A Brief Guide to Star Trek

at the climax. The alien threat was now identified as the long-lost Earth space probe
Voyager
(dubbed
V’ger
), searching for its creator. Unconvinced that mankind, as represented by the
Enterprise
crew, would be capable of creating an entity such as
V’ger
, the wayward probe threatens to destroy the planet. The solution was to see the largely redundant Will Decker merge with
V’ger
, thus informing the intelligent probe of mankind’s achievements and saving Earth. Many of these coreelements would be maintained through to the eventual production of
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
.
    By December 1977, Hollywood gossip columnist Rona Barrett had gone public with information well known within the upper echelons of Paramount:
Star Trek: Phase II
was a dummy project and the space-faring franchise was now set to be revived as a movie. Her report was business based, focusing on Paramount’s abandonment of the planned fourth TV network. The studio continued to deny anything had changed, except for a delay in the launch of the Paramount network to fall 1978. Among those still in the dark about the project’s change in nature were the series’ episodic writers, who continued to work on scripts for a show that the studio knew was never going to happen. Povill, Livingston and Roddenberry participated in the charade, taking the time to read all the story outlines and offer notes as if the series were going ahead. No one involved creatively at the lower levels of the production of
Star Trek: Phase II
had any real reason to suspect otherwise. But after a decade of struggle and false starts, by 1979
Star Trek
on television was finally pronounced dead. Now,
Star Trek
was going to the movies.

Chapter 6

Persistence of Vision:
The Original Cast Movies

‘
The question was not whether we killed Spock, but whether we killed him well
.’ Nicholas Meyer

    The story of the most successful
Star Trek
movies is primarily the story of three creative individuals: Harve Bennett, Leonard Nimoy and Nicholas Meyer. They would be the driving forces – in various capacities – behind the movies from
Star Trek II
to
Star Trek VI
, with William Shatner carrying the can for the poorly performing
Star Trek V
. However, to begin with it was down to one man to launch
Star Trek
on the big screen: the series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry.
    All the work done on the TV series was now repurposed for the movie, which was not as easy as it might sound. For ex -ample, the quality of finish required for sets (such as the new
Enterprise
bridge) on television was much lower than that required for a film image that would be projected onto the big screen. Everything – sets, costumes, props and special effects – now had to be brought up to movie quality.
    The biggest problem of all was still the script, which had gone through many drafts with several writers alternately tackling the story ideas in the form of a TV pilot or a would-be blockbuster movie. It’s little wonder that the attempted November 1977 combination of all previous scripts into one satisfied no one. There were questions of approach and tone: was this to be like anexpanded episode of the original series? Would broad comedy be suitable for
Star Trek
? Should it be heroic space adventure, like
Star Wars
, or a more contemplative, thoughtful film, like
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
or some of the better episodes of the original
Star Trek
series? The questions were endless, and few people – even Gene Roddenberry – had answers that everyone involved could get behind and support. The only thing that seemed to be agreed on was that the
Star Trek
movie should be full of ‘startling special effects’, a ‘light show’ that would ‘dazzle the senses’, according to a script memo from Jon Povill.
    What had been proposed originally as a $3-million TV movie in the mid-1970s quickly ballooned to an $8-million feature film, then a $15-million blockbuster (in comparison, 1977’s
Star Wars
had cost in the region of $9 million in direct production costs). The final tally (including all the amounts spent in development on
Phase II
) would eventually be a whopping $44 million.
    Although Paramount had tried to maintain the fiction that
Phase II
was an active project, by March 1978 they had to come clean. The appointment of director Robert Wise to helm what was now being dubbed
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
gave the game away. Wise was an old Hollywood hand who’d directed many classics,