The View from the Bridge

by Nicholas Meyer

  I gave the screenplay its title: The Undiscovered Country. I thought this particularly elegant, coming as it does from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, in which he refers to death as “the undiscover’d country.” After all, Spock would die in the movie.

  And so would my title.

  SHATNER

  But all that was down the road. The script was finished. The studio professed itself delighted. Could it be adjusted? Of course, and it would need to be. (Bennett contributed some delectable moments, including the “would you like a tranquilizer?” exchange between Kirk and Bones as the Enterprise is piloted out of space dock by first-time helmsman Saavik.)

  Nonetheless, the structure of the thing was sufficiently solid to send Bob Sallin and me up to Lucas’s special effects house, ILM, in San Mateo, across the bay from San Francisco.

  There we sat down with visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston and a roomful of agreeable technowizards to discuss the requirements of the script and how best to realize some of the tricky visuals.

  Ralston et al. had read my draft with a microscope, breaking it down in purely visual terms. Deliberately or not I had created what I came to think of as an “indoor/outdoor” film—that is to say, the scenes aboard the spaceships were indoors and typically required no ILM shots (except those that appeared on the Enterprise bridge’s forward viewing screen); and the bulk of the ILM material involved “outdoor,” i.e., space shots, wherein the Enterprise and the Reliant played cat and mouse with each other or blasted away, tearing off bits of each other’s armored hulls. This division greatly simplified my responsibilities as director. The ILM crowd had helpfully identified and numbered each of these “outdoor” shots and drawn preliminary cartoons, called storyboards, which resemble comic book panels, for Bob Sallin and me to evaluate. Did we see them differently from the ILM conceptions? Did we want more of them? Less of them? Did we have ideas of our own that they had failed to express? Had we imagined angles or perspectives they hadn’t anticipated? In the following months, these cartoons would be refined, simplified, amplified, and then, when agreed upon, the relevant shots—often involving multiple “elements” (spaceships, wires, lighting, shadows, explosions, etc.)—would be “composited” at ILM and sent down to LA, piecemeal, to be again evaluated, criticized, and sent back, until Harve Bennett, Bob Sallin, and I had signed off on each one as completed. When Star Trek II was made, computers and e-mail were only beginning to make their appearance for most of us; back then all the shots were hand carried by messengers on planes between San Francisco and LA and back again. The explosion of the Genesis planet was later filmed by ILM inside nearby Candlestick Park, then the home of the San Francisco Giants. In addition, we scrounged other special effects shots leftover from the first movie. The Enterprise leaving space dock at the film’s beginning was largely cobbled together from that source and included exquisite miniature work by John Dykstra and Robert Abel.

  Nowadays, computers, e-mail, and video-conferencing simplify the entire process, though I don’t believe they make it any better or less expensive. Computer-generated imagery has come a long way but has still, in my view, a long way to go before it can truly compete or compare with the three-dimensional reality provided by models.

  I don’t recall how long this initial ILM conversation had been in progress when I was called to the telephone. On the other end of the line in Los Angeles, Harve Bennett told me the bad news: William Shatner hated the script.

  I can remember only the pounding in my ears, not whether I was sitting or standing or, having been standing, had subsided into a chair.

  “He hates the script?”

  “Hates it,” Bennett repeated.

  I couldn’t think.

  “So . . . what do we do now?”

  He sighed. “Go back to your meeting. We’ll see what happens.”

  There may be—and I know for a fact there are—people who can play their bad hand close to their vest, cooler heads than mine who can function equably while the house they inhabit tumbles around them. But I am not one of those people.

  I sat through the afternoon’s meeting numbly answering questions on autopilot all the while knowing that this was all total bullshit. There was no movie, the meeting was a charade, but only I was aware of it. And anyone who really knew me would have detected something amiss; my characteristic ebullience was nowhere in evidence. I kept replaying Bennett’s blunt characterization of Shatner’s response. Hates the script? How could he hate the script? Everyone loves the script. Everyone says what a great job I did. What’s to hate?

  A day or so later, William Shatner himself met with me in Bennett’s office. I had known him slightly before this on a social basis, but today he was all agitated business.

  “This script is simply terrible, a disaster,” he began, and I don’t remember much of what he said after that. I do recall that I had to keep getting up and going to the bathroom—so often that he finally remarked on it. “Are you okay?”

  I mumbled something to justify my frequent egresses but the truth was that I was so distressed by what he was dishing out that my bladder kept filling up. A double humiliation.

  The only time he sparked was when I brought up Hornblower.

  “That’s exactly what Gene [Roddenberry] said it was!” he exclaimed.

  Later, I would learn just how infatuated with Hornblower Roddenberry had been.

  After Shatner finally left, Bennett ruminated. Much more experienced than I, he was used to temperament and he had that analytic ability I so sorely lacked of being able to parse and dissect what was being said into manageable components. As he talked I began to calm down and form a plan of my own. What seemed so catastrophic to Shatner seemed eminently fixable to me now that I wasn’t jumping up for the men’s room every five minutes.

  As part of my ongoing cinematic education, I was now learning how to write for a star. As a man, William Shatner is refreshingly free of ego. He is polite, attentive, unassuming, interested in other people and what they do. But as a leading actor, he is very protective, particularly of Kirk, his screen persona. Once I understood the paradoxical duality—no ego, but enormous vanity—of his character, it became easier to understand and address his concerns. Put simply (perhaps too simply), he wanted to be the first man through the door. If the messenger delivered the message, he didn’t want that messenger to tower over him. He didn’t mind that the film dealt with a man growing old; he just didn’t want to specify that man’s exact age. (Not unreasonable if you think about it. What actor wishes to find himself rejected for the role of a fifty-year-old because he’s already played a character who owns to sixty-two?)

  Later, rereading the above, it occurs to me that Shatner and I may not be all that different. I’ve been called egotistical but I think this is a misinterpretation. My narcissism has its own bespoke shape. I am passionate, enthusiastic, but not, I would argue, egotistical.

  But vain . . . yes, I’ll grant you vain.

  I went back to my screenplay—malleable as the Constitution it would prove to be—and amended it per my new insights. The revisions proved remarkably simple, and in the end Shatner’s needs were easily fulfilled. In a day or so—more paper cuts and more Wite-Out sticking to my fingers—I photocopied the revised result and sent it back to him.

  When I turned on my answering machine a few hours later, I heard his voice: “Nick, you are a genius, I don’t know what you’ve done but this is terrific . . .” etc.

  Uh huh. I saved the tape with this precious recording for some future emergency and started preparing the movie in earnest.

  PREP

  As I have noted, directing a movie that you have also written is doubly taxing. You want to be prepping the film when you are still revising the script; you want to be tweaking the script when you are busy prepping the film.

  Since Star Trek II was being made on the cheap, I would have no choice but to use hand-me-down sets and props, though I did hold fast on changing the costumes and gussyi
ng up those same drab interiors, which held all the interest for me of a Holiday Inn. I wanted blinking lights everywhere and I wanted uniforms that suggested a military, not to say nautical character. I wanted to understand rank, ratings, and function. I toured the Enterprise bridge, and it was hate at first sight, not least because I realized 40 percent of the film took place on a set in the shape of a circle, meaning that it would require coverage in 360 degrees. Typically, if you are shooting in a room, essentially a box, you can be very selective with your coverage and light everything for one direction before “turning around” and getting the rest. In a circular set, you are always turning around. Since the Enterprise bridge, with its removable, swappable pie-slice sections, also doubled as the bridge of the USS Reliant, I was actually forced into double 360-degree coverage. In order to fit or manipulate a camera in this confined space, we would be forever removing and reinserting these bulky, balky pie sections, each with its own elaborate wiring that brought light to the Enterprise’s endless controls and monitors, each hooked up to its own individual-playback VHS machine. Moviemaking frequently involves a lot of waiting around, but this was enough to grind all the enamel off my teeth, especially given our constricting schedule.

  There was another difficulty I was obliged to face. Many of the changes I contemplated for the second Star Trek movie flew directly in the face of the “ground rules” established by the first, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, directed by the legendary Robert Wise. I knew Wise and admired him both professionally and personally, which put me in a tricky position. I was intent on making a very different movie. Many people find much to trash about the original Star Trek movie, but I am not among them. I am certain that without Robert Wise’s pioneering effort, subsequent Trek films would not have been as successful. Say what you like, Wise and Star Trek: The Motion Picture went boldly where no one had gone before. And if those who preceded us made mistakes, those mistakes certainly pointed the way for people like me who came after. What some have described as the overarching solemnity of the original film drove me in the opposite direction. Tom Stoppard said somewhere that the first thing he looked for when writing was the jokes. This approach, coming from a writer I idolized, served to validate my own instincts to push back against the seriousness of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Similarly, I rebelled against the look of Wise’s film. For all I know, life aboard spaceships in the future will look bland and comfortable but in my opinion, it didn’t look very interesting. In line with my nautical ideas, I would attempt something different.

  The first Star Trek movie dealt in soft pastels and “updated” versions of the original Dr. Denton outfits. Doubtless the notion was that spaceships of the future would be user-friendly environments, where people could walk around in modified tracksuits, but in my opinion, however accurate such prognostications, the look was visually unexciting. What I wanted was the gritty interior of a destroyer or, better yet, the claustrophobic feeling of a submarine, with contrasting lighting to match the hard-edged, blinking lights of the sets. In my original inspection tour of the bridge, insisting on those flashing lights, I was told I had spent fifty thousand dollars. If I’d had the budget, I would’ve started from scratch and the result would have looked more like the spaceship freighter seen in Alien. (Gene Hackman once told me he thought the best film acting occurred in confined spaces. When I mentioned Lawrence of Arabia, he called it an exception.)

  At Robert Sallin’s suggestion, I hired Gayne Rescher as my director of photography and agreed to use the mercurial Bill Dornisch as the editor. It may be urged that these were not famous filmmakers. True. Like almost everyone connected with Star Trek II, they were drawn primarily from television (though Rescher had been Elia Kazan’s DP for the extraordinary A Face in the Crowd and had shot A New Leaf for Elaine May). But as we were to learn, this was in no way a handicap. It turned out all many of these television folks needed was a chance to spread their wings.

  Dornisch was a maddening talent with a high-pitched giggle that reminded me of Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death. All jolly intuition, he seldom read scripts but flew by the seat of his pants, juxtaposing images in the messiest cutting room I’d ever seen (not that I’d seen that many by that point), but ultimately throwing footage together in inspired fashion. Typically, I am able to get along with most people and once I succeeded in persuading Dornisch to read the script and could tell him what the film was trying to be about, he proved more than equal to the task. You meet a lot of walking wounded in my business, editors or actors or cinematographers who have been so abused by directors or studios that they have scars where there is no longer any skin. Handle with care and you may be able to bring them back to life, but it requires patience, tact, and, yes, affection.

  A film editor in many ways resembles a psychoanalyst. In each case the director (or analysand) turns over the raw footage—dailies in one instance, free associations in the other—and these, in turn, are “assembled” by the editor or psychoanalyst, who then plays them back for the director/analysand. If the editor is good and understands the material and the director, what he shows you is recognizable as what you intended. You will tweak it here and there but you know you’ve been understood. If he’s a great editor, he will take it further than you dreamed, finding, in the footage that you were so busy accumulating, the moments and “beats” you didn’t even know you’d captured. The scene he plays back for you is richer, more textured than you’d imagined. Conversely, if he’s a bad editor or the wrong one for this particular job, the result of his assembly is unrecognizable—you haven’t been understood. (All this, incidentally, applies to the psychoanalyst, as well, who is stitching together the dailies from your head.)

  Robert Fletcher was our costumer—again, a legacy, but one that made sense. He knew from Star Trek but he was a flexible, thorough professional and was excited, I believe, to be turned loose to rethink the uniforms of the Starfleet crew for the first time since the original series. For Khan and his genetically engineered shipmates, we settled on a sort of Hell’s Angels from Outer Space look. Joe Jennings, our production designer, was another experienced Star Trek hand, but the chance to breathe new life into familiar material, to rethink the look of Star Trek’s world, even if not entirely from scratch, got his juices flowing as well.

  I have a theory that art thrives on restrictions: It’s when you haven’t the money or the facilities to bring off your project that you are obliged to be imaginative and creative. When painters came to grips with the fact that paintings don’t move, that they exist in only two dimensions, they had to find ways to give the sense of movement to their pictures and to provide the illusion of depth. One might even argue that without censorship there would be no art, for what are metaphors, similes, allegories, symbols, etc., but attempts to circumvent the limitations placed on what we can say or show? One of my all-time favorite movies, the Laurence Olivier-directed Henry V, made on a shoestring during World War II, exploits its lack of resources by emphasizing them. The film acknowledges (as Shakespeare’s play also acknowledges) the fact that “this cockpit” cannot “hold the vasty fields of France.” By starting in a re-creation of an Elizabethan theater and letting the Chorus urge us, “On your imaginary forces, work!” we, the audience, get to contribute to the film, fleshing out its two-dimensional sets (taken from the Duc de Berry’s Book of Hours), until the battle of Agincourt, where cinematic realism is finally allowed to prevail (but never entirely—instead of realistic battle sounds, William Walton’s music is there to remind us, yet again, that something has been left to our imagination).

  Our production manager was the amazing Austen Jewell, who had performed the same function for me on Time After Time. Sometimes referred to as the unit production manager, or UPM, he prepares the budget (and sometimes the first shooting schedule as well). The UPM hires the key crew after consulting with the director and producer(s). The UPM is responsible for managing the production and making sure department heads keep to their respective budg
ets. He/she monitors the daily progress of the shooting schedule. Nowadays the title is occasionally gussied up to something called “line producer.” Jewell was well-named, a taciturn but dryly humorous taskmaster who was a living, one-man history of the movies. He played the child in Von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) and was one of two street toughs who gave the Little Tramp a hard time in City Lights (1931; the other “tough” was future director Robert Parrish); later still Jewell was Chaplin’s first AD on Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and countless others over the next forty years, including his chores as UPM on the Christopher Reeve Superman (1978). Watching and listening to him on Time After Time, I had learned the etiquette of a film set. There are codes of conduct behind and before the cameras. (Does the star stick around to deliver his off-camera dialogue to the day player?) I was humbled and envious that Jewell had lived his entire life on one set or another.

  Robert Wise’s nephew, Doug Wise, was my first AD. Calm and professional, whatever opinions or reservations he may have held concerning my revisions of his uncle’s Star Trek work, he never once uttered them. A good “first” is the director’s right arm, his expeditor, strategist, enforcer, and cocon spirator. I never could get below the surface of Doug’s professionalism, which is perhaps for the best. For all I know, Doug Wise had no interest whatsoever in Star Trek; his interest was in a smooth-running shoot and he let nothing interfere with that goal.