I love anything with the words "Director's Edition" attached to it. If my physician (yea right…who the hell can afford medical insurance these days with the high cost of comics rising every half second…just kidding Dave) were to say, "Strange, I need to perform a non-emergency castration on you immediately, without the troublesome use of pain killers or tobacco" then I'd say, "No, but can you still validate my parking?" But if 'non-emergency castration' suddenly became 'non-emergency "Director's Edition" castration', then we're talking about a quick hinnie hop on the tissue papered table and both legs in the air before you can say, "we'll need to shave him first nurse!" The words "Director's Edition" make everything sound so nice. A warrant for your arrest is just another piece of worthless junk mail, but a 'warrant for your arrest (for bangin' sleeping bears in Utah) "Director's Edition"' makes everyone sit up and take notice. I'll never forget the year my grandmother died (it was '85 or '86…hell, I don't remember) and the funeral home sent out invitations to the burial; invitations without the words "Director's Edition". Oh…my god! What a bore fest that was let me tell you. Hardly anyone showed up, (besides immediate family of course and a bunch of old people) everyone was dressed in black, and the service ended in like…less than an hour! Total humiliation here! Thank God when my Grandfather croaked, because the lady at Kinkos remembered to add "Director's Edition" to his 'being dead' invitations. Great turnout; good food, and the best part was when us kids got to play 'got Gramp's nose' before they shoveled in the dirt. "Director's Edition" works, and because of that, I'm reviewing "Star Trek's" "Star Trek: The Motion Picture-Director's Edition" on DVD. This is a fun loving film for all ages (males 18 to 35), but do you know the real history behind Paramount's biggest moneymaker of all time? If you do than you're in the wrong place, because we're talking about "Star Trek: The Motion Picture-The Director's Edition".
Released in 1979, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was the #1 box office draw from the middle of the last week in April to the first two days in May. Grossing well over $253.00 in just under 36 weeks, it was clear to executives at Paramount, that they had a hit on their hands. But what few persons outside of Mason, Wyoming know is, that the film that would go on to cement Persis Khambatta's memorable acting career was almost…never made.
With the immense success of "Silent Running" and "Dark Star", Paramount Pictures was foaming at the bit for small slice of the lucrative sci-fi franchise. "Paramount execs were desperate to cash in on the kind of money Fox was making with "Star Wars" and "The Man Who Fell to Earth", says then head of marketing for Paramount Studios, Baz Groinburg. "There was such an air of frenzied desperation at the studio at that time for a huge sci-fi hit, suits were throwing out any scripts that didn't have the words "star" or "wars" somewhere in the title. Intense psychological science fiction films like "The Cat From Outer Space" were being green-lighted, yet yielding little cash, while art house pictures like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and family features like "Apocalypse Now" were being put on the back burners. Paramount needed at hit…and luckily there was Dong Sledgzenger to save the day."
"I had been working for Paramount since '73, when my life partner at that time got me a job as Richard Dreyfuss's stunt double on "The Goodbye Girl"", says Dong Sledgzenger; now retired from filmmaking, and managing an 'all you can eat raoul' restaurant in Jeffers, Tennessee. "One day in August of '78, I was in the studio commissary with Paul Williams, doing Jell-O chest shots off of a comatose Lucille Ball, when in walks Paramount President Maurice Leberstein with Doug Henning." ["I've never eaten lime Jell-O since that day"- recounted Maurice Leberstein in a 1989 PEOPLE MAGAZINE interview, before his death in '92 after a long bout with shingles took his life.] "The studio had just signed a huge 8 picture contract with 5-time Oscar nominated and karaoke sensation Ruth Buzzi, and Maury was looking for a star vehicle to showcase her limitless talent. Paul Williams had just pitched to Paramount an idea about a musical comedy based on Flora Schreiber's novel Sybil, but it was the 12-page synopsis Paul had done a year earlier of Neal Simon's play "A Man Called Dorse" that interested both Buzzi and the studio."
"As fate would have it," continued Mr. Groinburg, "Dong had a completely different take in mind on how too showoff Ruth's unfathomable…talents, while at the same time, cash in on some of that lucrative sci-fi money that was out there, with a marriage of the two in hopes that their copulation together would ultimately yield a 'hit' for the studio. How the hell did he do it? Well…what few people, besides myself, know is, that not two days before that meeting, Dong had seen Grace Lee Whitney giving nickel lap dances to Bob Keeshan at 'Uvulas' on Fifth and Wilcox in Culver City."
"I knew Maury and Ruth were pretty dead set on making "Dorse" with Doug Henning doing the special effects and Rip Taylor directing," recounts Sledgzenger, "but after seeing Gracie and Bob pumping and grinding against each other at 'Uvulas', you could say the answer sort of 'came' to me instantly: "Star Trek"."
Former Air Force Lieutenants Bob Keeshan and Gene Roddenberry had served together during World War II, earning both metals of honor for a series of successful air- raids against the Axis Powers in Munich, Germany in 1943, and 4 years in prison for their unauthorized and repeated attacks upon grazing cattle in Augusta, Maine during the summer of 1944. After serving an additional 5 years for 'conduct unbecoming of a prisoner', Eugene Wesley Roddenberry (or Ram-Rod, as his cellmates affectionately referred to him) was paroled in June of '53 from Levensworth Military Prison. With $17.01 too his name, and sporting a William Ware Theiss-prison-issued suit, Gene left the spacious frontiers of Kansas on a starry-eyed trek heading west; to seek out a new life for himself, while exploring a strange unconfined world, boldly going where very few sober men have gone before…the bright and beckoning neon washed hills of Hollywood's…'red light' district.
Roddenberry's journey from the painted prairie plains of Kansas to sweltering seismic shores of California were to have taken 5 years to complete, but due to scheduling conflicts and trouble at the Ponderosa, this enterprising young ex-con's maiden voyage ultimately was reduced to a mere 3 year outing. Upon arriving in Hollywood during the fall of '56, Gene immediately sought work at MGM as a lead vocal in their all-female animated remake of "Gone With The Wind". After losing the role to human-contortionist and hemorrhoid sufferer Carol Channing, Roddenberry reluctantly took up teaching tap part-time and drinking full-time. Enter Bob Keeshan (Federal Prisoner #8572).
Baz Groinburg remembers, "Bob (Keeshan) had gotten out about 6 months before Gene's release in June. He had moved to California, and landed a job as special effects supervisor for Roger Corman Pictures down near Huntington Bay, but on the weekends he would drive up the coast to Burbank and work part-time at the Pia Zadora Talent Agency. The rumor that I heard from Todd Bridges was that one Saturday in the summer of '59, Bob was in San Francisco shopping for the latest version of Windows 58 so that he could download nude picks of Charlotte Rae, and while he was waiting for the light to change, he just happened to see a store front that said, 'Weiss's Wine & Liquor'. You see, while Bob was time in Levensworth, he not only sobered up long enough to dress himself from the waist down, but in the process…happened to find 'God' along the way."
'God' in fact was Weiss Godly. A former coach for Cochrane, Ontario's 'Canadian Women's Volleyball League For The Vision Impaired', Godly was serving out the remainder of a 14-year sentence in Levensworth, for a charge stemming from his 1939 arrest in Arkansas for indecency with a lawn ornament.
"Gene, Bob, and Weiss were really a family amid that sea of concrete and steel," recalls Gabe Sanchez [author of Shell Shocked Steers & 7Year Erections: The Unauthorized Biography of Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry; an April 1995-Oprah Book of the Month Club selection]. "It's was like the 3 Musketeers visit Oswald Maximum Security Prison…I just smile to myself whenever I think of those three guys crammed all together like Irish refugees in that hot 8x10 cell, day in, day out…it must have been great…they even had nicknames for each other."
"Gene was 'Ram-Rod' as I remember, I was of course called 'Captain', and Weiss…Weiss we just referred to as 'our B*#ch'," wrote Bob Keeshan in the May 1985 'Money Shot' issue of Top Bear Magazine, in an article entitled "Let the Moose Drop His Balls Where He May". "In prison, Weiss once told Gene and I that he had at one time been a volleyball coach for some 'blind women's volleyball team' up around Ontario, Canada. He never explained exactly…how the ladies knew when to hit the ball, but I guess the story really impressed Gene, because shortly there after he started to call Weiss a 'Miracle Worker'. I don't know if I'd have given Weiss the 'Non De Plume' of 'Miracle Worker' just for herding a bunch of cockeyed gimp broads around some dilapidated school gymnasium, but I will say this, if he did deserve that title, it'd more than likely be because the man had a mouth like velvet-VELVET. Anyway, I'm in San Francisco with "Lumpy" Brannum, and we stop at this red light on the corner of Lovelace and Damiano, and "Lumpy" starts getting the D.T.'s pretty bad, so I look for a liquor store that'll take a 2-party, temporary, out-of-town check. "Lumpy" had started twitching and shaking so bad, he looked like Katharine Hepburn on amphetamines, and somehow by luck, the first place I pulled into, was a 23-hour-liquor-store situated in between The Castro Theater, and all-night-proctologists clinic. I really thought 'Lady Luck' had flashed me her good parts when I realized that I knew the guy who owned "Weiss's Wine & Liquor", but she really pealed back the pasties for me, when I discovered that the fellow outside the store dressed in a soiled trench coat and fishnet stockings, the guy trying to teach a bunch of transients how to do the 'Charleston' while dancing in his own urine, that was in fact Gene Roddenberry."
Baz Groinburg-"In Dave Ziegler's unauthorized 1995 biography of Keeshan, Clowns Do "It" With Their Shoes On: The Life and Eventual Death of Bob Keeshan, Ziegler publishes the transcripts from Keeshan's 1987 'Today Show" interview with Jane Pauley. During part of that interview, Bob tells Jane about one day in '62, when Roddenberry smeared himself in pig's lard and saccharine, and slid through the Castor's mail slot, so that he could catch a 'double-feature'. After watching "Stage Coach" and "Conquest of Space", Gene called Keeshan collect and told him about his idea for a series based in space. Basically the idea Gene had come up with was "Wagon Train" to the stars."
Here's where I talk about the great aspects of the DVD and how much I enjoy owning it, but I'm tired, so just go buy the damn movie! "Star Trek: The Motion Picture-Director's Edition"-still in the player with no end in site.
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Really.
I'm not a well man.