"Planet of the Titans" Revisited

[Ryann866]

I've always been interested in these "lost Trek" stories -- especially the development of the scripts that eventually became TMP.

A friend's father is Jerry Isenberg, who was assigned as the producer of Planet of The Titans and worked with GR and the writers during that period. I'm going to ask him if he still has a dusty script lying around somewhere... no promises though...

 

[trevanian]

You'll be doing us all a HUGE favor if he even has a treatment. Even more than THE GOD THING, TITANS is the holy grail of untrek, at least for me.

 

[RAMA]

^^^Yep, the inspiration there is pretty clear. In fact, it's almost too close to have been coincidence. Ironically, I think the painting version still looks cooler.

So do I because the PoT painting appears to be more than just a spacedock, but an entire space habitat.

Actually the Enteprise dock looks like it includes a base and multiple docks. The Titans asteroid looks more like just a dock.

RAMA

 

[Maurice]

From The Art of Ralph McQuarrie

​

Organic Machine concept sketch.
They were talking about a great powerful brain in this huge machine which was guided by organic matter. I gave the machine arms and eyeballs on stalks. You can see a man working on a console controlling it in the foreground to establish scale.

No clue how this fits into the story....maybe Titans tech?

What struck me a moment ago (duh) is why "Titans" was selected as the name... since it was the Titan named Prometheus who brought fire to mankind. I'd gotten so rusty on my Greek Mythology that I had to have a dose of the metaphorical oil can to get the gears turning on that.

 

[trevanian]

One of those arms looks like the cockpit of the millennium falcon ...

I think maybe he over anthropomorphized that.

I've got the new Ken Adam book on order, maybe there are sketches of his that we can compare and contrast after the book ships (in a week or two, if lucky.)

 

[Procutus]

You'll be doing us all a HUGE favor if he even has a treatment. Even more than THE GOD THING, TITANS is the holy grail of untrek, at least for me.

I'm with you, I'd be tickled pink just to be able to read a treatment.

Hell, the whole script would probably cause me to have a fangasm!

 

[Data Holmes]

You'll be doing us all a HUGE favor if he even has a treatment. Even more than THE GOD THING, TITANS is the holy grail of untrek, at least for me.

I'm with you, I'd be tickled pink just to be able to read a treatment.

Hell, the whole script would probably cause me to have a fangasm!

Cleanup in forum three...

 

[Procutus]

^

 

[Maurice]

One of those arms looks like the cockpit of the millennium falcon ...

I think maybe he over anthropomorphized that.

I agree he over-anthropomorphized it. An odd number of eye stalks and limbs and less literal human hands would have helped. I can see where you see the Falcon cockpit, but that's just an accident of finger position. heheh

I've got the new Ken Adam book on order, maybe there are sketches of his that we can compare and contrast after the book ships (in a week or two, if lucky.)

Are you getting the UK edition? I notice it's not due to ship here until later this year.

 

[trevanian]

One of those arms looks like the cockpit of the millennium falcon ...

I think maybe he over anthropomorphized that.

I agree he over-anthropomorphized it. An odd number of eye stalks and limbs and less literal human hands would have helped. I can see where you see the Falcon cockpit, but that's just an accident of finger position. heheh

I've got the new Ken Adam book on order, maybe there are sketches of his that we can compare and contrast after the book ships (in a week or two, if lucky.)

Are you getting the UK edition? I notice it's not due to ship here until later this year.

My wife ordered it through domestic amazon, not the UK one, and even so it apparently mails out this week. So I dunno, I'm just greedily awaiting! Bond sites have noted already seeing the book in shrinkwrap on sale in the UK.

 

[Maurice]

My wife ordered it through domestic amazon, not the UK one, and even so it apparently mails out this week. So I dunno, I'm just greedily awaiting! Bond sites have noted already seeing the book in shrinkwrap on sale in the UK.

I wrote to Amazon cause I'm getting conflicting info from their site and on my order receipt about when it ships.

 

[trevanian]

The Adam book just arrived. It looks terrific, with six pages on TITANS.

Unfortunately I think I'd break the binding if I tried scanning it, but I'll try to describe the new stuff.

Most significant to me is visual confirmation of an old Kaufmann statement about wanting to see down through the whole ship in one shot ... which sounded pretty weird to me. I guess he was serious, because there is a large illustration of the inside of ... I guess the saucer ... where you have large station linked by horizontal and diagonal tubes.

The space brain pic is repeated, but then there are pics of an enormous meditation chamber, which is maybe where Spock has his destiny revealed to him? Hard to tell exactly what he had in mind, whether it was a precursor to the fortress of solitude or more of a limbo set. Very preliminary, but the perspective lines cry out for somebody to do something with it.

The text still has it wrong about Meyer writing the eventual TMP script, same as that other book, but this thing is so gorgeous I can't really complain.

What is even more interesting is that if you go past the TREK pages to the next, a presentation for a CINEMA OF THE FUTURE thing that never happened, you see this horseshoe design that is very evocative of what the TNG bridge wound up being, though much much larger.

 

[Data Holmes]

trev, any chance you could snap a quick pic with a camera atleast?

 

[trevanian]

I know this sounds prehistoric, but I don't actually have a digital camera, and my 35mm broke about 3 years ago. I tried taking a picture with my laptop just now, but even under kitchen halogen lighting, it was just mush, out of focus and indistinct.

One more thing of note; if any of you have seen SPY WHO LOVED ME, the bond that Adam designed just before he worked on STAR TREK, you may remember the huge submersible structure in the film. I've always thought the pontoons looked like warp nacelles, and it is even funnier now, because his trek enterprise nacelles didn't look as much like them as this ATLANTIS thing in SPY. Maybe he was afraid he'd be repeating himself.

I also just thought of something in reality that might have inspired that 'open' saucer section. In a really horrible movie called CONCORDE AIRPORT 79, which can be screamingly funny if you're in the right mood, there is a sequence inside a big airport (france?) and it is filled with escalators in tubes if I recall correctly. Anybody who has seen this POS will probably remember the location, as it is the only element in the movie that looks interesting and doesn't have matte lines.

I gotta get back to the book now.

 

[Maurice]

The Adam book just arrived. It looks terrific, with six pages on TITANS.

Can't wait. Mine should be here in the next few days.

 

[Maurice]

<CLICK HERE FOR LARGER VERSION>
​

THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE Concept for the interior of the Enterprise, including the control center and bridge.

<CLICK HERE FOR LARGER VERSION>
​

'This is my concept for the "Super Brain" -- like a giant machine on an alien planet. You can see the scale by the size of the humans." -- Ken Adam

These are photos, not scans, so I apologize for the quality. I took photos of the meditation chamber and Enterprise sketches, but they came out blurry.

 

[Christopher]

These are the voyages of the starship Habitrail...

 

[trevanian]

Yeah, that's a kneejerk response that would be valid, but then if you look at Adam's next project, MOONRAKER, you can see this kind of thing executed on a smaller scale, and quite handsomely too (fx & art direction are about the only saving graces in that steaming mess imo.)

And if you look at his earlier bond, SPY WHO LOVED ME, you'll see a seagoing city that looks to be equpped with warp engines, predating his trek involvement.

 

[Maurice]

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that sketches like these are rough and designed to evoke a sense of the feel for the set or object, a direction, rather than the details. I can see what Adam was going for, even though one can argue it's a pretty inefficient use of space.

 

[trevanian]

The wasted space issue is huge (no pun intended), but Gerrold cited the same thing about engineering in TOS, that life support shouldn't ever be an issue when you've got all this wasted space.

Adam was designing from Kaufmann and the writers more than GR, and Kaufmann wanted to see a shot where you looked down from (or through) the bridge to see the rest of the ship in one take. I never understood how that'd be possible till I saw this rendering. So I'm sure it made the director happy.