Obsession

Filmed October 1967

When I reported to the studio the day after completing filming BREAD AND CIRCUSES to begin prep on OBSESSION, producer Gene Coon had left. He stated he was leaving because he was burned out, but I wondered if Paramount’s purchase of Desilu Studio, with the subsequent shortening of the shooting schedule (and whatever other restrictions the new regime demanded) could have contributed to his departure. I for one certainly missed him.

OBSESSION was the second and final time when I would film on a planet set created on the studio sound stage.

There has been a continuing question about this episode: how could the character Jerry Ayres played in an episode (ARENA) of the first year, who was killed, show up in this episode. I have read an interview Jerry gave in which he said there was a scene filmed that explained that, but that scene ended up on the cutting room floor. I don’t think so; at least I didn’t direct that deleted scene, and I know it couldn’t have been one of the Yom Kippur scenes directed by John Meredyth Lucas because that scene was not in the script. Another thing, the characters played by Jerry in the two productions have different names. I find all of this an unusual happening, since I know how careful the production was NOT TO BRING BACK ACTORS unless they were playing the same character. I’ll have an interesting story to tell on this same topic regarding a later episode.

OBSESSION was the fourteenth time I directed Stephen Brooks. Our first two encounters were on the New York based THE NURSES, where he had a recurring role. Two years later he was Jim Rhodes, Efrem Zimbalist’s sidekick on QM’s THE FBI. Stephen left that series after only two seasons. I never asked him why. Was it his choice to walk away because of the limited opportunities his role gave him, or did Quinn or the network want someone older? (Stephen when he started THE FBI was only twenty-three years old. The original story plan had been that Jim Rhodes was the fiance of Efrem’s daughter, a character who soon disappeared from the series.) Or could it have been a request from Mr. Hoover’s FBI office in Washington? They were very careful to protect the image of their agents. Did Stephen’s youth make him too immature to fit that image? His replacement on that series was William Reynolds, an older version of Stephen, eleven years older.

Again, as in METAMORPHOSIS, the set for the visited planet was built on the small adjacent soundstage 8 used for swing sets. Again there was the same 180 degree rounded cyclorama, lit this time by Jerry Finnerman as a red sky, with rock and tree set pieces placed in front of it. In the first two sequences on the planet, each required two separate areas. These four locations were small enough areas that this was accomplished in front of the one cyclorama by judicious choice of camera angles and some minor repositioning of the rocks and trees.

Although Gene Coon was gone, I sensed his hands all over this script; after all it was created during his stewardship. And I realized from day one that it was a transferring of the Captain Ahab-Moby Dick battle from the ocean to outer space. But the script was more than the novel’s struggle between a man and a big whale; it was a mystery story, if not a “whodunit”, a “whatisit”. And it was more beyond that; it was a deep penetration into KIrk’s psyche, his inner struggle to overcome guilt for his actions in a past incident.

I cannot speak for the other directors and the other productions, but I can definitely say there was a drop in quality from THIS SIDE OF PARADISE and METAMORPHOSIS to the other episodes I directed the second season. And I ascribe the reason for this drop to the impossible expectation that episodes of STAR TREK could be filmed in five and a half days and maintain the standard of production excellence that had been established. There was an even more insidious influence caused by this shortening of the schedule. In the process of developing scripts, knowing there would be less time to film what was written had to have had an influence on what went onto the printed page. The series, which already leaned toward the cerebral, was now being nudged into telling even more of the story in long dialogue sequences.

As I bemoan the loss of Gene Coon, I don’t mean to dismiss the new producer, John Meredyth Lucas. His was a formidable task. As a director I felt that coming to direct a long running series for the first time was like a new Captain taking command of a ship in battle. For John, taking over as producer of STAR TREK was like an Admiral being reassigned to command an entire fleet. And to do it midseason — a monstrous assignment. Filling Gene Coon’s shoes? Use your imagination.

John came from Hollywood royalty. His mother was Bess Meredyth, noted screenplay writer dating back to the silents. She wrote the screenplays for many of Garbo’s films and was twice nominated for an Academy Award. When John was ten, his mother married Michael Curtiz, who I think is one of the underrated directors in filmdom; a total studio director who has never achieved an auteur status. But what a resume! What a range! CASABLANCA, CAPTAIN BLOOD, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY, MILDRED PIERCE, ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, THE SEA WOLF, WHITE CHRISTMAS and on and on. He directed his first film in Europe in 1912, his last in Hollywood in 1961.

This production didn’t suffer from the new regime as severely as BREAD AND CIRCUSES (the action sequences were not as complicated as those in the arena), nor as much as my next assignment, RETURN TO TOMORROW (the story line was more compact and, frankly, better written). OBSESSION may be the best of the episodes I directed after the  Gulf Western invasion. It did what television used to do so well when it told stories of people caught in emotional conflicts.

The final encounter between Kirk and his potential nemesis on the planet required a larger space than either of the first two sequences. This required a major rearrangement of the set pieces; it was in fact creating a new set, but with the same set pieces in front of the same cyclorama.

Three years later I directed Stephen Brooks for the fourteenth and final time. It was an episode of a medical series at Screen Gems that he headlined. The series was not successful, and our paths never crossed again. I didn’t know Stephen away from the movie set. And on the set I knew Jim Rhodes (THE FBI), Ensign Garrovick (STAR TREK), the twenty-one year old interne on THE NURSES or Dr. Petitt on THE INTERNES. Why did his career end so early? There was a barber shop in Toluca Lake that many of the men on THE FBI series patronized. It was a barber shop, not a ladies hair salon. Its owner was Eleanor, and the barbers were all women. Beverly at the second chair cut Pat Sajak’s hair; Eleanor cut Efrem Zimbalist’s hair. Some time in the mid-seventies Eleanor told me that Stephen was an unhappy, disturbed young man. He left Hollywood in his early forties and died of a heart attack in Seattle, Washington at the age of fifty-seven. Why do I bring this up? Because we are inundated ad nauseum with news about those in Hollywood who ‘make it’, many with a minuscule talent. There are so many more, talented like Stephen, whose star doesn’t shine, it only flickers. He was a sensitive and attractive young actor. WHY? Each episode of the series, NAKED CITY, ended with the line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.”  To do a variation of that line, “There are eight million stories in Hollywood; the Stephen Brooks story is one of them.”

The journey continues