The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, Volume 1
Page 50
I was so frustrated with that, I said, “The hell with it,” and two weeks before Star Trek III was released, the promo department said, “Oh, you’ve got to see our trailers; our trailers are so terrific for Star Trek III.” In the trailer they proclaim it as the “final voyage of the starship Enterprise.” The first thing, “BOOM!” and the ship blows up ten seconds into the trailer. The Enterprise is blowing up before your eyes. So that ended that surprise, but these are the vicissitudes of doing it in the Hollywood system.
NICHOLAS MEYER
We were sitting in one of those little screening rooms at Paramount looking at test footage of something. I was sitting behind Harve and we were all still mumbling about getting letters and flak about killing Spock. And the simulator scene in my script had already been written and I had started off the movie with it. But without the death of Spock. So I said, “We kill him in the simulator right at the beginning.” And Harve whirled around and he went, “That is brilliant!”
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Starting out with the Kobayashi Maru was great because it threw all of the really hard-core people off. It was just a publicity thing. They were not really killing Spock. After the simulator scene, Kirk saw Spock and asked, “Aren’t you dead?”
HARVE BENNETT
Moving Spock’s death to the end of the film made it stronger, and if I thought Gene knew what he was doing, and knew the long-range results, I would honor him fully. But it was accidental. It did, however, let us set up the nobility of the real death.
EDDIE EGAN
The letters and phone calls that came in from people were more outraged at the idea of Spock’s death than they were happy that Paramount was making another movie. They always sort of considered Paramount to be this monolithic evil corporation that didn’t care about Star Trek at all. I would say to these people, some of whom I became very friendly with over time, “You have to understand, they’re making another movie. If they hated Star Trek, they wouldn’t make another movie. They barely made a dollar on the last one.” That became part of my job. It was like holding the virtual hands of these people over the phone and just responding to letters and talking to fans, as well as these sorts of normal customary duties of publicity.
WALTER KOENIG
Harve Bennett had given me a copy of the script and asked me to do a Trekkie run [for accuracy to series canon] based on some comments I had made on an earlier draft where they had Spock dying in the first act, and I said this was absolutely unconscionable; this is the climax of your story. He’s not one of these guys in the red shirts. I guess he was reasonably impressed with that, because he then asked me to do a Trekkie run and there was some dialogue about Khan saying, “Mr. Chekov, I remember the face”—which he couldn’t possibly have since I wasn’t on the series when he did that episode. I was faced with the ethical dilemma of mentioning it to Bennett or letting it go. I chose survival as opposed to ethics and I didn’t mention it and, in fact, Ricardo didn’t even know it. He didn’t know that he hadn’t met me before.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Montalban had the longest credits of anybody, and if you watch him at his best in certain movies, he’s a fantastic actor. He was the only one who couldn’t come to rehearsals. We rehearsed the movie around my dining room table and he was doing Fantasy Island. So I didn’t really know him. I had lunch with him and that was it. And you know, directors always want to know one thing about the actor: Is he crazy? How crazy? Am I going to live or do I have to pull the boat over the mountain? Ricardo was a very courteous, very polite, very well-bred gentlemen.
He came to the set the first day ready to work and in full makeup. We had this whole six-page monologue about who he is and why he’s so pissed off at Kirk at having been marooned on this planet. I thought, “Let’s try to film it in one shot. Let the camera sort of dance around him and let him work up a head of steam.” A head of steam is what he worked up, all right, because when we first were doing it, he was screaming and bellowing. This is only the second movie I’ve ever directed, this guy’s got more credits than I’ve got inches in height, and I thought, “What to do, what to do?”
While they’re lighting I asked him into his trailer and to have a little conversation. I remember saying, “You know, Laurence Olivier said that an actor should never show an audience his top because once you show your top, they know you’ve got no place else to go.” And he said, “Ah, I see, you’re going to direct me. That’s good. I need directing, I don’t know what I’m doing up there.” And then he proceeded to regale me with some choice Mervyn LeRoy stories. “Ricardo, Lana, make it a good scene!” That wasn’t very helpful to him.
RICARDO MONTALBAN
When I started to articulate the words of Khan for myself, I sounded like Mr. Roarke and I was very concerned about it. Then I asked Harve Bennett to send me a tape of the old show that I did. I ran it two or three times. When I first saw it, I didn’t even remember what I did. On the third viewing, a strange thing happened to me and I started reliving the moment, and the mental process that I had arrived at, at that time began to work in me and I associated myself with that character more and more.
Now this character presented a different problem. The original character was in total control of the situation. Guided simply by his overriding ambition. The new character, however, was now obsessed. He was a man obsessed with vengeance for the death of his wife, for which he blamed Kirk. If he was bigger than life before, I felt he really had to become bigger than life almost to the point of becoming ludicrous to be effective. If I didn’t play it fully and totally obsessed with this, then I think the character would be little and insignificant and uninteresting. The danger was in going overboard. I had to be, if not deranged, then very close to it. I had to find a tone of really going right to the razor’s edge before the character becomes a caricature.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I remember saying apropos of Khan, “You know, the thing about a crazy person is that a crazy person doesn’t have to raise their voice because you just never know what they’re going to do … next!” And I sort of lashed out with my arm around his neck and then he understood, he got it. And then it was just a question of endless fine-tuning. He would look at me before every take or after every take and go, “Too much, too little?” It was like driving a Maserati, you just didn’t have to do much to get the response.
WALTER KOENIG
Working with him was a pure delight. He was always there for your close-up. I remember Nick saying something to him about his performance needing fine-tuning, and I thought, “Oh shit, here it comes.” Instead he says, “Ah, you’re right.” It was beautiful. That’s the way every theatrical experience should be and with us, unfortunately, it wasn’t.
Wrath of Khan was a delight from start to finish and one of the greatest delights was working with Ricardo Montalban and Paul Winfield [who played Terrell, captain of the starship Reliant], and not being on the Enterprise having to be judged by our leading man, not having scenes reblocked by our leading man, which I found very oppressive. I’m working with actors who give as well as take. Totally professional.
ROBERT SALLIN
Leonard and Bill have been doing this forever and they know these characters. It’s not that they weren’t delivering performances, because they were. But then Ricardo comes on to the set. We had him for ten days, and the first shot was a master shot that ran almost ten minutes; a full reel of film. Man, he was phenomenal. Just a delight. So after that day, suddenly everybody sharpened up a lot, because he was so good. He had raised the bar.
RALPH WINTER
In The Wrath of Khan there was never an on-camera scene in the same room with Ricardo Montalban and Bill Shatner. It was all on viewscreens. It was all ship-to-ship and there was never any face-to-face encounter. You can’t do that today.
NICHOLAS MEYER
They should have met. Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth the First never met and playwrights have been putting them together ever since.
Kirk and Khan may not have met in the film, but they did in my script. You bet your ass. In my script, Khan was more of a mystic than Attila the Hun. I invested Khan with certain powers. He could make you see things which didn’t actually exist. It was a battle of wills, which Kirk ultimately wins when Khan realizes he cannot control his mind. Nobody wins the fight and it ends up as a fight in space with the ships. It was a twelve-page fight that they simply took out and threw away. The fight would have required a lot of special effects, because it was really a mind attack by Khan on Kirk and Kirk’s being able to resist it. He would take it to different places. They would be on a shore somewhere, fighting with whips. They would be in a stone room of a castle. When you got into the whole thing, it was a very expensive process, so I can understand their dropping it. But not the face-to-face confrontation. I could never understand that.
RICARDO MONTALBAN
I don’t think this was a drawback. Actually, that was an element that was interesting. It was difficult as an actor, but that separation of the two ships gave it a really poignant touch to the scenes. The fact that being so strong, there was such pressure knowing that he can’t get his hands on Kirk. I didn’t mind that. I minded as an actor. I wish William Shatner and I had somehow been able to respond to each other at the time. The actual situation, though, I thought was a plus. We left the audience wanting them to get together and we don’t.
Beyond Ricardo Montalban, perhaps the greatest standout was the first starring role for now veteran actress Kirstie Alley, who portrayed the half-Vulcan, half-Romulan Lt. Saavik in The Wrath of Khan. “I liked the Star Trek TV series,” Alley related at the time. “In fact, I’ve been rehearsing Spock for some years now. I would pretend that I was his daughter. Every week, every episode, I’d sit there thinking, ‘I should play Spock’s daughter.’ I mean, I could arch my eyebrows as good as Leonard Nimoy. Whenever I’d watch the show, I’d write dialogue for myself so I could actually take part in the story. When Leonard said a line, I’d respond. So when I was told about the part, I was very excited. I went in there and acted like Spock. Then Nick Meyer said, ‘Boy, you have him down. Did you know that?’”
ROBERT SALLIN
I thought Kirstie Alley was a really nice young lady, but I became concerned as I saw her working on the set with Shatner and Nimoy. I went to the honchos and said, “You have a brand-new actress here. Shatner and Nimoy are going to chew her up and spit her out.” Back in the days of the television series, Shatner used to take other people’s dialogue and make it his. Leonard and Shatner are really top-level actors, really good actors, and she was just beginning.
I didn’t want her to get buried, so I suggested that we get her an acting coach to work on the rough spots or just someone she could talk to, because Nick was not that kind of guy. He couldn’t provide that kind of support for an actor. So I pushed it. I took her to lunch and as gently as I could made the suggestion. She said, “Oh, sure, that would be helpful.” She was really nice about it. We hired a really good guy who was with her for two or three weeks and it helped her settle in and deal with the process.
EDDIE EGAN
On the film there were the usual tensions with the newcomers, like Kirstie Alley. By the nature of being new, there’s attention that’s focused on the character or their story line and that means there’s attention taken away from one of the original cast member’s story line. I remember them all being very cordial. Not Bill so much, because Bill is Bill. But Kirstie persevered. She had a rough go the first few weeks. People were not pleased with her performance. There was talk that they were going to have her voice replaced for the entire movie. They actually didn’t do that, but they did have her rerecord most of her role in looping just to get some infliections that weren’t present in the production audio.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
My greatest regret is that I couldn’t find a way to steal Khan’s necklace. I thought that was the best piece that had ever been created. I don’t know where it ended up, but if you ever find it I want it. The uniforms were particularly nice. [Wardrobe supervisor] Agnes Henry had done such a tremendous job on the uniforms, and as such the pins were disappearing left, right, and center, which was driving up their budget.
They started stitching them onto the outfits so it was more difficult to steal and that didn’t work. I started getting phone calls from the administration building asking us to liberate pins for certain people. So I would call the stage and they would steal a pin here and there and it would go to the administration building. Finally, I started bitching to Leonard. I said, “You know what, I’ve stolen a pin for every goddamn person in this place. I got nothing.” So Leonard stole a pin for me and now I have a pin that was officially stolen by Nimoy.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The studio didn’t interfere at all because there just wasn’t time. I had, on the one hand, Harve Bennett. I also had Austen Jewell, who was the production manager. The things that happened I didn’t know about until later. Robert Sallin tried to have me fired. He didn’t like the way the movie looked. My job was ultimately saved by Michael Eisner.
ROBERT SALLIN
I’m not proud of myself for this, but it really was a result of never having produced a major picture on a major lot before. We were three days into shooting and we were a week behind. I didn’t know what to do. I called Harve, who was in London doing A Woman Called Golda. He had nothing to do with the running of Khan at all, except the script. I finally had a meeting with Michael Eisner and told him I thought we were going to have to replace the director and he said, “We can’t fire him, because no one will want to work at Paramount.” I was a director and there was no way I would be a week behind in two or three days. Especially on a film like this one that had so many conditions placed on it because of what happened with the first movie. I just felt that pressure all the time. Needless to say, this didn’t rocket me to the top of Nick’s best buddy list. But I had always tried to just help him; I wanted to get that picture to be the best picture that could be made, and certainly a terrific Star Trek experience. That was my focus. The rest of the stuff was how you got there.
RALPH WINTER
I remember the ending of the movie when we previewed it; the first ending where Spock dies was a downer. It was depressing, and I remember being in Gary Nardino’s office with all the executives. It was Eisner, Katzenberg, Diller, a bunch of people there, and really, that’s where the idea came from for the final shot that was added on the Genesis Planet, actually Golden Gate Park, of discovering the casket and raising the possibility that Spock could return. That ending is what shaped the movie, and when we shot that and previewed it, it made all the difference. It gave you a hopeful ending and it led to another movie.
EDDIE EGAN
That door was not open in the original script. He was gone. But as [Nimoy] worked on the picture and began to enjoy himelf and feel like they were getting back in the groove, he used that to his advantage. He said, “If I go this way and we agree that there’s a possibility that Spock will come back, I’m going to ask for something.” Obviously that was directing the third movie.
The events of The Wrath of Khan culminate with Spock’s attempt to save the Enterprise from destruction, and in the process he is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. Spock’s selfless decision results in the character’s poignant passing. There is, however, an enigmatic moment offered an instant earlier where he uses a Vulcan nerve pinch to render McCoy unconscious, places his hand on the doctor’s face, and utters the ambiguous word “Remember.”
LEONARD NIMOY
I found myself being moved by the scene very early, at about the point where Kirk says to Scott something about you have to get us out of here in three minutes or we’re all dead. You see Spock hear that and react. I’m already feeling emotional about what’s coming. I really came within a hairbreadth of walking off the lot rather than playing the scene. The day we were going to shoot it, I was very edgy about i
t and scared of it. Scared of playing it, almost looking for an excuse not to, finding something to pick an argument about. It was a very tense time. And I still feel that way seeing it. It’s a moving scene and I’m pleased with it in the context of the film. I’m glad we did it. I think we did it well. I think we did it honestly and sincerely.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The question in my mind was not whether Spock died, but whether he died well. His death needed some organic relationship to the rest of the movie, and a plausible connection to whatever else was going on. If we did that, I don’t think anyone would question it. On the other hand, if the movie suddenly turned around a corner on two wheels and “we fulfill Nimoy’s contract by bumping off his character which he has grown tired of playing,” if indeed that was the scenario, which I have never heard, that wouldn’t be so good. That rumor that we were going to have more than one ending, that we were going to let the audience decide … that was all bullshit. Art is not made by committee … and it’s not made by voting.
SUSAN SACKETT
I don’t know if that ending with a suggestion of hope is a cop-out, but it’s something that Gene fought for badly. He did not want to see his character killed off without having any hope. Having his molecules blasted all over the universe would have made it very difficult for him to ever return as that character. Gene created that character and he did not create the demise of that character, and he wanted it so that there would be some way to recall that character when needed, and that was the reason for the open-endedness.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The scenes which were the most difficult, or at least the most wrenching to do, were the death of Spock [sequences]. Everybody stood around the stage in tears, which was very surprising to me because I was not that experienced as a movie director and I was amazed at how moved they were. The next day at the dailies, same thing. Everybody cried. I come from the “less is more” school of thinking. You can have somebody point to something and say “Look at that!” and you don’t have to cut to what he is pointing to. In fact, you can raise considerable tension by not showing the audience what the character sees.