SPECIAL: Who Voiced the Companion?

Filmed May 1967

There has been a misinformation about STAR TREK’s METAMORPHOSS that has been circulating for over half a century. Now I could just take the easy way out and state what that is.  But I have a more interesting plan. Why not do what I’ve been doing here for the past 11 years and take you onto one of my sets and give you a fly eye-on-the-wall view of the circumstances leading up to this misinformation.

Now in those golden olden days before digital photography replaced film, a director assembled his cast and crew, shot sequence after sequence until the entire script had been turned into reels and reels of film, which were turned over to a film editor who spliced it into its first assemblage. It was different for the two sequences I’m going to be discussing. The time was 1967. The location was the Desilu studio in Hollywood and the experience was unlike any I had in my 26-year film-directing career.

The show was STAR TREK’s METAMORPHOSIS. Let me give you a quick recap of the events leading up to this point in the story. Kirk, Spock, Doc and an ill Ambassador Nancy Hedford were traveling through space in a shuttlecraft when a strange cloud formation overpowered their craft and took it to an unknown planet. Here they met a young astronaut, who claimed to have been marooned on this planet. He tells them a cloud (he called it the Companion) had brought his craft  to the planet when he was a dying 89 years old. His intention had been to die in space. The Companion rejuvenated him, made him a young man again and had kept him young. His name was Zefram Cochrane, of Alpha Century, the discoverer of the space warp, but to the utter amazement of all, they knew that Zefram Cochrane had died 150 years ago. Under intense questioning he then further reveals, they had been brought here to keep him company.

The 3 men view the hovering Companion, but in a different form than it had in space. The dramatic battle begins, Kirk’s efforts to get them off this planet, the Companion’s determined attacks to keep them captive and the Companion keeps winning. Kirk’s final desperate move is to try to contact the Companion and communicate with it via a Universal Translator. That brings us to the 2 vitally important sequences with its 2 conversing characters I referred to above. The two speaking characters: Captain James Kirk played by William Shatner and the Companion, an amorphous cloud to be visually created and produced post production by some Special Effects Company and vocally performed by an actress still to be cast.

I never met the man who designed the Companion, but I learned years later he was Richard Edlund of Westheimer Special Effects. Then one day in the past 6 months (long before I had any thoughts of doing this post), when I was casually Googling the internet, I found a film clip interview of a man (I’m sure it was Edlund) describing his creation of the Companion for a STAR TREK episode. He said he took a yellow piece of paper, painted several various shaped symbols in different colors on it and then waved it in front of a camera as he filmed it.

My responsibility was to stage the scenes, providing camera angle coverage of Captain Kirk, and the camera angles where the image of the Companion would be added. It was requested that where possible, I should avoid camera set-ups requiring a moving matte. Shatner would be playing the scenes looking at the set and the camera crew with an actress saying the Companion’s lines standing left of the camera instead of the cloud Captain Kirk would be viewing. For the voice of the still uncast Companion, I asked Elinor Donahue to play the role in the scenes with Shatner.

When filming wrapped, the final reels of film were turned over to the assigned film editor. I fulfilled my responsibility of viewing the first assemblage, offering my suggestions for changes. Copies of the camera angles involving the Companion were sent to Special Effects, where images created based on that yellow piece of paper could be added. Eventually these shots were integrated into the film, as was the audio voice of the actress who had ben cast as the Companion. I had not been consulted on her casting or involved in the recording of her performance on a dubbing stage. But I was there for the first viewing of the completed film and nobody disagreed with me when I declared the performance, which had been spoken in a robotic monotone, was unacceptable. I did not blame the actress for that performance. Whoever oversaw that recording, if it was anyone other than one of the technical recording staff, had advised her wrongly. Gene Coon’s 2 scenes were not between Captain Kirk and an unemotional thing. They needed to be played the same way they would have been played between two conflicting emotional people. These 2 sequences were the peak climaxes of this story. If not performed emotionally correctly, the transition to the final scenes would make no sense. I knew immediately whom I wanted to recast. I had worked with an actress the prior year on THE PLUNDERERS, an episode of THE FBI. I had been very impressed with her performance and more importantly with her voice. She was immediately hired. We went into the dubbing stage where I directed her, speech by speech, one speech at a time..

Here are those two scenes, assembled from 3 divergent sources, with Shatner’s inspired performance of Gene Coon’s wondrous words, photographed impeccably as always by Jerry Finnerman with George Duning’s enhancing background musical score.

Noted film critic Scott Mantz had this to say about that scene:

Everything that we’ve seen, up to this point … is an urgent drama that they’re in a race against time … right here at this moment the entire tone of this episode completely flips. The beautiful touch of the Companion’s moving off of Cochrane as he hears Kirk try to address it … it is a voice, she’s a female.

Their next conversation:

I personally was and am very moved by Gene Coon’s and her final words in the second scene: “If I were human there can be love!”

And now I will correct the misinformation about the casting. The actress playing the Companion was Lisabeth Hush. Here she is the year before in THE FBI episode.

And that’s the way it happened. You can come down now from your fly eye-on-the-wall perch as …

The journey continues