Quentin Tarantino is a well known household name director, as is the Star Trek franchise, but did you know that the director was once attached to write and direct a Star Trek film? This was at a time when the future for the Star Trek film franchise was uncertain and Tarantino signed on to team with screen writer Mark L. Smith to produce a script.
Gamespot, by way of Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast, spoke with Mark Smith and is reporting that the film that was being developed, but ultimately never produced, appeared to pull inspiration from the classic Trek episode “A Piece of the Action,” which took the Enterprise crew to a planet that mirrored 1920s Chicago.
“[Big Robot] just called me and said, ‘Hey, are you up for it? Do you want to go? Quentin wants to hook up.’ And I said, yeah,” Smith said. “And that was the first day I met Quentin, in the room and he’s reading a scene that he wrote and it was this awesome, cool gangster scene, and he’s acting it out and back and forth. I told him, I was so mad I didn’t record it on my phone. It would be so valuable. It was amazing.
“I would go hang out at his house one night and we would watch old gangster films,” the screenwriter continued. “We were there for hours! We were just kicking back watching gangster films, laughing at the bad dialogue, but talking about how it would bleed into what we wanted to do.”
This is a pretty interesting approach as the Star Trek shows often would mimic genre films by visiting worlds and dimensions identical to human history. I can only IMAGINE what a film by Tarantino would be like tying his grainy historical visual style with the occasional odd piece of future technology. It’s a super interesting concept that sounds pretty cool if the idea is ever revisited.
What do you think of a 1930s gangster film featuring the Star Trek crew?
