To the Stars

by George Takei

  “You know we have a tight budget. What I’m hearing makes me very sad. Really, George, STAR TREK will then have to go on without you. I’m telling you this as your friend. You won’t be in the next film then.”

  “I’m prepared for that, Harve. To me it’s sad that a big studio like Paramount, with a huge earner like STAR TREK, can’t meet the salary paid me by a British independent producer. But if that’s it, I’m prepared to live with it. My life will go on—with a void in it—but it will go on.”

  We maintained an amiable atmosphere throughout our leisurely lunch. In the lush ambiance of Le St. Germain, our conversation was as sweetly confected as the elegant pastries that were displayed on the silver trolley. And both our positions remained as firm as the solid oak antique table we dined on. When we left, we parted amicably but with a definite tone of finality. I said good-bye to Harve feeling that STAR TREK was now behind me.

  * * *

  “Paramount called back,” Steve exclaimed over the phone. “They still want to negotiate. They’ve come up a bit, but they’re still not meeting our price.”

  I had truly made my peace with the notion of not doing STAR TREK anymore. Now I was being jolted back into another cycle of expectancy, anxiety, and frustration. Steve responded. Paramount countered. Steve held firm. Paramount haggled. The dickering continued back and forth.

  I saw movie negotiations as a game of unequal players. The producer had the force of power and money; we, the actors, only the talent and the producer’s need of it. Fairness and equity played no part in the game, yet that was the basis of our position.

  But I had one more weapon in my arsenal. I was willing to walk away. Through three seasons as a television series and four enormously successful feature films, my efforts to enhance my role had been futile. I enjoyed working with most of the members of the cast, but that would be about the only thing I would miss, since other projects had fulfilled me more as an actor. If Harve Bennett wasn’t going to respect what I had established professionally outside of STAR TREK, I wasn’t going to give up that gain simply to return to a supernumerary role doing another STAR TREK. And this one, directed by Bill! My mind was set—conclusively—to move on with my life.

  * * *

  My upstairs phone was ringing. Only a few people know that number, so I dashed up and grabbed it on the last ring before the answering machine came on. It was Nichelle.

  “Baby, we’re all here but you. We miss you.” Her voice was grave and concerned. I knew from Walter that they were meeting at Bill’s home this morning for the first reading of the script.

  “Nichelle, I can’t tell you how empty I feel being here at home knowing that you guys are together there reading the next STAR TREK script. But I hope you understand.”

  “Hang on, honey, let me put someone on.” Nichelle passed the receiver on.

  “Georgie,” the voice cooed sweetly. It was Bill. “Why aren’t you here with us?” he asked innocently.

  “Bill, I’m sure you’ve had discussions with Harve about my situation. I really would appreciate it if the negotiations could be regarded seriously.”

  “But, Georgie,” he sweet-talked. “We need you here. I need you. What can I do to help change your mind?” I felt like saying he could begin by not calling me Georgie. No one calls me Georgie. Not even my mother. No one but Bill. But I restrained myself.

  “Bill, I’m quite serious about this. If there’s anything you can do, that would be to convey to Harve just how serious I am about this. I really am prepared to pass.” We chatted for a while longer, and then we hung up. I was not a bit ruffled by the call. Did Bill think that one charming “Georgie” call from him would change my mind? But I knew better. I knew that he was only playing the role of the director making a final heroic gesture in front of his cast—the one last try at bringing the stray back into the flock. I was not about to accomodate his glowing self-image.

  * * *

  Steve proved to be the buckaroo deal maker I suspected he was on our first meeting. He can ride out the wildest negotiations, the most rough-and-tumble bargaining, and tame it down to an exhausted compromise. He finally crafted a convoluted deal with Harve Bennett that sort of met the price—but with many complicated qualifications. Fifty thousand dollars of the compensation was to be a “pay or play” deal. In plain language, that meant that fifty thousand dollars of the payment could be applied to any other Paramount project—television or movie—that they could cast me in. They thus hadn’t in fact met the full River Kwai payment. But Steve also negotiated an option price for STAR TREK VI in the same agreement. This figure was a significant increase over the River Kwai amount. So he had established a new price for me—on the next film.

  I pondered this offer. Even if it didn’t truly meet the straight-out pay from River Kwai, the promise of parlaying a part of the money from this STAR TREK over to another project was attractive. In that sense, even if my part as Sulu should turn out to be minimal, at least I had enhanced my prospects as an actor with another “pay or play” project. I decided to accept. The suspense was over. Immediately, I got on the phone to Walter and began our conversation with, “Guess what?”

  STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER was an unexpectedly pleasant surprise on many counts.

  It began sublimely. Location filming in Yosemite National Park was really a one-week holiday with a few hours of light work tucked in. My daybreak runs in the invigorating forest crispness, morning sunlight streaming down through the towering sequoias, were daily communions with the glory of nature. I’d return shining with good sweat to the grandly rustic Ahwanee Hotel, give Walter his morning wake-up call, then step into the shower. When I got down to the dining room, Walter would already be seated at a table next to an expansive window with a heart-stopping vista of the Yosemite valley. After breakfast, we would go for leisurely hikes through sylvan meadows on the valley floor. Then, after a late morning nap, it was time for lunch.

  “You know, Walter,” I observed dreamily as we gazed out at the majesty of El Capitan, “I think I know now how it feels to be a kept woman. I could get used to this living.”

  “Yeah,’ sneered Walter cynically. “And every two years, our ‘man’ comes and gives it to us.” I roared at his extending my analogy to its logical conclusion, but I had to agree—Walter did have a point.

  The really unanticipated surprise was Bill. It was not an unpleasant working experience to be directed by him. In fact, he was actually quite good at creating a positive environment on the set, marshaling his considerable reservoir of charm, loading it into his weapon, and placing the setting at “enchant.” We were pleasantly taken aback. Even Jimmy remarked, “The man’s not half as bad as I thought he’d be!”

  I suspected, however, that it was more because he was a clever actor than a genuine director. Bill knew that for him to be successful as a director, he needed our support. And if there is anyone driven to personal success, that was Bill. He tapped all his acting prowess in his effort to triumph as a director. He was supportive, he was encouraging, he was solicitous, and he was accomodating. But I knew he was not a changed Bill. We had a history together. I knew that he had always been vivacious and convivial on the set. His charm was intended, however, always to burnish his own star. I knew I was only watching another acting performance—this time, he was enacting the role of a cheerfully earnest and helpful director.

  * * *

  STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER opened the summer of 1989. This one was not kindly received. The Final Frontier almost turned out to be a prophetic title. It became the only STAR TREK film to disappoint at the box office.

  Yet in a way I wasn’t surprised. The script seemed rather a muddle. It was as if three separately interesting plots were force-sealed together into one. Perhaps the mystery of Nimbus III, a planet that began as a paradisiacal world, now reduced to an arid place of gaunt, miserable people desperate for a Messiah, might have been developed into a gripping film. Perhaps the fraternal relationship between Spock
and his half-brother, Sybok, might have made for fascinating human/Vulcan drama. Perhaps even the Wizard of Oz-like search for God could have been a whimsical STAR TREK IV type of movie. But rammed together, they made for a confusing and ultimately tiresome two hours.

  And the humor serving as the glue to all this, instead of being light and frolicsome, seemed only mean-spirited. The laughs seemed to be at the cost of the very qualities that made our heros distinctive. Chekov and Sulu were supposed to be the best navigator and helmsman in Starfleet. The first joke was in seeing them hopelessly lost in the forest. Uhura was a classy lady as well as a spectacularly gorgeous woman. For a laugh, her beauty was reduced to a striptease sex object for a gaggle of grunting barbarians in the desert. Engineer Scott was supposed to know every inch of the Enterprise like “the back of my hand.” And just as he utters this line, the joke happens—he rams his head against a very prominent beam and knocks himself unconscious. This is funny? It was no wonder the fans did not buy it. Paramount learned that merely pasting the words STAR TREK on a movie did not automatically produce fans in mindless droves. STAR TREK V was not another megahit.

  * * *

  I got home from a weekend convention in St. Louis and played back the accumulation of telephone messages. There was a time I remembered, way back in the old days when STAR TREK was just starting up, when we didn’t have this device. We were mercifully spared this ritual that we now had to perform after any extended absence. Technological advance wasn’t necessarily making life easier. Now “progress” had granted us the burden of returning a weekend’s stockpile of telephone calls. There were at least four from Mama. I’ll never understand why she feels that she needs to leave message after message when she knows I’m out of town. I was writing down the information on my notepad when, suddenly, a voice that I almost never heard on my machine came on.

  “George, buddy, how ya been?” That drawl was immediately recognizable. It was DeForest Kelley. But the voice seemed edged with anxiety. He had a problem, he said, and perhaps I could help. That was it. Nothing more. I was worried. I stopped the machine and punched in De’s phone number immediately. It rang a couple of times, and then his wife Carolyn’s voice came on. It was the infernal answering machine! They were out. At times, “progress” can be frustrating. I left my message on their machine. Over the next few days, our answering machines got more intimate with each other than we could. What might be troubling De? I worried. My anxiety increased.

  But hearing Carolyn’s voice also brought back fond memories of the five-city promotional tour that I shared with them almost ten years ago prior to the opening of the first STAR TREK movie. They were the sweetest couple, and engaging travel companions. Carolyn was an actress who had given up her career to be Mrs. Kelley. They moved out to the Valley as a young couple and had been living in the same house since. And together they built that rarity in Hollywood, a solid and lasting marriage.

  My concern for whatever might have been troubling De grew with each passing day. I tried again. It rang a couple of times, and Carolyn’s voice came on. This time it was live!

  “Carolyn! It’s so good to hear your voice. I’ve been worried about you guys ever since De left that message for me last weekend. What’s the problem?”

  “Thank you for calling back, George. Here, let me put him on.” I could hear muffled voices and other background sounds. Then that familiar, slow Georgia drawl came on.

  “George, I appreciate your calling back,” he began, and immediately launched into a description of a bureaucratic nightmare in which they had become ensnared. It seemed they shared a surname with their next-door neighbor, but with one difference—their neighbor spelled their name “Kelly,” without the e, while De spelled his “Kelley.” Because of this similarity, their property tax bills had somehow become mixed up in the record-keeping machinery downtown, and interests and penalties were piling up alarmingly on their computer-imposed “tax delinquincy.” They had called downtown only to get caught up in another tangled web of bafflingly bureaucratic handoffs. They were at their wit’s end, and afraid their home was in jeopardy.

  “You know how government works, George,” De stated. “Can you help us?” As I listened to De describe his plight, my blood started to boil. I knew how confusing the maze of bureaucracy could be even to those familiar with it. I knew how coldly impersonal some government workers could be to the very people they should be serving. We were getting farther and farther away from the basic purpose of government—to serve people. My friends, who were worried for their home, were getting the worst of remote, unfeeling government inflicted upon them.

  “De, this gets me angry. Let me make a few calls.” I hung up and got to work. I called the deputy to a county supervisor I knew and explained the problem. I underscored the fact that these people had been run through the mill and been left even more worried and confused than before. Government had compounded its own mistake and was creating unnecessary distress. He said he would get right on it.

  A few days later, De called again to tell me that the supervisor’s office had called and that the problem now seemed resolved. Then he added, “If you ever decide to run for office again, let me know. You’ve got our votes.”

  I got more than the assurance of De’s and Carolyn’s votes in return for that phone call to the supervisor’s deputy. A couple of days later, a messenger brought an enormous basket of fruit, and among the mountainous sculpture of exotica were kiwifruits. They were delicious, but even better was having been given the chance to help out old friends.

  * * *

  There was something strange happening with STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION. It was growing in popularity. The show that had, at first, irked us as an idea, then on its faltering initial run delighted us with a secret sense of vindication, now seemed to be gaining its “space legs.” The show’s ratings were quite good. At conventions, we started getting challenging questions on why we didn’t like the show.

  I tuned in again. And it surprised me. The characters had become clearer and stronger. The scripts had become imaginative and thought-provoking. Issues such as euthanasia, society’s responsibility to its soldiers, and the inclusion of the infinite diversity of sexuality into our infinite combinations were inventively explored. The Next Generation was carrying the torch and running with it quite independently and now quite strongly. These characters on our spin-off series were not our spin-off equivalents. Rather, they each had their own identities. Picard was not a mirror of Kirk. Riker certainly was not Spock. In an advance on us, Dr. Crusher was female, and Worf was from our implacable adversary race, the Klingons. Ultimately, the cast’s chemistry was uniquely theirs. Yet at the core of both generations was our common subscription to the ideal of facing the future with confidence in our problem-solving capabilities and our creativity.

  Their lack of full diversity on the bridge still bothered me, but the show was remarkably improved. The evil delight we had initially taken now became paternal pride. We had given birth to another extention of the STAR TREK phenomenon. And an offspring’s success is claimed by many parents.

  * * *

  We wondered if there would be a STAR TREK VI. The general chagrin following the last picture placed a heavy damper on the prospects for another one. There was, however, a tiny glimmering in the near future. It sparkled tantalizingly for the possibility of another sequel.

  Nineteen ninety-one would be the twenty-fifth birthday of STAR TREK. A silver anniversary shone enticingly just two years away. What a gloriously rare achievement it would be for a television series that debuted rather inauspiciously back in 1966.

  With the anniversary looming, there must have been a lot of pressure on Paramount, both from the Paramount Licensing and Merchandising department and from the general public, to produce still another film. STAR VI soon started to loom as a distinct possibility.

  Harve Bennett was once again assigned to come up with an idea. This time, there would have to be more creative thought invested in th
e project to avoid the fate of the last one. Instead, Harve came up with an incredible whopper.

  “You won’t believe what I heard!” Walter’s voice trembled with incredulity. “Harve wants to do a flashback story again.”

  “So?” I replied. “That can work if done cleverly.”

  “Yeah, but this is a flashback to our Starfleet Academy days. Harve wants to find new, young actors who look like us and recast all our characters. Harve wants to replace us!”

  “That’s crazy!” I blurted out. “This is supposed to be our twenty-fifth anniversary picture. How can you celebrate twenty-five years with people who were never there at all! It doesn’t make sense!”

  When I hung up with Walter, my disbelief at this outrageous development started to burn, slowly turning into anger. I felt betrayed by Harve. One of his blandishments enticing me to sign the contract for STAR TREK V was the significant increase in compensation for STAR TREK VI—if the option should be picked up. I was in a fury. I knew that by recasting the story as a flashback, Paramount would not have to exercise the option.

  And the “pay or play” part of the contract had not been exercised either. So, as it turned out, the studio had paid me the equivalent of what I’d been paid for River Kwai. However, my true interest in signing had been in parlaying STAR TREK V into another role. Even that prospect was now dashed. The rage I felt was not just at Harve. I was furious at myself for being taken for a dupe.

  My mood as the holidays of 1989 approached was not very festive. I got grouchier as the year end neared. The more I thought on the betrayal, the more my anger gnawed away at me. It was making things unpleasant for all those around me. It was a self-injuring anger. I decided to act on it rather than let it ruin the holiday season.