The Making of the Star Trek Pilots, Part 3: “Assignment Earth”

The second season of STAR TREK concluded with a pilot for a proposed spin-off series that would have starred Robert Lansing as Gary Seven, a human captured by alien beings and trained to save mankind from destroying itself. Helping Seven is secretary Roberta Lincoln (Terri Garr), though the two of them first have to convince the time traveling Kirk and Spock that they are there to save the future, not destroy it.

“Assignment Earth” was written by Gene Roddenberry and the late Art Wallace (who is also the creator of the storyline for the soap opera DARK SHADOWS). “It’s interesting in a sense,” said Wallace, “because I had gone to Paramount and pitched a series idea to them. They had said that Gene Roddenberry had come up with a very similar idea. So I saw Gene and we decided to pool the idea, which was about a man from tomorrow who takes care of the present on Earth. That was intended to be the pilot, although it was never made into a series. It was a very good pilot and it’s a shame, because I think if they had done it as a series with just Gary Seven, it would have been a very successful show. I believe Gene and I split the credit on that one.”

Guest star Robert Lansing told STARLOG magazine, “What Gene had done was go to futurists and scientists and ask them what advanced societies out in space might do towards more primitive societies like ours. One of the futurists said that they would probably kidnap children from various planets, take them to their superior civilization, raise them, teach and enlighten them and then put them back as adults to lead their worlds in more peaceful ways. That was the idea behind Gary Seven.”

“It was interesting trying to balance the episode between the regular crew and Robert Lansing,” said the late director, Marc Daniels. “It was also difficult because we came back to the present and it’s always a dangerous idea to take the STAR TREK characters into the present. Suddenly you’re in a very tangible situation. The show’s reality becomes that much harder to sustain.

“We were simulating Mission Control, which, on our budget, was not easy. You had to make do with very abbreviated sets. In terms of the story’s physical demands, this is a problem of any kind of science fiction. For example, the original STAR TREK set, the Enterprise, was practically nothing; corridors we kept using over and over again, a few basic cabins which were constantly reused and, of course, the engine room. With the exception of those and the bridge, it was extremely limited.”

Gary Seven and his mission is another element of the original series that has found significant after-life. Writer Howard Weinstein included the character during his run on DC Comics’ STAR TREK title.

“With Gary Seven,” he muses, “there’s the intrigue of a character about whom so little was revealed in the TV episode. Since we really knew nothing about who he was, who he worked for, and how he knew what he did, it just begged for expansion. Fortunately, Paramount pretty much let me do whatever I wanted in establishing details of Gary Seven’s organization (which I called The Aegis), and how and why they wielded knowledge and technology far beyond what the Federation had. The goal was to take readers and the Enterprise crew inside Gary Seven’s universe – to discover that the greater the power, the bigger and more dangerous the conflicts. And even though I’m a dog person, I loved writing more of his interplay with his cat-associate, Isis. One year, when my pal and TNG comic writer Michael Jan Friedman and I bounced around ideas for a big story which would span both the TOS and TNG annuals, we wanted to do something involving both Enterprise crews. And Gary Seven’s Aegis organization came back into play. But we took the bold, shocking step of killing Gary Seven early. That probably surprised some readers, but killing off a familiar guest character raised the stakes and made the bad guys even badder.”

Ignoring those events was comic book writer John Byrne, who wrote and drew a six-issue ASSIGNMENT EARTH series for IDW, with plans to do a follow-up. When the first series was announced, he sat down for an interview with Newsarama.com, noting, “As a kid, I just thought [‘Assignment Earth’] was really neat. First, I was a Robert Lansing fan from his other work. Also, I am a sucker for time-travel stories (which the ongoing Assignment Earth would not have been, but the TOS episode was). And Terri Garr was so darn cute.

“There is no set timeline,” he continued. “I will cover a number of years – toward the end I want to touch on Nixon’s visit to China, which was in 1972 – but I am not going to be setting clear dates. Anyone who is not familiar with those years might well think all the stories take place in the same year, same week, even. The main indicator of time passing will be Roberta having a different hairstyle in each issue. Possibly a different hair color, too, playing off the Beta V’s comment that her hair was ‘presently tined honey blonde.’”

Author Greg Cox had fun with Gary Seven and Roberta Lincoln in his novel ASSIGNMENT: ETERNITY and the two-book THE EUGENICS WARS. Of these efforts the website www.assignmentearth.ca offers, “ASSIGNMENT: ETERNITY is fun and involved, and we get to see a possible outcome for the team of Seven and Lincoln. THE EUGENICS WARS pair open in 1974. Gary Seven watches with growing concern as the children of a top secret human genetic engineering project called Chrysalis grow to adulthood. In particular, he focuses on a brilliant youth named Khan Noonien Singh. Can Khan’s dark destiny be averted, or is Earth doomed to fight a global battle for supremacy?”

“Part of the appeal is the ‘60s spy-fi vibe of the whole thing,” says Cox. “I was always into James Bond, THE AVENGERS, MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. and all that. Basically Gary Seven is Our Man Flint of the STAR TREK universe. Also there’s the fact that they teased us at the end there would be many interesting adventures to come, and I wanted to know what those adventures were. I also had this theory that as STAR TREK is to FORBIDDEN PLANET, ‘Assignment Earth’ is to THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. It’s basically THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL: THE TV SERIES. Gary Seven is basically Klattu. It made an impression on me as a kid and I was obsessed with bringing it back.”

The Making of the Star Trek Pilots, Part 2: “Where No Man Has Gone Before”

With Jeffrey Hunter departing, taking over the center seat of the Enterprise in the second pilot would be Canadian-born actor William Shatner, whose career had included highly acclaimed roles on stage (THE WORLD OF SUZIE WONG, A SHOT IN THE DARK), screen (THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV) and television (TWILIGHT ZONE, THE OUTER LIMITS, FOR THE PEOPLE, and the pilot for the unsold series ALEXANDER, THE GREAT).

“I was offered the part in a rather peculiar fashion,” Shatner related to the English press in the 1970s. “They had made a pilot of STAR TREK with an actor who is now deceased, Jeffrey Hunter, and NBC did not like the pilot but they liked the idea. They said change the cast, change the story but give us another pilot for STAR TREK and we’ll pay a certain amount of money. So they showed me the first pilot and said, ‘Would you like to play the part and here are some of the storylines that we plan to go with; you can see the kind of production we have in mind. Would you care to play it?’ And I thought it was an interesting gamble for myself as an actor to take, because I’ve always been fascinated by science fiction. I liked the production; I liked the people involved with the production, and so I decided to do it. But it was under these peculiar circumstances of having a first pilot made that I did it.

“I then talked at great length with Gene Roddenberry about the objectives we hoped to achieve, and one of those objectives was serious drama as well as science fiction. His reputation and ability, which I knew first-hand, was such that I did not think he would do LOST IN SPACE. And I was too expensive an actor, with what special or particular abilities I have, to warrant being put in something that somebody else could walk through. So I felt confident that STAR TREK would keep those serious objectives for the most part, and it did.”

Bob Justman, who would go from assistant director on “The Cage” to Associate Producer on “Where No Man’s Gone Before,” explained, “Gene was very happy that he was able to get Bill Shatner, who was highly thought of in the industry. I had worked with Bill on OUTER LIMITS and he had a good reputation in the television and entertainment industries even at that time, well before the second pilot of STAR TREK. He was someone to be reckoned with and we certainly understood that he was a more accomplished actor than Jeff Hunter was, and he gave us more dimension. The network seemed to feel that Jeff Hunter was rather wooden. He was a nice person, everyone liked him, but he didn’t run the gamut of emotions that Bill Shatner could do. 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, which was the flawed hero. Or the hero who considers himself to be flawed. Captain Horatio Hornblower. That was who he was modeled on.”

Enthused Leonard 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.”

In the pages of I AM SPOCK, he elaborates, “Bill’s Captain Kirk was a swashbuckling Errol Flynn type of hero, he played the with a great deal of energy and élan, and wasn’t afraid to take chances. That élan has cost him at times; people have made fun of his exuberance because it made it easy to do a caricature of Kirk. His attack on a line of dialog, his unique way of pausing before blurting out the final word or phrase, were readily captured by imitators. But that energy was vital for the show, and made it possible for me to finally find a niche for my role. I don’t think the Spock character would have worked as well with Jeff Hunter, because Jeff’s Captain Pike was introverted and soft-spoken, so that there was no contrast between the two.”

And the relationship between the two characters and actors–despite whatever ego problems would arise later–positively sparked. David Gerrold, famed author, STAR TREK scholar and author of the episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” notes, “All of the movies and all of the episodes hold together because Shatner holds it together. Spock is only good when he has someone to play off of. The scenes where Spock doesn’t have Shatner to play off of are not interesting. If you look at Spock with his mom or dad, it’s very ponderous. But Spock working with Kirk has the magic and it plays very well, and people give all of the credit to Nimoy not to Shatner.”

While Shatner was hired, the three NBC-requested scripts for a second pilot were finished, including the Samuel A. Peeples’ effort “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” which chronicled the metamorphosis of Enterprise crewmember Gary Mitchell into a God-like being.

“My vague memory is that there had been several problems with ‘The Cage,’” reflected the late James Goldstone, who had been signed to direct STAR TREK’s second pilot. ” NBC was skeptical that a series could be manufactured, so to speak, on a weekly basis. One of the requisites put on the second pilot was to shoot it in, as I recall, eight days, which would then prove to them that a weekly series could be done in six or seven days. The other requisite, I would guess, it being television, is that NBC very much wanted something that could be ‘commercial’ against the police shows and all the other action things that were then on television.

“A combination of NBC, Gene, perhaps other executives at Desilu and I, read all three [scripts], discussed them in length, decided on what became ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before,’ and then embarked on a great deal of polishing and rewriting on a conceptual and physical level, so that we could make it in eight days. This one just seemed to have the potential to establish those characters on a human level. The only gimmick is the mutation forward, the silvering of Gary Mitchell’s eyes, and it works because it’s simple, as opposed to the growing of horns or something. Ours was a human science fiction concept, perhaps cerebral and certainly emotional.”

Samuel Peeples, who has written more segments of episodic television than anyone could ever keep track of, had actually had some connection with Gene Roddenberry and STAR TREK prior to “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”

“Gene Roddenberry and I had known each other from writing HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL” Peeples recalls. “He 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.”

In Peeples’ script, the starship Enterprise comes across a charred metallic “black box” (similar to what is used today on airplanes) from a long-lost space vessel. Captain James R. Kirk (the middle initial eventually changed to T. once the pilot led to series) has the device beamed aboard. In the meantime strong ties are established between the captain, Lieutenant Gary Mitchell, and first officer Mr. Spock. The Enterprise approaches an energy barrier at the edge of the galaxy and attempts to make its way through, resulting in the ship nearly being destroyed and metamorphosizing Mitchell’s natural ESP abilities. Those powers grow to the point where he becomes a god-like being, manipulating everything around him.

Spock listens to the black box and learns that the captain of that vessel was desperate to learn anything he could about ESP, and shortly thereafter ordered that his ship be set for self-destruction. Now Kirk is faced with one decision: kill Mitchell before the Enterprise is crushed by the man’s ever-increasing power.

“We were intrigued with the corruption of power theme manifesting over the ordinary individual,” says Peeples. “that was the basic premise, and we had to put in extrapolations of known scientific principles. At that time, the radiation belt had been discovered around the Earth, and my premise was that galaxies themselves might be separated by this type of barrier.

“Gene and I were trying to avoid the space cadet cliche,” he elaborates. “We were both very concerned about it being an adult show. One thing, as later episodes proved, was the problem which never should have existed: the bug eyed monsters. We both discouraged the idea, believing that we should keep things as realistic as possible. If a person was different physically, then explain the reason for that difference. In a particular atmosphere, he might have a larger lung. If it was a planet with an extraordinarily bright sun, he would have different eyes. We were actually trying to project reality against an unfamiliar background. In other words, we would deal with reality according to the environmental background we encountered.”

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” went into production soon thereafter. Joining Shatner, Nimoy and Gary Lockwood was Paul Fix as Dr. Mark Piper, George Takei as Physicist Sulu, James Doohan as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, Lloyd Haynes as Communications Officer Alden and Andrea Dromm as Yeoman Smith, with Sally Kellerman “guest starring” as Dr. Elizabeth Dehner. As fans of the show recognize, the final STAR TREK cast was slowly taking shape.

NBC viewed the pilot in early 1966, and gave Roddenberry the green light for his series, much to the delight of everyone, as they were proud of what they had achieved.

“I was very happy with it,” enthused James Goldstone. “From a director’s point of view–or this director’s point of view–you have certain targets and certain problems which have to be overcome in any picture, whether it’s a $20 million feature or a television show. A director measures his success in two ways. Obviously, like everybody else, you measure it by whether or not it’s a critical and commercial success, but you also measure it in terms of overcoming obstacles. The obstacles were temporal, budgetary, but they were also conceptual. I was very proud of the work we were able to do. When I say we, I don’t mean it in a generous sense. I mean that it was a very collaborative effort, as are all pilots. We, being Gene, especially; Bobby Justman and the main actors who later became the main stars. Everything was planned in detail, and Bobby and I knew if we didn’t move from one set to another or one scene to another by a certain hour, we were in trouble.”

At a convention appearance, Roddenberry expressed, “The second pilot seemed to have great concepts: humans turning into gods. But they were nice safe gods, gods who go ‘Zap! You’re punished.’ Kind of like the guys you see on those Sunday morning shows…The biggest factor in selling the second pilot was that it ended up in a hell of a fist fight with the villain suffering a painful death. Then, once we got STAR TREK on the air, we began infiltrating a few of our ideas.”

Actor Gary Lockwood, who portrayed Gary Mitchell and who would later go on to portray astronaut Frank Poole in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, recalls working on STAR TREK’s second pilot.

“To tell you the truth,” he smiles, “I thought it was a little bizarre and I thought it was kind of embarrassing, and I hoped it worked out because everybody was excited about it. It was a very hard job to do. You couldn’t see the other actors. I’d rehearse and get everything all ready, but I couldn’t see the actors because of the contact lenses that changed my eyes. They didn’t blind me for the first few days, but after a few days the eyes swelled up and got sore. Then to have them on for just two or three minutes was agonizing. Scenes were rehearsed without them. The other thing about it, people always thought I was kind of egotistical so when I got to play that part, a lot of people laughed and said, ‘He’s finally found his niche.’ That’s been a joke among my friends.

“That character was tough to reach, because there’s no prototype character to look at. So you create a mental image and try to fill that slot. All I tried to do was downplay the mechanics and not be too dramatic. It’s the same thing I did in 2,001. Try to play the part very quietly and very realistically, and later on people don’t think you’re pushing. That’s the way to sustain it. There was a natural progression to the character. In order to do that, you have to think it out. Let me say one thing to you that I can say about American actors I don’t like and who don’t like me. You have to apply a certain amount of intelligence to your role first, and then you can apply the emotion after you’ve made an intellectual decision. Too many young kids I work with are all trying to figure out how to make the line comfortable. You work in Europe, they’re trying to bend to the line. Here they’re trying to bend the line to them. It’s a different approach. With Gary Mitchell, the idea was trying to go to the character and not make the character comfortable to me. I’m not Gary Mitchell.”

In the early 1980s when the second STAR TREK feature, THE WRATH OF KHAN, was in development and word had leaked out that an enemy from Kirk’s past was reaching out to him in vengeance, many believed that that person was going to be a resurrected Gary Mitchell. More recently, visual effects supervisor Darren Doctorman, who works on the independent web series STAR TREK: PHASE II, mused that he thought that the fifth film in the series, THE FINAL FRONTIER, would have been far more interesting had the Enterprise’s quest to meet God resulted in Kirk confronting Gary Mitchell.

Although neither came to pass, the character DID return, albeit in print form. Author Michael Jan Friedman chronicled Mitchell’s life in a pair of novels published in 1998 under the umbrella title MY BROTHER’S KEEPER. Volume one was called REPUBLIC, followed by CONSTITUTION. The character was also resurrected in the one-shot 1996 comic book STAR TREX, which serves as a crossover between the original series and (believe it or not) Marvel Comics’ X-Men. The special was written by Scott Lobdell (an integral writer of the X-Men comics) and drawn by Marc Silvestri.

As the Star Trek Comics Checklist describes: “Investigating a spatial rift near Delta Vega, the planet where Dr. Elizabeth Dehner and Lt. Cmdr. Gary Mitchell mutated and died, the Enterprise encounters a ship in distress. Before exploding, seven life forms are detected and another ship comes through the rift. A being named Gladiator leaves the second ship and claims Delta Vega in the name of the Shi’ar Empire, punching Scotty’s shields for emphasis. Meanwhile, the seven life forms have teleported to a cargo hold in the Enterprise – Cyclops, Phoenix, The Beast, Wolverine, Storm, Gambit and Bishop. With the crew of the Enterprise, the X-Men must face Deathbird and Proteus, who has bonded with the essence of the long dead Gary Mitchell and a potentially inexhaustible supply of psionic energy.

In an interview with ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, Lobdell offered, “It’s a perfectly natural crossover. At heart, they’re both stories about a handful of people facing the unknown. They both hit the same nerve in American consciousness. Isn’t that what we’re in the business of doing – going where no one has gone before?”
Admitted Silvestri, “It was a challenge, putting realistic [human] characters next to one that are idealized forms. But it was fun just getting these characters into the same panel.” — Retrospective by Edward Gross

COMING SOON IN PART 3: “ASSIGNMENT EARTH”

The Questor Tapes: Now and In Retrospect

Roddenberry Productions has announced that it’s aligned itself with Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Entertainment to produce a new version of Gene Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes, the 1974 TV pilot starring Robert Foxworth and Mike Farrell. Also in that announcement was the statement that Angel, Firefly, The Inside, Dollhouse producer Tim Minear is being negotiated with for the show (unusual to say the least — no one ever really says that they are negotiating with someone; names are usually held until the deal is done).

Several years ago, SciFi Media Zone editor Edward Gross wrote a retrospective of the original Questor Tapes, which follows.

Gene Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes: The Unfulfilled Promise
by Edward Gross

The late Gene Roddenberry obviously had a thing for machines sparked with superior intelligence and in search of their purpose.

It’s a subject he dealt with in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, in which he had V’Ger — the metamorphosed Voyager 6 spacecraft — returning to Earth in search of its creator. The theme was embraced yet again in the creation of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which offered an android science officer named Data whose Pinocchio-like quest was to ultimately become human. It was thematic territory he came this close to exploring on a weekly basis via The Questor Tapes.

In this 1974 television pilot, Roddenberry postulated that an alien race had spent eons helping mankind’s progress by placing human-like androids within society to help guide the species. In the pilot, Dr. Jerry Robinson (Mike Farrell) ultimately teams up with Questor, who is on a quest to meet with his creator, Dr. Vaslovik, and learn his own destiny.

“Vaslovik, who was actually an android himself,” Roddenberry had explained, “realized that the line of androids who had been helping to guide earth for thousands of years was about to end. He was unable, because of certain conditions, to complete his replacement: Questor. Instead, he left all of his plans with a five-nation scientific consortium. They begin constructing the android for their own purposes, not really understanding all of the components or systems. However, Vaslovik had left a tape of secret programming that is only partially assimilated by the android. That part instructed the android to escape once it had been completed and go about its work.”

In his background for the pilot, Roddenberry pondered the notion that if you “awoke” on the first day of your life with a vast amount of information in your brain on science, mathematics, literature, history and economics, how would you react if you discovered that you had no knowledge of yourself? “Cogito ergo sum — I think, therefore I am,” he wrote. “…You think, you wonder, you move like a living thing. But can a mechanical thing like yourself be called ‘alive’? Whatever you are, that question leads inexorably to the enigma which has puzzled and plagued Man himself from his own beginning, it is the most powerful of all dramatic themes. Who was my architect? For what reason am I placed here?….We boldly challenge the audience to identify with an unusual television character who begins as a machine but who may turn out to share more of their own thoughts, doubts, frustrations, loneliness and dreams than many human fictional characters. Questor, in fact, is designed to become more human than human.”

As the pilot unfolds, soon after becoming activated — thanks to the efforts of Robinson — Questor escapes from the government research lab where he was assembled and begins his search for Vaslovik and his purpose. He is pursued by the government in the persona of Geoffrey Darro (John Vernon), who views him as the ultimate weapon that must be controlled or eliminated. Questor is aided by Robinson, at first reluctantly. In some ways, the set-up is strikingly similar to The Fugitive, but this dissipates toward the climax when Darro sacrifices himself to throw the government off of Questor’s trail, having been touched by the revelations of the android’s purpose on earth, and allows the duo to escape.

Director Richard Colla recalls The Questor Tapes and working with Roddenberry fondly. “It was a wonderful experience for me,” he says. “We were kind of reinterpreting Spock and Kirk, because that’s really what it was — the emotional side of man and the intellectual side of man and they come into conversation with each other. So what you really have is a character talking to himself, and that’s delightful.”

Colla, who would go on to direct the pilot for the original Battlestar: Galactica and the “Last Outpost” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, notes, “Since I’d talked to Gene while he was putting [TNG] together, I told him that I felt Data was a combination of Spock and Questor. When I was over there I said, ‘Brent [Spiner], you’ve got the part, because this is the intellectual side of man, this is the other side of the conversation. All of the other characters are dealing from an emotional standpoint, but this character alone is the intellectual side of man. So you’ve got the entire other side of the conversation.’”

Handling that side of the conversation in The Questor Tapes was actor Robert Foxworth, who had his choice of lead characters in the pilot and ultimately chose the android.

“I chose Questor,” says the actor, “because I thought, frankly, it would be more of a challenge to play a machine, an android. But getting into it I thought, ‘If this scientist is so clever, why make a guy who looks like me? Why doesn’t he make a guy who looks like Robert Redford at the time?’ I still haven’t figured that one out.”
Appealing to Foxworth was the evolution of the character, who went from a featureless humanoid on a lab table to a herky-jerky human male to a superior being determined to help guide us toward the future.

“They called me Super Chicken on the set in the beginning,” he laughs, referring to the way he moved his head early on, which mirrored the movements of a chicken. “I really thought one of the fun aspects of Questor was the growth and change. How he taught himself and how his relationship with others taught him to deal and think. We don’t get very many opportunities to play characters that evolve that fully in such a short span of time. I believe the film had an impact on a core of intelligent people who wanted more from television. I think it speaks to a desire in all of us to achieve some power and good or good through power.”

Mike Farrell, who of course went on to star in the long-running acclaimed CBS series M*A*S*H*, echoes Foxworth’s sentiments regarding the film, and still recalls it fondly.

“It was one of the first major opportunities for me to play a role in a movie for television that could have been a series,” says Farrell. “But more to the point, it was about something. It was not a show that was kind of mindless or silly, although I suppose there are some who consider science fiction to be those things. I was always impressed with Gene’s desire to make statements about the human condition through the use of his dramatic work, and I thought this did it wonderfully. The issue of dealing with a man who had a brain and capacities that were beyond the ordinary, but didn’t have emotional capacity and recognized how it diminished him, was, I thought, quite extraordinary at the time and quite touching.

“And I loved Jerry Robinson as a character,” he continues. “He’s a smart guy who had a heart and wasn’t driven by the usual scientific mumbo jumbo, letters and dollars and fame that seduces so many people. He seemed to have some access to his heart and his feelings and, as happened between Bob [Foxworth] and I, he really developed an emotional attachment to Questor. I thought that the way that played out was, personally, quite wonderful.”

Although proud of what had been accomplished in the film, Roddenberry had a number of run-ins with network and studio executives that made bitter the making of a film that would ultimately be embraced by the critics. Despite this, a 13-episode go-ahead was given for The Questor Tapes, with Foxworth and Farrell continuing in their roles. Joining the actors behind the scenes, besides Roddenberry, were producers Michael Rhodes and Earl Booth and story editor Larry Alexander, who notes that there were numerous creative differences with NBC and Universal.

Part of those problems had to do with the show’s science fiction trappings, particularly its base of operations. Set up under the cover of “Robinson Enterprises, Ltd.,” a charitable organization that has rapidly become a financially successful business, the duo work out of “The Information Center.” As Roddenberry wrote in the show’s bible, “Using the advanced science of the same superior race which put Questor and his predecessors here on earth, it is as advanced in its way as Questor is in his. It uses communications techniques, not yet discovered by mankind, which are completely untraceable and undetectable. They allow Questor to select and follow activity taking place anywhere in the world, whether a war plans conference in the Kremlin or the White House, or a romantic liaison taking place in a bedroom in Paris.” As such, it gives Questor access to those people that are most in need of a push in the right direction.

Laughs Alexander, “The executives just didn’t get it. They would say to Roddenberry, ‘How does he see into all of these different places so he knows what’s going on? Does he have a camera in every room?’ Roddenberry said, ‘No, it’s by coordinates.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘Like grids on a map.’ ‘How does that help him see?’ ‘It’s an advanced thing that this civilization supplies him with.’ They simply couldn’t understand it. It made no sense to them because they didn’t have the hardware right in front of them. At the same time they were developing The Six Million Dollar Man, and that they understood. The guy crashes in a plane, he’s a wreck, they rebuild him with bionic parts and now he’s a superman and they can send him out to do wonderful things.”

Another problem, he feels, was the very nature of Questor himself; that an android would essentially be solving the problems of human beings.

“They had a moral problem with that,” he notes. “From a series point of view, they also didn’t like the idea of this super race — or shall we say Master Race — overlooking the affairs of mankind. ‘Wait a minute, where does God fit into that?’ An entire amount of metaphysical questions came up, which were ludicrous on the face of it. It was like, ‘Come on, guys, we’re doing entertainment here.’ Maybe the show was before its time, if it ever ‘had a time.’ Certainly its time was not when The Six Million Dollar Man was being developed. It was in direct competition with a low-life version of itself, and the low-life version, especially in television, will always win. That show also didn’t have the metaphysical problems for the executives. The Lee Majors character they could understand because it deals with the human experience as we currently run our civilization. But to have an alien android who goes into a Captain Marvel-like cave every now and then to get his marching orders from an alien — this is very disturbing to them. They were truly scared shitless that the more fundamental parts of the country would find it anti-Christ. All you needed was Billy Graham, or even a minor-league Billy Graham, to denounce the show or say that it’s unChristian and strange and promoting an alien god. You’d be surprised at what those people think of.”

According to Earl Booth, the constant battles were wearing Roddenberry out. “Gene was a very private person,” says Booth. “Very nice, but he didn’t talk a lot about what he was going through. I sensed he was going through a lot with the executives at Universal in not being able to do what he wanted to do. They so frustrated him, I felt, that that was the main reason that nothing, ultimately, was done. In all my experience with him, he was very vocal about what he wanted and what he thought would work, and was perfectly willing to try anything that he felt was legitimate. So it was becoming more and more a series of frustrations.”

And those frustrations continued. Unlike his experience on Star Trek: The Next Generation where he had complete autonomy (at least in the beginning), Roddenberry was at the mercy of any studio or network executive who had an “innovative” idea to “improve” his show.

“One of the difficulties,” offers Robert Foxworth, “was that though the Questor character did develop feelings, it’s kind of hard to create conflict with a character who can do anything. That was the feeling, I think, of whatever the powers that be. The question was addressed on a daily basis. As far as I was concerned, it was overcome in the way that we saw the characters go in a possible series. But there were guys in tassel loafers sitting up in Universal’s Black Tower that didn’t have the vision.”

Perhaps the biggest “innovation” to come along was the decision to abruptly drop the Jerry Robinson character. This alteration is best summed up in a November 7, 1973 revised bible to the series which is simply called “New Questor Series Format.” On page one, it notes, “Questor is a dual-quest series. He is being sought and, at the same time, is a seeker himself. Questor is a fugitive from the five-nation combine headed by Darro or a Darro-type. They know the android is alive somewhere and want to recover what they consider to be a fantastically valuable ambulatory computer. Questor is himself a seeker, his quest being to discover his purpose and reason for having been constructed and given the imperative of helping mankind. Why am I here? Who and where is this mysterious Vaslovik who created me?” The paragraph concludes with this particular beauty, “We ignore the ending of the pilot in which he did find Vaslovik and got a full explanation of his identity and purpose.”

Ugh!

Obviously the intention was to turn Questor into either The Fugitive or The Immortal, both of which were series of the era in which the main protagonist was on the run.

“It goes along with the thinking that if something else worked, then this should work,” says Foxworth, “rather than doing something original.”

One of the primary proponents behind this shift was producer Michael Rhodes, who points out that it was his suggestion; a suggestion the studio seemed to support completely.

“What Universal had bought in their own minds, maybe without realizing it, was the relationship between Mike Farrell and Robert Foxworth,” opines Rhodes. “But in developing the scripts for the series, we realized that each character was flawed in their own way and as long as they were together they were perfect. They made a complete person, so you really couldn’t create any jeopardy for them because they had each other to handle what the other was missing. You had to separate them, but when you separated them you didn’t have the relationship. It was really a vicious circle. It didn’t work.”

Rhodes is the one who thought it would be best to forget Questor’s discovery of his purpose. “It was radical surgery,” he says, obviously the only person on the creative team who thought that this was the way to go. “It’s The Fugitive, then, because you’ve got all these government bad guys chasing him. He is still very vulnerable because he’s incomplete. He’s got parts missing and can make the same kind of relationships in each episode that he had with the Mike Farrell character.”

Earl Booth was not pleased with this direction, noting that it felt like the decision to drop Robinson was made “overnight.”

“It mystified me,” he admits, “because whatever the thrust of the show was, you had an alien — really — whose communication with the modern world was completely nil unless he had someone to talk to, and it was then that I began to see that what the people at Universal wanted was basically a carbon copy of The Fugitive, which they have tried to copy many times and for the most part have been unsuccessful. I personally felt that this was wrong. To have this unique being constantly chased by people who are after him for whatever stupid reason, I could never tell, was ridiculous. From that point on, things went downhill.”

In all of this decision making, the person most impacted was, obviously, Mike Farrell, who had even gone so far as to have wardrobe fitted for the series. His being dropped was actually rather ironic, considering that a series was the last thing he was thinking about at the time.

“Although I wasn’t looking to do a series, the idea of doing that as a series was intriguing,” he says. “When this was a pilot, my sense in doing it was the opportunity of doing the movie and I kind of let go of the notion of the series. Then when I got word it got picked up, it was very exciting. I thought, ‘Shit, we can do this, we can do that, we can travel, we can have some fun and say some things that are of some significance.’”

Throughout the preparation period, Farrell was in almost constant contact with the producers and Gene Roddenberry. One day, however, his phone call to Michael Rhodes went unreturned. He wasn’t concerned until a second phone call wasn’t returned either.

“It was a Friday — I’ll remember that for the rest of my life,” he reflects. “Over the weekend, all of those little gremlins went to work on my mind. Finally, my agent called and said, ‘I don’t know what this is about, but I’ve got a message here that you and I are being asked to come to a meeting at the Tower on Monday morning.’ Over the weekend I didn’t sleep well and I thought, ‘I’m being dropped from this goddamn show and I can’t understand it.’ I finally got a hold of Gene and he said, ‘Oh my God, nobody called you? Yeah, there’s a problem. Some people think the series will work better without the Jerry character.’ I may be creating dialogue to serve myself but as I recall, Gene said, ‘I think it’s a crazy idea, but we have to bow to some degree to the powers.’ Anyway, the long of the short of it was that the decision was made that Questor would more likely be in jeopardy if he didn’t have Jerry to get him out of trouble, so they were dropping the Jerry character.”

Farrell’s tale doesn’t end there, though. A couple of months later he received a phone call from an executive named Mervin Gerard, who had been given the assignment of making the series “happen.” The first thing he did was view the original pilot film.

“I will forever hold Mervin high in my regard,” smiles Farrell. “He told me that after watching the pilot he went to [Universal's] Frank Price and said, ‘Tell me who the idiot is who decided he wanted to drop Mike Farrell from the show.’ ‘I’m the idiot.’ ‘What works about this show is the chemistry between these two characters; they together become the one person that we root for and you destroy it by eliminating the human character. I’m not going to do this show unless we resurrect the Jerry character.’ By this point I said to Merv, ‘You’re very sweet to tell me this story, because it obviously does a lot for my ego, but I wouldn’t touch this thing with a ten-foot pole after what they did to me. That feels like exactly the wrong move.’ He tried to persuade me, but as I understand it, for reasons having nothing to do with that, they finally decided just to shelve the whole thing.

“It’s unfortunate,” he adds, “because my sense of it was that there was high hopes for this as a show. The other piece of it that I find kind of heartwarming is the longevity of it. Somebody within the last few weeks said something to me about Questor. I thought, ‘God almighty, how can something so old maintain that sort of impact?’ It speaks to all of the kind of things that we in television ought to be more aware of — that it’s an extraordinary outreach and impact that the medium has as well as the responsibility inherent in all of that. But that’s another talk for another time. I think that responsibility is something Gene took seriously; the responsibility of telling stories that are somehow life-affirming.”

By the time that Gerard had tried to convince Farrell to come back to the series, Roddenberry himself had decided that he had had enough and left. Having come off of his well-documented battles with NBC executives during the run of Star Trek, he had no interest in going through that again.

“I think the Jerry Robinson character was vital to Questor,” he said in the mid ’70s. “You can’t have just the android; you’ve got to have a partnership between an android and a human. Then they wanted Questor to be constantly on the run from the scientific consortium. That’s not the way I wanted to go and maybe I was wrong. But I really didn’t want to do a chase series. So I just let it die.”

Larry Alexander considers this thought and decides that the time is right for a Hollywood life lesson.

“I don’t know if you know how things die in Hollywood,” he muses. “Nobody shoots them between the eyes. What they do is continually hang up hope that some miracle will occur, so you twist slowly in the wind for months and years before one day you wake up and say, ‘Oh, this does not work. It’s not happening. It’s never going to happen.’”

In the case of The Questor Tapes, however, Alexander just might be wrong. The announcement of Roddenberry Productions teaming up with Imagine at least holds out the hope that Questor will live again.

Let’s hope so.

Questor deserves it.

So do we.

“My father always felt that Questor was the one that got away,” said Rod Roddenberry, Gene’s son who will serve as producer of the new version. “He believed that the show had the potential to be bigger than Star Trek.”

The Making of “Justice League: The Animated Series”

Warner Home Video recently released Justice League: The Complete Series on DVD, which features every episode of the animated Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. To celebrate, SciFi TV Zone offers this behind the scenes look at the making of the series, which is an excerpt from Voices From Krypton magazine.

When Batman The Animated Series made its debut in 1991, it was viewed as innovative, ground-breaking and unlike any other animated show to have been aired in the television medium’s history.

Not surprisingly, the show spawned a number of spin-offs (among them The Adventures of Batman and Robin and Gotham Knights), and its success paved the way for Superman The Animated Series and Batman Beyond, which took place 50 years in the future and chronicled the efforts of an elderly Bruce Wayne to train his successor. All told, an impressive track record for everyone involved, among them executive producer Bruce Timm. Ironically, though, it was precisely his previous success in animating DC Comics superheroes that prevented him from initially embracing the notion of a series based on the adventures of the Justice League.

“I kind of dodged the Justice League bullet for years, because I knew how difficult it would be,” he admits. “Just in terms of its scope and the fact that you had seven major players in it. Truthfully, we’d never done a show with that many superheroes in it. All the shows we’d done prior to that were one-character shows that would occasionally have guest stars or sidekicks. But even those shows were a hint of things to come in that every time we had an episode with Batman and Robin or Batgirl, just in staging the action scenes, it was difficult to do.”

That difficulty, he explains, came from the idea of keeping the characters in motion at the same time. In other words, if too much time is spent on Batgirl fighting someone, the audience is asking, “What’s Batman doing?”, so there is a need to then cut to Batman. Naturally at that point the audience is then asking, “What’s Batgirl doing?”

“It’s as simple as that,” Timm says. “It’s an extra problem that makes the storytelling a little more difficult. Suddenly you have to keep seven characters in motion and they all have fantastic powers. Just trying, for example, to come up with a way of staging the Flash so he doesn’t come off looking like a total moron is really difficult, because he can be everywhere at once. We know that really doesn’t work in any kind of filmic medium. Nobody should ever be able to get the drop on the Flash; his reflexes should be so fast that nobody should be able to land a punch on him or shoot him with a ray gun.”

Although interest in the concept of a Justice League series was mounting, Timm resisted – until about the time that production on Batman Beyond was winding down and there was a sense of determination to keep the production team together on a new project. According to Justice League co-producer James Tucker, at that time the Kids WB expressed interest in a new series that would skew to a young audience.

“Development was done on a Batman Anime show that kind of reflects on what Teen Titans is now,” he reflects. “And we developed a more youth-oriented version of Justice League. Thank God both of those projects never happened, although there’s a tape out there of a very kiddified Justice League that included Robin and a teenage female version of Cyborg. It was our attempt to try and do something that wasn’t as edgy or as dark as we would normally want to go. At the time, Kids WB totally passed on the Batman Anime idea and we actually did test animation for the Justice League idea.”

As Tucker explains it, the thing that convinced them that Justice League was a possibility was an episode of Batman Beyond titled “The Call,” which dealt with a future version of the team. “Prior to that,” he says, “Bruce was very public in saying he didn’t think we could do a Justice League show. Then, after ‘The Call,’ it kind of clicked something in his head that made him think we could. So we did the promotional footage, we looked at it and said, ‘This is good, but it’s a little too compromised from what we would really want to do.’ So on a whim he called Cartoon Network and asked if they wanted a Justice League show, and the response was, ‘Sure.’ It was as simple as that.”

A CALL TO ACTION
Once the greenlight was given, Timm and his team – including Tucker, producer Rich Fogel and story editors Stan Berkowitz and Dwayne McDuffie – set about trying to come up with a team dynamic, attempting to choose who would be appropriate for the series and how they would relate to each other. Timm notes that several years earlier, this problem was initially addressed as they first started to develop Superman The Animated Series, when a great deal of time was spent determining what that show would be.

“We didn’t quite know what to do with Superman the way we did with Batman,” he admits. “Even though, again, we were dealing with a big iconic hero. We all kind of got Superman, we knew what made him tick, but he didn’t have the psychological underpinnings that Batman did, which is what made Batman instantly interesting to us. One of the things we toyed with at the time was doing a Superman show that was half Superman and half the Justice League, where it was almost a Superman team-up show. At that point, when we talked about doing a back door Justice League show, some of the lineup we picked for that pitch were not the standard Justice League characters. I don’t think Flash was in it, John Stewart was. Wonder Woman wasn’t in it. So it was much more the kind of Justice League that was going on in the comics world at that time. You have to remember that the classic lineup of the Justice League wasn’t really in existence in the early ‘90s. That’s one thing I’ll give Grant Morrison a lot of credit for. He was the one who went to DC and said, ‘You know, if you want to revitalize Justice League, you’ve got to go back to the original seven, that core iconic group,’ and he was right. By the time we got around to doing the actual Justice League show, Grant Morrison’s idea had already implemented in the comics and we looked at that and said, ‘Yeah, that’s a really smart idea.’ And we also learned from Marvel’s mistake.

“When Marvel did their Avengers show in the ‘90s,” he continues, “they made a radical mistake by not having the Avengers be Captain America, Thor and Iron Man, plus the other guys. They made it just the other guys, and anybody who’s a comic book fan, when they hear there’s an Avengers show, you want to see the big three and you feel a little bit cheated when you don’t see them. All of these things were going through our minds when we decided on the lineup for Justice League. Really, the only ones that were even somewhat controversial among ourselves was which Green Lantern to choose. Hawkman or Hawkgirl? I instantly voted for Hawkgirl. It was purely an aesthetic thing; I have just always loved the Hawkgirl costume and the design of her helmet. I also thought we could afford to have an extra girl on the team, joining Wonder Woman.”

In the end, and despite the fact that a number of heroes were considered for the lineup, the final members of the Justice League were Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, J’onn J’onzz, Green Lantern (John Stewart), the Flash and Hawkgirl.

“There wasn’t a whole lot of arguing going on,” explains Timm. “We all decided very quickly and easily on the line up and from that point on it was just a matter of sitting down, talking about the characters and saying, ‘These are who we’re going to use. What do they do? What about their characters inform the way they act?’ Basically we wanted to keep the show to the core seven the first two seasons. We wanted to keep it limited, because the majority of the episodes didn’t have all seven of them in it. There were just too many damn characters. They won’t get enough screen time to make an impact if there’s seven of them every single episode. Somebody would have to be Chekov. Somebody would be saying, ‘Hailing frequencies open, Captain.’ So we always had to pare it down.”

He admits that he was surprised to hear at conventions just how badly the fans wanted to see a modern day animated version of the Justice League, especially as the whole concept, to his way of thinking, shouldn’t work at all. “There is something cool about seeing these heroes team up,” he says. “God knows why, because it doesn’t really make sense. It doesn’t even work dramatically in a lot of ways, but going back to the Golden Age and the Justice Society, they somehow struck gold when they started teaming those characters up. As cool as it is to see Batman and Superman by themselves, you get them together with Green Lantern or Hawkman, and suddenly it’s cooler. I don’t know why we have this desire to see these guys team up, but it’s cool and there’s no denying it.”

To read the full behind the scenes story on the making of Justice League, order a copy of Voices From Krypton magazine by clicking below.

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Dark Shadows: Jonathan Frid Audio Interview, Part 1

Back in the 1980s, SciFi TV Zone Editor Edward Gross was researching a book on the 60s horror soap opera, Dark Shadows. At the time he had the opportunity to interview a number of people involved with the show, both in front of and behind the camera, but the highlight was the opportunity to meet and interview Jonathan Frid. The actor, who portrayed vampire Barnabas Collins on the show, had been a childhood hero and it was felt to be the opportunity of a lifetime.

What follows is the first part of that meeting between actor and fledgling journalist. Two things to bear in mind: the sound source is a little low, but considering it was recorded nearly 25 years ago on a cassette tape, it’s not bad. Second, this was one of Gross’ earliest interviews, so there is definitely nervousness on his part. Look for Part two of this interview on Monday, December 7th.

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“Forever Knight”: Exclusive Audio Interview with Geraint Wyn Davies

This year, Chiller counts down to Thanksgiving with back-to-back evening marathons of the classic vampire series Forever Knight, featuring star Geraint Wyn Davies’ favorite episodes. Davies will host the marathon in all-new, ever-before-seen interstitials, offering behind-the-scenes scoop on the series. It all begins Tuesday, November 24 at 8PM and continues the following night on the Chiller network.
SciFi TV Zone caught up with Davies, who reflected on the series, his character of vampire cop Nick Knight and what he’s up to now.

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Biting Our Time: The Return of “Dark Shadows”

Long before Angel or Edward Cullen decided to become all angsty, they were preceded by vampire Barnabas Collins (Jonathan Frid) on the ABC 1960s soap opera, Dark Shadows. Notes Virginia’s The Roanoke Times notes, “Dark Shadows” was just another sappy 1960s soap opera until the frighteningly fanged Barnabas Collins swept into the wealthy and haunted Collins estate. With the ability to transform into a bat [Editor's note: he actually never did turn into a bat], hypnotize those around him and use his superhuman strength, Barnabas resembled his more famous predecessor, Dracula. Barnabas’ appearance was nothing like that of the more glamorous blood suckers. Still, in spite of his ugly teeth, greasy hair and leering grin, Barnabas was still able to mysteriously charm every woman who glimpsed his face, whether they be beautiful witches or bored suburban housewives watching afternoon TV. The TV series was revived in the early 1990s. Also, Johnny Depp is anticipated to star in a big-screen adaptation of the series.” That Depp film is supposed to be directed by frequent collaborator Tim Burton.

Look for coverage of both the original Dark Shadows as well as the new movie at Scifi TV Zone, beginning next week with a tribute to series writer Ron Sproat, who literally wrote hundreds of episodes of the soap and who passed away earlier this month of a heart attack.

The Star Trek Pilots, Part 1: “The Cage”

Throughout the early 1960s, the late Gene Roddenberry – eventually known as the Great Bird of the Galaxy – tried to get network interest in his idea for a television series called STAR TREK, the concept of which, by this moment in time, needs no further description than that.

This is the first of a nine-part series looking back at the making of the different pilots or “first episodes” of various incarnations of STAR TREK. Nine may sound like too many, but as will be revealed in installments to come, it’s an accurate number. Things begin with a look back at the making of 1964’s “The Cage,” in which the United Space Ship Enterprise arrives at the planet Talos IV to answer a distress signal. There, Captain Christopher Pike is taken prisoner by the telepathic Talosians who want him to mate with another human being named Vina, so that they can repopulate their nearly lifeless world. To accomplish this goal, they use their abilities to plunge Pike from one fantasy into another, attempting to blur his hold on reality and creating a false sense of security. Number One (ship’s first officer), Mr. Spock and other crewmembers work together to free him and end the Talosian plan.

Once Desilu (check out the audio interview with Desilu executive Oscar Katz at the end of this article) gave the go ahead for production, the crew for STAR TREK started to be brought together, including production designer Matt Jeffries, costume designer William Ware Theiss and director Robert Butler.

Then attention was turned to casting. Jeffrey Hunter, who had recently played Jesus Christ in KING OF KINGS and co-starred with John Wayne in THE SEARCHERS, among many other roles, was cast as Captain Pike, though other actors had been considered.

Majel Barrett, who would go on to marry Roddenberry and portray Nurse Christine Chapel in the ensuing television series, was cast as Number One, with John Hoyt as Dr. Boyce. One of the most integral roles to fill was that of Mr. Spock. After considering Martin (MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE) Landau and Michael (THE WILD WILD WEST) Dunn, Roddenberry decided to go with Leonard Nimoy, whose credits included ZOMBIES OF THE STRATOSPHERE and two episodes of THE OUTER LIMITS.

Roddenberry reflected on working with Nimoy during an episode of his previous TV series THE LIEUTENANT, noting, “He had played a Hollywood producer, of all things, in an episode with a gum-chewing, wise-cracking secretary who later became my wife. I looked at him during those days and I thought that if I ever did this science fiction series, I’d use him because of his Slavic face and his high cheekbones. And so I just cast it with a phone call by asking him to come over.”

Elsewhere, Leonard Nimoy recalled the experience. “The first time I heard about STAR TREK,” he mused, “was in 1964. Gene Roddenberry was producing a television series called THE LIEUTENANT [and] I was playing a flamboyant Hollywood [producer] who wanted to do a movie about the Marine Corps. When the job was finished, Gene called my agent, my agent called me and they asked for a meeting. I went in to see Gene at what was then Desilu Studios and he told me that he was preparing a pilot for a science fiction series to be called STAR TREK that he had in mind for me to play an alien character. As the talk continued, Gene showed me around the studio, he showed me the sets that were being developed and the wardrobe that had been designed, the prop department and so forth. I began to realize that he was selling me on the idea of being in this series, unusual for an actor. I figured all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I might end up with a good job here.

“Gene told me that he was determined to have at least one extra-terrestrial prominent on his starship,” added Nimoy. “He’d like to have more, but making human actors into other life forms was too expensive for television in those days. Pointed ears, skin color, plus some changes in eyebrows and hair style were all he felt he could afford, but he was certain that his Mr. Spock idea, properly handled and properly acted, could establish that we were in the 23rd Century and that interplanetary travel was an established fact. And with this, our ship would not be the United States Ship Enterprise, it would be the United Space Ship Enterprise, put out there in space by a federation of planets and the crew would be interplanetary in nature. In Spock, we would have a character who reminded us of that constantly.”

“The Cage” was directed by Robert Butler who had also worked with Roddenberry on The Lieutenant and has since gone on to become the “King of the Pilots,” having helmed the initial episodes of BATMAN, MOONLIGHTING, REMINGTON STEELE, HILL STREET BLUES, MIDNIGHT CALLER, LOIS & CLARK: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN and many others.

“Gene had finished writing ‘The Cage,’ and he asked me to read it, which I did,” recalls Butler. “I remember thinking it was a terrific yarn, but that it was somewhat obscured because it was such a showcase script. ‘The Cage’ showcased such solid, good and fascinating science fiction disciplines, examples and events, that it was, I thought, a little obscure. The story was somewhat remote, and I discussed whether or not people would get it. I could tell at that point that Gene was so consumed with it that he couldn’t have heard any objections.

“Good ideas were being examined,” Butler emphasizes. “Underneath all this I sensed a very honorable and well intentioned group of ideas. By the same token, I also remember that it was somewhat stiff. A street show is very loose in terms of language and characters, but in a science fiction show, or a show where you’re creating a new reality, you have to adhere to and honor that new reality. You invent a set of circumstances which translates to a kind of rigidity. After all, they’re in the equivalent of an army, and in any kind of service your behavior is more prescribed. Ideally, I don’t like that because it’s just another constraint. That kind of came with the territory, and wasn’t good or bad. But I’m more comfortable with looser behavior.”

NBC turned down ‘The Cage’ as reportedly being too cerebral for the television audience. Surprisingly, Roddenberry agreed with them to a certain degree.

At a STAR TREK 20th Anniversary convention in 1986, Roddenberry discussed what happened with “The Cage,” as well as the network’s motive for rejecting the pilot.

“The reasons were these: too cerebral, not enough action and adventure,” he said. “‘The Cage’ didn’t end with a chase and a right cross to the jaw, the way all manly films were supposed to end. There were no female leads then–women in those days were just set dressing. So, another thing they felt was wrong with our film was that we had Majel as a female second-in-command of the vessel. It’s nice now, I’m sure, for the ladies to say, ‘Well, the men did it,’ but 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 20 years, we have gone from a totally sexist society to where we are today–where all intelligent people certainly accept sexual equality. We’ve made progress.

“We also had what they called a ‘childish concept’–an alien with pointy ears from another planet,” he added. “People in those days were not talking about life forms on other worlds. It was generally assumed by most sensible people that this 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. But his only difference from the others was he had an alien perspective on emotion and logic. And that didn’t make television executives jump up and yell, ‘Yippee!’

“At that time, space travel was considered nonsense. It wasn’t until we were off the air three months that man landed on the Moon and minds were changed all over. The Talosian planet’s ‘ridiculous’ premise of mind control annoyed a great many people and the objection, of course, overlooks the fact that the most serious threat we face today in our world is mind control–such as not too long ago exercised by Hitler, and what’s now exercised by fanatical religions all over the world and even here in our own country. Mind control is a dangerous subject for TV to discuss, because the yuppies may wake up someday and be discussing it and say, ‘Well, wait a minute, television may be the most powerful mind control force of all,’ and may begin taking a very close look at television. And so most executives would like to avoid that possibility.

“Looking back,” he added elsewhere, “they probably felt that I had broken my word. In the series format I had promised to deliver a ‘Wagon Train to the Stars’…action/adventure, science-fiction style. But, instead, ['The Cage'] was a beautiful story, in the opinion of many the best science fiction film ever made up to that time. But it wasn’t action/adventure. It wasn’t what I had promised it would be. 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. But I forgot my plan and tried for something proud.”

In the pages of Inside Star Trek, Desilu Executive Herb Solow and associate producer Robert Justman offer a different scenario. “The NBC party line was that ‘The Cage’ was ‘too cerebral,’” they wrote. “That description has been bandied about in all the books about STAR TREK and was a rallying cry in the early days of the series. 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 what it foreshadowed for the ensuing series. Their knowledge of Roddenberry’s attitude toward, and relationship with, the fairer sex didn’t help. NBC sales was equally concerned with the Mister Spock character, him being seen as demonic by Bible Belt affiliate-station owners and important advertisers. Their concern, perhaps not accepted by all executives at the network, nonetheless had presented a serious stumbling block to the sale of the hoped-for series.”

Explained Oscar Katz, “I asked NBC, ‘Why are you turning it down?’ and I was told, ‘We can’t sell it from this show, it’s too atypical.’ I said, ‘But you guys picked this one, I gave you four choices.’ He said, ‘I know we did and because of that, right now we’re going to give you an order for a second pilot next season.’”

Although okaying a second pilot, NBC did make several “suggestions,” including the removal of Mr. Spock because, according to Oscar Katz, “they thought Spock’s ears would be scary.”

“They rejected most of the cast and asked that Spock be dropped too,” Roddenberry concurred. “In fact, they particularly asked that Spock be dropped. This is one of those cases where you go home at night and pound your head against a wall and say, ‘How come I am the only one in the world that believes in it?’ But 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.’”

This was particularly ironic when one considers that Spock would eventually go on to become one of the most popular characters on the show. In fact, the constant struggle between logic and emotion that waged through the half-Vulcan/half-human touched a generation searching for direction.

Adding to the scenario, Nimoy explained, “The network eliminated one character entirely, the role of Number One…They told Gene to also get rid of the guy with the ears, insisting that the audience couldn’t identify with an extra-terrestrial character. Gene battled this but was finally forced into a compromise. He felt the format badly needed the alien Spock, even if the price was the acceptance of 1960s style sexual inequality. A new pilot was written and Mr. Spock was in Number One’s place as second-in-command as well as having some of the woman’s computer mind qualities. Vulcan unemotionalism and logic came into being.”

In his autobiography I AM SPOCK, Nimoy described his portrayal of the character during the making of “The Cage.”

“For one thing,” he writes, “I didn’t’ have a handle on the character yet. If you watch ‘The Cage,’ you’ll see Spock emoting all over the place. He frowns, he smiles, and when the landing party is standing on the transporter platform, ready to beam down to Talos IV, and Number One and Yeoman Colt disappear, he leaps forward and shrieks, ‘The women!’ Even his intonation is different, and certain words are pronounced with a hint of a British accent… The reason for this was because Gene thought Spock should be played as though he had learned English as a second language, perhaps by listening to tapes of classic British English. He gave me a record of W. Somerset Maugham reading his own work. However, I wasn’t comfortable with the accent and decided to let it go.

“In ‘The Cage,’” he continues, “I wasn’t playing a Vulcan; I was playing a first officer. You know, where the captain says, ‘Full speed ahead,’ and his second-in-command briskly echoes, ‘FULL SPEED AHEAD!’ That was the character I portrayed against Jeffrey Hunter’s Captain Pike… He was a very soft-spoken, thoughtful, easygoing gentleman, and his character, Christopher Pike, was a brooding, introverted man who took his responsibilities as captain very seriously. In that way, Captain Pike and Spock were very much alike as characters. So, for that matter, was Number One, the cool, unemotional female commander. Spock was not yet distinguished from the other crew members; I had not yet found his niche.”

Neither had Star Trek, though it would when NBC okayed a second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” — Edward Gross

Alex O’Loughlin’s Guide to Moonlight, Eps 13-16

Episode 13
“Fated to Pretend”
Written by Gabrielle Stanton & Harry Worksman
Directed by David Barrett
Mick is enjoying the idea of being human again, but when Beth is threatened by the killer of her BuzzWire boss Maureen, he feels he has no choice but to ask Josef to turn him back into a vampire so that he can rescue her.

“I remember reading that scene with Mick and Josef in the loft when Mick is going off to be the hero, and Josef slaps him around a bit and says, ‘You’re out of your mind,’ and Mick realizes what he has to do,” says O’Loughlin. “So he reluctantly asks Josef to turn him back. I thought it came out great and I thought it was an evocative scene. That’s one of the things I’m intrigued by about these creatures – there’s such ambiguity to them, which this scene played in to sexually.”

Episode 14
“Click”
Written by Erin Maher & Kathryn Reindl
Directed by Scott LautanenWhen a member of the paparazzi takes photos that could expose the truth about Mick, Beth does the unthinkable: she goes to Josef to get him to take care of the “situation,” creating a pact between them and that Mick knows nothing about. Meanwhile, Mick and Beth decide to start pursuing a romantic relationship.

“What I like about the episode is the fact that it showed the risk that Mick faces on a daily basis in terms of possible exposure,” O’Loughlin says. “Between this paparazzi guy and the fact that D.A. Talbot has a file on Mick, you start to explore what could happen if this part of the lives of these creatures were exposed public. And with Beth going to Josef – wow! Knowing what her request will mean for this photographer shows a bit of ruthlessness on her part, but also the depth of her feelings for Mick.”

Episode 15
“What’s Left Behind”
Written by Jill Blotegovel
Directed by Chris Fisher
Flashbacks illuminate Mick’s past when the rescue of a kidnapped youth suggests that the boy may be the grandson of a woman Mick had had an affair with back during World War II. For Beth, life is changing as she quits BuzzWire and is offered a position of “civilian investigator” for the DA’s office.

“The subject matter in this episode is pretty great, and there’s a lot of potential for storytelling dealing with Mick’s past,” notes O’Loughlin. “Think about it: you’re looking at this guy who looks like he’s twice as old as Mick is, but could be his son. I felt like this was the strongest of the four that we did when we came back from the strike. I enjoyed playing this different version of Mick and this different side of him. Sometimes you wonder if this guy has the capacity to feel anything above and beyond what we’ve seen, and I kind of wanted to look a little deeper. Essentially he was faced with the things he wants most: his humanity back, his mortality and the chance to grow old and die. Which is a strange thing to want, because it goes against what we as humans think we want. We want to stay young. But he faces that in this one, and he has the hope that maybe his bloodline is carrying on. That was really fun to play. There was no shortage of drama or stakes in that episode.”

Episode 16
“Sonata”
Written by Ethan Erwin
Directed by Fred Toye
In the series finale, an exploration of the vampire culture and vampire justice is explored when a female vampire threatens to expose every vampire in Los Angeles. Towards the end, Beth wants to call the relationship off with Mick, but he declares his love for her and the two of them kiss passionately as they embrace the future.

“It felt like we did some pretty cool stuff in this one,” says O’Loughlin. “It was great seeing the different vampires together and have us out on this mission. Some very nice performances in it.”
The standout moment for him, naturally, is the climax when Beth says they can’t be together – largely because of the codes governing the vampires — but he nonetheless comes back into her apartment and the two begin to kiss.

“He’s trying to keep the boundary there and the reality is that he can’t allow, despite what his heart says, this human girl to dictate the moral code of something that’s been around for thousands and thousands of years. So he will always have boundaries there; he is a vampire. But then there’s the thing that he’ll always love her, too. That’s always been the great quandary of that character. Then he leaves and what followed just came out of the moment. I was walking away from the apartment and I stopped outside the door and stood against the wall for a moment before going back inside. I wanted to continue that thread in the series, that feeling, that there is a wall between them that will always be there no matter what. But in that moment he decides he’s still gonna have a go at it. The love is too strong, he’s not going to walk away and he’s still going to try and make it work.”

Despite its premature cancellation, this final moment in Moonlight at least fulfilled the promise of the show’s premise, having these two characters from different worlds uniting.

Wonder Woman’s (Almost) Return to Television

Back at the beginning of the decade, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman creator Deborah Joy Levine developed a new TV version of Wonder Woman, and got as far as writing the script for the pilot and beginning the casting process before the project fell apart. At the time, though, we caught up with Levine who, between casting sessions, took a few minutes to discuss her approach to the Amazon Princess.

SCIFI TV ZONE: So, what is it with you and super heroes?

DEBORAH JOY LEVINE: I guess I’m back. I didn’t mean to come back, but I came back to Warner Bros. after working for some time at Columbia Sony Tri-Star. And just as I arrived at Warner Bros., they purchased the rights to do Wonder Woman from DC Comics. I was here, they looked at me and they looked at DC Comics and the rest is history. It was the same kind of deal that I had with Lois & Clark: “Come up with a new take on Wonder woman.” I think I’ve managed to do that. At least I hope it’s a new take, because I never saw the old [Lynda Carter] series and I decided I didn’t want to read a lot of comic books so that I wouldn’t be influenced.

SCIFI TV ZONE: So how would you describe your new take on Wonder Woman?

DEBORAH JOY LEVINE: I guess my new take is that she is a Greek history professor, a young and very bright woman having a hard time juggling her personal life with her work. In this case, of course, her real work is being an Amazon warrior. It’s, like, “I’ll save the world, come home, pop a Lean Cuisine in the oven and watch the soap I taped this afternoon.” In many ways, she’s like a real woman, a real person. There’s a lot less holier than thou, out to fight for truth and justice, and more or less the fact that she’s here, she did come from Paradise Island, she was sent by her mother who the gods spoke to and said you have to send an emissary. So she came here and that’s sort of what she’s supposed to do as Wonder Woman, but she’s trying to live a normal life as Diana Prince, Greek history professor, as well.

SCIFI TV ZONE: On Lois & Clark, the super heroics, at least in the beginning, were very much a backdrop to the relationship . Where does that stand in Wonder Woman?

DEBORAH JOY LEVINE: I think about the same. There’s more concentration on her personal life, her love life. I think that she tries to live a normal life, but she will kick ass when she has to. That will probably happen in episodes a couple of times because she does, of course, get herself into situations that she shouldn’t. I think this is not a show that’s totally about her fighting the bad guys, and certainly not , as it was in the comic books, where she has to fight monsters. No monsters here.

SCIFI TV ZONE: Were there any lessons from Lois & Clark that you think you’re bringing to this show?

DEBORAH JOY LEVINE: I think what worked on Lois & Clark is that it was really 50/50 or 60/40 relationship and stuff going on between them versus the bad guys they had to deal with. The problem with Lois & Clark in the later years is that there was less emphasis when I left the show on relationship, or very sort of hurried relationship to try and serve the plotline of the bad guys. I sort of think people want both. I guess if you were to compare this to something, it would have to be Ally McBeal meets Xena. She can be like Xena and beat a group of people if she has to, but the drama of her life as a single woman living in Los Angeles is probably the priority here. — Edward Gross

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