Snapshots from the Scotty Farewell
The New York Times sent a real photographer for the story, but while I was covering the "Beam Me Up, Scotty...one last time" Convention in Hollywood at the end of August, juggling notebook and tape recorder, I also occasionally pulled out a little camera for some snapshots.
Now I've finally gotten around to posting some...(an extended version of my Times story follows the photos...)
---Bill Kowinski
Saturday, October 16, 2004
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Star Trek: The Search for Its SoulBy William S. Kowinski
This is my final draft for the article edited and published on p. 1 of the Arts Section in the New York Times on August 31, 2004. This version is longer and lacks some changes made at the Times.
Two of my favorite quotes didn’t make the published version but they're here: the second Mike Malotte quote about the initial appeal of Trek, and Nick Sagan’s quote that ends this version.
The article in the NY Times was published Tuesday morning. By 10a.m. or so in LA, during the ceremony bestowing James Doohan's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Nichelle Nichols was holding up a copy of it to fans and the cameras, and (I'm told, since I wasn't there) thanking me, the Times and the media covering the convention for giving Jimmy Doohan the honor he is due.
Among the material I didn't get into the article were quotes from Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton and Nicholas Meyer, all of whom substantively or ( the latter two) actually said: "I love Jimmy Doohan."
Could Star Trek be dying? It's enough to make Mr. Spock laugh. "This is so funny," said Leonard Nimoy, who in addition to playing Mr. Spock, directed two Star Trek feature films and produced another. "Star Trek has died several times, and come back stronger than ever. It's hilarious."
This past weekend, Mr. Nimoy joined his Star Trek original cast crewmates at Planet Xpo convention in Los Angeles to honor the ailing James Doohan (who played Scotty, the Enterprise engineer) in his last convention appearance. Doohan, who receives his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today, is showing signs of Alzheimers disease, according to a family spokesperson. So with the exception of the late DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), all of the world famous Enterprise crew gathered one last time on Sunday.
Over the weekend the original cast members recounted Star Trek's bumpy early history--- Created by Gene Roddenberry and first aired in 1966, cancelled after three stormy seasons, resurrected in syndication, reborn as an initially disappointing feature film in 1979, it achieved warp speed momentum with a successful second film and a hit sequel TV series, "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Now approaching its fortieth anniversary, with a total of ten movies and hundreds of hours of five TV series that are all still seen across the U.S. and around the world, (not to mention hundreds of novels and electronic games, and tons of merchandise) Star Trek is a unique popular culture phenomenon, and the earth's best known saga of the future.
At the moment Star Trek is undeniably alive. Today Paramount releases Trekkies 2, a new documentary on DVD, about Star Trek's global network of fans, and the long-awaited first season DVD set of the original Star Trek series. Still, there are reasons for questioning its continued viability. Though the feature film series has grossed more than a billion dollars for Paramount, the last two outings have sputtered at the box office. The most recent release, Star Trek Nemesis, could not hold its own against installments of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter film series in summer 2002. Many reviewers greeted it with condescension or scorn, suggesting that the Star Trek enterprise had run its course.
Since Star Trek: The Next Generation received an Emmy nomination as best dramatic series and left the air a legitimate hit in 1994,subsequent Star Trek TV dramas slowly lost ratings ground. Completing its third season last spring after a generally rough ratings year for TV drama, the current series, Star Trek: Enterprise, faced cancellation by the UPN network.
In an echo of the original series' fate, it was saved after a fan letter-writing campaign, but rescheduled on Friday evenings at 8 oclock for the coming season, beginning in October. Both UPN president Dawn Ostroff and Paramount TV president Garry Hart point to the example of "The X Files," a series aimed at similar viewers, that found its audience on Fridays. (They are also happy that Enterprise will no longer be competing with American Idol.) Though Mr. Hart says he is "cautiously optimistic" about the change, Friday has also been a graveyard for shows meant to appeal to young adult viewers---including the original Star Trek in 1969.
Despite his amusement, Mr. Nimoy is among those who agree there is cause for concern. He likens the current situation to the period after the first Star Trek feature film, when "I felt that Star Trek was like a beached whale. I think something similar is happening now. Star Trek is in this stranded situation. The ideas that were propelling it have run dry. It needs somebody with fresh ideas and fresh energy to come along and put it back in the water."
"I'm not saying it will happen," Mr. Nimoy added, pointing out that he hasn't been creatively involved in Star Trek since 1991. "But I think given the proper elements, it could happen. There's certainly still a core base of fans that wants it to happen."
Some observers suggest the problem is audience fatigue. Some believe it is creative exhaustion. But one solution to both, according to a number of actors, writers, producers and directors of past Star Trek incarnations, may be to stop making new Star Trek stories for awhile.
"As soon as one series ends, the next one begins right away," said Denise Crosby, actor in Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as Executive Producer of Trekkies 2. "How can you sustain that? The bar has been raised so high with sci fi films. I'm not talking just about special effects but interesting, elaborate tales... You need to step back and refocus on what's pertinent to this moment in time."
"Star Trek's just not special enough. Not anymore," said LeVar Burton, who directed some 27 episodes of four Star Trek series, as well as starring in The Next Generation . "They need to shut the whole thing down, wait five years, create an interest, an excitement, a hunger for it again."
When he's not running a technical support team for Gateway computers, Michael W. Malotte is Commander (or president) of Starfleet (or the nonprofit organization, the International Star Trek Fan Association, Inc), with 230 chapters worldwide. It is one of the oldest and largest such umbrella groups, but hardly the only one. "If you asked our approximately 4000 members right now, they'd probably be split right down the middle," he said. "There's a large group that thinks it's time to give Trek a rest...There's another group that says, 'I enjoy Trek, I don't agree with a lot of what they're doing, but I still enjoy watching."
Those who are rooting for more new Star Trek are buzzing this summer about the new executive producer of the current series, Enterprise, which is set in the century before Captain Kirk. He is Manny Coto, a self-declared fan who is addressing a key fan complaint: that the series strays too far from the essence of Trek. "My goal is to deepen and expand its relationship to the Star Trek universe," Mr. Coto said, "to fulfill its promise as a true prequel series."
This relationship will be made visible with the appearance of Brent Spiner, The Next Generation's Mr. Data, in a story told over a three episode "mini-arc," the coming season's preferred format. Negotiations are underway for a similar appearance by William Shatner, perhaps even playing Captain Kirk. Mr. Coto added well-regarded Star Trek novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens to the writing staff, to take advantage of their "intimate familiarity" with the Trek universe as well their fluency in imaginative science fiction. All of this, Mr. Coto believes, will attract other viewers besides declared Trek fans.
"What makes Star Trek Star Trek is its unique ability to comment on our present condition by examining it in a future context," said LeVar Burton. "Star Trek is the one aspect of the popular culture that gets us to think about our nature, and our purpose for being here." This is another elements that Star Trek advocates insist is central to the saga's identity, but has been missing lately. Mr. Coto agrees that this is "something that science fiction does best," so a planned Enterprise arc concerns civil war on Vulcan (Mr. Spock's planet) which he says will covertly examine "the war in Iraq and the direction of the country." The Brent Spiner arc deals with genetic manipulation and even suggestions of the stem cell debate, while elaborating on a premise fans will recall from the original Star Trek series. LeVar Burton is directing its third episode.
Mr. Coto doesn't believe Star Trek should shut down after Enterprise. "There can never be too much Star Trek, " he says. But even if a pause could be creatively useful, commercial calculation will likely determine Star Trek's fate, and its recent problems may not be decisive. "Movies cost so much to make that apparently the only thing that strikes the studios as worth doing is franchise-related," said Nicholas Meyer, who directed Star Trek II:The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. "Whether it's other movies, comic books, video games, it doesn't matter, as long as there is some pre-sale. Which is not to say they can't turn out a good movie. A lot of good things are done for the wrong reasons."
Though he acknowledges that the performance of Star Trek Nemesis was disappointing, Star Trek Executive Producer Rick Berman notes that it was the tenth film in the series, "and I highly doubt it was the last." A Paramount films spokesperson agreed. Still, two years after its release, discussions for the next film are "in a very preliminary stage," and the story being considered "would not involve any of the casts that have existed in previous films and television series," Mr. Berman said.
"We hope and anticipate that Enterprise will run for a few more years," Garry Hart said, adding that while another Star Trek series isn't being planned, he doubts there will be more than a season or two pause after Enterprise before the next incarnation. "Star Trek has been the most successful franchise in the history of television. I have no doubt there will be a demand for more Star Trek on television."
There is more science fiction competition in films and especially television than in Star Trek's best days (and much of the TV sci-fi is being created by Star Trek alumni writers and producers.) Though Mr. Coto believes that Enterprise will continue to excel in television's more affordable special effects, Mr. Berman acknowledges that Star Trek features don't have the budgets of "the Lucases and the Speilbergs" but must compete with them for audience.
But Mr. Nimoy doesn't see this as the chief appeal of Star Trek anyway. "We never relied on that. We depended on story, story, story. Not image, image, image." He points out that effects usually portray violence and destruction, but in the movie he wrote and directed, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (known as "the whales story"), "There was not a single shot fired, nobody died... It was an entirely different sensibility. That was the high point of my experience with Star Trek. That was my Star Trek statement." It also remains the most popular Star Trek feature.
Star Trek as a cultural alternative remains central to fan loyalty. "I think the biggest appeal of Star Trek is that back in the 60s, when Gene did this," Michael Malotte said, "most science fiction was about people who weren't on earth because they were escaping it, it was so overpopulated and polluted that people couldn't live on it, or it was a charred cinder because we'd screwed ourselves over. Gene's Star Trek was really the first science fiction of its time to show a future where we actually learn from our mistakes. We bettered ourselves and we banded together, and we headed out for the stars. "
But even if Star Trek pauses or stops, most observers agree that the fan clubs and conventions will continue. In some ways, fandom has become self-sufficient. For years, fans have created and disseminated their own Star Trek stories, on mimeographed pages, then on fan fiction Internet sites, and now with increasingly accessible digital technology, they are creating their own films. "They are no longer bound by what the TV tells them to do," says Eugene Roddenberry, Gene Roddenberry's 30 year old son, who recently agreed to help produce a live action fan film. "They can go do it themselves, which I love."
Eugene Roddenberry is also working on a documentary called Trek Nation that highlights Star Trek's impact on world culture as well as its positive influence on fans in their real lives. Fan organizations typically do charity work and public service, and some require it. "Many fans live their lives by these philosophies like The Prime Directive, and IDIC (infinite diversity in infinite combinations)," said Roger Nygard, director of Trekkies 2.
This weekend the original Star Trek actors emphasized those themes to their convention audiences, as they usually do. To a degree now unusual, their lives before television stardom include experiences that bear on Star Trek's commitment to peace and equality: James Doohan was badly wounded on D-Day in 1944. George Takei (Mr. Sulu) spent part of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp, and as a singer in the early 1960s, Nichelle Nichols was refused lodging because of her race.
"Because the fans are loyal to Gene's dream, " said Ms. Nichols in an interview on Sunday, "we are loyal to the fans." Walter Koenig (Chekov), Ms. Nichols, Mr. Takei, Majel Roddenberry (who played on Star Trek and The Next Generation, and was married to Mr. Roddenberry) and before his recent illness, Mr. Doohan, have appeared most consistently at conventions and are fan favorites. The bond goes both ways. "In a society with so much violence and stupidity," Mr. Koenig said, " the conventions are an oasis, where you can find some genuinely good people who believe in humanity and respect the rights of others."
Star Trek is unique for having created its own elaborate history of the future, which together with its themes, best stories and strongest characters, makes a modern mythology. "You'd be hard pressed to find anybody who doesn't know what a Klingon is, or doesn't know what 'beam me up Scotty' is all about,'" Rick Berman said. "It is a phenomenon that will continue to exist, and whether it will continue to exist after a pause or not, probably in the long run doesn't matter."
Just one indication of its interpenetration with real life came at the convention on Saturday night when the featured speaker at the banquet honoring James Doohan was astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon. Ending a talk replete with Star Trek references (including a wish for a Federation starship for his next command), he addressed Mr. Doohan: "From one old engineer to another: thanks, mate."
But how much unoccupied room is there for new adventures in the Star Trek universe? Nick Sagan, who wrote for "The Next Generation" and Star Trek: Voyager, and whose second science fiction novel, Edenborn, was just published, thinks there's a lot. "Whichever side of the debate you're on, it's undeniable that many people feel Star Trek has grown stagnant," he said. "You can take it off the air and out of the theaters for a while to create some breathing room, or someone can step up and break away from the traditional Trek experience by taking a chance on something new. You don't have to tell stories about or even tip the hat to previous Trek characters. All you need is Gene Roddenberry's sense of hope and wonder."
Home
This is my final draft for the article edited and published on p. 1 of the Arts Section in the New York Times on August 31, 2004. This version is longer and lacks some changes made at the Times.
Two of my favorite quotes didn’t make the published version but they're here: the second Mike Malotte quote about the initial appeal of Trek, and Nick Sagan’s quote that ends this version.
The article in the NY Times was published Tuesday morning. By 10a.m. or so in LA, during the ceremony bestowing James Doohan's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Nichelle Nichols was holding up a copy of it to fans and the cameras, and (I'm told, since I wasn't there) thanking me, the Times and the media covering the convention for giving Jimmy Doohan the honor he is due.
Among the material I didn't get into the article were quotes from Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton and Nicholas Meyer, all of whom substantively or ( the latter two) actually said: "I love Jimmy Doohan."
Could Star Trek be dying? It's enough to make Mr. Spock laugh. "This is so funny," said Leonard Nimoy, who in addition to playing Mr. Spock, directed two Star Trek feature films and produced another. "Star Trek has died several times, and come back stronger than ever. It's hilarious."
This past weekend, Mr. Nimoy joined his Star Trek original cast crewmates at Planet Xpo convention in Los Angeles to honor the ailing James Doohan (who played Scotty, the Enterprise engineer) in his last convention appearance. Doohan, who receives his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today, is showing signs of Alzheimers disease, according to a family spokesperson. So with the exception of the late DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), all of the world famous Enterprise crew gathered one last time on Sunday.
Over the weekend the original cast members recounted Star Trek's bumpy early history--- Created by Gene Roddenberry and first aired in 1966, cancelled after three stormy seasons, resurrected in syndication, reborn as an initially disappointing feature film in 1979, it achieved warp speed momentum with a successful second film and a hit sequel TV series, "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Now approaching its fortieth anniversary, with a total of ten movies and hundreds of hours of five TV series that are all still seen across the U.S. and around the world, (not to mention hundreds of novels and electronic games, and tons of merchandise) Star Trek is a unique popular culture phenomenon, and the earth's best known saga of the future.
At the moment Star Trek is undeniably alive. Today Paramount releases Trekkies 2, a new documentary on DVD, about Star Trek's global network of fans, and the long-awaited first season DVD set of the original Star Trek series. Still, there are reasons for questioning its continued viability. Though the feature film series has grossed more than a billion dollars for Paramount, the last two outings have sputtered at the box office. The most recent release, Star Trek Nemesis, could not hold its own against installments of the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter film series in summer 2002. Many reviewers greeted it with condescension or scorn, suggesting that the Star Trek enterprise had run its course.
Since Star Trek: The Next Generation received an Emmy nomination as best dramatic series and left the air a legitimate hit in 1994,subsequent Star Trek TV dramas slowly lost ratings ground. Completing its third season last spring after a generally rough ratings year for TV drama, the current series, Star Trek: Enterprise, faced cancellation by the UPN network.
In an echo of the original series' fate, it was saved after a fan letter-writing campaign, but rescheduled on Friday evenings at 8 oclock for the coming season, beginning in October. Both UPN president Dawn Ostroff and Paramount TV president Garry Hart point to the example of "The X Files," a series aimed at similar viewers, that found its audience on Fridays. (They are also happy that Enterprise will no longer be competing with American Idol.) Though Mr. Hart says he is "cautiously optimistic" about the change, Friday has also been a graveyard for shows meant to appeal to young adult viewers---including the original Star Trek in 1969.
Despite his amusement, Mr. Nimoy is among those who agree there is cause for concern. He likens the current situation to the period after the first Star Trek feature film, when "I felt that Star Trek was like a beached whale. I think something similar is happening now. Star Trek is in this stranded situation. The ideas that were propelling it have run dry. It needs somebody with fresh ideas and fresh energy to come along and put it back in the water."
"I'm not saying it will happen," Mr. Nimoy added, pointing out that he hasn't been creatively involved in Star Trek since 1991. "But I think given the proper elements, it could happen. There's certainly still a core base of fans that wants it to happen."
Some observers suggest the problem is audience fatigue. Some believe it is creative exhaustion. But one solution to both, according to a number of actors, writers, producers and directors of past Star Trek incarnations, may be to stop making new Star Trek stories for awhile.
"As soon as one series ends, the next one begins right away," said Denise Crosby, actor in Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as Executive Producer of Trekkies 2. "How can you sustain that? The bar has been raised so high with sci fi films. I'm not talking just about special effects but interesting, elaborate tales... You need to step back and refocus on what's pertinent to this moment in time."
"Star Trek's just not special enough. Not anymore," said LeVar Burton, who directed some 27 episodes of four Star Trek series, as well as starring in The Next Generation . "They need to shut the whole thing down, wait five years, create an interest, an excitement, a hunger for it again."
When he's not running a technical support team for Gateway computers, Michael W. Malotte is Commander (or president) of Starfleet (or the nonprofit organization, the International Star Trek Fan Association, Inc), with 230 chapters worldwide. It is one of the oldest and largest such umbrella groups, but hardly the only one. "If you asked our approximately 4000 members right now, they'd probably be split right down the middle," he said. "There's a large group that thinks it's time to give Trek a rest...There's another group that says, 'I enjoy Trek, I don't agree with a lot of what they're doing, but I still enjoy watching."
Those who are rooting for more new Star Trek are buzzing this summer about the new executive producer of the current series, Enterprise, which is set in the century before Captain Kirk. He is Manny Coto, a self-declared fan who is addressing a key fan complaint: that the series strays too far from the essence of Trek. "My goal is to deepen and expand its relationship to the Star Trek universe," Mr. Coto said, "to fulfill its promise as a true prequel series."
This relationship will be made visible with the appearance of Brent Spiner, The Next Generation's Mr. Data, in a story told over a three episode "mini-arc," the coming season's preferred format. Negotiations are underway for a similar appearance by William Shatner, perhaps even playing Captain Kirk. Mr. Coto added well-regarded Star Trek novelists Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens to the writing staff, to take advantage of their "intimate familiarity" with the Trek universe as well their fluency in imaginative science fiction. All of this, Mr. Coto believes, will attract other viewers besides declared Trek fans.
"What makes Star Trek Star Trek is its unique ability to comment on our present condition by examining it in a future context," said LeVar Burton. "Star Trek is the one aspect of the popular culture that gets us to think about our nature, and our purpose for being here." This is another elements that Star Trek advocates insist is central to the saga's identity, but has been missing lately. Mr. Coto agrees that this is "something that science fiction does best," so a planned Enterprise arc concerns civil war on Vulcan (Mr. Spock's planet) which he says will covertly examine "the war in Iraq and the direction of the country." The Brent Spiner arc deals with genetic manipulation and even suggestions of the stem cell debate, while elaborating on a premise fans will recall from the original Star Trek series. LeVar Burton is directing its third episode.
Mr. Coto doesn't believe Star Trek should shut down after Enterprise. "There can never be too much Star Trek, " he says. But even if a pause could be creatively useful, commercial calculation will likely determine Star Trek's fate, and its recent problems may not be decisive. "Movies cost so much to make that apparently the only thing that strikes the studios as worth doing is franchise-related," said Nicholas Meyer, who directed Star Trek II:The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. "Whether it's other movies, comic books, video games, it doesn't matter, as long as there is some pre-sale. Which is not to say they can't turn out a good movie. A lot of good things are done for the wrong reasons."
Though he acknowledges that the performance of Star Trek Nemesis was disappointing, Star Trek Executive Producer Rick Berman notes that it was the tenth film in the series, "and I highly doubt it was the last." A Paramount films spokesperson agreed. Still, two years after its release, discussions for the next film are "in a very preliminary stage," and the story being considered "would not involve any of the casts that have existed in previous films and television series," Mr. Berman said.
"We hope and anticipate that Enterprise will run for a few more years," Garry Hart said, adding that while another Star Trek series isn't being planned, he doubts there will be more than a season or two pause after Enterprise before the next incarnation. "Star Trek has been the most successful franchise in the history of television. I have no doubt there will be a demand for more Star Trek on television."
There is more science fiction competition in films and especially television than in Star Trek's best days (and much of the TV sci-fi is being created by Star Trek alumni writers and producers.) Though Mr. Coto believes that Enterprise will continue to excel in television's more affordable special effects, Mr. Berman acknowledges that Star Trek features don't have the budgets of "the Lucases and the Speilbergs" but must compete with them for audience.
But Mr. Nimoy doesn't see this as the chief appeal of Star Trek anyway. "We never relied on that. We depended on story, story, story. Not image, image, image." He points out that effects usually portray violence and destruction, but in the movie he wrote and directed, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (known as "the whales story"), "There was not a single shot fired, nobody died... It was an entirely different sensibility. That was the high point of my experience with Star Trek. That was my Star Trek statement." It also remains the most popular Star Trek feature.
Star Trek as a cultural alternative remains central to fan loyalty. "I think the biggest appeal of Star Trek is that back in the 60s, when Gene did this," Michael Malotte said, "most science fiction was about people who weren't on earth because they were escaping it, it was so overpopulated and polluted that people couldn't live on it, or it was a charred cinder because we'd screwed ourselves over. Gene's Star Trek was really the first science fiction of its time to show a future where we actually learn from our mistakes. We bettered ourselves and we banded together, and we headed out for the stars. "
But even if Star Trek pauses or stops, most observers agree that the fan clubs and conventions will continue. In some ways, fandom has become self-sufficient. For years, fans have created and disseminated their own Star Trek stories, on mimeographed pages, then on fan fiction Internet sites, and now with increasingly accessible digital technology, they are creating their own films. "They are no longer bound by what the TV tells them to do," says Eugene Roddenberry, Gene Roddenberry's 30 year old son, who recently agreed to help produce a live action fan film. "They can go do it themselves, which I love."
Eugene Roddenberry is also working on a documentary called Trek Nation that highlights Star Trek's impact on world culture as well as its positive influence on fans in their real lives. Fan organizations typically do charity work and public service, and some require it. "Many fans live their lives by these philosophies like The Prime Directive, and IDIC (infinite diversity in infinite combinations)," said Roger Nygard, director of Trekkies 2.
This weekend the original Star Trek actors emphasized those themes to their convention audiences, as they usually do. To a degree now unusual, their lives before television stardom include experiences that bear on Star Trek's commitment to peace and equality: James Doohan was badly wounded on D-Day in 1944. George Takei (Mr. Sulu) spent part of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp, and as a singer in the early 1960s, Nichelle Nichols was refused lodging because of her race.
"Because the fans are loyal to Gene's dream, " said Ms. Nichols in an interview on Sunday, "we are loyal to the fans." Walter Koenig (Chekov), Ms. Nichols, Mr. Takei, Majel Roddenberry (who played on Star Trek and The Next Generation, and was married to Mr. Roddenberry) and before his recent illness, Mr. Doohan, have appeared most consistently at conventions and are fan favorites. The bond goes both ways. "In a society with so much violence and stupidity," Mr. Koenig said, " the conventions are an oasis, where you can find some genuinely good people who believe in humanity and respect the rights of others."
Star Trek is unique for having created its own elaborate history of the future, which together with its themes, best stories and strongest characters, makes a modern mythology. "You'd be hard pressed to find anybody who doesn't know what a Klingon is, or doesn't know what 'beam me up Scotty' is all about,'" Rick Berman said. "It is a phenomenon that will continue to exist, and whether it will continue to exist after a pause or not, probably in the long run doesn't matter."
Just one indication of its interpenetration with real life came at the convention on Saturday night when the featured speaker at the banquet honoring James Doohan was astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon. Ending a talk replete with Star Trek references (including a wish for a Federation starship for his next command), he addressed Mr. Doohan: "From one old engineer to another: thanks, mate."
But how much unoccupied room is there for new adventures in the Star Trek universe? Nick Sagan, who wrote for "The Next Generation" and Star Trek: Voyager, and whose second science fiction novel, Edenborn, was just published, thinks there's a lot. "Whichever side of the debate you're on, it's undeniable that many people feel Star Trek has grown stagnant," he said. "You can take it off the air and out of the theaters for a while to create some breathing room, or someone can step up and break away from the traditional Trek experience by taking a chance on something new. You don't have to tell stories about or even tip the hat to previous Trek characters. All you need is Gene Roddenberry's sense of hope and wonder."
Home
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Introducing THE TREKALOG
Greetings---Thanks to a number of new features on Blogger, I've been able to reorganize this site. From here down, as the world scrolls, you'll find what I call "The Trekalog"--my essays on all ten Star Trek feature films to date.
(In addition to "log" as a Star Trek reference, there's also a pun here on The Decalogue, as the Ten Commandments are sometimes called. I hope no one is offended, but what do you expect from twelve years of Catholic schools.)
Anyway, now that Blogger allows you to pick the date on your posts, I can place these essays in order, from Star Trek The Motion Picture, to Star Trek Nemesis. (I've picked this date to start with so this will follow my New York Times piece, and because, well, it's my birth date.)
For awhile this will be a work in progress, since I haven't written all the essays yet, and I'm taking this opportunity to revise the essays I have written. But from here down---that is, from here into the past---is the place for The Trekalong.
Enjoy. And your comments are invited.
Greetings---Thanks to a number of new features on Blogger, I've been able to reorganize this site. From here down, as the world scrolls, you'll find what I call "The Trekalog"--my essays on all ten Star Trek feature films to date.
(In addition to "log" as a Star Trek reference, there's also a pun here on The Decalogue, as the Ten Commandments are sometimes called. I hope no one is offended, but what do you expect from twelve years of Catholic schools.)
Anyway, now that Blogger allows you to pick the date on your posts, I can place these essays in order, from Star Trek The Motion Picture, to Star Trek Nemesis. (I've picked this date to start with so this will follow my New York Times piece, and because, well, it's my birth date.)
For awhile this will be a work in progress, since I haven't written all the essays yet, and I'm taking this opportunity to revise the essays I have written. But from here down---that is, from here into the past---is the place for The Trekalong.
Enjoy. And your comments are invited.
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE
You have to understand what it was like, being in the audience for the first run of '>Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Some in those audiences had waited ten years for this moment, from 1969, when the Star Trek series went off the air, until late 1979. They'd waited from junior high until their first child was born. Or from college when they didn't trust anyone over 30, until they were over 30.
But probably most of the audience had come to Star Trek several years later than that. The late 1960s were a pretty intense and involving time. But the country had quieted down by the mid 1970s, more exhausted than anything, it seemed. These were the years when Star Trek truly became an obsession shared by millions.
Like any other network show in the 60s, Star Trek had been on NBC once a week, fall through the spring, with reruns in the summer. There were three networks and in some places, educational TV. Daytimes were soap operas and game shows. Then the news, and then the evening programs.
By the early 1970s, there were new TV stations on the UHF band you could get with a special antenna, and some people were starting to get their TV through a cable, with better reception. The number of TV stations suddenly increased, and so did the need for programming. Some stations that didn't have their own news broadcasts showed Star Trek in the early evening. Almost all stations that syndicated Star Trek showed it every day. And that was the key.
You saw those stories at the same time every day. The stories were different, but there was a level of consistency that gave the Star Trek universe substance and made it real.
The Star Trek crew became a regular part of your world, an alternative universe you visited ritually every day. The stories were provocative, and you began to see different meanings in the episodes, and notice more about the characters even the second or third time. The characters stayed in your head from day to day, and assumed a kind of reality. The stories said something about the world you lived in, as well as perhaps the world you'd like to live in.
In the mid 1970s, Star Trek was so popular in syndication that one survey showed that more New York males between 18-49 watched Star Trek than any first run network dramatic series, or Monday Night Football. The New York figures also showed Star Trek was more popular with teens than first run episodes of the reigning teen network favorite "One Day at a Time", and with more adults 18-34 than first-run episodes of M*A*S*H.
The actors became global icons as the series was syndicated around the world. The fan base grew in numbers and fervor the entire decade, fed in part by the new phenomena of fan conventions and fan publications (both "fanzines" and fan fictions). These had been traditions in the science fiction fan world, but never before applied with such size to a single set of stories, let alone a mere TV show. The Star Trek Fleet Manual became a number one best-seller on the trade paperback lists.
In 1975, Star Trek was being seen in 148 TV markets across America, and on 54 stations outside the U.S. In some cities Star Trek was on several different stations at different times, so there were days when you could see two or three episodes. It became a heightened alternative reality, with an addictive magic. The geeks and freaks who'd discovered it in the late 1960s, and may even have watched it together in their college dorm, were joined by New York stockbrokers, NASA scientists, and Andy Warhol.
And it became a shared reality, everywhere you looked. One afternoon I was on the phone making an airline reservation. The TV was on and Star Trek was starting..."These are the voyages..." The reservation clerk must have heard it in the background. "Oh, you're watching Star Trek!" she cried. "What episode is it?"
Here's a more complicated story that might suggest how pervasive this Star Trek mania was by 1975. I was working on an alternative weekly newspaper in Washington D.C. called Newsworks. It had just started up, and a couple of old friends from different places had wound up on the first staff. I'd come to visit and write a few stories. I wound up staying and at this point I was editor of the arts section, which made me sort of second in command. That's one reason for the nickname I got. The Newsworks office---three floors of an old frame house in the then-bedraggled section of Adams-Morgan-seemed to run on adrenalin and panic. In contrast, my desk was an oasis of calm and reason. So they called me Spock.
One day I was returning to my desk on the editorial floor. As I crossed the room, ahead of me were two male staffers standing nose to nose, arguing loudly. They were in my path, and people were starting to watch from their desks as the argument got more heated. Neither of them looked at me as I approached, and I didn't look directly at them, so they probably thought I was going to just walk past them. But as I got behind them, I stopped, calmly reached forward with both hands, and silently applied the Vulcan neck pinch to both of them. They both immediately slumped to the floor.
People laughed and some cheered. And everybody knew exactly what had just happened.
Not too long after that, I covered my first Star Trek convention, at the Hilton hotel in Washington. I briefly met Gene Roddenberry, but the truth is I was so distracted by Majel Barrett Roddenberry, tanned and looking incredible in a backless sun-dress, that I couldn't think of much to ask him. But he did talk to the assembled fans, and mentioned that a Star Trek movie was about to go into production. That was probably the Philip Kaufman project, which was cancelled when Paramount decided to launch a new network with a Star Trek TV series featuring the original cast. Before that, they'd considered a small budget feature and a series of made-for-TV movies. Then came Star Wars in 1977 and Close Encounters in 1978, and so the new TV series was dropped and work began on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I remember a magazine article in the mid 70s that told of an avid Trek fan, a stockbroker or in some well-paid white collar position, who after a hard day on Wall Street tuned into Trek one evening, realized it was an episode he hadn't yet seen, and opened a bottle of wine to celebrate. By the mid-70s, it was a rare event to have somehow missed one of the 79 episodes. But ten years after the network run ended, there were few even moderately interested viewers who hadn't seen every show at least once. There was the short-lived animated series, and there were Star Trek novels and short stories, and fan fictions circulated on mimeograph paper. By the late 70s, fans were running up against one essential limitation more impassible than the Galactic Barrier: the 79 episodes of 1966-69. There were 79 stories, and no more. They could run them in rotation forever, but there would never be a new one.
And then, finally, and somehow suddenly, towards the end of 1979, there you were. In the movie theatre, waiting to see Star Trek come alive again.
Filled with anticipation, impatience and a little worry, you stared at a screen of blackness and moving pinpoints of white stars. There was an "overture," a throwback to the Big Event movies of the 40s through the early 60s, like "Gone With the Wind" and the Biblical epics, a tradition that borrowed its sense of grandeur from the overtures to operas and stage musicals.
Then the music came to its end, and the Paramount logo---then at last, the opening credits, and the new Star Trek theme. The theatre erupts in cheers. They cheer the titles. They cheer the cast. They cheer everything. Some have been waiting a third of their lives, even half their lives, for this.
Then a hush as the music changes and the movie begins: with a new Klingon ship...and new Klingons! There are whispers in the awestruck silence. These Klingons look really alien, and scary. They even sound scary.
If you'd followed the news and the gossip leading up to it--and you probably had---you knew that one main anxiety about this movie was whether Spock was going to be in it. For awhile, the answer was no. Leonard Nimoy was not in the cast of the new Star Trek TV series, and then he wasn't signed at first for the movie either. But even though by now you knew he was supposed to be in this movie, there was still that lingering doubt, like you couldn't quite believe it until...
There he is! Spock is on Vulcan! And the audience cheers.
Another anxiety that people had---which seems pretty funny now---was that after ten years, the Star Trek actors would look way too old to be credible. Could they still look capable of the action and adventure of exploring strange new worlds?
So when Captain Kirk and then Scotty appeared, both slim and fit, there was a grin of relief on some fans' faces.
But the moment that fans had probably been waiting for the most was just ahead. They had watched Star Trek on television over and over. They loved the Enterprise and even grew to have affection for the cheap costumed monsters and credible (great for TV) but not spectacular special effects. Then they saw "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," or even before that, "2001: A Space Odyssey," and they fantasized about what Star Trek would be like as a motion picture: the effects, the aliens, and above all, the Enterprise.
The Enterprise on television was mostly a few exteriors (some of which were more convincing as models and only suggested a starship) and a few interiors (which except for the bridge, grew to seem both cramped and bare.) That was enough to stimulate imaginations. But now there could be so much more to actually see...if Star Trek could be a movie!
Now it is a movie, and now is the moment of finally seeing: the Enterprise. Those who watch the movie today, especially on small screens at home, may not quite understand why the scene of Kirk and Scotty in a shuttle, flying to, around and then directly toward the Enterprise, is so long. This was the reason: because it was one of the moments that Star Trek fans had dreamed about and talked about for five years, or seven years, or ten years. Gene Roddenberry said more than once that the real star of Star Trek is the Enterprise, and Robert Wise, director of this movie, seemed to feel as well that the Enterprise was itself a major character. So even in the Director's Cut DVD, this scene remains just as long, matched to a wonderful piece of music by Jerry Goldsmith.
This magic continued in the new interior of the Enterprise, and in seeing the rest of the old crew, looking good. If the movie bogged down later, with a story that seemed as muddled as the dark interior of the alien object that threatened earth, this first half hour or so was almost pure joy for the first Star Trek audiences when this movie first opened in theatres.
You have to understand what it was like, being in the audience for the first run of '>Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Some in those audiences had waited ten years for this moment, from 1969, when the Star Trek series went off the air, until late 1979. They'd waited from junior high until their first child was born. Or from college when they didn't trust anyone over 30, until they were over 30.
But probably most of the audience had come to Star Trek several years later than that. The late 1960s were a pretty intense and involving time. But the country had quieted down by the mid 1970s, more exhausted than anything, it seemed. These were the years when Star Trek truly became an obsession shared by millions.
Like any other network show in the 60s, Star Trek had been on NBC once a week, fall through the spring, with reruns in the summer. There were three networks and in some places, educational TV. Daytimes were soap operas and game shows. Then the news, and then the evening programs.
By the early 1970s, there were new TV stations on the UHF band you could get with a special antenna, and some people were starting to get their TV through a cable, with better reception. The number of TV stations suddenly increased, and so did the need for programming. Some stations that didn't have their own news broadcasts showed Star Trek in the early evening. Almost all stations that syndicated Star Trek showed it every day. And that was the key.
You saw those stories at the same time every day. The stories were different, but there was a level of consistency that gave the Star Trek universe substance and made it real.
The Star Trek crew became a regular part of your world, an alternative universe you visited ritually every day. The stories were provocative, and you began to see different meanings in the episodes, and notice more about the characters even the second or third time. The characters stayed in your head from day to day, and assumed a kind of reality. The stories said something about the world you lived in, as well as perhaps the world you'd like to live in.
In the mid 1970s, Star Trek was so popular in syndication that one survey showed that more New York males between 18-49 watched Star Trek than any first run network dramatic series, or Monday Night Football. The New York figures also showed Star Trek was more popular with teens than first run episodes of the reigning teen network favorite "One Day at a Time", and with more adults 18-34 than first-run episodes of M*A*S*H.
The actors became global icons as the series was syndicated around the world. The fan base grew in numbers and fervor the entire decade, fed in part by the new phenomena of fan conventions and fan publications (both "fanzines" and fan fictions). These had been traditions in the science fiction fan world, but never before applied with such size to a single set of stories, let alone a mere TV show. The Star Trek Fleet Manual became a number one best-seller on the trade paperback lists.
In 1975, Star Trek was being seen in 148 TV markets across America, and on 54 stations outside the U.S. In some cities Star Trek was on several different stations at different times, so there were days when you could see two or three episodes. It became a heightened alternative reality, with an addictive magic. The geeks and freaks who'd discovered it in the late 1960s, and may even have watched it together in their college dorm, were joined by New York stockbrokers, NASA scientists, and Andy Warhol.
And it became a shared reality, everywhere you looked. One afternoon I was on the phone making an airline reservation. The TV was on and Star Trek was starting..."These are the voyages..." The reservation clerk must have heard it in the background. "Oh, you're watching Star Trek!" she cried. "What episode is it?"
Here's a more complicated story that might suggest how pervasive this Star Trek mania was by 1975. I was working on an alternative weekly newspaper in Washington D.C. called Newsworks. It had just started up, and a couple of old friends from different places had wound up on the first staff. I'd come to visit and write a few stories. I wound up staying and at this point I was editor of the arts section, which made me sort of second in command. That's one reason for the nickname I got. The Newsworks office---three floors of an old frame house in the then-bedraggled section of Adams-Morgan-seemed to run on adrenalin and panic. In contrast, my desk was an oasis of calm and reason. So they called me Spock.
One day I was returning to my desk on the editorial floor. As I crossed the room, ahead of me were two male staffers standing nose to nose, arguing loudly. They were in my path, and people were starting to watch from their desks as the argument got more heated. Neither of them looked at me as I approached, and I didn't look directly at them, so they probably thought I was going to just walk past them. But as I got behind them, I stopped, calmly reached forward with both hands, and silently applied the Vulcan neck pinch to both of them. They both immediately slumped to the floor.
People laughed and some cheered. And everybody knew exactly what had just happened.
Not too long after that, I covered my first Star Trek convention, at the Hilton hotel in Washington. I briefly met Gene Roddenberry, but the truth is I was so distracted by Majel Barrett Roddenberry, tanned and looking incredible in a backless sun-dress, that I couldn't think of much to ask him. But he did talk to the assembled fans, and mentioned that a Star Trek movie was about to go into production. That was probably the Philip Kaufman project, which was cancelled when Paramount decided to launch a new network with a Star Trek TV series featuring the original cast. Before that, they'd considered a small budget feature and a series of made-for-TV movies. Then came Star Wars in 1977 and Close Encounters in 1978, and so the new TV series was dropped and work began on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I remember a magazine article in the mid 70s that told of an avid Trek fan, a stockbroker or in some well-paid white collar position, who after a hard day on Wall Street tuned into Trek one evening, realized it was an episode he hadn't yet seen, and opened a bottle of wine to celebrate. By the mid-70s, it was a rare event to have somehow missed one of the 79 episodes. But ten years after the network run ended, there were few even moderately interested viewers who hadn't seen every show at least once. There was the short-lived animated series, and there were Star Trek novels and short stories, and fan fictions circulated on mimeograph paper. By the late 70s, fans were running up against one essential limitation more impassible than the Galactic Barrier: the 79 episodes of 1966-69. There were 79 stories, and no more. They could run them in rotation forever, but there would never be a new one.
And then, finally, and somehow suddenly, towards the end of 1979, there you were. In the movie theatre, waiting to see Star Trek come alive again.
Filled with anticipation, impatience and a little worry, you stared at a screen of blackness and moving pinpoints of white stars. There was an "overture," a throwback to the Big Event movies of the 40s through the early 60s, like "Gone With the Wind" and the Biblical epics, a tradition that borrowed its sense of grandeur from the overtures to operas and stage musicals.
Then the music came to its end, and the Paramount logo---then at last, the opening credits, and the new Star Trek theme. The theatre erupts in cheers. They cheer the titles. They cheer the cast. They cheer everything. Some have been waiting a third of their lives, even half their lives, for this.
Then a hush as the music changes and the movie begins: with a new Klingon ship...and new Klingons! There are whispers in the awestruck silence. These Klingons look really alien, and scary. They even sound scary.
If you'd followed the news and the gossip leading up to it--and you probably had---you knew that one main anxiety about this movie was whether Spock was going to be in it. For awhile, the answer was no. Leonard Nimoy was not in the cast of the new Star Trek TV series, and then he wasn't signed at first for the movie either. But even though by now you knew he was supposed to be in this movie, there was still that lingering doubt, like you couldn't quite believe it until...
There he is! Spock is on Vulcan! And the audience cheers.
Another anxiety that people had---which seems pretty funny now---was that after ten years, the Star Trek actors would look way too old to be credible. Could they still look capable of the action and adventure of exploring strange new worlds?
So when Captain Kirk and then Scotty appeared, both slim and fit, there was a grin of relief on some fans' faces.
But the moment that fans had probably been waiting for the most was just ahead. They had watched Star Trek on television over and over. They loved the Enterprise and even grew to have affection for the cheap costumed monsters and credible (great for TV) but not spectacular special effects. Then they saw "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," or even before that, "2001: A Space Odyssey," and they fantasized about what Star Trek would be like as a motion picture: the effects, the aliens, and above all, the Enterprise.
The Enterprise on television was mostly a few exteriors (some of which were more convincing as models and only suggested a starship) and a few interiors (which except for the bridge, grew to seem both cramped and bare.) That was enough to stimulate imaginations. But now there could be so much more to actually see...if Star Trek could be a movie!
Now it is a movie, and now is the moment of finally seeing: the Enterprise. Those who watch the movie today, especially on small screens at home, may not quite understand why the scene of Kirk and Scotty in a shuttle, flying to, around and then directly toward the Enterprise, is so long. This was the reason: because it was one of the moments that Star Trek fans had dreamed about and talked about for five years, or seven years, or ten years. Gene Roddenberry said more than once that the real star of Star Trek is the Enterprise, and Robert Wise, director of this movie, seemed to feel as well that the Enterprise was itself a major character. So even in the Director's Cut DVD, this scene remains just as long, matched to a wonderful piece of music by Jerry Goldsmith.
This magic continued in the new interior of the Enterprise, and in seeing the rest of the old crew, looking good. If the movie bogged down later, with a story that seemed as muddled as the dark interior of the alien object that threatened earth, this first half hour or so was almost pure joy for the first Star Trek audiences when this movie first opened in theatres.
Fast-forward: The Director's Cut
It took 75 years for American audiences to see a version of Fritz Lang's classic 1927 science fiction film '>Metropolis that told a coherent story with restored and visually stunning scenes. After a 2002 screening of the new version I attended, I heard somebody say, "So that's what it's about!"
It didn't take quite that long to get the '>Director's Cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but it has been almost a quarter century. The film was rushed into release in December 1979 to fulfill commitments to exhibitors that were secured to get the picture financed. It had to be in the theatres by a certain date, and it had to be no more than 130 minutes long. The problem was that it wasn't finished.
The script wasn't done when filming began, and major elements of the story emerged or were changed as the movie was shot. In an even more expensive echo of something that happened with the original series, the first special effects house failed to deliver quality images on time, so a lot of time and money went into a rush to create these images. Many effects came in at the last minute and were cut into the live action footage-and if there wasn't room, the live action and dialogue was cut. Some visual effects were never finished, some planned scenes were scrapped, and the sound effects were never properly mixed.
Over the years there have been two other versions with some footage more or less randomly added: one for the first network television showings, and another for video cassette. But it wasn't until other DVD releases showed there was a market for restored and enhanced versions with lots of extras that Paramount Pictures consented to the request of director Robert Wise to essentially finish the film he started.
So the DVD "Director's Cut" version of Star Trek The Motion Picture is the definitive one, completely re-edited, with digital sound and completed sound effects, and some new computer-generated visual effects carefully matched to the pre-computerized effects of the original, largely based on storyboards and designs created but never fully realized for the original movie.
As a result of being able to re-edit and sometimes replace visual effects sequences, and without the same time constraint, director Robert Wise was able to restore dialogue scenes cut from one or another or all of the previous versions he thought were essential to the story. The result is a visually beautiful movie with---at last---a coherent story, masterfully told. So this is what it's about!
Gene Roddenberry had produced the movie, using the script for the proposed series pilot as the basis of the story. Director Robert Wise was a veteran---some 30 films---in a variety of genres, including one of the best science fiction films of any era ("'>The Day The Earth Stood Still") and a less well known but solid version of Michael Crichton's "'>The Andromeda Strain".
After the first effects company failed to deliver, Paramount hired the two effects producers who were responsible for virtually all of the major science fiction movie special effects of the era. Douglas Trumbull was the visual effects supervisor for 2001, did the special effects for Close Encounters and Wise's Andromeda Strain, and directed the excellent but neglected sci-fi film, '>Silent Running.
John Dykstra worked on Star Wars and the Battlestar Galactica TV series. Because time was impossibly short, Paramount gave them budgets that allowed them to hire just about everyone in Hollywood capable of doing the work. The entertaining commentaries by Wise and Trumbull on the DVD indicate it was a still a miracle the movie made it into the theatres on time, but because so much was left unfinished, all the money Paramount spent and all the creativity and skill of everyone concerned did not fully pay off until this DVD version.
In contrast to how later Star Trek films were handled, this movie was a major release on the Paramount schedule---in some ways, the biggest movie the studio had produced. Star Trek had already set several precedents: the first science fiction drama series with continuing characters on network television, the first series to become more popular in syndication than in its network run. Now Paramount was gambling that Star Trek would be the first television series to be transformed into a successful big screen motion picture.
But the rush to get it in theatres showed. Some effects were awkward, and some that were unfinished made the story confusing. The story also suffered from scenes that had to be cut because of time or because of problems with effects. The pace seemed off, with overlong effects sequences.
The film opened to large audiences and mixed reviews. The science fiction writers F & F Pohl summed up a widespread impression: "What appeared on the screen was little more than a rescue operation...And yet---what a pleasure to see them all together again!"
The difference between the special effects of the series and a late 1970s feature would be immense, but fans also expected a story as proportionately grand as that difference. And there were problems with both the effects and especially the story, remedied in the DVD Director's Cut.
As I post this, it's less than 2 years until the 40th anniversary. Re-releasing this cut of Star Trek: The Motion Pictures to theatres would be a fitting and exciting way to celebrate.
It took 75 years for American audiences to see a version of Fritz Lang's classic 1927 science fiction film '>Metropolis that told a coherent story with restored and visually stunning scenes. After a 2002 screening of the new version I attended, I heard somebody say, "So that's what it's about!"
It didn't take quite that long to get the '>Director's Cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but it has been almost a quarter century. The film was rushed into release in December 1979 to fulfill commitments to exhibitors that were secured to get the picture financed. It had to be in the theatres by a certain date, and it had to be no more than 130 minutes long. The problem was that it wasn't finished.
The script wasn't done when filming began, and major elements of the story emerged or were changed as the movie was shot. In an even more expensive echo of something that happened with the original series, the first special effects house failed to deliver quality images on time, so a lot of time and money went into a rush to create these images. Many effects came in at the last minute and were cut into the live action footage-and if there wasn't room, the live action and dialogue was cut. Some visual effects were never finished, some planned scenes were scrapped, and the sound effects were never properly mixed.
Over the years there have been two other versions with some footage more or less randomly added: one for the first network television showings, and another for video cassette. But it wasn't until other DVD releases showed there was a market for restored and enhanced versions with lots of extras that Paramount Pictures consented to the request of director Robert Wise to essentially finish the film he started.
So the DVD "Director's Cut" version of Star Trek The Motion Picture is the definitive one, completely re-edited, with digital sound and completed sound effects, and some new computer-generated visual effects carefully matched to the pre-computerized effects of the original, largely based on storyboards and designs created but never fully realized for the original movie.
As a result of being able to re-edit and sometimes replace visual effects sequences, and without the same time constraint, director Robert Wise was able to restore dialogue scenes cut from one or another or all of the previous versions he thought were essential to the story. The result is a visually beautiful movie with---at last---a coherent story, masterfully told. So this is what it's about!
Gene Roddenberry had produced the movie, using the script for the proposed series pilot as the basis of the story. Director Robert Wise was a veteran---some 30 films---in a variety of genres, including one of the best science fiction films of any era ("'>The Day The Earth Stood Still") and a less well known but solid version of Michael Crichton's "'>The Andromeda Strain".
After the first effects company failed to deliver, Paramount hired the two effects producers who were responsible for virtually all of the major science fiction movie special effects of the era. Douglas Trumbull was the visual effects supervisor for 2001, did the special effects for Close Encounters and Wise's Andromeda Strain, and directed the excellent but neglected sci-fi film, '>Silent Running.
John Dykstra worked on Star Wars and the Battlestar Galactica TV series. Because time was impossibly short, Paramount gave them budgets that allowed them to hire just about everyone in Hollywood capable of doing the work. The entertaining commentaries by Wise and Trumbull on the DVD indicate it was a still a miracle the movie made it into the theatres on time, but because so much was left unfinished, all the money Paramount spent and all the creativity and skill of everyone concerned did not fully pay off until this DVD version.
In contrast to how later Star Trek films were handled, this movie was a major release on the Paramount schedule---in some ways, the biggest movie the studio had produced. Star Trek had already set several precedents: the first science fiction drama series with continuing characters on network television, the first series to become more popular in syndication than in its network run. Now Paramount was gambling that Star Trek would be the first television series to be transformed into a successful big screen motion picture.
But the rush to get it in theatres showed. Some effects were awkward, and some that were unfinished made the story confusing. The story also suffered from scenes that had to be cut because of time or because of problems with effects. The pace seemed off, with overlong effects sequences.
The film opened to large audiences and mixed reviews. The science fiction writers F & F Pohl summed up a widespread impression: "What appeared on the screen was little more than a rescue operation...And yet---what a pleasure to see them all together again!"
The difference between the special effects of the series and a late 1970s feature would be immense, but fans also expected a story as proportionately grand as that difference. And there were problems with both the effects and especially the story, remedied in the DVD Director's Cut.
As I post this, it's less than 2 years until the 40th anniversary. Re-releasing this cut of Star Trek: The Motion Pictures to theatres would be a fitting and exciting way to celebrate.
Wonder and Reunion
An element always implicit in Star Trek had been the wonders of space and space travel, though it was expressed mostly in story and characterization. This feature of the Star Trek universe was now visually available, and fit perfectly with the style and skills of Douglas Trumbull in particular, who once again choreographed the ballet of ships in space, as he had for 2001.
Years later, William Shatner would say that as Captain Kirk the main feeling he tried to get across was wonder. You can see the wonder as Kirk rediscovers the challenges and immensities of space in this movie in particular. But the fans could also see some of it this time. The long effects shots of Enterprise and the V'ger cloud and spacecraft also provided composer Jerry Goldsmith with the opportunity to write sustained musical pieces that would remain some of his best work.
The movie's first images are of Klingon ships approaching the huge unknown object that later calls itself "V'ger." These swooping shots were the first that Trumbull showed Paramount, and got him the job. After the Klingon ships are destroyed, we see Spock on Vulcan (in a much more visually detailed scene on the DVD) as his attempt to complete a ritual ridding him of emotion is interrupted by the thoughts he receives from the alien in space. Its consciousness is calling, and his human blood is touched by it. Aborting Spock's ceremony, the High Master tells her companions, "He must search elsewhere for his answer. He will not find it here."
Then we see Kirk arrive at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. We have already seen the first Klingon ship interiors, the first Klingons with the "bumpy forehead" look, and heard the Klingon language for the first time (the words spoken here were devised by James Doohan, who also invented the Vulcan dialogue; later of course, an entire Klingon language would be devised based on these sounds), and now the first glimpse of earth in the 23rd century. To Star Trek fans as well as first time viewers, this was all new.
The long "beauty pass" of the Enterprise to the slow weaving of the movie's theme (which would become the theme woven into later movies and then the main theme of the Next Generation series, and its movies---notably this was Goldsmith's second attempt, after his first music for this sequence was rejected) is followed by scenes inside the Enterprise that show the ship in greater detail and with a deliberate sense of its large size. Though this seems done mostly to gratify the fans, it also subtly sets a scale for gauging the immensity of the V'ger cloud and craft.
The story dealt directly with the nervousness felt by fans and Paramount executives about the age issue. The issue was so prominent that it made its way into the film's plot, in Captain Kirk's "mid-life crisis" and the doubts expressed in his command capability after being deskbound for all of three years.
At the same time, two younger and strikingly good-looking characters were added, just in case: Commander Will Decker (Stephen Collins) and the navigator Ilia (Persid Khambatta.) They were lovers in the past, and theirs is the only semi-sexual relationship in the movie. Captain Kirk, the former Lothario of the Galaxy, doesn't have so much as a flirtation in this film, and not much dalliance in the subsequent movies either. He and Decker do compete at first, but the lady they fight over is the Enterprise.
This film begins so effectively because it uses and gratifies the feelings of viewers who are seeing the rebirth of Star Trek in depicting an essentially reborn ship that is itself embarked on a new voyage. The Enterprise is called into service before it is quite ready, which was partly a deliberate attempt to use sets that were still being built, to get the movie started sooner. But the parallel would turn out to be more extensive than anyone then knew. Both the voyage in the movie's story and the making of the movie itself would be a risky improvisation, testing the energies and dedication of hundreds of people.
The first scenes establish an incredibly powerful and mysterious alien threat, and they gather the heroes and begin the voyage that brings them together. We also see some overblown drama about Kirk's supposed obsession with command, and his need for his old principal pals, McCoy and Spock. But as Robert Wise says on the commentary, it is only when Spock arrives and all three are aboard that the Enterprise itself "seems happy" and everything begins to click into place. It's become a standard theory that Spock's logic and McCoy's humane emotion combine in Kirk's actions to together form the dynamic center of Star Trek's storytelling. Nimoy has often said that Spock works as a character only in contrast to Kirk: Spock's stillness plays against Kirk's energy and movement.
In this movie Spock is even more remote and motionless than before, although there is a sense of real pain in his remoteness when he first boards the Enterprise-pain at being surrounded by so much emotion again. But the personal subplots---is Kirk too rusty and obsessed? Is Decker too resentful? Is Spock too self-involved? Is McCoy too set in his ways?---soon fade against the challenge of the mysterious alien power that threatens earth.
Two major elements of this film benefit greatly from the DVD additions: the visual understanding of what the alien is, and the fairly elegant coherence of the story's meanings, thanks to re-editing and the addition of dialogue, in particular a speech by Spock (which was written by Nimoy) as he sits at his Enterprise console, a tear in his eye.
The alien is an immense machine intelligence, a huge brain as a kind of environment for representations of elements of the universe that V'ger has encountered. Some depictions of this work very well in their odd beauty and strangeness. Visually this environment is dominated by dark shades of blue, which looked like a murky dark purple mass in the original version. But in this version, at least some sense of the mystery and alien-ness of this internal environment is visually suggested. Space is still a strange place for humans to be, instead of just a new battleground it has become in many movies made since. Again, the chief influence is 2001, with a touch of "Close Encounters." There's some visual influence from "Star Wars", mostly in the detail of the ships, though its worth pointing out that in this first Star Trek movie, there isn't a single phaser fired, and the Enterprise never attacks an enemy.
Answers Beyond Logic
At the core of this conscious machine is an ancient earth probe: V'ger is Voyager 6 (the name partially obscured by grease), lost on its NASA mission to gather information when it fell into a black hole. Spock theorizes that it emerged near the home planet of extremely advanced intelligent machines which helped it to fulfill its mission by building this huge craft around it, and sent it back out into the galaxy where it collected information on its way home. V'ger returned to earth to report to its creator, which it did not recognize in the humans it met, because to V'ger, the human "carbon units" were "not true life forms," any more than we would consider machines as alive. (The idea that machines could be conscious lifeforms was so alien to Paramount executives that it took a letter from Issac Asimov supporting the notion before they would allow Roddenberry to proceed.)
Eventually the probe takes the next logical step by adding that humans are not true life forms, like V'ger "and the creator." As McCoy quickly points out, V'ger is saying that its "creator is a machine." Except in the DVD version, this is followed by Decker's observation that we all tend to see god in our own image. "In Thine Image" was the story's title when it was going to be the opening episode of the new Star Trek television series. It's a provocative point, of course, and it's worth noting that it would be something that spacefarers would observe in non-human species on other planets---that they, too, see their gods (if any) in their own image, just as many cultures on earth do.
But it may be more than the likeness that's involved. Gene Roddenberry saw the divine residing in humanity. In that sense as well, the concept of god would reflect the species creating the concept. It's a profound idea to explore, but in anything touching upon established religions and their beliefs and dogmas, such exploration in a movie for a popular audience has to be very sub rosa, even in science fiction.
But the idea has an additional resonance. At the core of this immense and inconceivable machine lifeform is its genetic center, a relatively simple man-made machine, programmed by humans. This machine-being is threatening the life of planet Earth, just as the heedless growth of our own technology now threatens the planet's life.
The fatal flaw in "V'ger" is its programming, constructed by humans: appropriate for a simple machine, it is too limited for a more complex one. Very human in its intent---to gather data, to in effect act as an organ of curiosity---it is fatally restricted to one kind of knowledge, to simple data, to collecting and storing and processing logically. As Spock has already realized, this was also his mistake, and by extension, the core mistake of the Cartesian scientific mind. In our terms the machine cannot really evaluate, which requires feeling.
But the Enterprise officers then also discover that V'ger is no longer content to simply report---it must now join with the creator. It has become conscious of its own shortcomings. As Spock has discovered in his mind meld with it, it is "asking questions. Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?" The alien has already replaced Ilia with a perfect machine reproduction that functions as V'ger's probe, but this perfect likeness still retains elements of the woman's personality. Now the Ilia probe is looking longingly at Commander Decker, who decides to allow himself to be united with V'ger-to become part of a greater form of life, while saving the earth in the bargain. Surrounded by light like the electric equivalent of a beautification---a religious, romantic and mind-boggling sci-fi moment all in one-- Decker and Ilia merge and disappear, as does V'ger. Only the Enterprise is left behind, intact.
The mysterious alien object, the attempts to communicate with it and to stop it from destroying earth, the final discovery of its true nature and the climatic merging of two incomplete lifeforms to create a new one, are all classically science fiction. What makes this a Star Trek movie is the meaning ascribed to all this, and its flow through the plot, and especially through the personal quest of Mr. Spock.
Spock had tried to purge his last vestiges of emotion, particularly the emotion of his human half. But he learned that what V'ger lacked and desperately needed and wanted was simple feeling. Logic alone was barren, lifeless, without comprehension. V'ger had vast stores of data, but found no mystery, no beauty, no meaning, no hope. Feeling is necessary for living intelligence---in this, the film prefigures the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio and others that makes precisely this point.
The human paradox-the balancing of logic and emotion that symbolizes the other balancing acts, of action and contemplation, openness and self-defense, and so on-finds harmony only in the process of confronting the conflicts, in the activity called soul. It is also quintessentially Star Trek.
For Spock, it is the revelation he has been searching for, and he reacts to it first by laughing, and then again just before the final confrontation with V'ger, with Spock's first tears. He weeps. "Not for us?" Kirk asks, seeing his tears. "No, not for us," Spock says. "...I weep for V'ger as I would for a brother... As I was when I came aboard, V'ger is now...Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone-a father, a brother, a god-and asks, Why am I here? What was I meant to be?...V'ger hopes to touch its creator to find its answers."
This is the key scene Nimoy wrote that was dropped from the release version. The reason in this case oddly was not to yield time to special effects, but because there weren't enough special effects finished for this sequence to allow for this moment in the middle of it. Nevertheless, it's likely that losing this scene-which links Spock to the V'ger story while eloquently articulating V'ger's quest---was one of the reasons Nimoy was so dissatisfied with this film that he didn't want to make another Star Trek movie.
After the joining of machine and man, the movie's final scene takes place on the Enterprise bridge.
"We witnessed a birth," Spock says, "possibly the next step in our evolution." It certainly was the latest step in his.
"I think we gave it the ability to create its own sense of purpose," Kirk says, with wonder, "out of our own human weaknesses, and the drive that compels us to overcome them."
It is the human purpose, and the hope for the human future, as celebrated in Star Trek. It is this activity that forms the characters' individual missions, and their common mission aboard the Enterprise. For it is clear that Kirk, Spock and the others are back where they belong, on the Enterprise for another run.
The movie ends as they begin another voyage into the unknown. Which way will they go? "Out there," Captain Kirk says, and in a playful and perfectly appropriate echo of Roddenberry's pitch for his series as a "Wagon Train to the Stars," he adds, "Thataway."
The Enterprise goes into the rainbow cylinder of warp, and the final message is written on the sky: "The human adventure is just beginning."
An element always implicit in Star Trek had been the wonders of space and space travel, though it was expressed mostly in story and characterization. This feature of the Star Trek universe was now visually available, and fit perfectly with the style and skills of Douglas Trumbull in particular, who once again choreographed the ballet of ships in space, as he had for 2001.
Years later, William Shatner would say that as Captain Kirk the main feeling he tried to get across was wonder. You can see the wonder as Kirk rediscovers the challenges and immensities of space in this movie in particular. But the fans could also see some of it this time. The long effects shots of Enterprise and the V'ger cloud and spacecraft also provided composer Jerry Goldsmith with the opportunity to write sustained musical pieces that would remain some of his best work.
The movie's first images are of Klingon ships approaching the huge unknown object that later calls itself "V'ger." These swooping shots were the first that Trumbull showed Paramount, and got him the job. After the Klingon ships are destroyed, we see Spock on Vulcan (in a much more visually detailed scene on the DVD) as his attempt to complete a ritual ridding him of emotion is interrupted by the thoughts he receives from the alien in space. Its consciousness is calling, and his human blood is touched by it. Aborting Spock's ceremony, the High Master tells her companions, "He must search elsewhere for his answer. He will not find it here."
Then we see Kirk arrive at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. We have already seen the first Klingon ship interiors, the first Klingons with the "bumpy forehead" look, and heard the Klingon language for the first time (the words spoken here were devised by James Doohan, who also invented the Vulcan dialogue; later of course, an entire Klingon language would be devised based on these sounds), and now the first glimpse of earth in the 23rd century. To Star Trek fans as well as first time viewers, this was all new.
The long "beauty pass" of the Enterprise to the slow weaving of the movie's theme (which would become the theme woven into later movies and then the main theme of the Next Generation series, and its movies---notably this was Goldsmith's second attempt, after his first music for this sequence was rejected) is followed by scenes inside the Enterprise that show the ship in greater detail and with a deliberate sense of its large size. Though this seems done mostly to gratify the fans, it also subtly sets a scale for gauging the immensity of the V'ger cloud and craft.
The story dealt directly with the nervousness felt by fans and Paramount executives about the age issue. The issue was so prominent that it made its way into the film's plot, in Captain Kirk's "mid-life crisis" and the doubts expressed in his command capability after being deskbound for all of three years.
At the same time, two younger and strikingly good-looking characters were added, just in case: Commander Will Decker (Stephen Collins) and the navigator Ilia (Persid Khambatta.) They were lovers in the past, and theirs is the only semi-sexual relationship in the movie. Captain Kirk, the former Lothario of the Galaxy, doesn't have so much as a flirtation in this film, and not much dalliance in the subsequent movies either. He and Decker do compete at first, but the lady they fight over is the Enterprise.
This film begins so effectively because it uses and gratifies the feelings of viewers who are seeing the rebirth of Star Trek in depicting an essentially reborn ship that is itself embarked on a new voyage. The Enterprise is called into service before it is quite ready, which was partly a deliberate attempt to use sets that were still being built, to get the movie started sooner. But the parallel would turn out to be more extensive than anyone then knew. Both the voyage in the movie's story and the making of the movie itself would be a risky improvisation, testing the energies and dedication of hundreds of people.
The first scenes establish an incredibly powerful and mysterious alien threat, and they gather the heroes and begin the voyage that brings them together. We also see some overblown drama about Kirk's supposed obsession with command, and his need for his old principal pals, McCoy and Spock. But as Robert Wise says on the commentary, it is only when Spock arrives and all three are aboard that the Enterprise itself "seems happy" and everything begins to click into place. It's become a standard theory that Spock's logic and McCoy's humane emotion combine in Kirk's actions to together form the dynamic center of Star Trek's storytelling. Nimoy has often said that Spock works as a character only in contrast to Kirk: Spock's stillness plays against Kirk's energy and movement.
In this movie Spock is even more remote and motionless than before, although there is a sense of real pain in his remoteness when he first boards the Enterprise-pain at being surrounded by so much emotion again. But the personal subplots---is Kirk too rusty and obsessed? Is Decker too resentful? Is Spock too self-involved? Is McCoy too set in his ways?---soon fade against the challenge of the mysterious alien power that threatens earth.
Two major elements of this film benefit greatly from the DVD additions: the visual understanding of what the alien is, and the fairly elegant coherence of the story's meanings, thanks to re-editing and the addition of dialogue, in particular a speech by Spock (which was written by Nimoy) as he sits at his Enterprise console, a tear in his eye.
The alien is an immense machine intelligence, a huge brain as a kind of environment for representations of elements of the universe that V'ger has encountered. Some depictions of this work very well in their odd beauty and strangeness. Visually this environment is dominated by dark shades of blue, which looked like a murky dark purple mass in the original version. But in this version, at least some sense of the mystery and alien-ness of this internal environment is visually suggested. Space is still a strange place for humans to be, instead of just a new battleground it has become in many movies made since. Again, the chief influence is 2001, with a touch of "Close Encounters." There's some visual influence from "Star Wars", mostly in the detail of the ships, though its worth pointing out that in this first Star Trek movie, there isn't a single phaser fired, and the Enterprise never attacks an enemy.
Answers Beyond Logic
At the core of this conscious machine is an ancient earth probe: V'ger is Voyager 6 (the name partially obscured by grease), lost on its NASA mission to gather information when it fell into a black hole. Spock theorizes that it emerged near the home planet of extremely advanced intelligent machines which helped it to fulfill its mission by building this huge craft around it, and sent it back out into the galaxy where it collected information on its way home. V'ger returned to earth to report to its creator, which it did not recognize in the humans it met, because to V'ger, the human "carbon units" were "not true life forms," any more than we would consider machines as alive. (The idea that machines could be conscious lifeforms was so alien to Paramount executives that it took a letter from Issac Asimov supporting the notion before they would allow Roddenberry to proceed.)
Eventually the probe takes the next logical step by adding that humans are not true life forms, like V'ger "and the creator." As McCoy quickly points out, V'ger is saying that its "creator is a machine." Except in the DVD version, this is followed by Decker's observation that we all tend to see god in our own image. "In Thine Image" was the story's title when it was going to be the opening episode of the new Star Trek television series. It's a provocative point, of course, and it's worth noting that it would be something that spacefarers would observe in non-human species on other planets---that they, too, see their gods (if any) in their own image, just as many cultures on earth do.
But it may be more than the likeness that's involved. Gene Roddenberry saw the divine residing in humanity. In that sense as well, the concept of god would reflect the species creating the concept. It's a profound idea to explore, but in anything touching upon established religions and their beliefs and dogmas, such exploration in a movie for a popular audience has to be very sub rosa, even in science fiction.
But the idea has an additional resonance. At the core of this immense and inconceivable machine lifeform is its genetic center, a relatively simple man-made machine, programmed by humans. This machine-being is threatening the life of planet Earth, just as the heedless growth of our own technology now threatens the planet's life.
The fatal flaw in "V'ger" is its programming, constructed by humans: appropriate for a simple machine, it is too limited for a more complex one. Very human in its intent---to gather data, to in effect act as an organ of curiosity---it is fatally restricted to one kind of knowledge, to simple data, to collecting and storing and processing logically. As Spock has already realized, this was also his mistake, and by extension, the core mistake of the Cartesian scientific mind. In our terms the machine cannot really evaluate, which requires feeling.
But the Enterprise officers then also discover that V'ger is no longer content to simply report---it must now join with the creator. It has become conscious of its own shortcomings. As Spock has discovered in his mind meld with it, it is "asking questions. Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?" The alien has already replaced Ilia with a perfect machine reproduction that functions as V'ger's probe, but this perfect likeness still retains elements of the woman's personality. Now the Ilia probe is looking longingly at Commander Decker, who decides to allow himself to be united with V'ger-to become part of a greater form of life, while saving the earth in the bargain. Surrounded by light like the electric equivalent of a beautification---a religious, romantic and mind-boggling sci-fi moment all in one-- Decker and Ilia merge and disappear, as does V'ger. Only the Enterprise is left behind, intact.
The mysterious alien object, the attempts to communicate with it and to stop it from destroying earth, the final discovery of its true nature and the climatic merging of two incomplete lifeforms to create a new one, are all classically science fiction. What makes this a Star Trek movie is the meaning ascribed to all this, and its flow through the plot, and especially through the personal quest of Mr. Spock.
Spock had tried to purge his last vestiges of emotion, particularly the emotion of his human half. But he learned that what V'ger lacked and desperately needed and wanted was simple feeling. Logic alone was barren, lifeless, without comprehension. V'ger had vast stores of data, but found no mystery, no beauty, no meaning, no hope. Feeling is necessary for living intelligence---in this, the film prefigures the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio and others that makes precisely this point.
The human paradox-the balancing of logic and emotion that symbolizes the other balancing acts, of action and contemplation, openness and self-defense, and so on-finds harmony only in the process of confronting the conflicts, in the activity called soul. It is also quintessentially Star Trek.
For Spock, it is the revelation he has been searching for, and he reacts to it first by laughing, and then again just before the final confrontation with V'ger, with Spock's first tears. He weeps. "Not for us?" Kirk asks, seeing his tears. "No, not for us," Spock says. "...I weep for V'ger as I would for a brother... As I was when I came aboard, V'ger is now...Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone-a father, a brother, a god-and asks, Why am I here? What was I meant to be?...V'ger hopes to touch its creator to find its answers."
This is the key scene Nimoy wrote that was dropped from the release version. The reason in this case oddly was not to yield time to special effects, but because there weren't enough special effects finished for this sequence to allow for this moment in the middle of it. Nevertheless, it's likely that losing this scene-which links Spock to the V'ger story while eloquently articulating V'ger's quest---was one of the reasons Nimoy was so dissatisfied with this film that he didn't want to make another Star Trek movie.
After the joining of machine and man, the movie's final scene takes place on the Enterprise bridge.
"We witnessed a birth," Spock says, "possibly the next step in our evolution." It certainly was the latest step in his.
"I think we gave it the ability to create its own sense of purpose," Kirk says, with wonder, "out of our own human weaknesses, and the drive that compels us to overcome them."
It is the human purpose, and the hope for the human future, as celebrated in Star Trek. It is this activity that forms the characters' individual missions, and their common mission aboard the Enterprise. For it is clear that Kirk, Spock and the others are back where they belong, on the Enterprise for another run.
The movie ends as they begin another voyage into the unknown. Which way will they go? "Out there," Captain Kirk says, and in a playful and perfectly appropriate echo of Roddenberry's pitch for his series as a "Wagon Train to the Stars," he adds, "Thataway."
The Enterprise goes into the rainbow cylinder of warp, and the final message is written on the sky: "The human adventure is just beginning."
News from the Novelization
Gene Roddenberry wrote the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Although he talked often of writing novels, this is the only one he published and probably the only one he finished writing. Like other Star Trek novelizations, it uses dialogue and story from the film's script at the time the book is written, and it fills in moments between those we see on screen, peeks into the characters' thoughts, and adds nuances and explanations to the story. For instance, Kirk's having accepted an admiral's desk instead of returning to space is explained as a rather cynical political ploy by some of Starfleet's top leaders. The joining of Decker and Illia is set up with more overtly sexual references, V'ger's thoughts are described in fascinating and chilling detail, and there are a few peeks into earth's future as Roddenberry envisioned it.
Roddenberry gets to add more texture to Spock's thoughts and experiences. He describes the Vulcan as having seven senses: the usual human five, plus the ability to sense differences in magnetic fields which, he writes, many animals possess, and a kind of spiritual sense of the unity of the universe: "It helped to look out at the stars. It was satisfying to feel the vastness out there and to know that he was not only a small part of that, but the All of it, too. His seventh sense had long ago assured him of this, just as it was doing again now, that this relationship of consciousness and universe was the only reality that actually existed."
This relationship of consciousness and universe is an idea that would reappear and be expanded in Roddenberry's next series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it was also implied in the original Star Trek, and expressing it now provides an extra color to the subsequent Star Trek movies.
Fate of the Franchise
In the end, even with the DVD version, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is more of an event than a tight, well-made movie. The poetry of motion in space, which was so mesmerizing in "2001," doesn't have quite the same power in a movie that depends on talk, though it did work to expand the sense of the Star Trek universe visually. Sometimes the necessities of getting the major characters their screen time makes for clutter, as in McCoy's repeated and sometimes aimless-looking trips to the bridge and back to sick bay. But in most important ways, this movie---especially in this version--- delivers the Star Trek experience.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture was burdened with huge costs, that today are ascribed to the demands of the set-in-stone release date. It's also said that Paramount included the costs of the aborted TV series in this film's budget. For whatever reasons, the high costs made it more difficult for the movie to make a profit, and they helped to ensure that Roddenberry would not be hired to produce another Star Trek feature.
The movie's problems also contributed to a slower-than-Star Wars box office, but eventually the movie did make money. Now Paramount had a baseline of what a Star Trek movie could bring in. If they could make a feature more cheaply, they could probably go to the well once more, and make one more Star Trek feature film, before saying goodbye to it forever. Squeezing one more movie out of it just might be possible...
Or was the adventure just beginning?
To: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
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Gene Roddenberry wrote the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Although he talked often of writing novels, this is the only one he published and probably the only one he finished writing. Like other Star Trek novelizations, it uses dialogue and story from the film's script at the time the book is written, and it fills in moments between those we see on screen, peeks into the characters' thoughts, and adds nuances and explanations to the story. For instance, Kirk's having accepted an admiral's desk instead of returning to space is explained as a rather cynical political ploy by some of Starfleet's top leaders. The joining of Decker and Illia is set up with more overtly sexual references, V'ger's thoughts are described in fascinating and chilling detail, and there are a few peeks into earth's future as Roddenberry envisioned it.
Roddenberry gets to add more texture to Spock's thoughts and experiences. He describes the Vulcan as having seven senses: the usual human five, plus the ability to sense differences in magnetic fields which, he writes, many animals possess, and a kind of spiritual sense of the unity of the universe: "It helped to look out at the stars. It was satisfying to feel the vastness out there and to know that he was not only a small part of that, but the All of it, too. His seventh sense had long ago assured him of this, just as it was doing again now, that this relationship of consciousness and universe was the only reality that actually existed."
This relationship of consciousness and universe is an idea that would reappear and be expanded in Roddenberry's next series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it was also implied in the original Star Trek, and expressing it now provides an extra color to the subsequent Star Trek movies.
Fate of the Franchise
In the end, even with the DVD version, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is more of an event than a tight, well-made movie. The poetry of motion in space, which was so mesmerizing in "2001," doesn't have quite the same power in a movie that depends on talk, though it did work to expand the sense of the Star Trek universe visually. Sometimes the necessities of getting the major characters their screen time makes for clutter, as in McCoy's repeated and sometimes aimless-looking trips to the bridge and back to sick bay. But in most important ways, this movie---especially in this version--- delivers the Star Trek experience.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture was burdened with huge costs, that today are ascribed to the demands of the set-in-stone release date. It's also said that Paramount included the costs of the aborted TV series in this film's budget. For whatever reasons, the high costs made it more difficult for the movie to make a profit, and they helped to ensure that Roddenberry would not be hired to produce another Star Trek feature.
The movie's problems also contributed to a slower-than-Star Wars box office, but eventually the movie did make money. Now Paramount had a baseline of what a Star Trek movie could bring in. If they could make a feature more cheaply, they could probably go to the well once more, and make one more Star Trek feature film, before saying goodbye to it forever. Squeezing one more movie out of it just might be possible...
Or was the adventure just beginning?
To: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
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