Star Trek: Planet of the Titans
Various reasons have been cited for the cancellation, including regime change at Paramount, and that executives thought they had missed their window due to Star Wars' imminent release, believing science fiction fans would not pay to see two such films.
Roddenberry pursued the project and invited several others to submit story and script ideas, including his personal assistant Jon Povill, as well as writers Robert Silverberg, John D. F. Black and Harlan Ellison.
Upon arriving at the last known location, they find no other ship, but Captain James T. Kirk is struck by electromagnetic waves and leaves the Enterprise in a shuttlecraft.
The ship emerges in orbit of Earth during the Paleolithic era, and the crew teach early man to make fire, in effect playing the role of Prometheus the Titan themselves,[6] similar to the alien influence on human ancestors in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
[7] Planet of the Titans also explored the concept of the third eye,[8] and was later compared to the appearance of the Greek Gods in the original series episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?".
[9] After Bryant and Scott departed the project, director Philip Kaufman tried to rewrite the story, with the resulting treatment heavily inspired by Olaf Stapledon's books Last and First Men (1930) and Star Maker (1937).
Kaufman explained that it would have featured the two undergoing a psychedelic experience, and summed it up by saying, "I'm sure the fans would have been upset, but I felt it could really open up a new type of science fiction.
In July 1976, Jerry Isenberg was assigned to be executive producer of the new film, and the British writing team of Bryant and Scott were hired in September.
[3] Jon Povill wrote up a list of possible directors for the project, which included Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Robert Wise, but all were busy at the time or unwilling to work with a $7.5 million budget.
Roddenberry introduced him to the series by showing him ten episodes, including those he felt were the most representative and popular of the series: "The City on the Edge of Forever", "The Devil in the Dark", "Amok Time", "Journey to Babel", "Shore Leave", "The Trouble with Tribbles", "The Enemy Within", "The Corbomite Maneuver", "This Side of Paradise" and "A Piece of the Action".
[3] However, Leonard Nimoy dropped out of the film[5] because he was concerned over potential merchandising after his likeness as Spock was used in a Heineken advertisement without either his permission or an arrangement for royalties.
Fans organized a mail campaign that flooded the White House with 400,000 letters, influencing President Gerald Ford to rechristen the Space Shuttle Constitution to Enterprise.
[13] Bryant and Scott's proposal became the first accepted by the studio in October; Roddenberry immediately stopped work on other projects to refocus on Star Trek, and the screenwriters and producers were swamped with grateful fan mail.
The elation was short-lived; the first draft of the completed script was not finished until March 1, 1977, and pressure was mounting for Paramount to either begin production or cut its losses and cancel the project.
His concepts include images of the Enterprise saucer module separated from the rest of the vessel (later associated with the Enterprise-D in the TNG era), an element which had been mentioned in The Original Series but never seen on screen.
[note 1] Other McQuarrie works included various interiors and exteriors of the Enterprise, shuttlecraft concepts, planetary landing facilities, and an inhabited asteroid featuring a space dock.
[17] Crude study models of at least two of the Enterprise concepts were constructed, and these were utilized as background elements in shots of later productions, including in the spacedock in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, as a shipwreck in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Best of Both Worlds", and as part of a reserve fleet in The Next Generation episode "Unification".
[7] It was rejected by Paramount and they departed the project in April 1977 because they found that Kaufman's and Roddenberry's ideas for the film repeatedly conflicted.
David Hughes included it in his book The Greatest Science Fiction Movies Never Made (2008) in the chapter about the planned Star Trek films of the 1970s.
