Ralph McQuarrie & The Canceled Star Trek Movie
A lot has been said about McQuarrie’s work on Star Wars since his passing this week but in 1976, he was also part of a failed attempt to make a big screen version of Star Trek.



George Lucas is a good friend of mine, he told me before he made Star Wars to be bought. I thought George had a great thing going. When I was asked if I would be interested in doing Star Trek, well...I felt I could go through the roofHaving a director who is very excited about a project is obviously a bonus but if you are planning on making a Star Trek movie, fans would expect the original cast to also be on board. All signed up but Leonard Nimoy proved stubborn. After the show was canceled in 1969, Nimoy had spent a lot of time distancing himself from Star Trek due to the fear of being type cast. As the image of Mr Spock become more and more iconic, he found it difficult to separate himself from the character in the eyes of the public. Also, he was not happy with the way Gene Roddenberry and the marketing team at Paramount exploited his image for which he felt he was not properly compensated. An example being the famous Heineken billboard poster that showed Spocks ears being aroused by beer.


We were dealing with important things, things that George has a smattering of in Star Wars. We were dealing a lot with Olaf Stapledon. There were chapters in Last and First Men that I was basing Star Trek on. That was my key thing. Gene and I disagreed on what the nature of a feature film really is. He was still bound by the things that he had been forced into by lack of money and by the fact that those times they were not into science fiction the way they are now. Gene has a very set way of looking at things. My feeling always was that he was anchored in a 10-year-old TV show which would not translate for a feature audience, ten years later with all that had been done and could potentially be done in a feature scope. For years I had walked around San Francisco with George Lucas talking about what he was doing. I knew what the potential of this kind of stuff was.' Perhaps most shocking to him was the feeling that Paramount canceled the film because of the success of STAR WARS, which was released in May of 1977, and the belief that they had blown their opportunity at the box office. 'They didn't even wait to see what Star Wars would do,' Kaufman said incredulously. 'I don't think they tried to understand what the phenomenon of Star Trek was.It is clear that Kaufman had a passion for the project but it might have blinded him to the obvious flaws in the storyline. He was trying to make a much deeper science fiction film in the same mould as 2001: A Space Odyssey and he might have succeeded but its difficult to see how as the story isnt very good. After Paramount pulled the plug on the Titans script, Kaufman came up with an idea for a Star Trek film that would have had Spock in command of his own ship and going head to head against a Klingon played by Japanese star Toshiro Mifune. But Paramount shelved that idea too, just weeks before the release of Star Wars. Kaufman explains -
My version was really built around Leonard Nimoy as Spock and Toshiro Mifune as his Klingon nemesis... My idea was to make it less "cult-ish", and more of an adult movie, dealing with sexuality and wonders rather than oddness; a big science fiction movie, filled with all kinds of questions, particularly about the nature of Spock's -exploring his humanity and what humanness was. To have Spock and Mifune's character tripping out in outer space. I'm sure the fans would have been upset, but I felt it could really open up a new type of science fiction.Again, I cant see this idea working or being popular with anybody although Mifune would have made an awesome Klingon. And the idea of Spock tripping out (be it actually or metaphorically) isnt very appealing. Going back to where I started, Ralph McQuarrie did come up with some amazing illustrations for how the Titan film might have looked. Most notably is the design of the new Enterprise, which clearly has been drawn with a Star Wars pencil and wouldnt look out of place in that universe. A couple of study models were made of McQuarries designs for the Enterprise and ended up being used in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock as well as in TNGs Best of Both Worlds and Unification Part 1. Because of this, they became officially part of Star Trek cannon.


