December 7th 1979 – Star Trek The Motion Picture Began 30 Years Of Star Trek Movies December 7, 2009 by Mark A. Altman
30 years ago today, on December 7th 1979 Star Trek leapt from the small to the big screen with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. All week long TrekMovie will be celebrating the anniversary, beginning today with a tribute by Free Enterprise producer Mark Altman, that looks at the film and its place in history.
TO HAVE BOLDLY GONE: AN APPRECIATION
The Beginning of 30 Years of Star Trek Movies
by Mark A. Altman
I come to praise Star Trek: The Motion Picture, not to bury it. Despite no less than Harlan Ellison decrying the film at the time as “The Motionless Picture,” Despite its reputation in some quarters as a lugubrious bore, it’s hard to imagine that Star Trek could have possibly lived long and prospered for another three decades had The Motion Picture not paved the way for what was to come (so, yes, you can blame it for Voyager and Enterprise too).
For those who’ve only seen the film on home video or were too young to experience the movie for the first time in theaters, it’s hard to appreciate the monumental important this film had on fans upon its release. Back in 1979, TV series simply didn’t make the jump to the big screen so for a series, once left for dead that was kept alive by likeminded individuals coming together in convention ballrooms and pouring over faded 16mm prints of the original episodes, hardly seemed like the architects of the greatest resurrection since Lazarus. But somehow Paramount got the message and after several false starts which included a low-budget film and subsequently a new TV series, the studio ended up bankrolling what would become at the time the second most expensive film of all-time next to Cleopatra, the epic film that nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox. Now admittedly, not all that money showed up on the screen. There was $10 million worth of effects from Robert Abel &
Company that were literally thrown away (and I could joke showed up in Star Trek V, but that’s not true, of course) as well as the development costs for the aborted series that was to spearhead the launch of a fourth TV network in the late 70s.
[...]
Now, in the cold light of day, it’s easy to see why people don’t love Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it’s a virtual remake of the episode “The Changeling” with the NOMAD probe that confuses Kirk as its creator, and has a glacial pace that today’s movie viewers are not accustomed to, especially watching it on television, and in the aftermath of The Wrath of Khan. But the fact is, in many ways, ST:TMP is a magnificent film.
[...]
The magnificent opening in which three Klingon ships are consumed by V’ger to the strains of Goldsmith’s brilliant Klingon Battle Theme stuck with you for weeks and, of course, the long, slow, lingering orgasmic glee on Kirk’s face as he, and the audience, admired the Enterprise in drydock for what seemed like forever.
[...]
A few years back, a group of intrepid filmmakers worked with the late Robert Wise to try and salvage the film by doing a definitive director’s cut. It’s a wonderful curiosity and adeptly realized with some superb new visual effects. However, they weren’t able to physically go in and re-edit much of the film which is ultimately ST: TMP failing. Much like Godfather III, years later, Paramount had to make a release date, in this case, the ill-advised December 7th, 1979 opening. As a result, the film was literally edited with black slugs where the special effects would go,
[...]
Now I wouldn’t go as far as saying Star Trek: The Motion Picture is a flawed masterpiece, it’s not, but it is the one film in the entire series, other than Star Trek (2009), that has a real cinematic scope to it and doesn’t feel like TV writ large. Even Khan, arguably the best of the series, was produced on a TV budget and, at times, looks that way through no fault of Nick Meyer. Fortunately, it’s crisp writing and clever plotting makes up for its deficiencies, of which there are many. And with its awesome cosmic vistas, cargo bays, massive engineering section (thankfully, not filmed at or near a brewery), galaxy spanning action, walking down the primary hull to the center of V’ger, the sumptuous Spock spacewalk, and expansive rec deck sequence, ST: TMP has an enormity of scale that befits its rather pretentious title, The Motion Picture.
[...]
!
