A Brief Guide to Star Trek

series was commissioned. However, the proposed show was thought to clash too strongly with another Universal project that was due to air on ABC:
The Six Million Dollar Man
, a series eventually produced by future
Star Trek
movie producer Harve Bennett.

    In spring 1975 Gene Roddenberry found himself moving back into his old
Star Trek
office on the Paramount lot. Although he’d made several attempts to move on from
Star Trek
, Roddenberry had bowed to the inevitable and was back working with Paramount to develop a potential $5-million
Star Trek
movie.
The Animated Series
– concluded just seven months before – had shown there was still life in the concept, as had the unexpected success of
The Original Series
in syndication and the exponential growth of
Star Trek
’s creative fandom.
    Roddenberry started work on a movie script called
The God Thing
. The story reunited the crew of the starship
Enterprise
, with Kirk now an admiral and Spock having returned to Vulcan to explore his heritage. They set out to confront an unknown force threatening Earth – which may be God, the Devil or something else altogether. These basics would survive through to the eventual
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
in 1979. However, Paramount studio executives Barry Diller and Michael Eisner rejected Roddenberry’s script treatment – an outline of the proposed screen story – in the summer of 1975. This wasfollowed by the cancellation of the scheduled start of shooting, originally planned for July 1976.
    Roddenberry then turned to recent film school graduate and writer Jon Povill (who’d co-drafted a screenplay for the Philip K. Dick short story ‘We Can Remember it for You Wholesale’ under the title
Total Recall
, finally filmed in 1990). Povill came up with a
Star Trek
time travel story in which Scotty was transported to Earth in 1937 and changed history by introducing advanced Starfleet technology. As a result, humanity found itself enslaved by an all-powerful computer and the future was changed. Travelling back in time, the
Enterprise
crew had to find Scotty and correct the altered timeline. Roddenberry judged Povill’s work to be great for an episode of an ongoing TV series, but not suitable for a would-be blockbuster motion picture. The pair then set to work together on a new approach to
Star Trek
that would please Paramount’s executives, who were seeking an epic story suitable for the big screen. In an echo of the early days of
The Original Series
, other writers were also asked to pitch ideas for the proposed movie, among them
Star Trek
veteran John D. F. Black and science fiction author Robert Silverberg. Black’s story, which saw the
Enterprise
save the entire universe from an all-consuming black hole, was deemed by Paramount to be ‘not big enough’ for a movie, while Silverberg’s plan to have the
Enterprise
crew battle aliens for possession of the artefacts of a long-dead advanced civilisation was similarly rejected.
    Things became so desperate at Paramount that even Harlan Ellison – still sore at Roddenberry for comprehensively rewriting his series episode – was called in to pitch a
Star Trek
movie idea. ‘Between 1975 and 1979 there was a parade of writers through Paramount’s gates whose abilities were sought for a
Star Trek
film’, wrote Ellison in
Starlog
in 1980. ‘I know because I was one of them.’ Ellison’s story saw a race of intelligent reptiles travel back in time to wipe out mankind and allow lizards to evolve as the dominant species on Earth. Distortions of the timeline result, causing the
Enterprise
crew to travel backto the dawn of time to confront the reptile aliens, only to be faced with the moral question of whether they have the right to eliminate an intelligent species simply to ensure their own survival. ‘The story spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem’, noted Ellison, suggesting it might be ‘big’ enough for Paramount. At a meeting of movie executives and Roddenberry, Ellison was asked if he could work in the ancient Mayan civilisation (then a hot topic in books such as Erich von Däniken’s
Chariots of the Gods?
). When Ellison pointed out that there were no Mayans at the dawn of time, the Paramount executive claimed no one would know the difference. Ellison said he’d know the difference. ‘I got up and walked out’, Ellison told Stephen King for
Danse Macabre
, King’s book on the craft of writing, ‘and that was the end of my