Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504940
22 FA L L 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y and for the first time in some cases, pulling out the 65mm for the first time. I was also doing behind-the-scenes features and doing interviews with him. But Star Trek was something he didn't want to talk about, and every time I brought it up, he kind of shut it down. Then, in the late '90s when we had the Star Wars special editions come out, there started to be a fad of going back [and] tinkering with movies and reissuing them. The new cut of Close Encounters came out, along with The Exorcist and Superman. Then we heard Steven Spielberg was going to do E.T. over for the 20th anniversary. "At some point, in maybe '97 or so, he suddenly said he was reading about this in the trades and said, 'If there was one movie where this really should happen, it's Star Trek.' And I just seized the opportunity and said, 'Well, if you're serious about this, Bob, why don't you go to Paramount? I think that if you really want to get back in there and recut it, look at it again, I really think you have a shot.' So, that's what he did. "He said, 'Well, I better watch the movie.' And I said, 'Okay. Do you want me to bring my LaserDisc over?' And he kind of laughed, picked up the phone, called Paramount, and said, 'I want a print of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.' Then he calls the Directors Guild of America (DGA) and says, 'I want theater number one,' on such and such date. And I was like, okay, that's how you watch a movie when you're Robert Wise! He then wrote to Sherry Lansing (Head of Paramount at the time). She said yes, and we got it going. "We went over to the DGA, and it was just the four of us. That's when we started right there on the spot talking about doing this and approaching Paramount. But later on, we did watch it at his house, had multiple viewings, and observed him working. So, this was almost a director's edition—a director's edit edition. It was really the editor of Citizen Kane coming back in a lot of ways. I watched him working and he would conduct like an orchestra conductor. He goes, 'Stop.' I'm like, 'Okay, what?' 'This is six frames shorter there.' I had no idea why but he knew. There were a lot of little micro edits done at the time. But working NTSC was very, very different from working 24 frames. "When it came time to do a television version without consulting Bob, they did a special longer version of the film, which was the ABC television version. They put back about 12 minutes of scenes. Paramount decided to make that television version of The Motion Picture available for home entertainment. That's when they did the special longer version on home video. That pan and scan version of the movie remained the only version available of the picture for many years. Many people fell in love with the film in that cut. Then the world switched to letterboxing—even on videotape. But they didn't have that cut in widescreen, so they went back to the theatrical version and that was the first loss of a version of The Motion Picture. That was still a flawed film; having unfinished scenes cut back into it. "At that time, DVD was new, and Paramount was very much focused on using this project to promote the DVD format. We proceeded with the opportunity that they were giving us, even though we really wanted to do it as a full photochemical thing at that time [with a] brand-new negative and so forth. They were not coming up with that kind of budget and we really had to sort of go with what they were offering and prove the concept with DVD. Then, if it was a success, we'd come back to it and do it again. We did that back in 2000 where Wise got his start at Paramount (which was originally RKO). And we worked on it through that whole year. By the time we had ironed out all the admin and did everything, the DVD came out in 2001 (in standard definition) and was a great success; very, very well received." This version included a few new digital effects, supervised by Daren Dochterman. Because they used CGI from that era, they knew that it would not stand up if they ever went to film resolution. "We brought all of them to the Directors Guild for a screening of Star Trek on 35mm in order to show them what their work needed to rise to, the level that they needed to reach. The new shots needed to reside side by side with what had been produced in 1979 by Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra. And we were very, very specific about that subject, Producers David C. Fein and Mike Matessino