After a year of hearing Star Trek movie pitches and ideas from creator Gene Roddenberry and science fiction writers, Paramount executives decided to take matters into their own hands.
In July 1976, they named Jerry Isenberg as the Executive Producer of the Star Trek movie project. Isenberg quickly hired two writers to work on a treatment, Chris Bryant and Alan Scott. In September 1976, they get to work and turn in a treatment at the end of the month called The Planet of the Titans.
Finally, Paramount had an idea it wanted to produce and execs ordered the writers to begin working on a script.
In the meantime, Isenberg began looking for a director. He talked with some of the big names of the day: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Robert Wise. Each turned him down because of commitments to other projects. But finally Phillip Kaufman agreed to direct.
During this activity, artist Ralph McQuarrie was hired to develop concept art for the project. He had just finished a job working for George Lucas on a science fiction project that had not been released yet called Star Wars. McQuarrie's art shows us a Star Trek that was very different from what we saw on our TV screens.
While we never had the chance to see this movie, the impact of McQuarrie's illustrations live on today. His redesign of the U.S.S. Enterprise is the basis for the U.S.S. Discovery, the ship featured in the newest series of the franchise, Star Trek Discovery.
Planet of the Titans came the closest to actually being produced. After Bryant and Scott turned in their finished script in March 1977, Paramount rejected it in April and went on to cancel the project permanently in May.
But just a few days later, a little movie called Star Wars opened, and suddenly it seemed like Hollywood was transformed over night.
But Paramount did not understand the impact of this film, nor did it understand the sentiment of sci-fi fans in the 70s. Execs at the studio thought it was a fluke and that Star Wars had satiated the appetite for this type of entertainment. They believed they had missed their window for a science fiction film and decided to move Star Trek back to TV.
Just two weeks after Star War's opening, Paramount announced its plans to launch a new television network and a new Star Trek show that would anchor its schedule. We will tell that story in another episode.
