A Brief Guide to Star Trek (7 page)

The two weeks’ filming saw Roddenberry engaged in script rewrites as well as supervising the entire production process. Shooting wrapped on 11 December and a period of frantic post-production followed in which special effects and model shots were worked into the edited footage. Three days after Christmas 1964, Gene Roddenberry viewed a completed rough cut of his debut episode of
Star Trek
– but he was not a happy man.

According to a memo he prepared after viewing the episode, and other correspondence with friends, Roddenberry felt the action in ‘The Cage’ didn’t start quickly enough, that the character of the captain was not defined clearly enough in the show’s opening moments, and that the time constraints involved in filming the episode over just two weeks had damaged the final product. A revised edit was prepared for mid-January 1965, and then the show had to be screened for NBC executives, ready or
not. Roddenberry admitted that if he’d had more time, he’d have continued to rework ‘The Cage’.

Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous maxim about Hollywood – ‘Nobody knows anything’ – applied equally to US television in the 1960s. Reluctant to make choices themselves about which programmes to back, NBC executives relied on flawed audience tests to tell them whether a show would be a hit or not. Such a different, unknown and untested quantity as
Star Trek
was always going to throw a regular test audience more used to generic Westerns, cop shows or sitcoms than challenging space adventures. So it proved.

With mixed results from the audience tests, NBC were still unsure about whether to back
Star Trek
. There was a lot about the show – as exhibited in ‘The Cage’ – that they liked, but there were other areas they were concerned about. Their primary worry was that if they failed to develop the show, they could be losing a potential hit series.

Roddenberry now felt he and the team had ironed out many of the problems they expected to encounter in creating and mounting a dramatically different TV series like
Star Trek
: he and the others involved wanted to capitalise on the lessons learned and get stuck in to producing the series proper. Throughout February 1965 Roddenberry felt trapped in a kind of limbo in which the fate of his show lay in the hands of a group of nervous NBC executives who, reluctant to make the wrong decision, were thus delaying making any decision at all. If an answer wasn’t forthcoming very soon Roddenberry knew the series would not be able to enter production quickly enough to make the forthcoming fall 1965 NBC schedule. Just as it started to look like
Star Trek
would be an ignoble failure, Gene Roddenberry was given a unique second chance.

Against usual practice for the time,
Star Trek
was afforded the unexpected luxury of a second attempt at creating a viable pilot episode. NBC itself accepted some of the blame for the failings of ‘The Cage’, in that they had selected that storyline from the
three on offer. Additionally, the network had already spent $630,000 making ‘The Cage’ (at that point,
Star Trek
’s initial pilot was the most expensive ever made) and while the expense of failed pilots was a recognised part of the television business, they saw enough potential in the
Star Trek
concept to let a frustrated Gene Roddenberry try again.

In
Inside Star Trek
, Desilu executive Herb Solow and associate producer Robert Justman offered their take on the reasons for NBC’s rejection of ‘The Cage’: ‘The NBC party line was that it was “too cerebral”. The unspoken reason, however, dealt more with the manners and morals of mid-1960s America. NBC was very concerned with the “eroticism” of the pilot and the ensuing series. Their knowledge of Roddenberry’s attitude toward [women] didn’t help. NBC sales was equally concerned with the Spock character, [fearing he’d be] seen as demonic by Bible Belt affiliate-stations and advertisers. Their concern presented a serious stumbling block to the sale of the hoped-for series.’

Roddenberry discussed his view of the rejection of ‘The Cage’ at a
Star Trek
convention in 1986. ‘The reasons [for NBC’s rejection] were these: too cerebral, not enough action and adventure,’ said Roddenberry, creating his legendary explan -ation for the first pilot’s failure. ‘“The Cage” didn’t end with a chase and a right cross to the jaw. Another thing they felt was wrong was that we had Majel [Barrett] as a female second-in-command. In the test reports, the women in the audience were saying, “Who does she think she is?” They hated her. It is hard to believe that in twenty years, we have gone from a totally sexist society to where we are today.

‘We also had what they called a “childish concept” – an alien with pointy ears from another planet [Spock]. People in those days were not talking about life forms on other worlds. It was generally assumed that this [Earth] is the place where life occurred and probably nowhere else. It would have been all right if this alien with pointy ears, this “silly creature,” had the biggest zap gun in existence, or the strength of 100 men, that could be exciting. His only difference from us was [that] he had an alien perspective.’

In a letter from February 1965 to his agent Alden Schwimmer, Roddenberry had defended ‘The Cage’ from the criticisms of NBC. ‘Whether or not this was the right story for a sale [to the network], it was definitely [the] right one for ironing out successfully a thousand how, when and whats of television science fiction. It did that job superbly and has us firmly in position to be the first who has ever successfully made TV series science fiction at a mass audience level and yet with a chance for quality and network prestige too. I have no respect or tolerance for those who say things like “If it were not so cerebral . . .”, and such garbage. [I] am wide open to criticism and suggestions, but not from those who think answers lie in things like giving someone aboard a dog, or adding a cute eleven-year-old boy to the crew.’ Later,
Star Trek: The Next Generation
would come close to the ‘cute eleven-year-old boy’ in Roddenberry’s own creation of the youthful wunderkind character of Wesley Crusher, while
Star Trek: Enterprise
would include Porthos, the captain’s dog, among the ship’s crew.

Despite this combative attitude, Roddenberry did admit (quoted in
Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages
) that as a producer he’d perhaps failed to deliver what he’d promised. ‘They probably felt that I had broken my word. In the series format I had promised a
Wagon Train
to the stars action/ adventure, science-fiction style. But, instead, ‘The Cage’ was a beautiful story, but it wasn’t action/adventure. It wasn’t what I had promised. Clearly the problem with the first pilot was easily traced back to me. I got too close to it and lost perspective. I had known the only way to tell
Star Trek
was with an action/adventure plot. I forgot my plan and tried for something proud.’

With ‘The Cage’, Roddenberry’s storytelling ambitions had trumped his years of practical production experience. According to him, it was only the prospect of the US landing a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, as pledged by President Kennedy at the start of the decade, that made NBC pay con -tinued attention to
Star Trek
beyond ‘The Cage’.

In approaching a potential second pilot episode, Roddenberry
was willing to tone down the Spock character, a compromise as NBC has originally wanted him removed altogether. Ironically, the alien Spock would turn out to be the only character retained from ‘The Cage’ in the ongoing
Star Trek
series. Indeed, he would go on to become one of the most iconic characters in the history of television and one of the most loved of all the
Star Trek
characters.

‘They rejected most of the cast [of “The Cage”] and asked that Spock be dropped too,’ Roddenberry recalled. ‘I said I would not do a second pilot without Spock because I felt we had to have him for many reasons. I felt we couldn’t do a space show without at least one person on board who constantly reminded you that you were out in space and in a world of the future. NBC finally agreed to do the second pilot with Spock in it, saying, “Well, kind of keep him in the background.”’

Once again, the network requested a trio of potential story outlines for the second pilot. Roddenberry himself had originally written two of them (‘Mudd’s Women’ – heavily rewritten by Stephen Kandel – and ‘The Omega Glory’, a take on the politics of the Cold War), while the third was ‘Star Prime’ (later retitled ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’), written by Roddenberry’s pulp fiction source, Samuel A. Peeples.

NBC thought Peeples’ ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ offered a better showcase for the potential of
Star Trek
than any of the ideas put forward by the show’s creator. Born in 1917, making him four years older than Roddenberry, Peeples would go on to write one other
Star Trek
episode (for
The Animated Series
), and he contributed to the storyline for the second
Star Trek
movie,
The Wrath of Khan
. However, having written hundreds of television episodes in his time, he knew how good drama worked, and he brought that to his script for
Star Trek
’s second pilot.

One aspect of ‘The Cage’ NBC had disliked was the casting of Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike. By 1965, the actor was also reluctant to commit to a potentially long-running TV series, so when his option was not picked up for the second pilot, it came as a relief. This move allowed Roddenberry and Peeples to develop a different kind of captain for their
Enterprise
, and to
build the drama around a key relationship between the captain and his antagonist, Gary Mitchell (
2001: A Space Odyssey
’s Gary Lockwood).

Roddenberry modelled his new captain more closely on Horatio Hornblower: a flawed hero, or at least a hero who believed himself to be flawed. Given that, according to Robert Justman, NBC saw Hunter as ‘wooden’, Roddenberry sought out an actor with a more dynamic range and a more expressive approach to television acting.

Roddenberry first approached Lloyd Bridges (father of actors Jeff and Beau Bridges and star of
Sea Hunt
) for the new role of Captain James Kirk. He also once again approached Jack Lord, who had been sounded out about the role of Pike in the previous pilot. Neither actor secured the job, but it was third time lucky for Gene Roddenberry in his hunt for a new
Enterprise
captain.

Robert Justman had worked with William Shatner on anthology show
The Outer Limits
. ‘[Shatner] had a good reputation in the television and entertainment industries. He was someone to be reckoned with and we certainly understood that he was a more accomplished actor than Jeff Hunter . . . he gave us more dimension. Shatner was classically trained. He had enormous technical abilities to do different things and he gave the captain a terrific personality. He embodied what Gene had in mind.’

While the drama of ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ was built around the captain trying to rescue his friend Gary Mitchell from the consequences of his transformation into a God-like being, the recasting of the central role allowed for new relationships with the ship’s other remaining crewmembers, especially Spock.

For the second pilot, the character of the strong female Number One was dropped (relegating Roddenberry’s lover Majel Barrett to the smaller background role of Nurse Chapel in later episodes) and Spock promoted in her place. The emotional Spock of ‘The Cage’ was rethought and he acquired the coldly logical characteristics of Number One, his new nature
playing nicely with his unearthly looks. Noted Nimoy, ‘Bill Shatner’s broader acting style created a new chemistry between the captain and Spock, and now it was quite different from that of the first pilot.’ The central trio of
Star Trek
legend was not yet complete, however, as the second pilot did not feature the yetto-be-developed character of Dr McCoy. Although Roddenberry had included a ship’s doctor in the series outline, the role of captain’s confidant was filled in the second pilot by the character of Gary Mitchell.

To ensure that such an effects-heavy, unconventional TV show could be made in a standard television time scale of around a week per episode, NBC insisted that
Star Trek
’s second pilot be shot in an eight-day period rather than the sixteen days taken to film ‘The Cage’ (each episode of the regular series would have to be shot in seven to eight days if it was to meet fall transmission dates). Director James Goldstone was hired to helm the show. ‘“Where No Man Has Gone Before” [went through] a great deal of polishing and rewriting on a conceptual and physical level, so that we could make it in eight days’, he later said. ‘[It] seemed to have the potential to establish those characters on a human level. The only gimmick is the mutation, the silvering of Gary Mitchell’s eyes, and it works because it’s simple, as opposed to growing horns or something. Ours was a human science fiction concept, perhaps cerebral [but] certainly emotional.’

Production on ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ began on 15 July 1965, with shooting commencing on 19 July on Stage 15 at the Desilu Studio in Culver City. As the production was able to use many of the sets already constructed for ‘The Cage’, the budget for the new episode came in at just $300,000, around half of the first attempt. The second pilot featured all the elements that NBC had liked about the
Star Trek
concept, but thanks to Peeples’ script, the action-adventure element that had been missing from ‘The Cage’ had been beefed up considerably. It didn’t take NBC long, upon viewing the completed cut of ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’, to greenlight
Star Trek
as an ongoing TV series for the fall 1966 schedule.