(Clockwise from the bottom) Model shop supervisor Steve Gawley, effects co-supervisor Ken Ralston, camera assistant Sel Eddy, and stagehand Bill Beck unpack the model of the refit Enterprise for use in the filming of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. The 1/120th scale model was originally used for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and had been built by Douglas Trumbull’s Magicom under the supervision of Jim Dow.  

According to Susan Sackett’s The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, building the Enterprise was a costly endeavour in time and money — it took 14 months and $150,000 to build (around $600k in 2022) — but advancements in plastics allowed the highly-detailed 8-foot-long ship to weigh in at just 85 pounds, making it quite a bit easier to position for filming. For comparison, Dow said, the Millennium Falcon miniature used in filming Star Wars had been roughly four feet by four feet in size and weighed over 300 pounds.

That said, it was still massive, with Industrial Light and Magic’s Ralston telling Kay Anderson from Cinefantastique: “I hate the Enterprise model. I think it’s made out of lead. It took eight guys to mount it for a shot and a forklift to move it around.”  (He would work out some of that anger with the ship later.)

It was also finicky enough that, Trumbull revealed in an interview with American Film magazine, ILM reached out to him to help get its lighting up and running again. This vindicated the special effects pioneer a bit; his company had underbid ILM by $1.5 million for the Star Trek II contract but had lost out because Paramount had wished to seal their relationship with Lucasfilm after the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

(Of note to some nitpickers like myself is the fact that some contemporary behind-the-scenes accounts, including the one from which this photo was taken, there is talk of the model being made of metal. There’s enough evidence to contradict this in various interviews from people who worked on the films over the years that I feel comfortable saying that they’re wrong.)

Photo scanned from my personal collection. It originally appeared in the July-August 1982 issue of Cinefantastique.

Front cover for Town Mook’s 1982 Super-Visual Magazine, Issue #8, devoted to the third part of a “complete visual guide of Star Trek,” something of a treasure trove for fans in Japan at the time. It’s laden with episode images and synopses for the Original Series, a guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series, material about the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and a preview of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. There’s even a full-color guide to the guest stars of Star Trek, with a heavy focus on the women.

If I were less precious about the magazines I spent over $40 on, I’d break the spine on this 110+ page guide to scan it, but, alas, I am not less precious about my expensive Japanese magazines. 

Scanned from my personal collection. 

Director Nicholas Meyer (with trademark cigar) addresses a group of background players in the torpedo bay set while filming Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.

Prior to directing The Wrath of Khan, Meyer had previously written a screenplay for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, based on his own novel of the same name, and handled screenwriter and directorial duties on the time travel epic Time After Time, based on a college friend’s uncompleted novel. 

When asked by Allen Asherman about how he was contacted about directing the second Star Trek feature film, Meyer recounted: “The project was offered to me by a woman named Karen Moore. She was not empowered to confirm the offer; she was the first person who broached the subject. I’ve known her since she was about twelve…she’s a friend of mine, and she was at my house for dinner. She was working at Paramount Pictures at the time, and she said there were two very nice fellows making this movie, harve Bennett and Bob Sallin, and they had a good script…would I be interested. Then I went in to meet Harve and Bob, and got along very well. Then they showed me the first movie and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this, because I’ve got to be able to do as good as this.’”

(Quote source: Allan Asherman’s The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, published in 1982 by Pocket Books.)

Photo scanned from my personal collection.

Poster concepts for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan by Bob Peak.

The medical tunic that DeForest Kelley sported in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Search For Spock is up for auction at Heritage. With five days left and an opening bid of just $8,000, this gives you all plenty of time to rummage through your couch cushions and break open your Tellarite piggy banks.

(If you want to economize, the opening bid for a wrist communicator from Star Trek: The Motion Picture is just $1,000.)

The Director’s Cut of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is less than $11 on Amazon right now.

Not only does it include footage left out of the theatrical release, it’s also simply the best version of the film available, restored from an original negative and presented in 1080p and loaded with special features. Highly recommended.

Paste up sheets and select ads for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. These were distributed to theatres to allow them to advertise showtimes in their local newspapers in the days before desktop publishing. I could go into more detail, but there’s a quite good Wikipedia article that covers it:

A professional known variously as a paste-up artist, layout artist, mechanical artist, production artist, or compositor would cut the type into sections and arrange it carefully across multiple columns. For example, a 15 inch strip could be cut into 3 5-inch sections. Headlines and other typographic elements were often created and supplied separately by the typesetter, leaving it to the paste up artist to determine their final position on the page.

Adhesive was then applied to the back side of these strips, either by applying rubber cement with a brush or passing them through a machine that would apply a wax adhesive. The adhesives were intentionally made semi-permanent, allowing the strips to be removed and moved around the layout if it needed to be changed. The strips would be adhered to a board, usually a stiff white paper on which the artist would draw the publication’s margins and columns, either lightly in pencil or in non-photographic blue ink, a light cyan color that would be ignored by the orthochromatic film used to make printing plates in offset lithography. For magazines, newspapers, and other recurring projects, often the boards would be pre-printed in this color.

Other camera-ready materials like photostats and line art would also be prepared with adhesive and attached to the boards. Continuous-tone photographs would need halftoning, which would require black paper or red film (which photo-imaged the same as black) to be trimmed and placed on the board in place of the image; in the process of creating the negative film for the printing plates, the solid black area would create a clear spot on the negative, called a window. The photographs would be converted to halftone film separately and then positioned in this window to complete the page (although this process was typically performed by a different worker, known as a negative “stripper”).

Images scanned from the originals.
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Star Trek II artwork by J.K. Moore, who would later become the cover artist for DC’s various Star Trek comics. The artist, whose likenesses were never short of exemplary, took the unfinished art to a convention, where it was autographed by Majel Barrett and Bibi Besch. 

(Source: deviantart.com)