Enlarge / The two-book set, full of interviews with cast, writers, and crew, will give you a glimpse of the good, the bad, and the ugly behind the scenes on Star Trek.
The Star Trek franchise created such a fully-realized world that many of us feel like we’ve actually traveled to the 23rd and 24th centuries. But building that world was a messy, weird process. If you want to know what the creators were really thinking when they wrote your favorite TV show or movie, there’s a new two-volume set of books that’s full of inside secrets. Some are inspirational, some are just depressing.
The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, edited by Mark Altman and Edward Gross, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the oral history of the franchise, from its earliest gleamings in 1964 to Star Trek Beyond in 2016. The two volumes, clocking in at over 1,700 pages, are overstuffed and prone to clutter and repetition, but they also have some fascinatingly honest assessments of Trek’s history from the people who were there.
You’ll find out about the various failed attempts to bring the original series back in the 1970s, including the notorious movie called The God Thing. But probably the most fascinating part of the first volume is the account of the chaos behind the scenes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which went into production with no finished script, as Gene Roddenberry kept trying to wrest control away from the film’s actual writer. (And Spock wasn’t in the film until very late in the process, because it was originally written as the pilot for a new, Spock-less, TV show.)
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Source: Ars Technica – The 50-Year Mission reveals the egomania and idealism that built Star Trek