STARTREK.COM: Who are you?
Matt Jefferies: My name is Matt Jefferies. Walter was on the credit line and I was known around the studio as Matt, so finally we had to put Matt in parenthesis. So it's Walter (Matt) Jefferies.
Q: How did you get a job working on Star Trek?
MJ: Became a freelance aviation illustrator and basically that's the way I got into the business. I went in to Warner Brothers to help them with some technical stuff on Tab Hunter's "Bombers B-52".
Since I went into Warner's as a technical, they handed me a project to do a twenty-foot mechanical, man-carrying shark for "Old Man and the Sea". Then they said, "Well, if you can do that stuff you can do ship interiors." So there were two or three projects at Warner's and then over to MGM for "The Wreck of the Mary Deare". And that seemed to qualify me to go with "The Untouchables" to do a Ford Tri-Motor interior and then a couple of breweries, which we had to break up, and a number of other things. Actually, a bordello was one of them - I've never told anybody why I was qualified to do that. And then into "Ben Casey". And at that point we took a month off and went to the East Coast to visit the family. Came back and I couldn't find my equipment. My little cubicle was empty. So I went into Bud Brooks' office, head of the art department, and said "Where's the next Casey script?" and he said, "You're not on the show anymore."
It served me right for taking a month's vacation. At any rate he said, "Your stuff is in the big drafting room." That was a room that's about twenty-five by fifty, I guess. He said, "Your stuff 's in there and there's a man coming in this morning by the name of Roddenberry to do a space show." So due to my aviation background. He said he had already told Gene that I had been on B-17's in Europe. Gene had flown 'em in the Pacific so we had a mutual meeting point, I guess. So when he came in we re-fought World War II for about twenty minutes. And then he told me what he wanted. Actually, about all he said that would help me along was several "don'ts." Such as, "no flames, no fins, no rockets." And one "do," is "make it look like its got power." And then he walked out.
The job that was handed to me, primarily, was to come up with a space ship. So, considering the restraints that he did not give me, it was a case that I had to find my own design envelope, which meant I was looking for a shape, but I didn't know what the shape looked like. It had to be instantly recognizable. That was my job strictly at the beginning. As it fleshed a little bit more then I also had the bridge to do. When we finally managed to sell the basic design, and that's a fun anecdote too when you get down to it, I did a very quick rendering on black illustration board and in white, kicked in a little color. I was now probably in the fifth week of frustration. We had sketches in every medium all over the place just trying to find something. I finally came up with the basic design and I felt we had something. Well, after doing that rendering, I thought, "Sure, we're going to pre-load this deal". Everything else looks crude but we're going to polish this a bit. So I took the drawing down to the Mill real quick, and I had a guy on the lathe with balsa wood turn out a saucer and put another one on another lathe turning out the bottom hull. The head of the Mill said, "In a minute these lathes will be free and we'll turn out the other two things. I said, "No, just give me some ½ inch birch dowels". So at any rate, we felt it looked passable and we put a little hook in the top with a string. The next day when Gene and Herb Solow and the people from NBC came over that color rendering cinched it. And I said, well if you really thing that will do it, how about this, and I held it up. Gene liked it. So he took the string and held it but immediately, the birch being heavier, the thing flipped upside down. I had another selling job to do to get that thing right-side up again.
As luck would have it when the first show went on the air, TV Guide ran a picture of the Enterprise on the front cover — upside down.
Q: Where did the numbers NCC-1701 come from?
MJ: The rumors ran around, I know, for a long time that the numbers on my airplane came off the Enterprise and others said it went on the Enterprise from my airplane. It did neither. I didn't go to much of a great extent to squash that rumor. I just thought it seemed to be so much fun. The number was on the airplane when I got it and that was a year after the original Star Trek folded.
NC stood for the United States Commercial and Russia wound up with CCCC for their national markings. Of course, it had been said for a long time that no one country could afford to really go up into outer space. Well of course Russia was sort of our counterpart in the space thing, I said, "Well, we'll use some of each" so it became NCC. For numbering I needed numbers that could be instantly recognized. Therefore three, six, eight, and nine would not work I said, "One seven. Okay, so it's "17th" basic design for the Federation. Serial number one. A prototype. 1701". I did put that on paper to guide anybody else following — thought I didn't know if anyone else would want to follow it — but the second ship of the same type would have been a "02" and a modification would have a letter. Standard military practice. But that's basically what it was — a number you could pick up immediately.
