“I have to tell you I’ve spent a lot of time with studio executives,” Gerrold said, “and they can tell the difference between a good and bad story […] Paramount is the most successful studio in the industry. Down the line they’re doing all these great pictures like The Godfather, Saturday Night Fever... and they can’t get Star Trek on the boards? Give me a break.”

Roddenberry, on the other hand, blamed Paramount.

“Paramount went about the movie in exactly the wrong way to accomplish anything artistic,” Roddenberry complained. “They decided to make it a committee effort, and have no one really in charge. They told me that I had creative control – then told Jerry Eisenberg that he had it, and then without his knowing it they also told the director that he had creative control. You can’t make a worthwhile movie that way. Good movies are made almost invariably by one person carrying the enthusiasm and the vision of it into completion. This is the way George Lucas made Star Wars over three years of struggle. He fought hard because he had the vision of what he wanted. I found myself being second-guessed by people at the studio who had never even seen Star Trek. It was just a horror tale.”

Whatever went wrong behind the scenes between 1975 and 1977, it was clear that indecision over who or what should be written lay at the heart of it. Susan Sackett, who reported on that fateful 1977 leaving party and later wrote The Making Of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with Roddenberry in 1980, suggests that, at one point, no fewer than 34 writers were suggested as potential Star Trek scribes. That list read like a who’s who of the talented and now very famous, from Francis Ford Coppola to George Lucas to Psycho novelist Robert Bloch. And guess how many of them actually got a shot at writing a script? Precisely none.

With Planet Of The Titans shelved, work began on a possible new TV show entitled Star Trek: Phase II. This was also cancelled: just one year later, in March 1978, Paramount announced that it had changed its mind again and that work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture was about to begin.