20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek⁠: The Motion Picture (1979)

Spock’s unauthorized spacewalk through the heart of V’ger was a late addition to the script, a new sequence supervised by special photographic effects director Doug Trumbull and filmed during a series of reshoots. Script pages for those reshoots are dated August 6, 1979—only four months before the movie was slated to hit theaters.

It replaced a troubled sequence called the “V’GER SPACE WALK” in the shooting schedule, but known by most fans as the “Memory Wall” sequence. Although the Memory Wall scenes have never appeared in any released version of the movie, stills from them were used for a variety of promotional purposes and a comic adaptation of the Memory Wall sequence was included in the Marvel comic version of the movie in 1979.

Construction on the massive sets built for this sequence was supervised by the Abel group (the original visual effects company that was dramatically fired and replaced by Doug Trumbull during post-production). The memory wall itself filled an entire soundstage (Paramount Stage 6) and cost $250,000. A separate trench set for the sequence cost an additional $130,000 and was built on Paramount Stage 17.

The Memory Wall itself was the second most expensive set in the movie, with only the Recreation Deck costing slightly more ($252,000). At least one of the key creative heads on the movie, production designer Harold Michelson, was not a fan:

I laid out camera angles with a viewfinder and there were only two shots you could take in the set. Wherever you went, you got the same two shots. Wherever Kirk and Spock would be would have the same background, even though it took up a whole stage.

You can build a wall five miles long and have people walking along, but every place you shoot it, it’s the same thing, so why build it? With continuity and cutting, you can build a fragment of that wall and keep shooting it so it looks like different parts of the same wall. But Abel’s set was the whole wall.

Exactly how much of the sequence was completed is an open question. In 1979, Robert Wise said, “We shot, at quite considerable expense, about half the sequence, but it was not terribly exciting.” Around the same time, visual effects photographer Dave Stewart claimed, “They had just about finished the sequence when Doug came on and looked at it, and they all discussed it thoroughly.” The shooting scheduled dated August 29, 1978 planned for seven days on the massive set. According to camera reports for the movie, they spent more than two weeks filming on the set before deciding to move on to other scenes.

Explanations for the sequence’s deletion vary. Leonard Nimoy said it was redesigned because Doug Trumbull “had a very different concept of what it should look like.” Dave Stewart blamed the design of the spacesuits and the sets, and said that the stakeholders decided the sequence was lacking narrative momentum:

Plus, they’d also decided that it just played too slowly. Because, suddenly, in the midst of all the action and getting to V’Ger and being in harm’s way, so to speak, this slowed down to a very slow, spacesuit-floating-through, investigatory type of thing.

Unit production manager Phil Rawlins blamed some of the reverse photography effects that were tried with the V’ger antibodies that attack Kirk:

Some of the antibodies that attack Kirk were supposed to be put in later optically, but they had these eight-sided little things on strings, and we ran cameras backwards trying to pull them off so that they’d look like they were sticking on him, but it just didn’t work. It was a disaster. We shot, I think, two weeks on that sequence and it was completely thrown out of the picture.