Star Trek Connection
By Donna McCrohan Rosenthal, East Sierra Branch
Forty years ago this September, TV’s series Star Trek premiered and the starship U.S.S. Enterprise set out to “boldly go where no man had gone before.” Among the territories traversed, it would cross paths with the people and places of the Mojave Desert over and over again.
The Star Trek phenomenon enjoyed such esteem that when NASA rolled out plans to call the real-life first Space Shuttle Orbiter “Constitution,” a write-in campaign persuaded the White House to rename it “The Enterprise.” NASA conducted the initial captive-carry sortie of the shuttle’s non-orbiting prototype at Dryden Flight Research Facility on Rogers Dry Lake, Edwards Air Force Base, in 1977.
The event became one of many links to evolve between Star Trek and the Mojave Desert. The connection took a quantum leap forward in 1988 when Spock’s half-brother Sybok hijacked the Enterprise to look for God in the movie Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. A call for extras went out in Ridgecrest, east of the Sierra, and in this pre-digital era of technology, about 50 stalwart residents signed aboard to portray Sybok’s soldiers.
“They interviewed us,” remembers Roger Butterfield, who today bears a striking resemblance to the c. 1988 William Shatner. “My friend Phil Wilson and I were hired. We got into costumes that appeared to be rags sewn together, then we rode off for the various locations. Altogether, we were at it for a week. First we went to Trona Pinnacles in a school bus, and there I got to run quarter mile after quarter mile. The director would yell ‘cut’ after a hundred yards or so, and then I’d go back to my starting place for another take, and another, all of this in 110-degree heat. Then, at the dry lake bed, they had constructed fake boulders, a fake wall, and a fake gate of this city that Sybok’s army was pillaging. Phil and I ran across the gate and over the camera. That scene made it into the movie.”
The bizarre geological formations of the Trona Pinnacles represented a desolate corner of the universe where a powerful entity pretended to be God. According to Kern County Board of Trade Marketing and Promotions Associate Dave Hook, lead film liaison for the county and longtime Star Trek fan, “In Final Frontier, catching onto the fact that the alleged God seemed awfully eager to hitch a ride on the Enterprise, Kirk asked the immortal question, ‘Why does God need a starship?’
“But I was more intrigued with a question they didn’t address, which is how this mythic planet that was supposed to be pristine had a dirt bike trail. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s kind of your own private inside joke. I personally find it hysterical every time I see it.”
A longer version of this article originally appeared in
Bakersfield Magazine in 2006, and then in the 2011 East Sierra anthology
Planet Mojave: Visions from a World Apart.