The View from the Bridge

by Nicholas Meyer

  I was giving myself goose bumps. Thus far, I was thinking in my role as screenwriter. Now I felt a tap on my shoulder from my alter ego, the director, demanding to know how the hell I thought an effect of floating blood bubbles (of any color) was going to be achieved.

  I told the director to get lost. It’s the movies, I comforted myself. In movies, you can do anything. This isn’t the moment to pull your punches.

  So I kept writing the most fanciful version of the sequence I could imagine and decided I would worry about how to execute it down the road. As it happened, recent technological advances of which I was then unaware would, in the end, make my floating blood simpler than I dreaded.

  Eventually we had our draft, and the studio was pleased. David Kirkpatrick was now in the driver’s seat (President of the Motion Picture Group of Paramount Pictures—these titles!), and his only comment was that he was tired of sand planets, so with the help of my trusty computer, the desert planet gulag where Kirk (and now Dr. McCoy as well) are exiled became an ice planet.

  BATTLE OF THE BUDGET

  The year 1990 was ending. My wife and I—now with a second daughter—took a six-month lease on a house in Beverly Hills. In January of 1991 we showed up in Los Angeles, and on January 4, my team, consisting of Nimoy, Ralph Winter, Steve Jaffe, and myself, sat down in Gary Lucchesi’s office to “confab” with him, David Kirkpatrick, and John Goldwyn, the junior exec to whom the film had been assigned.

  After the requisite smiles and glad-handing, Kirkpatrick began the meeting.

  “Now, we’re talking about twenty-five million dollars,” he commenced, when my hand shot into the air.

  “Excuse me, David, but we’re talking about thirty million dollars. That is the figure Frank [Mancuso] mentioned at my lunch with him and that is the figure I agreed to. That is the figure that brought me to LA.”

  Kirkpatrick frowned and reiterated the figure was twenty-five million, that Frank had a “vision,” which in turn was based on a formula, which derived from the calculation of how much money a Star Trek movie could make domestically and internationally (much less; Star Trek was a failure in France—the result of a penny-pinching decision years earlier to use the Canadian French Québécois dub of the original TV series, rendering it laughable in France, etc.).

  “David,” I interjected, knowing perfectly well that it was the feature division’s continued wretched performance in the months between my lunch at Claridge’s and this present meeting that was responsible for lowering the budget on our film, “let me explain why the film cannot be made for twenty-five million dollars.

  “You have fourteen million dollars above the line, for starters. [‘Above the line’ refers to costs of starring cast, writer, director, producer, etc.] You have to pay for Shatner, Nimoy, and all the rest of the Enterprise crew, and this comes to fourteen million dollars. You have four and a half million dollars in special effects. This is the same effects budget as Star Trek V, two years ago, but I’ll live with it. That brings us to eighteen and a half million dollars.”

  Their faces were clouding over.

  “Then,” I concluded, “you have two and a half million dollars in postproduction [editing, music, etc.], which brings us to a grand total of twenty-one million dollars, leaving only four million dollars to make an outer space sci-fi extravaganza. Where’s the movie going to come from?”

  Dead silence greeted this calculation. I could sense the execs wanting to trade looks but not quite daring to.

  Finally Kirkpatrick spoke. “Would you please excuse us for a few minutes?” His team withdrew into his office across the hall, leaving us to twiddle our thumbs. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Eventually they returned, their faces as expressionless as jurors reentering the courtroom with a murder verdict.

  “Twenty-seven million,” Kirkpatrick stated without preamble or embellishment.

  “David,” I responded, trying to keep the panic out of my voice (how could I have been so foolish as to move bag and baggage to LA for six months without having an agreed-upon budget?), “you are under a misapprehension. I am not negotiating. I am giving you reality.”

  I now spread out the top sheets (budget totals) of every Star Trek movie for their perusal. I was mightily annoyed; numbers was supposed to be their department. I was supposed to be the “creative” person; why was I having to take them through figures they should have researched long before this meeting?

  “Please note: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1979, cost forty-five million dollars. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1982, cost eleven point two million. From then on, each successive Star Trek film—numbers three, four, and five—cost forty-one percent more than its predecessor.

  “The only exceptions were The Wrath of Khan, made by me, which cost only twenty-five percent of the first film’s budget, and the one I am now proposing to direct for you, which will cost exactly the same as its predecessor, Star Trek V, namely thirty million dollars. Allowing for inflation over two years’ time, it will actually cost less than V, but the figure will remain thirty million. You cannot get blood from a stone.”

  But you can get stony silence. Then came the hurt accusations. I was not being a team player, I was inflexible, I was noncooperative, etc. I listened to this until I lost my temper.

  “This is pointless and graceless,” I said, standing. “I will meet with Frank Mancuso and give him the same facts and figures I’ve given you. Let him make up his own mind.”

  Which is what I did. Frank, courteous, even courtly, heard me out in respectful silence some days later in his office. I produced all the numbers and took him slowly, carefully through the process, explaining the nuts and bolts of making a Star Trek movie in 1990.

  “Obviously,” I concluded, pleased with my performance, “this is entirely your decision. I just wanted you to have all the facts from the horse’s mouth.”

  He shook my hand in a most civil manner and thanked me for my comprehensive explanation. I left, feeling I had made the situation perfectly clear.

  He then canceled the film.

  I can’t remember who gave me the news, but it came at the end of a day, and I only recall being stunned. While I had recognized intellectually that this decision was a distinct possibility, once the boom had actually been lowered, it sucked the wind right out of my sails. I subsided into my chair and tried to think.

  But nothing came. I would have to drive to Beverly Hills and explain to Lauren that we were stranded high and dry in Los Angeles, tethered to our house lease with no earnings in sight.

  I wandered over to Gary Lucchesi’s office in the administration building and sat on the floor in his office, my eyes filled with tears, my back literally to the wall. Gary looked at me not unkindly. He’s an old and dear friend, but he’s a realist. I had taken a gamble and lost. “If you want love, go home,” he advised me. So in the end, I did.

  It was a melancholy evening, made palatable by only the cheerful un-awareness of our daughters, whose smiles and laughter took away some of the sting, though not all.

  The next day I returned to my office to pack my things, after which I strolled around the lot in a kind of daze. I cannot now remember when or from whom I heard the improbable rumor floating across the lot that Frank Mancuso had lost his job, but I do recall vividly what happened next: I was standing in the middle of Stage 5, which we were to have used, taking a last, silent look, when the stage phone rang. Bizarre, I thought. Seeing no one else to answer it, I picked up.

  On the other end of the line I heard Stanley Jaffe tell me that he and his producing partner, Sherry Lansing, were now running the studio.

  “Kid”—it was always “kid”—“I hear you have problems,” Stanley said, after giving me the chance to digest his news.

  “I need two and a half million dollars,” I explained.

  “You got it,” was his answer, and Star Trek VI was back on again. I don’t know how long I stayed on that empty stage before I began to move, slowly at first, then breaking into a ru
n back to my office, still located in the Marx Brothers Building.

  I started calling people, beginning with my wife, and relating the improbable deus ex machina that had rescued the film, shaking my head in disbelief every time I delivered my news. Stanley Jaffe, my friend and supporter since my work on Fatal Attraction. He was bold and decisive. Sometimes pro, sometimes con. Today was pro. Like Tanen, an experienced hand at running a studio (Jaffe had headed Paramount when he was in his twenties, his father having run Columbia), Stanley knew what the feature division needed: a hit. Star Trek had been halfway backed out of the starting gate when he pushed the buzzer and we were back in again, running forward, full tilt out the other side.

  I’ve since heard it said that we got the money because Stanley’s son, Steven-Charles Jaffe, was my producing partner.

  As I mentioned earlier, Steven-Charles Jaffe is no relation to Stanley Jaffe.

  PREP-CASTING

  There were other obstacles to overcome, among them the fact of our film’s being the sixth in a series that was generally perceived to be played out. The critical drubbing received by its predecessor seemed to epitomize the conventional wisdom. Star Trek VI had a credibility problem; no one was taking us seriously. No one was going to be in a great hurry to take part in the flaccid continuation of a moribund Enterprise.

  The possibility of this perception and the accompanying resistance to participation in the film had not occurred to me. I thought the script Denny and I had written was terrific: complicated and ambitious, managing to deliver the Star Trek goods (it featured an assassination in weightless space, for heaven’s sake), as well as examining the post-Soviet world and its effects on inhabitants who had lived eye to unblinking eye for over half a century. Denny, who had by now thankfully almost completely recovered from his bout with cancer, was of the same sanguine view. There was, at the same time, something niggling at my brain connected with all this doom and gloom. Where had I heard all this before? Of course: when I had first reported for work on Star Trek II. It was funny how I always seemed to come up in the same position in the batting order.

  I learned around this time that my floating blood would be a relatively simple effect to produce, thanks to advances in computer-generated imagery or, more familiarly, CGI. The more I studied this new phenomenon, visiting once more with the magicians of San Mateo, the more intrigued I became with its possibilities. The technique had come a long way from its stylized use in Carol Marcus’s Genesis Planet proposal from Star Trek II. Used properly, the images it produced could easily pass for reality.

  One person who believed utterly in the movie from the get-go was our casting director, Mary Jo Slater. She never treated it like the hand-me-down or leftover others saw. The script worked and this was a movie she wanted to see. By happy coincidence, her son, Christian, was an avid Trekker and desperate to be in the film, which we took to be a good sign. Comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg was equally enthusiastic, and I met with her to discuss the possibility of her playing a Klingon princess. This idea, however, was vetoed by Nimoy, who felt—perhaps rightly—that a supporting cast of stars might detract from the farewell appearance of the Enterprise crew. (Later, Goldberg showed up as a regular on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

  Nimoy understood, however, that our villain needed to be top drawer. For the Shakespeare-spouting General Chang, there was only one actor possible, and I begged Mary Jo not to come back without Christopher Plummer, the actor for whom I had written the role. Mary Jo took off for Plummer like a pedigreed foxhound and returned almost bearing the prize in gleaming teeth. “Just don’t bury me under a ton of makeup so I can’t act,” was his only request.

  Nimoy also saw the logic of a name actor of talent and presence to play Gorkon, our Gorbachev/Lincolnesque Klingon Chancellor, who foresees a brave, new, and peaceful world and who is assassinated for his vision. Parallels with the real world abounded—not only was Lincoln murdered after espousing a policy of reconciliation with the defeated South but, more recently, the Irish patriot Michael Collins had been killed by his own men for failing to obtain sufficient territory from Northern Ireland for the new republic, and Gandhi had been shot by his Hindu followers for agreeing to Partition and the creation of Pakistan. Anwar Sadat was slain by his own troops for recognizing and visiting Israel; Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was killed by an extremist Israeli for signing the Oslo accords and shaking hands with Arafat.

  David Warner, the famous postwar Hamlet and oleaginous Mr. Blifil of Tom Jones, had played Jack the Ripper in Time After Time. He seemed perfect for Gorkon, and I cast him, failing to remember—or never knowing—that he had appeared in Star Trek V (in a very different role), thus making Warner the only actor to play two different parts in the original Star Trek feature series.

  A more difficult role was that of the treacherous but oddly sympathetic Vulcan lieutenant, Valeris, who would betray Spock and the Federation. Valeris would later, at her court-martial, quote Kirk’s own words regarding Klingons (“They’re animals! Don’t trust them! Don’t believe them!”) in support of her actions. Regarding her complicity in Gorkon’s murder, she would, like Brünnhilde pleading with her father Wotan in Die Walküre, demand of Kirk, “Did I misinterpret you?” (Coming from Valeris, admittedly, her plea is more an ironic taunt.)

  As I have noted, in an ideal world Valeris should have been the stalwart Saavik, a character we had already come to love. And trust. This would have sharpened the pain of her betrayal, but absent Kirstie Alley, we decided it would be better to introduce a new character. We read a lot of actresses searching for that elusive quality that was at once alien, opaque, funny in its humorlessness, and yet touching because of its vulnerability. Valeris doesn’t know how to express her misgivings about the peace conference to her mentor, Spock. She can’t give voice to her own fears about the coming rapprochement with the Federation’s lifelong enemies, and Spock, sounding a bit like Polonious, shuts her down. “You must have faith, lieutenant,” he admonishes. “Faith?” echoes the bewildered Vulcan. “That the universe will unfold as it should,” Spock concludes, sententiously, leaving her to her expanding terror of an unknown future in the wake of disarmament.

  Kim Cattrall nailed the part and understood it so perfectly that any regrets over the loss of Saavik in the story were forgotten.

  But I remained intrigued by the idea of a character from previous Star Trek adventures, someone we had come to trust, turning out to be one of the conspirators. I settled on Admiral Cartwright, already portrayed by the intensely sympathetic Brock Peters in Star Trek IV. Peters, also an accomplished singer, had played villains before, notably in The Pawnbroker, but as far as Star Trek audiences were concerned, he was Federation true blue. His racist denunciation of Klingons—akin to Kirk’s own views—would be especially unnerving as Peters was an African American, and all the slurs against Klingons that he lays out at the Starfleet briefing are queasily akin to anti-black epithets from planet Earth centuries earlier. (In fact Peters’s big racist speech was so repugnant to him that he experienced great difficulty memorizing it; I had to film it in sections.)

  RODDENBERRY

  There was one other party who took the gravest possible exception to Cartwright’s sentiments, and that was Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry’s deal on the Star Trek movies called for him to receive a credit (“Based on Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry”) and, I assume, a salary and profit participation, but it did not include actual involvement in making the movies after Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

  Nonetheless, there had evolved the tradition of kissing the ring, obtaining Roddenberry’s blessing for each of the successive films and giving ear to his opinions. I didn’t recall doing so on Star Trek II, when our contact was limited to a brief meeting at which we shook hands; but now, a decade and five features later, an audience had become part of the process.

  In the case of The Undiscovered Country, Roddenberry’s opinions were many and heated. He was pained and
angered by the script, which depicted bigotry not only among Starfleet brass like Cartwright but also among the Enterprise crew, not merely Kirk (whose prejudice might be excused as being related to the death of his son at the hands of Klingons), but even ordinary Able Seamen aboard the ship complained of how Klingons “all look alike” and alluded to the aliens’ distinctive odor.

  I could advance explanations for what followed. I had been through the ringer on this film from the moment we had sat down in Kirkpatrick’s office in early January. We hadn’t even called Action! and I was already stressed and exhausted trying to make thirty million dollars into thirty-three. For monetary reasons we’d had to junk Denny’s nifty prologue, in which the crew of the Enterprise, now retired, had gone their myriad post-Starfleet ways, only to be summoned back into harness for one last mission. (Uhura, I seem to remember, had her own intergalactic radio call-in show.) Salary cuts, FX cuts, wardrobe cuts (I had asked for Starfleet uniforms with pants pockets, but no)—all had taken their toll. Instead of making the film, I had been spending far too much time trying to figure out how it would be possible to make the film.

  Nonetheless explanations are not excuses. There was no excuse for my tactless and impatient handling of Gene Roddenberry when I finally sat down to meet with this big, tired man in his offices, our respective henchmen hovering silently on the sidelines as the conversation degenerated into barely disguised acrimony. I suppose underneath it all was a conviction on my part that Roddenberry’s was a specious utopian vision for which there was no historical evidence. Did he really believe in the perfectibility of man, or (as I suspected) was this just some sort of pose? I was cynical, maybe because somewhere along the line, I’d learned that Frank Capra was a Republican. I found myself straining against the shape of the Star Trek bottle, rewriting the words of the Mass, not merely altering the music. These were big no-nos, but I mulishly persisted, straying off the Federation reservation and not caring whether I ever found my way back to the Neutral Zone. Against Roddenberry’s complaints, I dug in my heels. Where was there any evidence, I wanted to know, that bigotry had disappeared—or would disappear—in human affairs? Was racism still not a powerful force in America? Were the Serbs and Croats not intent on “ethnic cleansing”? Were not Muslims still fighting Christians? Had it not always been thus since the beginnings of man? What, I demanded, was the justification for Roddenberry’s optimism? The evidence of millennia was on my side. In the meantime, I insisted, in my movie people would continue to act like human beings.