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The legend of the lost 1969 Star Trek movie

posted a year ago by bozo_500 (12364)
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It’s early 1969 and Star Trek is in production on its last season as it has just been announced that the show is being cancelled for good. Gene Roddenberry persuades Paramount to finance a feature length movie based on Star Trek with the intent of using the same sets and costumes, which will save money, and will be shot in secret right after completion of the third season’s episodes. At the pitch, Roddenberry name drops Fox’s Planet of the Apes, reminding Paramount that Sci-fi can be hugely profitable. Robert Evans, who recently took over as head of production at Paramount and sired the hit horror flick Rosemary’s Baby, greenlights the project but stipulates that it must be done at a very low budget.

Roddenberry needs a director and remembers a great little Sci-fi movie loaded with mood and atmosphere he saw a few years back called Planet of the Vampires. He learns that the movie was directed by an Italian called Mario Bava. This gets Roddenberry excited because he figures this must be the same Mario Bava that directed Danger Diabolik (1968), a movie he saw and LOVED the year before. He calls producer Dino DeLaurentis and asks him about Bava. DeLaurentis praises Bava and reveals that he offered him a 3 million dollar budget for Diabolik but, in the end, he only spent 500k.

This convinces Roddenberry that Bava is the man for the job. As a part of his deal with Paramount, Evans wanted William Castle to produce the Star Trek feature since he had done so on Rosemary’s Baby and was known for getting movies done at a very reasonable cost on his own low budget productions. This doesn’t bother Roddenberry as he and Castle get along very well from their first meeting and onwards. Castle and Roddenberry decide to commission a screenplay that mixes Sci-fi with horror as Castle specialized in cheapo horror flicks and both men admired Planet of the Vampires creepy style.

They are also big fans of The Twilight Zone and decide to hire Rod Serling to script since he worked on Planet of the Apes. Serling recommends that they also hire Richard Matheson, who wrote many Twilight Zone episodes including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" starring William Shatner and the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within", as Serling teaches part time and can’t focus all his time between writing Star Trek, teaching and his other writing jobs. Matheson and Serling agree that the screenplay should harken back to the early Star Trek episodes, which had an eerie uncanny tone not unlike The Twilight Zone, and focus on exploration, adventure, horror and if they can get a bit of social commentary in there, all the better. The two collaborate for several weeks until a suitable screenplay is produced with input from Roddenberry and Castle. It is reminiscent of the first season of Star Trek, the Enterprise alone in deep space charting a haunted universe of supernatural aliens and long dead civilisations.

Bava is presented with the script and is more then happy to work for a major studio. He also happens to like the script very much. They hire a few Italian speaking production assistants and AD to help with the language barriers but everything runs very smoothly. Bava casts several of his Vampires/Diabolik actors in supporting roles: Barry Sullivan, John Phillip Law, Adolfo Celi (Largo from Thunderball), Norma Bengell, Evi Marandi, and Marisa Mell. The cast loves working with Bava, who even manages to get Ennio Morricone to score the flick. There was talk about trying to compete with the visual FX of 2001 but Bava decided that would clash with the cheap and cheerful style of Star Trek, not to mention being ridiculously expensive. No, Bava acts as visual effects supervisor, as he had on his previous movies, and pulls off wonders with his crew back in Italy where he works on Post-Production.

The Star Trek feature film is completed and given a late November release date. Everyone is excited as they believe their film is quality and will do well at the box office. Unfortunately tragedy strikes as there is a massive fire in Paramount’s labs which destroys all of the prints including the negative. Evans writes off the disaster and even makes a profit as the insurance covers everything. Luckily, none of the other major productions of that year are affected.

A crushing blow to everyone that worked on the movie, the cast and crew go back to their usual grind.

CONT

[–] bozo_500 (12364) a year ago

Roddenberry struggles to recapture the success of Star Trek until the box office of Star Wars renews interest in putting Trek on the big screen. He clashes with the studio as he forgets what made Star Trek special as he now envisions Star Trek as a tone poem about the evolution of man. Director Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Sound of Music) is pulled between the studio and Roddenberry who fight over script issues. The movie goes wildly over budget but manages to be a success in late 1979, although critics deride the film as Star Trek The Motionless Picture given its glacial pace. Roddenberry is kicked upstairs as the studio turns to its TV division where producer Harve Bennett succeeds in re-invigorating Trek with the help of a young writer/director named Nicholas Meyer. The new Trek is a hit and several sequels are created to varying levels of success. Roddenberry gets into bitter arguments over the studio taking control of his creation but successfully re-launches it in the form of The Next Generation before his death age 70 in 1991.

Mario Bava returns to Italy where he laments the accident that destroyed Star Trek but remembers enjoying every moment of his days in Hollywood. He makes one more masterpiece, Bay of Blood in 1971, and several other flicks until his death in 1980. Today he is remembered as a pioneering director and one of Italy’s greatest filmmakers. William Castle dies in 1977 at age 63. He is fondly remembered as a schlockmeister who made cheesy movies but managed to squeeze out a few gems along the way. Both men gain a whole new generation of fans with the advent of video tape players which make their many movies available for audiences in the comfort of their own homes around the world. The internet helps their work reach even more in the future.

Robert Evans was one of the great flameout stories of the 1970’s. Under his tenure at Paramount, he helped to revolutionize Hollywood with several classic movies (The Godfather 1/2 and Chinatown among them) that exemplified the decade as America’s greatest in cinema history. However, drugs lead to his ruin as he got deeper into addiction with the nadir of his life being his suspected involvement in a murder of which he was eventually cleared. He later releases a book based on his life, The Kid Stays in the Picture, and continued to work as a producer although he never managed to recapture the magic of his run at Paramount during the 1970’s. He resided in LA until his death in 2019 age 89.

Rod Serling continued to write and teach until his death in 1975 from complications during surgery at age 50. He is remembered as one of the icons of Television and a profound influence on its development while The Twilight Zone is considered one of the greatest TV shows of all time. Richard Matheson lived in California until his death in 2013. He is known, rightfully, as one of the greatest writers of Horror, Sci-fi and Fantasy fiction in history with such stories as I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, and Duel later turned into iconic movies.

CONT

[–] bozo_500 (12364) a year ago

It is 2023, in a dusty old film storage warehouse in Rome Italy, a young man is on his first day at the job, working as an inventory assistant, hired to go through the thousands of film cans and assess the quality of their contents. In a few weeks he comes across a box initialed MBSM69. He opens it and discovers several cans with the words Mario Bava Space Movie 69 written on the side. Upon inspection it appears to be a copy of the original negative of Bava’s lost Star Trek feature. Once word reaches the internet, fans the world over are in shock and overwhelmed with joy at the discovery of this long lost secret Star Trek movie.

The negative and soundtrack is digitally re-mastered and the movie is finally released theatrically and on Paramount+ on September 2026 to coincide with Star Trek’s 60th anniversary not to mention cash in on the success of the new wave of Star Trek shows and TV movies. The lost Star Trek movie is quickly declared a masterpiece by the shows fans as well as general audiences despite its dated style and visual effects which were left as is by the studio.

The Blu-ray release has a commentary by the shows surviving cast members who put aside their difficulties for each other long enough to reminisce about their glory days aboard the USS Enterprise.