Excerpted from:
The Making of Star Trekby Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry
Ballantine Books, New York, 1968
Pg. 78 to 84
During the rest of the summer and into the early fall of 1964, major effort was devoted to the following principal areas: development of the shooting script that would be submitted to NBC for approval; research aimed at developing and verifying the scientific validity of the technology that Star Trek would express; finalizing the design of the U.S.S. Enterprise; and designing, on paper, the sets that would be required for the pilot.
Among those who were first to join the growing nucleus of Star Trek staff members and crew were Pato Guzman and Matt Jefferies. Pato is a volatile Chilean and a man of exceptional creative ability as an art director. Mat Jefferies, assigned to the show as the assistant art director, is an equally creative designer, with a background that suited him well to the series. He is an experienced pilot, a member of the Aviation Writers Society, a nationally acknowledged aviation historian, and has an educational background in areas of aeronautical engineering.
Matt Jefferies' first meeting with Roddenberry came on the same day he returned from a thirty-day vacation. He had been working on the "Ben Casey" series and expected to pick up where he had left off prior to his vacation. To his surprise, he was told that he would not go back to the "Casey" series. A man named Roddenberry would be in his office about ten that morning and would explain the new show that Matt would be working on.
About 10:00 A.M. Gene came in, accompanied by Herb Solow (At the time, Herb Solow was assistant to Oscar Katz at Desilu. Later, when Katz left Desilu, Solow was promoted to Vice President in Charge of Television Production. Even in Star Trek's darkest moments Solow was a staunch ally.) After introductions, Gene quickly outlined what the series would be all about, saying, "We're a hundred and fifty or maybe two hundred years from now. Out in deep space, on the equivalent of a cruiser-size spaceship. We don't know what the motive power is, but I don't want to see any trails of fire. No streaks of smoke, no jet intakes, rocket exhaust, or anything like that. We're not going to Mars, or any of that sort of limited thing. It will be like a deep-space exploration vessel, operating throughout our galaxy. We'll be going to stars and planets that nobody has named yet." He then got up and, as he started for the door, turned and said, "I don't care how you do it, but make it look like it's got power."
Matt Jefferies couldn't believe he'd heard it right. Someone had just walked in and casually, matter-of-factly, asked for the almost impossible. Even our own scientists hadn't been able to come up with a design such as he'd just heard described.
According to Matt, the Enterprise design was arrived at by a process of elimination. "For years I had been collecting material on space exploration and activities from friends of mine in companies like North American, Douglas, NASA, and TRW. After Roddenberry's visit I brought all that stuff to the studio, along with everything else we could get our hands on. We pinned the stuff up on the wall and said, 'This we will
not do.' We wanted to establish a basis of design to work from, but we didn't want the Enterprise to look like something currently planned for our space program. We knew that by the time the show got on the air, this type of thing would be old hat. We had to go further than even the most advanced space scientists were thinking.
"We also drew on a lot of research material on Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Again we said, 'This we will not do.' There have been a lot of things that took place in those comic strips that have proven out today, but pictorially we felt they were hokey. They used a lot of air-foil fins and rocket tube-like shapes that had no feeling of practicality or necessity. Roddenberry insisted everything be believable. We had to base it all on fairly solid scientific concepts, project it into the future, and try to visualize what the fourth, fifth, or tenth generation of present-day equipment would be like. So, working within those limits, Pato and I sat down and began to sketch out ideas. When we had about two walls covered with these sketches, we called Roddenberry in and he looked them over. Damn it but he can be irritating. He liked only a piece of this one or a small part of that one, but none of our ideas had what he really was looking for. So we did twenty-some more designs, using the few elements he had said he liked.
"Again we called him in. This time people from the sales department came with him, as well as people from the production office, and Harvey Lynn from the Rand Corporation. Again the designs were narrowed down to four or five things he liked. We started the process all over again.
"By the third time around we had two sheets of eight or ten drawings, plus a half dozen good-sized renderings. One of them was the beginning of the design finally chosen and one that I liked very much... an upper, saucer-shaped hull, a cigar-shaped lower hull, and two engine pods. Before calling
everyone in again, I did a little fast model building. I went down to the mill [woodworking shop], grabbed a couple of chunks of wood, and had the men turn out a saucer shape on a lathe. In about thirty-five or forty minutes I had a model. We hung it up on a piece of thread and then called everyone in. Oddly enough, the original model was hung upside down as opposed to the way we use it now.
"Based on that model and the color rendering I had prepared for it, Roddenberry felt we were on the right track. We wound up shortening the main pylon strut and made a few other little changes and then sat down to do some scale drawings."
All else has followed...
Chaos
Topic: O.T. Matt Jefferies Passed Away (Read 1925 times)