by Edward Gross
In February of 1981, Sowards elaborated on his previous outline and turned in a first draft of what was now entitled “The Omega System,” in which Kirk is a vice admiral and Uhura is his assistant. While Khan remains the villain, his wife, Marla McGivers, introduced in the TOS episode “Space Seed,” is still very much alive. By April of 1981, Sowards’s new rewrite was now entitled “The Genesis Project.” Janet Wallace is gone, replaced by Carol Baxter and her son, David. In this draft, Spock makes it midway through the picture before his death. Khan and Marla McGivers were the only ones who survived being stranded on Ceti Alpha V, but Khan is still able to project images into people’s minds.
That evolving screenplay had several significant elements that would ultimately make it into the final draft: first, it was a sequel to the original-series episode “Space Seed,” in which Khan has escaped from Ceti Alpha V and is seeking vengeance against Kirk. Additionally, the story would feature the death of Spock.
The screenplay would also deal with a midlife crisis for Kirk as he attempts to recapture the man he once was, while simultaneously being reunited with former love Carol Marcus and meeting his son, David, for the first time. All of this would be played out against the backdrop of the the Genesis Device, created for terraforming but which has the power to destroy worlds if used for more sinister purposes.
ROBERT SALLIN
Kirk goes through a great deal of introspection and reflection on his life. In a sense, he’s having a midlife crisis. Throughout the film we exposed and plumbed the interpersonal relationships that were established back on the series.
JACK B. SOWARDS
The only thing we had to do with the characters was let them age. They’re a good set of characters you can move anywhere, and these actors are so good. They’re so used to working with each other and they have such a rapport. It’s almost as if they can read each other’s minds. They know when the cue’s coming and how to play it, and it’s a pleasure to work with people like that.
Work on the screenplay continued over the next several months, though no one seemed to be entirely satisfied. By July of 1981, an attempt at finding fresh blood led Bennett to original-series writers David Gerrold, Theodore Sturgeon, and Samuel A. Peeples, the latter of whom wrote an outline and eventually a screenplay that pretty much utilized all of the existing elements of the scripts written by Sowards and Bennett with the exception of Khan. Instead, he introduced the aliens Sojin and Moray.
HARVE BENNETT
Sam Peeples had done outstanding work in other areas when I was at ABC. He had done two pilots that I had been involved with, and I thought he could write robustly. I brought him in, he read the script, and I said, “Sam, you know more about Star Trek than I do. I want you to fix this.” He said, “I know just what to do.” The result was his script.
Entitled Worlds That Never Were, submitted in July 1981, and eschewing the characters of Khan and McGivers for his new antagonists, Peeples’s script also has Spock, not unlike Obi-Wan Kenobi, reaching out from beyond the grave to talk to Kirk and McCoy, imparting crucial information that saves the day. Shortly thereafter, a script was developed, dated August 24, 1981, entitled The New Star Trek, consisting of a pastiche of ideas from the various outlines (with the first mention of Saavik as female and half-Romulan) that preceded it, including the aforementioned scene in which the crew sings happy birthday to Spock in Vulcan.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
It was a no-win scenario for whoever walked in there. They actually had me reading SF writers and suggesting some of the best SF writers in the business. It was a dream job: I was being paid to sit there and read for a while. But Harve went to a couple of previous Star Trek writers and it didn’t work.
HARVE BENNETT
Star Trek writers came in with supreme egos. I had worked with many of them before and found them, like most science-fiction writers, very unyielding to comment. Harlan [Ellison] was in a class by himself. He gave me an outline on The Mod Squad that would have cost twenty million dollars to produce. When I asked him to think reasonably, he responded as if I were questioning Allah. I worked with D. C. Fontana on Six Million Dollar Man and had a similar experience. I said, “Hey, we’re not doing Chekhov here.”
ROBERT SALLIN
Neither the Jack Sowards or Samuel Peeples script worked. It felt like television. It felt like a long television episode, and I didn’t believe that the underlying humanity and the relationships between the people were very strong. There was a lot of intergalactic weirdness in the scripts which I felt was defeating.
SAMUEL A. PEEPLES (writer, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”)
I didn’t like the basic premise. My personal objection to the original version was simply that it was cast too much in the mold of the 1967 Star Trek episodes. When Gene Roddenberry and I first discussed his project, long before the first pilot script was written, I was much taken by Gene’s imaginatively pragmatic approach. Extrapolation was the key to the visual reality he sought after. But somehow, along the way, pragmatism became dogma and only what had been used before was acceptable. This, I believe, is the major fault of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It is far too easy to be influenced by the traditions Star Trek has initiated. Tradition and déjà vu and nostalgia cannot be major influences in the new Star Trek. It is common sense to use the basics that have proven so right, but it is also common sense to open our minds to the very expansive creativity that brought Star Trek to us in the first place.
It’s for this reason I didn’t hesitate to break old barriers, try new themes, ideas, dialogue, and characterizations. Star Trek had grown and expanded its horizons. The “heavies” in this version is a good example. They are not representations of “evil” or “good.” They were, perhaps, the first totally alien concepts used in Star Trek—one more departure from traditional themes—beings from another cosmos. Their universe is not ours; their motivations are hidden from us. But within the projected limitations of their own environment, they are logical and normal.
In the end, though, I was never actually given an assignment and never asked for one. I wasn’t happy with what I wrote and neither was the producer, so it just died.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Then Harve took a swing at it, but it didn’t work. He sweated bullets over it. He worked on it. But Harve was a TV executive first and foremost. Then he became a producer. This was a job for a pure writer, in my not so humble opinion. It’s not slamming Harve. This was just not his forte. I’ll tell you how he did it, he hired the right people. He may not consider that his greatest talent. But frankly his greatest talent was assembling the right team on Star Trek II. Star Trek III was not as successful because they replaced a lot of the people.
ROBERT SALLIN
I had a lot of sleepless nights about the process. I knew this script just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel right as a Star Trek picture, and at its core it didn’t feel right as anything good. I was getting pressure from the studio: “We’re going to be filming such and such a date,” and we just didn’t have anything that made any sense. I just thought it would look like a Saturday-morning television show if we did something like this. It had no stature, no quality, no uniqueness to it.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Harve is not a natural-born writer, but he wanted to write the screenplay. Not a good idea.
ROBERT SALLIN
Jack was a much more solid writer and made huge contributions to the script. But even then, Harve was always rewriting Sowards. He used to throw all of these versions of the script into what he called the arbitration box. I knew nothing about this kind of thing. What that was, to a certain point, was that Harve eventually took that to the Writers Guild and submitted it in an attempt to receive the sole writing credit. This is true. They rejected him. That was not too cool.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
So, between Harve writing it and before that some writers that were hired that couldn’t deliver, they had gone through their story money and there was none
left. The studio was not going to shoot the final draft that Harve turned in. It was awful. He’s not a great writer, but when you’re that close to Star Trek you really want to put your fingerprints on it as much as possible. I don’t question his desire to do that, but Nicky Meyer is a real writer.
JUDY BURNS (writer, “The Tholian Web”)
Harve Bennett, who had hired me several times to do The Six Million Dollar Man, called me and asked if I wanted to rewrite the Jack Sowards script for The Wrath of Khan. I read it, gave him all of my suggestions, and said, “You’re really into this and love it so much, why don’t you rewrite it yourself?” He said, “Maybe I will,” and that’s what he did. I could kick myself now that I didn’t rewrite it, because almost everything I suggested to Harve was used in the rewrite.
Since Leonard Nimoy wanted Spock to die, I said to Harve, “You mustn’t kill Spock in such a fashion that he can’t be brought back.” It was such a final idea originally that it was impossible to bring him back. He also died in such a way that there was no emotional impact on the viewers, and I said what they were missing in that script was the relationship between Spock and Kirk, which was so critical and which ultimately ended up in the scene between the two of them as Spock is dying. Originally, that scene didn’t exist. Those were specifically my notes, all five pages of which had to do with character, because Harve had never done Star Trek before. Thank God he found Nicholas Meyer, a very good character person.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Bob Sallin came in, looked at me, and mind you, I’ve just taken a huge cut in salary to do this. I’m practically living on friends’ sofas. And he says, “I’ve got bad news. We’re going to be out of a job in a week because the studio is not going to shoot Harve’s script and they’re not going to give us any more money for development.”
ROBERT SALLIN
I had put together a list of about thirty or forty directors, and I was almost universally turned down. Nobody wanted to touch Star Trek, nobody wanted to do a sequel, no one wanted to do science fiction or anything with special effects. I was dumbstruck. One day my secretary suggested Nick Meyer.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
I said to Bob Sallin, “The development executive on this is Karen Moore. Karen Moore is very good friends with Nicholas Meyer. Nicholas Meyer has directed one movie, he’s a fledgling director but I know he’s a really good writer. What if you hire him as a director and he quietly rewrites the script?” Now, ultimately, Nicky did not quietly rewrite it, but Bob thought that was a good idea and he didn’t have any others at the time.
NICHOLAS MEYER
There was a movie that I wanted to make and tried to make for fifteen years, based on a book by a Canadian author named Robertson Davies called Fifth Business. I didn’t want to do anything else. I wound up doing Time After Time, and people said if you do this and it’s a hit, then they’ll let you do Fifth Business. So Time After Time was a hit, but it wasn’t a big enough hit, and they weren’t going to let me do this because at that time no one had heard of or was interested in Robertson Davies.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
When Bob Sallin came back to the office at the end of whatever meeting that he took in the administration building and he looked at me and he said, “I’ve got some bad news for you. We’re going to be out of a job in a week,” that’s when panic became the mother of invention and I strongly suggested they look at hiring Nicky and then he took that idea back and it flew. He had nothing to lose, and they sold that idea and they hired Nick to direct it and, of course, Nick obviously rewrote the entire script and wrote a great script. Bob had had a long history in the commercial business and had worked with all of the best cinematographers. And the concept was to surround Nick with the best. And to be there to prop him up, and it worked.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I was sitting in my house in Laurel Canyon just vegetating. I had a childhood friend who was now an executive at Paramount. She’d come on board with Louis Malle for Pretty Baby and had done such a good job for him that the studio hired her. It was a Sunday, and my recollection is that we were flipping burgers on a grill, and my friend Tony Bill was there, and Karen said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “I’m waiting.” And she said, “If you want to learn how to direct, in my opinion, you ought to direct and not just sit up here holding your breath because you’re not getting your way. Maybe what you ought to do is go down and meet Harve Bennett because he is going to make the next Star Trek movie and I think you guys would get along.”
I said, “Star Trek? Is that the one with the guy with the pointy ears?” And she said, “You’re such a snob. Just meet the man, why don’t you?” And if this had been my mother talking I probably wouldn’t have gone but, for whatever reason, she got through to me, and so I went to see Harve on the Paramount lot. As I recall, he cracked open a couple of beers and we sat there and we had a long conversation about it.
ROBERT SALLIN
I went to see Nick, had an interesting conversation, and then brought Harve over. I admired Nick’s writing, but I wasn’t keen on his directorial ability. But I did like the way he wrote and his sense of story was fabulous. So I took Harve over and we had a long meeting. Afterward, Harve turned to me and said, “You know, if we go with him, he’s going to be trouble.” I said, “What do you mean? He’s great.” Well, Harve perceived something which I didn’t, which was that [Meyer] has a very substantial ego. He’s a very intelligent guy and not without talent. I pushed and I said, “I think we really have to do this, because we don’t have anyone who is even remotely interested in doing this.” The long and short of it is that we did it, and when Nick read the various versions of things that Harve was struggling with, he realized that the thing simply didn’t work. It was his uncredited rewrite that we actually shot. He gets, as far as I’m concerned, all the credit. He really did a masterful job of taking these disparate parts and brought them together into something that was cogent, made sense, and was an entertainment.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Harve showed me the first movie and some episodes, and I remember thinking that it all pleasantly reminded me of something I always liked. It took me a while to remember and it was probably in the middle of the night I woke up thinking, “Oh yes, you used to love those C. S. Forester books about Captain Hornblower.” And I said, “This is Hornblower in outer space,” and that’s when everything really clicked into place.
HARVE BENNETT
I think—and this is where Nick and I part ways with Gene—that Star Trek is a naval show; always was and always will be.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Roddenberry definitely averred or opined that Star Trek was not a naval operation, not a military operation, it was a sort of a Coast Guard, is how he put it. And I thought watching these episodes that that didn’t seem to be the case. This was definitely a form of gunboat diplomacy, in which the Federation was a yardstick of correctness. Would we weep for Hamlet if we didn’t know what the fuck he was on about? We understand perfectly, that’s why we keep doing it. Would we suck in our breath, awestruck at the sight of the Michelangelo David if we didn’t understand the idealized human form? It’s all the same. And it doesn’t seem, aside from certain technological advancements, the world has substantially changed. People are still making fists and cutting off each other’s heads. And, in that sense, my version of Star Trek was a gloomier, darker version. But the people were still the same people. They were just having to confront a less optimistic reality.
HARVE BENNETT
When I saw The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, I was so impressed with the screenplay that I went out and read the book, and I was even more impressed with the book. Nick read my rewrite of Sowards and Peeples and said, “This has promise. What if…”
NICHOLAS MEYER
Harve said he was going to send me draft five of the script, and I woke up one day and said, “What happened to that script?” It never showed up. I called Harve and he was sort of embarrassed and said, “I can’t send it
to you. I don’t like it. It’s not good. And it’s 178 pages.” I said send it anyway and he sent it. I didn’t know what I was reading and I said, “Well, what about draft four?” And he said, “It’s just five different attempts to get a different Star Trek movie.” So I said to send them all. This van shows up and there were all these scripts and even though I read very slowly, I read all these different scripts—and along the way a dim idea had begun to percolate through me. Philosophically, I said that I was simply going to take these characters more seriously and more literally than anyone has ever taken them before.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Nick was hired. And Nick didn’t even know it came from me to the extent that he bought a washer and dryer for Karen Moore’s house to thank her.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I sat down with Harve Bennett and his producing partner Robert Sallin, they’d been at UCLA together, with a yellow legal pad which is never very far away from me, and said, “Why don’t we make a list of all the things that we like in these five drafts? A major plot, a minor plot, a sequence, a scene, a character, a line of dialogue, it doesn’t matter. Then I’ll try to fashion a new screenplay that accommodates as many of these things as possible.” They didn’t seem to like my idea and I said, “What’s wrong with what I just said?” They started telling me this whole thing about ILM, the special-effects house, needs a script in twelve days or they can’t get delivery of the visual effects in time for the release of the movie. And I said, “What release?” because it was only the second movie I’d ever been involved with as a filmmaker. And I thought, “Holy cow, they’d already booked this thing into theaters.” Twelve days? I don’t know why I wound up saying, “I think I can do this in twelve days, but we’ve got to get going, guys.”
They still weren’t happy and I said, “Well, now what’s the problem?” And they said, “The problem is we couldn’t even make your deal in twelve days,” and that’s when I made my fatal error of forgoing money and credit on the writing of it because I just thought, “If we don’t get going on this now, then there’s no movie.”
