The first time l heard Gene`s voice l was walking on the lot,
having delivered the first draft of my very first script,
and l was coming in for notes,
typical thing for a freelancer to do.
And as l walked into the building l hear this booming voice that says,
``There aren`t enough aliens in this show.``
That`s my introduction to Gene Roddenberry.
Call your shot.
Point to a star.
One great blast and the crowd rises.
A brand-new era in astrophysics...
..postponed 196 years...
..on account of rain.
That speech got me a job on Star Trek because Rick Berman loved baseball
and everybody loved that speech.
And when Gene said, ``There aren`t enough aliens on this show.``
``l want the scientist to be an alien,``
l thought, ``There goes the baseball speech.``
Aliens are not going to talk about baseball.
And Rick was marvellous.
He was so diplomatic with Gene in that meeting.
l was tongue-tied and l was nervous,
but Rick sort of manoeuvred our way through it
till we got him to approve the fact that this guy would be a human,
the baseball speech remained, l got the job and here l am.
My episode, Evolution, which was about nanites,
was the only script that everybody had a consensus that they liked it.
Gene and Rick came to me and said,
``You obviously know how to write this series.``
``Do you want to run the writing staff?`` And there l was.
When Michael came in at the beginning of the third season
there were no scripts ready to produce.
We were immediately behind schedule.
We had a terrible situation.
We had no stories that had been approved, no scripts,
it was already the third episode that was in production
and l had nothing for next week.
Michael just went to the task of organising everything
and getting everybody working on scripts.
l said, ``l want to see every piece of material that`s there.``
``Anything that`s been abandoned,
anything that might give me an idea of what to do.``
The one characteristic about Michael that l found the most admirable
is that he always gives new, young writers
a shot to get their foot in the door.
Somebody showed me a script by a young guy named Ron Moore.
lt was called The Bonding. lt was very rough,
but it had a great idea at the core of it
about a kid who created a duplicate of his dead mother
in the holodeck.
So l took it to Gene and he said, ``You know, this won`t work.``
l said, ``Why not?`` He said, ``Because in the 24th century
children don`t mourn the death of their parents.``
``Death is a part of life.``
l`m all alone now, sir.
On the Starship Enterprise, no one is alone.
No one.
Ultimately, that discussion yielded an entirely different approach,
saying, ``Alright, what if this kid did not mourn the death of a parent?``
That`s about as weird an idea as you can come up with. That`s strange.
ln order for him to give up the duplicate of his mother,
Troi must get to him and make him feel something
for the loss of his mother.
Gene loved that idea, embraced it,
and we had a much more interesting episode
than if we had done it the original way.
lt`s time for this to end.
lt`s not real, and it`s over now.
We`ll be happy together, Jeremy.
No.
One of the things l`m proudest of about my contribution to Star Trek
is all the young writers that l helped bring into it.
Michael was the one who created the open-submission policy,
where anybody could submit a script to Star Trek
even if they didn`t have an agent or a lawyer or a manager.
We were the only show in the entire city of Hollywood
that would take speculative material by amateurs,
as long as they were willing to sign a release form.
We started getting thousands of script submissions,
which it was my job to keep track of.
One was from a writer, René Echevarria,
who was a waiter in New York, l believe,
and it has this great idea about Data having a daughter.
- You`re new here, aren`t you? - Yes.
Lal! Put him down.
Commander, what are your intentions toward my daughter?
Your daughter?
The script that he wrote, all on his own, was a pretty solid script.
l liked the idea. The problem was it was all about the guest star.
One of the fundamental rules l have
is that the guest star must be the catalyst
to tell stories about our people because our people are the heroes.
Our job was to figure out a way to make it Data`s story.
When we did that`s when it came together.
We must strive to be more than we are, Lal.
l learned today that humans like to hold hands.
lt is a symbolic gesture of affection.
ln year three we seemed to hit a good stride on the show,
both with the writers and the actors, who were by that time
comfortable with their characters.
They were looking at ways to evolve their characters
and get greater depth.
Also in visual effects we were hitting our stride
because we were learning ways to accomplish the volume of work we had
in a more reasonable fashion.
- Mr Data. - Shields holding.
Photon torpedoes ready.
Dispersal pattern Sierra.
And fire.
Yesterday`s Enterprise was a huge episode.
Even though technically it was almost entirely
on board the Enterprise,
we had to do redresses on every single set.
lt was the first opportunity for me
to do a fairly big motion-control show
and create the rift in time-space,
for which we used elements of liquid nitrogen
and wrapped it in various electronic widgets to create it into cones.
For the Enterprise-C, because it was an older ship,
l thought it appropriate for the instruments
to be of an older era of Starfleet vessel.
For The Next Generation, whenever we had an older vessel,
l tried to use the colours and styles of the Enterprise-A
from the Star Trek feature films.
All the pieces worked together. lt had a great score.
lt was very well directed.
lt was good chemistry all around.
Q just appeared on the bridge of the Enterprise
being punished by the Q continuum
and having his powers taken away.
l went down on the set and did some sketches about where things would be.
John DeLancie came in and he was really game for the whole sequence.
l guess the most outrageous special effect for me
was standing naked in front of a blue screen
for half a dozen hours waving my hands in hula-hula style
while actually they were twisting that image sideways
so as to look like l was levitating in space.
He jumped up and was ready to go
and we all had a great time making sure that
Patrick`s figure was properly blocking all those areas.
Red alert.
There was a scene where they were in caves,
so, remembering a favourite shot from Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
we had them walking around on blue screen or partial sets,
and then, on a paint system, freehand paint with an electronic stylus,
cave extensions.
Richard James won an Emmy for Sins of the Father,
which was a spectacular episode.
lt`s a first look at the Klingon Homeworld
and it really launched the character of Worf.
We`d never been to the Klingon planet before until that episode.
We had seen Klingon ships,
but we`d not seen Klingon architecture.
That was a proposal for the grand hall.
That`s what we built and that`s the one l won the Emmy for.
Richard James wanted to give the ship a very organic look,
so we worked with Greg Jein,
who actually built a model that was partly based on a peach pit.
For the interior, Richard had this great idea of using spray foam.
lt gave the ship a very organic look. You didn`t have angles.
lt leant itself to the final revelation
that the spacecraft was a living being.
You have shown me wonders l could never have imagined
and l am grateful to you beyond words.
For a typical Star Trek Next Gen model
we only had about three to four weeks to do each one,
sometimes a little less, depending upon what they were.
When the series got a go, they decided they needed a smaller model
so they could get their camera back further and make it disappear faster.
lt was also decided at that point
that they would have more detail on the ship,
and the model that we handled down here was about four feet long
and it had more surface detail so lights would create shadows
across the details on the surface.
Now, l have here the pattern for the nacelle.
lf you play it through the light you can see the detail scribed into it.
lt`s also cast so that this area is a translucent plastic
so the neon would show through it and be diffused.
Now, this is a big difference from the lLM size,
which was this big.
So you can see the differences in the two ships.
To simulate the damage on the Enterprise-C
we used a lot of the leftover pyro we had from the Fourth of July
like firecrackers and smoke pots
and scorched the surface rather than paint it on.
They wanted a model that didn`t look made of something else.
Rick Sternbach had a really nice design.
lt was a nice challenge to kind of go back
and work up the Enterprise-C
as a melding of Picard`s Galaxy-Class ship
and the Ex celsior.
Andy Probert had worked up
a sketch of a blend of those two ships.
So l fleshed out the design work.
Greg Jein got involved in building the miniature.
You could see the evolution of the Enterprise
from B to C to D.
l got involved with Star Trek
in an interesting and quite different way
of being chosen to compose music.
The producers requested tapes for some different musical directions.
At the time l was doing lots of features and documentaries.
l had done a collection of documentaries
for the Jacques Cousteau specials
and there was a lot of underwater alien-jellyfish kind of things
with whales and things of that sort.
There must have been something in the tape that was presented
that sounded like it could be from space.
My space just happened to be underwater
as opposed to up in the different quadrants of the universe.
So l wrote this very grandiose music.
The process of doing a Star Trek is
while the music and sound-effects people are working
the visual-effects people are working simultaneously,
so we never really get to see what they do
until the moment when we bring it on stage
and score it with the orchestra.
So this grandiose-looking thing comes out sort of looking like a rock
and had this huge big music for it and it just was over the top.
l had one guy who was just...
He was playing the whales.
We use synthesisers and they sample various things,
so we press a key and you get a whale playing a G-sharp.
A lot of the organic sound of the Tin Man planet,
or whatever it really was, came from a combination of my whales
and the sound designer`s...
Supposedly he held a microphone to his stomach
and listened to his juices inside
make these sort of organic, wishy-washy sounds.
Star Trek was done traditionally.
The music wasn`t really reactive.
They liked the sound of the whales,
and in the very last flyaway moment of the Enterprise
going off to another place in space,
l recapped a tiny little bit of the whale theme.
l was off into my career in space.
When Michael Piller came on staff at the beginning of the third season
he would frequently call Rick Sternbach and myself
asking for suggestions as to how the ship would work here
or what the technical ramifications of that might be
or asking how technically credible we thought something might be.
Certainly we`d done that a lot for writers prior to that,
but there was a point where he started calling us quite regularly
and Michael, being the very gracious person that he is,
offered to give us a screen credit and we said, ``Cool.``
For example, earlier in the season was Evolution,
where Wesley created the nanites.
They needed a way to eradicate them.
We realised that, for what the script called for,
simple gamma rays would do it.
lt would be technically credible, it`d be equipment they should have...
So just to put that familiar word in there was a very small change
but one that gave it a bit more technical credibility.
Michael Piller is an excellent storyteller.
He came into it with not a great knowledge of science fiction
but a great willingness to listen and to learn.
Michael Piller had great respect for the integrity of the universe.
He understood that this isn`t silly science fiction but a period piece.
lt`s an invented period
but you need to observe the traditions, continuity and styles.
He immersed himself in it
and l think that`s one of the reasons why he did such a good job.
A writer
is very much like
the captain on a starship,
facing the unknown.
When you face the blank page
and you have no idea where you`re going, it can be terrifying,
but it also could be the adventure of a lifetime.
And if you can bring that kind of energy to your work,
then l think you are going to be writing some exciting material.
l just think that we did some great television,
entertaining television.
l`m proud my name is on it
and l`m very proud of the writers l brought in
to understand that great stories are about moral and ethical dilemmas
and that in essence
the writers who write about the universe of Star Trek
are really exploring the human condition.
Data, l`ve decided to give you something very, very special.
lf you intend to make me human, Q...
No, no, no. l would never curse you by making you human.
Think of it... as a going-away present.
Data, why are you laughing?
l do not know.