Star Trek may be the series that bred fandom as we know it, but even among the Trekkies, Huston Huddleston is standing out: he's about to unveil the chair from where no one has gone before. Sort of.
Huddleston is a working screenwriter who, back in 2011, started on a journey to restore the signature modern Star Trek set piece—the entire bridge of the NCC-1701-D. The bridge was home to Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and his crew on The Next Generation, but it was actually destroyed during the filming of Star Trek: Generations, where the Enterprise crash-lands onto the surface of Veridian III. Following the conclusion of the show and its related films, only four replicas were made for Star Trek: The Experience, a theme park in Las Vegas that closed in 2008 after a 10-year run.
It took three years and several thousand dollars, but Huddleston now has what he believes is the most accurate representation of Picard's throne in existence. And actually, it took four chairs to get there. The captain's chair that Huddleston originally rescued (a replica to begin with) was in such bad shape that it couldn't be restored. The seat had to be remade from scratch, but it later turned out that this design was wrong too. Remake 2.0 was sold off. Huddleston now hopes he has the definitive and final version.The captain's chair was originally the centerpiece of a vast and ambitious project to restore the entire NCC-1701-D bridge, but now even the bridge is merely the first step. But just as his beloved series is always evolving, Huddleston's plans have grown beyond TNG. He hopes a full Enterprise-D bridge will become one of the primary attractions at the Hollywood Sci-Fi Museum, a proposed interactive and nonprofit science fiction museum to be set in Hollywood. And before his bridge (let alone the logistics for a museum) is even set, Huddleston is envisioning restoration projects from other notable series—the cockpit from Serenity, the main ship in the Firefly series, and the command center of the title ship from Battlestar Galactica, among others.
It won't be easy as, to be clear, Huddleston doesn't even have the fully formed bridge his organization—a non-profit called The New Starship Foundation—was created to restore. To make matters worse, former volunteers are stepping up to question the decisions Huddleston made just to get to this point. But this week some fans will be able to shout "Engage!" in their best Patrick Stewart voice as New Starship claims its first victory in the ongoing quest—the captain's chair will finally be displayed in public for the first time during the Salt Lake City Comic Con on April 17.
"Captain, I saved the bridge"
How the chair became lost is a matter of old Hollywood logistics (see, for a similar instance, the tale of a short film that ran before Empire Strikes Back). In addition to the Experience park, there was an official traveling exhibit and immersive "ride" that used the Enterprise-D bridge and other sets built for Star Trek: World Tour. It traveled around in 1998 to Dusseldorf, Vienna, and Singapore. The four replicas were further repurposed for Star Trek: The Adventure in London in 2002, but when the Adventure concluded in Europe in 2003, nearly all of that bridge eventually came to reside—stored and ignored in legal limbo—in a warehouse facility in Long Beach, California, just south of Los Angeles.
As Huddleston tells it, an eventual changing of the guard at Paramount and CBS caused a lot of Star Trek pieces to fall through the cracks. It started when the last Trek TV series, Star Trek: Enterprise, wasn’t doing well in the ratings and was cancelled following its fourth season in 2005. At the time, its parent company was also going through a lot of changes.
Viacom was the previous rightsholder to the franchise, but it split into two parts: one called Viacom and another called CBS Corporation. CBS retained the rights to television (including all the Star Trek shows and related properties), while Paramount Pictures retained the rights to the movies. For Star Trek, that meant a lot of managers and longtime hands went on to a new corporate parent.
“Once this happened, that's how this bridge got forgotten about—people changed hands, people got fired,” Huddleston said in December 2012. New Starship board member and Star Trek archivist Larry Nemecek confirmed Huddleston’s account of the CBS handover.
“When the Rick Berman era ended and then the [2006] Christie's auction, everything changed,” he said, referring to the producer who was chosen by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to helm TNG and all the TV series that followed. Berman’s tenure with Star Trek ended when Enterprise was cancelled in 2005.
“That's the mistake that they made in the 1970s, [getting rid of the sets],” Nemecek said. “The corporate consensus was to just get rid of it—it's old and we'll never use it again. In 2005, everything turned; the psyche of the corporate mind turned—there was suddenly new people who didn't have a history [with Star Trek].”
As we previously reported, Huddleston saved what was left of the touring bridge before its pending trip to the junkyard in December 2011. He paid nothing for the props—just $7,000 to have the bridge shipped from Long Beach to his home in Sherman Oaks, 40 miles north. As a fan, Huddleston previously collected various Trek items, notably paying $500 each for bridge pieces like the Riker and Troi chairs from the Experience before other items were auctioned in 2010.
But the bridge represents a new level of fandom—Huddleston didn't have anything of this scale. He reached out to various contacts in Hollywood for advice on what to do next. Now, alongside Nemecek, many of the former TNG staffers Huddleston approached serve on the board of directors for New Starship.
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