And to this day, all Warner Brothers movies start with the Warner shield.
We learn the lessons that life teaches us; sometimes they are the wrong lessons. The lesson I learned from Time After Time is that making good movies is easy, and that I knew how to do it.
I clearly couldn’t distinguish between expertise and beginner’s luck. Clever is not wise, as Odysseus learned to his cost.
Then it was back to the couch and more years of talking to myself. I was determined that my next film would be Robertson Davies’s novel Fifth Business , for which I had written what I thought was a truly great script.
But the world wasn’t ready for Robertson Davies’s blend of mysticism and melodrama (it still isn’t, apparently), and Time After Time was not so big a hit as to give me carte blanche. I waited for about two years, wrote a couple of other novels to pass the time, and got angrier and angrier.
Another thing about the movies and me; about art and me. I have always been more interested in content than in the form in which that content is expressed, which I believe is a defect on my part as an artist. Art is mainly about expression or execution and only secondarily about content. Anything can be made into art—even pornography or fascism, like it or not. (If you don’t believe me, check out the wonderful Carmina Burana, which is comprised of both.) But I never was able fully to buy into the form-over-content argument. In my films, I care less for the photography and composition of the images than I do for what the people are saying and doing. I would a thousand times sooner direct actors and help shape their performance rather than work on special effects. I have this theory that the film can be anything but out of focus and audiences will tolerate it, so long as what they are watching is interesting. Ditto the sound. On the other hand, I, as an audience member, respond like everyone else to ravishing or original imagery in the movies, to nifty sound effects. I am as seducible as the next man. Even as I disapprove of the content-less image-makers, I envy them; envy their technical facility and their cheerful, absent-minded amorality. Hey, it’s the movies—let’s blow something up.
I had only half an idea what Fifth Business would look like; but I understood with perfect clarity that it was a terrific story, which was basically all I cared about, and I insisted on being allowed to tell it. Hollywood resisted. Time, meanwhile, was passing.
STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN
Looking back on earlier portions of one’s life, one is surprised by the turns it has taken. Things and events no imagination could have predicted unfold in a seemingly random manner, leading to equally unexpected and improbable results. Like pinballs in one of those arcade games, we bang into things and ricochet off in unanticipated directions. Detours become highways. I certainly could never have anticipated my involvement with the Star Trek series, let alone where that involvement would lead.
Had Time After Time been a bigger hit, I might’ve got my shot at Fifth Business, but it wasn’t and I didn’t. In the meanwhile the film had netted me Hollywood’s (then) über agent, Stan Kamen, who called and said he wanted to represent me. I responded that he wouldn’t when he heard that there was only one project in which I was interested. Agents must be used to all sorts of quaint notions and obsessions from clients, and mine didn’t appear to faze him: agents know how to wait . . . Kamen would patiently send me scripts; I would send them back.
Time passed. I sat in my house and went to meetings only if they involved Conjuring (the screen name for Fifth Business). Months became years. I met with all sorts of people but Conjuring stubbornly resisted my efforts to give it life.
I got all sorts of advice, including of the “Make one for them—something commercial” (again that word!) “and then you can get your film financed” bromide.
It was on a Sunday afternoon in early 1982 and I was barbecuing hamburgers with a childhood friend, Karen Moore, now (i.e., then) an executive at Paramount, when she gave me a piece of blunt advice: “Nicky, if you want to learn how to direct, you should direct, and not sit up here holding your breath because you’re not getting to make the film you want.”
Had this counsel come unsolicited from, say, my parents, I doubt I would have paid it heed, but originating in a disinterested friend, it resonated, especially when she followed it up with, “Why don’t you sit down with Harve Bennett over at Paramount? He’s in charge of producing the next Star Trek movie and I think you’d like him.”
I must have stared at her.
“Star Trek? Is that the one with the guy with pointy ears?” My experience of and exposure to the series had been limited to my Iowa City friend and since then had consisted only of seeing those ears flash by when channel surfing. One look and I kept going. The whole idea that, contrary to all scientific understanding and evidence to date, the cosmos was filled with other “life-forms,” most of them walking around on two legs, speaking English, and always landing on planets with breathable air, seemed utterly absurd to me.
“You’ll like him,” Karen insisted, meaning Bennett, not Spock. With her earlier advice still ringing in my ears, I agreed to meet the man.
Each of Hollywood’s studio lots has its own personality and feel. Warner is perhaps the most attractive, with a gardened, country-club sort of atmosphere; Universal most resembles a factory, while Fox and MGM are shadows of what they once were. Most of Fox’s territory is now occupied by the high-rise office buildings known as Century City, while MGM, in some sort of irony, is now the home of another company entirely, Columbia (in turn owned by Sony), once known, due to its puny size, as Columbia the Germ of the Ocean.
The Paramount lot was the most “Hollywood” of the bunch, due to its location in the heart of that zip code, even though it shared space, eerily enough, with a cemetery. Aside from a “Western” street and some New York facades, there never had been a real backlot (exteriors had typically utilized the Paramount ranch in Agoura). In fact the smallish studio had actually been cobbled together from Paramount and what was formerly RKO, before it had been bought by Lucille Ball and turned into something called Desilu, combining Lucy’s name with that of her Cuban husband, Desi Arnaz. Before the Desilu incorporation, RKO had been largely owned and controlled by someone named Howard Hughes. RKO (for Radio Keith Orpheum) was the place where they filmed Citizen Kane, and where Fred and Ginger had cavorted, personifying pure happiness. Over the wall that separated them, Paramount was home to Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder.
Studios concentrated on different fare—MGM was wholesome and musical, Warner made gangster melodramas, biopics, and “premature” anti-Nazi propaganda, Fox concerned itself with great domestic social issues, Universal with Frankenstein et al., while Columbia relied on Frank Capra populism and Rita Hayworth.
Paramount went for Marlene Dietrich, European sophistication, and DeMille historical hokum, before going on to Hope and Crosby, then Martin and Lewis. By the time of my arrival that day in 1982, the wall that had separated the two studios had been long since been breached, and all was now Paramount.
Film studios not only don’t look like one another, they tend not to look like anything else, either, with their huge soundstages and intermittent “bungalows.” Although periodically gutted and refurbished with the latest decor and technology, the old wood and stucco exteriors at Paramount look pretty much the way they do as Billy Wilder showed them in Sunset Blvd.
In one of those bungalows, after I finally located it among its lookalike neighbors, I found myself chatting with an unpretentious gent some years older than myself. Harve Bennett had thinning light reddish hair, a friendly smile, and a keen, analytic intelligence he was at some pains to conceal under the cloak of “I’m just a regular guy” affability. Perhaps he saw himself in this light—or at any rate, wished to see himself in it—but if so, he was kidding himself along with others. At some point I learned Bennett had been a child radio star on a program called Quiz Kids. A native of Chicago, he’d migrated to Los Angeles, where he’d found a great deal of success in the world o
f television, having produced The Mod Squad, The Bionic Woman, and The Six Million Dollar Man, none of which I had seen.
My attitude toward television has always been ambivalent, to say the least. The constant interruption of the stories by commercials makes it hard for me to watch. The only shows I could stand were the comedies of my childhood: Your Show of Shows (Sid Caesar), You’ll Never Get Rich (Sgt. Bilko), Ernie Kovacs, The Honeymooners, etc. The rest, as Hamlet might have said, was PBS.
On the other hand, Star Wars had recently come out and knocked my socks off (along with everyone else’s), and the idea of doing a big-screen space opera had its appeal. I use the word “opera” advisedly. I am an unabashed opera fan and I recognized in Lucas’s work, along with John Williams’s ersatz Richard Straussian score and its enormous contribution to the goings-on, a cinematic opera, a sort of Ring Lite.
Bennett, who was tactful enough to laugh at my jokes, sipped beer from a bottle and showed me several episodes of the original Star Trek. I confess what I saw did not particularly excite me; neither did the first Star Trek movie, released in 1979. I couldn’t quite place (not having Bennett’s analytical mind) what it was I found so off-putting and could only grope toward insight. My groping took the form of noting all the things I didn’t like: the uniforms, the acting, the sets, the solemnity.
Bennett then showed me “Space Seed,” the television episode that introduced the supervillain Khan, and I did respond to that: Ricardo Montalban was a great actor and like most great actors was wasted in roles beneath his talents. When Bennett, who spoke in clipped, foreshortened English, not unreminiscent of Star Trek dialogue (“Message, Spock?”), suggested using Khan as a character in the new film, I began to become interested.
The reasons Paramount was intent on making a second Star Trek film are by now well-known: despite the fact that the original motion picture had been a “runaway” production, costing an astounding forty-five million dollars (in 1979!) and despite the fact that it had received indifferent notices, the movie wound up in profit, close to eighty-three million dollars. Barry Diller, then running the studio with Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, realized that if they could make another, better film, at a reasonable budget, they might develop a franchise to rival Lucas’s. The first Star Trek had been a torturous learning process, originally to be helmed by Phil Kauffman and designed by the great Ken Adam; disagreements about scripts and budgets sent both men packing. Eventually the film was directed by Robert Wise, whose impressive credits included editing Citizen Kane and directing such successful films as The Day the Earth Stood Still and West Side Story (with Jerome Robbins), as well as the indestructible The Sound of Music.
The second Trek attempt had subsequently been farmed out to the television division of Paramount, headed by Gary Nardino, who would undertake to make the film for a quarter of the original movie’s budget.
These considerations did not escape me. I didn’t know if I could make a great movie (my jovial editor on Star Trek II, Bill Dornisch, wanted to call his production company “Miracle Pictures”—their soubriquet: “If it’s a good picture, it’s a Miracle!” ) but I began to see that even if I made an okay one that cost a fraction of the original, it would be a shrewd career move.
Bennett explained that draft five of the screenplay would be arriving in two weeks and offered to send it to me. I said fine and went home, where my mind began to toy with the idea of my outer space singspiel, featuring the redoubtable Montalban.
Other events intervened—including some involving Conjuring, never far from the forefront of my consciousness—before I realized that a month had passed and a Star Trek II script had yet to appear at my door. I rang Bennett and asked him what had happened. He chuckled awkwardly and said, “Kid”—his usual term of address for me—“my tit’s in a ringer.”
“Come again?” I’d heard him; I just couldn’t process the locution.
“I can’t send it to you,” he explained. “It isn’t any good.”
In my naïveté, this was the last thing I had expected to hear. Several “beats” (as screenwriters are fond of writing) of silence must have followed.
“Kid?”
“Well, what about draft four?” I inquired, remembering he had referred to the latest pass as five.
A second chuckle on the other end of the line. “Kid, you don’t get it. Draft four, draft three, and all the rest—these are unrelated attempts to get a second Star Trek script, and none of them works.”
“Let me read them,” I said before realizing that I’d said it.
“There’s no point.”
The conversation continued in this vein, but I persisted—why, I am no longer certain. All I can offer is that the space opera idea wouldn’t let me go, and Karen Moore’s words about learning how to direct hadn’t ceased reverberating in my cerebellum, either.
A day or so later a car drove up, and a ton of scripts were hefted in my direction. I began with draft number five. As Bennett had described, it was a failure. Reading it made me feel as if I was watching the episodes again, and I had no particular interest in, much less affection for them. I didn’t understand the world, the people, or the language.
I picked up draft four with the same result, then doggedly plowed through the rest. The process must have taken a couple of days. Not only were the scripts uninvolving, but I happen to be a slow reader.
Idly I did some calculating. Figure at least two months, more likely three, to write a film script—there had been five of these attempts. That probably represented a cumulative year’s fruitless gestation. Now add the standard contractual studio “reading period” of six weeks, and what I was reading had taken even longer. The attempt to get a second Star Trek feature in the works may have consumed upward of two years.
Write us another Star Trek movie. What marching orders had the studio given each of these writers? Any? Too many? Were there themes or ideas they had been offered, or did their labors represent merely their own imaginations and initiative? I didn’t think to ask. What difference would the answer have made? In any case, as I have since learned, studio memos are never signed, thus avoiding the assignment of responsibility. Script notes typically arrive attributed to some collective euphemism, such as FROM: THE GROUP but that’s as far as anyone goes since the heyday of David O. Selznick. Years later, when Paramount asked me to write other Star Treks, they never specified storylines or themes, so it is reasonable to suppose they hadn’t on Star Trek II. Just make us another one. Later, as I recall, I would give them the general idea to approve, but it related to the area and subject matter, rather than the specific plot. Whatever it was, they always said okay. Things are quite different today; today the studio wants a complete précis of the proposed film before authorizing the script. They want the story broken down by scenes in something referred to as a “beat sheet.” (I am not very good at creating the “beat sheets” because I don’t know how the film will break down until I have written it.)
One thing was certain: after all of their work and chopped-down trees, there were bits and pieces of interest in each of the five drafts I read, but no theme, character, or situation was sustained such that it added up to anything. (Maybe beat sheets would have helped.)
Two years for bits and pieces seemed to me an awful lot of dry wells, but what did I know? (Nothing, as it turned out; years later, on Fatal Attraction, I again marveled at studios’ stubbornness about getting what they’d made up their minds to have. I could never figure out, half the time, why they chose to make the movies they did. David Picker, for years head of United Artists, once acknowledged that if he’d made all the movies he’d passed on and passed on all the films he’d made, he would probably have scored about the same. But on the other side, for every ridiculous financial disaster, we find ourselves grateful for stupendous follies that somehow got filmed thanks to the same incontrovertible zeal, movies that today number among cinema’s triumphs. Think Darling Lili vs. Reds.)
Disappointed and dishea
rtened after my perusal of the five Star Trek scripts, I prepared to write the whole thing off and went back to my routine, such as it was. In those days, after feeding my dogs, I rolled down from my home in Laurel Canyon to the public tennis courts in the Valley and slammed the ball around with Gary Lucchesi, who had, following Stan Kamen’s untimely death, succeeded him as my agent. Lucchesi thrashed me with regularity before heading off for William Morris. I was an enthusiastic but inept player—rallying brilliantly in practice but always clutching when points were at stake.
While Lucchesi was cutting deals for his other clients, I was being psychoanalyzed. It must have been driving from tennis to my analyst’s couch that two ideas began to take shape in my mind. The first involved a niggling association at the back of my brain that had been there since I first began watching the episodes and the original movie. Star Trek vaguely reminded me of something, something for which I had great affection. It took me quite a while before I realized what it was. I remember waking with a start one night and saying it aloud:
“Hornblower!”
When I was a teenager I had devoured a series of novels by the English author C. S. Forester (author of The African Queen and Sink the Bismarck!, among other favorites), concerning an English sea captain, Horatio Hornblower, and his adventures during the Napoleonic wars. “Horatio” as a first name was the giveaway; Hornblower was clearly based on Lord Nelson, though I’ve recently learned his surname derived from that of Hollywood producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., a friend of Forester’s. There was also a beloved movie version, Raoul Walsh’s Captain Horatio Hornblower R. N., starring Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo. (In the picaresque film, Hornblower faces off with the malignant and memorable El Supremo. Watching the film later as an adult, I understood that El Supremo, the frothing megalomaniac, was a racist caricature, the more so as he was played by a Caucasian in “swarthy” face, the UK-born Alec Mango. Khan Noonian Singh, by contrast, was a genuine [if oddly named] superman, embodied by a superb actor who happened to be Hispanic. Khan was a cunning, remorseless, but witty adversary—his true triumph being that audiences adored his Lear-inflected villainy as much as they responded to Kirk’s enraged heroism.)
The View from the Bridge Page 8
