Later this month, “Star Trek Beyond” opens, and to be totally honest, I still have zero idea what that movie is about other than I think Rihanna‘s new song saves the day or something. But regardless of how Trekkies might be feeling about the new film, it’s a good time to be a “Star Trek” fan, because even if the film is a disappointment, there’s a new TV series on the way next year, shepherded by Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal,” “Star Trek: Voyager“). So it’s easy to forget that at one time, “Star Trek” was sitting on a shelf gathering dust, but the ratings for reruns of the original, canceled series were so good, that in the mid-70s, Paramount decided to try their luck on bringing it to the big screen.
As related in an excerpt from Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman‘s upcoming “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek – The First 25 Years” in THR, the studio reached out to “Star Trek” creator Gene Rodenberry to create the movie treatment, and what he came up with is the now infamous, “The God Thing.” Essentially, the story found Captain Kirk and the gang encountering a force that claims to be God, only for it to turn out to be a living computer program (yeah, it’s bonkers).
READ MORE: Watch A New Trailer For ‘Star Trek Beyond’ With Chris Pine, Zoe Saldana & Idris Elba
William Shatner recalls the pitch Rodenberry gave him about the story.
“[Rodenberry] said, ‘First of all, we have to explain how you guys got older. So what we have to do is move everybody up in a rank. You become an admiral, and the rest of the cast become Starfleet commanders. One day a force comes toward Earth — might be God, might be the Devil — breaking everything in its path, except the minds of the starship commanders. So we gotta find all the original crewmen for the starship Enterprise, but first — where is Spock? He’s back on Vulcan, doing R & R; five-year mission, seven years of R & R. He swam back upstream. So we gotta go get him.’ So we get Spock, do battle, and it was a great story,” Shatner reflected.
Sounds reasonable, but director Richard A. Colla (“The Questor Tapes,” “Battlestar Galactica“) shares that there was more to it than that.
“Gene showed me that treatment, which was much more daring than ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture’ would be. The Enterprise went off in search of that thing from outer space that was affecting everything,” he said. “By the time they got into the alien’s presence, it manifested itself and said, ‘Do you know me?’ Kirk said, ‘No, I don’t know who you are.’ It said, ‘Strange, how could you not know who I am?’ So it shift-changed and became another image and said, ‘Do you know me?’ Kirk said, ‘No, who are you?’ It said, ‘Strange, how could you not know who I am?’ So it shift-changed and came up in the form of Christ the carpenter, and says, ‘Do you know me?’ and Kirk says, ‘Oh, now I know who you are.’ ”
And that’s just the start. Michael Jan Friedman, one of many who were tapped to write the novelization of “The God Thing” (which has never been published) recalls that the treatment just wasn’t very good, and completely outlandish.
“To the best of my recollection, I received both the script and a short narrative version of it. Naturally I jumped at the chance to translate and expand it. Gene was — and still is — one of my heroes, for God’s sake, no pun intended. As he had already left the land of the living, this was a unique opportunity to collaborate with him. But when I read the material, I was dismayed. I hadn’t seen other samples of Gene’s unvarnished writing, but what I saw this time could not possibly have been his best work,” Friedman said. “It was disjointed — scenes didn’t work together, didn’t build toward anything meaningful. Kirk, Spock and McCoy didn’t seem anything like themselves. There was some mildly erotic, midlife-crisis stuff in there that didn’t serve any real purpose. In the climactic scene, Kirk had a fistfight with an alien who had assumed the image of Jesus Christ.”
“So Kirk was slugging it out on the bridge. With Jesus,” he added. It certainly boggles the mind.
Obviously, that treatment was ditched, a new story was found, and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” launched a massive big screen run from the original cast.
“Star Trek Beyond” — which features no Jesus punching — opens on July 22nd.
