But I had other problems, such as hitting my mark—and unlike Montalban, who had effortlessly nailed twenty-three, I was too spooked to manage my one and only. During rehearsals, when it was indicated by a huge, black electrical tape cross, I experienced no difficulty. Imagine my surprise when, just prior to rolling, the big X was replaced by something the size of a beauty mark.
I have never seen my performance, which is probably just as well.
With shooting finally completed, I could concentrate on work in the cutting room.
CLIPPERS ON THE SIDES
Editing is a part of filmmaking I greatly enjoy. Like writing, where the name of the game is rewriting, I love the process of experimentation that editing affords. Though computers have simplified the mechanics of this process, even with time-consuming Moviolas or KEMs, the experiments were where the fun was. The work—no matter how electronically simplified—generally conforms to the following stages: (1) the editor strings together an assembly of what you’ve shot, trying to include as much as possible so you can be reminded of the possibilities; (2) the director views the assembly, after which he contemplates suicide (it is a maxim that no movie is ever as good as its dailies or as bad as its first cut); (3) the director starts slashing away and may jettison as much as an hour out of the assembly; (4) he looks at it again and still wants to kill himself but perhaps more humanely; (5) he then cuts another fifteen minutes; and so on. Eventually, he is no longer cutting minutes but seconds, endlessly refining the moments in the film, ultimately down to frames. Sometimes, hit by a brainstorm, the order of scenes is rearranged, or it occurs to someone that maybe a voice-over here or a flashback there might help and the continuity itself undergoes a transformation. You are no longer bound by the screenplay, for now the film has assumed a life of its own and you are molding celluloid instead of paper. Finally, at the end of the time contractually granted the director for his cut, the movie is turned over to the studio, and the fun ends as a tug-of-war commences. But let us leave that until its proper place.
Bill Dornisch the giggler took some getting used to. And he had a tendency to tear film, which led to a battered workprint. But he also had a sure-footed instinct about the footage itself and an impeccable sense of rhythm, essential for an editor. Unlike Bennett, with his shrewdly analytic temperament, Dornisch operated on pure instinct. He could seldom explain his choices, but they startled you with their rightness. I learned much from him when he’d offer certain truisms over his shoulder: “I can make ’em talk sooner but I can’t make ’em talk faster.”
You can lose track of time in an editing room. Typically, there are no windows or, if they exist, they’ve been blacked out. Day, night, these distinctions become meaningless as you sit, hypnotized, before your footage, amazed at what editing can do. Show a man entering a room and smiling. Cut to a baby gurgling in its crib, and the man is a nice man, smiling at the baby. Now substitute a shot of a bloody, headless corpse, and that same man with the same smile has been transformed into a sadistic killer. If movies are a director’s medium rather than an actor’s (let’s omit writers for purposes of this discussion), it is because the actor’s performance ultimately lies in the hands of the director and his editor and, as such, is at their mercy. Whereas an actor in a play is in complete control (the director can rage from the back of the theater but he can’t stop the performance once the curtain is up), here the choices—the particular takes, which close-up (if any), the length of the pauses—will determine how that performance goes over. Performances have indeed been made and lost in the cutting room. If the filmmakers start to panic over the movie, decisions may become draconian. Maybe the solution is to look at another take! This is an especially seductive notion, since we’ve all become so bored with the one we’ve been playing with all these months. The “new” take suddenly seems better, more vivid, etc., even though it typically is no such thing—merely different.
Star Trek II was in fact the first feature film to utilize computer-generated imagery. The informational Project Genesis video presented on Kirk’s monitor by Dr. Carol Marcus, was, I believe, the first time CGI found its way into a movie.
Throughout the postproduction process, each individual FX shot, like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, would trickle down from San Francisco to be viewed, criticized, redone, and eventually slipped into its proper place in the film. Until such time as the finished shot was approved, a blank piece of film was inserted with the words SCENE MISSING. Some slugs had descriptions on them (“Enterprise fires back”), while on others there was a crude storyboard sketch of the missing scene. I learned the hard way not to preview a movie without all the finished effects shots. No matter how many times or how emphatically you attempt to explain to the preview audience that some shots are missing or incomplete, that they must understand these are yet to be included, please ignore this, we’re sorry, blah blah, when the cartoon version or the SCENE MISSING title appears instead of the real thing, audiences always erupt in laughter, bounced out of the tale.
“In Space No One Can Hear You Scream” ran the tagline of the original Alien movie. From a scientific standpoint, this is certainly the case. But when we viewed the ILM spaceships flying around without sound to accompany their motion, they did indeed resemble nothing so much as the plastic models they were. It was sound that gave them their heft, their gravity, if you will, even though they were in an ostensibly weightless environment. Too bad, as I had been intrigued by breaking with spaceship movie tradition and having the ships glide silently, accompanied only by music when appropriate.
About spaceship sound inside the Enterprise, I was much more certain: There had to be some. I didn’t care what speculation had informed the previous movie or how silent the engines of the Enterprise had been heretofore. As far as I was concerned, this Enterprise was going to have a throbbing heartbeat. Our discussion on this subject happened to take place in one of the Paramount screening rooms, where during a pause in the conversation I became aware of a rhythmic, reverberating pounding. It was the air conditioning unit for the entire building, located next door. “Listen!” I said. “That’s just how I want the Enterprise to sound.” Cecelia Hall, our sound effects editor, duly recorded it and used it at various volumes whenever we were anywhere inside the ship.
At some point during this period, those whispers about our film began to get louder. People who hadn’t seen a frame were spreading the buzz that it was terrific. I was pleased but uneasy hearing this, mainly because I couldn’t imagine how this rumor had gotten started or on what it had been based.
It was also during this period that I encountered my taciturn production manager, Austen Jewell, one day in the parking lot. Jewell, whom I had met and whose work I had so admired on Time After Time, asked me how the editing was coming. In the course of telling him, Bob Sallin’s name came up, and Austin (at different times in his career he spelled his first name both ways) held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Don’t mistake him for your friend,” he warned me. “He tried to have you fired during the first week of shooting.”
I must’ve stood in that parking lot with my mouth opening and closing like a goldfish’s. “He—?”
“He wasn’t happy with the footage so he tried to have you fired. I was in the screening room when he showed your stuff to Michael Eisner.” (Eisner was Paramount’s president and chief operating officer at the time.) “Eisner said, ‘I don’t know what your problem is; I only wish Grease looked this good,’ and that was the end of it.”
We chatted for a few moments more and then Jewell got into his car, leaving me to my confused thoughts. I now recalled Sallin’s disappointment with my staging of Kirk’s original entrance. He had been correct about that. I liked Bob Sallin and admired his understated style. Evidently, the reverse was not the case. Or perhaps, despite liking me, he had been disappointed in my performance as director. If our positions had been reversed, what would I have done? Or, more to the point, how would I have done it? And what to do with this inf
ormation now? In the end I elected to do nothing. I hadn’t been fired. It was water over the dam or under the bridge or whatever it was. The film was finished, the buzz was positive, and I had bigger fish to keep frying.
It was also sometime during this period that I got a call from Harve Bennett, summoning me to his office. Wondering what excrement had now tumbled into the wind machine, I trudged wearily across the nighttime lot and sat opposite his cluttered desk.
“Kid, we have a problem,” Bennett began, pausing to sip his beer. “I’ve lost the credit arbitration. What do you think I should do?”
Determining screen credits on a movie is the prerogative of the Writers Guild, not the studios. The studio submits its proposed screen credits to the Guild, but the WGA has the final say. Writers may appeal to the Guild for arbitration if they feel they have been unjustly credited (or uncredited) but only on narrow, procedural grounds. There is, as I have noted, a prejudice against according a producer a writing credit on the same film. In our blithe innocence, we had placed Bennett’s name on the screenplay, and now he was telling me it had been rejected and asking me what I thought he should do.
Something in his expression told me this was not the moment to hesitate.
“You’ve been robbed,” I said quickly, “and if you appeal, I’ll go in there as a witness.”
Which, surreally enough, was exactly what happened. I felt as if I was one-upping Tom Sawyer, who got to observe his own funeral. In my case I got to deliver the eulogy as well. “Gentlemen, this script, one of the swellest it has ever been my privilege to read, let alone direct,” and so on.
One of the reasons credits are so hotly and frequently contested is the pernicious system of awarding bonuses tied to the amount of screen credit received. If a writer gets sole credit, so much more money; half credit, less; and so on. In the end, Bennett and Jack B. Sowards (author of one of the five original screenplay drafts), received story credit and Sowards received the sole screenplay credit.
At a meeting in Michael Eisner’s office, Barry Diller fumed at the title of the movie. “No one knows what the fuck ‘wrath’ means!” he shouted, glaring at me. “How did we wind up with this stupid title?”
“Don’t look at me,” I responded. “The title is the handiwork of Mr. Mancuso in New York.”
We showed our cut of the film to Eisner and company. Shots were still missing, and there was a musical “temp” track in place of Horner’s anticipated score, but it was evident the studio was much pleased. The buzz continued to grow. I was spared the ordeal of sitting through the movie in the executives’ presence (I always have trouble watching my own work, anyway; all I can see are mistakes), but I did screen the cut for myself and sat there, trying to figure out what I had done—or failed to do. It was no use; I couldn’t be objective. I couldn’t make head or tail of the movie, except to know every cut, every line, every scratch on our very scratched-up work print. I had no idea what the studio’s enthusiasm was based on. I might as well have been looking at the thing through the wrong end of a telescope.
The studio’s notes, when they arrived, were few and mostly reasonable. One interesting plot issue they felt needed to be addressed: In the present cut (and script) of the film, Kirk is aware that he has an illegitimate son. But given the fact that in the previous twenty years (which is to say, throughout the period covered by the series and first movie) no mention has been made of this fact, Kirk emerges as a schmuck for having ignored the boy all this time. The studio felt this was not only unsympathetic but perhaps also implausible, and requested that the scene in which Kirk and David meet be reshot so as to resolve this. Kirk’s line, “Why didn’t you tell him?” delivered to the boy’s mother would now be changed to, “Why didn’t you tell me?” which would require Carol to present a rationale for having completely cut Kirk out of David’s life. This made sense to me, and we reshot the exchange. Reshooting is a surreal feeling. The cast and crew have long departed, the sets have been dismantled, etc., and now a skeletal version of all must be reconstituted. Sometimes key components are no longer available, which coerces you into close-ups. If your cameraman is now off on another film, someone must attempt to replicate his style and use the same lenses, but you can usually spot the difference in the lighting or framing when you watch the finished film. A battle I lost involved eliminating the identity of midshipman Peter Preston (as Scotty’s nephew); also Kirk’s line, “Midshipman, you’re a tiger,” which they felt came out sort of gay. In subsequent versions of the film, I managed to restore Preston’s identity without Kirk’s questionable line reading.
Our first “public” showing, or preview, took place on the lot at the Paramount Theater. Because of the secretive nature of our film’s plot, all Star Trek II ’s previews were likewise held on the lot. (For all I know, the viewers had to sign loyalty oaths.) First screenings, before no matter how friendly an audience, are among the most terrifying parts of the filmmaking process. When we had first screened Time After Time, my intestines entwined themselves like a horse’s, and I would have colicked if I could. The same symptoms obtained now: I stood in the back of the theater and fought the urge to flee to the men’s room and be sick. That Hydra-headed monster, the audience, can, on a whim, destroy you and all you’ve worked for.
True, some things can be fixed; that’s what previews are for. With plays in “tryouts” you can rewrite; in film you can reedit or reshoot if necessary (if you can afford it). Here, though, we faced a greater challenge: How would an audience react to the death of a beloved character?
We had no idea how the audience would in fact respond to Spock’s death but we all knew the moment when they would be bluntly reminded that it was imminent: a shot of Spock’s empty chair on the bridge after he’d quietly gone below in an effort to save the ship. Suddenly the opening scene came back to them and they remembered: this is the movie where Spock dies. If they were going to throw things, this was when they’d do it.
There was dead silence at the sight of that chair.
And there always would be. What one audience does, every audience does. Similarly, if a joke doesn’t work with one audience, it will never work with any audience.
The audience giggled at the SCENE MISSING slugs but otherwise was enrap tured by the film beyond anything I could’ve imagined. The movie played like gangbusters, with the audience laughing, cheering, and weeping in all the right places. You could hear people sobbing throughout Spock’s death.
At the end, they were simply stunned.
Was this what we wanted?
I had certainly thought so.
But by this point another thought began percolating through everyone’s head. As enthusiasm for the film mounted, some people were beginning to think beyond Star Trek II. It was not a foregone conclusion that we had saved the franchise—the film could always flop—but the question was now being asked: What If? And, as a corollary, how could there be another Star Trek movie without Spock? Kirk might well be the anchor of the series, but it was hard to escape the conclusion that Spock was its most popular character. Was there any way of keeping him alive, or, failing that, bringing him back to life or, at the very least, hinting at that possibility? Instead of stunned silence, should we heed Harvey Milk’s credo: you gotta give them hope?
Something to cheer about?
It is hard to describe how infuriated I was by what I took to be these crass commercial considerations. I had by now come to realize how devoted the show’s fan base was, how seriously people took the idea of Spock’s death, something for which I had fought long and hard, confident in the belief that, if it proceeded organically, it would be more than justified; it would be inevitable. From my point of view, bringing him back to life would constitute a complete dry hustle of people’s emotions, an unforgivable breach of trust. Yes, we’ll get you all worked up, we’ll wring tears at the passing of Spock, and then we’ll reveal it was all a crock. Someone once observed that Americans like their tragedies with happy endings, an idea that I foun
d morbidly repellent as it negated the tragedy in the first place.
Bennett’s concern—possibly influenced by his overall deal on the Paramount lot (he would be here when the rest of us had cleaned out our offices), but also perhaps the product of his shrewd analytical abilities—was whether the film was making a mistake when it simply deprived people of anything that could be construed as “hope.”
Pick your battles, I learned—and this is the battle I picked. I did not want the death of Spock to end in a betrayal of the audience’s emotional investment in that moment. In this I had no hesitation in believing that I was in the right. I fought the proposed idea of hinting at Spock’s resurrection every way I knew how. I argued against it. I stalled. I lied. I refused to cooperate, trying to let the clock run out against the moment when it was time to cut negative or miss our release date.
I even came up with what I thought was an elegant compromise. At the beginning of each Star Trek television episode, we hear Kirk’s voice-over in the log of the Enterprise: “These are the continuing voyages of the starship Enterprise; her ongoing [originally “five-year” ] mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations . . . to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
I proposed letting Spock’s sepulchral voice read these lines at the end of our film. The audience wouldn’t know how he came to be saying them—was it his ghost speaking?—but they would get the idea of Spock’s own “ongoingness.”
But bigger gears had been set in motion than I could clog. My Spock log-entry idea was merely incorporated into a more literal hint that he was—somehow—not dead.
When Bennett indicated he would go along and try to come up with a satisfying compromise, I viewed it as a cave-in. Bennett, by contrast, was a realist. He had an overall studio contract and explained it to me like this: “Kid, you’re the squadron leader, no question. But I’m the base commander. And after you’re long gone, I’ll still be here.” Trying to make other movies, he didn’t need to add.
The View from the Bridge Page 14