And, bringing the series up to date with political correctness, Kirk’s sign-off was now amended to: “to boldly go where no man—where no ONE—has gone before . . .”
After we wrapped the last scene, a party was held on the soundstage, something between a funeral and a wake, with no one quite sure how he felt or exactly what had happened. There was sentiment and sorrow, tears of happiness and of grief, a sense of confusion overall. Only time would distill the significance of this journey’s end, and that significance would vary for each of the participants, who would now be facing life without Star Trek, though it could be argued they had already done so. After all, when the television series had been canceled, these same actors had gone almost ten years without playing their roles and with no expectation of ever revisiting them. As Spock says in the last film, “I’ve been dead before.”
FINAL CUT
And now I was back in the cutting room, where strange things happened. For starters Paramount decided that they didn’t have the money to let me finish the film in London, the result of which was that I was separated from my family, who returned to England following the shoot, leaving me to live by my lonesome in a hotel, flying home periodically to see them.
The real shocker, however, turned out to be a genuine coup d’état in the Soviet Union, which we learned had occurred while we were in the midst of assembling our version of the coup in the cutting room. Mikhail Gorbachev had been overthrown, disappeared, and had very possibly been assassinated—just as in our film. There was a flurry of bewildered phone calls among the filmmakers (“Can you believe this?”) followed by excited calls from the studio, Goldwyn wanting to know how soon we could get the movie in theaters. This last was an absurd consideration, as not only was my cut incomplete but most of the FX shots had yet to be delivered from ILM. To give him credit, Goldwyn knew this perfectly well but he had to ask. . . . In the stupefaction and glee of our film’s prediction coming true, the fate of poor Gorbachev and of Russia generally, was, I blush to say, of only theoretical concern. Was it good or bad for the film? (To our credit, we were genuinely relieved when we finally learned Gorbachev was unharmed.)
It was certainly strange to contemplate. Denny and I had tried to imagine our own brave new world in the absence of the Soviet Union. We had created Gorkon and then, in effect, extrapolating from what we read in the newspapers or saw on television, imagined his likely fate. And then it had seemingly come to pass.
Of the movers behind the coup I shall have more to say presently.
Nimoy saw my first cut and was pleased. We continued working and showed it to him again, substantially improved. But this time his reaction was oddly subdued, which was puzzling. I had known Nimoy for several years and several films by this point, but knowing someone long is not the same as knowing him deep. I couldn’t quite figure (and never did) what was really going on. I was certainly unaware of the rage he had apparently been stockpiling.
He asked me if he could fiddle with the last reel, and I didn’t see why not (he was, after all, the executive producer), so he took it home and sat down with an editor before giving it back a day or so later. He had improved the reel and in doing so had sparked more ideas for Ron and me, so we went to work and built on the structure introduced by Nimoy.
When we showed him our efforts, he exploded and screamed bloody murder. By what right had I altered his cut? I was in complete shock. His cut? At no time had Nimoy suggested that what he had given back to me was sacrosanct . By what right? I was the director as well as the cowriter. What more right was I supposed to need? I became equally enraged and remembered shouting back at him (this was, I recollect, over the phone), “I am not your secretary! I am not a stenographer!” Or words to that effect.
Eventually we cooled off, but from then on I kept myself at an emotional remove.
Scott Farrar’s effects shots dribbled in from ILM, and Gorkon’s floating blood was every bit as spectacular as I’d imagined. We also had a character who “morphed” (then a new term, which I infer was short for “metamor phosed”), again thanks to the brave new world of CGI, and there was a lively scene in which Kirk battled a version of himself. Shooting “effects” scenes is usually tedious beyond belief, but the results are eye-popping when all the pieces come together. Kirk fighting himself was enormous fun to watch, especially the quips he tossed in both directions. “I can’t believe I kissed you!” “ must’ve been your lifelong ambition.” And so forth. (There is a whole geekian subliterature of snappy dialogue during fight scenes and duels. Check out the exchanges between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood; also in the clinches between Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in The Prisoner of Zenda.)
The studio’s notes were, as I recall, minimal. They were still involved with palace putsches: David Kirkpatrick was out, and Brandon Tartikoff, the wunderkind from NBC, was in.
We recorded the music with Eidelman conducting a large ensemble and chorus (Was this the first musical setting of “To be or not to be”? Not if you include the 1868 Hamlet of Ambrose Thomas, but it it may safely be said it was the first setting of the words in Klingon) on a scoring stage at 20th Century Fox, where it quickly became apparent that something remarkable was taking place. Visitors to the session as well as those connected with the film came into the booth and listened with mounting excitement to what everyone recognized was a great score and one that would define and elevate the film. Once again I got a particular charge out of the presence of my sister, Constance, in the violin section.
THE WOOL
At the end of the shoot it is customary to offer the director some souvenir of the experience. I was given the heavy, iron steering wheel from the Klingon Bird of Prey (always useful) but, asked if there was anything I might prefer, I asked for one of the attractive blankets from the Enterprise’s crew’s quarters. The prop man said fine but regretfully informed me that the colorful Enterprise logo was merely a temporary stencil. I was disappointed to learn this and began turning over the blanket idea in my mind, finally calling up Paramount merchandising.
“If I suggest something for you guys to sell and you go for it, what do I get out of it?” I asked the lady. She asked what I thought I should get.
“Ten percent?”
She said yes so quickly I knew at once I should have asked for more. I then proceeded to describe my idea. “What are the two problems with most souvenirs?” I began. “The first is that they are cheaply made items that will gather dust on a bookshelf or go into a garage sale within two years. The second drawback is that they tend to have no organic relationship to their actual subject. I used the example of a Star Trek mouse pad. “On the other hand,” I continued triumphantly, “wouldn’t you sleep better knowing you were underneath the same blankets that covered the crew of the greatest starship of all?” I then went on to detail the blankets. She listened in unenthusiastic silence. The blanket, I was given to understand, would be a headache to create and sell for more money than they believed fans would be willing to pay.
Nonetheless, in the grip of my own enthusiasm, I pushed for the product that was finally authorized on the condition that I sign a certificate of authenticity to accompany each blanket.
This time it was my turn not to hesitate: “Fine.” It took months and many phone calls—and many signatures—to nudge the blankets into being but they were splendid when finished and Paramount brought them to a Star Trek convention where the entire lot sold out before the convention even opened. One would have thought this was sufficient inducement to produce more blankets but Paramount merchandising evidently still thought they were more trouble than they were worth. And I got tired of signing my name—though I did enjoy telling my wife that if we ever fell on hard times, all we had to do was buy several hundred blankets and bank those 10 percent royalties. She’d looked at me strangely when I offered this logic.
ENDINGS
When the mix was complete, the finished movie was screened for Gene Roddenberry, who wa
s by now very ill. Word came back that he liked the film, which was a load off my mind. I was still feeling guilty about my behavior when we’d met before shooting began. Three days after viewing the movie, Roddenberry died, a loss that sent shock waves through the studio. It was a foregone decision that the film be dedicated to him. (Later an entire new building on the lot was named for him.) I wanted the wording of our dedication to be simple—For Gene Roddenberry—but Brandon Tartikoff had other ideas. Various longer, more flowery versions were considered (“For Gene Roddenberry and his enduring vision”) but I argued strenuously against them, insisting that less was more. I felt the sentiment required no embellishment and I was irked that Tartikoff, who hadn’t been around for any of the film’s making (or involved with any of the previous Star Treks, for that matter) should take it upon himself to decide corporately how the dedication should read. Tartikoff, who loved the movie and was nothing if not good-humored, allowed himself to be persuaded to employ the simpler wording.
(Tragically, Tartikoff and his daughter, Calla Lianne, were severely injured in a car accident less than a year later. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Tartikoff succumbed to Hodgkin’s disease in August of 1997 at the age of forty-eight.)
There followed the usual credit arbitration, during which Nimoy was understandably outraged to learn that the original screenwriters were to share story credit without him or, for that matter, Denny and me. It certainly struck me as absurd; I still had vivid memories of taking one of these gentlemen through the story scene by scene in London (“the boys are having a little trouble getting started”) while he dutifully copied all I told him on a legal pad. The story had definitely originated with Nimoy; the problem from the Guild’s point of view was that he had not literally written any of it down. There was no paperwork—only what “the boys” had transcribed from conversations between Nimoy and them and, later, between one of them and me. Nimoy cut through this Gordian knot by threatening to sue the WGA. The credits were duly altered to reflect his prime contribution; Denny and I received screenwriting credit.
During the postproduction period I was informed by Art Cohen and Barry London, heads of PR and marketing, that they would like to meet regarding the title of the movie. It was déjà vu all over again. After we’d sat down and sipped our coffees, they told me they felt that The Undiscovered Country as a title was “soft.”
But I was in a different position now than I’d been in ten years earlier, when no one except my assistant, Janna Wong, had even troubled to inform me that my title was being discarded.
“Listen,” I responded, “you’ve exhausted all the superlatives. We’ve had the ‘final,’ the ‘last,’ the ‘ultimate’—no one is paying any attention. Put aside for the moment the fact that no one cares what the subtitle of a Star Trek movie is, you might do well to throw people a curveball this time, something oblique like, well . . . ‘The Undiscovered Country.’ ” I put up my hands before they could respond and went on amicably: “However, let me make this easy for you. If anyone comes up with a better title, I will be happy to relinquish mine.”
In the good old days of real studios (before they became subsidiaries of conglomerates and bean counters) titles were often decided via a contest. The secretary who named the movie got a bonus. Nowadays the matter is turned over to a computer, which will take a word and do mechanical riffs on it. Take, for example, the word, escape. The computer will spew forth, ESCAPE TO THE FUTURE, ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW, ESCAPE TO YESTERDAY, BIG ESCAPE, GREAT ESCAPE, etc. Or try the word bridge and you will get BRIDGE TO THE FUTURE, BRIDGE ACROSS TOMORROW, BRIDGE FROM THE PAST, and so forth, before proceeding to the next word. Love? Hate? Death? Balloons?
When we reconvened I found myself in a huge room populated by over thirty men and women whose job it was to help sell Star Trek VI. Reams of computer printouts confronted me. I picked up the first title—I forget what it was—read it slowly and then asked what the assembly thought of it. No one seemed very taken so I went with deliberation onto the second name, Bridge to Tomorrow. “Any takers?” I inquired. Silence. As I prepared to go on to Bridge number three of what looked to be ten thousand possibilities, Barry London interrupted.
“You win,” he smiled. And so did I.
The film opened on December 6, 1991, to excellent notices and a huge box office. (One reviewer was so enthusiastic he wondered why the original cast didn’t simply keep going.) I think we broke another opening weekend record, and among Monday’s congratulations was a call from Lucia Ludovico in marketing. “Thank God we didn’t change your title!” she exclaimed. I had to smile at the thought the title had made any difference one way or the other.
Some months later, while I was getting my teeth cleaned, my dentist told me how much he enjoyed the movie. In acknowledging his kind remarks through all the instruments jammed into my mouth, I marveled yet again at how we had managed to predict the Soviet coup.
“Come again?” said Dr. Brown.
“Well,” I pointed out, “you know that this was basically a movie about the Wall coming down. The Klingons were stand-ins for the Russians. We called Gorbachev ‘Gorkon’ and so on and basically staged the coup before the one that actually happened in the USSR. . . .”
He regarded me with a puzzled demeanor.
“Huh,” he conceded at length, “I guess I’ll have to look at the movie again.”
And we had worried about being too obvious.
I made a few subsequent alterations for the VHS and DVD release, mainly to improve a sequence that I felt I had bungled in the cutting (the scene where Scotty stumbles on an important clue in the empty officers’ mess) and adding some quick cutaways to the conspirators’ faces for clarity when Valeris reveals their names under compulsion in the Vulcan mind meld. It is a curious reality of film that audiences frequently have difficulty learning the names of characters. They may have no problems with Indiana Jones or Lawrence of Arabia, but subsidiary names tend to mean little. (When we describe North by Northwest, we invariably refer to Cary Grant, not Roger Thornhill.) When Valeris reluctantly identifies her coconspirators, I realized—belatedly—that it would help the audience if they could see the faces belonging to those names. Surely Admiral Cartwright, when you saw him as embodied by Brock Peters, would pack more of a wallop for viewers than a conspirator whose name rang no bells. I hadn’t made Cartwright part of the conspiracy by chance, either; I loved the idea of going against the stereotype movies had embraced of African Americans as flawless heroes in the Sidney Poitier mold and thought it would be stingingly politically incorrect to include Cartwright among the traitors, a decorated Starfleet officer, one we knew and trusted from an earlier movie.
No wonder Gene Roddenberry had been so dismayed by the script.
But aside from these minor improvements, I resisted the temptation to fiddle and I refused to let the DVD promoters title the slightly altered movie the “director’s cut,” as I felt the changes were so minimal that such a label would amount to deceptive advertising.
Postmortem
The passage of time has, however, altered my perceptions of the film itself. While I am still pleased to find it entertaining, there can be no doubt that part of what we intended has dated in melancholy and chilling fashion. At the end of The Undiscovered Country, we learn that the conspirators were in fact a cabal comprised of Federation members and Klingons acting in concert to preserve a cold war status quo. “People can be very frightened of change,” Kirk sums up, and we cut to the stricken expression on Valeris before she is led off, under guard. Our point at the time certainly anticipated a wonderful new chapter in human history once the cold war was over. According to our view, people frightened of change were just scaredy-cats.
In fact, however, a wonderful new chapter in human history is not what has occurred. Instead, we got 9/11 and a resurgent form of human horror, terrorism, in which incalculable destruction is visited upon us not by dictators and armies but rather by crazies with box cutters and primitive but lethally destruc
tive capabilities. The age of the suicide bomber was at hand. How long before that bomb would prove to be a nuclear one? Was this any improvement on the cold war era or is it not, in fact, much worse? As awful as MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was, no one was actually destroyed. But as of 2001, the world became an infinitely more dangerous place—all of which now leads me to wonder if the conspirators of Star Trek VI were not more justified than we gave them credit for being. Knowing what I now know (in the famous formulation of Senator Clinton), would I still maintain that Valeris, Cartwright, and their Klingon counterparts were misguided in their attempts to thwart détente between the Federation and the Klingon Empire?
I also confess to being troubled by the Vulcan mind meld, clearly a form of torture, wherein Spock attempts to forcibly extract vital information from the traitor, Valeris. In light of the Bush administration’s treatment of “enemy combatants,” I blush.
PART 3
POST TREK
FIFTEEN YEARS
By 2009, when this book is published, almost twenty years will have elapsed since the release of Star Trek VI. Much has happened since then—to the world; to Star Trek. And to me. I have worked on multiple scripts, some of which, like Sommersby, Voices, The Informant (aka Field of Blood), The Human Stain, and Elegy, were eventually filmed, for better or worse. Behind each of these titles lies tales of hard work, high hopes, dreary frustrations, and memorable people. I once saw a slip of paper on which were written the five stages of movie production: (1) Wild Enthusiasm; (2) Total Confusion; (3) Utter Despair; (4) Hunt for the Guilty; (5) Punishment of the Innocent. I wrote many screenplays—some I consider equal to if not superior to those that were filmed—that never saw the cinematic light of day. Just a lot of chopped-down trees. This is not unusual. In the ’90s movies themselves were undergoing a transition whose momentum was gathering steam. At first, competition from such venues as television was offset by the bonanza that was DVD, but as time passed, it became clear that the monopoly movies had once enjoyed with the general public was being steadily eroded by competing and insistent claims on its attention, including hundred-channel television, video games, and latterly, the Internet. Also, as big corporations swallowed up the studios and burdened them with their huge corporate debt, the choices about which movies to make became increasingly conservative, driven by market demographics rather than instinct or guts or passion or taste. Once upon a time, before Eve gave Adam a bite of the Apple and there was Knowledge, film studios would make movies out of all kinds of stories. “Hey, this tale of sheep drovers in Australia seems cool,” etc. But as the bean counters, those descendents of Eve, applied their—alleged—Knowledge, films now must fit into genres: the gross-out teen comedy, the slasher flick, the comic book translation, etc. Quirky was starting to look like polar bears on melting ice seeking solid ground. Older filmgoers were alienated by louder, more bombastic soundtracks, unrelenting special effects, and puerile scripts. For a while the independent market provided these moviegoers with an alternative, but with Pay-Per-View and Netflix, many preferred to simply stay home. Movie criticism languished in the absence of films worth writing about, and soon newspapers, struggling themselves, cut costs by sacking voices to which—they argued—no one was paying any heed.
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