A Brief Guide to Star Trek

including
West Side Story
(1961) and
The Sound of Music
(1965). More relevant to Paramount were his science fiction and fantasy credentials on
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951),
The Haunting
(1963) and
The Andromeda Strain
(1971). Wise had started out as a film editor working with Orson Welles on
Citizen Kane
(1941), before moving on to directing for producer Val Lewton with
Curse of the Cat People
(1944). He was regarded as a safe pair of hands to helm Paramount’s biggest movie project in years.
    As the creative point man on any film project, the director is generally regarded as the authority figure on set (sometimes for specific projects producers or writers can hold that position, but for the majority of films the director is the driving force). A single voice in the form of an authoritative director was exactly what
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
needed to break the logjamthat was crippling the production. The problem was that this was not any run-of-the-mill movie but
Star Trek
, and the series’ creative godfather Gene Roddenberry was still very much involved. While Robert Wise was able to take command of the creative departments (sets, costumes, props, make-up, special effects) and get them all pulling in the same direction to realise the film, he still had to deal with the politics of Paramount, the involvement of Roddenberry and a far from finished script.
    The first action Wise took was to resolve any outstanding issues with Spock actor Leonard Nimoy, bringing him back on board the project (and in the process dropping new Vulcan character Xon), as he knew it would be impossible to have
Star Trek
without Spock. Secondly, Wise recalled writer Harold Livingston to rework the ‘In Thy Image’ script from the ground up, removing all the rewriting done by Roddenberry, Povill and others through countless confused drafts. Wise wanted a script that contained the same ideas and action, but was written for the big screen rather than cobbled together from failed TV pilot drafts.
    From the first musings about a possible
Star Trek
film, by D. C. Fontana in a fanzine called
Star-Borne
in 1972, through Gene Roddenberry’s 1975 script ‘The God Thing’ to Harold Livingston’s 1977 script ‘In Thy Image’, the voyage of
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
to its first day of principal photography on 7 August 1978 had been a long and complicated one.
    Robert Wise started shooting barely eighteen months before the planned December 1979 release date, with an unfinished script and no idea if the studio could handle the special effects required by the story (which had remained true to the basics of
Phase II
’s ‘In Thy Image’). With new script pages arriving on set daily, the film was still without an agreed ending well into shooting (script revisions were so numerous that some were noted not just by the day they were made, but by the hour).
    With scenes on the redesigned
Enterprise
bridge and transporter platform completed in the studio, the production relocated for three days to Yellowstone National Park to shoot the scenes on Vulcan featuring Nimoy. The film’s realisation ofVulcan (easily outstripping anything seen on the original TV show) would be augmented with the use of visual effects and matte paintings for a convincing otherworldly feel. However, by the end of August the production was around two weeks behind the planned shooting schedule. It would be 26 January 1979 before shooting wrapped on the film after 125 days, with a huge amount of post-production work still to be done.
    The creation of the special effects for
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
proved to be the biggest headache for the production. Robert Abel and Associates were appointed to realise the
Enterprise
’s encounter with
V’ger
, but found the work and the tight schedule daunting. Paramount brought in effects specialist Douglas Trumbull (
2001: A Space Odyssey
,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
) to rescue the project and ensure it met the release date. Despite all the time and money available, the film was barely completed in time for release, with Wise always considering it to have been a ‘rough cut’: an unfinished project released due to commercial deadlines.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
was not audience tested due to lack of time (something Wise regretted) and the film’s just-completed print was delivered to the premiere in Washington DC by the director himself. ‘I saw the completed film for the first time on December 1,