BBC Cult - Printer Friendly Version
Matt Jefferies - Designer of the original Enterprise.

The right man for the job
  Tell me about the background to designing the Enterprise.

The question has been asked a number of times why the network or the studio decided that I was qualified to do the show. Basically it was due to my aeronautical background, with four years as a flight test engineer, my combat time, plus my own private licence and me being an aviation illustrator, and I have to say a successful one because I sure as hell wasn’t starving at it. That’s what got me the thing and Gene and I hit it off right off the bat due to our mutual experience in the opposite ends of the world in World War Two.

The original Enterprise brief
  When you met Gene, what did he want for the Enterprise?

Basically he described what the mission was, the size of the crew, the make-up. He built that picture, and the only requirement that he laid down were he didn’t want to see any fins, no rockets and no fire.

What were Gene’s requirements for the ship?

Fantastic speed beyond our galaxy, shirt sleeve environment, mixed crew, probably a five year voyage, not to worry about gravity. "I don’t want to see any fins or rockets, no fire," he said, "make it look like it’s got power", and he walked out the door. I sat there, thinking what was he talking about?

I decided that whatever we came up with had to be instantly recognisable, and to sell the speed it would probably have to start in the distance as a tiny speck of light, and enlarge and come right by your head or go the other way. In that couple of seconds you had to be able to recognise it.

The habitat part I felt ideally should be a ball, but it got too awkward to play with. It just didn’t look like it would get out of first gear, much less the speeds he was talking about. So it gradually got flattened. I was trying to stay away from a saucer because the UFOs or flying saucer were old hat but it did gradually turn it into a saucer.

Deep in the warp core
  Where did the idea come from for the engine?

I felt that if he was going to get this sort of fantastic performance out of the thing, there would have to be very powerful engines of some kind or other, even to the point they might be dangerous to be around. I said, "Well, we better get ’em away from the main hall." The other thing is what we called during war a Quick Change Unit. By having the engines out there, if anything is wrong, you can just quickly unhook it and put another in its place.

Showing the Enterprise to Gene Roddenberry
  What did Gene say when he saw what you’d done?

We knocked out a small model and went to Solo and Gene and Mr Katz and some of the others from the network came in the next day. They started out just saying they felt we had something. I pulled the model out. We had a put a little hook in the top of it with a string, but I was holding it underneath. It was made out of balsa wood, except for the two engine pods which were stock birch dowels, which are much heavier than the other wood.

I held it up and Gene took it by the string and it immediately flopped upside down. He liked that better. I didn’t. That was one of our biggest arguments which I won, and then when the show hit the air it was on the cover of TV Guide - printed upside down.

Military modes for Starfleet
  So what about the exterior, the colours and things you put on it?

Basically I wanted to keep it as plain as I could. To be able to play light on it. I didn’t want to load the exterior up with what looked like equipment of some kind. We used to talk about Murphy’s law, that whatever man makes will break at the most inopportune time. So why have equipment on the outside in the worst possible environment to put a crewman out to work on it if you can keep it on the inside?

The same was true with the instrumentation on the bridge. On almost any military airplane, or ship, to fit a new piece of equipment it’s hung in there where you’re going to knock your head on it, and everybody’s got to get out of the way while they fix it or pull it out. I said, "Why bother a crewman that’s doing his work just because one thing goes out? Change it from the backside."

Why NCC-1701?
  Tell me where the number on the exterior came from?

NC, by international agreement, stood for all United States commercial vehicles. Russia had wound up with four Cs, CC CC. It’d been pretty much a common opinion that any major effort in space would be two expensive for any one country, so I mixed the US and the Russian and came up with NCC.

The one seven zero part - I needed a number that would be instantly identifiable, and three, six, eight and nine are too easily confused. I don’t think anyone’ll confuse a one and a seven, or the zero. So the one seven stood for the seventeenth basic ship design in the Federation, and the zero one would have been serial number one, the first bird.

Not a rocket ship
  Is it true you had copies of Flash Gordon and Buck Rodgers in the room as an example of what not to do?

I needed an envelope to design to, anything else is pie-in-the-sky time and isn’t going to work. So I spent a lot of money on old Buck Rodgers and Flash Gordon comic books.

I’d been a member of the Aviation Writers Association for quite a few years and I had the material that had been produced by NASA, NACA at that time, Douglas, Northrop, Lockheed, Boeing, all their work on possible space work. I pinned all that up on the board and said, "That I will not do".

The Enterprise bridge
  Tell us about your ideas for designing the bridge.

It was pretty well established with the model that the things was going to be in a full circle. From there it became a question of how we were going to make it, how it could come apart, where the cameraman could get into it.

Of course, every director that came in wanted to pan three hundred and sixty right roundy-roundy. We’d tell them it’s just going to wind up on the cutting room floor, it isn’t going to work, but every one of them had to try it regardless.

I decided that the crewman would work like the navy, so often would on for four hours, off eight hours, and it had better be comfortable. The switches would all be so that the crewman doesn’t have to reach for anything. Each of the viewing screens would be at right-angles to his eyes, and we drew a full size section of the bridge that way.

I wanted an all-black instrument panel that would light up from behind which is pretty much what we came up with. I did all of the artwork on each one of the instruments, and got the negative, put the colour on the negative and mounted ’em under black glass. I was still assembling those things on one side of the bridge when they were shooting the other side.

The quarry sets
  How did you build the rocks on the planet sets?

Most of those were fibreglass rocks that the studio had. We had faked in a few distant rocks out of Sellotex or something like that. When we built the planet set for the series we made them primarily out of foam.

There were a lot of large rocks at the studio, but usually they were fibreglass on steel frames and very heavy. We found we could take very small pieces along, make pyramids out of them and craft paper, burlap rags and shoot foam on ’em, and make a rock or boulder ten by twelve feet and twelve feet high which four men could pick up and walk off with. Whereas with the heavy stuff that the studio had, you had to clear the sand and get five or six men to try to move ’em on rollers. So the foam was infinitely better for us.

A Hilton in space
  Do you watch the new series? The Next Generation and Voyager and Deep Space Nine?

No. I went to the first movie. I was invited to the screening. I fell asleep. John Dwyer noticed it from across the screening room and said, "Matt, wake up." Fortunately nobody else in there knew me.

Gene asked me how I liked the show, and I said that he had taken the bridge of my ship and turned it into the lobby of the Hilton. And I have just never watched any of them since. I’m lost.

Did you mind that your set had become more like a luxury liner?

Yeah, it bugged me a little bit because my logic was blown out of the box. But it was a different deal and a different time. They had requirements to meet and that was their answer to it. I am pleased that certain elements have dragged through and still show.

Being creative
  Matt Jefferies gives his advice to budding art directors.

I get mail and they’ll send pictures of something that they’ve built. One man sent a whole packet of pictures. He had duplicated all of our interior sets on a model from watching the TV screen. I think he said he was forty-two, he was an engineer, became a Star Trek nut when still in High School, and what did I think of his work. And I had to write back and tell him, ‘A good try. Now sit down and do something on your own.’

Sounds like good advice to me.

You’ve got to keep the creativity going. I’ve had students taking film courses call and want to come in for an interview and I’ll look through their art work. If they have show a definite creative bent I’m the wettest blanket they could run into, because art directors come from scenic artists, sketch artist, or from the ranks of the set designers, and there is no basic plan to become an art director. Finally some producer decides to take a chance on you.

In the meantime you’re going to be executing somebody else’s work, and to me it’s a death knell for creativity. If they showed up a sharp drawing capability but no creativity then I’d put them in line to somebody they could talk to, to become a set designer or sketch artist. But if they were really creative, boy, don’t come around here, it’ll kill you.