ENTERPRISE INCIDENTS: Bread and Circuses

First Aired: February 13, 2022

I have related that when I had my services with STAR TREK abruptly terminated in August 1968, I was proud of my first two Desilu productions (THIS SIDE OF PARADISE and METAMORPHOSIS), but I had negative or negative-leaning feelings about my 5 Paramount productions. Yet later when I began my website RALPH’S CINEMA TREK in 2011, the first line I wrote was “STAR TREK was a phenomenon”.

Within weeks of its cancellation, STAR TREK, rising like a Phoenix from the ashes, was back in space via the airwaves of syndication. But it took 52 years from its cancellation in 1969 until 2021 when two guys (Scott Mantz and Steve Morris), who hadn’t even been born when it was cancelled, created ENTERPRISE INCIDENTS and soared into space, treating the 79 individual episodes as a serialized entity but raising a possible question of WHY. Why had STAR TREK become a Phenomenon.

Why am I bringing this up now as I discuss BREAD AND CIRCUSES? When Lucille Ball was forced to sell Desilu Studio in 1968 to Gulf Western, who merged it with Paramount Studio, BREAD AND CIRCUSES was the first produced STAR TREK episode labeled a Paramount Production. It wasn’t until many years later that I stated: I thought BREAD AND CIRCUSES was the beginning of the spiral downward to STAR TREK’s cancellation at the end of its 3^rd season.

Having said all of that, I have no more to add to what I reported on my guesting, so I will leave you to revisit the podcast if you’ve already viewed it but want another listen and for those who haven’t viewed it, here’s your chance …

…and then I hope you will join me on …

MY DEEPER DIVE INTO WHERE
THIS MAN HAS NOT GONE BEFORE

When Hollywood’s major film studios finally realized television was here to stay, they decided to quit thinking this new medium was a usurper that would soon go away and realized they had to start treating it as a customer to sell to. They did something they had been reluctant to do – they offered to lease the networks old films from their vaults to air as programming. More importantly the film studios created television departments to create new television series to sell to the networks.

I seem to be overflowing with questions, so let me ask another simple one. What was this new medium of television? Answer: It was a way of transmitting free visual entertainment into homes, just like radio – actually it was visual radio – and who better to take on this new means of communication than NBC and CBS, the two primary radio broadcasting companies. But this did have its pitfalls, its stumbling blocks. I want to point out that television like radio had many types of programs: mysteries, dramas, comedies, variety musicals, conversation shows, news. I will be dealing only with how STAR TREK was affected.

So where do we start? As usual we follow the MONEY! STAR TREK was shot on a soundstage with the same equipment used by the current Scifi movies, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY and PLANET OF THE APES. Those productions were each financed by a studio and leased to theatres, where people purchased tickets to enter and view them. (The profit from those ticket sales could be astronomical.) Television was different – it was FREE to its viewers. As with all series, STAR TREK was sold to NBC at an established price per episode – a price that many times did not cover the cost of production. STAR TREK’s producer’s goal was to get 5 seasons in the can and make back its overinvestment plus a profit in syndication.

How about the length of a television film! Authors of short stories, novels, stage plays or movie scripts could write them as long as it took to tell the story. Not so the STAR TREK teleplay author. The network, to get back their investment plus a hopeful profit, needed time in the airing for the allowed 6 one-minute commercials per hour. And that plus about one-minute for the series billboard at the opening of the film, another minute for the end credits and 45 seconds at the midway point reserved for the network’s local affiliates (where their station was identified and their commercial was inserted) meant the lime left for a STAR TREK episode was about 50 minutes. But the problem for the teleplay author didn’t stop there. The script had to have a teaser and 4 acts. Furthermore Act II had to end at the half hour for that 45-second break for the network affiliates mentioned above.

And there was still more. During the years of live television production, the networks were accustomed to having control of the shows they aired. In fact they produced many of them. I know. I was at CBS and worked on staff of their production of PLAYHOUSE 90 for seasons 2 through 5 and then another 6 months on a daytime soap opera, FULL CIRCLE. As the STAR TREK producers soon learned, the networks irritatingly continued to exert undue control over the product they were purchasing.

Scott Mantz and Steve Morris on their inquisitive ENTERPRISE INCIDENTS journey through the original series have focused on story, plot, how characters acted, reacted and interacted. I’ve tried to present the prevailing conditions under which thIs was accomplished as writers wrote and cast and crew rehearsed and filmed. The amazing thing is that the phenomenon of STAR TREK emerged out of this chaos. No other television series, even very successful ones, accomplished what this 3-season failure achieved: at least 7 more STAR TREK series (with something added to their titles to differentiate them) and 13 movies — so far and counting!

So now we return to the WHY question I posed above — why had STAR TREK become a Phenomenon? The answer to that will take an even more exhaustive deeper dive.

I will be publishing that here – sooooooooooooooooon!

The journey continues