How did you get the opportunity to work on Star Trek?
Well, going back to 1986, the scuttlebutt around the studio was that Gene Roddenberry was going to get to produce another Star Trek series, and it was probably going to be a bust. The Executive in charge of production for Paramount television, Mike Shawnburn, called me into his office and said, "I want you to interview for this show, I think you�re right for this show." He literally twisted my arm.
I didn�t say I�d do it but I went over and I talked to Gene Roddenberry and immediately just fell in love with the man. The man was the most caring and interesting producer I�d ever met. I never regretted making the decision to do the show.
Gene had hired a couple of illustrators who were doing wonderful work. But they had both feet firmly planted in mid-air, didn�t know what construction problems were created by this line, as opposed to that line. I functioned as a creative doorstop to keep them from going wild.
In the other way I also made sure that what Gene wanted of what they drew was really possible, and got it on the screen. I�m very proud of all of that but it was very constricting because we had inherited most of the sets on Stage 9, where The Next Generation spent so many years, from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
We built a new bridge but we didn�t build new corridors, we didn�t build a new transporter room. We turned what was a space caf� into the sick bay and, of course, we used the engine room from the motion picture, but took the engine from horizontal to vertical. Which is curious, because now we are having a horizontal engine in our new Enterprise. I like that, because we�re going back in history with a purpose and it still leads us to where much of it started.
Those sets have been recycled from The Motion Picture through several of the other feature pictures and into Next Generation and then into Voyager. On the other hand, when I did Star Trek: Deep Space 9, we had three empty stages, a blank sheet of paper and we didn�t have any restrictions at all.
