The film, which came to be known as Company Business, was a catastrophe, and it was no one’s fault but mine. Going forward without a finished script was suicide. And while on paper, the troika of Hackman, Baryshnikov, and Meyer might have appeared promising, in reality we were all pulling in different directions, and my bouts with Hackman just about wrecked me. Going toe-to-toe with talent is not my forte. I assume that people who get to make a film are (a) doggone lucky and (b) doing this job because they want to do it. The rest of the world may be struggling with god-awful tasks such as mining coal, but here the pay is good, you’re seeing the world, and you’re telling a story. What could there be to act up about? Of course this is a wild oversimplification, but it does contain some truth, and that made it hard for me to understand Hackman’s attitude, though I understood that three pictures back-to-back before mine had exhausted him. The only result of our inability to work in harness was that I dropped twenty pounds and lived on Valium. In truth, I didn’t know what I was doing and I felt bad, especially for Baryshnikov, who had shown up in good faith; bad, too, for MGM, who had jumped at the chance to finance a film with such promising “elements.” At one point Hackman and I found ourselves sitting together in a jail cell in Maryland, waiting for the crew to show up and film a scene set there. “Well,” he allowed, “I’ve behaved badly on a bunch of films but I’ve got to admit, this one takes the cake.”
It was certainly memorable to be in Berlin during this period of convulsive change. One week you had to go through the notorious Checkpoint Charlie to get into bullet-pocked (from World War II!) East Berlin; the next week, you just sped past a bunch of broken windows where Checkpoint Charlie had stood. The world was changing.
There were a couple of sequences in Company Business of which I was proud, notably the tense spy swap sequence in the Berlin subway—but isolated sequences do not a good film make. A great movie is great from start to finish. Company Business, alas, did not come close.
Struggling with Ron in our cutting rooms outside London to make sense of virtually unusable footage, I welcomed the distraction of an invitation from Frank Mancuso and Martin Davis for lunch at Claridge’s. The topic: Star Trek VI.
STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY
Over a suitably elegant repast and clanking, heavy cutlery, Mancuso and Davis asked if I would be interested in writing and directing the last Star Trek film to utilize the original cast. By this time the new television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, was a hit, and Patrick Stewart and friends were waiting in the wings to make their Star Trek feature debuts. But the studio was, as Mancuso put it, disinclined “to go out with Star Trek V,” a film in which they were frankly disappointed. As I understood him, it wasn’t merely the film’s economic performance about which he was speaking. I took him to mean it was a matter of pride to the studio to end the original cast’s contribution on a more successful note critically as well as commercially.
Or perhaps that was the explanation calculated to appeal to a creative person. Perhaps they merely thought they could hedge their bets by squeezing one more film out of the surefire old hands before turning them out to pasture. Or am I being cynical?
“We’re talking around thirty million dollars,” Mancuso said.
I had no idea for another Star Trek movie but following my devastating experience on Company Business, I wished I did. The cozy familiarity of the Star Trek family seemed very appealing after what I’d just gone through.
I agreed that thirty million was feasible and further agreed to meet with Leonard Nimoy, who would function as executive producer, to see if we could cook up a story while I took a two-week summer breather on Cape Cod.
In my excitement at being thus wooed, I neglected to inquire where Harve Bennett fit into the plan. I would have been—as I subsequently was—distressed to learn that not only would he not be a participant but that he had left the Paramount lot under bitter circumstances, as he later recounted to me.
For the previous year, preoccupied as they were with internecine power struggles within the studio, Paramount encouraged Bennett to develop and revise his own proposal for a sixth Star Trek movie, one that featured young Kirk, young Spock, et al., during their early days at the Starfleet Academy.
Having strung Bennett along month after month, Paramount abruptly stipulated that he produce yet another film with the old cast first and then (maybe) they would move on to his young Trek story. Bennett was furious that the studio had thus unceremoniously abandoned his laboriously worked-out idea in favor of that last squeeze of the orange, as proposed to me at Claridge’s. Feeling betrayed, Bennett left the studio. His complaint was not that Paramount had decided in favor of another approach but rather the amount of time they had allowed him to work under the delusion that they were seriously entertaining his. Someone observed that the chief problem in Hollywood is behavior. Paramount’s treatment of the man who had saved the franchise for them over the course of five movies, making who knows how much money for the studio in the process, seemed graceless at best. (It is interesting to note that the 2009 Star Trek movie, directed by J. J. Abrams, deals with precisely Bennett’s conceit: young Kirk and Spock.)
A month or so after my luncheon at Claridge’s, Nimoy, a native of Boston and currently visiting his hometown, flew twenty minutes across Massachusetts Bay to spend the day with me in Provincetown. At low tide we ambled up and down the beach as Nimoy talked and I listened.
“Star Trek has always reflected current events,” he began, pointing out that the alien Klingon race had always been Trek’s stand-in for the Russians, whose empire, even as we spoke, was crumbling like Alka-Seltzer. Reflecting on the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, he mused: “What about a story where the wall comes down in outer space? What is the United States without the Soviet Union? Who am I if I have no enemy to define me?”
This was all I needed. I don’t get ideas on my own, but typically with me all you need do is prime the pump.
“Right,” I jumped in. “We start with a massive Chernobyl-type explosion in outer space. A Klingon moon has been destroyed, maybe ending their oxygen or energy supply—it’s going to be like East Berliners streaming over the places where the Wall used to be unless there’s a treaty. The Klingon Chancellor is coming to meet with the Federation to discuss the peace. It’s a brave new world, and Kirk is assigned to escort the Klingon chief through Federation space to the conference. But Kirk hates Klingons because they killed his son (see Star Trek III) and he botches the job. The Chancellor is assassinated; Kirk takes the rap at a Klingon show trial (nifty alien courtroom scene here) and is exiled to a sand planet from which he must escape (think POW escape movie) and track down the real killers (Agatha Christie locked room mystery potential here) before more havoc occurs at the peace conference—or something like that. . . .”
Did it all come together that fast? Maybe not, but we did hammer out the basic story on the beach, after which Nimoy returned to California and I took my family back to London.
Things got weird shortly thereafter. Although Paramount approved our story idea, Nimoy called me in London a few weeks following our meeting to report that the studio had hired two other writers to write the screenplay of the story we had concocted.
Why on earth? I pondered this with him over the phone, but the one suspicion I had didn’t make sense so I didn’t say it aloud.
Maybe they were trying to save money? Over a script? It seemed penny-wise and pound-foolish. Were these writers less costly than Paramount knew me to be? (My fees as part of my on-the-lot contract were established and well known to Business Affairs.)
I was not unaware that the feature division of the studio was in trouble and had been hemorrhaging red ink for over a year, making films that lost money at forty million a pop. I knew this could not go on indefinitely and could almost hear the band tuning up for the next round of musical chairs.
In fact, the explanation was rather different. The executive in charge of Star
Trek VI (as yet untitled) had two writers under contract to be paid for a picture—any picture—and he hadn’t been able to find them one.
My deal called for me to be paid only if I worked, whereas these two would be owed money regardless.
No contest . . .
But Paramount’s problems were small compared to those of my assistant. I got a strained phone call from Denny to tell me he had been diagnosed with cancer; a growth in his mouth, of all places. Denny, a health nut who exercised and had never smoked, would be in for the fight of his life.
And I couldn’t think of a single way to be of help. The screenplay dilemma abruptly took a back place in my thoughts. In any case, there was seemingly nothing to be done except to sit tight and wait for the script I was supposed to direct and Nimoy to executive produce.
In the meantime, and from long distance, I kept track of Denny’s progress and tried as well to stay in touch with his state of mind. The person next to you has just been struck by lightning. Your move. It is uniquely horrible to have someone you care deeply for in the fight of his life, and all you can do is hold his coat. If that.
A few weeks later there was more news on the screenplay front: “The boys are having a little trouble getting started,” I was told, I can’t remember by whom.
“Send them to London, and I’ll talk them through it,” I offered, eager to get on with things, and shortly one of them showed up, a pleasant enough fellow. He sat in my living room with a legal pad on his lap and took copious notes over three days while I led him step by step through the story, which had by now grown more detailed, as I’d had over a month to daydream about it.
When Nimoy learned that I had met the young man in London, he was furious that I had discussed “his” story without his knowledge or consent. I was surprised at his reaction because (a) I assumed that, as executive producer, he had been told of this plan (though given Paramount’s convulsions at the time, it latterly made perfect sense that they hadn’t bothered; see notes on behavior, above); (b) like Harve Bennett, I was now the one with an overall deal and an obligation to be helpful to the studio that had contracted me; and lastly (c) it had not occurred to me that Nimoy viewed the story as solely his. While there could be no doubt that he had shown up on the Cape with the general thematic idea, we had (or at least it seemed to me)—walking up and down the beach—fleshed out the many if not most of the subsequent details jointly. But I learned none of this festering indignation until later.
In the end the script by the two prepaid authors went the way of Star Trek IV’s first draft, and I was asked to write the thing myself, again without consulting the discarded version.
By this point, I was mainly thinking about Denny. I now asked Paramount to hire us as a writing team for Star Trek VI, which I had already subtitled (once again!) The Undiscovered Country. I wasn’t doing Denny a favor; he was a terrific writer, great with structure and witty dialogue. Why not?
By this point the studio was open to anything and didn’t even blink at my request. They hired, as well, my long-time producing partner, Steven-Charles Jaffe, who had worked with me since Time After Time.
The question of postproduction (where the film was to be edited, the sound mixed, etc.) was left open. I wanted to finish the picture at home in London so as to be with my family. The studio tap-danced and said they would take this idea under advisement.
SCRIPT
Star Trek VI must have been the first screenplay written in collaboration using e-mail, with Denny and I bouncing drafts back and forth through cyberspace from LA to London. He was feeling wretched from the chemo and radiation he was forced to undergo but he had the constitution of an ox thanks to a life of dance, and the responsibility for delivering kept him from obsessing about his situation. It kept me from obsessing as well.
We showed the script to Paramount and to Nimoy, and Paramount sent me an enthusiastic memo along with some notes. I forwarded their enthusiasm to Nimoy but omitted their notes, preferring to let him reach his own independent conclusions. He later interpreted this as duplicity on my part—another black mark against me. I would have been wiser to tell him what I had done and why.
In the event, Nimoy didn’t need any help from Paramount. He liked what he read but kept pushing us to make improvements. We were circling around a promising dramatic situation and then, in his view, failing to exploit it. In the story Spock has a new Vulcan protégée, Lieutenant Valeris. Originally we had hoped to lure Kirstie Alley back to reprise her character as Saavik—her backstory from the other films would have made this especially poignant—but once again she declined.
In our tale it turns out the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (as close as Denny dared come to the name Gorbachev) is assassinated by a conspiracy consisting of Klingons and Federation members working together to preserve the eye-for-an-eye, cold war status quo. Better the devil you know than the “undiscovered country,” which, in this instance was an uncertain future with no cold war or cold warriors left.
The newly introduced character of Valeris proves to be one of the chief conspirators. Nimoy wanted a scene where, if she’s really true to her beliefs, she must shoot her mentor after she is unmasked by him. He chuckled as he described the “shoot, if you must, this old gray head” moment he was searching for. He was a keen and clever contributor to the final draft, never satisfied with what was facile or glib. In this as in other aspects of the script, Nimoy’s experience as an actor, director, and producer prevented us from getting too pleased with ourselves and kept us on our toes, always searching to see if we had mined the material for all its potential, always probing and pushing to see if we had found all that was there.
It did not escape my notice that The Undiscovered Country, with its deliberate parallels to the collapsing Soviet Union and what conservative Harvard political philosopher Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history,” was essentially another attempt (by me) to make a film about the demise of the USSR and the brave new post cold war world we were allegedly entering. Company Business had simply been a more literal version of the same movie. I could only hope the science fiction riff would turn out better than its earthbound (in every sense) predecessor.
Villains are always important in space operas, and in Khan we had created a tough act to follow. It was during this period that I spent a fair amount of recreational time listening to a new Chandos CD I had bought of Christopher Plummer declaiming passages from Henry V, accompanied by a fresh, stereophonic performance of William Walton’s score for the Olivier film. Plummer’s thrilling performance completely captivated me. For the first time that I can recall (other than for the members of the Star Trek cast), I tailored a role with a specific actor in mind. God knows what I would have done if we hadn’t landed him. I dreamed of being around Plummer and hearing him spout Shakespeare with that trumpet voice. But how to get him to do it? All I could think of was using Shakespeare’s words and sticking them in my villain’s mouth. I found myself recalling the story of Nazis who claimed you had never heard Shakespeare until you had heard him in the “original (sic) German.” (This isn’t as kooky as it sounds; Shakespeare in German is a lot better than Shakespeare in French.) I thought: You have never heard Shakespeare until you have heard him in the original Klingon. Thus the jovial but deadly General Chang was born.
Another aspect of the story posed a really provocative problem: How do you assassinate somebody in space? There are a million pedestrian ways to do so—guns, poison, knives, bombs, etc.—but what form of dispatch would be unique to the context of space?
Where do creative ideas come from, anyway? A question more asked than answered, in all likelihood. It is easier to describe where ideas originate than why or how. My own ideas tend to come infrequently and when I’m not expecting them. They come, like sleep, when I let go. I don’t fall asleep by clenching closed my eyes and insisting on unconsciousness; I fall asleep when I relax. Similarly, I get ideas when I let go, when I’m thinking of or doing something else, usually something ma
nual like the laundry, rewiring a lamp, or building a model boat. I get ideas when I am falling asleep or when I’m waking up. I get them while driving miles of boring freeway with the radio turned off; I get them sitting in the tub and watching my toes turn into prunes. I know that I have a problem to solve—in this case, a writing problem revolving around an assassination in space. Whether I stay with this consciously, insisting on an answer (clenching my eyes to fall asleep), or whether I “forget” about it while doing the laundry, some part of my brain will continue to fiddle with the task at hand . . . and then the solution will “leak” out into my consciousness.
An assassination in space . . . I don’t know what I was doing when I found myself wondering—not for the first time, as it happens—about footage I had seen of the space station and astronauts aboard various shuttles. They were always weightless, which looked like a lot of fun to me.
But in all space operas there is always gravity (pardon the expression) on those space vessels. How to account for this? Evidently, there is a centrifuge or some such device on board each vessel that simulates gravity. That being the case, how is it that in the battles between spaceships, this gravity device is never hit and put out of action?
What would happen if it were? Everything and everyone not secured would simply float. Haven’t you ever wondered why no chair on the bridge of the Enterprise has seat belts? Because people wouldn’t go flying around during explosions if they did. (Planets are another matter—there’s simply no accounting for the fact that in these selfsame space movies, all planets have earth’s gravity.)
This was starting to interest me. I posited a pair of assassins who, having shot out the gravity device aboard Gorkon’s flagship, now beam aboard in magnetic boots and make their way through helpless, floating Klingon secret service details (imagine their ray guns levitating from their holsters, just out of reach!). The killers eventually make their way to the hapless, floating Chancellor Gorkon. When he’s hit, his blood (what color, what color??) will float in the stillness as motionless bubbles!
The View from the Bridge Page 22