By BWilliams / 09:37, 15 September 2005 / General Star Trek

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CNN has reported that Academy Award-winning director Robert Wise has died at the age of 91. Wise died Wednesday of heart failure after falling ill and was rushed to the UCLA Medical Center, according to Lawrence Mirisch, an entertainment agent and friend of the Wise family. According to Mirisch, Wise had celebrated his 91st birthday on Saturday and appeared in good health.

Wise began his career as a film editor, working on editing THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME and THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER and winning the first of his four Academy Awards for editing the Orson Welles classic CITIZEN KANE, considered by many to be the quintessential American film. Wise later won Oscars for directing I WANT TO LIVE! in 1958, and for producing THE SAND PEBBLES in 1966. His most successful and notable acclaim came with producing and directing the Oscar-winning musicals WEST SIDE STORY and THE SOUND OF MUSIC in the 1960's.

Wise's forays into the science fiction and horror genres first began with THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE in 1944, followed by THE BODY SNATCHER in 1945, and one of the seminal science fiction films of the 1950's, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.

Wise directed 39 films in his career, including THE SET-UP, DESTINATION GOBI, EXECUTIVE SUITE, TWO FOR THE SEESAW, THE HAUNTING, RUN SILENT RUN DEEP, TRIBUTE TO A BAD MAN, and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. In addition, Wise recently served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Directors Guild of America. He was also awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1966 for sustained achievement in the motion picture industry, and the D.W. Griffith Award from the Directors Guild of America in 1988.

In 1978 Wise directed the first landmark STAR TREK feature film, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, released on December 7, 1979, which reunited the cast of the original series for the first of six theatrical outings. STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE became a big-screen blockbuster and earned three Academy Award nominations in 1980. But because of tight deadlines, problems with the script and problems with the visual effects, it remained for 20 years the only film that Wise felt was incomplete.

"We were forced to start filming the picture with a script that was still being worked on," Wise said in a chat transcript for StarTrek.com two years ago. "The studio had pre-sold the movie to theatres in exchange for guaranteeing that the film would be released on a certain date. And so we continued to revise the script as we were shooting, which is not the ideal way to make a picture. Then, later on we ran into problems with the special effects, which weren't working, so we pretty much had to start over with a new team." That led to the removal of a number of visual effects sequences Wise had planned for the film.

"I normally would have taken the picture out for previews and then go back and give the picture a fine cut. We never had that opportunity," Wise said.

In 1999 Wise revisited the film and, with Paramount's blessings, restored a number of scenes to the film along with completing and updating a number of visual effects sequences. The Director's Edition of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE was released on home video and DVD in November 2001 to overwhelming success. "I'm proud of the film today (in the form of the 'Director's Edition'), something I thought I would never be," he stated.

TrekWeb.com offers its sincere condolences to the Wise family at this time. To read the full obituary, click here. More thoughts from the Wise transcript can be found here. A full biography of Wise's credentials can be found here. A longer copy of the obituary can be found on the Los Angeles Tribune's web site here.

StarTrek.com will update its site with tributes from colleagues later in the day, and TrekWeb.com will post some of those tributes as they become available.