Ryan Thomas Riddle (aka Middyseafort) pointed out that the Mission Log podcast site has posted the first 20 pages of Roddenberry's 1975 "Star Trek II" script (link). Interesting to see how much of what starts there ended up in TMP.
Great googa-mooga, I NEVER thought any of that script would ever see the light of day! This is a monumental find. I'm eager to find out if more will ever be posted, naturally.
Man, Gene Roddenberry must've been in pretty dire straits by 1975 to be writing Trek fanfic like this … I'm curious about Ical and the decision to bump Chekov up to First Officer that early on. It suggests an idea, at least to start the movie with, of swapping out about half the regulars, and that's not a bad notion.
Screenplays often read badly if you're not used to reading them. What we've seen certainly isn't great but there are germs of some good ideas and visually interesting sequences. It suffers from TV-itis in that it's much too talky, which drags it down. Hopefully someone will eventually post the rest of it so we can see if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
In one unofficial reference book I read in the 90s, it said that Paramount wasn't sure that the television cast could carry a film and they wanted a cast with people like Robert Redford. Carrying over a handful of cast from the television series and bringing in a new cast would be a way of accomplishing that. I'm curious who "RF" mentioned on the title page is. A producer? Someone at Paramount, surely. My snap reaction to the first twenty pages is that it's slow, dull, and talky. The Captain's Log infodump is terrible; we've already had a dull, talky scene with Spock, and now we follow it with Kirk talking to himself. For that matter, the dialogue in general is terrible. Plus, nothing happens for the first ten or twelve pages, and the major action takes place off-stage. I'm not hooked by this. Obviously, there's still a lot of script to go -- I'd assume about 100 pages on the "one page per minute" rule -- so it's not really fair to judge what may be an unrepresentative sample. If this is representative, though, I would have passed on the script at this point. Maybe it could be salvaged with another, tighter draft, one from another writer.
My first thought as well was that this would have been a MOW, had it been filmed as written. Still, it was a helluva thrill to get to read it and be "back" in 1975 for a moment, contemplating Trek as it was then. Sir Rhosis
Got a kick out of the transporter-accident, right near the end of the sample -- you can identify several story-elements that survived all the way through Harold Livingston's drafts into The Motion Picture itself.
So true. Those were fun days, weren't they? So much of it existed in our imaginations only, and somehow just having the original series made less seem like more, somehow! There were so many questions we had, and we each had our own answers, all of which were just as valid as the others. Even the typewritten pages evoke the times! Thanks, Maurice!
The TMP novelization, I'd assume. And there are several concepts which leaked into Roddenberry's later novel, including the notion of Spock telepathically linking with Kirk while kneeling before the High Masters on Vulcan (in the very opening of the script), etc. That particular one didn't make it into the final film, and it's clear that Gene decided to reuse several of them when writing the book.
I'm certain I've seen cover art for a novel of The God Thing. I hope it wasn't a fake! Here's an amazon.com entry apparently it never materialized.
It's not a fake. Pocket printed the dust jackets for Michael Jan Friedman's novel expansion of Roddenberry's screenplay. I've seen one of them; Friedman sold the one he had to a friend of mine. Steve Roby has the most detailed website on The God-Thing.
^ I've seen the website before, glad they've kept updating. I'd really like to see that novel get printed someday.
It won't happen; there are too many stakeholders to keep happy. But, if I were permitted to dream, I'd love a book done in the Christopher Tolkien style -- outlines, treatments, screenplay drafts, and various other attempts.