ST:TMP - Lost Footage from the Trench

I think you're thinking of Tony Smith (Richard Taylor's professor of fine arts at the University of Utah).

TGT

 

I don't know that name at all. (pause to consider implications. wow.)

The guy I was thinking of was named Niagra or something like that.

 

David Negron.

TGT

 

Thanks!

 

I am still amazed that 30 years later we still don't have all the facts...

 

Indeed. And not to continue teasing, but one of the longer sequences we have is of a medium close-up of Kirk reacting to the crystal swarms. As he turns around in his suit, he grabs that thruster control and, for all the world, it looks like a screwdriver stuck in his wrist. (IMHO, and your mileage may vary.)

 

What's ironic about that Phase II book is that there is not a SINGLE picture of the Mike Minor version of V'ger. Fortunately, I have one...

From what I recall, all the versions in the Phase II book are V'ger designs for TMP.

 

I interviewed him as well for the Ottens site.

 

Tony Smith did a lot of conceptual art for the interior of V'ger. A lot of this can be seen at Otten's Forgotten Trek website...

 

That's the name I was trying to remember.
So was he on Abel's team or Apogee's?

 

He worked for both Abel and the Apogee/Trumbull teams. He stayed on the project after Abel was dismissed.

 

What bugs me is that nobody has unearthed a photo of the Abel designed-model of vger that supposedly looked like a fish. Does anybody remember if the Minor version was ever built physically by Magicam?

 

Trust me, there was no final shooting model of V'ger built by Magicam. There was only a study model. Again, there's a picture of that over at the Ottens Forgotten Trek site.

RT told me Magicam was about to start work on the V'Ger model around the time Abel was let go.

However, it is worth noting that RT says in my interview with him that you would never see the entire ship. They wanted to keep the actual shape of the thing a mystery.

The "weird fish" description was based off the illustrations he saw. Those too are over at Forgotten Trek.

 

So that's the one thing that Trumbull and co wound up keeping, not seeing the thing in its entirety in the theatrical cut.

 

Yeah...and I'm not sure I agreed with that idea from either team. I do like being able to see all of V'ger in the director's cut. Although, for me, there's some scale issues in that it certainly loses it's gravity in that shot. RT said you could not get far enough away from it to see the whole thing because it would be so massive. And it really is...even by the description in the script. 83 AUs is so huge it's hard to wrap your mind around! If I recall correctly, just one AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

A cool shot would have been to show V'ger shadowing the Earth...possibly blocking out the sun.

One really cool thing about the Abel version is that the surfaces of their version of V'ger would have had a surface that moved (a combination of mechanical effects, irridescent paints and lighting). RT sent me some drawings of how they wanted to do that...and those are also on display over at the Forgotten Trek site.

So, theirs would not have just been a simple static model like what we saw in the theatrical release.

 

Just one detail, it was V'Ger's powerfield that was 82AUs in diameter, not the vessel itself.

 

Yeah, the script line (cut) had the vessel at 78 km, which is still pretty big relative the E.

 

DOH!!! You're right.

 

As trevanian says, V'Ger was about 78 kilometers long, roughly the same size as the island of Maui or Jupiter's moon Amalthea.

Of course, in the DE, V'Ger's powerfield is reduced in size from 82 AU to 2 AU thanks to a quick dialogue edit. Which makes a lot more sense, since otherwise the E would've had to be travelling at Warp 4 or something to get through it in just five minutes. If 2 AU is its maximum diameter, and if the E penetrated at the narrow equator of the "apple-core" shape seen on the tactical display, then the thickness of cloud it would have had to penetrate could've easily been less than 5/8 of an AU and therefore traversable in less than 5 minutes on impulse drive.

Which I think is preferable, because clearly the "cloud" would've had to be within V'Ger's warpfield, or to actually be the warpfield itself, or it couldn't have travelled FTL. And I'm not sure it's feasible for one ship to travel at (relative) warp speed within another ship's warpfield.

 

It's worth noting that the Enterprise's engines were illuminated on approach to V'Ger, suggesting that they were travelling at warp.

Whether that makes any real-world physical sense... although considering we're discussing a living machine looking for God on Earth being chased by a group of seventies-clad astronauts, I guess reality goes out the window.