Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Star Trek’ Had Gangsters and Time Travel

It’s going to go down in history as one of the great Hollywood what ifs: What would Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek movie look like. Tarantino teased the film for years, and worked on the screenplay with The Revenant writer Mark L. Smith. But eventually, as often happens with Tarantino projects he considers but doesn’t personally start from scratch, it just kind of fell apart. Paramount has since moved in another direction with the big-screen Star Trek franchise. (Actually, they’ve moved in another another direction, as their first concept after Tarantino with Fargo creator Noah Hawley also fell apart.)

We never got many details about what Tarantino had in mind with his Star Trek, beyond the fact that it would have involved Captain Kirk’s Enterprise crew. But now Smith has shared a couple tidbits about their plan with the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast (via The Playlist). The first day he met Tarantino, Smith said, he read him an “awesome cool gangster scene” that Tarantino’d written himself. Smith called it “amazing.” He added:

Kirk’s in it, we’ve got him. All the characters are there. It would be those guys. I guess you would look at it like all the episodes of the show didn’t really connect. So this would be almost its own episode. A very cool episode. There’s a little time travel stuff going on … it’s really wild.

As part of the research for the project, Smith said he and Tarantino would hang out at Tarantino’s house watching old gangster films for hours. Well, that sounds like a very fun way to write a script.

There was an episode of the original Star Trek series that involved gangsters. In “A Piece of the Action,” the Enterprise visits a planet where everyone dresses and acts like they live in a 1930s gangster movie. There wasn’t time travel involved, but it had plenty of William Shatner talking like James Cagney.

Is it really too late to get a feature film version of this directed by Quentin Tarantino? Because I still really, really want it.