20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
9. Jeffrey Katzenberg Told Robert Collins He Would Never Replace Him—While Negotiating With Robert Wise
When the first Star Trek movie was still being planned as a movie-of-the-week, Robert Collins—a writer and director with credits including The Invaders, Police Story, and Marcus Welby, M.D.—was brought on board to helm the project.
Collins worked on Star Trek and the script for “In Thy Image” for several months, and during this period had his mind blown by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which he saw alongside Gene Roddenberry at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.
As the project changed from an $8 million television pilot into a $20 million theatrical feature, however, Collins felt his days were numbered. In 1977, he had no feature film credits to his name and had never worked on a project with so much at stake for the studio. Nevertheless, when he called Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and asked if he was being replaced, Katzenberg told him, “No, Bob, never. Take my word for it, Bob. Trust me.”
In fact, when Collins made that call, Paramount was already negotiating with Robert Wise to take over the project. However, there was one small problem: Collins and Wise had the same agent, who of course told Collins he was being replaced. Said Collins later:
I laughed about that for a while. I knew it would happen sooner or later, but I was more angry about the way it happened. I could understand them wanting someone else when the budget escalated, but I wish they would have been nicer about it and said, ‘Look, these are the facts of the situation.’