By the mid-1970s, the push to revive Star Trek was well underway. Fan passion—in the form of the growing convention phenomenon, still skyrocketing ratings of the original series in rerun syndication—the 1973 to 1974 Saturday morning animated show and even series creator Gene Roddenberry’s 1975 script treatment for The God Thing, which would have concluded with Captain Kirk battling Jesus on the bridge of the Enterprise(!), all proved that something was happening. And the proposed project that would have likely changed Star Trek forever was Planet of the Titans.
Developed in 1976, a year before the Star Trek Phase II television series was put into development and pre-production and three years before the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the project was emblematic of the fact that Trek had become a priority at Paramount Pictures, particularly after the first space shuttle, originally called the Constitution, was renamed the Enterprise following a fan letter-writing campaign. This prompted Paramount to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times proclaiming, “Starship Enterprise will be joining the space shuttle Enterprise in its space travels very soon. Early next year, Paramount Pictures begins filming an extraordinary motion picture adventure—Star Trek. Now we can look forward to two great space adventures.”
GERALD ISENBERG (producer, Star Trek: Planet of the Titans): “I was brought into Paramount because I made a deal and that deal said that if a movie of Star Trek is made, I’m going to be the producer. David Picker, who was the head of the studio at the time, and I hired Phil Kaufman to direct and write.”
The concept for Planet of the Titans came from Kaufman, an auteur whose credits include The Right Stuff and the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The script was written by British screenwriters Chris Bryant and Allan Scott, later rewritten by Kaufman himself.
GERALD ISENBERG: “Phil was very taken with the Spock character and Leonard Nimoy and thought that a lot of the other characters were past their usefulness. We began to develop a script that was a time-travel story really influenced by Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, which was a history of human evolution for a billion years going forward.”
ALLAN SCOTT (writer, Star Trek: Planet of the Titans): “Jerry Isenberg brought us in. We came out and met with him and Gene Roddenberry. We talked about the project and I think the only thing we agreed on at the time was that if we were going to make Star Trek as a motion picture, we should try and go forward, as it were, from the television series. Take it into another realm, if you like. Another dimension. To that end, we were talking quite excitedly about a distinguished film director and Phil Kaufman’s name came up. We all thought that was a wonderful idea and we met with him. Phil is a great enthusiast and very knowledgeable about science fiction.”
PHILIP KAUFMAN (director): “I had done White Dawn for Paramount and it wasn’t a big hit, but it was well regarded, so I got the call from my agent who thought I wouldn’t be interested in doing it. But the minute I heard what it was, that they wanted to make a three-million-dollar movie of an old television series they thought would be worth reviving and there was a certain fan base, I knew I was interested. It wouldn’t have ordinarily been something that would interest me if it didn’t have all of these interesting situations, which I didn’t feel were that well executed on the TV show, by necessity.”
ALLAN SCOTT: “We did a huge amount of reading. We must have read thirty science fiction books of various kinds. At that time, we also had that guy from NASA who was one of the advisors to the project, Jesco von Puttkamer. He was at some of the meetings, and Gene was at all of the meetings.”
PHILIP KAUFMAN: “I met with Gene and I looked at episodes with him and we talked about all sorts of things. Somehow, through the whole process, I must say, Gene always wanted to go back to his script [The God Thing], that he always wanted to really just do another episode with a little more money. Paramount wasn’t interested in that, because they’d already turned it down. But in the process of working with Jerry and Gene, we got them to commit to a $10 million movie, which was a good amount of money in those days.”
GERALD ISENBERG: “Phil was thinking 2001: A Space Odyssey. He wanted to make another great movie, like the way 2001 explored the future and alternate realities. That’s where he was going.”
PHILIP KAUFMAN: “Whatever the requirements of sixties television were, they were really lacking in a visual quality and in all those things that a feature film in science fiction needed to have. I felt that if those elements were in there, if properly thought out and expanded, it could be a fantastic event. We knew what the feature films in science fiction had been prior to this: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, a few of these things that were wondrous adventures.”
GERALD ISENBERG: “We sat in a room and Phil basically talked to us about the Star Trek audience and who the characters are, who the most important characters are and who is the center of Star Trek, and it’s Spock. You can take any other character out of that series and the series is the same. Even Kirk. You just replace him with another captain. But Spock is the center of the series. That character represents the essence of what the show is about.”
PHILIP KAUFMAN: “It was an adventure through a black hole into the future and the past and all, there were more relationships really developed beyond just the crew relationships. Kirk was to have an important role but not the center, the center was Spock, a Klingon, a woman parapsychologist who was trying to treat Spock’s insanity [he had gotten caught in his pon farr cycles], and there was going to be sex, which the sixties series never had, but we were here at the end of the seven- ties and we’re in a world where great movies were being made and the times were really ripe for expanding your mind.”
Star Trek: Planet of the Titans was designed to open on a shock that would have caught audiences completely off guard. Captain James T. Kirk was gone—missing and presumed dead for three years after disappearing during a rescue mission near a dangerous black hole. The Enterprise still flew, but it wasn’t the same ship. The crew carried on under new leadership, capable but clearly changed by loss. No one felt it more deeply than Spock. Having left Starfleet, he returned to Vulcan and attempted to purge his emotions, hoping logic could quiet the grief he felt over losing his closest friend. But when Starfleet detects strange new energy coming from the same black hole, Spock rejoins the mission not because of duty, but because he can’t let go of the possibility that Kirk might still be alive.
What the crew of the Enterprise would have discovered pushed Star Trek into darker, more philosophical territory. Spock finds Kirk alive on a hidden planet trapped inside the black hole—but barely holding on, changed by years of isolation and strange cosmic forces. As Klingons close in, the story turns inward, forcing Kirk to face whether he can still be the captain he once was. The final twist was an intended bold one: the Enterprise escapes by plunging into the black hole, only to emerge in Earth’s distant past. There, the crew realizes that they are the legendary “Titans” of myth, guiding early humanity and shaping civilization itself. Unable to return home, Kirk and his crew are left to watch the dawn of the world they helped create—a haunting ending that asked whether exploration always leads forward, or sometimes loops back to where it all began.
ALLAN SCOTT: “Once we started working on the project with Phil, we were told that they had no deal with William Shatner, so in fact the first story draft we did eliminated Captain Kirk. It was only a month or six weeks in that we were called and told that Kirk was now aboard and should be one of the leading characters. So all of that work was wasted. At that time Chris and I would sit in a room and talk about story ideas and notions, and talk them through with either Phil or Gene.”
GERALD EISENBERG: “We sent Gene the first draft and he was not happy at all, but neither were we. He thought we were making a mistake in dropping Kirk. He basically took the position that we were not helping this franchise.”
ALLAN SCOTT: “Without any ill feeling on any part, it became clear to us that there was a divergence of view of how the movie should be made between Gene and Phil. I think Gene was quite right in sticking by not so much the specifics of Star Trek, but the general ethics of it. I think Phil was more interested in exploring a wider range of science-fiction stories, and yet, nonetheless, staying faithful to Star Trek. There was definitely a tugging on the two sides between them. One of the reasons it took us so long to come up with a story was because things like that would change. If we came up with some aspects that pleased Gene, they often didn’t please Phil and vice versa. We were kind of piggies in the middle.”
PHILIP KAUFMAN: “Gene was a great guy, but it was a little bit of the Alec Guinness syndrome in Bridge on the River Kwai. He built a bridge and he didn’t want to be rescued and he couldn’t see anything other than what he wanted it to be. I thought science fiction should go forward and I thought that the order was to go boldly where no man has gone before, but Roddenberry wanted to go back.”
ALLAN SCOTT: “The difficulty was trying to make, as it were, an exploded episode of Star Trek that had its own justification in terms of the new scale that was available for it, because much of Star Trek’s charm was the fact that it dealt with big and bold ideas on a small budget. Of course, the first thing that a movie would do, potentially, was match the budget and the scale of the production to the boldness and vigor of the ideas. We spent weeks looking at every single episode of Star Trek and I would guess that pretty much every cast member came by and met us.”
Among those involved with preproduction and creation of concept art on the film were visionary James Bond production designer Ken Adam and Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica conceptual guru Ralph McQuarrie. The design of the Enterprise developed for Planet of the Titans would ultimately find life—in somewhat altered form—as the title vessel in the 2017 series Star Trek: Discovery.
Star Trek continued to remain an obsession for Paramount parent company Gulf & Western chairman, the legendary Charles Bludhorn, whose daughter, Dominique, was a devoted fan of the series.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: “Ken Adam and I became good friends, and we had that sense of making Star Trek a big event with this sense of wonder and visuals. I got to know Ralph McQuarrie through George Lucas, and Ralph came aboard and started designing things. I went to London scouting with Ken Adam, looking for locations. They were going to pull the plug on Star Wars. Fox and all the people in London were laughing at what a disaster it was. George and his producer, Gary Kurtz, had gone on with the last couple of days with cameras to hastily try and piece together what they knew they needed to finish the movie.”
“So there was this mood out there that Star Wars was going to be a disaster. I knew otherwise; I had seen what George was doing and had been to what became ILM in the Valley and had spoken to George about that when we were working on the story for the first Raiders of the Lost Ark together. It was a sense of storytelling of what science fiction could be that George was into. That was brilliant and excited me. I’d been in touch with him while he was shooting Star Wars, and I think George possibly had tried to get the rights to Star Trek prior to his doing Star Wars. I knew there was something great there. Times were crying out for good science fiction. Spielberg was also developing Close Encounters at that time, but Paramount didn’t really know what they had. It was to Roddenberry’s credit that he and the fan base had convinced them that a movie could be made, albeit on the cheap, and I didn’t want to do that, nor did Jerry.”
Bryant and Scott turned in their first draft on March 1, 1977. Kaufman hoped to cast legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune as the Enterprise’s Klingon adversary, which could have been the greatest Star Trek villain in the franchise’s history, exceeding, it’s believed, even Khan.
PHILIP KAUFMAN: “I had loved the power of those Kurosawa movies and The Seven Samurai. If any other country other than America had a sense of science fiction, it was Japan. Toshiro Mifune up against Spock would have been a great piece of casting. There would have been a couple of scenes between the two of them, emotion versus Spock’s logic mind shield, trying to close things off, and having humor play between them. Leonard is a funny guy and the idea was not to break the mold of Star Trek, but to introduce it to a bigger audience around the world.”
GERALD ISENBERG: “We weren’t thinking, ‘This is a franchise and we’re going to do eight movies.’ We were thinking we would make one good movie. Star Wars launched as a franchise, and nowadays, you look back and think that everything is a franchise. What we would have ended up doing is a version that was essentially Star Trek, but not the Star Trek that was the series, because we would have focused on Spock and his conflict and being human and what being human is. And that’s really what 80 percent of the Star Trek episodes are dealing with: being human. We were not trying to perpetuate the Star Trek franchise at that time. No one was.”
ALLAN SCOTT: “Eventually, we got to a stage where we more or less didn’t have a story that everybody could agree on and we were in very short time of our delivery date. Chris and I decided that the best thing we could do was take all the information we had absorbed from everybody, sit down and hammer something out. In fact, we first did a 15 or 20-page story in a three-day time period. I guess amendments were made to that in light of Gene and Phil’s recommendations, but already we were at a stage by then that the situation was desperate if we were going to make the movie according to the schedule that was given to us. We made various amendments, wrote the script, went to the studio with it and they turned it down.”
PHILIP KAUFMAN: “I still remember the night when I was getting very close, I was then writing and I stayed up all night, but I knew I had a great story. I remember how shaky I was trying to stand up from my writing table and I called Rose, my wife, and I said, ‘I’ve got it, I really know this story,’ and right then the phone rang. It was Jerry Isenberg saying the project’s been canceled. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘They said there’s no future in science fiction,’ which is the greatest line: there is no future in science fiction. About two or three months after Star Trek was canceled, Star Wars was released and then shortly thereafter, Close Encounters came out. It turned out there was a future in science fiction after all.”