Star Trek scripts from Roddenberry.com
by Rob - November 15th, 2006.Filed under: Uncategorized.
Roddenberry.com — the company run by Gene Roddenberry’s son — has teamed up with CafePress.com to offer handsome perfect-bound volumes of the scripts for the original Star Trek. They started with a special limited-edition of “The Cage” (the original pilot, later incorporated into “The Menagerie”). I bought that, and was favorably impressed. And now I’ve bought the first two (of five) volumes of the first-season scripts. “The Cage” had been retyped on a word processor, which I guess means no clean copy of the original typewriter script still exists; it also seems that “The Cage” is no longer for sale. The scripts in volumes one and two are very clean copies of the original typed versions.
I’m enjoying the heck out of these. These scripts date back to the era when writers tried to direct on the page (“Close up on Kirk. Kirk’s eyebrows go up. Two shot: Kirk and Spock …”). No one writes scripts like that anymore; directors hate it when writers try to compose shots. But it’s fascinating to see how much of what we saw on screen, including a lot of the subtleties in the acting, WAS indeed in the scripts. Plus there’s lots of little bits that were cut, or changed (like a long opening narration by Kirk for “Where No Man Has Gone Before”).
Anyway, check ’em out here. I’m going to order all the season-one scripts, once the rest of them are released; I’ll probably stop there, since it gets kinda pricey to buy all three seasons, and what I’m particularly interested in seeing is how the stuff we came to know and love on screen was first conceptualized on the printed page (in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” there’s a great description of what a journey in a turbolift is supposed to feel and sound like, for instance). Lots of fun.