“Don’t you know who you are?” I countered, passionately. “You’re Harve fucking Bennett! They need you. If you take a stand, we’ll win!”
In the end Bennett, admittedly conflicted but obliged to take the long view, came up with the scenario that pleased everyone (except me, of course): first a shot was added in the engine room: Spock’s fingers splayed on Dr. McCoy’s unconscious face right before Spock enters the lethal radiation chamber as he utters the somber admonition “Remember,” and later Spock’s coffin, shot from within a photon torpedo, would land on the Genesis planet, and Kirk would vow to return to see what had become of it. “If Genesis is indeed life from death,” he would proclaim, “I must return here . . .” blah, blah. . . .
Since I refused to shoot it, Sallin was dispatched to San Francisco with a team to film the surface of the Genesis planet with Spock’s coffin lying among the bull(shit) rushes in a botanical museum. At one point, he and I had an explosive encounter—again in the Paramount parking lot—in which he yelled, accusing me of being “morally bankrupt” and added for good measure, “You’d walk over your own mother to get the film your way.”
“I would!” I admitted at equally high volume. “But as long as anybody around here is filing for Chapter 11, maybe you should go over your own accounts and look into the business of trying to get me fired.”
And so on.
In the end none of my stonewalling did any good. Sallin’s San Francisco footage looked beautiful, and when James Horner added music to help sell it, Bennett saw the result and wept. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong,” he confessed, “but I believe it.”
Horner’s music did indeed crown the movie, with or without what I viewed as its vulgar compromise. Music is always added at the end of the process, and if it works it is one of the most exciting parts of making a film. Sound always dominates image. If you doubt this, simply drive around town (or country) and listen to your radio. The music will determine the character of the landscape, never the reverse. Show a laughing girl bounding across a field of yellow daisies and underscore that child with Chopin’s “Funeral March” and you will know the kid is doomed to die of an incurable disease. Horner’s music captured the essence of the film; he even made sense of Star Trek ’s fanfare.
But oh, the satisfaction when you subdue the beast. Comedians talk about “killing” an audience, “knocking them dead,” and I understand the sense in which the relationship is an adversarial one. And when the monster is defeated, when you have a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand people eating out of the palm of your hand, laughing or crying at your command, you can pound your chest like King Kong. The delirious sense of accomplishment is nonetheless the high that we in the theater—any theater—are constantly chasing, the reason we’re going through all this hell in the first place: to make strangers laugh or cry. Nothing is more important to us. To outsiders, such a goal may seem absurd, puerile, incomprehensible—but only because they haven’t inhaled the opium of a smash. The bliss is ultimately indescribable, but Sondheim’s song, “It’s a Hit!” comes closest to capturing the feeling.
And once you know your film plays, once you have ironed out every last frame so that it works from beginning to end (rarely!), you can relax and revel in that power, that high.
How calm, how serene you are watching that celluloid unspool . . .
Later I attended another showing of the film in the executive screening room with Harve Bennett, Gary Nardino (head of the television division), and Paramount chairman Barry Diller. When the lights came up, the others waited in silence for Diller’s reaction.
“I didn’t know this movie was about the death of Spock,” he began. “You can’t kill Spock.”
This was less than a month before the film was to open. Bennett stared at the floor, Nardino gazed at the ceiling, or perhaps it was the other way around. Regardless, neither man spoke.
I wanted to ask how it was that the boss of a studio with this much money involved (admittedly less than 25 percent of the previous film’s gargantuan budget) could not have been bothered to read the script, but I confined myself to replying, “Yes, you can kill him—if you do it well.” I had all the courage of the preview audience’s convictions.
“And another thing,” Diller went on as though I hadn’t spoken. “The reconciliation scene between Kirk and his son doesn’t work.”
“In your opinion,” I responded, my intestines contracting and my heart pounding so that it could be heard across the room.
He turned to look at me, as if seeing me for the first time, a vein throbbing in his forehead.
“Look, I can say it to you politely or I can just say it: the scene doesn’t work. If I were that kid I’d want to know where the hell my father had been my whole life.”
I took a deep breath. “Here’s where I come out,” I said, speaking very slowly so as to keep my voice steady. “I filmed the script we all agreed upon. I was asked to make editorial changes and I made them. I was asked to reshoot material and I reshot it. More material was reshot without my agreement, but this is where I draw the line. If any further cuts or reshoots take place they will take place without me, and if this film is further touched, I will get a sandwich board and picket Paramount Pictures in Westwood when the film opens, and if this is the sort of reputation you want to attract other directors to this lot, that is, of course, entirely your affair.”
Neither Bennett nor Nardino moved. Diller stared at me. The closest I could come to looking him back in the eye was to stare at the adjacent pulsing vein on his forehead. Finally he said, “Well, if you feel that strongly, it’s your movie.”
With which he walked out.
At some point during all of this, Bennett had to check into the hospital for several days with an infected cat scratch.
Our next preview also took place again on the Paramount lot with another recruited audience; once again I was a complete wreck. What if this crowd—in unique contradiction to the show biz rule cited above—felt differently? What if they ridiculed what had made others weep? I had stuck to my guns, defied the head of the studio, and now I was—predictably—panicked about my stand. Unlike Bennett (and a lot of other folks), I came late to the concept of considering “the big picture,” which in my case was whether I’d ever work for Paramount again—or indeed anywhere else, as word of my intransigent behavior would certainly get around town.
The “reconciliation” scene between Kirk and his son received applause, and no one seemed to object to Spock’s coffin on the Genesis planet with its—to me—unforgivable implications. “ ‘ There are always possibilities,’ Spock would say,” Kirk reflects.
Exiting the theater, I caught sight of Diller’s sour expression. When he saw me, he said: “Yes, yes, I know what I’m supposed to say but I still don’t think it works.”
Was there any point in replying that it no longer mattered what either of us thought? That audiences may be stupid but they are never wrong? No, but I said it anyway.
As other wildly successful previews followed, the struggle for credit became even more intense. One night I received a call from a distraught Bennett.
“Were you aware that Bob Sallin has hired his own publicist?” he asked.
I told him I was not.
“I called him when I heard this,” Harve went on, a catch in his voice. “I asked him if this was true. He said, ‘What business is it of yours?’ ”
I was silent on my end of the phone. What was there to say? On the other end of the line I could hear Harve’s breathing.
Contrary to all the clichés, Hollywood is in fact comprised of human beings, who, in addition to their ambition, are possessed of sentiment and sen tience. Bennett and Sallin had been friends for years, always dreaming of the time they would work together.
And it ended like this.
On June 4, 1982, the film opened to the biggest weekend gross to date and I had my fifteen seconds of fame. At the (now demolished) National Theatre in Westwood, I was stu
nned to see lines around the block with folks seated before TV trays, eating their dinner. But that wasn’t the biggest surprise. The biggest surprise was how many of them were already wearing the brand-new uniforms of the Enterprise crew. This was long before all the Internet sites that now render any secrecy impossible. How had these people learned about and copied our uniforms?
I flew to New York, saw the film in Times Square with my parents, had the thrill of waiting up with heart-pounding anticipation for the morning papers to come out with their notices (another treat now denied us by the internet), and can still remember the first line of Janet Maslin’s New York Times review: “Well, this is more like it.”
Later I did the television and VHS cuts, where, with the studio no longer interested, I got to reinsert midshipman Preston to his rightful place in the plot but otherwise made no particular alterations. In my experience of watching them, so called “director’s cuts” are rarely superior to the release version of the picture. (Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, as reconstructed by Walter Murch, being the conspicuous exception that proves the rule.) They are usually longer but not better.
The Wrath of Khan was now part of cinema history, and history would judge it.
Post mortem
As the years passed I was pleased, proud, and always surprised and touched to see the film continue to garner affection and respect from critics and audiences. It was a long time before I saw The Wrath of Khan again. The occasion was a twentieth-anniversary screening in 2002 at the new, wonderfully appointed Paramount Theater on the lot, which—no coincidence—was also the occasion to launch the special DVD edition. In the intervening years, Kirstie Alley had become a television star. Gayne Rescher, Bill Dornisch, Joe Jennings, Bibi Besch and Merritt Butrick (mother and son in the film), and art director Mike Minor had all passed away (the latter two of a new and deadly scourge). The film had already appeared on DVD, but the studio was by now aware of the whole ancillary arena known as “special features,” to which I had somewhat reluctantly contributed. I had not wished to do the “director’s commentary” (I can think of nothing worse than trying to watch a movie with someone yammering in my ear throughout), but I sold out when I was offered DVDs from the Paramount catalog to jump-start my own collection.
When I was interviewed for a separate feature concerning the origins of the film and my contribution to them, I narrated the events surrounding the screenplay as I have recounted them here. Paramount’s lawyers became alarmed, and the DVD producers were told they could not use parts of the story that might appear to put Paramount in jeopardy with the Writers Guild. I, in turn, responded that if they didn’t include the truth, I would back out of the project entirely. In the end a compromise was reached and I was responsible for a clause that is now standard in all studio DVDs, the disclaimer that states that the studio is in no way responsible for any of the content or comments made by people appearing in the interviews on the disc. It is hard to overstate the importance of this clause: It enables those supplementary DVD segments to be more than mere puff pieces but a valuable form of oral history. People can tell their differing, multiple versions and perceptions of the truth (as Rashomon tries to explain), in all their fascinating variety, without the studio worrying about the consequences.
That night the Paramount Theater was full to overflowing with friends and fans. Ricardo Montalban was the guest of honor. There were speeches, including a brief one by me. (Brief because, who wants speeches in a movie theater?) Then Star Trek II in its DVD format was projected on the huge screen with incredible fidelity, and I had a chance to sit back and try to be objective about the movie, just another member of the audience.
Mindful that I had long ago surrendered all proprietary authority over the film (all artists, as I’ve claimed, lose that authority when their creations go out into the wide world), and mindful that my opinion was no more or less “definitive” than anyone else’s, I decided that The Wrath of Khan was a pretty good film. It also struck me as sui generis. It wasn’t really Star Trek in the sense that its predecessor or the TV series was; it existed as a kind of one-off tale, set in a unique landscape of its own devising. As for Spock’s coffin on the Genesis planet . . . it seemed so innocuous now that I marveled at having made such a fuss about it. I found the movie involving, affecting, well-acted, and well-photographed, with a lovely “nautical” score, all in all a rousing adventure that put me in mind of Captain Horatio Hornblower. In short, I was able to enjoy something I had done, an infrequent occurrence.
But in another sense, The Wrath of Khan was a Star Trek movie, and it was in that sense that I finally began to understand what it was that made the series special. I had been mistaken when first exposed to the Star Trek universe. All I could see then was its ludicrous science—but I had missed the fiction.
As I wrote elsewhere:At its best, Star Trek appears to function as pop-allegory/ pop metaphor, taking current events and issues (ecology, war, racism) and objectifying them for us to contemplate in a sci-fi setting. The world it presents may make no scientific sense but it is well and truly sufficient to lay out human questions for us to think about. Removed from our immediate neighborhoods, it is refreshing and even intriguing to consider earth matters from the distance of a few light years.
Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—for better or worse, in sickness and in health. In truth, Star Trek doesn’t really even pretend to show us other worlds—only humanity refracted in a vaguely hi-tech mirror.
More years have passed since that twentieth-anniversary showing of the film, and since then more cast members have passed away. Dee Kelley and Jimmy Doohan have left the sick bay and the engine room of the Enterprise, and lately Kirk’s archnemesis, the redoubtable Khan, has joined them in another space and possibly another dimension, going boldly to the undiscovered country where the rest of us have yet to journey. It goes without saying that I shall miss them; even if I didn’t see them often, I confess it comforted me somehow to know they were on the planet. Perhaps now Ricardo will finally get to play Lear for the ultimate audience.
I, who never watched the show when it first aired, now always pause when, flicking around the dial at home or in hotel rooms on the road, I behold again, those familiar, cherished faces. I stay with them—as they have remained with me.
THE DAY AFTER
Someone said that Hollywood is like an extension of high school. I am not sure exactly what this means but I do acknowledge the place’s stratified aspects, among which is the difference between having a hit and having a flop. With the success of The Wrath of Khan I was suddenly popular. If Time After Time had registered in the town’s eyes, as a succès d’estime, The Wrath of Khan was just a big, fat hit and it catapulted me into the ranks of “bankable” directors. It was time, I thought, to go back to Conjuring.
But that still wasn’t happening, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why. Hadn’t I “made one for them”? And, from my perspective, more to the point, what was wrong with Conjuring? People always began their response by telling me how well written it was. It took me years to figure out that this was not a compliment. They were taking shelter behind, “It’s well written.” “Well written” is, “These are beautiful blueprints but I don’t intend to build this house.” When someone tells you your screenplay is “so well written,” that’s the kiss of death. “Well written” is code for “I don’t love you.” Normally, when someone says, “I don’t love you,” you don’t find yourself asking “Why?” but when it’s your script instead of you, the temptation to masochistically pursue this absence of love is well nigh irresistible. Now you’re really pressing people to the wall. Most of the time, who knows why someone doesn’t love someone? In the case of Conjuring, people said they couldn’t tell if it was “commercial,” to which I always responded: How can you tell if anything’s commercial until it’s made a ton of money? Be reasonable, people. If you knew what “commercial” was, al
l films would make millions, but it’s a crapshoot every time. Why are you always trying to figure out what “the people” want, instead of figuring out what you think is terrific? I always seem to get into this pissing match of unprovables. I was once talking to someone about the movie business, and when I pointed out that Romeo and Juliet had always been a hit despite the fact that the lovers die at the end, he responded, “It would’ve been an even bigger hit if they lived.” You can’t win. “I don’t love you” trumps any and all logic.
In the midst of a period of what Variety would call “mulling offers,” ABC gave me the opportunity to direct The Day After, a TV movie about a nuclear holocaust, written by Ed Hume. I was the fourth director to be offered the script and I could see why others had turned it down. Who wanted to learn about this god-awful stuff? The great and terrible paradox about the nuclear issue is that while it remains the single most important dilemma (latterly twined with global warming) to confront the human race, it is at the same time so dreadful that no one in his right mind can bear to contemplate it. Like most people, I preferred to avoid the entire terrifying topic. What sort of person willingly immerses himself in the prospect of nuclear annihilation? Everyone knows the bombs are out there, Damoclean swords dangling over our necks, and that knowledge—semiconsciously carried around inside our heads—is more than sufficient for most of us.
As it happened, during this heady time of professional success, I was being psychoanalyzed. (Still! ). I spent a lot of time on the couch (and elsewhere) trying to rationalize my way out of doing this movie. I could think of endless reasons.
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