20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
12. A Who’s Who List Of 1970s Directors Was Considered For The Movie
On June 22, 1976, associate producer Jon Povill prepared a list of potential directors for Gene Roddenberry. First, he broke out who he considered to be the top seven candidates, a list which shows the caliber of talent they were pursuing for the movie.
1. Francis Ford Coppola
2. Steven Spielberg
3. George Lucas
4. Robert Wise
5. William Friedkin
6. George Roy Hill
7. Norman Jewison
Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas were busy with production on three little films called Apocalypse Now, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, and Star Wars. Friedkin, Hill, and Jewison were all coming off of box office hits. Interestingly, Wise was the closest to falling off the A-list when this memo was sent. He had directed back-to-back critical disappointments (Two People in 1973 and The Hindenburg in 1975) and was in the middle of production on Audrey Rose (1977), which would be savaged by the critics the following year. Plus, only The Hindenburg had made any money at the box office.
Beyond the top seven candidates, Povil listed eleven more directors he thought would be worth pursuing. This list included names like Milos Forman, Sydney Pollack, and Martin Scorsese (although Povil noted that Scorsese was “probably unavailable and not really right for STAR TREK anyhow”). It also included Joseph Sargent, the only candidate with any experience directing the original series (“The Corbomite Maneuver”).
Not until J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) would Paramount hire an A-list director to helm a Star Trek movie. Nicholas Meyer was a neophyte; Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, and Jonathan Frakes were primarily actors with some television directing credits; David Carson was firmly a TV director; and Stuart Baird was primarily a film editor with only two prior directing credits.