I visited Jerry at home several times as "The Director's Edition" came together. I remember being very nervous when I had to drop the bomb that Bob Wise wanted to shorten two long effects sequences: the Enterprise's trip through the cloud and the flight over the giant Vger craft which immediately followed. "Good,” was the maestro's response. He then explained that he had always suspected that those sequences would be shortened before the film was released in 1979, and so he composed cues with a lot of repetitive phrases which would lend themselves to truncation. "That's great,” I said, "because the way I'd like to do it is to shorten the cues first, so that they still make sense musically, and then cut the picture to the score.” "Great!,” he agreed, and then added matter-of-factly, "they should cut all movies like that."

The following week I played him the cut down cues. You can just imagine what was going on in my mind as he listened to two five-minute compositions that were now each four minutes. Fortunately, he approved. A while later I came back with the music laid over the shortened sequences once I got them okayed by Mr. Wise and the film's original editor, Todd Ramsay. "What did you cut?” Jerry asked after watching them. His response was exactly what we were going for: a sense that the movie was the same but that it moved more briskly.

On next week's edition of "Celluloid Dreams," Matessino returns to discuss the restoration of George Greeley's music from the 1960s TV sitcom My Favorite Martian, starring Ray Walston, known to Star Trek fans as Starfleet Academy groundskeeper "Boothby." The release was produced by David C. Fein, Matessino's colleague on "The Director's Edition," with original cover art by Daren Dochterman, and is now available from La La Land Records.