It was during this most frantic period of shooting and cutting that my assistant, Janna Wong, came up to me one evening (was it evening?) and said she thought the studio had changed the name of the movie.
“What’re you talking about?” I demanded, frazzled as we walked from soundstage to our editing rooms. Janna wasn’t certain but she’d heard rumors. I dismissed them.
A day or two later, she was certain: A Paramount executive in New York named Mancuso had renamed the movie The Vengeance of Khan. I was baffled and had more important things on my mind; still, I had to deal with this. I asked Janna to call the gentleman for me early the following morning.
“Mr. Mancuso, how do you do? I am Nicholas Meyer, the writer-director of Star Trek II.”
“How do you do, Mr. Meyer?”
“Well, I am being told that you have changed the name of my film and that it is now to be called Star Trek II: The Vengeance of Khan.”
“That is correct.”
“Mr. Mancuso, have you seen any of the film?”
“No, I haven’t.” Nor had he read the script.
“Don’t you think it would have been tactful to contact me as the maker of the film and discuss this decision?”
There followed what I took to be a puzzled pause three time zones away, and then:
“Mr. Meyer, I’m only trying to do what’s best for the movie.”
“. . . I see,” I responded, more to maintain the stichomythia than because I did. “Let me ask you something else,” I proceeded, still stuck in this After You, Alphonse mode, “George Lucas’s third Star Wars movie is being finished. It is called, as I’m sure you know, The Revenge of the Jedi. I know Paramount has extensive dealings with Lucas over the Indiana Jones franchise. . . . Do you think he will be pleased by your copycat title?”
“I assure you, that won’t be a problem.”
I wasn’t sure what to say or do at this point. My job was to make the best possible movie I knew how and I couldn’t do that and waste my time and energy on a tug-of-war about its title. Lots of arguments surround titles in general. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire was originally The Poker Night; Death of a Salesman was originally The Inside of His Head. In both cases the ultimate titles sound “classic” to us, reek of inevitability, but who is to say that The Poker Night wouldn’t have had the same effect if it had been retained?
Movie titles generally don’t mean much, though there are always exceptions. Raiders of the Lost Ark, I grant you, sounds thrilling, but what of Forrest Gump—is that a swamp in Louisiana? Both films were enormous hits.
In the event, George Lucas predictably lodged a strong objection to our title, which was thereupon altered, again by Mr. Mancuso, in consultation with no one, to The Wrath of Khan (after which Lucas himself changed his mind, realizing that the Jedi weren’t revenge takers and substituting the now-familiar Return of the Jedi as that film’s final moniker).
As the cutting room began to catch up, I started going home at night and allowing myself occasional treats. In those far-off times, Los Angeles had no opera company of its own but hosted the New York City Opera for a three-week visit each year. Their sojourn this year coincided with our shoot, enabling me to obtain my annual opera fix. On my opera nights I would stage a complicated shot for the last of the day. While the crew was lighting, I would shower and put on a suit so that I could head downtown immediately after we wrapped. I wound up directing looking like those directors of yore, who worked in jackets and ties.
Aside from the title wrangle, the studio seemed pleased with what we were shooting. I made my share of blunders. Bob Sallin was not happy with the way I staged Kirk’s original entrance in the movie and he was perfectly right—it was pedestrian. As a maker of innumerable commercials, Sallin was far more experienced and visually sophisticated than I, with only one film under my belt. At his instigation we reshot Kirk’s entrance, to far greater effect. On another occasion I lost my temper when I had no business doing so. Dee Kelley was having a hard time remembering a simple, single line: “Those people back there bought time for Genesis with their lives.” For some reason he couldn’t get it out, and the more we tried, the more spooked he became, like a horse who is now terrified of a big jump. Instead of calming him down or calming myself down, instead of taking a breather, I stubbornly couldn’t understand what the difficulty was and allowed my gathering impatience to show. For a sensitive person like Dee, my irritation only compounded his nerves. Later, after we’d finally got it right, I went to him and apologized. I have a rigid streak that makes small allowances for the unexpected. I show up for work prepared and I always expect my cast and crew to do the same, which includes the actors knowing their lines. This is, to my way of thinking, part of what they’re paid to do, and getting to do it (i.e., to make movies) is something that I regard as a great privilege. But mine wasn’t always a great MO, as it made no allowances for the thousand variables that are an inevitable part of the filmmaking process, including other people’s quirks and problems. It also made few allowances for spontaneity when spontaneity might help. In movies where the dialogue is stylized, for whatever reason, I believe that I am within my rights to insist that it be delivered letter perfect rather than improvised. Billy Wilder felt the same way, a precedent I relished since it helped to justify my own instincts and inclinations where the dialogue of Star Trek was concerned. But where Wilder was willing to put up with fifty-three takes for Monroe and her whiskey bottle (“I could get my aunt Hattie to do it right the first time, but who would pay to see my aunt Hattie?” Wilder pointed out), I did not possess the same professional cool. There are many reasons why an actor may not be able to say a line. It may be the actor’s problem, it may be that there’s something wrong with the line, but whatever it is, exacerbating the actor’s terror is not what I’m being paid for.
Of the move to fire me I learned nothing until much later.
When I started directing Time After Time I was stylistically very conservative. I shot wide angles, close-ups, over-the-shoulders, POVs, etc., like any other director would . . . and then I remember thinking, If you’re going to shoot your film like the next man, why don’t you move over and let the next man do it? People say they want to direct, but what’s the point of doing it if you’re only going to do it the way other people do it? What’s the point if you aren’t bringing something unique to the process? At the end of the day, all you have to offer as an artist in any medium is yourself. And if the best you can do is simply to imitate what others have done, why bother? Could I still hear the small voice Spielberg describes, the inmost conscience of the film? That voice can easily get lost in the hubbub of the convoluted and noisy process. (Those who enjoy sausage would do well not to see how it is manufactured.)
As shooting had continued on Time After Time, I had become progressively bolder in many ways, more willing to try things that hadn’t—so far as I knew—been done before. By the time I got to direct Star Trek II, I surrendered to my instincts much sooner. For example, in my zeal to pay homage to Hornblower (and, also, to favorite U-boat movies of my youth), I determined that there should be a scene in which we ran out the guns. To make this possible, I asked Joe Jennings to design a futuristic torpedo bay, complete with steel gratings that would be ripped up manually by the crew when the Enterprise prepared for action. I encountered many dubious reactions to what, after all, was bound to be (correctly) perceived as an anachronism, but I held fast, and the yanking up of those gratings as the torpedo is lowered into place remains my favorite shot of the movie.
Years later, listening to a fan rhapsodize over this shot, I asked if the anachronism hadn’t troubled him. He was surprised—“What anachronism?” he demanded. “Half the ship’s machinery had been put out of action by Khan; they had to rip up those torpedo gratings manually!” Here is a perfect instance of a movie lover making his own logic to paper over what to another viewer would be sheerest nonsense, a lovely instance of the collaboration that Coleridge described
as the willing suspension of disbelief.
My instincts were not infallible, however.
I was wrong when I draped a sweater over David Marcus’s shoulders toward the end of the movie. I was—as always—trying to keep things real but in this instance only succeeded in making them ludicrous. Similarly, I wanted a sign that read NO SMOKING ON THE BRIDGE but lost that one. Probably a good thing.
During the filming of Spock’s funeral, Shatner was alarmed to see Saavik, Spock’s Vulcan protégée, shedding tears. “Are you gonna let her do that?” he protested. “Vulcans can’t cry!”
“That’s why it will be so moving when this one does,” I countered, and this time I was correct. Directors make a million such choices, and I expect it’s their batting average that separates the good filmmakers from the mediocri ties. (Vulcans don’t lose their tempers, either—except when Spock becomes enraged in Star Trek VI.)
SPOCK’S DEATH
The shooting schedule of a movie is usually drawn up for maximum efficiency. All the scenes occurring on a given set are likely to be scheduled together, no matter how far apart they are in the story, and actors are expected to shoot out of sequence, calibrating their performances accordingly.
But there is one exception to this scheduling imperative: when the actors’ emotional complexities must be taken into consideration—if possible. (I was astonished to learn that Marion Cottilard’s Oscar-winning tour de force as Edith Piaf in the French film La Vie en Rose, during which she ages decades, was shot out of sequence. How she managed this, I have no idea.) In Star Trek II, respecting the highly emotional nature of the material involved, we saved the death of Spock for almost the end of the shoot.
How the original decision to kill Spock was made, I do not know. I have heard rumors that it was Nimoy who, disillusioned with the first film and tired of the carapace of Spock’s identity, agreed as part of his contract to appear in the second movie only with the promise of a heroic death scene. I cannot say. In any case, no matter what its origin, it was my job to make Spock’s death plausible, meaningful, and moving and this, to the best of my ability, I set out to do, starting with the script and shepherding it through the filming and the editing.
Throughout the making of the film, rumors of Spock’s demise fueled the rage of fans. I received a helpful letter that ran: If Spock dies, you die.
Great. But in the final analysis, art is not a democracy. Nor, notwithstanding the collaborative nature of the medium, are films made by committee.
The French director Robert Bresson made the observation: “My job is not to find out what the public want and give it to them; my job is to make the public want what I want.”
The question, as I offered it to nervous Paramount executives, was not whether we killed Spock, but whether we killed him well. If we botched the job and the death appeared to be nothing more than the working-out of a clause in Nimoy’s contract, people would throw things at the screen and they’d be right to throw them. But if we did it correctly and that death proceeded organically from the material, no one would ever question it.
That was my theory and my rationale.
Nimoy was uncharacteristically restive on the day of Spock’s death. There may have been several reasons for this but I suspect his nerves were brought on (a) by the knowledge that he was (we thought at the time) taking an irrevocable step as regards an alter ego he had lived with for almost fifteen years and (b) by the fact that there was now a feeling on the lot that this film might be something special, and there were already whispers about continuing with a sequel. Was Nimoy now having second thoughts?
Whatever the cause, our actor was understandably on edge. I was interested years later, on reading his memoir (everyone connected with Star Trek writes a memoir), to discover that part of his annoyance was caused by my showing up to shoot his death scene dressed as Sherlock Holmes.
At the outset of this book, I cited the observation of trial lawyers as to the unreliability of eyewitnesses, and here is a perfect instance of that principle. I have never on any occasion in my life dressed as Sherlock Holmes. But it is true that I was wearing a suit, because it happened to be one of the nights when I was going directly downtown to the opera after we wrapped. It was likely my suit and not a Holmes costume that distressed Nimoy, though I suspect he would have been upset no matter what. The scene we were about to film was especially tricky for him.
I have also owned at the outset of this memoir that I was unfamiliar with Star Trek and its television history and the devotion of its fan base. And this may have contributed to my surprise while we were rolling when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my cinematographer, Gayne Rescher, with tears streaming down his cheeks. I looked around and beheld more of the crew weeping as the dying Spock held up his splayed hand and enjoined Kirk to live long and prosper. (I had wanted his blood to be green—Dr. McCoy was always referring to Spock as “You green-blooded, inhuman” etc.—but Nimoy vetoed it.)
I felt my own eyes begin to sting but I squelched my tears and concentrated on my job, which was not to weep but to make others weep. I had written this scene as best I knew how; I photographed and choreographed it the same way and hoped it would be okay.
I asked Nimoy about the spread-fingered salute (which, incidentally, Shatner could not duplicate in return, though most audiences never notice), and he told me that it originated from a childhood experience in Boston. His father took him to temple, he recalled, “And there was a moment during the service when the congregation was supposed to turn away from the altar but I turned back and peeked—and they were all holding their hands like this,” at which point he demonstrated Spock’s trademark gesture with the palm held away like a cop stopping traffic, only with the third and fourth fingers held together, split from the first and second in like configuration.
Spock turns out to be Jewish.
Despite whatever efforts we may make, we live in the present. What happened yesterday is done and each day the train we ride in called Life will take us further from it. Only madmen can take up residence in their memories while the future remains an undiscovered country.
But movies are different.
Jimmy Stewart memorably described movies as little pieces of captured time. This felicitous and poetic image comes as close as anything I’ve read to encapsulating the phenomenon of film, the idea, in effect, of putting a frame around a moment for eternity. The creation of that moment may have been meticulously prepared or it may have been simply improvised; a thousand variables may have contributed to it and God knows, more dreadful moments than magical ones have doubtless been preserved in this fashion, but the major point I’m endeavoring to make is this: what more or less took place in an instant, or a day, thanks to the phenomenon of movies, morphs into a piece of the permanent record.
In physical terms, it took about a day to film the death of Spock. In another sense that day was more than a decade aborning. The confluence of Gene Roddenberry, of Leonard Nimoy, Bill Shatner and the rest of the Star Trek ensemble, the work of many writers and directors, the devotion of countless legions of fans and, yes, my own happenstance contribution, all combined on that day. Some of us understood the significance (small s) of that eternal moment while it was unfolding; some were just doing their jobs. I am not prepared to argue that the Death of Spock ranks with Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer, but I think it facile to altogether dismiss its significance. I am certainly pleased to have played my small part, even as the train called Life carried me inexorably forward.
One further consequence of wearing my suit during that day’s filming led to my acting debut. While directing a week or so later, I was summoned to the soundstage phone, a novelty for me. In the absence of the now ubiquitous cell phone, its primitive soundstage predecessor was typically monopolized by all sorts of people, many of them, by this point in the shoot, intent on lining up their next gigs. My call turned out to be a double novelty, for it was from a casting director named Toni Howard.
“N
ick,” she greeted me. “Are you still acting?” This, I fancied, was a little bit akin to asking a man when he had stopped beating his wife. Acting? How did she know I had ever acted? Nonetheless, my vanity instantly aroused, I assured her that I still acted and why did she want to know? It seemed she was casting a TV movie, Mae West, and wondered if I might be interested in playing the young George Raft.
“It’s not a large role,” she warned me. How large? I asked. One line—perfect. In January—even better. While my cast and crew dithered behind me, fiddling with lights and wardrobe, I continued to indulge myself. How did you come to ask me about playing George Raft? I asked. It turns out she’d seen a still photographer’s shot of me, in my suit, riding a camera crane, my hair slicked back from my pre-opera shower.
“You look like Valentino,” Toni stated. “And, as you may know, George Raft was brought to Hollywood as a lookalike replacement for Valentino, after his sudden death.”
Vain, I grant you. Hah. I was in.
Come January, we were still mopping up what is known as “principal photography” but in actual fact all we were doing the day I departed for my one-line debut was close-ups of hands flipping switches and turning instrument dials. My crew wished me jolly good luck as I abandoned them in search of a new career.
It was a surreal experience. I had begun (typically) with grandiose notions of myself, like John Huston, doing a “guest starring” role in Otto Preminger’s film The Cardinal and ended with cold sweats. I was mailed not the entire script but only the page with my single line, which, when I read it, I knew at once was wrong. (“Oh, Jeez,” I could imagine the director groaning, “he wants to change his one line?”) But I did have a point. My character, George Raft, was supposed to be exiting a sneak preview of his own film, when he gets accosted in the theater lobby by studio execs asking his opinion of the movie. He was supposed to snarl in reply, “Mae West stole everything but the cameras,” before stalking off. Surely, I reasoned, we know by this point that the movie’s about Mae West. Shouldn’t my line be, “That broad stole everything but the cameras?” “That bitch”? “That tomato”? Anything but the fearfully on-the-nose “Mae West.”
The View from the Bridge Page 13
