OTD 38 years ago. March 4, 1983, Paramount Pictures. The development department issued coverage (notes and feedback) on a proposed Star Trek feature film screenplay. Not The Search for Spock, which was already in the works, but the script for a proposed film you’ve never heard of. It’s got no Kirk, no Spock, no starship Enterprise, no Federation, no Klingons, and only one familiar name… one BIG familiar name: Khan. When Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan opened to big box office it appears the studio pounced on the idea of making sequels and spinoffs. Just days after the film’s opening, it was reported, “Not one to rest on its laurels, Paramount is already preparing ‘Star Trek III: In Search of Spock,’" and, “According to Paramount President Michael Eisner, there even may be a future movie about the fate of Khan, the villain of ‘Star Trek II’ played with Cordoban relish by Ricardo Montalban.” But while there were rumors of such a thing (such as a supposed project titled Prison Planet set on Khan’s Elbe of Ceti Alpha V), they were seemingly just that. Not eight months after the film’s release the studio received a hefty screenplay—not for a sequel, but a prequel to both the movie and the 1960s TV episode that inspired it. The script was titled THE RISE OF KHAN. We’d never heard of this before, so imagine our surprise when our friend and author of the excellently researched book The First Star Trek Movie, Sherilyn Connelly handed us a folder full of documents related to the development of Star Trek—The Motion Picture within which was a 6-page memo covering a script and story we’d never heard of before. Here's the top of the first page: Given the negative assessment of the coverage, it’s unsurprising that this prospective prequel went nowhere. In fact, we’d be surprised if the story weren’t immediately cut off right after this memo. We posted the complete text of the memo on our blog piece A Khan Noonien Thing here (link) if anyone is interested in the particulars of this story and who wrote it.
Weird. Given the lack of corroboration, I'd almost wonder if it was a hoax, but it's just too strange to be a hoax. It seems like the sort of thing that only could have been concocted back in the '80s when the understanding of the Star Trek universe was vaguer due to only TOS/TAS existing. Although of course, this premise doesn't fit the "Space Seed"/TWOK backstory at all, since it's on an interstellar scale and sometime in the 21st century, rather than on Earth in the 1990s. If anything close to this had actually been made, with such drastic revisionism of Trek history, imagine the fan debates about canon.
We're making a few tweaks to the post, all around the "John Hughes" question. We verified that the Hughes of Nate and Hayes is the same one as Mr. Mom et al., and will also be pointing out that the coverage calls out the similarities to The Count of Monte Cristo, and Hughes sometimes employed Cristo's protagonist name Edmond Dantès as a pseudonym (Beethoven, Maid In Manhattan).
He wrote a 3-part miniseries about Khan on Ceti Alpha V set between "Space Seed" and "Wrath of Khan" for CBS All Access which seemingly went nowhere. Rumour has it one of the Star Trek projects CBS are working on is codenamed "1992" which I guess covers the same ground as this pitch?
Thanas is obviously not a planet in our own solar system. And presumably "Tau Ceti" refers to some settlement in the vicinity of the actual star of that name, if not some other completely made-up place. "Space Seed" does seem to indicate that travel to other star systems wasn't feasible in the era of DY-100 ships and Khan's rise to power (chronologically in the 1990s in the TOS universe's timeline). But of course, "records of that period are fragmentary" if we take Spock at his word. So maybe that discrepancy could be handwaved away. Maybe I missed it, but this synopsis doesn't seem to specify what year(s) the story would be set in. If they stuck with what was established in "Space Seed" and repeated in TWOK, then this would have to end in the year 1996 with Khan's exile. Khan starts out as a Lieutenant here, and becomes Emperor. So the phase with him as Emperor would be during his time as "absolute ruler of more than a quarter of [our] world" in the years 1992 to 1996. To a 1980s audience it would have been very unrealistic to have space colonies and prisons on planets in other star systems that near in the future. But ignoring real-life developments, there could have been enough wiggle room to make this work in the established Trek timeline, given what little we knew for sure from TOS and TWOK. On a completely separate note, facttrek.com keeps redirecting me to log in to Squarespace. Kor
From the coverage it seems likely the Hughers' script was based wholly on what little Khan backstory revealed in Wrath and not informed by the constraints of the original “Space Seed” episode in any way shape or form. The interstellar travel aspect would have been an easy fix: the prison could have relocated to Mars or a moon in this solar system. This would fit with them having ships like the DY100.
See the cover page, right under John Hughes's name. There's an entry in the form for "Circa:" and it's filled in "21st century." Note also that the synopsis says that Khan has a son with Pierce's love interest after Pierce is thrown in prison, and by the time Pierce escapes, the son is 16 years old. So the story was meant to span at least 17 years, with Earth already an interstellar power at the start of that span of time, and it was proposed in 1983. I doubt it was meant to take place any earlier than the mid-2000s. (Or maybe the early-ish 2000s. Blade Runner was a 1982 film that proposed an apparently interstellar human civilization by 2019.) And that makes sense. For a 1967 episode, a eugenics war in the 1990s seems reasonably futuristic, but by 1983, it's far too close. That's why TNG ignored the Eugenics Wars and went for a mid-century "post-atomic horror" instead. The franchise then was not as committed to rigid consistency as we demand it to be today.
There's no reason to suppose the Star Trek universe has any correlation to our own. And it isn't just the Eugenics wars of the 90's by now. There are too many events that would have to be constantly altered as things are to keep trying to revise it. I would have loved to see this movie. And earth fought at 4 Kzin wars in the 21st century. There's room for this, too.
No, but both "Space Seed" and TWOK put the Eugenics Wars in the 1990s, and this movie would clearly have retconned that heavily. There are franchises that do exactly that. Marvel Comics frequently updates its real-world references to the present; for instance, Tony Stark was originally wounded in the Vietnam War, then it was updated to Afghanistan, and now it's a made-up war that can be bumped forward in time as needed. DC just reboots its whole universe every decade or two. The 2005-present Doctor Who revival ignored everything the original series established about Moon missions in the 1970s and global weather control and interplanetary space stations in the early 2000s. If anything, Star Trek's refusal to bump the Eugenics Wars forward in time is the exception to the rule. Although things would be very different if this movie or one like it had been made.
There are ways to make much of the existing Pre-ENT cannon work by assuming its all an alternate reality. Not easy, but they do work. Several fellow fans and I spent several years making 3d models, set pieces, uniforms, etc for a virtual world rpg that took place during a theoretical first Kzin conflict, and there was some thought as to any remaining augment elements. It's a long discussion, and too off topic for this thread. I only point out, it can be done. However, if this movie had been made, it might have been able to work better with what little backstory canon was already established. A very great find, Maurice.
Thanks. Sherilyn Connelly tossed the document at us and I just ran with it. @Harvey chipped in a lot, but I mostly slammed this piece through and got all the images together to make the #OTD today. I just added a new image to the piece: a newspaper item on John Hughes.
If a script questionable provenance had turned up at convention like "Stars Of Sargasso" — a purported TOS script erroneously credited to D.C. Fontana — I might be inclined to agree. But this was sourced from studio files that were donated to a major film archive. And on top of that, because it's a coverage memo rather than a script or a treatment (and as such, lacking in the kind of re-sale value fake scripts might have), the chances of this being a fake seem slim to none. Add to that the contemporary references to a possible Khan spin-off film in the press at the time this is dated and I'm confident this is the real deal. My contribution to this one pales in comparison to all the work @Maurice put into it. Great job putting together all the pieces on this one.
All true. I'm just saying it's so strange and left-field that it's amazing it's actually real. Except that a hoaxer would probably want to make it seem plausible, so a hoax wouldn't be nearly this weird or revisionist.
I also hasten to remind everyone that we got three little paragraphs roughly sketching out the story. That’s not a lot to go on. The Interstellar setting and the time frame appear to be the most wonky things we are aware of but they would also have been some of the easiest fixes to make. I had to change a feature film script built specifically around Berlin to Cape Town, and then move one sequence back to Hamburg and still make it make sense. That’s relatively easy. Changing the story structure and character beats is the rough stuff.