David's Reviews > Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Inside the Art and Visual Effects

I just finished reading “Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Inside the Art & Visual Effects” (2020, Titan Books) by Jeff Bond and Gene Kozicki. I highly recommend this book for both fans of Star Trek (the 1979 film specifically) and also for aficionados of how motion picture visual special effects are made (or, at least, were made on now classic films like this).

This is a very nice “coffee table” type book with the requisite ample supply of nice big photos (conceptual art, photos of technicians creating the Enterprise, V’ger, Klingon battlecruiser, and other shooting models, pictures of the actors on set, etc.).

This is a nice history of the entire project, the art and visual effects needed to bring the first Star Trek movie to theaters (reviving the franchise and setting the visual tone for all Star Trek film and television projects to follow even to today).

Included in this history is the well known events (well known to Star Trek fans, that is) of how one visual effects studio was hired at the start of production (Jack Abel & Associates) only to be fired after not being able to produce any useable visual effects sequences on film after a year of work and after spending millions of dollars of the film’s budget.

“Star Wars” visual effects veterans Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra then had to be brought in the create nearly all of the movie’s visual effects in only six months or so (the studio having an ironclad contract with the major movie theater chains as to when the movie would come out, a date that could not be changed without losing millions of dollars in fees). Trumbull’s and Dykstra’s companies had to work around the clock shifts to get all of the work completed in time and the finished film was “still wet” as they say when delivered for the big premiere in Washington, D.C. on December 6, 1979.

The book begins, however, with how the project initially began life as an earlier film script in 1976 titled “Star Trek: Planet of the Titans” and then a planned hour long weekly television series titled “Star Trek: Phase II”. A lot of conceptual art had been created for both of these projects and actual physical studio models and interior Enterprise sets had been constructed for the television series when that idea was then scrapped in favor of a film again (thanks largely to the success of both “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”).

The level of technical detail is high enough to explain how various scenes were shot and the technical challenges that had to be overcome, but not so much as to be overwhelming to most of us readers who are laymen to the film and television visual effects trade.

Also very interesting is learning about scenes that were originally envisaged differently from what was shot and, even more so, entire sequences that were shot but weren’t used in the film (like an entire chapter about the shooting of the “Memory Wall” sequence that would have seen both Spock *and* Kirk enter into the inner chambers of the V’ger spaceship in their EVA suits and Kirk get attacked by V’ger’s defenses. Shot practically on a stage over the course of several days, the practical effects (Shatner and Nimoy hanging from wires, the “antibodies” that would swarm and cover Shatner, etc, just wasn’t working as originally envisaged. (This was while Abel was still doing the visual effects.) They decided to scrap this and when Trumbull and Dykstra took over they (I can’t remember which) decided to go in an entirely different direction, the one we see in the finished movie of only Spock entering into V’ger and witnessing its psychedelic light show.

The last chapter in the book looks at how director Robert Wise became involved in revisiting “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” for the Director’s Cut DVD release in 2001. Doing so enabled them to go back and redo some of the visual effects sequences for the DVD as they had originally been envisaged (but which they were unable to achieve in 1979 for various reasons, mostly a lack of time due to the film’s preset release date and the rush to get everything done in time).

Again, highly recommended. The authors conducted new interviews with as many of the relevant individuals as possible and quoted (with permission) from Preston Neal Jones’ book, “Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (2014) (another book that I’m still in the process of reading) for interview quotes with those important to the subject who are no longer living.

I checked this book out from the public library (after asking them to buy a copy) but this is one book that I will eventually have to get a copy of my own.