Yes, but that's just the surface appearance. We're talking about budgetary matters here -- about the cost overruns the studio blamed Roddenberry for. So it's not a question of how the sets appeared onscreen, it's a question of whether the investment put into building them for Phase II paid off or was wasted. And the investment was absolutely not wasted...
If Cushman's book claims that most of the Phase II sets were discarded, that's just one more piece of Cushman's incredibly sloppy research, which has been well-documented by Harvey and Maurice in other threads.
I don’t want to try to remember exactly what was said in Cushman’s book from memory alone (as I said earlier, I’ve already returned the copy I read to the library) for fear of misrepresenting it so I won’t try to.
I never said anything about the money used to build or refashion the sets as having been “wasted”, though. I was merely using them as examples as to how the overall production budget of ST:TMP ended up being so high, that it was partially because they had to include the costs of all of the previous attempts including “Phase II” into ST:TMP’s budget. (I wonder if that has ever happened on any other similar projects? Like, did what James Camron got paid to write a script or whatever it was that he did for a Spider-Man movie, was that cost wrapped into the eventual budget of the Sam Raimi movie?)
Back to how much work (rework) was actually done on the sets that had been built for “Phase II”, I did find the following section in my ebook version of
Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Neal Preston Jones (and I do recall it also being discussed in the Cushman book that the redesigned bridge sets were intentionally designed *without* movable sections like that had done on the classic tv series bridge, that this was an aesthetic choice made that did end up making shooting the bridge scenes more difficult):
“MICHAEL MINOR: Harold Michelson showed up in late March, and Lee Cole, Rick Sternbach, myself and the other set designers sat down and tried to give him a crash course in what had transpired, what was happening, and where we thought it was headed. He was told, basically, “The sets are up, all you have to do is a little bit of changes, just add a bit or take out a wall here or there….” When he came to the stage and saw what a total redo was necessary, we still had a time problem. We had to modify and build cosmetics over existing pieces, like the bridge, which was made for a TV show, with breakaway walls. And by this time, they also had the director of photography, Richard Kline, and he wanted to shoot things intact, without breaking out walls. He wanted to use bounce lighting and shoot the sets with what we called, I think, integrity. So we worked in very cramped situations, planning things, tearing out walls. Working with Harold, and Leon Harris, the art director, and the set designers, I really started evolving into more of an assistant art director, which is my direction anyway. And I was lucky enough to have some of my input used, because we were all taking a piece and running in whatever direction was called for.
GENE RODDENBERRY: Decisions about updating the bridge, which elements to retain from the original series, what kinds of instruments we’d want to create—these things come out of a hundred conversations. You sit, and talk, and sketch, and explore dreams and ideas. It almost passes back and forth like osmosis, and you can very rarely remember that scintillating, clear-cut statement that set everything in perspective. What I do recall is that I had a marvelous, marvelous relationship with Harold Michelson and the art department. There was a warm give-and-take, a constant trying to excel, and wandering back and forth with ideas, and so on. Michelson knew a little bit about Star Trek, he had read some science fiction, I think, and had had dealings with people I’ve worked with over many years, and was anxious to talk and compare ideas.
HAROLD MICHELSON: Bob Wise had been to the stages to see the sets, and of course they had been designed mainly for TV. If they’d put them on the big screen, you would have seen an awful lot of plywood and things like that. When I walked through the sets, I made some quick decisions and went up to discuss them with the art department. I was operating on the feeling that the walls went a certain way and I had to do something inside them. But then I met with Bob Wise, and he said that he would like the ship to really be something special, which meant that I could rip out the walls and really change it. I could take out the walls, twist them and turn them, mold the thing any way I liked. Joe Jennings had pretty much followed Matt Jefferies’ original designs for the Enterprise, which made sense for television. But now we had the freedom of the big screen. In fact, the story, as you know, starts out with the Enterprise being overhauled in drydock, which gave us free reign. I figured we could do anything to improve the design for motion pictures.”
