once that had happened, the next day Roddenberry came into Dennis’s office with, like, thirty pages of notes on the first twenty-five pages of new screenplay. This continued for the next several weeks until Roddenberry had stalled the rewrite process to where Bob Wise had to shrug his shoulders and say, “I guess we’re going with Roddenberry’s script, because, clearly, we’re not going to get a new script in time to do the work that’s necessary to prep it.” A week or so later, Dennis was cut loose and we went off to work at Fox.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
On a Saturday night, I get a call at ten o’clock at night. I pick up the phone. I knew it was Roddenberry. “Hello! How are you?” he asked. I answered, “What the fuck do you want?” He says, “Listen, I got a problem.” I said, “I know you have a problem. So what do you want from me?” He said, “I want you to read a script.” I said, “Whose script? Yours? I won’t read it.” “No, this is Dennis Clark’s.” Not ten minutes later the doorbell rings and there is a messenger with the script. Gene asked me to read it and get back to him no matter what time that night.
I read the script. My script, rewritten a number of times. Total shit. So I call him up and I said, “Forget it.” He said, “Listen, will you meet me and Bob Wise tomorrow morning?” So I agree. It’s the first time ever I met Bob Wise, the revered director. My first words to him were, “Mr. Wise, you better take a gun and shoot yourself.” Which went over good. And Gene, of course, laughed. The upshot of that is they hired me back—so now I got him by the balls. I go back to work for ten thousand dollars a week and I’m rewriting my own script.
SUSAN SACKETT
What people don’t understand is television does not always translate into feature-length motion pictures. This was one of the first TV shows to become a motion picture. There were so many attempts at the story that had started out as the beginning of what was going to
be one of many TV episodes, and then they chose this particular story and everybody had a finger in the pie and it grew. What we ended up with was pretty good considering everybody had input. It was story by committee, although Gene took it and finalized it. It probably suffered from that.
HAROLD LIVINGSTON
Nimoy was a tremendous help to me. He used to come to my house every night and we would have to fix what Gene did, because Gene would rewrite it and give it to the production people. Nimoy had good character sense. Shatner did, too. But I didn’t work as closely with Shatner as I did with Leonard because he lived nearby. And he knew characterization because he was more Star Trek than I was. He helped me in that respect.
LEONARD NIMOY
One of the things that Star Trek fans always enjoyed a lot about the series was the humor. There was always something tongue-in-cheek if not flat-out comedy. There was always some wry look, a line, an eyebrow raised, something that let them in on the joke. On Star Trek I it was forbidden. I mean it was forbidden! It was decided that we were doing a very serious motion picture here, we would not do funny stuff.
At the end, in fact it was the last day of filming, we were shooting the tag scene on the bridge. The adventure is over. The world has been saved. Everybody is safe. Kirk had brought together this crew after a hiatus for this one special mission. He has taken McCoy out of retirement, called Spock off Vulcan. Now it is time to take everybody back. He says to McCoy, “I can have you back on Earth in two days.” McCoy says, “Now that I’m here, I might as well stay.” Then he says to Spock, “I suppose you want to go back to Vulcan.” Spock’s line, as written, was “My business there is finished.” Final rehearsal before the take, Kirk says, “I can have you back on Earth…” McCoy says, “No, I’ll stay here . .” and he says, “I suppose you’ll want to go back to Vulcan.” And I said, “If Dr. McCoy is to remain on board, then my presence here will be essential.” Everybody roared—which I knew they would. But then I saw the command group gather. They really huddled. Bob Wise came to me and he said, “Seems inappropriate to be doing humor at this point.” I said, “I offer it to you. I can’t make you take it.” They wouldn’t let me do it. They were really adamant about it. That picture had a very classy look, but it was not a lot of fun—either to do or to watch.
