I'm near the end reading The Making Of Star Trek - The Motion Picture by Susan Sackett. Curiously I never managed to read this all these years and only now got hold of a copy.
It's an okay book with some interesting tidbits. It's interesting to read a work about Star Trek with a perspective that isn't coloured by everything else that has since followed in its wake. One thing that impresses me is the level of thought that went into this film. A lot of folks bash the story (then and today) but they did seem to put a lot of thought into it, a fact I can appreciate. No matter what one thinks very little (if anything) of the film was put on the screen arbitrarily.
The book does lean to affirming my appreciation of TMP partly because it doesn't follow the usual movie sci-fi conventions. It's not about run-and-jump and space battles which Star Wars had just popularized. It's about something more which for me elevates it above the usual sci-fi feature.
I would like the book to have been somewhat more like The Making Of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield. That book gave us a look at the TOS universe as well a behind-the-scenes look at making a television show like Star Trek. The TMP era is barely glimpsed and only through some of the thinking behind the film's ideas. That in itself isn't wholly bad because we learn how they arrived at certain decisions. I did find it neat learning the intent behind the Enterprise display in the rec-room and that the ringship was indeed meant to be the first and only starship named Enterprise before the famed TOS 1701.
In the end it does reaffirm in my mind that the film's flaws when released were basically two: Paramount's rush to release it and thus not allowing proper time to finish post-production as it should have been, and the story needing a little more character drama. I really don't have a problem with the essential story itself.
It's an okay book with some interesting tidbits. It's interesting to read a work about Star Trek with a perspective that isn't coloured by everything else that has since followed in its wake. One thing that impresses me is the level of thought that went into this film. A lot of folks bash the story (then and today) but they did seem to put a lot of thought into it, a fact I can appreciate. No matter what one thinks very little (if anything) of the film was put on the screen arbitrarily.
The book does lean to affirming my appreciation of TMP partly because it doesn't follow the usual movie sci-fi conventions. It's not about run-and-jump and space battles which Star Wars had just popularized. It's about something more which for me elevates it above the usual sci-fi feature.
I would like the book to have been somewhat more like The Making Of Star Trek by Stephen E. Whitfield. That book gave us a look at the TOS universe as well a behind-the-scenes look at making a television show like Star Trek. The TMP era is barely glimpsed and only through some of the thinking behind the film's ideas. That in itself isn't wholly bad because we learn how they arrived at certain decisions. I did find it neat learning the intent behind the Enterprise display in the rec-room and that the ringship was indeed meant to be the first and only starship named Enterprise before the famed TOS 1701.
In the end it does reaffirm in my mind that the film's flaws when released were basically two: Paramount's rush to release it and thus not allowing proper time to finish post-production as it should have been, and the story needing a little more character drama. I really don't have a problem with the essential story itself.
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