New Treat for Trekkies

Starship Enterprise and crew are coming out of drydock

An elevator opens into deep space. A familiar trio steps onto a starship wing. One actor has pointed ears. Another, raised to admiral's rank since his last mission, walks with familiar jut-jawed rectitude. A third shuffles toward the wing's edge with the rumpled calm of a country doctor. A beautiful woman, all the more striking because she has no hair, and a young flight officer stare straight ahead. When the cameras stop rolling, a makeup aide moves in to slap some goo on the woman's head--she shaves twice a day to avoid 5 o'clock shadow--while the men lean over the platform's railing to talk to onlookers below. "Does anyone have a prayer?" quips William Shatner, a.k.a. Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise. "We certainly have . . . the wing."

In real life that wing and prayer belong to Paramount studios, which has budgeted $20 million for a flashy film revival of Star Trek, the unkillable TV series. Its hope is that the show's fans, known for their legendary loyalty, will flock to the theaters next Christmas in Trekkie-breaking numbers.

Since the series ended, Captain (now Admiral) Kirk has been kicked upstairs to dull desk duty, Mr. Spock has settled on his native Vulcan, and "Bones" McCoy has become a bearded country doctor. The Enterprise itself is in drydock. Suddenly a Starfleet monitoring station spots an immense alien "force" speeding toward earth at "warp seven" speed, making nasty noises and devouring spaceships like popcorn. Out of drydock comes the Enterprise, and Kirk is returned to its command.

Enter the familiar multiethnic crew, some with new assignments: Chief Engineer Scott, Helmsman Sulu, Communications Officer Uhura, Security Chief Chekov, Doctor Chapel and Transporter Chief Janice Rand. They will be joined by the Enterprise's new captain, Willard Decker (Stephen Collins), who is naturally annoyed at being bumped to No. 2, and Navigator Ilia (Persis Khambatta), the bald beauty from the planet Delta.

The most important character to watch, in true Star Trek tradition, is the villain. Star Trek Creator Eugene Roddenberry, 57, is famous for introducing horrible monsters who are searching for a little understanding to make them un-horrible. While the film's script is under tight lock and key, it is safe to speculate, as does Actor Leonard Nimoy, the pointy-eared Mr. Spock, "that we eventually find our antagonist is searching as well." At first the Enterprise will be fighting what looks like a cloud of electrically charged whipped cream, but the monster is hiding its true nature. "It is the same as any mystery story," Director Robert Wise told TIME Correspondent James Willwerth. "Something's out there in the dark prowling around. You can't see it, but you keep getting horrible reports."

For years, of course, Paramount has been getting just the opposite news about Star Trek's box-office potential. The show was dreamed up by Roddenberry in 1966, because he thought that science fiction might provide a persuasive way of telling a hopeful, and presumably profitable, vision of history. Says he: "It seemed to me that if I had a ship, a home base, I could take it out and make any kind of comment I wanted to."

Despite his best work, however, the ratings were mediocre, and Star Trek was canceled after three years. The Trekkie phenomenon did not begin until the series went into syndication, and almost a decade later it shows no signs of abating. A Star Trek directory lists 19 pages of fan clubs, including some whose only members are grandmothers and others that concern themselves with the show's most minor characters, such as Mr. Spock's bride, who has had all of five lines. More than 50 books, not counting graduate theses, have been written, and a Detroit station has been running the program every day for nine years. In honor of the show, the White House even renamed the new space shuttle Enterprise.

Prompted by all this unexpected success, Paramount scheduled a low-budget movie several years ago. Then, when Star Wars hit, the studio returned to the project at a speed approaching warp seven. The new movie will have an expensive layering of special effects. Optics Wizard Robert Abel has been hired to give that cloud of electric whipped cream a throbbing, ominous personality. "It's so big you can't make a model of it," he hints vaguely. "It's so awesome, so powerful and has so many unique identities . . ." When the monster first appears, audiences will see a surface Abel has constructed out of filmed layers of highspeed light streaking, chemically milled metal, animation, liquid crystal and half a dozen other gimmicks.

In its earlier life Star Trek was produced for $186,000 per show. Stars were holes punched in black paper, the crew was beamed in and out of the ship with simple light tricks, and the instrument boards were plywood. Whole shows were done on one set to save money. "I'd have blown my whole budget landing that big mother of a ship each week," Roddenberry says. These days he has a problem of affluence: how to update and add the newest wrinkles in special effects without losing "the elements that really count."

Trekkies will notice that the Enterprise bridge has an extra door and that the crew wears sleek new uniforms. The computer terminal is so complicated that the actors had to be given instruction manuals. Bones McCoy's clinic is updated, and the ship is constructed of gleaming metal. The Trekkies, of course, will be the movie's best friends and severest critics. Roddenberry guesses that there are 10 million "hardcore" fans, along with kids and kooks, such well-known names as Senator Barry Goldwater and Science-Fiction Author Robert Heinlein.

The movie has not come any too soon for most of the Enterprise's crew, which was virtually typecast out of existence. Residuals were not commonly given to actors a decade ago. DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), an actor for nearly 30 years, simply went home. "I sort of pulled in my horns," he grimaces, "and let it roll by. We've gone through all the aches and pains of being in a hit series without being compensated for it." Where is all the TV syndication money going? Don't ask Roddenberry, who nearly went broke. "As of my last statement," he says, "I'm told that Star Trek has yet to make a profit."

Ironically, the series' most visible characters, Shatner and Nimoy, have succeeded at maintaining parallel careers. Shatner stays active in summer stock and makes $5,000 plus for an appearance at a Star Trek convention. Leonard Nimoy, who can currently be seen as the sinister psychologist in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, will soon take to the road with Vincent, a one-man show based on the life of Van Gogh. Both actors are puzzled by the Star Trek phenomenon. "Frankly, I can't get a grip on what has happened," says Shatner. "I'll see a 60-year-old grandmother holding a six-year-old child, and both are fans. The whole thing has an air of unreality."

Just how a new version of an old, if farsighted, television series will be treated at the box office next Christmas is also a puzzling question. Despite the immense success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, science-fiction movies are often a fragile film commodity whose only sure audiences are cult enthusiasts. To make a profit, Star Trek must reach out far beyond them. Monsters aside, that may be the most difficult enterprise confronting the creators of the starship Enterprise.

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