Star (Trek) Struck

For some time now, I'd been aware of a trilogy of non-fiction books by author Marc Cushman about the original Star Trek television series. In These Are the Voyages, Cushman chronicled the production of those classic episodes (one book for each of the three seasons), and I'd long wanted to get around to reading them. I hadn't exactly made a high priority of it, as I'd imagined there wasn't much left to be told about the making of Star Trek that I hadn't heard at some point.

It turns out I was wrong. Cushman conducted a number of new interviews for his books, and was granted access to production files and old papers. He dove truly deep, and indeed found plenty of stories to be told that really had not been told before. I've now finished his first volume, dedicated to season one of the original series, and I definitely plan to continue on to the other two books.

Cushman really gets into how the sausage was made. He writes all about the courting of established science fiction writers for the show, the pitch process for ideas, and the writing and re-writing (and re-re-writing) of scripts. There might be occasional exaggeration about the quality of some of the lesser episodes of that season, but there's no varnishing of the conflict behind the scenes in making them. You read about open clashes clashes between Gene Roddenberry and both the writers and the key network executive assigned to the show. You read about more passive-aggressive wars waged in memos and in open letters to trade publications. There are noble moments where praise and credit are given where they're due, but there's certainly no suggestion that creating utopia on the screen was anything like a utopia behind the scenes.

Cushman's research is so deep that he does at times get bogged down in minute details. He provides the exact completion date of every single draft of every single script of the season. He tells you the exact end time of each day of filming on every episode, whether something interesting happened that day or not. He lists the money spent on each episode, to the dollar. This sort of detail can be a bit much, as can the thorough historical context he provides for each episode's production. (Yes, it's interesting to think that The Monkees were the pinnacle of pop culture at the time the first season was being filmed. It's not so interesting to be told for the 12th time that "I'm a Believer" was the number one song on the charts as filming began on an episode.)

Still, microscopic detail and all, I found myself sucked into this book in a big way. Knowing that it was going to be broken in separate chapters for each of the 29 first season episodes produced (not to mention additional chapters covering the selling of the show, major shifts in production, and more), I assumed it would be something I'd read intermittently. When I didn't feel like committing to a long chapter of a novel one night, I'd read an easy chapter about the making of Star Trek instead. But Cushman's account swallowed me whole -- I read it without any interjections along the way.

Things got less rosy for Star Trek after the first season. The troubled third season is particularly notorious for the drop in quality and the marginalization of Gene Roddenberry after one too many fights with the network. I'll be curious to read Cushman's other two books on seasons two and three, to learn what more there is to know than I do now. If this first book is any indication, it'll be quite a bit.

You'd have to be a major Star Trek fan to want to read this, but you'll love it if you are and do. I give These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One an A-.