It was not, as I say, my finest hour. Roddenberry was old and in ill health, soon to die. The fact that I was tired and unwilling to revisit the screenplay when it was almost time to start shooting was of less moment than my conviction that what was in the script was correct. I left the meeting and returned to work, leaving others to mop up the damage I had done. I like to think of myself as a decent, straight-shooting person but as I write these lines, I have to admit that I am not always the person I like to believe I am.
FILMING
Shortly before we started shooting, shooting of a different character began. The first Gulf War (we didn’t realize then that there would be more than one) broke out and distracted us with events “back on earth.” Iraq had invaded Kuwait, Saddam Hussein having been convinced that the United States would not interfere. It was a sobering time; wars, as every generation seems fated to relearn, are easier to start than to stop. Who knew where this one would lead? But there was little to do except watch the news and continue with our work.
At any rate, that’s what I told myself at the time. The odd thing about making a movie is that events beyond the film suddenly seem relevant only to the degree that they can affect the film, rendering it irrelevant or suddenly conferring it with additional resonance. As the director, you develop tunnel vision, distilling outside information through the obsessive prism of what’s good or bad for the movie never mind about the world. When I made Company Business , rapidly unfolding international events constantly caused me to revise the script in an effort to stay au courant. I realized that with Star Trek VI we faced potentially the same task. After all, there had been no coup or assassination as yet in the Soviet Union, but what if there were . . . ? The Three Mile Island nuclear accident had been “good” for The China Syndrome as, before too long, events in the Soviet Union would be perceived as “good” for Star Trek VI.
Meantime, as was usual with my underfunded Star Trek movies, I continued to exhaust myself trying to find ways to skin the cat. I could not afford Jerry Goldsmith to write our score; I couldn’t even afford James Horner, who had risen in prominence (and price) in the years since The Wrath of Khan. With what we had for music in our budget, perhaps I ought to play the kazoo.
I was back to listening to demo tapes and, as so many times before, disheartened by what I heard. I wondered whether there wasn’t some existing piece I knew that depicted stars or the heavens. I sat up when I remembered Holst’s The Planets. Now here, I told myself, was a very classy idea: Get someone to arrange Holst for Star Trek VI. I began listening to The Planets and fell in love with my idea: The granddaddy of all outer space music would finally be used where it belonged, in a space opera. (I knew that Holst’s music was intended as illustrative of astrological rather than planetary symbols, but who cared?) The music department at Paramount, when I explained my idea and played them some selections, had no objections. Had they ever heard of Holst?
Throughout the making of Star Trek VI the Paramount front office continued its state of seismic convulsions, which had at least one happy effect: The players were so concentrated on their jobs that our film was more or less left to its own devices. The movie was in the nominal charge of a capable, young executive, John Goldwyn, who, I gathered, had more important things on his mind.
At any rate we gave him scant cause for alarm. The people making this film were old hands, a team that had done this kind of thing before. True, Harve Bennett was not around, and I, for one, missed his warmth and analytic intelligence, but there was Denny and my long-time editor, Ron Roose, as well as Marty Hornstein, who would go on to become a regular Star Trek feature film producer.
The weightless space assassination was storyboarded and largely filmed by Steven-Charles Jaffe, working the second unit. Corridors in the Klingon vessel, originally built on the horizontal, had been designed by production designer Herman Zimmerman (now also a Star Trek vet from the series Next Generation and Deep Space Nine), in such a fashion that they would be lifted, like towers, into vertical configurations. Then we could dangle helpless Klingons at the ends of long ropes within the towers, “floating” helplessly as the assassins in their magnetic boots blew them away. Later, CGI techniques would be employed by ILM to erase the ropes.
There was a debate over the color of blood, which I wanted to be different than human blood. I wound up choosing a pink shade that seemed suitably weird, only to regret my choice down the road when I realized it reminded me of Pepto-Bismol.
The ice planet presented a different set of problems. Having no time in our ridiculously tight schedule to travel to the glaciers of Alaska for our exteriors, we dispatched Steve Jaffe and his second unit there, with stunt doubles for Kirk and McCoy, again to cover material specific to my carefully worked-out storyboards. The rest of the ice gulag would be filmed on soundstages.
I found many differences between shooting Star Trek II in 1981 and Star Trek VI ten years later. And while many of these differences were of a technological character—primarily, conspicuous advances in special effects, as I have noted—others were more unnerving. Security on sets had become progressively tighter. Because of the high incidents of theft—props and entire sets had been known to vanish—all members of the cast and crew were now required to wear identifying badges, complete with the wearer’s photo, in what proved a largely futile effort to stem the flow of contraband from the Paramount lot. (Piracy had also become endemic to films themselves, which were frequently released abroad before they’d even been finished at home. Illegal video and DVD reproduction has caused horrific economic damage to studios and filmmakers alike.)
Star Trek VI was always short of everything. I had asked for knee-high snow for the soundstage version of the ice planet; there was barely enough to cover anyone’s feet, so that shots had to be redesigned to make the stuff look deeper than it was. Sets had curtains where there were no walls. Art, as I have suggested, thrives on restrictions but it can’t thrive on nothing. When the costumes never turned up for the murder of Cassio in Orson Welles’s Othello, he brilliantly staged the sequence in a Turkish bath, but I could hardly stage all of Star Trek VI in a similar location.
Some sequences worked out amazingly. The weightless assassination pleased me very much, as did the gulag mines where prisoners were forced into hard labor with light-emitting helmets far below ground on railroad cars. It looked like hell, it sounded like hell, but it was only Bronson Canyon, just up the street from Paramount where they used to film episodes of Highway Patrol and, for all I know, The Lone Ranger. We could have traveled halfway around the world, and the result would have been no better.
Goldwyn was nervous nonetheless. His characteristic mantra was, “I think we have a problem,” to which my auto-reply always was, “No, we don’t.”
Sometimes, he was right. On the day we filmed the scene where Kirk’s crew sits down to a formal banquet for the Klingon delegation in the officers’ mess aboard the Enterprise (“Guess who’s coming to dinner,” in Denny’s clever line), we had visitors from the Holst estate. As part of their meeting with the Paramount legal department, we invited them to visit the set, where I went out of my way to treat them like royalty.
We were in the middle of an enjoyable though complicated sequence. I have always had a weakness for blue food, probably because—aside from blueberries—very little exists. So I had decreed that all the food served for the occasion (including the infamous, forbidden Romulan ale) be blue. The actors were understandably reluctant to eat any blue seafood or pasta, so the Holst delegation was treated to the spectacle of the director pulling out his wallet and offering ten bucks a bite to Kirk & Co. And of course, being actors, they chowed down for bucks, to the amusement of Gustav’s representatives. There must have been close to twenty diners in the sequence, so we had to keep photographing the scene over and over to cover all the participants.
This was also the scene wherein Chang recites part of Hamlet’s soliloquy “in the original Klingon.” Some may be surprised to learn tha
t Klingon is an actual language, concocted by Marc Okrand, a linguist hired by Paramount to develop the Vulcan and Klingon languages, and it comes complete with its own dictionary. However, “To be or not to be” in Klingon posed a problem not only for the redoubtable Chris Plummer but for Okrand himself, who, in creating the language, had long ago decided there would be no verb for “being”; hence, “to be” would be impossible to utter in Klingon (just as I am told that there is, for example, no word for “foot” in Russian). More recently, on the Internet, it is possible to watch excerpts of Hamlet, performed in Klingon.
But in the end, as I understood it, the Paramount legal department wanted all rights to The Planets in something like perpetuity with permission—I wouldn’t put it past them—to reorchestrate and use the music for whatever else they liked. The Planets is the cash cow of the Holst estate (there must be at least forty different recordings of the piece), and there was no way that it was ever going to agree to give away its crown jewel.
So much for my Holst idea. It was back to the drawing board—and those tedious demo tapes. To speed the process along I gave a bunch of them to my editor, Ron Roose, who had a musical background.
The actual shooting of the film proceeded smoothly, with only the usual hiccups. The celebrated Somali supermodel, Iman, who played a yellow-eyed shape-shifter in the gulag, had the flu and bravely soldiered through her scenes, deep kissing the imprisoned Kirk (who did not, thankfully, succumb to the illness); Plummer’s Klingon makeup did get wearying for him as the day went on; Nimoy felt I was missing close-ups of him. I was, and had to go back for them.
With Plummer the problem was that no movie screen could contain him. He was truly a theater actor, larger than life before any camera ever rolled. He was well aware of this propensity and always at pains to make his performance as “small” as possible. Still, this was hard to do when he had to deliver a line like, “Cry, ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war!” Nonetheless, he forged his own version of a Star Trek villain. Instead of a wild-eyed raver like most of the Star Trek rogues’ gallery, Chang didn’t even boast two eyes (one had a steel patch bolted over it), and he rarely raised his voice above a dry chuckle. If Khan’s appeal and strength lay in the personal origins of his rage, Chang’s terror and fascination originated from the polar opposite source: the impersonal considerations of realpolitik. (“Tell Mike it was only business,” pleads Tessio in The Godfather.) In pursuit of his goals, Chang would crush his enemies with mildly sadistic indifference. “As flies to wanton boys,” he’d kill them for their sport. A smiling villain with a heart of lead, Chang become Plummer’s most popular role after Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music.
Christian Slater, the movie-star son of my indefatigable casting director, was a Star Trek devotee and made a one-day appearance aboard Sulu’s ship as a bewildered communications officer. I tried to shoot him in such a way that audiences might be pleasantly confused. “Was that . . . ?”
Overall, it was fun to shoot the film. For one thing, I wasn’t stuck on the Enterprise bridge all the time, as had been the case on Star Trek II. Ice planets, Klingon show trials (a riff on the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals), alien boxing matches, and alien guard dogs—as well as revealing parts of the Enterprise not heretofore shown (crew quarters, the galley, etc.)—made each day something to look forward to.
The music was still an ongoing concern, until one day Ronnie met me in the cutting room, a cassette in his hand. “Listen to this one,” he suggested, so I put it in my car’s tape deck as I drove back to Beverly Hills following wrap. The composer was one Cliff Eidelman, and the music was surprising in its originality. Moreover, his attached résumé specified Eidelman had done his senior thesis on The Planets. I listened again and had my assistant, Mike (Denny having long since been promoted to writer status), locate young Eidelman and invite him for a chat on the lot.
Between takes, in shuffled the Jewish Jimmy Stewart. Tall, lanky, with blue-gray eyes and an aw-shucks delivery, Eidelman was eight when he began violin lessons. He continued his musical education at Santa Monica College and USC. By this time, a new thought had begun percolating in my head. Rather than imitate Holst, I was now fixated on Stravinsky, specifically the opening of his ballet The Firebird (1919) with its uneasy, quietly brooding sounds. While The Planets might be described as “generic” space music, Firebird ’s opening sounded Klingon all the way—an alien, mysterious, and dangerous culture.
Directors talking to composers about music is a tricky business. Typically you have two parties who tend not to speak each other’s language. For directors that language tends to be visual; for the composer, it is likely aural. The lingua franca relies on reference points known to both (whether recordings of other music, previous film scores, or rock, marches, or madrigals), specifically music the director likes and wishes he could hear in his film. Some composers find these “temp” scores very helpful; others can’t bear to listen to them.
I usually tried to split the difference by citing scores rather than actually playing them. Eidelman was, of course, familiar with The Firebird and didn’t need me to play it for him to know what I was on about. I screened some film for him, minus any temp track, and we chatted for another fifteen minutes or so, after which he left to think over what he’d seen and what I’d described.
“He’s the man,” Ron predicted.
In this he was correct.
A day or so later Eidelman returned with another synthesizer-generated tape, this time a composition à la manière de Firebird, which amply demonstrated his understanding of what I was after. Good film composers must be quick-change artists, and directors must have some idea of what role music is to play in their film. If they don’t, the results are likely to be generic, undistinguished, or redundant. Is the music intended to emphasize what is already going on? To provide emotion where there is none? To foreshadow things to come? To tell us things are not what they seem? (“I hate you,” the actor says, while throbbing violins insist he’s actually in love.) Or, as I suggested earlier, discussing James Horner, will the music give the movie a voice? Surely no one who is familiar with Anton Karas’s haunting zither in The Third Man, Jerry Goldsmith’s eerie electronic pan pipes in Under Fire, or John Williams’s Strauss-Korngold bombast in Star Wars can hear this music without immediately thinking of the films for which they were written. Bette Davis complained that Max Steiner’s scores for her movies always tipped what was coming, and she may have had a point, but Steiner’s score for Gone with the Wind undoubtedly gave that film its voice, just as his pioneering score for King Kong made that ape bigger and more threatening than it would have been without those earth-shaking footsteps in the orchestra. Nowadays the fashion is for music to be songs and for their words to direct the audience’s feelings and tell them more intellectually what the director wishes them to understand. Not to my taste, but I concede its effectiveness.
In addition to Bronson Canyon and Alaska, the company went into deepest Simi Valley, where we filmed the climatic peace conference at a Jewish community center with what we hoped would register as futuristic architecture. I had planned an elaborate ceremonial introduction to the peace conference (different alien nations marching in under different banners) prior to a second assassination attempt by the conspirators, but in the end it played too long, and much of it was dropped. The influence for the actual assassination attempt was the finale of The Manchurian Candidate in Madison Square Garden, and that part thankfully did work.
I knew how ridiculous our budget was when I shot a scene in which Scotty breaks through a door to reach the assassin before he can squeeze off a second round. When I asked for another take I was told there would be a twenty-five minute caesura. The reason: the effects department had to rebuild the one door we had.
Later, when he realized that the film was going to be something more than merely the sixth installment in a spent franchise, Goldwyn said, “We should have given you enough money to do it properly.” He was referring to the m
undane office furniture chairs so in evidence in our peace conference finale. It did occur to me that it would one day be fun to make a film like this when I wasn’t relief pitching.
The last scene was a touchy affair because it was not merely the end of the picture (which, like Spock’s death in Star Trek II, had tactfully been scheduled at the conclusion of shooting), but because it was also the end of Star Trek for the original cast. Whatever ambivalent feelings the actors had about this lifelong, enforced association now manifested themselves as that association neared its end. They were edgy, irritable, suddenly dissatisfied with lines of dialogue, bits of business, reluctant to do this or that, caviling over the ninth particle of a hair. The result was a scene that started well but whose focus and shape were dissipated beneath a welter of last-minute, ad lib adjustments and alterations. As a result, I felt the movie lacked the satisfying climactic feel of Spock’s death and funeral in The Wrath of Khan.
Star Trek audiences were suitably moved nonetheless—in this respect and given that it was the final film with the original cast, the material was essentially bulletproof. Someone had the idea that the cast should literally “sign off” with their handwritten signatures on appearing (in contractual order) on the screen. I thought the notion hokey but felt that in light of my disappointment with the final scene, I might have need of hokey and so lodged no objection.
The View from the Bridge Page 24
