A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Foster’s version.
    There was an important
Phase II
creative meeting in early August 1977, attended by Paramount executives Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. Alan Dean Foster pitched his ‘In Thy Image’ story in some detail, at the end of which Eisner (seemingly without any irony, given this was a
Star Trek
TV series meeting) declared: ‘We’ve been looking for a [
Star Trek
] feature [film] for years, and this is it!’ Those attending the crucial meeting, including Goodwin, Livingston and Roddenberry, were stunned. For the past month Paramount executives had been struggling in their attempt to secure advertiser support for their fourth television network concept, which was itself to have been built around the
Phase II
series. By the end of July 1977 it was clear that the time was not right for Paramount to proceed. Thatdecision also meant the end of
Star Trek: Phase II
as a television series. The project had already incurred $500,000 in development costs and there were several significant future commitments (to potential cast and crew) that would have to be honoured, whether the project progressed or not. Whatever the fate of the proposed Paramount TV network, something would have to be salvaged from the wreckage of
Phase II
so the studio could recover the substantial investment already made.
    The initial plan was to continue with production on the two-hour pilot movie and see if that could be sold to one of the existing networks as a broadcast event. If that succeeded, then perhaps a full television series could follow. However, at the conclusion of the August meeting, Eisner decided that
Star Trek
would instead become a movie – as had originally been intended when Roddenberry had returned to Paramount almost three years earlier.
    However, until the administrative requirements of switching the
Phase II
project to a feature film could be completed, production would have to continue as if
Star Trek
was still returning as the already-announced TV series. Having cancelled
Planet of the Titans
and announced
Phase II
in quick succession in recent months, Paramount did not want to suffer the embarrassment of a third disappointing
Star Trek
announcement. Nothing could be said publicly until the studio was ready to fully announce the new
Star Trek
feature film.

    By the middle of 1977,
Star Trek: Phase II
was essentially a zombie project – it was still walking around as if it were alive, but the top creatives involved knew their new TV show was dead on its feet. The intended fate of the project would be kept secret from those working on it – only those who were in attendance at the August meeting knew the truth. There was still a possibility that a new
Star Trek
TV series might follow the film, so any script, production art and other material produced for
Phase II
might then prove to be useful (much of the development work would actually prove to have a direct influence on
The Next Generation
in the late 1980s). For the next five months (essentially the rest of 1977), development work on
Phase II
would continue.
    Gene Roddenberry’s immediate task was to adapt the ‘In Thy Image’ story to a movie screenplay while keeping the preproduction work on
Phase II
ticking over, without giving anything away to the team putting in the creative work on the officially abandoned show. The basic story of an unknown, artificial object heading for Earth – clearly a potential threat – and the entanglement with it of the
Enterprise
crew was retained. However, the big problem Roddenberry had to solve was the nature of this unknown object: what is it and what does it want? The breakthrough came when Roddenberry moved on from the object being ‘God’ to it being something in search of ‘God’ (or, at the very least, its creator). He also noted that the creative team had discussed making the object ‘Pioneer 10 [or] a later NASA probe’.
    Meanwhile, Harold Livingston was commissioning writing assignments for
Phase II
, canvassing likely new
Star Trek
episodic storylines from writers such as Ted Sturgeon (‘Shore Leave’, ‘Amok Time’), Walter Koenig (who’d scripted an episode of
The Animated Series
), and David Gerrold (‘The Trouble With Tribbles’). By the end of the month, building had begun on the brand new, revamped
Enterprise
bridge set – with few of those involved aware that it would not be used for
Phase II
but would instead feature as the central set for
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
.
    In