A Brief Guide to Star Trek

slightly “alien”.’ Other actors had been considered for the role, including Western actor DeForest Kelley, Rex Holman and dwarf actor Michael Dunn, best known for playing Miguelito Loveless, the recurring villain in
The Wild, Wild West
(1965–9). Their casting would have brought a very different interpretation to the character of Spock. It was, however, Majel Barrett who was instrumental in the selection of Nimoy, recalling him from a guest appearance in Roddenberry’s
The Lieutenant
and bringing him to the producer’s attention once again. His thin frame and angular features were ideal for the alien character Roddenberry had in mind.
    While all the actors associated with
Star Trek
saw their professional lives changed by the series, this applied to no one more than Nimoy. Following his time in the US Army, Nimoy played a variety of guest roles in TV series, including episodes of
The Untouchables
,
The Outer Limits
and
Perry Mason
, but it was the character of Spock that would bring him public acclaim, private anguish and define him in the eyes of audiences right up to and beyond J. J. Abrams’ 2009 movie reinvention of
Star Trek
. It is safe to say that
Star Trek
would not have been the same without Nimoy as Spock: within days of his casting Roddenberry had requested his props department cost up something simply described in a memo as ‘ear appliances’ . . .
    Rejected for the role of Spock, DeForest Kelley was up for the part of ‘Doc’, the ship’s medical officer. The character was one of the more straightforward in Roddenberry’s initial 1964 pitch document: ‘Ship’s Doctor – Philip Boyce, an unlikely space traveller. At the age of fifty-one, he’s worldly, humorously cynical, makes it a point to thoroughly enjoy his own weaknesses. Captain April’s only real confidant, “Bones” Boyceconsiders himself the only realist aboard, and measures each new landing in terms of relative annoyance, rather than excitement.’ Kelley had played plenty of irascible country doctors in several Western movies and TV series, but he lost out on the role in ‘The Cage’ to B-movie actor John Hoyt. Neither the character of Dr Philip John Boyce nor the actor’s participation in
Star Trek
would last beyond the filming of this pilot. After a fairly fruitless search for an actress to play Vina, Roddenberry eventually secured Susan Oliver for the guest starring role.
    With the creative and casting work complete, shooting began on ‘The Cage’ on the day after Thanksgiving, 27 November 1964 on Desilu’s Stage 16 in Culver City. Fittingly, the first scenes shot involved one of
Star Trek
’s iconic sets: the transporter room of the
Enterprise
. Roddenberry had dreamt up the ‘transporter’ as a method of getting characters to and from planets (and other locations) without a lot of messing about in space shuttles (or, indeed, having the
Enterprise
repeatedly land and take off from planets). It was an elegant solution to a practical problem (saving a fortune in regular effects work, although the transporter ‘beaming’ effect itself became a regular feature).
    The two weeks’ filming saw Roddenberry engaged in script rewrites as well as supervising the entire production process. Shooting wrapped on 11 December and a period of frantic post-production followed in which special effects and model shots were worked into the edited footage. Three days after Christmas 1964, Gene Roddenberry viewed a completed rough cut of his debut episode of
Star Trek
– but he was not a happy man.
    According to a memo he prepared after viewing the episode, and other correspondence with friends, Roddenberry felt the action in ‘The Cage’ didn’t start quickly enough, that the character of the captain was not defined clearly enough in the show’s opening moments, and that the time constraints involved in filming the episode over just two weeks had damaged the final product. A revised edit was prepared for mid-January 1965, and then the show had to be screened for NBC executives, ready or not. Roddenberry admitted that if he’d had more time, he’d have continued to rework ‘The Cage’.
    Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous maxim about Hollywood – ‘Nobody knows anything’ – applied equally to US television in the 1960s. Reluctant to make choices themselves about which programmes to back, NBC executives relied on flawed audience tests to tell them whether a show would be a hit or not. Such a different, unknown