by Edward Gross
Harve Bennett’s involvement in Star Trek first began in 1980, when he was brought over to Paramount to produce for their television division. Born Harve Bennett Fischman, Bennett was a child genius who was one of the original radio and TV Quiz Kids. His successful television producing career included stewarding The Mod Squad and later The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. He had previously served as a network executive at CBS and, later, ABC, where among the numerous shows he oversaw was The Long Hunt of April Savage, starring Robert Lansing, which Gene Roddenberry had produced for Sam Rolfe. During the production, Roddenberry and Bennett sparred heavily, and Roddenberry had him thrown off the set. Bennett, however, would eventually have his “wrath.”
In 1980, after a recent series of wildly over-budget Hollywood films, including Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Heaven’s Gate (the latter decimating United Artists), Paramount knew they had to produce the next Star Trek film on a substantially lower budget. Chairman Charles Bludhorn, along with Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, realized the best way to do this was to hire an experienced television producer. Some early rumors had the low-budget Star Trek II pegged as being a movie-for-television then known as The Omega Factor.
HARVE BENNETT
Someone conceived the idea of giving this kind of film to the people whose background and training was essentially in the more cost-conscious area of television. They chose wisely, because they picked good storytellers and not just people who make pictures for controlled budgets. However, it was never seriously a television project. The minute the script began shaping up, it was clear to all that we had something terrific.
GARY NARDINO (president of production, Paramount Pictures)
When I was assigned the responsibility to do STII because of the bad economic situation they had on TMP, I invited Harve, who I had already brought in to the studio to do Star Trek. You went from a $44 million Star Trek movie to the one they assigned me to supervise that we did for $13 million and it made almost as much money as the first one. We delivered a good movie in that genre as well as good finance. It was done under the production auspices of television. That transition from STII to STIII was how I became executive producer of Star Trek III and I went on from there and did comedies and Harve kept on doing Star Trek.
GERALD FINNERMAN (director of photography, Star Trek)
Harve Bennett called me and he said he didn’t realize I had done the show. I was under contract to Columbia for a few years and had done a lot of projects for Harve including From Here to Eternity, the miniseries that he was nominated for an Emmy for. He said that he had not realized that I had done Star Trek until he had read the book The Making of Star Trek, and we talked about the possibility of me doing Star Trek, but at that time they didn’t know whether it was going to be a feature or television and I didn’t want to do television.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
I was working in the administration building, and the guy who would ultimately be the executive producer of Star Trek II, Harve Bennett, is seeing my boss on a regular basis because he’s working with her. He’s sitting outside her office and he says, “My girlfriend really wants me to do Star Trek II, the studio has asked me to do it, and I don’t speak Star Trek.” I said, “Well, I do.” We started talking about it and he started showing me some story ideas, and the next thing I know, I’m the first person hired to be on Star Trek II. I was the assistant to the producers, Harve and to Bob Sallin. I took a gigantic cut in pay. I knew I had to do this. I always looked at my time at Paramount as grad school. I ultimately spent seven years there, and the last two years were working on Star Trek. I had the time of my life working on Star Trek II. There was just a surprise around every corner and I had a blast.
HARVE BENNETT
The main thing that rang false about the first film was that the characters had gone twenty years and hadn’t aged, which, to my way of thinking, was totally unbelievable. I felt a major element in future films would be to have the characters age and to focus on what they were going through as people as they did so. At one point, I even sat down with Shatner and told him point-blank that there was a real danger in having a middle-aged Kirk running around like a thirty-year-old.
I am the same age as Shatner, and was going through my own time of change. I wouldn’t have dared try to look like I was twenty-five, and I was aware of how silly Bill looked radiating this gauzy look. Even Leonard had too much makeup—he had Lillian Gish lips [in The Motion Picture]. I decided Star Trek II was going to be gritty, about people and how they cope with aging.
ROBERT SALLIN (producer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
Before I joined Harve on the project, I sent him a lengthy memo. I had studied Star Trek I and I pinpointed a lot of the fundamental weaknesses of the first film. First and foremost, I felt it was too much a special-effects picture and that the humanity of Star Trek just wasn’t there. Let the special effects support it, as any effect should support basic storytelling, not be driven by the effects, which so many science-fiction films are. I felt that the look of the picture from a design point of view had been all wrong, the lighting was too flat and uninteresting.
HARVE BENNETT
What I saw that I liked about Star Trek were the relationships between the three men, and the sense of male bonding and family and the ethics, the morality—though there are times and episodes, and I can’t trace who is responsible, when Trek was as kinky a show as ever came down the pike. They had Kirk play an entire episode as a woman.
ROBERT SALLIN
I made a very strong point about one thing. I said, “Let’s not attack this as though it’s another film project or another television project. I want to interview every member of the crew. I want to make sure that these guys are not only mentally competent, but I want an attitude here. I want an attitude that we’re all in this together.” As corny as it sounds, I wanted to make sure we had a great time making this film.
MICHAEL MINOR (art director, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
Harve wanted something uplifting, something that would be as fundamental in the twenty-third century as the discovery of recombinant DNA is in our time. Then something just came to me and I said, “Terraforming.” Harve asked, “What’s that?” and I told him it was the altering of existing planets to conditions which are compatible to human life. I suggested a plot, just making it up in my head while talking on the phone. The Federation had developed a way of engineering the planetary evolution of a body in space on such a rapid scale that instead of eons you have events taking place in months or years. You pick a dead world or an inhospitable gas planet, and you change its genetic matrix or code, thereby speeding up time. This, of course, is also a terrible weapon. Suppose you trained it on a planet filled with people and speeded up its evolution. You could destroy the planet and every life-form on it. Harve liked the idea a lot. At the story conference the next day, he came over, hugged me and said, “You saved Star Trek!”
ROBERT SALLIN
I applied some old commercial-production techniques. I storyboarded everything. I had a chart made which listed, by scene, every special effect and optical effect, and I timed each one. I designed and supervised all the special effects. Mike Minor, our art director, sat up here in my office and did the storyboards. Then I held meetings with four or five optical-effects companies, and some of those meetings ran over three hours. I gave them thorough information, so that when the movie was finished, the amount of deviation from the plan was very slight. On this film it was more like I was codirecting as well as producing, and I was the visual-effects supervisor.
In the first movie there were quite a few problems with special effects. Because I knew how to handle and manage production, I was left very much alone by the studio. They were all a little intimidated by what had gone on previously, and the idea of special effects escalating the way they did on Star Trek I was a major fear and concern. This time we came in so close to budget that you couldn’t go out for a decent lunch
on the difference.
MICHAEL MINOR
I laid out four different features in storyboard. Literally different plots, different characters, different events, different effects. I put in maybe four hundred man-hours before we settled on what we used to get bids for the effects.
When he first got involved, Bennett had written a one-page story concept titled “War of the Generations,” which was presented to Paramount executive Gary Nardino in November 1980. A month later, it was expanded into an outline and then a script by Jack Sowards, which in turn would be continuously rewritten by him and Bennett. “The War of the Generations” involves Admiral Kirk taking command of the Enterprise to rescue a lost love from a rebellion on a distant Federation planet. In the process, Kirk is captured by the leader of the rebels, revealed as his own son, who sentences him to death. Before Kirk can be killed, the shadowy hand behind the rebellion is revealed: Khan Noonian Singh and his band of eugenically bred superhumans on Ceti Alpha V. Khan’s true intent is to capture a Federation starship (shades of STV) and conquer the United Federation of Planets (ironically, this is similar to an early unrealized concept for Star Trek Beyond, the latest in the Bad Robot produced film series, where Khan would have manipulated the Klingons into conquering Earth). In the end, Kirk and his son join forces to defeat Khan, leaving them in the coda to “together, boldly go where no man has gone before.”
HARVE BENNETT
After considering other writers, I found out that Jack Sowards, a great movie-of-the-week writer, was a Star Trek fan. We talked and he clearly knew more about Star Trek than I did, so I hired him. Jack and I went to work, and I say we went to work because the process is like this: you talk, and you rap, and the responsibility is that the writer records, in whatever fashion he chooses, the fruits of the give-and-take of this process. His task is then to go and make it become a script.
JACK B. SOWARDS (writer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
For me, I think the biggest problem is that I started working on the show in December 1980. I met Harve at his house and he had a page of a story worked out. It was a good idea. In other words, somebody gives you a good idea and you say, “Oh, hell, you do this, you do this,” and it just sets you off. April 11, 1981, was the Writers Guild strike deadline and we were always working against that deadline. When you’re doing a feature, three months is not a long time, so we were always working under that deadline. As a matter of fact, on April 10, I handed in the final draft of my script. That was one of the downsides. We knew that the writers were going to go on strike and I couldn’t write beyond that point.
HARVE BENNETT
What we started with was, “Who is the heavy? Who is the black hat? We won’t make this picture unless there is a black-hat heavy.” You know the solution the writers and producers came up with: Khan.
“Space Seed” kept haunting me. I thought it was fabulous. I had seen Ricardo Montalban when I was a little boy, while visiting a soundstage at MGM, and he was doing his first dance with Cyd Charisse. I was there to interview him as a Quiz Kid reporter. He always fascinated me. And “Space Seed” spoke to me. I called Ricardo, who was in the midst of shooting Fantasy Island. We had lunch and he was charming. “You write theeese for me!” he said in that wonderful accent.
JACK B. SOWARDS
I thought “Space Seed” was wonderful. Ricardo Montalban is a classically trained actor. Anybody who can deliver those lines has got to be. Most actors in town would mumble them, but the man knows just how far to go. If you’ve watched Fantasy Island or his movies, there’s a smoothness. In this, he was something totally different and he knew just where to go with it without going over the edge. He is Khan. He brings that sort of macho arrogance to it, and you believe this is a genetically engineered man who is stronger, smarter, and brighter. A hero is nothing without a villain. If you overcome a slug and a snail, you haven’t done anything. If you overcome something like Khan, a hero is defined.
NICHOLAS MEYER (director, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
The story that I was told about the death of Spock was that Leonard, having been disenchanted with the first motion picture, wasn’t eager to do any more Star Trek and that as a way of enticing him or exciting his interest was Harve Bennett promising him a great death scene. That’s all I know. I have to say at this point I have no memory after all these years of any of these five other scripts of Star Trek II. I remember two things: I think one script had people singing “Happy Birthday” to Spock in Vulcan. And I remember that there was a simulator sequence in one of the scripts. I don’t remember how Spock died in anything. He probably always died somewhere near the end. My idea was to have him die in the first scene.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
There have been times when I’ve been concerned about the future of my career, because of the identification with the character. But I never had a confrontation with the studio in which I’ve said I would never play the part again. My only concern with Star Trek has been that if we’re going to do it, we do it well. I don’t want to just do a rip-off Star Trek title just because people will pay to see it. If it’s going to be good, I wanted to be there. I’d hate like hell to see a great Star Trek movie hit the screen and not be in it. I’d feel very jealous. [At the time] I really was adamant that I would not work on Star Trek II because I had been so frustrated with the other and I was feeling very negative about the whole thing.
JACK B. SOWARDS
When Harve and I had our first meeting, Harve said, “Look, Nimoy has refused to do it.” I said, “You want Nimoy to do it?” He said, “Yeah,” and I told him to dial Nimoy’s number. He picked up the phone, dialed the number, and said, “What do I say?” I said, “You say, ‘Leonard, how would you like to play your death scene?’” And Leonard’s comeback was, “Where does it come in the picture?” Harve looked at me and said, “Where does it come in the picture?” And I said, “Right up front. Right in the very beginning.” A minute or two later Harve hung up and said, “Leonard will do it.” Of course when we wrote it, it came in the very beginning. But every time we wrote a little bit more, we moved it back and we moved it back and we moved it back until it came at the end.
HARVE BENNETT
Spock is the most important character. I’ve always thought that. Remember The Man from U.N.C.L.E., in which the real star was David McCallum, but Robert Vaughn was the star and matinee idol? Bill is the centerpiece, but the thing that makes it work is this extraordinary oddball who makes the show unpredictable. Agreeing on Spock’s death was the beginning of an evolution that got so convoluted that its resemblance to the final film is, of course, a process.
LEONARD NIMOY
[Harve] caught me completely by surprise with that one. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, “Well, maybe that’s the honest thing to do. Finish it properly rather than turn your back on it.” So, eventually, we agreed Spock would die. There was a lot of controversy over whose idea it was and why. It was even said that it was the only way I would do it and that it was in my contract that Spock would die! It got to be a messy situation.
When Harve and I started to explore the idea, I thought back to the first season of Star Trek, when the Spock character had taken root and been widely accepted. The whole concept of his lack of emotionality, his control of emotions, was a very interesting and important part of the character. Dorothy Fontana, who was a writer on the series, came to me on the set one day and said, “I’m going to write a love story for Spock.” I told her she couldn’t do it, because it would destroy the character, destroy the whole mystique about whether or not he’s emotional. The whole story we’d been telling was that he was completely in control of his emotions. She said, “I have an idea that might work, and I’m going to try it.” She did, and wrote “This Side of Paradise,” a beautiful episode in which Spock fell in love. At the end of it, there was a bittersweet parting and it was all over. And he had gone through this fantastic experience.
With Jack Sowar
ds officially on board, Bennett’s initial outline was expanded into a full treatment dated December 18, 1980. In the story, the Federation has ceased colonization of new worlds and Starfleet is solely tasked with protecting and developing the territories within its existing realm. On one such world, the society’s youth is being coaxed to rebellion by a mysterious “Teacher.” Aboard the Enterprise, Spock is killed at the very beginning of the film attempting to shutdown a damaged warp engine. After Spock’s meaningless death, Kirk comes aboard the Enterprise and upon examining Spock’s personal logs realizes that Spock was attempting to reengage with his emotions after his encounter with V’ger in TMP.
Shortly thereafter, the Enterprise encounters a refugee ship with Diana, an old flame of Kirk’s with whom he had a son, unbeknownst to Kirk but known to McCoy. Kirk arrives on the rebellious planet, encountering his son, and is blamed for the carnage, only to discover the mysterious Teacher’s identity: Khan, who is able to marshal massive psychic abilities to manifest illusions, much like the Talosians in “The Cage,” around Kirk and David.
In his next version, Sowards introduced the character of Janet Wallace from the TOS episode “The Deadly Years” (a former Kirk love interest whose son David Wallace would be an antagonist in this version) as well as the first mention of Saavik, the male Vulcan first officer aboard the Enterprise. It is also the first time that Commander Terrell is introduced as is the Reliant, which attacks the Enterprise. The Omega weapons system, which would later become the Genesis Device, is also introduced here as the object of Khan’s obsession.
