Star Trek's Enterprising Return

Scene: The bridge of the refurbished Starship Enterprise, where members of the crew are staring, horrified, at their viewer screens. Four huge objects, which appear to be some destructive form of plasma energy, have just been released toward earth by an unknown force.

On hand are the vessel's commanding officer, Captain James T. Kirk; science officer, the pointy-eared, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock; chief medical officer, Leonard "Bones" Mc Coy; Helmsman Sulu; security officer, Chekov; communications officer, Lieutenant Uhura; and three new members of the crew: executive officer Willard Decker; Ilia (eye-lee-ah), a hauntingly beautiful, hairless female who speaks in a strangely robotized fashion; and, at the navigator's console, another female officer--Difalco--who whispers in disbelief:

Di Falco: They're going to destroy every living thing on earth!

Kirk (to Ilia): Why?

Ilia: The carbon-unit infestation is to be removed from the Creator's planet.

Kirk: Why?

Ilia: Because the Creator has not answered.

Kirk: The carbon-units are not responsible for that.

Ilia: You infest Enterprise. You interfere with the Creator in the same manner.

Kirk: The carbon-units are not an infestation. They're a natural function of the Creator's planet. They are living things.

Ilia: They are not true life forms. Only the Creator and other similar life forms are true.

Mc coy: Similar life forms? Jim! V'ger is saying the Creator is a machine!

Decker: Of course. We all create God in our own image.

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That's a climactic moment from Star Trek--The Motion Picture, a multimillion-dollar epic due to hit the nation's screens in December after one of the longest gestation periods in showbiz history. Like the television series from which it sprang, the film is heavy on message and characterization, virtually devoid of wham-bam shoot-'em-ups and bug-eyed monsters. Will it succeed with audiences who have been conditioned by the comic-book simplicity of Star Wars, the otherworldly concepts and son et lumière of Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Paramount Pictures has belatedly bet a bundle ("All I'll say is that it's less than $40,000,000," says one executive) on a property that was in its possession long before Star Wars and Close Encounters were so much as twinkles in the eyes of their creators.

Movies have often spawned TV series, but no television epic has ever been turned into a blockbuster movie. On the other hand, never before has a motion picture come to the screen with so large, so fanatic a built-in audience. It all began modestly enough with a weekly television series debuting on NBC September 8, 1966. The brain child of Gene Roddenberry, a former Pan Am pilot and Los Angeles cop, it dealt with the voyages of a 23rd Century space vessel, part of the Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets, and the adventures that befell its crew on its five-year exploratory mission through space.

From the first, Star Trek attracted a devoted following, but not a large one. The network tried to cancel the show after its second season, only to be deluged by letters from irate fans organized by a Los Angeles housewife and science-fiction buff named Bjo Trimble. She says the campaign resulted in 1,000,000 letters to NBC.

The gimmick worked, but only for one season. In 1968, Star Trek was put in a graveyard Friday-night slot, where its ratings continued to drop, and it left the air--for good, its stars assumed--at the end of that season.

As it turned out, the apparent end was only the beginning. Once the show went into syndication, local independent stations started booking it in early-evening and weekend time slots, where it would be seen by both adults and children. Audiences began to grow, and today--more than ten years since the 79th and final TV episode was shot--Star Trek is seen 308 times a week on 134 U. S. stations and, translated into 47 languages, in 131 international markets. Its popularity has actually expanded 77 percent in the past five years and it has, incredibly enough, been the subject of masters theses and doctoral dissertations.

To the moviemakers, this established fandom is both blessing and curse. The hard-core Star Trek fan knows everything there is to know about the Enterprise and its crew, and this inexplicable, insatiable demand for even more has been greeted with books of Enterprise blue-prints, a technical manual, trivia compilations and even a concordance of all Star Trek episodes (compiled by the aforementioned Trimble). Your true Trekker--as distinct from Trekkie, a term looked down upon by real fanatics as having groupie connotations--can pass the most esoteric of trivia quizzes.

"Not me," says Roddenberry merrily. "At a Star Trek convention some years ago, they gave me 50 multiple-choice trivia questions and I got only four of them right."

Roddenberry has been working out of an office on the Paramount lot for something over four years now. "Seems like a fucking lifetime," he says. "Sometimes it feels like being crucified: You realize it's a great honor, but you'll be glad when it's over."

There's an irony in the fact that Paramount has finally backed this project with megabucks. The studio bought the portion of Star Trek rights originally owned by the now-defunct Desilu organization (Roddenberry is the co-owner). After sitting on it for almost a decade, Paramount has been roundly castigated by Trek fans. During the early Seventies, the very name Paramount was routinely booed at conventions of fans eager for a movie, a new TV series, a special, anything to bring their heroes back. Then, in 1976, the studio got a new president: Michael D. Eisner, whose background is in TV. He reactivated the Star Trek project, telling a writer for The New York Times that his predecessors had "made a mistake" not realizing that through its TV exposure, Star Trek could guarantee an audience. "The project should have been done in 1975," Eisner said.

If it had, it would have beaten Star Wars, the box-office champion of all time, to the screen. By the time Star Wars hit, Roddenberry was already on the Paramount lot, set to make a middle-budget Star Trek movie based on a script that has been dubbed, facetiously, The Enterprise Finds God in Outer Space.

"Actually, it wasn't God they were meeting," Roddenberry explains, "but someone who had been here on earth before, claiming to be God. I was going to say that this false thing claiming to be God had screwed up man's concept of the real infinity and beauty of what God is. Paramount was reluctant to put that up on the screen, and I can understand that position. But someday it would be fun to do."

There are elements of that concept in the present script (by Roddenberry and Harold Livingston), which at another point in the movie's four-year pregnancy was going to be the pilot for the flagship series in a proposed fourth television network Paramount and its parent company, Gulf & Western Industries, hoped to launch. When that fell through, it was recycled yet again and in 1978 the making of Star Trek--The Motion Picture was announced with Roddenberry as producer, the highly respected Oscar-winning Robert (West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Day the Earth Stood Still) Wise as director, and all the principal characters from the original TV-series cast.

Last to sign on was Leonard Nimoy, the ultralogical, half-Vulcan Mr. Spock--who said his reluctance was due to the fact that he didn't want to get tied up in another series. Insiders, however, speculated that Nimoy, like some other members of the Star Trek company, had been unhappy with the compensation he had received not only for residuals--back in 1966, actors were paid for only some seven reruns, and Star Trek is now in its umpteenth--but for such by-products as Star Trek character dolls and games. "Sometimes the most creative writers at a studio are in the accounting department," Nimoy once remarked; it's an observation seemingly borne out by the fact that Paramount has yet to admit--at least to Roddenberry, who owns a third of Star Trek--that the TV series has turned a profit.

Despite that, they're all friends now. Except with the firm of Robert Abel & Associates, which with much hoopla was originally signed on to do the movie's special effects. After reviewing his budget upward from $4,000,000 to $16,000,000 and spending a year working on optical effects, Abel was able to screen only a few partial sequences for Paramount representatives in February 1979.

On seeing them, mild-mannered Wise, who looks like a silver-haired, bespectacled cherub and is legendary in Hollywood circles for his equanimity, blew up. Studio brass huddled and Abel was canned. Months later, interviewed in his office in Building E of Paramount's sprawling lot, Wise would only say of Abel: "We have not been in touch. The air might be a little blue if we had."

Signed on--reportedly for an arm, a leg and a free hand at directing his own picture, if not for half the outstanding stock in Gulf & Western--was the reigning king of special effects, Douglas Trumbull, who directed the contemporary sci-fi classic Silent Running and did the effects for 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Trumbull recruited John Dykstra, the man behind much of Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. With the hottest special-effects team in the business at the controls, work on Star Trek--The Motion Picture--sometimes round the clock, six days a week--began all over again (see Star Trek's Very Special Effects, page 138).

As this is being written, the effects wizards are in a race against time, trying to get all those visuals ready before mid-November, when the film would have to be delivered to the color labs entrusted with making the 800 prints for the mass December opening. Edgiest of all was the 29-year-old Wunderkind Jeffrey Katzenberg, vice-president in charge of feature production, for whom this is the first major motion-picture project. "This is your picture, Jeffrey," Paramount top man Barry Diller reportedly said to him. "You sink with it or swim with it."

Katzenberg tried to clamp a tight security lid on everything about the movie--to keep his workers from wasting valuable time talking to the press, he said, but also because he was striving, somewhat vainly, to conserve whatever surprise value he could for the opening of the film. His anxiety was not without foundation; way back in February 1978, a California man stole plans for some of the movie sets and tried to sell them to the president of the Star Trek Association of Orange County; the FBI was called in and the miscreant was apprehended, fined $750 and given two years' probation on a felony charge of stealing a trade secret. In yet another incident, bootlegged copies of the script were put on sale at a fan convention.

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What is there about Star Trek that has made its following the most fanatical in showbiz history? Roddenberry suspects that it gives people hope that mankind will survive another three centuries. William Shatner, who plays Captain Kirk, thinks it may fulfill needs people have for "otherworldliness" in their lives. Bjo Trimble thinks it's just good sci-fi: "Star Trek," she says, "is the first series in which the Great Rutabaga doesn't invade Seattle every week."

George Takei (Mr. Sulu) theorizes that Star Trek attracts a thoughtful audience that gets really involved--whereas the audience for I Love Lucy, another phenomenally popular series, "just sits back and enjoys itself, and that's the end of it."

Nimoy hypothesizes that the answer lies in the show's characters. "To me, there are six or eight TV shows that you could turn on and mistake one for the others," he says. "You could put the bald guy in this one and the guy with the police uniform in that one, and it wouldn't matter. We on Star Trek, I think, are specifically identifiable as individuals. Everybody knows who each of these characters is and feels very deep personal relationships with them. With all due respect to all the shows that are on the air, I don't know of any other that will warrant a fan convention seven or ten years from now, anyplace."

Whichever theory, or combination of theories, holds the answer to the secret of Star Trek, Nimoy is right on target about his audience's involvement with the characters--who had inspired 371 fan clubs at latest count. Some of the Star Trek actors have made a modest living out of that fandom, through lecture and personal-appearance fees, but, on the other hand, many have been so seriously typecast that they've had trouble landing other roles.

Prior to Star Trek, Shatner was the best known of all of them. The Canadian-born actor starred in some of the most memorable television dramas of the early Sixties: with Ralph Bellamy in the opening episode of The Defenders, with Lee J. Cobb in No Deadly Medicine on Studio One, as the idealistic trial attorney Lieutenant Colonel N. P. Chipman on PBS' acclaimed The Andersonville Trial--and, less successfully, in an abortive costume Western called The Barbary Coast.

(continued on page 172)Star Trek's Return(continued from page 144)

Perhaps because of all that varied experience in the limelight--some of it with his actress wife, Marcy Lafferty, who plays DiFalco in Star Trek--The Motion Picture--Shatner has not fallen into the typecasting trap to the extent that some of his subordinate officers have. "Actually," he says, "I suppose there was less danger of being typecast the year after Star Trek was canceled than there is now, because of the increasing popularity of the series. On the other hand, Captain Kirk is a leading man, a man of action; so if I'm typecast as a man of action, that's not such a bad way to go." Making the best of both worlds, Shatner has been touring with a music-and-light show called Star Traveler.

Nimoy has been in constant demand since the TV Trek shut down--appearing in Mission: Impossible, narrating In Search of... on the tube, starring in Equus on Broadway, touring his one-man show Vincent, in which he appears both as the painter Van Gogh and as the artist's brother Theo, and, most recently, playing the sinister psychiatrist in the movie remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Still, when people see him on the street, they're liable to shout, "Hey, Spock, where are your ears?" And when he toured in Sherlock, audiences invariably laughed when the man they'd known as the superlogical Spock, now Holmes, had to deliver a line containing the word logic. Not content with acting, Nimoy has waxed five record albums and written three books: two volumes of poems and photographs and an autobiography, I Am Not Spock.

De Forest Kelley (Bones McCoy), a veteran character actor--usually a Western villain whom you can catch on the late-night tube in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral--has virtually retired to his home in Sherman Oaks, California, since the TV series wrapped.

"The stuff offered to me after the series ended was crap," he says, "and I thought, I've done so much crap I don't need to do that again. Fortunately, I learned a long time ago in this business that when you make some money, you had better put a little bit of it aside. So I'm not going to go hungry now. I'm not talking about living in Bel Air; I'm talking about living a nice normal life." Which he does with Carolyn, his wife of 34 years, plus a dog, a cat and a 75-year-old turtle.

Despite his recent semiretirement, Kelley still finds himself instantly recognized. "I'll never forget the time Carolyn and I went to New York and decided to take in a matinee at the Palace," he says. "Carolyn went to the ladies' room and I waited for her beside an empty candy counter. A lady came up and asked me to sign her program, and then another, and another, and by the time Carolyn came out, the lobby was packed and she couldn't get to me. I had to have a couple of policemen escort me to my seat, and as I walked down the aisle, the audience was all yelling, 'Bones! McCoy!' It was absolutely wild. And when we sat down, there were four nuns on one side of us and three on the other, and the people were passing their programs down for me to sign. And one nun said, 'This must be terrible. You can't go anywhere, can you? Well, just remember, Mr. Kelley, with every blessing that comes, there are penalties.' "

Jimmy Doohan (Scotty) thinks he's probably the world's best-known Scotsman--though he's mostly Irish. "I was conceived in Ireland and born in Canada--Vancouver, British Columbia," he says. "But I fool all the Scotsmen--they think I'm really a Scot." Doohan can, in fact, reproduce almost any accent, but the one he's stuck with is Scottish--chosen for the series, he explains, "because in the great days of the British mercantile navy, practically every engineer was a Scotsman; they were the ones who built the ships." A World War Two artilleryman and then a stunting reconnaissance pilot, Doohan appeared on 4000 radio shows and in 100 stage plays before joining the crew of the Enterprise. The Star Trek phenomenon brought him a unique fringe benefit: young wife Wende, a Trek fan who came to see him during a theatrical engagement in San Francisco.

George Takei is the politician of the Enterprise crew. Back in 1973, he ran for the Los Angeles City Council seat left vacant when Tom Bradley became the city's mayor; he came within seven percent of winning. Now he's vice-president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District board--"Mayor Bradley calls me his futuristic bus driver"--and vice-president of human resources for the American Public Transit Association. Takei's biggest campaign at the moment: getting a subway built in L.A.'s Wilshire Corridor, from downtown under Wilshire Boulevard and out to North Hollywood. Takei carries his rapid-transit gospel wherever he goes--and believes his Star Trek cachet has helped him tremendously in public life. "If I'd been Bozo the Clown, it wouldn't have helped," he says, "but my Star Trek image gives me a broad-based support, which has kept me from having to go to fat cats for aid." Takei has just written his first novel, Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe, published in December by, coincidentally, Playboy Press.

Takei and Nimoy aren't the only writers, though, among this Enterprising crew. Walter Koenig (former Ensign, now Lieutenant and Security Chief Chekov) is writing, rather than acting, almost full time now. "To be absolutely candid," says Koenig, "my film career has come to a screeching halt." He can't say the same about his writing career: His credits include episodes of the TV series Class of '65 and Family, a novel about the supernatural and a journal about the filming of the Star Trek movie, Chekov's Enterprise. (Everybody, it seems, is writing about the making of the movie; a book is also due from Roddenberry and his longtime assistant, Susan Sackett.)

Nichelle Nichols (Communications Officer Uhura), a black former ballerina and supper-club singer, was catapulted by Star Trek into a genuinely way-out career: a consultantcy for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, in which she was assigned to recruit women and members of minorities into NASA's astronaut program. As such, Nichols was present at the roll-out of America's first space shuttle, the Enterprise--named after you-know-what--and was appointed to the board of directors of the National Space Institute. The American Society for Aerospace Education presented her with its Woman of the Year, Friend of the Year award for 1979, and she has recently produced an orientation film, What's in It for Me?, for the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

Besides serving as president of Women in Motion, a consultant firm specializing in career education, Nichols has written a musical, Ancestry, set--you guessed it--in outer space. "It's called Ancestry because we are the ancestors of future generations, and we have a responsibility to them," she says. "We are paying now for the mistakes our ancestors have been making ever since 1492; in the virgin frontiers of space, we won't have to make the same mistakes. This musical is my way of doing my bit, my propaganda."

Majel Barrett and Grace Lee Whitney round out the ranks of the veterans in the cast. Barrett--who has been Mrs. Gene Roddenberry since 1969--was Nurse Chapel on the tube; in the film version, she has completed medical school and become Dr. Chapel. Whitney, who was the blonde, miniskirted (continued on page 308)Star Trek's Return(continued from page 172) Yeoman Janice Rand on TV, is now Transporter Chief Rand. Gone, incidentally, are the miniskirts; classy new Robert Fletcher--designed costumes in muted colors boast tailored slacks with built-in boots for both sexes. Leg men may lose out with this one, but the female ass watchers of the world have a treat in store: Shatner's shapely derriere is famous throughout fandom, and these new outfits are outstandingly fanny-flattering. All of the crew members, as a matter of fact, look to be in great shape; many have trimmed down to weigh in at considerably less than their TV poundage of a decade ago.

The new stars in the Enterprise's galaxy--Stephen Collins and Persis Khambatta--provide Star Trek's relatively sedate love interest. They are also, definitely, the new kids in class. "I figure I must have been the only person in the world, just about, who'd never seen Star Trek," says Collins, best known for his portrayal of Hugh Sloan in All the President's Men. "So when I met Wise and Roddenberry and they talked to me about reading for a part, I asked if they could deliver a script to me in Malibu, where I was staying for a few days. They said. 'We can't let the script out of the office. You have to come in.' So I did, and it was like going in to the back of the First National Bank with the Brinks guard. I was ushered into this little room, no decorations on the walls or anything, just one copy of the script, or, rather, a few pages. And I was very taken with it; it was a much more cerebral script than I had expected. Being ignorant about Star Trek, I expected much more of a shoot-'em-up."

Once Collins got on the set, things were strange for a while. "It felt like being the guest star on the most extravagant episodic television show ever done, because for the rest of them, it was almost as if the intervening time hadn't been there. They fell into their old relationships, their old rapport." Eventually, though, Collins fit in--especially on the Star Trek softball team.

Khambatta, a former Miss India and winner of best-actress laurels in her native country, began modeling at the age of 13. For seven years, she lived in London, where she became a Star Trek fan. "I asked my agent to get me work in the series," she says, "because I could see they used exotic-looking girls. But it wasn't being made anymore; it was already in syndication." For this, her first American film, she was required to shave her head; during shooting, a make-up girl went over her skull daily. "Actually, I like the look," says Khambatta. "I can wear jewelry on my head, and sometimes I paint it with different designs. Or I can wear a scarf or something, and when I do go into a restaurant, somebody will ask me to take it off, and I do, and everybody gasps. It's all a nice reaction, you know. It's given me a lot of confidence."

If Collins and Khambatta felt a tad disoriented in the one-big-family atmosphere of the Star Trek set, director Wise was in the strangest situation of all: His actors, who had worked together for three years, knew more about the characters they were playing than he, supposedly the final authority during shooting. "I've found it interesting--a little crazy at times," he says. "But they're all professionals, very good to work with. Enthusiastic. probably because they didn't believe it was ever going to happen after being talked about for so long."

Koenig sums up the feeling best: "The first day, truly, when I was at my console and Nichelle was at hers and George was at his and Bill, the captain, walked onto the bridge for the first time, and I said, 'Kep-un,' and we all jumped up and ran over to him. I got such a high, such a rush at that moment that it took all my self-control not to embrace him. It was such a lovely moment. I should have embraced him. What the hell."

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Back in the more innocent days of TV production, with its plywood sets, a Star Trek story didn't require much in the way of special effects. But today's more sophisticated audience--conditioned by Star Wars, Close Encounters and Alien and looking forward to Walt Disney's The Black Hole, which will debut within two weeks of Star Trek's release in 800 theaters across the country--demands something more. So, although plot and characters are still pre-eminent in Star Trek--The Motion Picture, what happens to those characters often requires dramatic visual gimmicks.

At the film's beginning, some battle cruisers of the Klingon Empire--Starfleet's traditional opponents--are attacked by an unknown entity of hitherto unsuspected power. First the Klingons, then a Federation outpost on Epsilon 9 are vaporized, and the mysterious assailant is headed straight for Earth. Since the Enterprise--until now in dry dock, undergoing renovation--is the only ship within striking distance, it is hastily called into service. Kirk, its former captain, who has been moved into an admiral's desk job, assumes command--thus demoting the young Captain Decker, played by Collins. Gradually, all the members of the crew are assembled, joined by the new navigator, the sleek Ilia (who, it is hinted but unfortunately never explicitly revealed, comes from a planet of extremely highly developed sexuality).

Off they blast, encountering difficulties almost immediately when Kirk, despite Scotty's warnings, tries to push the Enterprise into warp drive before all systems are fully go. The ship hurtles into a time warp, causing a wormhole effect in which everything seems out of sync. Voices and faces are distorted, and suddenly, dead ahead, there's an enormous asteroid hurtling straight at the ship.

The Enterprise, as you may suspect, gets out of that one, only to be sucked into the maw of the attacker, which is visible at first--in the movie as well as in our illustration on page 140--only as an enormous, strangely glowing but oddly beautiful cloud. Inside the cloud is a creature that calls itself V'ger--which, as the plot develops, turns out to be a hybrid of the American space probe Voyager 6 with... well, we won't give away the entire story, except to say that it involves lightning-fast energy bolts, space walks by Kirk and Spock and a final, mysterious disappearance of some of the characters as they are fused with--transcended into might possibly be a better phrase--a heretofore undreamed-of power.

If the unthinkable happens and Star Trek flops as a movie--it is, after all, inherently vulnerable to complaints both from fanatics who feel it's not enough like the old days and from critics who can sniff at it as just an overblown TV episode--it should still make a bundle on the side. The marketing concepts for this film leave few intergalactic rocks unturned. The TV show spawned more than 50 books and some 400 fan publications; the movie starts the whole process all over again. Pocket Books alone has scheduled 16 separate Star Trek projects under its Pocket, Wallaby and Wanderer imprints. There're The Official U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Date Book for 1980; The Star Trek Make-Your-Own-Costume Book; The Star Trek Space-flight Chronology, a history of space flight from the 20th to 23rd centuries; Star Trek Speaks, a sort of Quotations from Chairman Kirk; peel-off graphics, official blueprints of the refitted Enterprise, punch-out and pop-up books and various calendars. There will be Star Trek toys--among them an amazingly realistic phaser water pistol--shirts, bubble-gum trading cards, records, sleeping bags, kites, bumper stickers, even a Spock-shaped ceramic liquor decanter. Star Trek artwork and premium offers appear on 37,000,000 boxes of General Mills cereal; McDonald's has booked $20,000,000 in TV advertising to promote 50,000,000 boxes of Star Trek Happy Meals (burger, fries, cookies, games and cartoons); and Bally has toted up $19,490,000 in sales on a $1795 Star Trek pinball machine.

Dawn Steel, Paramount's vice-president for merchandising and licensing, claims her most conservative projection is $250,000,000 in sales of licensed products and that it could be twice that much. "Licensed children's merchandise," she explains, "is the last category to suffer in a recession; Dad will give up his suits, but his kids will still get toys and clothes."

How much will Paramount net from this bonanza? Steel isn't saying, exactly. "Our fee ranges from one to 11 percent, depending on the product." That adds up to something in the neighborhood of $2,500,000 to $55,000,000. Pretty ritzy neighborhood.

As the movie release date nears, we're seeing the revival of Star Trek conventions--those orgies of Trekkermania that sometimes attracted as many as 16,000 fans for a weekend of entertainment, discussion and merchandising in a general celebration of that wonderful future that used to be. Everything comes to a head December sixth, starting with a world premiere in Washington's MacArthur Theater--followed by a gala reception on the mezzanine of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, where one of the most popular exhibits is a model of the TV Enterprise. Among the invited guests: cast members, Government officials and the diplomatic corps. "After all," says a Paramount executive, in all seriousness, "Star Trek is a world-wide phenomenon."

Roddenberry and a few million fans could have told him that five years ago.

"'Star Trek' is the first series in which the Great Rutabaga doesn't invade Seattle every week."