Franz Bachelin

Franz Bachelin was the -nominated art director who oversaw the set design for Star Treks first pilot, , after Pato Guzman dropped out to return to Chile. He was the oldest member of the production staff to be directly hired for a position working for the Star Trek franchise.
The sudden departure of Guzman in early October 1964, left Associate Producer Byron Haskin seriously shorthanded, as Guzman's subordinate, Matt Jefferies, had his hands full with designing the exterior and subsequently the bridge of the new starship , leaving the design work for other production assets, such as sets and props, up in the air. Haskin needed a replacement for Guzman fast. It was then that he recalled Bachelin, with whom he had worked previously, among others on the 1951 western Silver City. Being 68 at the time when Bachelin received the call from Haskin, Bachelin was already looking forward to retirement but agreed to pitch in when Haskin promised that it only constituted merely a month's work and that he was home in time for the holidays, though that did not quite happen the way Haskin had led to believe. A veteran set designer, Bachelin's first responsibility entailed working out the layout of the bridge set in close cooperation with Jefferies, before moving on to work on the other sets for the pilot episode. Like his friend Haskin, Bachelin has taken a dim view on the interrupting on-set antics of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, a novice producer, during the production of "The Cage". (The Making of Star Trek, pp. 101-102; These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One, 1st ed, p. 44)
Jefferies, by his admission a practical "nuts-and-bolts" designer, approached his new superior's more artful designs for the other sets, beyond that of the bridge, with some skepticism, as he had admitted to decades later, "I had to come up with the construction drawings to actually build these sets, and my problem was in trying to figure out just what the hell Bachelin had done such a pretty painting about. I mean in terms of practicality, his paintings just didn't work; the construction crew would have gone out of their minds trying to build what he'd painted. At any rate, as I had said, I was a nuts-and-bolts man, so I took his basic paintings and used them in creating all of the ship's specific design work. I'm talking mainly about the bridge, the layout, the relationships between Enterprise crew members positions, the original instrumentations – all of this stuff required a massive amount of work." (Star Trek Memories, 1994, p. 57) 
After the pilot was produced, Bachelin, having been an outside contractor, left and did not return for either the next pilot or the eventual series when it was picked up by NBC, his place being filled by Desilu Art Director Rolland M. Brooks. However, his work was later seen in and (from the unaired pilot reworked regular series episodes), and he received onscreen credit for it in the latter episode.
== Career ==
German-born Franz Bachelin served as a fighter pilot in the imperial German Air Service during World War I. (The Making of Star Trek, p. 101) After the war, Bachelin received an invitation from fellow former fighter pilot Hermann Göring to help rebuild the German air force (it eventually became the World War II "Luftwaffe"), which he declined, opting to study architecture instead. Bachelin subsequently decided to emigrate in 1927 in the face of rising Nazism in his home country, a decision very much expedited by the circumstance that he, a Catholic, had in the meantime married actress/dancer Anita Hirtfield, who was of Jewish descent. After a brief stay in Cuba, he arrived in Los Angeles, USA, (alone, as his homesick wife returned to native Berlin, but who rejoined her husband in 1932 in Hollywood, very shortly before the Nazi party rose to power the year after, thereby, unlike most of her German family, escaping the Holocaust) where he was from 1928 onward working as art director at various Hollywood studios, conspicuously Paramount Pictures. 
Bachelin's many other art direction credits include a number of the classic Bulldog Drummond films of the 1930s, (1953), in which Bachelin made an uncredited and non-speaking – as he had never been able to loose his thick German accent (The Making of Star Trek, p. 101) – background cameo appearance, ironically as an American POW), (1954, starring Abraham Sofaer), John Wayne's (1955, co-starring Paul Fix), (1957, featuring William Schallert), (1962, starring Gary Lockwood), and (1965). Bachelin earned an Academy Award nomination in Best Art Direction-Set Decoration for Jules Verne's (1959). He shared the nomination with fellow art directors Herman A. Blumenthal and Lyle R. Wheeler and set decorators Joseph Kish and Walter M. Scott.
While he had intended to retire after Star Trek, Bachelin made three more motion picture contributions afterward, two 1965 films and the 1966 two-part pilot episode for , featuring guest star Frank Gorshin in his Emmy Award-nominated role as The Riddler, becoming his last recorded motion picture industry work.
Bachelin died in Pacific Palisades, California in 1980, aged 84, and was survived by his daughter , a well-known Californian art paintress and mixed-media artist. Her father incidentally, had taken up art painting as well after his retirement from the motion picture industry. 
== Credits ==
=== Art Director ===
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** (uncredited)
** (archive footage portions, uncredited)
** (archive footage portions, credited)
== Further reading ==
* The Making of Star Trek, September 1968
* Star Trek: The Original Series Sketchbook, May 1997
* These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One, August 2013
== External links ==
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* (in German)
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Category:Art directors