20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
5. A Time Crunch Kept Some Effects Shots From Appearing In The Movie—Even Ones That Were Finished
In an interview with Preston Neal Jones, matte artist Matthew Yuricich recalled that near the end of post-production, time was so precious that the studio put him up in a hotel room so he wouldn’t waste valuable time driving to and from home each day.
But even without the daily commute, the post-production schedule remained tight, and there simply wasn’t time to edit a few revised matte shots Yuricich completed into the movie:
One of these mattes was the Enterprise and the hexagons in the wing walk sequence. We had a nicer version, but we couldn’t get it in the picture in time. We had two or three shots that we’d fixed up for the picture, but they just didn’t make it.
Director Robert Wise similarly blamed “the time problem” for a lack of a climactic reveal of the whole of V’Ger at the end of the picture. “We never did see, in the whole picture, a complete look at V’Ger, did we? ‘That’s V’Ger.’” he told Jones. “That’s something that I’ve always regretted.”
Probably not coincidentally, a revised wing walk and a new reveal of the entirety of V’Ger were two of the major changes to the Director’s Edition of the film released on DVD in 2001.