The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, Volume 1 Read online

  It was about this time that another writer, who was a frequent contributor to Starlog, Cinefantastique’s less erudite but equally essential periodical, contacted me, the jocular Edward Gross. Ed, who had spent years interviewing virtually every living member of the original TOS production team and has an insatiable and buoyant enthusiasm for the subject matter, suggested we might make good collaborators, and we subsequently worked together on a number of projects culminating with this—I suspect, and hope—definitive accounting of the past, present, and future of the Star Trek franchise.

  Covering Star Trek for those many years for CFQ proved a film school of a sort as I learned about the minutiae of television production, inside and out. When offered my own genre magazine to launch by none other than the infamous Larry Flynt, I jumped at the opportunity, with Fred’s blessing, and Sci-Fi Universe, the self-proclaimed magazine for sci-fi fans with a life, was born. Snarky and smart, Sci-Fi Universe was a great and beloved magazine that also undermined my relationship with the Trek brain trust when our honesty proved a little too, well, honest. After that magazine was sold, I was done with genre journalism forever … or so I thought.

  My days at Sci-Fi Universe proved to be the basis for my first feature film, originally called Trekkers, later Free Enterprise. If they say “write what you know,” then Free Enterprise certainly validated that axiom. The film, about two die-hard and dysfunctional Star Trek fans who meet their idol, William Shatner, and find out that he’s more screwed up than they are, was the opportunity of a lifetime. Not only did I get to write and produce my first movie, but it starred William Shatner, a man I had admired and idolized since I was in utero. And still do.

  Prior to the film’s premiere—it opened in theaters in 1999, propitiously on June 4, the same date that The Wrath of Khan was released in 1982—director Robert Burnett and I traveled to the Cannes Film Festival with Mr. Shatner … or Bill, as he preferred to be called. Although he was on the Concorde and we were flying coach on Delta, it was a wonderful week of screenings and walking (more often staggering) along the Croisette as Bill admired the view of the beach and winked with a sly grin as he muttered in his legendary staccato fashion, “Topless … topless is good.” A few hours later he was giving away a bomber jacket to Planet Hollywood Cannes that he had worn in the film, telling the assembled throngs of press that he unearthed it in a secondhand thrift store in Los Angeles and that it had once belonged to the famous World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker. He added that he was now returning it to the beaches of France.

  I was stunned. How come he had never told us this? What an incredible find. “I made it up” was his simple and elegant reply. And I learned something that day about the art of great storytelling and a great storyteller.

  Because in the end, the magic that had always endeared Star Trek to me wasn’t necessarily its optimistic (some would say, Pollyannaish) view of the future, the gee-whiz and prescient peek at the technology of tomorrow (although I did dig those sliding doors and Automat-like replicators), the cutting edge of visual-effects technology or even the great writing, directing, and scores. It was its anchor: William Shatner as Kirk. A man who, I’ve often said, had the respect of his crew, the loyalty of his friends, and a green girl on every planet. What more could you ask for in life? But perhaps that’s too frivolous an answer. Maybe the rabbi was right, maybe there’s more to this Star Trek stuff than just some cool spaceships and crazy alien characters. The thing about Kirk that makes him a great leader is that while he is open and inviting of the opinions of others, he’s ultimately decisive, smart, and insatiably curious. And willing to disregard rules and regulations when necessary. He is a leader in the best sense of the word. John F. Kennedy by way of Bill Clinton. With the debut of The Next Generation, Captain Picard proved a different type of leader for a different era. Not the twenty-fourth century, mind you, but the early 1990s. He was a consensus builder, and thoughtful and deliberate; George H. W. Bush meets Barack Obama. These two templates would color the captains that would follow and forever define what Star Trek was for a generation of viewers.

  While Star Wars is wonderfully elevated pulp, Star Trek is something else entirely. At its heart have always been characters who are a family, united by friendship, loyalty, and an insatiable curiosity about the unknown. In a culture in which cynicism and fatalism are the currency of the day—whether it be because of political gridlock, economic depression, famine, or the horror of disease—in which all our best contemporary television series from Breaking Bad to The Walking Dead plumb the darkness of man, what makes Star Trek so unique is that even when it goes into the heart of darkness, it still manages to come out the other side extolling the human adventure with a palpable sense of optimism and hope for the future. It’s a progressive, liberal vision that is to be lauded and not deconstructed or replaced with the fashionable pessimism that permeates the zeitgeist of today. I don’t think optimism needs to be old-fashioned, but it needs to be earned. In the end, it’s harder to write characters that aspire and situations that inspire without being hokey and, dare I say, passé. It doesn’t mean there can’t be conflict—there must be both interpersonal and interstellar conflict in order for Star Trek to be good drama—but humanity united has always been at the very heart of Star Trek rather than humanity divided. At its best it’s space opera writ large with something profound to say about the human condition.

  Since Free Enterprise, I’ve produced many films and worked on a number of popular TV series, but Star Trek has continued to remain a source of continued fascination for me. After Fred Clarke’s death, I was involved with the acquisition of Cinefantastique and published it for several years with Mark Gottwald until selling it, and even launched the fictional Geek Magazine featured in, you guessed it, Free Enterprise as a real publication.

  But I never suspected that one day I would find myself once again going back to the future. So when Ed Gross approached me with the suggestion that we create the definitive history of the Star Trek franchise for the show’s fiftieth anniversary, I didn’t exactly jump at the chance at first. Frankly, I didn’t know if there was anything left to say. But I was embarrassingly wrong. It was shortly after reading a lively and lacerating oral history of MTV, as well as Tom Shales’s magnificent Live From New York about Saturday Night Live, that I realized that Ed and I were in a unique position to tell the Star Trek story in a new, fresh, and, most important, uncensored way that no one had before … and no one else could. And while it would mean reaching out to hundreds of actors, writers, craftsmen, sociologists, executives, and fans again for new insights on the dawn of its fifth decade in space, it would also allow us to honor the many richly gifted and all too deserving talents whom we have spoken to over the last thirty years who are no longer with us to tell their stories: Gene Roddenberry, Gene L. Coon, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, John Meredyth Lucas, Ricardo Montalban, Michael Piller, Harve Bennett, and the remarkable Leonard Nimoy … the list is sadly all too long to recount here.

  So our mission was clear. Our mantra: learn all that is learnable, know all that is knowable … and print not the legend but the real story. The whole truth and nothing but the truth. And that’s what you now hold in your hands. I am immensely proud of this volume and, if I hadn’t written it, you could bet credits to navy beans, I would be reading it.

  It is my sincere hope this isn’t a book cherished by just Trekkies, Trekkers, and Trekophiles, but rather anyone who’s interested in the truly Shakespearean drama behind the scenes of the making of an iconic television series. You don’t need to love Star Trek—or even have seen Star Trek—to appreciate the Herculean (some would say Sisyphean) task of creating and re-creating this franchise, but as Groucho Marx might add, it couldn’t hurt.

  In the end, I don’t think this is necessarily a traditional work of scholarship or even an artifact of a pop-culture phenomena. After all, the original Star Trek series easily ranks alongside The Twilight Zone, Hill Street Blues, Crime Story, Twin Peaks, The Sop
ranos, The Wire, Arrested Development, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men as one of the greatest television series ever made. This book is a love letter. It’s a love letter to a show that has given us so much … and, hopefully, will continue to do so until the twenty-third century and beyond. And if you don’t get it already, maybe you will after reading this volume.

  Live long and prosper,

  Mark A. Altman

  September 8, 2015

  REFLECTIONS ON THE TREK OF A LIFETIME

  Edward Gross

  My three sons’ most passionate involvement with Star Trek has been the Abramsverse film efforts, so I found it particularly interesting when my middle son, Dennis, and I were watching 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. As William Shatner’s Kirk offered commentary on what the adventure we’d just watched was all about, Dennis turned to me with a thoughtful expression on his face and mused, “Star Trek’s supposed to be about something, isn’t it?”

  If I’d had any Romulan ale in the house, I’d have offered the lad a toast.

  Of course, when I first discovered Star Trek sometime during its 1966–69 run, I wasn’t really aware that it was supposed to be about something either. After all, I was somewhere between the ages of six and nine, and my greatest memories of those days were “playing” Star Trek with my friends. John Garry was Captain Kirk, Raymond Ciccolella was Spock, and I was “Bones” McCoy, armed with a toy binocular case as my tricorder and a Tiger water gun as a phaser. Together, we secured Brooklyn, New York, in general and Schenectady Avenue in particular for the Federation!

  Flash-forward to January 1972 and New York City’s Statler Hilton Hotel. The first Star Trek convention, and I was there. Not that I have many clear memories of that day, beyond the fact that there was a long line of people waiting for … something. My eleven-year-old self looked up at a nearby adult and asked what the line was for. When he replied, “Gene Roddenberry’s autograph,” and I said, “Who’s Gene Roddenberry?,” he just shook his head sadly and offered, “You’re on the wrong line, kid.”

  Maybe. But I’d eventually find my way.

  Throughout the seventies, as I watched Star Trek five nights a week at six on New York’s WPIX, my love for the show grew to the point of near obsession. It was during this time that I, too, came to realize that Star Trek was about something; that the relationship between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had a life to it that seemed to transcend ordinary television and sparked my imagination, making me conscious of true character interaction and giving me new personal heroes to add to a pantheon that included Superman, James Bond, and Caesar (not Julius, but the chimp from the original Planet of the Apes films).

  Reruns, additional conventions, novels, and poster books devoted to the show, gleaning any information on possible revivals in the pages of Starlog magazine, excitement over Star Trek: Phase II (the series that was never to be), and anticipation for Star Trek: The Motion Picture made up much of that decade for me. I remember on the morning of December 7, 1979, that the entire newspaper staff of Suffolk County Community College joined me on a trip to Sunrise Mall in Nassau County and the only multiplex on Long Island, New York, showing a morning performance of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. We watched the film and then headed back to the newspaper office, where I pounded out a review, giving it three and a half stars and proclaiming in the headline, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Worth the Wait!” I headed back to theatres on December 8 to be transported to the twenty-third century once again and wondered where the film I’d seen the day before had gone. Obviously I’d gotten caught in some sort of transporter malfunction involving the space-time continuum.

  I still remember the press screening, in the first week of June 1982, of the sequel, The Wrath of Khan. We watched the trailer that played on a loop at an outside kiosk at the Manhattan theatre and couldn’t believe how incredible it looked. A few hours later it was obvious that this film had lived up to its hype. Star Trek was back!

  A year later, my career in entertainment journalism began as I sold a story on the James Bond film Octopussy to Daredevils magazine and received my first-ever payment for writing: fifteen dollars! In 1985, I began writing for Starlog magazine, for which—among many other subjects—I interviewed a wide-ranging number of writers and directors from the original Star Trek, discovering in years to come that I had probably covered that show more than just about anyone else.

  As time went on, my love for Trek dovetailed perfectly with my journalistic ambitions, resulting in a number of career highlights:

  • Endlessly fascinated by Phase II and the Star Trek that could have been but wasn’t, I began researching that proposed show, conducting many interviews and piecing together the story that had never been told.

  • Sitting with Leonard Nimoy—the man from Vulcan himself—in his New York Paramount office in November 1986 to discuss Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. My twenty-six-year-old brain couldn’t comprehend how it was possible that I could actually have been sitting there talking to him.

  • A year after the 1987 launch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I found myself in California and uncovering the true behind-the-scenes story of the tumultuous start-up period for that show, meeting with the likes of the late Herb Wright, David Gerrold, and Dorothy Fontana, and obtaining a wide variety of resource material—much of the results of which are being revealed for the first time in the pages of Volume Two of this book

  • Becoming the Star Trek “go-to” guy for magazines like Cinescape, SFX, and SciFiNow, interviewing cast and crew of the various series and films.

  • Meeting William Shatner and Patrick Stewart at the Generations junket, and having Patrick Stewart remember me two years later when I was on the set of First Contact. And in terms of the latter, being shocked when director Jonathan Frakes started referring to Sir Patrick as Butt-Head—until I saw the Beavis and Butt-Head T-shirt the good captain was wearing.

  • With the arrival of Deep Space Nine—the only one of the spin-off series that came this close to rivaling the original in my heart—connecting with the various producers who, each year, took the time to discuss that season’s episodes with me.

  • Visiting the set of Voyager and sitting down to chat with Captain Janeway’s real-life alter ego, Kate Mulgrew, and, in one of her first interviews after being signed to the show as Seven of Nine, Jeri Ryan.

  • Being among the first to interview the entire cast of Enterprise to preview the last Star Trek series to date.

  • Continuing my tradition of Star Trek coverage by interviewing J. J. Abrams, Chris Pine, and various cast and crew members making the 2009 and 2013 rebooted universe, Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness, for Movie Magic and SciFiNow magazines.

  In between all of this, I became aware of Mark A. Altman through his own magazine, Galactic Journal, and his in-depth coverage of Star Trek: The Next Generation in Cinefantastique. After giving him a call, we instantly connected and established a professional and personal friendship that’s lasted for nearly three decades, no doubt fueled by our mutual love for Star Trek, James Bond, and Wiseguy (and if you don’t know what that is, go stream it as soon as you’re finished with this book!).

  In the years since, a number of things changed, among them the diminishing of interest in Star Trek as a whole, many believing that it was at least partially due to oversaturation between television series and feature films. Then there was the rise of the Internet, which in turn played havoc with the publishing industry, the belief being that anything people would want on a particular pop-culture subject, they could find online.

  We disagree.

  For starters, on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary, Star Trek is very much back, the success of the Abrams films serving as a reminder to the media and the public of what Star Trek was all about, reinvigorating the franchise—particularly the original series—in the process.

  And as far as the Internet is concerned, you simply cannot get everything online that you could get from a book. Especially this book.
<
br />   When Mark and I agreed to collaborate on The Fifty-Year Mission, we believed that, given our decades of research, and the hundreds of new interviews we would be conducting, we could tell the real history of Star Trek in a way that no one else would be able to. That we could take this thing that has meant so much to us for almost our entire lives—and to millions of people around the world—and serve as its caretakers, crafting a telling of its history unlike any that has been presented before.

  The writing of The Fifty-Year Mission has been a genuine labor of love. Our way of giving something back to a universe that has given us so much, and promises to do so for the rest of our lives.

  Edward Gross

  August 2015

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  STAR TREK ABBREVIATIONS

  Star Trek: The Original Series: TOS

  Star Trek: The Animated Series: TAS

  Star Trek: Phase II: Phase II

  Star Trek: The Next Generation: TNG

  Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: DS9

  Star Trek: Voyager: VOY

  Star Trek: Enterprise: ENT

  Star Trek: The Motion Picture: TMP

  Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: STII

  Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: STIII

  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: STIV

  Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: STV

  Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: STVI

  Star Trek: Generations: Generations

  Star Trek: First Contact: First Contact

  Star Trek: Insurrection: Insurrection

  Star Trek: Nemesis: Nemesis

  Star Trek (2009): Star Trek

  Star Trek Into Darkness: Star Trek Into Darkness

  J. J. ABRAMS is a director, producer, and writer best known for his work directing Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, Super 8, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. He is also the cocreator of the hit TV series Lost, Alias, and Felicity.