THE USUAL SUSPECTS
I began to meet other members of the cast: Leonard Nimoy (Spock), DeForest Kelley (Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy), George Takei (helmsman Mr. Sulu), Nichelle Nichols (communications officer Uhura), James Doohan (Mr. Scott, aka “Scotty,” chief engineer), and Walter Koenig (Commander Pavel Chekov). These folks were uniformly supportive. They didn’t hold my inexperience as either a director or a Star Trek watcher against me but tactfully pointed out things in the script that they felt were uncharacteristic or untrue of their roles—So-and-so would never say this line in these words, etc. More adjustments were made.
The cast of Star Trek, almost to a man (or woman), I felt, harbored ambivalent feelings about their roles and participation in the series. The crew of the Enterprise had been struggling actors of greater or lesser talent when fate had selected them for a television series. For sixty-seven episodes, those roles had paid their bills (this was before residuals) before the show was canceled.
And then something unprecedented had happened. The fans, as we all know by now, would not let the series die. Years passed and finally—in the wake of Star Wars—Paramount decided to take the cast out of mothballs, dust them off, and pay them again.
The phenomenon of an actor chafing at being exclusively identified with one role is not new. Eugene O’Neill’s father had been driven almost mad (and arguably to drink) because the public was interested in him only when he played Edmond Dantès, aka the Count of Monte Cristo. For years Sean Connery struggled to escape the embrace of James Bond. What was possibly unique in theatrical annals was an entire cast yoked together by the same imperative. For better. For worse. Forever. Whatever they thought about the series, about science fiction, about the characters themselves, or about one another, they were joined to their on-screen personae at the hip for eternity. Nowhere is their ambivalence more clear than in the titles of two of Leonard Nimoy’s books: I Am Not Spock (1975) and—almost twenty years later—I Am Spock (1995). Perhaps the most amusing approximation of the cast’s collective feelings is to be found in the hilarious film by Dean Parisot and David Howard, Galaxy Quest, which deftly sends the embittered cast of a Star Trek-like TV series off on an actual interstellar adventure, as the show’s ambivalent “actors” come to grips with their divided feelings about the roles that have enslaved them, concluding, finally that, like turning eighty, it’s not so bad when you consider the alternative.
Kelley, Nimoy, and Shatner had the longest résumés. Atlanta-born Kelley had appeared in such Western fare as John Sturges’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and Fred Zinneman’s The Men before his lengthy television career; Nimoy’s résumé before Star Trek was almost exclusively in television, where the Boston native appeared in everything from episodes of Perry Mason to Sea Hunt to Broken Arrow, Highway Patrol, The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible , Rawhide, Tales of Wells Fargo, Wagon Train, Bonanza, ad infinitum.
Originally a stage actor, Shatner’s initial appearances in live television, were followed by several features, among them Richard Brooks’s unfortunate adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremeburg, before also becoming a television stalwart in such shows as Naked City, The Defenders, The Dick Powell Theatre, Boris Karloff’s Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and, most memorably, an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Like Shatner, James Doohan (Scotty) hailed from Canada and specialized in television, appearing in Gunsmoke, Gallant Men, Twilight Zone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Ben Casey, and The Fugitive, among tons of others.
George Takei, born in California, spent part of his youth during World War II interned in a Nisei camp in Arkansas before going the TV route in Twilight Zone, The Gallant Men, Hawaiian Eye, Assignment: Underwater, Perry Mason, etc. In addition to his role as a nonvillainous Japanese officer aboard the Enterprise (he played the other kind in Return from the River Kwai), Takei was silently representing another minority on American television, one that had yet to emerge from the closet, though on satellite radio with Howard Stern, he has not been shy discussing his love life (or, for that matter, his opinion of William Shatner).
Walter Koenig was born in New York. His television career included episodes of The Untouchables, Combat, Ben Casey, and General Hospital. By an unlikely coincidence, Koenig and I had attended the same high school. Although we were some years apart, I was often tempted to compare notes about various teachers with him.
Nichelle Nichols (née Grace Nichols), from Illinois, started as a singer with the Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton bands before being cast in her groundbreaking Star Trek role, the first African American to appear on “equal” footing with a white cast. Instead of “the maid,” Nichols played an officer, and more racial barriers fell when she shared the first interracial television kiss with Shatner in one of the original episodes.
It is probable, if not inevitable, that the paths of these actors crossed on all those television shows before their Star Trek encounters.
But it is their work in Star Trek for which most are likely to be remembered. I suppose the wonder is that the Star Trek cast was not more embittered, that they managed to retain their freshness, their hospitality to a stranger, and their enthusiasm despite the knowledge that—for better or worse—this was what they would always been known for.
There were newcomers to the second Star Trek film, as well. I hired a girl from Wichita with striking blue-gray eyes, who said she was fixated on Spock, to play the Vulcan beauty, Lieutenant Saavik. (She was fixated, too—Kirstie Alley told me she used to sleep wearing her Vulcan ears.) Bibi Besch (who later acted for me to great effect in my television movie The Day After) played a former sweetheart of the libidinous Kirk, while a young actor named Merritt Butrick played their illegitimate son. Our ensemble was rounded out by the great Paul Winfield, who played Captain Terrill of the Reliant. As I’ve observed, one of the great treats in the movie business is that you sometimes actually get to meet your dreams. After seeing Winfield in Sounder, I longed to tell this wonderful actor how much he had affected me with his performance—and now I got to do just that.
The only major cast member with whom I did not get to spend time before the commencement of shooting was Ricardo Montalban. He was busy filming his television series, Fantasy Island. We managed only a brief lunch at the Paramount commissary, during which I found him replete with gentlemanly—one is tempted to say “formal”—but guarded courtesy. Actors are typically suspicious of new directors (“Is he crazy?”) until set at ease. Or not. Actors are fragile, their feelings easily bruised, and they have a sixth sense for when the man or woman in charge doesn’t know how to drive the bus—or where it’s heading. Has no sense of direction, you might say.
Mexican-born Montalban could claim the longest résumé of anyone in the cast. His work began with Mexican features in 1942 before wartime shortages of leading men in California brought him to Hollywood. Montalban had also twice appeared on Broadway to acclaim, in Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell and in the musical Jamaica, opposite Lena Horne. He danced in the latter show, managing to conceal a limp, the result of a spinal injury incurred in 1951 when a horse rolled over him during the filming of Across the Wide Missouri. I was intimidated to meet him, and his reserved manner didn’t assuage my awe. I discussed the role and gave him a copy of Moby-Dick, concluding, “It’s all in this book.” He thanked me with the same formal politesse and went back to his Island. We were not to see each other again before shooting started, and I hadn’t an inkling of what a good friend he was to become.
MUSIC AND CREDITS
I had to find a composer for the film, but it couldn’t be the great Jerry Goldsmith, who had done the rousing score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as there was no way our budget could afford him. When I wasn’t meeting, greeting, rewriting, and making a thousand decisions connected with the film’s preparation, I was listening to cassette tapes containing samples of undiscovered, aspiring composers who used this device as a means of auditioning.
; It was a dispiriting exercise. So much of what I heard sounded the same, which is to say generic, devoid of personality, much the way modern automobiles seem to be boxy replications of themselves, no matter what brand name is stuck on them. When you listen to Beethoven you do not imagine you are listening to anyone else, and while it is a truism that good film composers must be adroit quick-change artists, the best of them always retain the stamp of their own personas, no matter what subject they are charged with embodying musically. Dmitri Tiomkin sounds like Tiomkin, whether he’s accompanying the Old West, ancient Egypt, or the isles of Greece. To the degree that I wanted a score that would be the “voice” of our film, I wanted a composer who had a voice.
I can no longer recall the particular circumstances under which I found myself listening to the music of someone named James Horner, but I remember paraphrasing Wagner, who, when he heard Bizet, grudgingly conceded, “Well, at last, here is someone with ideas in his head.”
I met and hired master Horner, a quiet young man who spoke with a vaguely English accent, acquired, as I learned, from years spent at school in England, during the time his father, Harry Horner, had worked as a production designer there. Young Horner had studied at the Royal College of Music before pursuing a PhD at UCLA. I asked James (somehow one did not think to address him as Jim or Jimmy) to listen to Debussy’s La Mer and told him I wanted a score that suggested the sweep of the ocean—nautical but nice, I added.
He smiled, but I couldn’t tell if he thought that was funny. Later I discovered he had his own droll sense of humor. When I asked during a subsequent recording session if a certain passage he composed for the movie didn’t smack of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, he squeaked, “Whatdya want from me? I’m a kid; I haven’t outgrown my influences.”
While all this was going on, a dilemma was unfolding between Harve Bennett and Bob Sallin, his college friend, whom Harve had hired to produce the film. This was another instance where Bennett’s inexperience with the world and nomenclature of features did him harm. In television the key credit is executive producer. He is the main honcho; the producer title in television, by contrast, usually indicates what features refer to as the line producer (aka UPM), a lesser title bestowed on those who see to it that the trucks show up on time, are parked in the right places and that shooting permits have been obtained. Line producers are responsible for the physical logistics of the shoot.
Bennett had offered Sallin the title of producer, retaining the executive producer title for himself, unaware that the coveted credit in feature films was the former. Realizing his mistake, he contacted me and asked what I thought was the honorable thing to do. Sallin was sticking to the letter of his offer and wished to retain his producer title.
I was no more experienced in these matters than Bennett but I said what I felt, namely, that a deal was a deal and that if Sallin was taking Bennett up on his original offer, I felt he was obliged to stick to it. In any case, I assured him (rightly as it proved), everyone would know that Star Trek II: The Undiscovered Country was Harve Bennett’s production.
Did Harve ever actually ask if Bob would change titles with him? Did Bob turn him down flat? I have no idea and am not likely ever to learn.
Young Horner came over to play themes for the movie on my piano. They sounded good to me. Henceforth while I was filming, those tunes would echo in my head. I was somewhat frustrated to learn of the studio’s insistence that we use the fanfare from the original television series, composed by Alexander Courage, which I had never really liked. But the studio had so far stayed out of my hair to a surprising degree. and I had already learned that you must pick your battles. After all, it was only eight notes . . .
Years later, a new recording was made of the music that the English light classics composer Robert Farnon had written for the movie Captain Horatio Hornblower R. N. I was astonished to hear something that sounded, at least to me, very like the Star Trek theme leap out (much more effectively, I might add) in the opening bars.
Yes, indeed, Gene Roddenberry had certainly been a Hornblower fan.
REHEARSALS
Before shooting was to commence, I badly wished to rehearse, though in this desire I was swimming upstream. My background was in live theater, and I knew and understood the value of rehearsals. Rehearsals allow the actors to be freer on set when the meter is running. They have already become familiar with the script, with one another (admittedly hardly necessary for most of them in this case) and with the director. In rehearsals there is opportunity to experiment, to discover what lines need adjusting or can be deleted altogether. Actors like to rehearse, but agents wish them to be paid for it, which studios are (typically) reluctant to do. The result is that rehearsals are encouraged to be clandestine affairs, conducted off the lot, largely dependent on the professional good will (and pride) of the performers. Normally, a play rehearses for six weeks before opening. Most movie rehearsal periods are nothing like that long—nor should they be. Movies are a species of short-order cooking; rehearse too much and you lose the spontaneity whose absence the camera is prone to detect. The exceptions to this rule are chariot races and dance numbers. Movie rehearsing must therefore strike a middle ground, something between a read-through and individual scene work. While some directors—Mike Nichols, for example—request and receive extensive rehearsal time when they ask for it, the most I could hope for would be three or four days spent in Laurel Canyon around my dining room table. Montalban was unavailable for these sessions, but all the other actors showed up, and we noshed on deli eats while we read aloud, discussed, and then broke into smaller groups to work on specific scenes. I wanted to have my cheesecake and eat it, too, which is to say, while being “true” to the original Star Trek characters, I wanted to expand their range of feelings and emotional possibilities, not defined by their jobs or plot functions but by their natures and how this would influence their reactions to particular events. I knew I couldn’t achieve this with all seven characters but I could certainly try making things more earthbound in terms of recognizable human reality.
We made many dialogue trims. Speeches or lines I had written I was now told by the actors could be “done with a look,” and this was all to the good. One thing I had learned watching The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and directing Time After Time: too much dialogue and your film is in danger of becoming static. Movies must move, and faces as well as actions can often do the work of words. In fact, I have since computed that the attrition rate for dialogue in a screenplay of mine, between the first draft and the answer print, i.e., finished movie, is 50 percent. Half the words will go, and you will save yourself time and money if you lose as many as possible before the cameras start rolling. Cutting out the words in the editing room is possible, even inevitable, but cutting them beforehand is usually better.
There is another advantage to rehearsals. They allow the director to get to know his actors, how best to support them, exploit their strengths, conceal their weaknesses, absorb their work habits and personality quirks. Who will need help, and how best to give it? Who is likely to be best on take one? Who will need more takes? Who thrives on encouragement and coaching; who needs to work out problems and solutions for himself; etc.
I learned as well that though the crew of the Enterprise functions in space as a crack team, equal to any of the challenges it must confront, once off camera and subject to earth’s gravitational pull, the cast was a microcosm of any other society, riven by factionalism, allegiances, and jealousies. These people were not only joined at the hip to the characters they played, they were anatomically connected to each other, as well. But because they were professionals, they made the best of it. They carried human baggage and toted it the best they knew how. (There was at least one solid friendship among them: Shatner and Nimoy, whose relationship had begun as rivalry early on, evolved from a competitive modus operandi into a mutual admiration society that endured long after the series’ cancellation and the last of the features.)
Conversely, r
ehearsals allow the actors to know and grow comfortable with the director. As I intimated earlier, the one question cast and crew always need answered when there’s an unfamiliar hand at the helm is: is he or she crazy? This person is in charge of the film and of my performance. Does he know what he’s doing? Or are we being led over a cliff on some kind of suicide mission as a result of which I’ll never work again—assuming I live? (Think Klaus Kinski dragging that steamboat over a jungle-covered mountain in South America in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo if you want help visualizing how crazy crazy can get.)
The studio, as I have noted, pretty much left me alone. Studio conduct has changed a lot since then. In the beginning the studios were fiefdoms run by those for whom film was a passionate personal concern as well as a business. Those illiterate, mostly Russian immigrants for whom film was a fundamental means of communication never lost their enthusiasm for the medium. At private screenings they talked and argued about a film’s merits or possibilities. But as corporations with their bean counters absorbed the studios into their spreadsheets and the prize became only the bottom line (admittedly costs skyrocketed as the years passed, as the studios’ monopolies on theater chains were broken up, etc.), studio control over filmmaking became ever tighter. I’m not sure what purpose this has served (most films continue to stink or lose money), but when Star Trek II was made, the front office took no interest in who was cast as the maid. I was given a free hand to make the movie my way, with the studio content to let me show it to them when I’d finished my cut, at which point they would weigh in.
Later, I would learn that matters had not been quite that simple, but I will relate this revelation at the point I experienced it.
The View from the Bridge Page 11
