Leonard

by William Shatner

  Ironically, when Leonard and Susan returned to Paris, he learned his father was in a hospital, dying. By the time they got there, Leonard’s father was on morphine, barely conscious. Leonard played one of the recorded messages for him but never knew if he heard them before he died. Several weeks later, he showed the photographs he’d taken to his mother. One of them was a lovely, pastoral picture of a horse drinking from the river. His mother looked at it and said sadly, “Oh, this used to be so beautiful. Look, look. It’s not even clean anymore.”

  Leonard was quite taken with the reality that her memory of it was more beautiful than the obvious beauty he saw in his photograph.

  All of the challenges we faced in our lives took place against the background music of Star Trek. The three years we had spent making the original shows had been stretched, for reasons that have long been debated, into the rest of our lives. We’d thought we were making a TV show; instead, we had flown boldly into legend. It truly was inescapable. I remember reading a story that Leonard had told to a reporter. He was stopped at a traffic light, he explained, and he took out his Motorola StarTAC cell phone, flipped it open, and made a call. As he was speaking, he glanced into the car sitting next to him and noted that the several people in that car were pointing at him and laughing. It took him a few seconds for the reason to click in: his phone was an almost exact replica of our “communicators.” With that realization, he started laughing.

  As I read that story, I started laughing—because I actually believed that had happened to me. In fact, I was quite sure of it. Except, maybe it hadn’t. And I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if Nichelle and George and the other members of our cast had told the same story. Star Trek had never ended for any of us. It was always there in some form, always.

  TWELVE

  After the first four movies had established that the franchise would fly successfully into the next generation of viewers, the studio decided it was time to revive the series. Leonard actually was editing the fourth movie when Frank Mancuso, then running Paramount, told him they intended to produce a new series and asked if he would be interested in producing it. It was a great show of respect for Leonard’s abilities, but he had no interest in doing that. At that point, he probably still believed he eventually would escape the tractor beam that held us so tightly to the franchise. Neither Leonard nor I had any great confidence that the new series, which they titled Star Trek: The Next Generation, would succeed. There was a bit of ego, of course; Kirk and Spock were the core of the stories, and we didn’t see how it could be successful without them. Especially because, as I heard, Roddenberry had decided the series would take place a century after our voyages ended. The crew would be flying the fifth Enterprise, and it would take place in a world in which people have grown out of conflict. When the writers wondered how they could dramatize a world without emotional problems, he supposedly told them, “That’s your problem.”

  As it turned out, Leonard and I were absolutely incorrect, as Patrick Stewart, who brought Captain Jean-Luc Picard to life, was happy to remind us when we would meet at the conventions. Star Trek: The Next Generation was quite successful without us, although because Vulcans are long-lived, Spock was able to make an appearance on that show. For those members of the staff that Roddenberry brought back, this was a very lucrative voyage. Contractual terms in the industry had changed, and this time the actors, writers, directors, and producers were entitled to residuals in perpetuity, and as I have been told, nice green envelopes from the various talent unions arrived at their homes every three months.

  The critical success of the new series combined with the financial success of Leonard’s movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home led to the making of my Star Trek V film, The Final Frontier. These films were mini-reunions for all of us, and certainly we enjoyed being back together. There was a great comfort level, although we also were well aware of the expectations of our Trekkie base. On the original series, it had just been a job, but because of that acclaim, it had practically become elevated to a calling. There was a sense that we weren’t simply making a $30 million movie, we were adding to the legend! As director, I was given the freedom to make absolutely any movie I wanted to make; first the studio told me what movie I wanted to make, and then I made it. As long as I made it cheaply. My original concept was that the crew of the Enterprise meet God and the devil. Roddenberry turned that down. There is no God in the Star Trek universe, he explained; we didn’t want to alienate anyone. We finally settled on a concept in which we are forced to confront an alien who believes he is the devil.

  It still could work, I believed. As we developed the story, I would meet with Leonard to go over my concepts. And I remember excitedly explaining to him how Kirk and Spock would have to go down into hell and …

  “Spock wouldn’t do that,” Leonard said.

  Excuse me?

  He shook his head. “No, Spock wouldn’t do that.” As I was beginning to discover, there were a lot of things Spock wouldn’t do. How about if McCoy goes down to the depths of hell and Spock goes after him and … Spock wouldn’t do that. Okay, Kirk and Spock fight and … Spock wouldn’t do that.

  It was a very difficult situation. Leonard was caught between our friendship and his loyalty to his character. Loyalty won. I felt sure he was coming from an honest place, but I wanted to say to him, “Why wouldn’t your character do that? It’s a fictional character. Why wouldn’t you go to some dimension that you hadn’t thought of that enriches your character?” I believed that, within certain boundaries, a character is what the writer says the character is. If the writer decided Kirk loved jelly, for example, I’d probably think, I didn’t know that, but from that moment on, Kirk would love jelly. A character isn’t carved in stone; it’s flexible.

  Spock wouldn’t do that.

  I didn’t know how to deal with it. Leonard was my friend as well as an actor for whom I had great respect. How could I argue with him? On the earlier film, Nick Meyer, who had written and directed several movies with great success, had the power to correct him. “Well, your character does do that. That’s your character.” I didn’t, and I couldn’t. I wasn’t a writer-slash-director, I was his peer. I had no choice but to accept it.

  Between the demands of the studio, the authority of Roddenberry as protector of the canon, Leonard’s Spockiness, and the limited budget I was given, the script never reached its potential. And I certainly agree with Leonard’s belief that if the story isn’t on the page it won’t end up on the screen. On the set, we had absolutely no problems. It could have been difficult, but it wasn’t. Part of the reason for that was my approach.

  Leonard and I had very different directing styles; as someone who had taught acting and had worked extensively with actors, Leonard was experienced in helping actors interpret a script and bring it to life. He was vastly more equipped than I was to help an actor with the reading of a line or to suggest a gesture. Never once did I say, “Let’s do it again, and you can do it better, or faster or slower.” It would have been impossible for me to say that to someone like Leonard, who was so well grounded in technique. Instead, I liked to shoot the scene several times and let the actors, especially this group of actors, do those things that they were most comfortable and familiar with doing.

  I believed that the nuances in a film can be expressed by the interesting use of the camera. When possible, I would locate the camera in a place that would emphasize the meaning of the line. I felt it was easier to do it that way than to get politic about the way the actor is playing the scene—especially when that actor was Leonard.

  But even with all the problems, it was a very good shoot. As Leonard explained to Laurence Luckinbill, who was playing his evil half brother, Sybok, a pure Vulcan, “The difference between a Nimoy film and a Shatner film is that a Shatner film has a lot more running. Bill is a lot more physical; I’m much more cerebral—I’m happy to duck a fight scene any way I can. The way I approached them in the series was, when there was a way to let Bil
l do it, I’d let Bill do it!” Admittedly, I had always envied Leonard’s genius in figuring out a method that had made his work considerably easier. It seemed like in every show I’d find myself rolling around the floor, diving, jumping, falling—and being continually battered and bruised, while Leonard just pinched his fingers together. It was remarkable he never strained his fingers.

  And he was not shy about pointing that out. I think because he and I got along so well, the camaraderie on the set was quite good. We often slipped into our usual mode, which Luckinbill described, maybe accurately, as “typical Hardy Boys.” We would compete about everything—who had lost more weight, who was the better athlete, and whose movie was more successful. It was a shame that in those days I didn’t have the magic word to shut down all discussion about movie grosses: “Priceline, Leonard, Priceline.”

  While we were constrained by budgetary limitations—I especially remember the rubber rocks we had to use that, unfortunately, were so light that when they supposedly were falling from a mountain they instead bounced high into the air and almost floated down—everybody pitched in to help. All the lessons we had all learned in the early days of TV had to be applied. We were out in the desert late one afternoon; we hadn’t finished the shot, and we were losing the sun. I literally stood up on a box and exhorted the cast, including an army of extras, to run to the next set. “I know you’re tired,” I yelled, “but you’re in the army now! Let’s go!” And we all raced to the next set and got it done.

  Critical reaction to the film could accurately be described as critical. It proved impossible to overcome compromises I’d accepted in the story combined with the small budget we had to work with, and the film failed. It was a financial disappointment, and there were fears that this would be the last film made by the original cast. But we rapidly were approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of our debut, and the studio decided to make one final film with the original cast. Leonard was hired to be executive producer. Because The Final Frontier had not performed well at the box office, Leonard, Dee Kelley, and I had to agree to accept a significant reduction in our salaries. Creating the story was where all the parts of Leonard came together so beautifully. A few years earlier, a script had been written for a prequel that began in Starfleet Academy when Kirk and Spock first met. It was a way to ease other actors into our characters. Eventually, it had been shelved, but the story itself was rewritten for the original cast. While Leonard and Roddenberry’s relationship had never really gotten any better, Leonard wanted the original cast’s last movie to be true to Roddenberry’s original concept of what Star Trek at its best would be: a show that highlighted and commented on the great moral questions then being debated—set in the twenty-third century. He had asked Nick Meyer to write the script, and together, they searched for a workable concept. At that time, the once great and monolithic Soviet Union was splintering, bursting apart, and spawning free nations. Meyer remembers a meeting at his house on Cape Cod; as they walked along the beach discussing ideas, Leonard suggested, “[What if] the wall comes down in outer space? You know, the Klingons have always been our stand-ins for the Russians…” The “wall” specifically meaning the Berlin Wall, which had just come down, but actually the Iron Curtain, which had been the metaphorical border between democracy and communism since the end of World War II. The events of that time, which obviously excited him, made the perfect background for the movie, in which the Federation and the Klingons would meet to forge a peace.

  Meyer recalled that he replied, “Oh, wait a minute! Okay, we start with an intergalactic Chernobyl! Big explosion! We got no more Klingon Empire!” The Klingon leader, Gorkon, was based on Gorbachev—and it was not a stretch to believe that Klingon militants would assassinate him, as had happened to Egypt’s Sadat after he signed a peace treaty with Israel.

  Meyer very quickly wrote the script. In his original opening, which the studio rejected because it would cost too much to film, we saw what had happened to each of the key crew members in retirement. Spock, perfectly fittingly for Leonard, was starring as Polonius in the all-Vulcan dispassionate version of Hamlet.

  This was our last time together as a cast. I don’t remember a lot of nostalgia, but there was a sense of great pride in what we had created. One thing I do remember is a banquet scene we filmed that seemed to take weeks, but actually only took several days. To make the food look fit for an alien, it was colored an especially unappetizing blue. If you have wondered why there are no great blue foods, looking at our plates answered that question. The fact that these meals had to sit under the hot lights for long periods of time did not make them more appealing. The food became a great joke for the cast and crew. It got so bad, in fact, that Nick Meyer ended up offering a crisp twenty-dollar bill to any cast member who would be filmed eating the stuff. Being paid to eat is the perfect bribe for the starving actor that lived inside all of us—well, at least lived inside me. As the captain, I felt it was my duty to collect that offer. I gained recognition as the only actor willing to eat the purple squid.

  Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, our last film together, was a substantial hit, grossing just under $100 million.

  While I made a brief appearance in Star Trek: Generations, the seventh film in the series, Leonard did not. Asked about that, he responded, “I think that Star Trek was kind of done with me for a while. I acted in the first six films. I directed two of them. I wrote story for two of them. I produced one of them. I was very, very active in the first six films. When the seventh film came along, there was no role for Spock. And they killed Kirk. So one would have to ask the makers of those films, and the next few, why I was not involved. I was never offered anything that was like a Spock role. I was asked to direct the seventh film. I didn’t think much of the script, and I passed.”

  But while the five-year voyage of the Enterprise had lasted twenty-five years, Spock was still not ready to lay down his ears. In addition to the series and the movies, we had done the voiceovers for twenty-two episodes in the animated series. Leonard liked to joke that this was the only time in his career that he “mailed in” his performance. In show-business terms, “mailing in” a performance means to give less than a complete effort, to just sort of go through it without any real commitment. I can say without any doubt that neither Leonard nor I had ever figuratively mailed in a performance. However, in this case, we literally mailed it in. Leonard was touring with several stage shows, and I was doing my usual thirty-four projects, but wherever we happened to be they would send us a script, and we would find a recording studio and read our lines. This was long before e-mailing was possible, so we would make the recording and mail it to Filmation, which is how we literally mailed it in. Once, though, Filmation sent a crew to record me. When Leonard heard about that, he was curious why I’d gotten that special treatment. I explained to him there were three possible reasons: one, they liked me better; two, my performance was so lacking in the depth they needed to honestly convey my animated emotions, meaning I wasn’t animated enough for animation; or three, they had a time problem, so they couldn’t wait even an extra day. I let him decided which one it was.

  When The Next Generation became a hit, there were occasional and halfhearted requests that we appear in an episode. There just didn’t seem to be any reason to do it, and they never made a reasonable offer. Hey, Kirk had to earn a living, you know. But Leonard finally agreed to appear in a two-part episode of The Next Generation, mostly to publicize the then about-to-be-released feature The Undiscovered Country. In that episode, Spock was treated in the future with the same kind of reverence Leonard was receiving in this world for creating him. Both of them had become beloved characters, albeit only one of them was … was … well, they both certainly existed, just on very different planes. The story began when Captain Picard and Data feared that Federation Ambassador Spock had defected to the Romulan Empire, but as it turns out, he actually had chosen to risk his life trying to forge a peace agreement between the Romulans and the Vulcan
s. “Unification,” as that two-parter was titled, drew one of the largest audiences in the seven years of voyages of The Next Generation.

  While Leonard and I aged and prospered, Star Trek continued into even another new generation, until it came time for other actors to finally play our roles. To create a role that has become so iconic other actors can inhabit that space is a tremendous compliment, although sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Sometimes it feels like they just don’t want you anymore. Both Leonard and I had believed for quite some time that we had been “marginalized”; that was the word he used, but it spoke for both of us. We both had accepted the reality that we were done forever with Star Trek when he was approached by J. J. Abrams to once again become Spock for a new approach to the material, Star Trek (2009). This wasn’t something Leonard and I ever discussed, nor was there a reason we should have.

  Star Trek remained a potentially very valuable brand that was not being exploited. After the new film was announced, Leonard and I were asked during a joint interview how we felt about that. We laughed, we laughed really hard, and Leonard replied for us, “So you want Paramount to say, ‘We’ve made enough money. We’re going to stop making money now … It’s been a wonderful ride. We’re going on vacation … We don’t want to make any more money.’” We laughed a little harder at that concept.