20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
7. Jeffrey Katzenberg Proposed An Ending That Was More Directly Religious
In late June of 1978, about six weeks before the start of principal photography, Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg offered his own take on the ending of the movie, which was still in flux and would not be firmly settled on for many months thereafter.
We know this because of a surviving memo dated June 20, 1978 in which associate producer Jon Povill (a carryover from the abandoned Star Trek II television series and a close associate of Gene Roddenberry) forcefully objected to Katzenberg’s proposed ending.
According to Povill’s memo, this ending had a much more religious bent than what was eventually filmed. In Katzenberg’s version, once V’Ger learns that humanity is responsible for its creation, it “suddenly adopts Judeo-Christian values...and [flies] off in search of our God.” But before the super-powered probe rides off into the sunset in search of an awfully Western European version of the supreme being, it completes its mission and transmits the sum total of its vast knowledge to Earth.
This put Povil in the awkward position of arguing that Katzenberg’s proposed denouement was too cerebral—ironic, given the fact that Roddenberry often complained that NBC rejected his original pilot proposal back in 1964 for the same reason. Wrote Povill:
I can see no emotional catharsis resulting from being handed a volume of information that must be depicted as being beyond the grasp of both our characters and our audience.
A Star Trek movie about finding God would have to wait until William Shatner took the reins on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989). Given the results of that movie, perhaps it is best that Katzenberg’s proposed ending was not seriously pursued.