Exile From the Stars: ‘Star Trek’ Creator Gene Roddenberry’s Decade Away from the Enterprise
Nineteen sixty-nine saw one voyage off of Earth end right before another began.
June 3, 1969, was the airdate for the last original Star Trek episode, “Turnabout Intruder.” This was delayed from the originally scheduled airdate of March 28 in order to allow NBC News to devote coverage to the death of Dwight Eisenhower, though some could be forgiven for imagining that the network was looking for any excuse to kick the show off the air. The fact that NBC only grudgingly gave Star Trek a third season after a successful letter-writing campaign, then slashed its per-episode production budget as the network placed the show late on Fridays, was evidence of the contempt the folks at 30 Rock had for the series, and the fact that sets were being struck at the Paramount lot as the episode was being filmed back January was a sign that the USS Enterprise was not going to get a full five years on its mission to seek out new worlds and new civilizations.
And so, only 43 days before Apollo 11’s launch from Cape Kennedy, Star Trek stopped airing new episodes on NBC, leaving its creator, Gene Roddenberry, without a regular gig for most of the 1970s.
The decade that followed after the Enterprise came into dry dock (with a few notable excursions during that time) was the journey of one man’s frustration, of his inability to find his place in this world as he struggled for acceptance from a wide audience.
In addition to Dylan Hunt, this story is also about Gene Roddenberry. He spent the decade attempting to go in a new direction after Star Trek’s cancellation, trying to sell to television the story of his newest creation, Hunt, through a number of ventures that just never gelled. He also tried to find if there was life beyond this one TV series, during a time when his three years with Desilu/Paramount went from a curiosity to a cultural touchstone.
The naked time
The end of Star Trek wasn’t the first taste of failure for Roddenberry in his writing career. His percent of scripts sold out of total written during his days with the Los Angeles Police Department was not out of the norm, and his first series, The Lieutenant, where he met many of the Star Trek cast and crew, was cancelled by NBC after only one season. All the love the fans showed didn’t save the series from the hard business decisions that 30 Rock made.
In interviews about that time, however, Roddenberry would describe the months after the cancellation in bleak terms, exacerbated due to some financial miscalculations. During the time of Gulf and Western’s acquisition phase, when the company purchased Desilu and folded it into Paramount Pictures to give the studio a pre-built television unit as Star Trek entered its third season, Roddenberry diminished his stake in Star Trek to work within the newly reduced budgets in return for further profits down the road; with the series no longer in production, those promised monies were a long way off. (Paramount would go on to claim that Star Trek had lost money through 1982, only a few years before Buchwald v. Paramount introduced the world at large to “Hollywood accounting.”)
With no income coming in and obligations on a mortgage and alimony to his first wife, Roddenberry took up an offer from former Desilu executive Herb Solow, who was now at MGM and needed someone to oversee production of a book he just optioned, Francis Pollini’s Pretty Maids All in a Row.
Roddenberry not only produced the film, he wrote the screenplay — his only full theatrical screenplay that saw production. (The theatrical Star Trek films would list him as inspiration, while the writing tasks would go to other talents.) To say the film was a product of its time would be an understatement; the chance that a film about a high school football coach sleeping his way through the underage student body until the murders start would be made today is below zilch. Even in a more open 1971, the subject matter and execution left a lot of folk cold, and Roddenberry’s foray into theatricals came to an end when the film failed to find an audience.
All our yesterdays
With television and now films seemingly closed off, Roddenberry had to consider new options to stay afloat; in the process he laid the foundation for the return of Star Trek and helped develop the modern fan community into the force we know today.
Soon after Pretty Maids All in a Row left theaters, and anxious to keep the house and not fall in arrears with the courts, Roddenberry took invitations from college speaker bureaus and science fiction fan conventions (which had been mostly devoted to following written works since their inception in the 1930s, but by this time were opening themselves up to other media as well) to speak about the series.
The above is a clip of an early convention appearance made by Roddenberry, shot by a fan on Super8; unfortunately, there was no sound recording of the event. What we can assume we’re seeing here is his relaying anecdotes about the series, which by this time was building an audience in a second life as a syndication staple, finding audiences in some markets as counter-programming to the local news, where a hopeful future among the stars seemed a good alternative to an anxious present down the block. The series premiered on WPIX in New York, one of the largest independent stations in the United States, which put it in rotation in September of 1969 and became a major ratings grabber for them for decades.
With a stoked audience fed their favorite show by syndicated stations, demand was building for new product…
…the rights to which was controlled by a studio that shut down production in the first instance.
For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky
So while Paramount was not convinced (yet) that it needed Gene Roddenberry back on set, being the creator of a popular (if cancelled) show opened a few doors for him elsewhere, particularly at Warner Brothers, where the pilot for a new series, Genesis II, was produced for CBS.
The focus of the series is on one Dylan Hunt, who through a cryogenic accident sleeps through the next two centuries, is awoken, and ends up with an organization that maintains a subterranean shuttle train that crosses the planet, Pax, who are trying to bring back the better parts of civilization to lead Earth out of a second Dark Ages.
It’s interesting to speculate why a man whose last series was about Earth getting its act together to explore the stars would come up with a setting where we blew ourselves up, and a man from the past, Dylan Hunt (played here by Alex Cord), had to help clean up our messes. Though there are similarities between the two in that both have series set-ups that allow for visit-a-problem-area/social-critique-opportunity-and-fix-this-week format, the darker origin of Genesis II is striking in terms of contrast against Star Trek’s “New Frontier” optimism, a possible reflection of where we were culturally 10 years later.
Roddenberry may also have just played more to a read of the market in that Genesis II was seriously considered for CBS, but lost out to the other post-apoc series available to the network for that season, Planet of the Apes, which was cancelled by year’s end; whether Genesis II would have done much better is up for debate.
This side of paradise
While Paramount wasn’t willing to go full bore on a Star Trek revival, it didn’t pass on opportunities that allowed them to keep their hand in the game, if the right one came along. So when Hal Sutherland from Filmation came back to Paramount a second time asking about an animated version of the Star Trek (as opposed to the first pitch for a kid-friendly Starfleet Academy show that Roddenberry vetoed in 1968), Paramount was willing to authorize this iteration, offering Roddenberry an executive producer role that he ultimately shifted the duties off onto script editor and original Star Trek story editor D. C. Fontana.
The series had a number of prominent features that made it stand out: Most of the series cast voiced their characters in animated form, precipitated by Leonard Nimoy threatening to walk away if they had not been allowed to contribute. The one exception was Walter Koenig, whose character Chekov was replaced by the animated three-legged alien Lt. Arex. In return for not being on the bridge, Koenig wrote the episode “The Infinite Vulcan” which was the start of his career as a scriptwriter. Where additional voices were needed, James Doohan (who played “Scotty”) could do five more roles each episode (and would have voiced Sulu had Nimoy not raised an objection).
While praised for its insightful writing and effort to keep the franchise alive, the fact that the series was a Saturday morning cartoon for NBC did not allow it much cachet, and that even its small comparative budget was too high for programs in that bracket, led to production being capped at only 22 episodes. Like Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, it was but a brief light in the midst of a long dark.
The ultimate computer
During the time Filmation supposedly had Roddenberry working on the animated series, he was concentrating on a series for adults entitled The Questor Tapes.
What some consider a revisit to a backdoor pilot Roddenberry tried to pull off during Star Trek’s run, the episode “Assignment: Earth,” Rodenberry’s proposed series about an android with programming from aliens whose job is to save humanity from itself was originally warmly embraced by Universal, the studio overseeing production, and NBC, which ordered 13 episodes. It was after the order was placed and Roddenberry had to deal with the studio’s and network’s notes, however, that the project ended up only as a made-for-TV film that premiered January 23, 1974. With the disagreements dooming the effort, Questor was left open to have some of its (his?) qualities and best bits end up being used by Lt. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation, while co-star Mike Farrell was free to take the next regular gig he was offered when this fell apart: the role of B.J. Hunnicut on M*A*S*H.
Assignment: Earth
Undeterred by rejection and not pausing long enough to piss and moan, Roddenberry was soon after Questor’s run-time errors getting ready to mount another pilot on ABC via Warner Brothers on April 23, 1974, this one entitled Planet Earth.
Yes, this was another effort to re-mount Genesis II, with Dylan Hunt recast this time as John Saxon in the hope that some cast changes would allow the series to reach the network. Unfortunately, ABC was no more enthusiastic for the project than CBS had been for Version 1.0, and the pilot never went beyond a made-for-TV movie. This prompted Warners to revisit Roddenberry’s pitch later and make a third attempt without the guidance of it’s originator.
By any other name
And so, with a name change and a stand that their rights to the property allowed them to do a new version without involving or even crediting Roddenberry, Warners came up with a new pilot, Strange New World.
Again, John Saxon was playing Dylan Hunt Anthony Vico, who through a cryogenic accident found himself in the role of reminding the world two centuries hence of what we got right in the past. Interestingly, the only callbacks to the past were the only two actors to appear in all three iterations of the Dylan Hunt saga, Ted Cassidy and Majel Barrett, who played Nurse Chapel in Star Trek and was Roddenberry’s second wife and collaborator from 1969 through his death in 1991, and beyond until her passing in 2008.
Even as the latest effort to save the world in the future ended up as another made-for-TV movie, getting a premiere in ABC on July 13, 1975, the past work of Roddenberry was getting noticed by no less a forward-thinking body than NASA.
The Enterprise incident
By 1976, Star Trek had so been associated with space exploration, through both the initial NBC run and syndication, that NASA was compelled, thanks to a letter writing campaign from the fans to President Ford, to name orbiter OV-001 Enterprise.
While never a fully functional orbital vehicle, Enterprise did provide important service with gliding tests conducted to test her wing strength and ability to glide from heights to a runway landing, essential tasks for a reusable orbital vehicle. The testing enabled her sister shuttles to serve through 2011 as reusable orbital spacecraft.
Of particular interest was her roll-out on September 17, 1976, depicted in the cover photo above. Roddenberry was invited with most of the cast to attend the realization, the physical manifestation, of the dreams promised back in 1966. While the Space Shuttle program didn’t quite live up to the promise the United Federation of Planets had proposed, it was still a great moment when dreams were still able to be realized, where going to the next adventure was still within our grasp.
The devil in the dark
While NASA was willing to go to the stars, Paramount was not. Roddenberry, still looking for a new venture to offer network TV, came up with the supernatural pilot Spectre, which was produced through 20th Century Fox and premiered on CBS on May 21, 1977.
A supernatural thriller that predated such similar offerings as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Millennium by a good 20 years, the series paired Robert Culp and Gig Young as a modern version of Holmes and Watson tasked with keeping us safe from supernatural evil aided by a witch played by Majel Barret Roddenberry, but despite their credentials for being on the side of good, never went beyond a made-for-TV film (that got a theatrical release in the UK where nudity was added).
However, no matter how far from the mother ship Roddenberry would conduct an EVA, there was always the chance that something would come together.
Tomorrow is yesterday
Whether it was the long-simmering interest in the property that had been there since the show’s cancellation or prompting because of NASA naming the test shuttle Enterprise, Paramount’s desire to never give up on Star Trek meant that they ultimately found a plan to bring the show back that made sense.
In 1977, Paramount almost greenlit a new series, Star Trek: Phase II, which would have brought most of the cast back together for a new series (save Leonard Nimoy, who would have been replaced by David Gautreaux as Lt. Xon) on a new network formed out of a number of disenfranchised independent stations, many of which, when the plan fell apart, became members of Operation Prime Time which gave the country Solid Gold.
What helped to scuttle the new series was a change in perceptions; after May 25, 1977, the premier of Star Wars made Paramount reconsider its approach to the property, which led to the pilot for the new series “In Thy Image” becoming Star Trek: The Motion Picture, while one of the commissioned episodes, “The Child,” ultimately ending up as an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, pulled up for production because of the 1988 WGA Strike.
After December of 1979, when Star Trek was again an active property, Roddenberry would spend the rest of his life engaged to varying degrees with Star Trek until his demise in 1991.
Let that be your last battlefield
Ironically, Roddenberry had more success placing series after he died than he did in life. A combination of name recognition along with a more receptive environment led to two multi-season series placements after his death in 1991.
One of these successes was the syndicated series Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, which ran in syndication for five seasons, about a starship captain who was in suspended animation for 300 years and was tasked with rebuilding the galaxy on awaking.
The series starred Kevin Sorbo as Captain Dylan Hunt.
Author’s note: For anyone wanting further consideration regarding the many iterations of Dylan Hunt, the summaries provided at Christopher Mills’ Space 1970 blog are especially recommended.
