Mea Culpa Culture

FACT TREK was established to try to get to the facts and get them as correct as the historical record permits. On our very first day we said if we made a mistake we would own it and post corrections.

That’s what we’re here to do today.

On August 26, the pop culture website What Culture published an article, “20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek⁠: The Motion Picture (1979),” credited solely to Fact Trek’s Michael Kmet, but with some blame shared by Maurice Molyneaux. We’re proud of that piece, which goes into detail about a decade’s worth of attempts to revive the series prior to the 1979 feature film, an FBI sting operation that took place after a set of Enterprise blueprints were stolen, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s role shepherding the project to completion (and the unique way he was paid for his efforts), and several scenes cut from the script during the film’s lengthy production process.

Video based on the article in question. Largely the same, but with some tweaks by the WhatCulture staff.

Part One above, Part Two below.

But, since the article went live, we’ve become aware of several oversights and outright errors that warrant a correction. We have submitted these corrections to the piece, so the inaccuracies should be corrected to anyone reading the article going forward, but the video version of the article that WhatCulture produced can’t be so easily corrected, so we’re going to set the record straight here.

We hope that by taking egg on our faces when we make a mistake, and correcting ourselves, we can lead by example.

Now with 4 Corrections!

Tickets Sold In The U.S.

The first claim we want to correct can be found in the article’s introduction, which states:

According to an analysis in Daily Variety, of the 1.1 billion movie tickets purchased at the U.S. box office in 1979, nearly one in four was for Star Trek—The Motion Picture.

We first learned of this information in Sherilyn Connelly’s excellent book, The First Star Trek Movie: Bringing the Franchise to the Big Screen, 1969-1980, which states (on page 176):

By the last day of 1979, Roddenberry’s novelization had reached no. 1 on the New York Times list. As for the movie itself, Daily Variety calculated that U.S. box office hit a new record that year of $2.806B, and approximately 1,100,000,000 movie tickets had been purchased. In what may be an example of Zipf ’s Law in action, three films were responsible for 40% of those ticket sales: Kramer vs. Kramer accounted for 7%, The Jerk for 10%, and the remaining 23% was ST—TMP. Put another way, approximately one out of four of the more than one billion movie tickets purchased in 1979 was for the Robert Wise film.

The First Star Trek Movie supports this claim by citing an article that ran in Daily Variety on January 9, 1980 titled “Estimated $2.806 Bil Tally Due to 7% Ticket Inflation, Not Increased Admissions” by A.D. Murphy. We dutifully tracked down that article (and a version that was reprinted, with only minor changes, in Weekly Variety on January 16, 1980) and found the following two paragraphs, which seemed to corroborate the claim:

It is estimated that, in 1979, there were approximately 1,120,000,000 admissions at a national composite ticket price of $2.50. For 1978, admissions came to 1,133,000,000 (best since 1961) at an average ticket price of $2.34. Though down about 1% in admissions, 1979’s 1,120,000,000 admissions remain the second highest since 1961 when the total was 1,224,000,000 (and that year’s average tic price was a mere 77¢).

At year’s end, the three top films were “Star Trek” (which garnered more than 23% of the total b.o. market, partly from its Dec. 7 head start preem), “The Jerk” (with nearly 10% of the market) and “Kramer Vs. Kramer” (with nearly 7% of the market). These three films alone grabbed 40% of all domestic boxoffice [sic] dollars.

Except—in a clear case of confirmation bias (we read the claim in a work of scholarship we liked, and found a primary source that seemed to back up that claim)—we didn’t take the essential step of stopping to do the math. If Star Trek—The Motion Picture accounted for 23% of the tickets sold in 1979, and there were 1.12 billion tickets sold in 1979, that would mean over 257 million tickets were bought for TMP. And, at an average ticket price of $2.34, that would mean a box office gross (unadjusted for inflation) of $602,784,000. (Plus, as The First Star Trek Movie makes clear, many theatres in the U.S. charged quite a bit more than that average ticket price for the first Star Trek film, which makes this math even less tenable.)

Suffice it to say, the lifetime domestic box office of Star Trek—The Motion Picture was not anywhere close to $602.8 million dollars (both The Numbers and Box Office Mojo calculate the total domestic box office haul as being $82,258,456, and that figure includes significant receipts from showings in January and February of 1980).

So, where’s the truth?

Re-reading the passage from Variety now, our best determination is that the phrase “at year’s end” was meant to refer to the month of December, 1979. In that context, the box office performance reported for TMP, The Jerk, and Kramer Vs. Kramer begins to make more sense. The wording of this passage was a little vague, but that’s no excuse…we ought to have subjected it to more scrutiny.

Therefore, to set the record straight, Star Trek—The Motion Picture did not command 23% of the total domestic box office market in 1979; rather, it commanded >23% of the total domestic box office market in December 1979.

What’s In A [UPM’s] Name?

In item #6, we quoted the film’s unit production manager (UPM) and identified him as “Phil Stewart.” This was a typo (the same item also quoted visual effects photographer Dave Stewart, both sourced from the excellent history of TMP, Return to Tomorrow, p.292-293). The unit production manager for Star Trek—The Motion Picture was Phil Rawlins (1930-2009). Rawlins, in addition to his work on the first Star Trek movie, served as the unit production manager for Gremlins (1984) and Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), and was the assistant director on eight episodes of a series you might have heard of called Star Trek from 1967-68.

tlhIngan Hol chenmoHwI'* (Father[s] of The Klingon Language)

*or something like that…

The TMP Klingon language (and lobster heads) as parodied in the Cracked Magazine sendup of the film in its July 1980 issue (read the whole thing here).

In item #13, we cited James Doohan as the father of the Klingon language, which is largely correct.

However, what we neglected to mention is that Associate Producer Jon Povill claimed to have worked with him on that effort, and stated that prior to their effort, linguist and UCLA professor Hartmut Scharfe—who created the Vulcan language overdubs—had created a Klingon language, which Povill described as “not alien enough.” (For more, reference Return to Tomorrow—The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, pages 260-261).

A‑List Directors & Star Trek

In item #10, we wrote, “Not until J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) would Paramount consider hiring an A‑List director to helm a Star Trek movie.” One of our readers told us that information online suggested Ridley Scott was offered the directing job on Star Trek: First Contact (1996).

According to the current Wikipedia entry for the film Star Trek: First Contact, “[Jonathan] Frakes had not been the first choice for director; Ridley Scott and John McTiernan reportedly turned down the project.” The footnote for this claim cites an article that ran in The Orange County Register on November 20, 1996 titled “Calling His Shots—Movies: Jonathan Frakes is second banana in front of the camera, but top dog behind it in ‘Star Trek: First Contact’.”

We tracked down this article, which quotes Mr. Frakes as saying:

I know I wasn’t the first choice for this job (rumour has it that Blade Runner’s Ridley Scott and Die Hard’s John McTiernan turned it down), but they gave Leonard Nimoy (from the original Star Trek series) a shot at directing, and I was hoping to get my shot.

“Rumour has it” [sic] does not strike us as a citable confirmation that Ridley Scott or any other A‑List directors were actually offered the directing gig for the movie. In a separate article promoting the movie (“Jonathan Frakes looks for new direction” by Stephen Rea, Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1996, page E10), Frakes again brought up Ridley Scott (and this time, James Cameron):

When Jonathan Frakes was tapped in January to direct “Star Trek: First Contact”—an assignment he won, he says, after Paramount execs realized “they were not going to get Ridley Scott or James Cameron to do a ‘Star Trek’” ...

Again, Frakes mentions two A‑List directors, but does not say they were actually offered the directing job.

(Also, some might debate just how “A‑List” J.J. Abrams was at the time he was signed to do his first Star Trek movie, at the end of 2006. His only feature directing credit at that point was Mission: Impossible III, which grossed 2.5 times its $150 million budget, but performed well below the previous installment in the franchise. However, Abrams’ career in the five years prior to Mission: Impossible III had been primarily in TV, where he was indisputably an A‑List figure with Lost and Alias under his belt. Discuss amongst yourselves.)

So, while we were not wrong to leave out the unsubstantiated rumors of A‑List directors, where we erred was in how we presented the subject. We wrote (emphasis ours): “Not until J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) would Paramount consider hiring an A‑List director to helm a Star Trek movie.” But that’s not accurate because we can’t know what the decision makers at Paramount might have considered over a thirty-year period. The statement should have read, “Not until J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) would Paramount hire an A‑List director to helm a Star Trek movie.”

That last item may seem a picayune distinction, but it’s what separates fact from fiction. Too many pop culture histories employ these kinds of definitive statements which are in truth only speculations.

Speculation is not fact.

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