The Unauthorized History of Trek

Again, Matt Jefferies’s air force engineering background came in handy in the design of the sets. The U.S. Navy was so impressed by the bridge design that it supposedly used it as a basis for one of its own communications centers.

Another seemingly insurmountable problem revolved around Roddenberry’s desire to feature a green-skinned woman in the pilot. For some reason, all the makeup department’s experiments failed to show up on the test footage shot of actress Susan Oliver for this purpose. No matter how dark they made the green, their model always showed up on film as looking perfectly normal. Eventually, they discovered that someone at the photo lab, perplexed by the pictures coming his way, was chemically correcting what he thought was a flaw in the initial photography. When this was cleared up, the desired makeup effect was achieved with a minimum of fuss.

“The Cage” began shooting with a cast of characters drawn from the original format, although the captain was now named Christopher Pike. Pike was portrayed by Jeffrey Hunter, who had the rare distinction of having once played Jesus Christ, in King of Kings. John Hoyt played the ship’s doctor, Philip Boyce. Leonard Nimoy appeared as Spock, but the character was a bit different from its later incarnation, as the logical aspect of his future personality belonged to the character Number One, portrayed by Majel Barrett.

Leonard Nimoy had assumed that he would be trying out for the part of Spock; he failed to realize that he was Roddenberry’s first and preferred choice for the role. The prospect of a regular series was exciting to the actor, who, despite his frequent guest appearances on television, did not have what could be called a stable income. He did have some misgivings about the part; what if the show was an unmitigated flop? Would he become a laughing stock, forever derided for having dared to don those silly-looking pointed ears? In conference with his friend Vic Morrow, he even pondered the possibility of developing character makeup that would completely conceal his true face—just in case Star Trek was a disaster and an embarrassment. Fortunately for his future recognizability, he thought better of this idea.

Still, one obstacle remained to be overcome. The makeup department had yet to come up with a painless means of applying the Spock ears. The ears were irritating and painful where the glue was applied; one of the reasons for Spock’s general stiffness was the fact that any facial movement, however slight, served only to compound the intense physical discomfort generated by the aural appliances.

Matters were even more confounded by the odd fact that, due to contractual obligations, the actual ears had to be made by the props department, not the makeup department. Considerable variations in the shape of the ears (as well as in Spock’s general appearance) can still be seen in the two pilot episodes. Leonard was frustrated by this situation, and expressed his dissatisfaction over it to his producer.

Roddenberry could tell that Nimoy’s anguish was real—but what could he do? Finally, grasping at straws, he promised Nimoy that if, after thirteen episodes, he was still unhappy with the ears, Roddenberry would personally write an episode in which Spock had an ear-job to give him normal, human-looking ears. Nimoy pondered this, and then broke into laughter. The fate of the ears was sealed—and Spock still has them to this day.

“The Cage” introduces viewers to Roddenberry’s nascent version of the Enterprise crew as it is headed toward a starbase after a disastrous first contact with an alien culture. Captain Pike and his crew are tired and in great need of some rest, but they are distracted by a distress signal from a nearby planet.

When they investigate, they find a colony of scientists who have survived a crash nearly twenty years earlier… and a beautiful young girl, Vina, who the survivors claim was born just as their ship crashed. When Vina lures Captain Pike away from the encampment, he is abducted by dome-skulled aliens and taken below the surface. The scientists and their camp, merely an illusion designed to lure humans, disappear.

Pike regains consciousness to find himself in an enclosed space; he has become part of an alien zoo, held prisoner by beings who can read his thoughts and project him into a bewildering variety of subjective but real-seeming scenarios. As he goes through these, he resists them at every turn, but begins to realize that the girl has a role in all this, too. Perhaps she is not an illusion, but another captive; she constantly tries to get him to accept his situation and make the best of the illusions his captors create.

Meanwhile, Number One and Spock haul out an impressive array of technology in their attempts to free their captain from his subterranean prison, but to no avail. Beneath the surface, the philosophical drama unfolds, with Pike finally being freed after resisting mind control. It is revealed that the woman, Vina, was the only survivor of the crash; not truly young, she was also severely disfigured by the crash. When Pike offers to take her off the planet to rejoin humanity, she elects to stay and live the rest of her life in the illusionary happiness the aliens have provided her. The aliens have been acting partly out of their own motivations but also out of a desire to help the lonely woman. Pike goes on to a starbase while she continues to embrace a reality that is false but which offers her the only comfort she will ever know.

NBC’s reaction to this pilot was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. In its intelligence and its appearance, it surpassed anything done in the genre television before, and looked better than the vast majority of theatrical science fiction films as well. No one had a bad word to say about the finished product.

They rejected it anyway.

The problem, it seemed, was that it was too intelligent. NBC execs were afraid that the story would go over the heads of most of the audience. Something a bit more action-oriented would perhaps be better, they mused—and, in an unprecedented move, they gave Roddenberry a shot at a second pilot.

They also wanted to get rid of the guy with the pointed ears. There was always the possibility that religious groups might be offended by such a demonic-looking character.

Roddenberry set out to revamp the entire show, but he was determined to keep Spock. He discarded the character of Number One, who hadn’t gone over too well, and promoted Spock to second-in-command, bringing him closer to the forefront.

This time, NBC wanted three complete scripts for consideration. All three had plenty of action: “Mudd’s Women,” by Stephen Kandel; “Omega Glory,” by Roddenberry; and “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” by Samuel A. Peeples. The network chose the Peeples script; the second Star Trek pilot was under way.

CHAPTER TWO:

A NEAR MISS AND A SOLID HIT

Despite the network’s misgivings, Roddenberry was determined to stick with Spock. He was also determined to maintain the Enterprise’s multiethnic crew despite the network’s concerns that this might affect ratings in various areas of the country.

As for Spock, Roddenberry worked with the character a bit; the now-discarded Number One left a vacancy for the second-in-command, and Spock fit the bill perfectly. Spock also inherited Number One’s cold, dispassionate logic. This all gelled to provide a fascinating amalgam of intelligence, restraint, and a certain attractive aura of mystery, all admirably brought to life by a highly capable actor, Leonard Nimoy.

Leonard Nimoy was born in Boston in 1931, the son of Jewish immigrants from the USSR. He showed an early interest in the theater, making his stage debut in a production of Hansel and Gretel at the age of eight.

After high school, he studied briefly at Boston College. With only six hundred dollars to his name, he took a three-day train trip to California in pursuit of an acting career. Studies at the Pasadena Playhouse did not lead to much movie work, however, and he was obliged to work at a variety of menial jobs: theater usher, ice cream counterman, pet shop clerk, vacuum cleaner salesman, and many others.

A fluke break landed him the lead in a Z-grade boxing picture, Kid Monk Baroni, but this and a few much smaller roles in such forgettable pictures as Francis Goes to West Point, where he was billed far below the picture’s talking-donkey star, were all the film work he could obtain at the time.

After marriage and a stint in the army in Georgia, Nimoy returned to Los Angeles in the late fifties and began to get more roles in episodic television, frequently as a heavy. But he was far from being a household name.

In fact, although it was too early to realize it, it was his fortuitous encounter with Gene Roddenberry and The Lieutenant series that would save him from a career as one of those all-too-familiar faces whose name the audience can’t quite place. Star Trek would soon preclude this possibility from ever coming true.

With Nimoy the sole holdover from “The Cage” pilot, Roddenberry was obliged to create an entirely new cast from scratch. Of course, the most important character on any ship is the captain. Inspired by C. S. Forester’s heroic Horatio Hornblower character, Roddenberry created a new leader for the Enterprise, James Tiberius Kirk.

Kirk, a Midwesterner, is a driven officer with great faith in himself, who is not afraid to take a stand; apart from his senior officers, he confides in few, and bears the full responsibility for his command. Yet he is not without humor and he has a highly developed sense of adventure. For this all-important lead role, Roddenberry cast actor William Shatner.

William Shatner, thirty-eight at the time he started playing Captain Kirk, was born in Canada and was, like Leonard Nimoy, involved in the theater quite early. By the time he graduated McGill University in 1952, Shatner had already done extensive radio acting work.

He then joined the National Repertory Theater of Ottawa, where he earned the massive sum of thirty-one dollars (Canadian) a week. After years of hard work he received excellent reviews in a New York production of Tamburlaine, but he turned down a seven-year, five-hundred-dollar-a-week (American) contract with Twentieth Century-Fox in order to return to Canada and star in a television drama that he had written himself.

Soon afterward, he returned to New York and became extremely active in live television. He also played in the movie The Brothers Karamazov, which starred Yul Brynner. Work in westerns soon followed. He settled in Los Angeles, determined to make his fortunes in Hollywood.

Roles on The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits feature prominently in his resume from this period. He starred in the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” and in the Outer Limits episode “Cold Hands, Warm Heart” he delivered, at one point, a passionate declaration about the importance of space exploration which sounds like a paraphrase of the opening narration of every Star Trek episode.

For the technical end of things, Roddenberry came up with the character of the chief engineer, Montgomery Scott. A regular shirtsleeves kind of guy, with an unbending devotion to his captain superseded only by his devotion to his ship, Scott would often be called upon to do the impossible, in as little time as he could manage. His ethnic background was suggested by the actor who played Scott. He was gifted in the area of dialects, and since there was a long tradition of Scotsmen in nautical and military engineering, his suggestion was approved.

Star Trek’s other Canadian, James Doohan, was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and flew an artillery observation plane in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. Like many other actors of his generation, he did extensive radio work. He arrived in the United States in 1946 and remained until 1953, performing and teaching acting.

In 1961 he came back to the United States and worked on such television shows as Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Bewitched, and The FBI. Doohan had been offered the role of the chief engineer on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea right after he auditioned for Star Trek, and only a call from the Star Trek offices at just the right time decided him on which series he would take. Of Scotty, Doohan once surmised that perhaps his accent was not natural, but was actually learned, possibly in a time when people would re-create archaic modes of speech in order to reduce the monotony of an ever-more-homogeneous language. An intriguing theory, indeed!

For the helmsman, who also doubles as weapons officer, Roddenberry created a character of Asian background, Sulu, who is primarily Japanese but also has Filipino blood. Sulu was portrayed by George Takei.

George Takei was born in Los Angeles but spent the World War Two period in Arkansas where, as a child, he lived with his family in a Japanese/American detention camp. He studied architecture at U.C. Berkeley and earned a bachelor’s degree at UCLA in 1960.

In the few years between this and the debut of Star Trek, he managed to appear on a number of shows, including Perry Mason and I Spy. He also acted in The Green Berets, The Brothers Karamazov, and other movies.

He appeared in The Twilight Zone episode “The Encounter,” an episode no longer included in the syndication package for reasons of anti-Japanese prejudice expressed in the script.

At a time when the networks were still dubious about the use of black characters in television (Bill Cosby’s equal billing with Robert Culp on I Spy was definitely the exception, not the rule), Roddenberry pushed the envelope by creating the black communications officer Uhura.

Things were thrown more out of kilter when he made the character a woman as well. Even after the loss of the Number One character, he was determined to have a woman in a responsible position on the Enterprise bridge. In this, he was years ahead of our own military.

Uhura, whose name means “freedom,” was from an African nation (according to the background material, anyway), and is proof of the changes Earth society has achieved in Roddenberry’s hopeful vision of the future.

Actress, dancer, and singer Nichelle Nichols was cast as Uhura. Born in Chicago, she had worked extensively as a vocalist, and toured with Duke Ellington’s and Lionel Hampton’s bands. On stage, she appeared in such plays as The Blacks, No Strings, Carmen Jones, and James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie.

With the new cast set and ready to go, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” started shooting on July 21, 1965, and was not completed until January 1966, costing $330,000 to produce. Needless to say, the network was eager to see what it had been waiting for.

Roddenberry and his team were on tenterhooks; would NBC reject this effort, too? In February, the word came through: Star Trek would debut in December, with the network committed to sixteen episodes. It was time to start producing the series. With a budget of roughly $180,000 an episode, it was going to be quite a ride.

Early on, the idea of incorporating the rejected “Cage” pilot into a two-part episode was put forward as a means of relieving the expected time-and-budget crunch. Set building, prop design, and, of course, scripts all occupied a great deal of this preparation period.

Roddenberry attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland on September 4, 1966, where he showed “Where No Man Has Gone Before” to a suitably impressed audience of five hundred die-hard science fiction fans.

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” was different from the form that Star Trek would soon assume. Uhura had not yet joined the roster, nor had Yeoman Janice Rand; the ship’s doctor. Dr. Piper, was portrayed by Paul Fix; and Sulu was a physicist, not the helmsman. Several characters in key roles appeared only in the pilot.

What the Worldcon audience saw was the story of how the Enterprise tries to penetrate a mysterious purple energy barrier in space. Strange radiations affect the crew; Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell seems normal, but his eyes begin to glow silver. It soon becomes apparent that the radiation has boosted his latent extrasensory perceptions to a previously undreamed-of level. Mitchell’s mental powers begin to accelerate, and Spock becomes convinced that Mitchell is a threat to the Enterprise and prompts Kirk to kill him.

But the Captain cannot bring himself to terminate an old college buddy from Starfleet Academy. Ultimately, Kirk and Mitchell battle to the death in a harsh landscape altered by Mitchell’s godlike powers. At one point, Mitchell produces a tombstone bearing the name of James R. Kirk, proving that even a nearly omnipotent being can get someone’s middle initial wrong. Finally, Kirk destroys Mitchell, but it is a hollow triumph, as he has killed the friend he once had.

The audience gave Roddenberry a standing ovation; he knew then that he was on the right track.

Finally, on September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC. (Actually, the first broadcast was two days earlier, on Canadian television.) The episode aired was not the pilot (that was shown two weeks later) but the sixth episode filmed, “The Man Trap,” perhaps best known for its piteous Salt Vampire nemesis.

This episode was most notable for introducing audiences to a character who was not actually in the pilot, but who would quickly become an indispensable part of the Star Trek myth: Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy.

This seemingly cynical but strongly compassionate humanitarian would provide a constant counterpoint to the cold logic of Spock, and their battle of wits would soon become legendary.

Fed up with protocol, distrustful of technology (especially transporters), and wary of dehumanizing influences, in a way McCoy represents the probable reaction of an intelligent twentieth-century man cast forward into the twenty-third century. He has his roots very much in our present. Veteran actor DeForest Kelley was called upon to bring this crucial character to life.

DeForest Kelley was born in Atlanta, but bucked his Baptist minister father’s desire for him to become a doctor and opted for acting instead. Moving to Long Beach, California, he continued the radio work he had begun in Georgia, and also worked as an elevator operator.

In the navy during World War Two, he worked in training films, where he was spotted by a talent scout from Paramount. He worked as a contract player at Paramount Studios for two and a half years. About this time, a fortune-teller told him that he would not achieve success until after he passed the age of forty, which proved to be true!

Then, in 1948, he went to New York City and worked in television and on stage. Returning to Hollywood, he worked extensively in westerns, both on television shows such as Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Bonanza and in movies such as Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Warlock. For Gene Roddenberry, Kelley starred in two pilots: 1960’s Free. Free, Free Montgomery, in which he played a famous, controversial defense attorney named Jake Early, and the unsold Police Story (no relation to the later TV series).

With the key elements in place and the show finally in production and on the air, Star Trek was now more than a dream in Gene Roddenberry’s mind. It was a reality. Variety insisted that the series wouldn’t work; time has certainly proven the newspaper wrong.

CHAPTER THREE:

ONWARD TO THE STARS, WITH HOPE

(THE FIRST SEASON)

A week before Star Trek premiered, the Buffalo Evening News previewed new shows:

A 400-man space ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, cruises the TV universe this fall starting Thursday night in Star Trek, NBC’s expensive full-hour science fiction adventure series about puny man exploring the wide blue yonder. Starring the talented Canadian actor William Shatner as spaceship commander Kirk, assisted by brainy, elf-eared Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), Star Trek goes back and forth in time, jousting with alien spirits, bewildering viruses and ordinary human conflicts on a never-ending trip to other worlds.

In this article, both NBC and Shatner are already defending the show against criticism, days before it even premieres. NBC tries to cast Star Trek as action/adventure rather than science fiction. At a time when Bonanza was a hit and science fiction television was represented by Lost in Space, their concern was well-founded! Shatner insists, “We’re not going to be like the children’s show Lost in Space, where characters battle villains in eerie costumes. … We deal with human conflicts against a science fiction background.” Some of these conflicts will include Kirk’s Jekyll and Hyde battle with his own self, the attack of a bizarre virus that robs humans of will, and Mr. Spock’s battle to be a true Vulcan and control his feelings.

Star Trek promises to deliver new and exotic technology, fun gadgets, and wild special effects:

The Earth men have a few dandy tools and gadgets on display, all calculated to catch the fancy of young viewers. Captain Kirk and crew make excellent use of laser beam guns, jolting enemies with the sizzle of cutting light. They listen and understand various alien languages by way of walkie-talkie interpreters that translate foreign words in a split second.

From these clumsy attempts to describe Star Trek’s technology, it would have been hard to imagine that much of its terminology would actually one day be incorporated into common daily usage. The only clue is that according to Shatner, there is already a company working on a real-life walkie-talkie interpreter! “That’s the point of our show—science fiction projections into the future based on what is possible today.”

The Buffalo Evening News places Star Trek a step above Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, but calls it a Twilight Zone set in space. Of course, a show this new would be hard to categorize—Roddenberry even once tried to sell the idea as a space western!

The News comes out in praise of Shatner, both for his bold plugs for the new show and for his previous acting credits, including Shakespeare, Broadway, and the short-lived TV series For the People. Fortunately for the actor, the new show would enjoy a longer TV life than his first effort; in fact, it would make him world-famous.

“The Man Trap,” written by Twilight Zone alumnus George Clayton Johnson, kicked off the Star Trek series with a story featuring Dr. McCoy’s apparent reunion with his old flame Nancy, now married to archaeologist Robert Crater. Unfortunately, Nancy is actually dead and is being impersonated by a creature that lives off the body salt of other living creatures.

Things are further compounded by its ability to take on any form. McCoy is faced with the agonizing truth in a story that is quite poignant and moving. The good doctor’s futuristic medical supplies came out of the prop search for this episode, as futuristic salt shakers were sought out but then discarded for fear that they wouldn’t be recognized as such. The props department, always on a budget, converted the salt shakers into medical devices.

The next episode aired, “Charlie X,” featured Robert Walker, Jr., as a space foundling whose hidden psychic powers are ill matched with his adolescent need for attention and approval, in a story about loneliness and alienation. In hindsight, the story has more than passing similarities to the central character in Robert Heinlein’s 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.