A Brief Guide to Star Trek (5 page)

Schwimmer had an ace up his sleeve. His company had become the agent for Desilu Studios, which had once produced the hit series
I Love Lucy
(1951–7) and now made
The Lucy Show
(1962–8). Star Lucille Ball had become the sole owner of the studio, following her divorce from husband Desi Arnaz. The extensive studio facilities (inherited from old Hollywood studio RKO, makers of
King Kong
and
Citizen Kane
) built up during the heyday of
I Love Lucy
, now stood largely empty, except for their once a week usage for
The Lucy Show
and occasional external space rentals. Desilu Studios were keen to find projects to utilise the studio space and their agent – Schwimmer – was keen for his client Roddenberry to launch a science fiction television series. It was a marriage of convenience from which all parties could benefit enormously.

As a result of her ongoing deal with CBS for
The Lucy Show
, Ball had access to a $600,000-per-year development fund. Schwimmer was tasked with finding new projects to spend the money on, in the hope that they’d develop into new hit shows. Pilots that eventually resulted from this development fund included
Mission: Impossible
(the series began in 1966, in the same season as
Star Trek
) and
Mannix
(which debuted the following year).

The Desilu development money allowed Roddenberry to further build on his ideas for ‘
Wagon Train
to the stars’, which may not have happened otherwise without a firm series commission from a broadcaster. It was expected any resulting series would be produced by Desilu and would air on CBS, as they were providing the initial funding.

Roddenberry had a partner working with him on developing his new series proposal, Herb Solow – Desilu’s in-house executive who would decide which projects would be pitched to the broadcasters. Solow saw Roddenberry’s proposed series as another anthology show, like
The Lieutenant
, with new characters and settings every week, something he feared would be prohibitively expensive. Solow also worried that reintroducing the series concept each week would take up too much of the
show’s running time. His proposed solution was a voiceover from the spaceship’s captain explaining the set-up, allowing the episode to get on with the drama. Later in life Roddenberry was reluctant to share the credit for the success of
Star Trek
, especially in the creation of the key elements that went into making up the series. In a memo from 1966 Roddenberry erroneously credited the captain’s voiceover idea to ‘my cousin in Ohio’. For him, it made for a better story.

There was another writer involved in developing ideas for
Star Trek
in addition to Roddenberry. Samuel A. Peeples, a prolific television screenwriter in the 1960s, had written for many Western series, including
Wanted: Dead or Alive
,
The Rifleman
and
Bonanza
. Roddenberry knew that Peeples had a significant collection of pulp magazines. Roddenberry had read some of the same story magazines – including
Amazing Stories
– as a teenager, but was not an expert or a particularly big fan of the genre. He remembered reading E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s
Skylark
series and the Buck Rogers newspaper comic strip, as well as listening to the exciting radio serial. However, as a kid during the depression he’d been far more interested in the adventures of the Lone Ranger and the Shadow. He needed help putting his dramatic ideas into a plausible science fiction context.

Peeples recalled, ‘[Roddenberry] was trying to start a science fiction series and he knew that I had one of the largest science fiction collections in the world. He was researching his show and asked if he could go through my magazines and get some ideas for the
Enterprise
. Gene went through all the covers, and that’s really how the
Enterprise
was born.’

Roddenberry felt he needed a crash course in science fiction and borrowed some books from Peeples – among them Olaf Stapleton’s
First and Last Men
– to get a feel for what the genre encompassed. Peeples suggested other writers that Roddenberry should sample, including Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Poul Anderson and Richard Matheson. From the beginning Roddenberry was keen to involve serious science fiction storytellers in his series to give the show authenticity.

One of the first television writers Roddenberry arranged to meet was Jerry Sohl, whose credits included
The Twilight Zone
,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and
The Outer Limits
, as well as several science fiction novels. He had the ideal combination of science fiction credentials and TV scriptwriting that Roddenberry would look for in the initial batch of
Star Trek
writers. Sohl clearly understood that the meeting was a fishing exercise on Roddenberry’s part, with the putative showrunner asking for the names of other West Coast writers he could contact, as well as sounding out Sohl’s opinion of his
Star Trek
idea. Among the names Sohl added to Roddenberry’s growing list of writers to contact were William Nolan, George Clayton Johnson and Harlan Ellison.

Desilu’s Herb Solow was charged with selling
Star Trek
to the studios. It was quickly rejected by CBS, despite them having initially funded development through the Desilu fund. Solow had more luck with NBC, who offered to finance the writing of a pilot script (subject to a choice from three outlines) that might result in the broadcaster funding the shooting of a pilot. Gene Roddenberry’s
Star Trek
was about to blast off.

‘
I am Spock!
’ Leonard Nimoy

Gene Roddenberry was first and foremost an accomplished storyteller, and
Star Trek
was the ideal vehicle for telling stories about the modern world that happened to be set in space, in a far-off future that seemed strangely to echo the present. He wasn’t alone in creating
Star Trek
in its lasting incarnation: he drew on the talents of many other individuals who contributed key elements that went in to making the concept durable.

Unusually for television in the 1960s,
Star Trek
was allowed two pilot episodes to demonstrate to NBC that the show could work. The story of the two
Star Trek
pilots is the story of the two writers involved, Gene Roddenberry and Samuel A. Peeples. For the 1964 pilot, Roddenberry flew solo. In the script for ‘The Cage’ he brought to life the concepts that had featured in his March 1964 series outline in a dramatic form. For his critics, it was not dramatic enough and simply too thoughtful for American television in the mid-1960s.

For the show’s second pilot in 1965, NBC chose Samuel A. Peeples’ script, ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’. Peeples brought action and adventure to
Star Trek
, elements that Roddenberry later admitted had been missing from his effort. Between them, the two storytellers used their
Star Trek
pilots to
lay down the template for a franchise that would ‘live long and prosper’ for the next forty-five years and beyond.

Gene Roddenberry had three alternatives to represent the potential of
Star Trek
through the initial pilot storylines requested by NBC in 1964. The first storyline was entitled ‘Landru’s Paradise’ (and would later become the basis for the episode ‘The Return of the Archons’). In the story, Captain Robert April (the name lifted from a character who’d appeared in the final episode of
The Lieutenant
) discovers a seemingly all-American town located on a distant planet. The contented inhabitants are reluctant to question their existence or challenge authority, apparently happy with their lot. Roddenberry’s story outline reveals that this ‘happiness’ is imposed by a group called The Lawgivers, who issue severe punishments for even the mildest infractions of the rules (an idea later explored in more depth in the
Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode ‘Justice’). The climax sees April confront the planet’s ruling computer and proceed (as in several
Star Trek
episodes) to talk it to death, freeing the populace.

The second proposed storyline was ‘The Women’ (the basis for the later episode ‘Mudd’s Women’). The outline was clear about its inspiration: ‘Duplicating a page from the “Old West”; hankypanky aboard [the
Enterprise
] with a cargo of women destined for a far-off colony.’ Essentially about prostitution, people trafficking and slavery, ‘The Women’ saw a space trader supply plain-looking women to lonely men on far-off mining planets, using a drug to create the illusion that the women are beautiful and happy to cater to the men’s every need without question.

Finally there was ‘The Cage’, chronicling a battle between illusion and reality. Captured by powerful aliens, April is forced to live through memories and fantasies in the company of another human captive, the beautiful Vina. His captors feed off the emotions generated by his turmoil, and in the end April has to decide between the seductive illusions or harsh reality.

The three stories were surprisingly revealing and reflected Roddenberry’s attitudes to life, especially as his marriage
crumbled. In dealing with subjects such as God-like beings, judicial authority, and the role of women Roddenberry laid down a marker as to the ambitions of
Star Trek
: his science fiction TV show was going to be ‘about’ something, rather than just entertaining fluff filling the airwaves between advertisements.

There was no denying that living and working in the Hollywood milieu of 1960s television was having an effect on Roddenberry and his family life. He’d long had a roving eye and not thought twice about cheating on his wife, even during his police days. Now, in a position of relative power in the Los Angeles television business, it was easier than ever for Roddenberry to indulge his passions. His regular extra-marital relationship continued with actress Majel Barrett, but she wasn’t alone. Roddenberry told friends he remained married for the sake of his children, but that did little to curb his wandering ways. One of the reasons for the growing distance between Roddenberry and his wife Eileen may have been the widening of his horizons compared to hers. While he grew and changed, perhaps not always for the better, she remained the policeman’s wife and home-making mother, disapproving of the ‘Hollywood’ lifestyle. That they grew apart is not surprising.

As the distance between him and his wife grew larger, Roddenberry focused on his work. Although NBC had agreed to fund the writing of a pilot script for
Star Trek
in 1964, it would be a further two years before the regular series would reach American TV screens. The intermediate time was a frustrating one of repeated development and failure for Roddenberry, eventually followed by compromised success.

According to Desilu executive Herb Solow (in his personal memoir
Inside Star Trek
, co-authored with
Star Trek
producer Robert Justman), NBC continued to harbour doubts about whether Desilu could pull off a show as ambitious and complicated as the
Star Trek
pitch. Of the three storylines submitted, NBC finally chose ‘The Cage’. The plot had been further refined in numerous pitching sessions with the NBC brass, so
writing the script itself came fast and easy to Roddenberry. Dated 29 June 1964, his story outline featured a group of sixlimbed, crab-like aliens who capture the
Enterprise
’s Captain April and subject him to a variety of tests. In captivity with him is another apparent human, a woman named Vina. Writing without much regard to budget – odd for someone who’d had a fair degree of practical television production experience – Roddenberry seemed more interested in concocting a dramatic introduction to his universe to sell the
Star Trek
concept to NBC than worrying about practical considerations that might face Desilu should the series enter production.

A bizarre menagerie of non-humanoid creatures featured in the draft script, including a six-legged ‘Rigelian spider ape’ and another character described as a cross between an angel and a snake. These visions would be easy to achieve on screen now with a decent budget and CGI technology. Back in the mid-1960s computers in special effects were non-existent and animation for television was prohibitively expensive. Nonetheless, Roddenberry stubbornly featured an intelligent lemur from Arcturus (the kind of truly alien character that would not be properly visually realised until
Star Trek: The Animated Series
in the early 1970s).

The final script delivered to NBC at the end of June 1964 featured Captain Pike (replacing April, but still not yet the familiar Kirk) commanding the USS
Enterprise
, en route to a Starbase for a spot of shore leave. Drawn by indications that a ship may have crashed on Talos IV, the
Enterprise
diverts to investigate. A landing party of Pike, Lieutenant Spock, Dr Phillip Boyce, navigator José Tyler and others is convened. The ship is left under the command of the cold, logic-driven female first officer, Number One.

A group of survivors is discovered, all that remain of the crew of the SS
Columbia
, a ship that crashed over a decade before. Vina – just a child when the ship crashed – forms a strong connection with Pike. Hidden alien intelligences observe them and use Vina to lure Pike into a trap. Captured by the Talosians (large-headed mute creatures, now humanoid in form), Pike is
incarcerated with Vina, in fact the sole survivor of the
Columbia
crash. The remaining
Enterprise
landing crew see the encampment vanish, realising it to have been an illusion created by the aliens as a lure.