It’s hard to imagine today, but in 1965, television executives weren’t convinced that “Star Trek” would make a marketable series. Luckily, they gave series creator Gene Roddenberry a second chance. However, when the pilot was completely reshot, the characters and casting were changed, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy as Spock. According to Nimoy, the move from Jeffrey Hunter (Captain Christopher Pike) to William Shatner (Captain James T. Kirk) was due to contractual differences. “He was concerned about his film career,” Nimoy told the Television Academy in 2000. “He asked the studio to guarantee him one or more roles in a feature film as part of his contract to star in that series.” Since the studio had no potential roles for Hunter, everyone went their separate ways.
In 1972, Oscar Katz, executive vice president in charge of production at Desilu Productions, explained that the failure of the first pilot had created an opportunity for Hunter to renegotiate his contract. Katz claimed Hunter tried to play hardball to get a better deal. “The word came back that he didn’t want to do it because he didn’t like the show,” Katz recalled (via Fact Trek). “I thought it was a negotiating position.” Regardless of Hunter’s actual position regarding the project, this negotiation technique failed. According to Roddenberry’s 1994 biography “Star Trek Creator,” NBC executives were not enthusiastic about Hunter from the start, which could have doomed later negotiations.
Hunter’s wife may have played a role
Five years before his interview with The Television Academy, Leonard Nimoy told a slightly different story that involved Jeffrey Hunter’s second wife, Joan “Dusty” Bartlett, in his departure from “Star Trek.” “Hunter was fired when his wife began representing him and made what Gene considered excessive demands,” Nimoy explained in “I Am Spock.”
William Shatner made a similar claim in “Star Trek Memories,” which he co-wrote with Chris Kreski. “Gene told me later that he would much rather deal with Jeff and his agent, or even Jeff and a gorilla, than Jeff and his wife,” Shatner said. “There were so many tantrums, restrictions and ultimatums.” However, whatever his personal feelings, Gene Roddenberry had an important motivation to resist burning bridges. In an April 1965 letter reprinted in “Star Trek Creator,” Roddenberry kept his cool about Hunter’s departure and asked him to consider shooting additional footage so the pilot could be repackaged as a film.
Of course, what really happened was that the footage became a flashback for the two-part episode “The Menagerie”, starring Sean Kenney as the older version of Captain Pike. Hunter ended up receiving an additional $5,000 as part of the deal, half of his salary for the original pilot. Sadly, Hunter died in June 1969 from a brain hemorrhage, which may be related to a recent accident on the set of another project. So we’ll never get to hear his version of what happened with “Star Trek.”
Shatner was surprisingly the captain’s third choice
Ironically, Jeffrey Hunter seemed to have enjoyed greater job security than the other actors in the first “Star Trek” pilot. As Gene Roddenberry later recalled, NBC had a particular problem with the Spock character. However, Roddenberry was adamant about keeping him. “I wouldn’t do a second pilot without Spock,” he explained in “The Making of Star Trek,” adding that the character was needed to “constantly remind you that you’re in space and a future world.”
Although Roddenberry also had a strong attachment to character number one, played by his future wife, Majel Barrett, he decided to pick his battles and create another role for her. Besides her work as Nurse Christine Chapel and as the ship’s computer on the original series, Barrett has the distinction of having played roles in six Star Trek shows and several films.
Although William Shatner was selected during the initial casting of the first “Star Trek” pilot, he was not the first choice after Hunter left. As Shatner explained in “Star Trek Memories,” Roddenberry asked Jack Lord if he wanted the job, but things fell through when contract disputes arose. Fortunately, things ended well and Lord became the star of “Hawaii Five-O” a few years later. Once they asked Shatner, the contracts worked in everyone’s favor. His short-lived legal drama “For the People” had just ended, freeing him to become Captain Kirk.
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