These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One

These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One
	First edition cover
Author	Marc Cushman and Susan Osborn
Published	Aug 2013 (1st edition); 30 Dec 2013 (2nd edition)
Publisher	Jacobs Brown Press
Pages	600 (1st edition); 680 (2nd edition)
ISBN	0989238113

Real-World

These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One is an unlicensed reference book published by Jacobs Brown Press that provides an extensive episode guide to the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series, written by Marc Cushman and Susan Osborn from a purely production point of view.

Summary[edit | edit source]

From the first edition book jacket: In the 1980s Gene Roddenberry and Robert H. Justman gave Marc Cushman permission to write the definitive history of the first Star Trek®. They backed their stamp of approval by providing documentation never before shared with the public. These Are the Voyages, published in three volumes – one designated for each season of TOS – will take you back in time and put you into the producers' offices, the writers' room, onto the soundstages, and in front of your TV sets for the first historic broadcasts. Included are hundreds of memos between Roddenberry and his staff, production schedules, budgets, fan letters, behind-the-scenes images, and the TV ratings, documenting the making of each episode of "The Classic 79" in staggering detail. Buckle your seat belts, the trek of a lifetime begins here.

This is going to be the bible to Star Trek® and how it was made. This is a book that I'm going to keep near and dear and utilize throughout my life. – Rod Roddenberry

Background information[edit | edit source]

Featuring a foreword by Mary and John D. F. Black, the book was first published as a hardcover edition in August 2013 and provided background and production information from “The Cage” through “Operation -- Annihilate!”. In format the book differed greatly from previously released episode guides or companions, as it exclusively contained background and production information, and had therefore more in common with the 1968 reference book The Making of Star Trek (which was acknowledged by the authors). The only recounting of the episodes was strictly limited to the blurbs as they were originally published in contemporary TV Guide issues, or in NBC press releases.

Richly illustrated with black and white photographs, the background-information-only character of the book was reinforced by the fact that not a single still from the actual productions was included, but only publicity shots and behind-the-scenes imagery. Many of these were provided to the authors by noted American collector Gerald Gurian, who served as an Archivist/Photo Editor on the editorial staff of the publisher.^[1] Gurian stated, in response to a perceived copyright violation accusation, "All of the photos in the book that are credited to me come from my personal collection of thousands of images. I started acquiring these rare pictures in the early '70s with over 800 film clips obtained from Gene Roddenberry's company - Lincoln Enterprises - at that time and have continued to steadily grow my collection since then. Many of these behind the scenes photos appear all over the internet these days - as many multiples were sold by Lincoln - and they are all public domain. Most in the book have been shown on my website since 2008 onwards; although I've had them in my possession much longer, and I've personally restored / retouched all images that appear in the book with Corel Paint Shop Pro software. And despite my photo editing efforts... they are still public domain and it is perfectly appropriate for any publisher to reprint them."^[2] In January 2014, Gurian published a special behind-the-scenes report on the rare images used in the These Are The Voyages book series on his website startrekpropauthority.com which included many photos of the raw Lincoln clapperboard and filming model clips in his collection. As part of his rare image holdings, it was revealed that Gurian had acquired Original Series Art Director and Production Designer Matt Jefferies' entire reference collection of Desilu TOS film cells.

It should be noted however, that Gurian's reasoning may not be watertight with regard to the sale of the Lincoln clippings, as one source claims that the Roddenberrys themselves had obtained the clippings without explicit permission from the studio, when they supposedly cleaned out the studio's vaults of these back in 1967. According to former Studio Executive Herb Solow, while it was "a sensitive matter for the Paramount executives", no actions were taken to prevent Roddenberry from taking and selling additional film stock during the final season of production as "everyone pretended not to know what had happened. So it continued to happen." (Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, 1997, pp. 400-401) However, according to an interview published at startrekhistory.com with Bjo Trimble, who started Lincoln Enterprises for Roddenberry with her husband John, Roddenberry did obtain permission to sell them and "John and I would go to Paramount (after Gene got permission to sell them [note: implicitly conceding she was merely told by Roddenberry and had not received any other managerial confirmation to the affirmative]) and pick them up from the people who bagged up the film strips for us." Trimble further alleged that the Lincoln stock came from stacks of film and boxes of film stored in the editing rooms, and not any valuable archival film from Desilu storage vaults as Solow had claimed. Regardless of the original film stock ownership issues or Roddenberry's authority to sell the clippings, Gurian's point regarding the public domain nature of the behind-the-scenes imagery may not be in dispute, since Paramount Television chose to copyright only the footage from the Original Series episodes that were broadcast on television and not the out takes or behind-the-scenes material and publicity photos; which, being left unregistered were thus allowed to become public domain material according to the copyright laws. This position is also adhered to by Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia, where such publicity imagery are considered public domain "(...)because it was published in the United States between 1924 and 1977 without a copyright notice".^[3]

The project itself though, was something quite in excess of three decades in the making. Originating author Marc Cushman explained,
"I was happily assigned the job of meeting with Gene Roddenberry and interviewing him for a television special I was hired to write on the Star Trek phenomenon. This was in 1982 for a Los Angeles-based company that made programs of that type for local TV. Gene was wonderfully gracious and giving, with both his time and materials – he provided me with all the scripts from TOS, along with numerous other documents. I was amazed by the amount of documents he had kept from Star Trek – memos between him and his staff (and NBC), letters, production schedules, notes from the productions, budgets, contracts, and even fan letters from 1966 through 1969. I had read "The Making of Star Trek," which utilized some of these documents, but had no idea there was such a wealth of materials. I must have looked like a kid in a candy store to him, because Gene invited me – even dared me – to try to find a way to include substantial elements from all this material into a book. I accepted the dare but told him it would be years before I could start on such a project. He gave me a letter of endorsement and told me he would find the time to cooperate in all ways possible when I could make time to take it on."^[4]

Cushman's warning that the writing of the work would take "years", was not an exaggeration, since the actual writing only started in 2007, as he later explained, "I met with Gene many times and, on one of those occasions, pitched the story for TNG episode “Sarek” to him. I was preparing to write the book when he became ill. That postponed it. Bob Justman picked up the torch in 2007 and provided me with many documents not found in the UCLA Roddenberry/Justman collections, where I also spent several months doing research. It took six years to write this book – which turned into seventeen-hundred pages, which the publisher then decided to release in three volumes, each covering one season of the show. I don't think a book spine has been made that can handle that many pages... and who'd want to pick that thing up!?"^[4]

Assigned to Cushman was Susan Osborn, a creative consultant at the publishing house where the work was to be released. Originally she was "shanghaied" into assisting with the research, writing, and illustrating of a book on Star Trek, a proposition that was supposed to take only a year, maybe two. Six years later though, fully credited as a co-author, the first third of that work was published as the 600-plus page first volume epic These are the Voyages, despite that all that "Sue really wanted to do was paint". [1]

The information provided by Roddenberry et al., was not the only source material for the authors. Additional information was gleaned from secondary sources, most notably the fanzine Inside Star Trek, the reference book, aside from The Making of Star Trek, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story as well as the magazines Starlog, Cinefantastique, Star Trek Magazine, Star Trek: Communicator, and Star Trek: The Magazine.

Officially, the whole project was neither licensed nor endorsed by the franchise, the letter of endorsement by Roddenberry notwithstanding. That being said, Cushman actively did seek out the franchise's approval,
"There was an attempt. Simon & Schuster asked to see three chapters and my agent sent in the first three. Now, I've received a lot of letters in the last couple weeks from people who love the first three chapters, saying they have found out more about Gene Roddenberry's life and career before Star Trek, and about Lucille Ball being the sponsor of Star Trek, and the mindset of NBC, all things that are examined in those early chapters. But Pocket Books was not dazzled and said, basically, that with two books out on Roddenberry, and a couple out on Lucy, and that no one cares about what NBC was thinking, that they didn't see enough there to justify them publishing. If they had read any of the chapters that deal with the episodes – and there is a separate chapter for each episode – I think they would have thought differently. And they would have seen how the information in those first few chapters pays off as you continue reading. But once a publisher says "no," it's always going to be "no." Bottom line, my agent sent in the wrong chapters as a sample of what these books are really about. CBS has not picked up on this yet – has not endorsed it – because they wrote and told us they didn't have time to read a six-hundred-page book, to be followed by two more books of about five hundred pages each. So we had to go out without their stamp of approval, which certainly limits us in how we can promote this book, in the cover images we could legally use, even in the title."^[4]
Nevertheless, this particular legal limbo as far as licensed publications were concerned, but also the massive acclaim he received from former Original Series cast and production staff members, still alive, has made Cushman's work de facto a published unofficial, "official", reference work, very much unlike those of, for example, Schuster & Schuster. It has helped to somewhat allay Cushman's trepidations about the cover design when the second edition and the follow-up volumes were released, as they now featured Star Trek imagery and were less nondescript than the first edition of volume one was.

Being a small, independent publisher, the first edition was initially released by its publishing house as a print-on-demand only edition, though internet sellers like Amazon.com kept some limited stock available for customers. The second, revised edition was published in hardcover, softcover, and Kindle formats, on 30 December 2013, containing an additional eighty pages, and this time in the traditional release manner, due to the success of the first edition.

The with eighty pages expanded second edition, released only four months after the first one, was met with dismay by costumers of the latter. In an effort to appease these customers, a rebate was offered for a limited time for those customers who had already bought the first edition – albeit only mentioned on the now defunct facebook pages of the author and publisher – , but were willing to buy the updated second edition as well. Gurian had at the time justified the rapid re-issue as follows,
"I honestly don't think it was the plan all along to have such a short span of time between the release of the first edition and a revised version. It was the combination of several things - a rushed initial timetable that caused a lapse in proofreading the 1st edition, and an incredible fan response to that printing and outreach from TOS production folks such as Leonard Nimoy which created an unanticipated new wealth of information that the author was anxious to incorporate in the work! Many readers even reached out to the author and urged him to create a better looking cover that was more TOS oriented - and it was felt that responding quickly to all of these influences would actually be perceived as listening to and acting upon fan input. So, IMO, it was truly good intentions that resulted in the revised version."^[5]