by Edward Gross
BRAN FERREN (visual effects supervisor, Associates & Ferren)
There was a lot of time wasted on this film. Ultimately, every model we received from Paramount had to be completely refurbished prior to shooting. We had to have Greg Jein build some new ones while we created five planet landscapes and moons as well. One entire side of the Enterprise model was spray-painted matte gray, destroying the meticulous original paint job. We had to go in and fix it before we could shoot it, which took two painters and assistant about six weeks to do.
WILLIAM SHATNER
We had problems that we might not have had if we had different personnel. I followed other people’s leads because I did not have firsthand knowledge of these things, but I was in on the decision so I make no excuse for that. It’s an instance where my lack of experience showed.
RALPH WINTER
We were high on the success of IV. We thought we could no wrong. David Loughery, the writer, had done a lot of good movies. It was all within the construct of what Bill and Harve wanted to do. And Leonard was a part of that. But we almost killed the franchise. My part in killing it almost was the digital effects. I was reacting against the high costs of ILM, and so we went with another company. Bran Ferren sold us on a lot of cool technology at the time. He’s a brilliant man. Ultimately, he was a mile wide in terms of his ability and intelligence, but the follow-through and infrastructure of actually delivering fell apart. And so, in the crush of trying to get that work done, he just didn’t have the infrastructure to make it happen. All of his film had to go through one machine to get all the work out and we couldn’t do it in time, so he had to compromise. The effects on that movie are dreadful. ILM knows how to deliver. The chance we took to save money and get fresh ideas is just too difficult to do on a franchise big-budget movie. It almost ended my career and the franchise. I took a lot of heat for it. You know: “How could you let this happen?”
HARVE BENNETT
That’s peripheral. You should have seen ILM’s tests for God. They were silly. We went with the creative judgment that Bran had a more vigorous attack to help us sell the illusions, and it was a picture, as discussed, that needed fancy footwork. In addition to that, it is only correct to note that by the time we were ready to start, ILM was overcrowded. We would have been the fourth or fifth major picture, and we would have received at their hands, not withstanding our relationships, the D team instead of the A team. That was an important consideration. All the people we had worked with [before] were booked.
KENNY MYERS (makeup effects supervisor, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
How do you make God? When they said we had to make God, I went crazy! Our first question was whether to go for that classic Jesus look, or for an alien look. The first thing Bill suggested was to think of the audience—a lot of baby boomers—and their ideas of God. We decided we needed something people could immediately identify with, so we chose Charlton Heston’s Moses combined with God as depicted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling as the look that would sell most people. It’s that long flowing white-haired look combined with that very fatherly, smooth talker that just makes you feel comfortable.
BRAN FERREN
A project like Star Trek allowed us to fuse a lot of different technologies together simultaneously—integration of transportable data files from computer graphic systems to electron microscopes to optical printers—that actually worked rather well on a project like this. It’s the only way we could have done it all in three months. Still, it was a fun project to do. But it would’ve been nice to have had a year.
WALTER KOENIG
No matter what my differences are with Bill, each time he has said he would do one of these films, no matter how outrageous the discrepancies in salaries are, I breathe a sigh of relief and say thank you, because I know the pictures wouldn’t be made unless he was there and he knows they wouldn’t be made, and that’s why he’s so difficult sometimes.
RALPH WINTER
I had a great time with Bill. He was terrific and a lot of fun. I enjoyed it a lot.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (coexecutive producer, Futurama)
Almost every line of dialogue is a cliché: “They don’t make them like they used to; the right tool for the right job; I know this ship like the back of my hand.” It’s terrible writing.
JAMES DOOHAN
The only reason that I agreed to it was they had spent two hundred thousand dollars on that set. I can tell you for certain that it took at least thirty-five takes for me to build up to that scene where I knock myself out. I’m usually called “one-take Doohan,” but I was not happy, and nobody was happy with Bill.
WALTER KOENIG
My main concern was [whether] Bill was going to manipulate us and to reinterpret our characters. In fact, he was quoted in Starlog as saying he’s had things he wanted to change in our characters for years and this is our opportunity. A more pretentious comment I couldn’t believe, and I was very upset about that, and I was angry, and I told George and Nichelle and Jimmy if at any point he picks on any of us, I’m walking off the set. I will not stand for that, he cannot do that to us. I had heard stories about him from T.J. Hooker when he directed, and even when he didn’t direct, how he had caused grief for other people, and that’s what I was anticipating.
I had underestimated Bill again … he was so cordial and so generous with his approbation that it became almost a gag. I would say, “Yessir, Captain,” and he would say, “Walt, wonderful, wonderful!” He was very affirming and very supportive. I knew the part would be small, he’s talked about how the big three is what carried the TV series and that he wanted to do an episode of the series on a bigger level. So I knew the part was going to be very small, but as it is I still had more to do on Star Trek V than I did on Star Trek VI. I only worked eight days on the picture, so I didn’t have any time to develop an animosity, and the way he dealt with us was very pleasant.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
I saw Star Trek V on the day it came out. I went to the GCC Northeast Philadelphia where I grew up and felt like I had seen the “Spock’s Brain” of Star Trek movies. What the hell was that? It was embarrassing. “Row, row, row your boat.” The special effects were awful. “Jim, please, not in front of the Klingons.” I mean, c’mon, it was bad. I walked out of that movie with my phaser between my legs. Just embarrassed. I cannot watch Star Trek V. It is unwatchable to me … like Generations, Insurrection, and Nemesis.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
McCoy is watching Kirk on El Capitan in the beginning of the movie, and he’s got twentieth-century binoculars, and Kirk is tiny and falls off the mountain. McCoy starts running and he gets there immediately. There are a couple of good action scenes in the beginning, but in general, the casting is terrible. I liked the idea of Nimbus III. I’ve always liked those things in Star Trek where we’re shown that not everything works out great. And the ending is terrible. I know the plans had him being chased by rock monsters, but the ending doesn’t seem to make any sense.
I’m also not a religious person, but it takes the cheap way out saying God “is right here, the human heart.” It’s like you’re just going to dismiss thousands of years of human religion with that? Either explore it and say something or just stay away from it—but I still watched it way too many times.
RONALD D. MOORE (supervising producer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
It seemed cheap on the screen technically. It didn’t look like it was made as well as the other movies; the visual effects were terrible. The story was just not compelling and it felt silly at some points. It was indulging silliness—not humor, but just silliness. I just didn’t think it worked. The “row, row, row your boat” scene is nice and it’s sweet and sentimental, though it’s turning up the saccharine level pretty high, but you could deal with it. If everything else in the movie had worked, it would have been regarded as just a sweet wonderful little scene in a good movie, but as it is, it set the tone that they were going to a weird silly place.
HARVE BENNETT
The appetite for Star Trek movies was seriously impacted by the success of Next Generation, not destroyed, just kind of subdivided, and the feeding frenzy we experienced on Star Trek II, III, and IV did not exist on V, even if it had been a better movie.
RALPH WINTER
If you develop a story that says “We’re going to look for God,” right away you might be disappointed because what you find may not be what you think you should find. So that’s very tough story material to grab a hold of.
RONALD D. MOORE
When I was doing an interview for the Shatner documentary on The Next Generation, David Gerrold was there and was saying to Shatner as I walked in the door that “What does God need with a starship?” is one of the great Kirk lines … and it’s one of the greatest lines in cinema. I just remember thinking, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Really?” I didn’t buy that line at all. He said it and I went, “Really?” It felt like they’d strained to get to this point where he can say this line.
WILLIAM SHATNER
It took me a while to take another look at Star Trek V. In the end, I think I learned a great deal directing a multimillion-dollar picture like that. It was an enormous responsibility to be in control of that much money, and I realized that I hadn’t spent the money wisely in allowing for a big finale. I’d blown it in the first half and had nothing in the second.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN (writer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
Part of working on sequels is adding to something that already exists, and what exists works real well, so don’t fuck it up. That’s a tremendous responsibility. With Star Trek I, the studio said, “If it hadn’t cost us forty-five million dollars, we would have made more money.” It bombed critically too, and it was Harve Bennett who came along and got back to what had driven the episodes, which is a bit of action-adventure with a strong guest star. One was a bore and V also suffers terribly from something that is a dangerous formula to film. If you spend two hours telling people “Wait until you see what’s around this corner,” you had better have something around that corner to show them, whether it’s a monster or a concept of God or whatever the hell it is. They were big letdowns.
RALPH WINTER
Three or four weeks after we finished shooting, Bill goes, “I’m done. I’ve cut the movie together and I’m done.” I looked at Harve and we just shook our heads, because you need time in the cutting room to retell the story and shape it. But there is no way you can do it in a three-week period. That’s the first indication that we were in trouble. We needed more time and more work and we had to figure it out. And then you have to take a chance of putting your baby out there ahead of time to a crowd and seeing what they say. That’s always hard.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Directing film is a wild adventure for anyone equipped to do it. I made compromises on Star Trek V thinking I had to do that, that’s the nature of the business.But the line where you do not compromise I couldn’t tread because of a number of factors, not the least of which is my own nature. I got to learn when it’s time to stand and when it’s time to turn. That, really, for a knowledgeable person in the business is a more important lesson than where the camera is and how to play a scene and what your establishing shot is. Those mechanics of making a film no longer become a point of discussion, it’s automatic, it’s there creatively. I had the most joyful time of my life directing Star Trek V.
RALPH WINTER
Recently, I noticed the front page of The New York Times showcased some guys that are free-climbing El Capitan with no ropes. I tweeted Bill Shatner, saying, “Check out the front page of The New York Times. I think you did this in the future.”
UP THE ACADEMY
“I AM A GRADUATE OF STARFLEET ACADEMY; I KNOW MANY THINGS.”
After the box-office implosion of Star Trek V, producer Harve Bennett sold Paramount on a plan to reboot the franchise with a prequel film, The Academy Years, that would show how Kirk, Spock, and McCoy first met at Starfleet Academy—a film that he would direct. In many ways anticipating J. J. Abrams’s reinvention, The Academy Years would have starred a new cast replacing the pricey original ensemble. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy would have reprised their roles in bookends designed to introduce and end the film. At the time, the announcement was greeted by much antipathy on the part of creator Gene Roddenberry and the fans as well as the original cast, which feared losing a lucrative gig. Its ultimate cancellation marked an acrimonious end to the Harve Bennett era of Star Trek.
DAVID LOUGHERY (writer, The Academy Years)
Every time they went to make one of these Star Trek movies, the producers and the studio always ran into the same problem in getting the original cast together. The reasons for that are money, power, creative differences, ego, health, unavailability … all of those things.
RALPH WINTER (producer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
I had pitched Harve an idea, The Academy Years, at his daughter’s bat mitzvah. I remember saying to him we shouldn’t make Star Trek V. We should make Star Trek V, VI, and VII. We’ve just demonstrated with Star Trek III that we can do a young Spock. We should see how these guys meet the first time. And build something that would be a reboot of this with younger characters to pick up with when these older characters don’t want to do this as much. He loved the idea. We followed up on it. We got the studio excited about it. David Loughery wrote a script and it was terrific. It was set in Huntsville, Alabama. It was the training ground for Starfleet Academy. It was young Kirk and Bones and Spock, who was the first off-worlder to attend. The three of them become friends and they’re all the extremes that were presented in the TV series. Spock is überlogical, Kirk is the ladies man and always out there, and Bones is trying to be a medical student.
HARVE BENNETT (producer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
A proposal was made to me that we could do Star Trek in the beginning, which was Ralph Winter’s idea. Let’s do them at the academy. That picture seems to have worked in a variety of incarnations including Top Gun.
DAVID LOUGHERY
Harve always had this ace up his sleeve, which was if we can’t get everybody together for one of the Star Trek movies, we should do a prequel.
HARVE BENNETT
I suggested we develop a series of films to be another franchise, another tentpole that we could open. We could do a prequel and find out how Kirk and Spock met at Starfleet Academy. When we were doing Star Trek V, we got the studio to approve work on the script. It is an excellent story, but it has been misperceived. It’s a great story finding out about this young cocky character on a farm who goes to flight school and meets up with the first alien that comes from Vulcan and how they meet the other characters. It would have been a gift for the fans on the twenty-fifth anniversary.
DAVID LOUGHERY
When I heard about the idea, I thought it was terrific. Not from the point of view of recasting, but from the point of view of storytelling, because I worked so closely with these characters on Star Trek V that the idea of doing an origin story—where you show them as young cadets and kids—was tremendously exciting. What it was, was a real coming-of-age story. In outline form, it was the story of Kirk and Spock meeting for the first time as cadets here on Earth. We’ve got a young Jim Kirk, who’s kind of cocky and wild. He’s not exactly what you might think starship-captain material might be. He’s like one of these kids who would rather fly hot planes and chase girls. Spock is this brilliant, arrogant, aloof-to-the-point-of-obnoxiousness genius. It’s the mask he’s hiding behind to cover his own conflicting human emotions. He’s an outcast, he left Vulcan in shame against his father’s wishes, and like all adolescents, he’s trying to find a place to fit in, but he keeps screwing it up.
Over the course of this story, which is one year at Starfleet Academy, Kirk and Spock are sort of put to the test and they begin as rivals and end up as friends and comrades who learn that they have to combine their talents for th
e first time to defeat a deadly enemy. In the final scene, where they say good-bye at graduation and go their separate ways, we’re able to see the legends that these two boys are going to grow up to become.
HARVE BENNETT
We did the best we could on V and when it was over, I went to see [studio president] Ned Tanen, who was the last of the decisive people at Paramount before the bean counters took over, and he said, “Well, are we going to do another one?” I said it was time to do the prequel, and he said, “Do it.” It was later that everybody else asked for long meetings. Our model, or mock-up, was Santa Fe Trail, a Warner Bros. movie made in 1940 about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. We gave Kirk a genuine love affair with an eighteen-year-old, her first. The girl dies heroically. Kirk, insane with grief, performs his first heroic act against all odds. And Spock saves the day in a struggle with racist overtones, getting the medal of honor. The prequel story ends over the grave of his lost love, giving some insight into why Kirk never falls in love again for the rest of the Star Trek series. At the end of the film, while the older Kirk is contemplating her passing, Spock beams down and asks him if he’s going into teaching or back to the ship. They have a sentimental exchange and Bill says, “Beam me up.”
DAVID LOUGHERY
We felt that there was a powerful story there, one that the audience would be interested in. We’re always interested in young Indiana Jones and young Sherlock Holmes, and how they started and come to be who they are. This was sort of the way to explain Kirk and Spock and where they came from.
HARVE BENNETT
We had a better movie and we had a film that would have allowed them to make the same Star Trek VI eighteen months later.