The View from the Bridge

by Nicholas Meyer

  The movie and its fate were largely unknown to me as I got married on June 6 and headed off on my honeymoon. I heard in distant fashion that the film was a success and learned occasionally of doings on the Paramount lot. Incomprehensibly to me, Diller, Eisner, and Katzenberg had been summarily dismissed. As I understood it, their firings had to do with a photograph of all three on the cover of New York magazine for an article extolling the value and virtues of the most successful studio chiefs at the time. Martin Davis, CEO of Gulf & Western, Paramount’s corporate owner in New York (he had succeeded Charles Bluhdorn following the latter’s death in 1983), was, according to this version of events, incensed that he had not been included in the photo or accompanying article.

  With the Eisner-Katzenberg-Diller triumvirate gone (the first two would save Walt Disney and turn it into an entertainment behemoth; the third would found the wildly successful Fox television network), Davis picked Frank Mancuso to head the studio. Originally a film salesman from Buffalo, Mancuso headed west. With no hands-on production experience, he asked the recently retired head of Universal Pictures, Ned Tanen, to run Paramount’s feature division. Tanen agreed to undertake the job on condition that he be given a free hand, answerable to no one and limited to what I think was a two-year contract. Dawn Steel (née Spielberg, a cousin) was made production chief, the second woman ever to reach the position (Sherry Lansing was first, at 20th Century Fox). Steel had begun in Paramount’s marketing division and would go on to an extremely successful career, working on such projects as Flashdance and Top Gun with Don Simpson before succumbing tragically to a brain tumor in 1997.

  Tanen was not unknown to me; as head of Universal (he of the Verna Fields eulogy) he had bought the rights to my Sherlock Holmes novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and had green-lit the film in 1975. A mercurial, brilliant, and witty man, he had led Universal for so long, he knew how to run a film studio in his sleep, which was probably why he didn’t want to do it again for very long.

  Tanen looked at the Paramount slate and computed what was needed. He green-lit a new Eddie Murphy feature, The Golden Child, and he ordered up the fourth Star Trek. Tanen’s production slate would always include films he believed were more or less surefire so that he could—judiciously—experiment with other fare.

  When Mancuso demurred at the price for both films, Tanen reminded him—brusquely, as I heard it—of the terms of his contract. As events proved, Tanen knew his stuff, and both films were successful. Star Trek IV, in fact, made the most money of any film in the series, for reasons that we’ll examine shortly.

  Paramount hired two screenwriters to deliver the script for Star Trek IV, both unknown to me. Following my honeymoon, I was preparing a comedy, Volunteers (written by David Isaacs and Ken Levine), that would star Tom Hanks and John Candy, when I was surprised to receive a phone call from Dawn Steel, an old friend whom I had first met through Karen Moore.

  “Nicky, we have an emergency,” she began without preamble. “Can you come over here right away?” “Here” meaning Paramount.

  I could and did, to be told that the studio (read Tanen and Steel) were not happy with the screenplay for Star Trek IV, later aptly subtitled by studio exec David Kirkpatrick The Voyage Home.

  “We’re four weeks away from starting prep,” Dawn explained, “And we need a whole new script. We want to keep the central story but start over with the screenplay. Can you help us?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that, since I had no idea what was being contemplated. I asked to speak with Bennett and Nimoy, who were to produce and direct the film. I left Dawn’s office and trudged across the lot to Bennett’s.

  There was a comforting familiarity to our reunion. These were my friends, and I hadn’t realized—or allowed myself to realize—how much I had missed them.

  “What’s the idea?” I asked, when we had shaken hands and settled into our old chairs.

  “The idea,” responded Nimoy with a smile, “is to do something nice.”

  He then told me the story he and Bennett had concocted, which I thought was terrific. I rarely get ideas myself and when I do, most of them stink. I am a pretty shrewd judge of other people’s ideas, however, and I was convinced this one was a doozy. It would not only be Star Trek with all its special effects bells and whistles, but at the same time a cautionary ecological fable, the sort of effortless fusing of fantasy and reality that embodies Star Trek at its best.

  Mind you, when all’s said and done, you can make a movie out of even the most unpromising idea. Like most art, it’s all in the doing.

  In the present instance, the idea was: A “probe” from deep space approaches Earth, causing havoc on the planet, until it is realized that the probe is merely asking a question and becoming impatient with the lack of response. It wants to hear from humpback whales—the only hitch being that at this time (i.e., the twenty-third century) the creatures have become extinct, collateral damage in man’s ongoing war against nature. With no reply from the whales, the probe becomes increasingly aggressive. Bridges topple, forests burn, etc. The only solution for Kirk and his crew: to go back in time, procure two humpbacks, export them to the twenty-third century, and hope they will sing in such a fashion as to placate the probe.

  The Enterprise crew, having lost their own ship in the previous movie, goes through time travel aboard a captured Klingon vessel known as a Bird of Prey (which features an invisibility “cloaking device”). The ship deposits members of her prize crew in twentieth-century San Francisco, there to take part in what amounts to a scavenger hunt: crew members (the Star Trek cast) must locate and capture two humpback whales and transport them into a future ocean aboard the ship. In addition to capturing the cetaceans, a male and female of the species, this involves tracking down and assembling the components of a huge aquarium in which said whales can be housed aboard the Klingon vessel until safely delivered to a twenty-third-century ocean, there, presumably to sing for our supper.

  At this point, I interrupted. “Does it have to be San Francisco?” I had already made a movie in which time travelers wind up in San Francisco. “Can’t they go someplace else for a change? What about Paris?”

  Bennett and Nimoy glanced briefly at each other before telling me, No, it had to be San Francisco. Ostensibly this had something to do with the fact of Starfleet Headquarters being based there but may more likely have been related to the fact that filming in San Francisco would be cheaper than attempting it in Paris.

  Bennett and I agreed to split up the work. Bennett would write Acts I and IV, the outer space bookends of the movie, while I would do Acts II and III, those that took place on Earth.

  “Should I read the previous draft?” I asked.

  They preferred I didn’t. “We just want to use the same story,” Nimoy explained, “and I’d prefer you weren’t influenced by anything but what we’ve just told you.”

  This was fine with me, as I knew that once I read another version of the same narrative I would (a) be unable to forget it and (b) that would only confuse and hamper my effort to rethink the material.

  (Later I would learn that the discarded draft had been written to include a major role for Eddie Murphy, an avowed Trek fan. Paramount executives had ultimately nixed the idea, reluctant to put their two biggest franchises in one basket.)

  In blissful ignorance—my preferred condition—I went home and set to work. The job was pleasant and fun. As usual I got to indulge my love of comedy. My first lines in the script follow the time travel sequence, after which someone asks, “When are we?” and Spock replies, “Judging by the pollution content of the atmosphere, I believe we have arrived at the late twentieth century.”

  The Klingon Bird of Prey then does something Gene Roddenberry had always avoided on the television series: showing a spaceship actually landing on a planet. In the original series Roddenberry created the ingenious “beam me up” transporter gadget to avoid having to show enormous hardware on the surface of any planet. But now, using the famous Klin
gon “cloaking device,” we again circumvented the problem by having an invisible spaceship land near the Golden Gate Tea Gardens.

  “Everyone remember where we parked,” Kirk cautions as they debark, much to my amusement. There was in the story, notwithstanding its cataclys mic, earth-ending potential, an element of gaiety that was hard to suppress. I didn’t see the need to try and, in the process, discovered some personal payoffs as well.

  When I wrote and directed Time After Time, I had been obliged to cut scenes from the film that, for one reason or another, didn’t play. They had either been badly written or ineptly staged. Or both. In one instance I had the notion of trashing rock and roll from H. G. Wells’s point of view. He’s wandering around the city, a stranger in 1979 (to which he had been transported by his time machine), and finds himself stranded next to a Chinese youth, waiting for a traffic light to change. Having already caused one accident, Wells knows he must wait until the light turns green—but the young man next to him is carrying a ghetto blaster, which is emitting the most appalling sounds. Finally the light turns, and Wells makes his escape. Later, cooking dinner for Wells at her apartment, a young woman asks what kind of music he likes, and Wells responds, “Anything but Oriental.”

  That line should have worked like gangbusters but it fell flat. So much film time had elapsed between Wells’s encounter with the young Chinese man and his boom box and the girl and her dinnertime question that audiences had completely forgotten the earlier encounter. “Anything but Oriental” made no sense to them. I still tried to save the scene with the Chinese boy, which I thought might play on its own, without the later punch line, but I had staged it so clumsily that it was unusable.

  But on Star Trek IV I got to recycle my joke. In my new version—very ably staged by director Nimoy—Kirk and Spock find themselves sharing a bus with a ghetto blaster carried by an invincibly punk creature sporting a purple Mohawk (memorably played by the film’s associate producer, Kirk Thatcher). After their polite attempts to get this apparition to modulate the volume on his boom box are rudely rebuffed, Spock, poker-faced, applies the Vulcan nerve pinch, bringing blessed peace and grateful applause from the relieved bus passengers.

  Some movies take years to get made; others fall into place rapidly. I’m not sure that those made on the fly don’t come out with more energy and élan than the ones that plod into their starting gates over decades. Star Trek IV was on a round-the-clock assembly line, much as Star Trek II had been, with delivery dates and release dates already in place. There was no time for a lot of second-guessing, and I recall only one studio note over which we wrangled.

  While Ned Tanen loved the script and told me over lunch he thought it so good he would have made the film even if it hadn’t been part of the Trek franchise, Dawn had one concern: she wanted to know about the probe and, in particular, what the actual question was that it kept posing to the whales.

  Later I was to learn this kettle of whales was just the tip of the iceberg. Bennett and Nimoy, who had become as successful a collaboration as Gilbert & Sullivan, were now—like those storied partners—having serious interpersonal difficulties. Though not reflected in their work (to anyone’s knowledge), at issue seemed to be a question of who was running the show. Bennett, the producer in residence, would be around long after Nimoy had departed, presumably working for the studio on other projects. (He had advanced this logic with me when I had found myself at loggerheads with the studio on Star Trek II.) On the other hand Nimoy was indispensable to Star Trek, now having added director to his other role as the incarnation of a certain Vulcan.

  Their differences seemingly came to a head over Dawn’s request that the probe’s query to the whales be translated. Nimoy felt strongly that the message should be left to the audience’s imagination while Bennett bowed to the studio in agreeing with their point of view, a defection that enraged his partner. Later, when I was the one under contract with an overall deal at the studio, and acting as I thought my responsibilities were defined, Nimoy would be infuriated all over again.

  In the present instance, ignorant of their heated dispute, I unknowingly took Nimoy’s side in vehemently opposing our supplying any answers or explanation for the probe’s behavior. I argued that it didn’t matter why the probe had shown up, what or who it was, or precisely what it wanted to know. “It will only diminish and trivialize the event if we answer these questions,” I urged. In art, questions are always more interesting than answers. Once you give the answer, the gas goes out of the balloon. Who wants to see the Lone Ranger without his mask? Resolving artistic questions is akin to revealing the secrets behind the magician’s trick. The audience won’t thank you for it.

  Dawn was a forceful personality and her Bronx passion was known to intimidate people. But as it happens I had attended high school in the Bronx and was of the opinion that what others took to be abrasive or scary was for Dawn nothing more than a typical argument in a kitchen situated in that locality. She yelled; I yelled back. “Fuck you!”s were liberally exchanged. As a studio executive, her inclination—indeed her training—was to assume an audience comprised of idiots: every t had to be crossed and every i dotted; everything to be explained on their behalf. There was nothing personal at stake for her; it was merely studio thinking. For the filmmaker (or writer, in this case), such things are personal, or they ought to be. All you have to go on in this business is your gut. As William Goldman famously explained, “No one knows anything.” I held my ground, and finally Dawn yielded with good humor (“You’re wrong, Nicky Meyer!”) and the matter was never raised again, either by her or the audiences that flocked to the film. Yet it is interesting how these choices and the passions behind them can linger and rankle. Thirty-six years after she made The Letter, Bette Davis spoke at an American Film Institute tribute to director William Wyler. During her laudatory speech Davis found herself still arguing with Wyler over the way he had insisted she deliver a line in the film. (“I was right !”)

  Such arguments are always unanswerable. To the charge that failing to explain the probe’s motives did not affect the film’s success, the studio executive can always maintain: “Yes, but had you explained it, the movie would’ve been even more successful.” (“If Romeo and Juliet hadn’t died at the end . . .” etc.) Aside from the financial yardstick by which to judge a film, questions of pure aesthetics can never be resolved.

  Once matters of text were concluded, my involvement with Star Trek IV ceased and I resumed work on Volunteers, my Tom Hanks-John Candy comedy, shortly afterward leaving for location in Mexico in the fall of 1984.

  VOLUNTEERS

  Each time I agree to direct a film, I tell myself I am going to keep a record of all the decisions I make from start to finish—and then I forget to do so, or I begin my list and then lose track. Commencing with the decision to direct a given script, the list of choices the director makes is never-ending: the cast, the crew, what locations are available, what budget compromises will be necessary, how the movie will be cut, etc., ad infinitum. Be wrong on any one of these, and you seriously injure if not doom the film. During the course of my honeymoon in 1984, I had read and laughed myself silly over a script about the Peace Corps. Written by Ken Levine and David Isaacs and called Volunteers , the movie was already (perfectly) packaged with Tom Hanks and John Candy committed to play a pair of mismatched Peace Corps workers in Thailand. The film was a hodgepodge of wit and slapstick and it was consistently smart, which may have been a black mark against it. In keeping with my eclectic temperament, the idea of a comedy held terrific appeal. Perhaps the comedic opportunities presented by Star Trek IV had whetted my appetite. I said I would be happy to do it. Other directors may have shrewd, long-range goals and strategies for achieving them; I only wanted to keep doing different things. Join the movies and see the world. Be a storyteller. More objective observers may discern thematic consistencies in my work; I only know I love stories and have never much concerned myself with whether those stories were happy or sad, past or
present, comical or pastoral or tragical, whether they were movies, plays, books, operas, or jokes—I just want them to be good stories. When someone once asked me what my definition of a good story was, I said, A good story is one that after I’ve told it to you, you understand why I wanted to tell it. I never knew why I was offered Volunteers or who it was who thought I could direct a comedy. Perhaps, all those years ago, directors hadn’t yet been slotted into genres. For whatever reason the chance came my way, I can only be grateful.

  I hired cinematographer Ric Waite and production designer Jim Schoppe, and we determined to shoot Mexico for Thailand and flew down for a recce (short for “reconnaissance”), which is arguably the most fun part of filmmaking. Essentially, you are being paid to look around at anything that interests you and eat well along the way. We flew to Mexico City and thence to Veracruz (landing place of Cortés, whose roofless, ruined house with tentacular tree roots we saw on the coast; it reminded me of Geiger’s beast in Alien). The town itself reminded me of the one in my favorite film noir, Out of the Past; also of Tampico in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, only in vivid, eye-aching color. From Veracruz we motored south for three hours along treacherous roads. In those days everyone in the van talked to one another, ideas were exchanged, plans laid and revised. People got to know one another. Nowadays everyone in the van is on his or her cell phone, and the result is a half dozen cacophonous monologues, each department head yakking to some unseen underling.

  There is a section of Oaxaca, just over the border from the province of Veracruz, that goes by the nickname “Little China,” because of its strong resemblance to that part of the world. Indeed, when we later shipped down thirty Thai families to populate the Karen hill-tribe village we had created for them, they got off the bus utterly flabbergasted to find how much the place resembled home in the green, mountainous jungles near Chiang Mai. The site for our village even had a river, across which we would build the suspension bridge the Peace Corps volunteers must later blow up in order to thwart the intentions of Communists and drug warlords, who intend to exploit it for their own evil purposes. (The final structure would be the largest wood suspension bridge in the world.) Of course we were far from anything, including electricity. Whatever supplies we needed would have to be humped into the wilderness and later humped out again.