thought,
"Well, you're not gonna do it.
"You haven't done it for...
You don't think about doing it.
"So what's the problem?"
And it went away.
So I wondered if the same thing
came to you all.
Why are they doing this again?
It can't be done better than we did it.
What's the point of it?
Well, they were gonna do...
After we were cancelled,
Paramount was gonna do
a whole network
and lead it off with the series Star Trek.
And then they dropped that idea.
-Am I right so far?
-That's right.
And then decided to do
a movie of the week.
Then they dropped that idea
and decided to do a major motion film.
-Feature.
-Feature.
And then they started
going back and forth.
So, for several years, we kept hearing,
"Get ready, we're gonna...
No, we're not gonna."
We're starting, we're stopping...
We're starting, we're going.
And then Robert Wise was hired,
and we realised we're gonna make
a big motion picture
to ride on the popularity of Star Wars
and equal Star Wars in its production.
And that's where
they were coming from.
It was a complicated issue for me.
I don't think there was any secret
about the fact
that I was very heavily identified
with the Spock character.
And I was trying to find my way
into other kinds of work
and to build a career beyond that.
And I was actually here,
I was in New York on Broadway,
acting in a wonderful play called Equus
when I got a call from
Jeff Katzenberg at Paramount.
And he said, "I'd like to come
and talk to you about this movie."
And he came and we had a very
intense couple of days of conversation
and we ironed out some issues
that had been hanging loose
for some time, hadn't been resolved.
And he got them resolved,
and then I met with Robert Wise
and Gene Roddenberry and Jeff,
and we decided to go ahead
and work on the movie.
But it was not an easy decision.
It was complicated.
Because the question was,
"Is this a one-time thing?
"And why get back into that territory
"when you've been gradually
growing out of it
"and into the other kinds of work?
"And what will it mean
to go back into that character?"
-It was complicated.
-Were you approached as if
it was going to be the launching
of a new franchise?
We were approached
in every which way.
-Not me. Maybe you.
-But you heard the rumours.
You know, it was gonna be this, and...
Well, I didn't know any more than you.
-Less, probably.
-No, you have to remember.
It was called
Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
-Right.
-Which had a singularity about it.
The sense was,
"We're gonna make a movie."
We had no sense that it was
gonna go beyond that.
And as a matter of fact,
when the movie was done,
-I really thought, "That's it."
-Well, they destroyed the sets.
They destroyed this expensive Bridge
that they...
-Really?
-Every movie they made,
even the subsequent movies,
to VI or VII.
I don't know about your movies,
which we're gonna get to,
I'm sure, in a moment.
All six movies that I was in,
movie would be over. "Thank you, guys,
it was great, wonderful."
And they would either sell the set,
destroy it, burn it,
-send it to a fair, or something or other.
-Right.
But it was over. That was
the last movie we were gonna make.
And then a year later,
"Let's do it again.
"And let's spend the money
and build a new Bridge set."
Which was exactly the same
as the previous Bridge set.
The best thing that ever happened
to me in terms of contacts,
as we're being serious now,
was a letter I got from a police sergeant
in the Las Vegas police force.
And he'd said that he enjoyed the show,
but most particularly he said,
"There are bad days in the job that I do,
really bad days
"when my view of humanity
and of the world is low.
"I see some awful things.
"When that happens,
when that day comes to an end,
"my response to it is to go home
and put in a tape of Star Trek.
"And I feel that things will get better."
Yeah, that's great.
Is that Gene's legacy?
That he