by Edward Gross
LEONARD NIMOY
I have been around a long time. I have been on soundstages since 1950. But I never dreamed I would find myself directing a twenty-two- or twenty-four-million-dollar big physical picture … and feeling totally comfortable, not awed by it at all. None of it scares me, I’ve seen it all done before or I know a way can be found to do it if you get the right people.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Star Trek III was not fun. It left a really bad taste in your mouth. You can feel when things are going well. When you’re on the set and there’s an electricity in the air. There wasn’t that. The only time that people perked up was when Dame Judy was around—and she only worked like two days. I was not glad when Star Trek II wrapped. I felt a sense of loss. I was glad after Star Trek III wrapped. I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of there.
A WHALE OF A TALE
“THERE BE WHALES HERE.”
Until the release of J. J. Abrams’s 2009 reimagining, The Voyage Home was the most successful Star Trek film of them all. With little violence and humor that harkened back to classic episodes like “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “A Piece of the Action,” Star Trek IV brought with it an eco-friendly message at its heart and a cautionary warning about endangered species—in this case, the imperiled humpback whale. Additionally, its fish-out-of-water-story of twenty-third-century characters stuck in the San Francisco of 1986 was an irresistible premise that its filmmakers milked to the fullest. Although dismissed by some die-hard fans as too whimsical and slight to be considered among Star Trek’s greatest adventures, there’s little doubt that the success of Star Trek IV would ensure that the franchise would continue to live long and prosper for many years to come.
EDDIE EGAN (unit publicist, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
The difference from the studio perspective on this film was that it was a full-fledged movie again with a movie budget, supervised by the movie group. Everyone was just incredibly excited about the potential of the story and the fact that it could take place outdoors on real locations for a legitimate reason.
I think the studio realized that they had imposed limitations on the films in terms of how they looked and recognized what the audience expects to see in a movie theater. Just the fact they were able to use different kinds of lenses made a big difference in how the movie looks, plus they could use cranes and dollies and things like that that they weren’t able to use on the previous two movies. At that point, the studio was convinced that this could be a continuing series of films and it was given first-class treatment.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor/director, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
I was asked to do Star Trek IV before Star Trek III even opened. I had had some constraints on Star Trek III. I was told flat out that they wanted my vision on this one. “This is a Leonard Nimoy film.” That being the case, Harve and I were asked to develop a concept. I went off to Europe to work on The Sun Also Rises. While I was there, I also wrote a seven- or eight-page outline of what I thought the film could be about. Harve came over and we collaborated on the material … it went in as the very first concept.
HARVE BENNETT (cowriter/producer, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
In moving through the trilogy, I confess that every one of the major tricks I learned in television, I used. Here are the three tricks of the trilogy: Star Trek II, in television we call that the “bottle show.” The “bottle show” in television takes place in an elevator that’s hopefully trapped between two floors. Or it takes place in a mine shaft where people are desperately coming to try to save you and you have to stay down there and talk a lot. Sixty-five percent of the film was on the Enterprise bridge in one incarnation or another. It was also the Reliant bridge, and that is an incomparable savings in terms of time, dollars, and moves. We’d shoot a scene, move the people out, repaint it, and it would now be the Reliant.
Star Trek III was the classic television, “the leading actor loses his memory” show. I did that on Mod Squad, Six Million Dollar Man, Bionic Woman. You usually do it when your leading actor is exhausted or needs a rest. He’s in a coma-like state. In Star Trek III, we had a man who was directing the movie, and who had never directed a feature before, and we felt that to act and so forth would kill him. We had our choice of how to utilize that asset and what we did was we spent most of our money building one great set, the Genesis Planet, and the story became “let’s find him while he directs.” For Star Trek IV we decided to use local location. We had to add some size to the picture, so what do we do? We go out. How do you go out in the twenty-third century? You come to the twentieth century.
LEONARD NIMOY
We decided early on that we wanted to do a time-travel story. When I say “we,” I’m talking about Harve Bennett and I. We were asked by the studio to come up with a story, and our very first conversation was about doing time travel, which we both agreed was a good idea. We also felt that we should lighten up. The picture should be fun in comparison to the previous three.
STEVE MEERSON (cowriter, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
We sat in a room with Leonard and Harve. Leonard told us that he wanted to do a departure, although they weren’t sure what they wanted to do.
LEONARD NIMOY
When we started out to do this picture, I went to three universities—the University of California, Santa Cruz; Harvard; and MIT—to talk to three different professors who are physicists, scientists, and futurists. I spent several hours talking to them about their immediate concerns for the future of the planet. We talked about their ideas for potential contact with extraterrestrials. What it might be like. Where it might come from. How it might come. How we would deal with it. The philosophy of it. And the immediate impact on the sociology of the planet, the religions of the planet. I had some great times.
PETER KRIKES (cowriter, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
They wanted to do a film sort of based on “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Leonard started talking about plankton, cells, that cells become plankton, that things eat plankton, and then whales entered the conversation. We said, “Why not make it as simple as the whale and the whale song?” That was our idea, though that’s not to say Leonard hadn’t done research on whales, because he had.
LEONARD NIMOY
I was also in touch with Edward O. Wilson. In his book Biophilia, he tells us we could be losing as many as ten thousand species off this planet per year—many of them having gone unrecorded. We won’t even have known what they were and they will be gone. He touches on the concept of a keystone species. If you set up a house of cards you may be able to pull away one card successfully … and another card successfully. But at some point you are going to get a card that is a keystone card. When that one is pulled away, the whole thing will collapse.
The same might be true of species: a planetary imbalance might be caused by the destruction or loss of just one. Our tendency is to say, “Here’s this pressure group pestering us—but things aren’t really bad yet. Let’s pay attention to the things we really have to.” But when the ozone question or the species question or whatever gets really bad, we’ll turn to scientists and say, “Okay, here’s the money, God damn it. Fix it!”
They, at some point, may have to come back and say, “It’s too late. We cannot do that anymore, there was a time when we might have…” There is a fantasy that if we did have a holocaust kind of war on this planet, those who are left could eventually rebuild the planet. It’s simply not true. They could never again reach the technical accomplishments that we have reached.
STEVE MEERSON
Leonard had mountains of information on various things. We were hired in February of 1985 and between that time and May or June, Peter and I did several outlines of what eventually became the story. Harve and Leonard took our outline and went through it step by step with the studio executives, and we got the go-ahead to start writing.
LEONARD NIMOY
What we set out to do, frankly, was very dangerous. I was trying to ser
vice a lot of masters. I wanted to continue and wrap up some threads that were left over from Star Trek III. At the same time I wanted to make an entirely different kind of film. Those ideas seemed in opposition to each other, but I think we pulled it off.
RALPH WINTER (executive producer, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
It was Leonard’s idea about saving the whales as opposed to, as he famously said, “trying to save the snail darter.” Saving whales made it a bigger movie.
LEONARD NIMOY
At the same, I wanted to make a film that would be accessible and enjoyable to people who had not seen Star Trek III in order to enjoy this picture. I also wanted to make it accessible to people who don’t go to Star Trek movies. I wanted to make it a movie-movie. It starts out like a Star Trek movie and then makes a left turn. It is intentionally very different. I felt very strongly about the fact that II and III were really two of a kind. They both were played with black-hat heavies. We are the good guys and they are the bad guys and we have to beat them. I really wanted to make a change in that.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
I didn’t know Leonard that well, but one day I was chatting with his secretary in the outer office and he says, “What kind of questions do you think Spock should try to solve in a puzzle in the movie?” and I said, “Ask him to disprove God.” He didn’t run with it.
LEONARD NIMOY
The first movie had no comedy at all. The second film had a little. The third film had a little. But there we were dealing with a lot of serious drama. There was a lot of life and death going on. I just felt it was time to lighten up and have some fun. That meant that if we were going to do time travel, the best thing we could do was come back to contemporary Earth, where we could have some fun with our people. They would more or less be a fish out of water on the streets.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
We discovered something in Star Trek IV that we hadn’t pinpointed in any of the other movies and it just shows how the obvious can escape you. There is a texture to the best Star Trek hours that verges on tongue-in-cheek, but isn’t. There’s a line we all have to walk that is reality. It’s as though the characters within the play have a great deal of joy about themselves, a joy of living. The energy, that joie de vivre about the characters seems to be tongue-in-cheek but isn’t, because you play it with the reality that you would in a kitchen-sink drama written for today’s life.
LEONARD NIMOY
We were talking about the idea that if alien intelligence was trying to contact us, it would probably take quite a long time for us to know what it is saying, and for us to communicate with it. I became intrigued with the idea that there was some lack of communication that was causing the problem. [I was] aware that humpback whales sing this unusual kind of song, which we don’t understand but which obviously means something to them. It’s quite a complex structure, and that’s very interesting.
We don’t know, and we may never know, what the communication is all about, so suppose that something in the twenty-third century is trying to communicate with them and they’re gone. That’s how it all happened, and it’s a hell of a lot more interesting and challenging, cinematically, to come back to the twentieth century to pick up a pair of whales than it is to pick up a plant or insect.
HARVE BENNETT
We went through every writer we could think of. We finally found Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes, whose work was highly regarded. Nothing came of it. Some of that, in fairness to them, was because we had saddled them with what appeared to be a male character that we thought was going to be Eddie Murphy at one time.
STEVE MEERSON
Eddie Murphy was going to play a college professor who taught English, but a professor who we probably all had in the sixties or seventies, who’s a little bit wacky and believes in extraterrestrials. Every Wednesday, he would open up his class to a discussion and the room would light up with conversation.
HARVE BENNETT
Now, the meeting with Eddie Murphy was a little bizarre. He had a separate meeting with Leonard. Leonard said, “He’s a little strange in a room.” So he came in with two guys, good-looking guys, and they were all in black leather. [We] told Eddie this story and he thought about it for a while and he said, “It’s good. Let me see a script,” and walked out. We sat there and thought, “Wouldn’t it be terrific to have Eddie in this movie?”
Later, the studio started getting very anxious for a very good reason. Here you have a franchise called Star Trek and it performs in a certain wonderful way. Here you have a franchise called Eddie Murphy and it performs in an even bigger way. Why not take them together and form one franchise? Bad economics, because you are probably diminishing by compositing. So the studio was resistant to it, but Eddie has a certain amount of clout, and he said that he hadn’t decided whether he wanted to do it or not, and so much of the development of the story was with the very distinct possibility that Eddie Murphy was in it.
PETER KRIKES
He would play whale songs, and it was the whale songs he played in the classroom that the ship locked on to. That was in the first draft we wrote, but the second draft was different. After you write a first draft of anything, once the director, the cast, and the producers come aboard, everything changes, and not necessarily for the better. But the tone was pretty much a reflection of what was in the movie. For example, there was a scene where the Eddie Murphy character was trying to convince the Catherine Hicks character that aliens do exist on Earth. In the first draft, Hicks was a newswoman and there was a marine biologist as well. Gillian Taylor was ultimately a marriage of about three characters. Murphy believed in aliens and saw them beam into his classroom.
STEVE MEERSON
It was the boy who cried wolf. No one would ever believe him, so he took it upon himself to follow the crew, and in one scene, he lifted a phaser from Kirk, took it back to the newswoman and said, “See, they really do exist.” And she says, “What’s this?” and casts the gun aside, accidentally activating it. The phaser lands on the floor and her cat jumps off the couch. We follow her to her bedroom and she goes to sleep. The cat keeps phasing things out of the apartment by hitting the phaser, and when she wakes up, she sees that all the furniture is gone.
EDDIE MURPHY (actor, comedian)
I’m a Trekkie. I’ve always loved Star Trek and have wanted to do one of the films. I wanted to be in Star Trek and that’s where they got the idea of coming back in time to Earth in 1986.
PETER KRIKES
We were given two instructions: keep Eddie Murphy in mind for the guest star, and make sure that the character of Admiral Kirk is the driving force behind every aspect of the story.
STEVE MEERSON
The approach we were told to take is that Kirk really had to be the one to lead everyone. Not necessarily that he had to actually have the idea to do something, but it had to appear as if he had the idea. I think the perfect example in the movie is when Spock goes into the belly of the Bird of the Prey to use the computers and learns that the alien probe is emitting the sound of whale songs. It’s Kirk who has the idea to go back through time, although Spock is the one who plants the suggestion in Kirk’s mind. Kirk verbalizes it, and that’s the way it had to be played. We were told Bill had to be the leader at all times. In that scene, if you’re reading it, you say, “It’s Spock’s idea,” but on film Spock’s discovery that it’s humpback whales is not as important as Kirk’s idea of going to get them.
PETER KRIKES
Visually, the scene between Spock and his father at the end is another example. You kind of ask, “Why is Kirk standing there listening to this?” He has to be a part of everything.
STEVE MEERSON
I know a lot of the cast wasn’t happy about Eddie Murphy possibly being cast. I think all of those guys became terrified that Eddie would blow them off the screen. They also got a lot of negative mail from the fans.
HARVE BENNETT
When Eddie Murphy f
ell out, we had to readjust the script. But by then it had turned to paste. It just didn’t work. Essentially we didn’t have a script we felt good about or one that was even submittable to the studio.
STEVE MEERSON
Actually, every beat of the film’s first, second, and third acts is exactly the same as our script. The only thing that changed slightly was that our Eddie Murphy character and the marine biologist were combined.
EDDIE MURPHY
The script was developed, but we eventually dropped the idea. Golden Child came along and I decided to do that film instead, because I thought it would be better for my career. In retrospect, I think I might have been better off doing Star Trek IV.
PETER KRIKES
If you look at our script and the movie you saw, basically everything is still there, like Eddie Murphy going to meet the aliens in the park to bring them gifts, and he runs into the invisible ship … which is what Catherine Hicks did when she ran into the park to find Kirk. The structure really is exactly the same.
Also, she grabbed Kirk’s waist and is beamed aboard the Bird of Prey with him. In the script, Murphy says good-bye to Kirk who starts to beam out, then grabs him by the ankles and is transported aboard. He goes back to the twenty-third century and salutes Kirk when they get the Enterprise-A. You know when Spock nerve-pinches the guy on the bus? In our draft, that took place in an underground subway system.
You can’t imagine the frustration of them trying to take all the credit for something that was completely blocked out for them. Plus, they removed a lot of the emotional qualities that we thought it would have.
PETER KRIKES
There was a scene with Kirk on the bridge of the Bird of Prey. They cut out five lines where Kirk says to Saavik, “Have you told him yet?” And she says, “No. I’m taking a maternity leave.”