Four to beam up -- 'Star Trek' and its designs on the future

Long before there was Industrial Light & Magic, there was industrial lighting and papier-mache. When CGI was, well, science fiction, the men who created the unique look of the "Star Trek" series and movies were making chicken salad out of chicken-coop wire and plaster.

Sunday night at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, the Art Directors Guild honored four such men during "Star Trek: 45 Years of Designing the Future": John Jeffries (classic "Star Trek"), Joseph R. Jennings ("Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan"), Herman Zimmerman ("Deep Space 9") and Scott Chambliss ("Star Trek" 2009).

"Our winky, blinky lights were two sheets of masonite with holes drilled in them and a rope on them, and a grip pulled them up and down and it made the lights flash," Jennings said.

While William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were memorizing their lines, Jeffries, Jennings and Zimmerman were conceptualizing what a phaser would look like, what color the rocks on Talos IV might be and how to mount a tricorder on a strap. They know firsthand the trouble with Tribbles.

"The scenery had to be extra sturdy for Shatner to chew on," quipped moderator Daren R. Dochterman of the Art Directors Guild.

Clips of the men's work were shown and the panel talked about their memories of working on the show. The event was the prelude to the screening of the director’s cut of 1979’s "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," completed in 2001, and which Dochterman said was one of Robert Wise's final projects. The director died in 2005.

In the original "Trek," other planets looked like the soundstages they were, but back in the day, the show was state-of-the-art. The papier-mache "rocks" weren't even painted – "Paint was too expensive," Zimmerman said – they were lit with different colored lights, so the same boulders could double as other planets.

It was interesting to see clips of "Amok Time" and "Metamorphosis" from the original series juxtaposed with clips from "Deep Space 9." Watching Kirk and Spock with their first-generation gizmos, and then clips of "Voyager" (Kes, we hardly knew ye!) and "Deep Space 9" in which shape-shifter Odo, played by Rene Auberjonois, morphs from a piece of furniture into a humoid was like watching clips of Tiger Woods as a child, playing golf with plastic clubs, then winning the Master's by a dozen strokes as a young pro. The talent is obviously there, but the technology enabled the art directors to totally bend reality.
"Gene [Roddenberry] had a lot of do's and don'ts," Zimmerman said. "One was you can't go past Warp 10!"

Much was made of the budgets and time constraints production designers face when working on TV series. There's a little more leeway in film, but within limits. Zimmerman said the 1979 "Trek" cost about $30 million, but the creative forces wanted to film another ending, which would have tacked an extra $2 million onto the cost.

Back then, Zimmerman explained, $2 million was a lot of money, but today …
"It's craft services," chimed in Dochterman. Said Zimmerman of graduating from "Deep Space 9," set in the mid-23rd century, to "Star Trek: Enterprise," set in the mid 22nd, he was relieved "to be designing a show only 90 years in the future."

Jennings joked about developing five designs for a phaser, and the powers that be choosing one element from each of the five they wanted incorporated. By the way, in "Star Trek" parlance, when a rock or wall has "GNDN" painted on it, it merely means “Goes nowhere, does nothing."

Chambliss, the youngest and most restrained on the panel, commented briefly about conceptualizing the look of the 2009 "Trek" film. He was thinking about Nero's ship one evening while chopping ingredients for dinner in his kitchen. Looking at the knife, he said, "That's scary." Then pointing the imaginary knife at his face, he said, "That's really scary." Hence the idea for the Romulan's ship.

The theater was about three-quarters full (and I sure hope the guests came by shuttle craft, because between "Disco Fever" night at the Hollywood Bowl, and the Feast of San Gennaro just down the street, traffic was …. well, damn). The discussion was capped by a tribute reel compiled by Michael and Denise Okuda featuring the names of every art director and production designer who has ever worked on a "Star Trek" series or film. A separate reel of Harold Michelson, a production designer who died in 2007. The interview, from 2000, kept the audience in stitches as the self-effacing professional talked about being nominated for an Oscar for his work on the 1979 "Trek" movie. He talked about dreading winning, because he didn't want to stand up in front of all those people and say something. He didn't win, but said he and his wife got a great meal out of the evening.

"Star Trek: The Motion Picture" came along at an inopportune time for some. "There was going to be another series," Jennings said. "It was going to be 'Star Trek: Phase 2.' We were two weeks from starting the new series, when someone said, 'Let's make a movie!'"

When the movie began, the biggest round of applause wasn't for the stars, or even the art director, for that matter. It was for composer Jerry Goldsmith's dead-on score, which opens with the French-horn driven Klingon's theme. Reminiscent of a hunt, the film opens as the hunters become the hunted.
Not nearly as peripatetic as J.J. Abrams' reboot this summer, "ST: TMP" borrows heavily from an original episode ("The Changeling"), in which artificial life forms confront their limitations and long for something beyond circuitry and binary logic. ("Open the pod bay doors, HAL?") But the film adds the beautiful Persis Khambatta (pictured right with Shatner, she died of a heart attack in her native India 1998 in her late 40s) and Stephen Collins — former lovers who demonstrate for "V-ger" the ultimate human emotion.

The film's special effects are a pay grade above classic "Trek," but remember, between 1969, when the series was canceled, and 1979, "Star Wars" rewrote the rulebook. But asked how he felt about working as production designer for "The Wrath of Khan," Jennings deadpanned, "It was a better show than the first one."

Space Travel and Television

The dream of traveling in space has had a resonance with popular culture since that dream first sprang into being. This has manifested itself, in one way or another, in television. The result has been somewhat varied in quality. However there have been a few gems.

Men into Space

Men into Space is all but forgotten series that aired in 1959 and 1960 that depicted the near future exploration of space, conducted in its version of reality by the US Air Force. Men into Space largely adhered to known scientific facts, somewhat unique for the time. The main character, Col. Edward McCauley, was depicted as being on just about every mission in space, which included early orbital missions, the first landing on the Moon, the construction of a Moon base and an orbiting space station, and two attempts to reach Mars. In the never produced second season, missions to Mars and beyond would have been depicted.

Star Trek

The most popular and most prolific, of course, has been Star Trek, a series that first aired in the 1960s. Star Trek has spun off a myriad of films and four other TV series. The first Star Trek, or Star Trek classic, was a phenomenon in its time. Star Trek depicted the adventures of a star ship, USS Enterprise, commanded by the brash Captain James T. Kirk, along with a crew of both humans and aliens, including his second in command, Mr. Spock, a half human, half alien, Dr. McCoy, Lt. Uhura, Commander Scott, Lt. Sulu, and Ensign Chekov. Every week, the Enterprise and her crew would meet some alien threat or dangerous natural phenomenon and overcome it with a combination of guile and a fully charged phaser bank. Star Trek was cancelled after three seasons, but then took off in popularity that persists over forty years later.

One of the reasons often cited for Star Trek's enduring popularity is that it actually depicted a future in which humanity did survive the various problems of the 20th Century, including the threat of nuclear war, and went on to expand among the stars. While the quality of the episodes varied from wonderful to—well—not so wonderful, Star Trek has become as much an iconic part of popular culture as Sherlock Holmes, Superman, and the Knights of the Round Table.

The spin off series included Star Trek: The Next Generation, which took place almost a century beyond the events of the original Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which took place on a space station in an alien star system, Star Trek: Voyager, which took place on a star ship lost in "the Delta Quadrant", and "Enterprise" which took place about a century before the original Star Trek.

Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica was actually two TV series, one airing in the late 1970s, the other a kind of remake airing in the early 21st Century. Both had the same premise. A human civilization living on twelve planets, each named after the zodiac constellations, is all but wiped out by a race of machines called the Cylons. The last remaining humans take whatever star ships they can and, led by the last Battlestar Galactica, go in search of "the shining planet known as Earth" where it is presumed that refuge and fellow humans await. They are harried constantly by the Cylons, determined to finish the genocide of the humans.

Whereas the 1970s version of the series had a lot of the camp and humor of its era, the later version was a grim, somewhat realistic story that touched on issues of religion, society, politics, and human relations with great depth. The later series was somewhat strange in its depiction of the humans as wearing contemporary western clothing, worshiping the Ancient Greek pantheon of gods, and not having a lot of advanced, futuristic technology beyond faster than light star ships. The Cylons, some of the human-like, were depicted as fanatical monotheists. In the 21st Century version, they found Earth, bringing the story arc to a conclusion.