You think Captain Kirk racing a dirt bike is wild?
There’s a new book out titled (deep breath) “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years”
The Hollywood Reporter published an excerpt dealing with an until-now little-discussed period after the 1969 cancellation of NBC’s “Star Trek” but before 1977’s “Star Wars” became the biggest movie ever. A few choice details from the excerpt:
* Series mastermind Gene Roddenberry says it was tricky finding work following NBC’s cancellation of “Star Trek” and it was “tough” trying to scrape enough money to pay his mortgage. (His eventual compensation for subsequent “Trek” projects reversed his financial situation dramatically; I gather that at the time of Roddenberry’s death 16 years later, he had not only paid off his mortgage but left his widow an estate worth many millions of dollars.)
* Shortly after the cancellation, ex-Beatle and Trek fan Paul McCartney hired Roddenberry to write a movie about Wings competing in an interplanetary battle of the bands.
* In May of 1975, almost exactly two years before Fox released “Star Wars,” Paramount hired Roddenberry to return to his old “Star Trek” office and pound out a script for a big-screen “Star Trek.” (The offer may have been precipitated by Paramount execs following George Lucas’ progress on Fox’s “Star Wars”; Lucas had already completed a second draft script for that project four months earlier.)
* William Shatner, who had coincidentally returned to the Paramount lot that spring to star in ABC’s new TV western “The Barbary Coast,” says he impulsively decided to visit Trek’s old stages one day and was shocked to discover Gene Roddenberry in his old office, typing a new Star Trek script.
* “There’s gonna be a movie?” asked the “Star Trek” star. “What’s it gonna be about?” Roddenberry was happy to spill:
“First of all, we have to explain how you guys got older. So what we have to do is move everybody up in a rank. You become an admiral, and the rest of the cast become Starfleet commanders. One day a force comes toward Earth — might be God, might be the Devil — breaking everything in its path, except the minds of the starship commanders. So we gotta find all the original crewmen for the starship Enterprise, but first — where is Spock? He's back on Vulcan, doing R & R; five-year mission, seven years of R & R. He swam back upstream. So we gotta go get him.”
* At one point in this movie script, which came to be known unofficially as “The God Thing,” the alien force assumes (reverts to?) the form of Jesus Christ and asks if Kirk knows him. Kirk says he does.
* Paramount chief Barry Diller, a devout Catholic, passed on this script. “Actually, it wasn’t God they were meeting, but someone who had been born here on Earth before, claiming to be God,” said Roddenberry. “I was going to say that this false thing claiming to be God had screwed up man’s concept of the real infinity and beauty of what God is. Paramount was reluctant to put that up on the screen, and I can understand that position.”
* Following Roddenberry’s 1991 death, Trek novelist Michael Jan Friedman was approached by Paramount-owned Pocket Books to novelize Roddenberry’s “God Thing” script for publication. Friedman says he was “dismayed” when he read Roddenberry's screenplay:
It was disjointed — scenes didn’t work together, didn’t build toward anything meaningful. Kirk, Spock and McCoy didn’t seem anything like themselves. There was some mildly erotic, midlife-crisis stuff in there that didn’t serve any real purpose. In the climactic scene, Kirk had a fistfight with an alien who had assumed the image of Jesus Christ.
Friedman created an outline for the book but ended up not writing it because Roddenberry’s lawyer and widow objected to the additions Friedman had in mind to expand the story to the length of a novel. Friedman remembers that because Pocket Books and Majel Roddenberry could not agree on the book’s direction, the novelization was scrapped.
According to Roddenberry associate Jon Povill, a number of “Trek” vets – among them Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, John D.F. Black, Richard Matheson and Ted Sturgeon – may have pitched Roddenberry ideas for a Trek movie during this period.
In late summer Povill himself pitched Roddenberry a time-travel movie that sent the Enterprise to Ancient Vulcan to prevent a desperate wartime decision that precipitated terrible consequences for the planet in the Kirk-Spock era.
While Roddenberry deemed Povill’s Ancient Vulcan pitch better suited to the small screen, the following December Roddenberry invited Povill to help him write another time-travel script – this time about a desperate Montgomery Scott traveling back to 1937 and creating a chain of events that prevents World War II, John Kennedy’s assassination and the creation of The United Federation of Planets. In this script Einstein, Kennedy, Churchill and Hitler all get to tour the Enterprise. Diller passed on this script as well.
Mind you, this all transpired well prior to Roddenberry’s June 1977 announcement that “Star Trek Phase II” would return Captain Kirk to the small screen, this time in the company of empath navigator Ilia and commander Will Decker. As the grosses for “Star Wars” continued to accrue over the subsequent year, it was the pilot script for “Phase II” that formed the basis for 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.”
This first book went on sale last week.
Find all of the first book’s excerpt here.
