by Edward Gross
ROBERT SALLIN
It is, in all candor, Nick’s uncredited rewrite that is on the screen. Contrary to what the critics may say, Harve made contributions, I made contributions, but it was Nick’s final version that we used. Nick never took credit for it, and he told me his agent said he was crazy.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I don’t remember what happened in those twelve days; I must have gone into some kind of alternate state of being, because I really don’t remember anything except that my back was killing me at the end of it because I was bent over a Smith Corona portable electric.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Some writers are particularly good, and for me it was a joy watching Nick fix this thing on the fly, because it was like an advanced college class on screenwriting. It was screenwriting 303. It wasn’t 101. It was brilliant watching him strip away the stuff that just was unnecessary and get to the basic through line, telling a good story simply and making it a tight, clean script. The way I learned to write, right down to the word, if there’s no reason for it, don’t put it in. It’s got to serve a purpose. And a lot of that I learned from watching Nicky work. And believe me, Nicky and I are not exactly friends, but he is a real writer. He has technique and he’s got chops, and he knows what to do and how to fix a script.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Screenwriting, for me anyway, always amounts to a form of short-order cooking. I thrive on that kind of front burner, walking into the propeller, you’ve got to do it, so do it. There’s a certain adrenaline by-product that, if you’re lucky, infects the actual end result. I’ve taken long periods of time to write scripts and they’ve come out well, but certainly in the case of the second Star Trek movie, that working under the gun, as it were, was good for it.
To some degree, the same is true of IV and probably VI. Movies didn’t always take so long to get made; they just used to happen faster. Nowadays they do draft after draft after draft of things and the life gets squeezed out of them, the spontaneity gets squeezed out of them, the intuition gets squeezed out of them. The advantage I had in writing those scripts is that there wasn’t time to be second-guessed by a bunch of executives or people saying, “Well, what if we did this?” and everybody sticking in their oar. It just worked out that you had to kind of go with your gut and go, go, go … or there wasn’t going to be any movie.
HARVE BENNETT
Star Trek has enormous snob appeal. It purports to be a program for the bright. If you watched Trek it was like going to a Mensa meeting. If you compare the shows of the sixties, as to intentions and content, a Star Trek alongside a Starsky and Hutch or Bonanza, you have something that aspired to as high as TV would allow it to go. It was smart.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I’m not terribly interested in space. But I was interested in real ships—Run Silent, Run Deep, frigates blasting each other. I wanted the characters to look like sailors, not like they were wearing pajamas. I wanted the Enterprise to be reminiscent of a tin can. These are not comfortable places, so let’s rip up the carpet, put in more instrumentation, electronic bosun’s whistles and ship’s bells. I did what I could to echo a nautical frame of reference.
GEORGE TAKEI (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”)
When I first got the script and saw the kind of participation Sulu had, I saw that he wasn’t much more than a talking prop. There was no character there, and I decided that I just couldn’t go back under those conditions. My heart just wouldn’t be in it. I told this to Harve Bennett and Nick Meyer and they understood, but the script was already written and there wasn’t much that they could do with it at that point … Harve understood the problems and had a few scenes added that bolstered my part a little, but I was still unhappy. Filming was due to begin soon and a decision had to be made. So they made certain promises and I was on the set the first day of filming without even a contract. The first shots included me on the simulation bridge, so I was locked in. Unfortunately, when the film came out, some of the little scenes, which would have added to my character, ended up on the cutting-room floor.
DeFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy)
At first I turned it down. I strongly disliked the earlier script that had been handed to me. I felt it was a busy story and didn’t work, so I had a big conversation with Harve Bennett. He was upset. I said I would rather not be in it, because the role was not meaningful, and the script was just not a good Star Trek script. He said, “What do you think we should do?” “I think you should hire a writer who has written for Star Trek before and rewrite it!” He looked at me funny and said, “Well, who would you hire?” I said, “Gee, Harve, I don’t know, I’m not in that line of work.”
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
It was a dysfunctional family reunion. De is such a gentlemen who couldn’t care less. What a lovely human being. De tended a garden; he carried a picture of his shih tzu in his wallet. He pulls out the picture of his dog like he was pulling out a picture of his kid. He was a sweet man. De was just above it all; you couldn’t say or do anything that would shake him. The only time I saw him a little on edge was when we were doing ADR [additional dialogue recording], because De was a little older than the rest of them. He felt that his voice wasn’t strong enough, so he really got into ADR and pumped everything up beautifully. He had that big career in westerns and stuff before Star Trek began. He was on another level. He appreciated Star Trek but it didn’t define him.
WILLIAM SHATNER
I was nervous about it. Especially after the first film. The success of your performance, essentially, rests in the words. Everything rises and falls on the script. When a script is good, it takes a heroic effort to ruin it. As this script developed, I swung wildly from awful lows to exalted highs. I began to realize that the movie might be good.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
John Belushi was on the set one day studying Shatner. He did a brilliant Shatner imitation on Saturday Night Live. He was perfecting it. He was just sitting there watching Shatner. I said to the associate producer, “Don’t let him go because The Blues Brothers just played the wrap party for Laverne & Shirley and I wanted to get them for our wrap party,” so I dropped everything and ran over, and Belushi had gone. They let him go and that night he died.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I have always thought, to the extent that I’ve had any clear thoughts about Star Trek, that it was something that for one reason or another never quite fulfilled its promise. Either because in terms of a TV show, they couldn’t afford the sets or the effects, or because in the first movie they dropped the ball somewhere. This was an opportunity to make something right that had never quite been on the nose before. The more specific you get, the better. It was not necessary for me to see Admiral Kirk go to the bathroom, but I said why couldn’t he read a book?
At which point I grabbed the first book off my shelf, which was A Tale of Two Cities, and for some reason or another, I just stuck with that, which was interesting because it’s the one book that everybody knows the first and the last line to. That became the bracket of the movie and also somehow became the theme of the movie. Leonard and Shatner got excited, because they always felt in some way that they had the Sydney Carton–Charles Darnay relationship going on between them. That’s very specific, and from the book we got the glasses, which was specific, too … and real! From all of that came age. Interestingly enough, Star Trek II is not very much about science fiction, the Genesis Planet aside. Its themes are entirely earthbound—death, aging, friendship.
DeFOREST KELLEY
I feel that Meyer brought it to life and really made it a kind of Star Trek script. When he sent me that draft, I said, “That’s more like it,” and I went with it.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I never wanted to be teased by the prospects of another film. I remember reading the script and thinking this can’t be true, this is so nice for my character. It came out of the blue for me. I had no reason to believe that they were going to elaborate on wh
at I had done in the past. I kept holding my breath when I was reading it and thereafter, wondering whether or not it was all going to come apart somehow.
NICHOLAS MEYER
When Bill Shatner first read the screenplay that I had written for Star Trek II, he thought it was a disaster, and we had this meeting. I was so upset that I just kept jumping up to go pee. I didn’t know whether it was the humiliation or rage or what. And Bill said, “Are you okay?” And I said, “Oh yeah, indigestion.” It wasn’t indigestion.
When he finally left, I was just crestfallen and thought, “This is never going to happen.” And Harve sat there and said, “Well, yeah, but what he really said was only this.” And he broke it down into these bite-sized pieces. And when I stopped panicking and realized the value and the insight and the precision of what Harve had isolated, I thought “Oh.” I went home, and twelve hours later I’d turned the thing around again and Bill was happy. He just wanted to be the first guy through the door.
In my relations with Harve, he was always the mentor and I was always the kid, which I thought suited us both. I said this to Harve at the time that he didn’t give himself enough credit sometimes for being Harve Bennett. There was a kind of insecurity or inferiority thing going on as opposed to the rather thoughtful and well-read and diligent person that he was. And very, very smart. He was one of those kids that went on the radio because he was a kid genius.
RALPH WINTER (postproduction supervisor, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
Harve was very calm about all that stuff. That was the statesman in him. He was able to manage all those emotions and everything else very well. A lot of the stuff that I learned from him is you need a calm presence on the set to give the crew and everyone else confidence that not only you know what the hell you’re doing, but that the ship is heading in the right direction.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Nick Meyer had written a script and we were in love with the script and impressed by his creative ability. So even though it was only the second picture he had directed, we felt that his imagination should be given full flower. And so here he was. He had written the script, but he hadn’t directed very much. Whatever help we could give him was offered and he would accept it or not accept it, depending on whether he thought we were correct.
NICHOLAS MEYER
In the case of the cast, they had a lot of ideas about how their characters behaved or spoke. But I never viewed them in an adversarial capacity once Bill decided that he loved the script. There were times when they would get bent out of shape over something, but it was all over the course of a day’s work. I remember having a close-up of Nichelle Nichols at the end of the day and she said that’s not fair, because no one looks their best at the end of a day. It was only my second movie, so I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I remember Leonard didn’t like the set of his cabin on the Enterprise. And you know what? He was right. In that sense, it was a totally professional series of exchanges. I was treated with respect and they liked me more than not. And I think what they really liked was the script. Because they liked the script and I had written it, they were inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Try telling him what to do. I dare you. Nicky is Nicky. He is larger than life. His persona is much larger than Bill’s. Nobody can tell Nicky what to do. Bill could have tried, but he would have failed miserably. And why mess with it? They were getting a great product. Only a total freaking moron would say you need to rewrite that scene because there is not enough of me in it. I saw none of that going on.
ROBERT SALLIN
I watched dailies. Remember the scene in the container on the sand planet where Khan and his followers are living? Khan delivers this fabulous speech and there are all of these cutaways to reactions. I looked at it and realized that Nick shot it with the wrong screen direction. I was livid. I went to the set and found out a couple of people had warned him about it and he ignored them. I went to Nick, controlling myself, and said, “All of that stuff you shot of the reactions is going to have to be reshot.” He said, “Why?” and I explained it to him. He said, “I’m not doing a picture about screen directions.” How do you like that? We reshot it. That was the kind of thing I was dealing with a lot.
Remember when they open the picture with the training exercise? The exercise fails and Shatner comes through the door with the light behind him. My feeling was that his arrival has to be like the Second Coming. I had a discussion with Nick about how to do it, and I said, “You must put the light directly in line with the lens so that the figure of Shatner blocks it and is surrounded by the fingers of light and smoke and it all comes out equally.” I go up to San Rafael with ILM, I come back, and Shatner’s off to one side and it looks terrible. Again, I went to Nick and said, “That shot doesn’t work.” “Why? Why?” “Because you didn’t do what I suggested and it doesn’t work. It’s not appropriate for this key moment. Here’s how it has to be.” I explained to him again what had to be done and he said, “That’s fine. I’m going to get credit for it anyway.”
WILLIAM SHATNER
By the time we were ready to shoot, I knew Wrath of Khan would be great. We had ILM for the effects, so the movie couldn’t look bad. We also had a very human Star Trek-ian script. It was a wonderful working experience. It was as if the years between this film and the old show never existed.
At one point, production was rocked by public outcry following media announcements that in Star Trek II, Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock was going to die. The shocking thing is that the leak came from an inside source.
ROBERT SALLIN
The studio did not generate any of the rumors about Spock’s death. People have assumed that when this movie was conceived the first thing the studio did was to run out and create the rumors that Spock was going to die, to get the Trekkies excited and generate publicity. I know that the position of the studio brass was that they would just assume nobody said anything. Early drafts of the script were stolen and made their way into the hands of fans, and that fueled the furor.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Gene Roddenberry was none too happy we were going to kill off Spock. He didn’t hide that. The big shocker for everybody was toward the end of principal production Leonard coming back and saying, “You know, I had such a good time with this I’d be willing to do one more.” That was where they decided to add a scene to give them an avenue into Star Trek III. Nicky Meyer had no problem splattering green blood all over the place when it came to killing Spock. There was an attempt by Harve to keep everything under wraps. We did not want this leaking out, but it did leak out.
SUSAN SACKETT
Some things Gene fought for and did not get and would very much like to have had. In the second movie, for example, he fought very desperately against any attempt to kill the Spock character, and he was overruled.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
There were only like six or seven copies of the story outline that were circulated and only two people who needed to know. Harve came to me and said, “I need you to devise a way that if somebody leaks this we might be able to track it back to the person who leaked it.” It was a typo. Everybody had a distinct typo. Literally it was like a period snuck into each page. That’s what I did.
Harve said, “Don’t tell me what you do, just do it.” So I did. I sort of embedded my own little special code. At the time, we were using typewriters, but this rudimentary code actually worked because at one point it was leaked, it was published, and instead of retyping the text it was just photographically put out there in one of the rags. And so Harve came in and plunked a newspaper in front of me and he said, “Okay, track it!” And I could. I went back to his office. I said, “Here’s the legend. Here’s whose copy this was. Now what are you going to do about it?” It was Gene’s.
Gene never knew anything about this. I never told him. I can say with 100 percent certainty that it was Gene’s copy that was leaked. There was nothing Harve could do about it because it was
Gene’s copy.
JOEL ENGEL (author, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth & Man Behind Star Trek)
Gene Roddenberry’s treachery caught Harve by surprise, given that Harve thought he had GR’s approval and imprimatur. It didn’t occur to him that GR might leak a plot point to undermine Harve’s work. And it’s telling that GR couldn’t imagine Spock’s rebirth. My recollection is that they didn’t have a working relationship, since there was nothing for GR to do but sit there like Jabba the Hutt and have the scripts and rough cuts brought to him for his amusement. Roddenberry was indulged to stop him from unleashing the dogs of war, the fans.
HARVE BENNETT
In those days fanzines were the equivalent of the Internet. They’re still out there, but in those days there were like a hundred thousand subscribers to such publications, and after the first outline of Star Trek II was distributed within Paramount, within two weeks every fanzine was crying, “They’re going to kill Spock!” That was followed by a massive write-in campaign. I think they sent a hundred thousand letters saying don’t kill Spock, and put a terrible crimp in the most difficult problem I had, which was convincing Leonard Nimoy to get back into the ears. Leonard wanted nothing to do with the next feature, having had a bad experience on The Motion Picture. So I had convinced him by telling him he was going to get the greatest death since Psycho—the genius Hitchcock kills the largest star in the picture a third of the way through, and no one could believe it. Suddenly it was no longer a Janet Leigh vehicle.
Anyway, I said, “That’s what we’re going to do to you; no one will know and they will be scared shitless.” He said, “Ooh, I like that,” and his actor side said, “That is a great death scene, and I’m through with it. I’m not Spock.” But now we’re confronted with the world knowing we’re going to kill him, so that ended that surprise. I then had to really convince Leonard that we could make it work, and told him how. By that time, though, Leonard had regained his enthusiasm, reading with Bill, and he’d met some of the cast again and there was a certain warmth that was reentering the whole franchise. He said, “You fix it that way and I’m aboard,” so that ended that problem. But I will forever know who ratted us out and he did it again, by the way, when we destroyed the Enterprise in Star Trek III.
