by Edward Gross
For example, once Spock enters the reactor room I deliberately didn’t cut back to him for a long time. After hearing “You can’t go in there, you can’t go…” you gotta be wondering, “What’s happening to him?” You want to see what’s going on there. It’s a matter of choice, of taste. I would rather underplay and let the audience’s imagination rise to meet something halfway. From what I’ve seen of the series, I tend to think they overacted or showed too much. My attitude has changed perceptibly. I don’t know whether it was the actors themselves or the characters, but I finally thought, when I was watching the death scene and I realized that I was choking up, I thought, well, we have now transcended the subject matter. This is no longer simply about a man with pointy ears … which is how I felt because I didn’t know it that well.
HARVE BENNETT
We went to the mat only when I said that as keeper of the franchise, I have to give people an ambiguous hope. Nick said, “No, the opera is over, the fat lady has sung, and Carmen is dead.” I think he was wrong. There wouldn’t have been a Star Trek III or IV, which were pretty good pictures. Spock was a secret weapon. He is the pivot, the true uniqueness of the show.
WILLIAM SHATNER
I don’t know whether the Star Trek series could have gone on without Spock. It certainly would have been different and probably not as good. The Spock–Kirk interrelationship is really the key to so much for the way the stories are told.
HARVE BENNETT
I’m the guy who brought the Bionic Woman back to life after she was dead, dead, dead, so I’m an old hand at how you can change course if everybody wants you to. In fact, it would be fair to say that no matter how big the stories of Star Trek, the fact remains it is still a series. It is a continuing adventure with the same characters and has the matrix and nature of a television series, which is that the characters have to keep coming back and you have to keep making them fresh by exploring new avenues of their lives. That’s the tough part of making series-oriented material.
ROBERT SALLIN
One of the major conflicts Nick and I had in the making of the picture was the whole idea of planting the seed that Spock might come back. It was not in the original script, that idea of going back to the planet. Nick hated the idea, but the studio wanted it because they were getting so much flak about killing Spock.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I fought very hard to make him dead, and the shots that imply a resurrection—the vision of the casket on the Genesis Planet—were done over my dead body, with my enormous objection. I objected so strenuously, and went to such lengths, that a producer on the film referred to me as morally bankrupt. He said, “You’d walk over your mother to get this the way you wanted,” and I said, “You know, I think you’re right. I don’t believe you can bring a dead person back to life.” Having seen Star Trek III, I still don’t believe it. But okay, he’s back, Leonard is back and since it’s Leonard, I’m happy.
HARVE BENNETT
The last weeks of Star Trek II were frenetic because of an organized campaign: Don’t Kill Spock! And the studio panicked that this would affect the box office. Nick Meyer was steadfastly going to walk off the picture. He said that we said we would kill him, so we’re going to kill him. Leonard was getting threatening letters. This was a serious thing, and I felt that the compromise we had to make was that we made an ambiguity out of the ending by saying, “There are always possibilities.”
RONALD D. MOORE
It totally choked me up. I was there with my high-school sweetheart and we got out and I was very quiet, and I was crying and she was, too, and we couldn’t believe it had happened. We couldn’t believe they’d done it, and it was beautifully done, and I kind of knew they were probably going to bring him back but at that point I didn’t want them to. When they announced the title of the third one, I was kind of disappointed. I love the character, but I just felt like it was taking something away from this experience that I’d just had, that had touched me and moved me really deeply, because I loved the characters and I loved him and I loved Kirk. I felt the pain of that loss and what that meant, it really affected me, and then in the very next movie they were going to wipe it away. I felt like it was taking something from me rather than giving something back. It was a cheat, and one of the things I thought when I saw Wrath of Khan originally was how bold it was not to cheat, how bold it was to actually kill one of these characters and to make it stick and not have them wave a magic wand like they did on the TV series and have Bones or someone come back at the end. So I was really kind of bummed that they weren’t going to stick with it and keep going and deal with the consequences in the Star Trek universe.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Bringing back somebody from the dead loses validity. I think that as a dramatic device a time warp does the same thing for me. To go back in time is to rob you of the essential jeopardy. It should be life and death and if it’s death, it should be death.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The only other run-ins I had with the studio were over the title. The title of the movie was The Undiscovered Country. And they wanted to change it to The Vengeance of Khan. I knew that wasn’t going to work because George Lucas was doing a movie at the time called Revenge of the Jedi. And we wound up where we wound up.
GENE RODDENBERRY
It was an exciting picture. I had many problems with it, though. They were very lucky they had the actor they did in Ricardo Montalban to play Khan since it was not a well-written part. “I will chase you through the moons of Jupiter” and so on. In the hands of almost any other actor, it would have gotten snickers from the audience. Montalban saved their ass. Khan was not written as that exciting a character, he was rather flimsy. The Khan in the TV episode was a much deeper and better character than the movie Khan, except that Montalban pulled it off.
HARVE BENNETT
Gene is a remarkable visionary and a very bad supervisor of other writers. He alienated some really creative people who were doing their very best to make his show a hit. That’s the summation of what my perspective is. I had very little to do with him in the movies, because I was fortunate enough to have a mandate from Paramount to not pay any attention to him, which is easier said than done because he is a master manipulator of a loyal and large following. It’s like the Bolshevik party. It isn’t that there were so many of them, it’s that they were so smart and so vociferous.
In a September 29, 1981, memo to Bennett, Roddenberry expressed a bit of frustration over the situation between them: “You have never requested nor even made it possible for me to act in any way as ‘Executive Consultant’ on this movie. Or even as ‘Infrequent Advisor.’ You did not ask my comments on the story … neither did you ask for my comments on the writer selected; we never discussed director other than your calling me the day before his name was announced. Although I may have sometimes wondered if you could not have profited from at least some of my experience, I am neither embarrassed [nor] annoyed over the way you clearly preferred for it to be. You are the man running the Star Trek II movie and I accept your right to run it your way.”
While he felt that certain criticisms of the script were “fairly unimportant,” there was a concern that certain philosophical tenets of Star Trek be maintained, particularly where it came to celebrating the differences between species rather than seeing them as a detriment. “If Star Trek slides into becoming just a routine ‘space battle show’ (an SF form which the critics now consider ‘tiresome’), then I have no doubt but that Star Trek will slide downhill rapidly. In this case, I am doubly concerned because I have an interest in this property remaining valuable. However, there are some areas of script comment which I consider the most important of all—examples of these are things like Star Trek’s avoiding the use of violence in story solutions, maintaining the importance of the Prime Directive, continuing our reminders that to be different does not mean that something is ugly or to think differently does not mean that someone is necessarily wrong. It seems to me that there is s
omething very decent and very necessary in saying such things to people, especially today.”
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
The studio would only do it on their terms. Gene was between a rock and a hard spot. Either he does it according to their liking, which is to take the check, and smile, and be a friendly consultant, or it doesn’t get done. So I think Gene made the right decision. It was not easy for him. Couldn’t have been tougher. He handled it well. As well as he possibly could. Harve kept Gene in the loop as much as possible. Gene’s office was just a stone’s throw away from ours. We didn’t see a lot of him once the movie was shooting.
HARVE BENNETT
One thing about Roddenberry: as he aged, he somehow became disassociated with the very thing he wanted the show to be. For example, his concept was nautical, the officers are addressed as “mister,” a naval tradition. There’s a captain, tactical officer, gunnery officer, all that stuff. Engineering is below, and he, in his words, described Star Trek as Horatio Hornblower in space. Okay. Makes enormous sense. And Kirk is Hornblower. Now we start, and from the first outline in addition to the leakage, he whined and complained that we were making a militaristic show. It was frustrating. The studio promised, “We’ll handle him, don’t worry about Gene, we’ll handle him.” Ha! I would call occasionally and I would say, “Hey, you guys said…” and they’d say, “You’re doing fine. See you later!” So it did fall on me to respond to his long, haranguing memos. Once in a while he’d pop in an idea, in a long haranguing memo, and we’d use it. And we’d thank him for it. But essentially he was our opponent in so many ways.
RALPH WINTER
It was clear from people like Leonard and Bill Shatner, when they dedicated the Gene Roddenberry building, that they were going to talk about people like Harve Bennett and Gene Coon, who have made this thing successful. There were so many times when there were problems and someone didn’t know how we would get by, and it would fall on Harve to solve it. Harve is absolutely the unheralded guy to save the series of films.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The history of human endeavor has frequently [been] comprised of certain institutions which are based on two archetypes. There’s a guy who comes along and, with a certain kind of messianic fortitude and charisma, conjures up a universe out of nothing, hot air, if you’ll pardon the expression. He makes it happen. Usually, he never stays around to run it.
The task is always turned over to a can-do type who is distinctly lacking in messianic qualities, but is a very good organizer. Jesus Christ presumably founded the Christian faith. But it seems like it was either Peter or Paul who got the thing rolling as a business. Star Trek would not have existed without Roddenberry. There’s no question about that. I have no wish in any shape or form to detract from the magnitude of his accomplishments, but I also think that nothing can stay the same forever. For things to grow, there have to be these Joshua types, of which I suppose I am one, who pick up the burden and carry it. Maybe we carry it clumsily … or in the wrong direction … but we fucking carry it.
RALPH WINTER
Gene kept sabotaging us. It was too bad. I remember a fight on the second movie; Nick wanted David Marcus to wear a sweater over his shoulder, wrapped in the fashion of the time. Backward over his neck. Roddenberry hated that. Nick also had a “No Smoking” sign on the bridge of the Enterprise. And he and Roddenberry went round and round about no smoking because, Roddenberry said, “No one is going to smoke in the twenty-third century.” And Nick said, “People have been smoking for hundreds of years and they will for hundreds of years.” And they were at it on the set. They were arguing and yelling, it was bizarre. But that was part of Gene’s view of the future and utopia and what he believed.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I also objected to other little things. Remember when the eel came out of Chekov’s ear? What did Kirk do? He had a look of disgust on his face and grabbed his phaser and went “zap.” Now, how dare he destroy a life-form that had never been seen before! It needs studying. They had him act like an old woman trampling on a tarantula. Now that’s not the Kirk we built up for three years. So many of those fine little things in the episodes, hundreds of them, are what gave Star Trek its quality. Unfortunately, they began doing those things incorrectly in that movie. There was also a great deal of violence. But yet, it was exciting—exciting photographically. I’m grateful that it did what it did.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN
Gene did have the most interesting group of friends that showed up at the set. Buzz Aldrin was a trip. Unfortunately he showed up on a day when they were throwing fireballs on Star Trek II and the fire marshal had the set closed down. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t go to set. I said, “Fire marshals have it closed. Come back tomorrow.” And he literally said, “Don’t you know who I am?” So, I started laughing and said, “You’ll burn up like the next one.” But Gene was always in contact with people at JPL. He really had a sense of staying in touch with scientists and keeping apprised of that stuff and so we would have people like Aldrin show up that were guests of Gene’s.
For Star Trek II, the film’s diminished budget made it impossible to rehire composer Jerry Goldsmith (an Academy Award nominee for Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Instead, Meyer and Sallin took a chance on a relative newcomer, James Horner, whose films at the time largely consisted of low-budget sci-fi for horror-meister Roger Corman, including Humanoids from the Deep and Battle Beyond the Stars.
ROBERT SALLIN
I went to Joel Sill, who was the music person at the studio. I said, “Joel, I’d like to listen to some tapes. What I don’t want is musical wallpaper. I want someone who’s young, who is eager for this, and somebody who is technically accomplished. I don’t want that stuff I hear on television.” He gave me twenty-five or thirty tapes that I took home and listened to every single one. There were some big names there, too, by the way. I heard this one and I came back and said, “This is my guy.” He smiled and said, “I’m so glad. I’ve been trying to get him in here for years.” His name was James Horner.
JAMES HORNER (composer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
I felt it was very important musically to bring the audience back to ground zero, as it were. There are certain givens: the Enterprise is a given, Kirk is a given, Spock is a given, Uhura is a given, and the fanfare theme, that theme is a given. I felt I was fighting an instinct not to use it, and I thought it would be very interesting to use it. I talked it over with Harve [Bennett] and we all agreed it would be good to use it. I remember when audiences first heard the music and heard the whole buildup in the main titles, and they went crazy. They were cheering. I chose to use it in a very haunting way when Spock dies. I just wanted “Spock’s Theme” and the Star Trek theme and all my themes to be playing simultaneously there. That was a very emotional section.
ALEXANDER COURAGE (composer, Star Trek)
James Horner has used it here and there, pieces of the fanfare and all that, because he was told to. It’s that simple. I know a lot of people around town and I go into the store and they know I have written it and they say, “Are they going to use your theme in the picture?” I say, “Well, I guess so,” and they say, “They’d better!” So that’s generally the way it seems to have worked.
JAMES HORNER
When I was asked to do Star Trek II, I made a promise to Harve Bennett. He asked me to do number three, if and when it was made. I made that promise to him and it was a promise I kept. I have mixed feelings about doing large orchestral scores. It’s great for the ego, but artistically, it’s not that fulfilling. As soon as you try and bend the producer and try to get him to take some chances, they get very nervous because it’s so expensive. The recording session for Star Trek was upward of four hundred thousand dollars when you had a ninety-piece orchestra for six days.
JOE KRAEMER (composer, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation)
I’d also heard Elmer Bernstein was first hired to score Trek II, but left after he saw a rough cut, and it was at t
his point Horner was brought on board. Horner certainly capitalized on the opportunity—I think his score for II is the high point of his career.
LUKAS KENDALL (editor, Film Score Monthly)
Want some real trivia? Two major film composers have made cameos in Star Trek. James Horner is a crewman holding a vacuum cleaner in Star Trek II. And in the original series, Basil Poledouris is a security guard (“Obsession”), Klingon (“Errand of Mercy”), and Nazi soldier (“Patterns of Force”). Basil was a film student at USC and he and his friends used to be Hollywood extras.
NICHOLAS MEYER
When it came time to do the DVD version of the movie or the television version or whatever it is, the studio loses all interest in it and you get to do what you want. I had a movie that worked really well by this time, and the public and critical reception of the movie had already established that, so the question was, do I really want to do a so-called director’s cut, and the answer was no.
But I did have a couple of issues where they had made a mistake. It was battles that I had lost at the time. And one of them was the whole notion that Scotty’s nephew was killed in the engine room explosion and that’s why he’s so flipped out. And I just put it back in. But there weren’t a lot of those. There weren’t enough of them to say this is the director’s cut. I just thought that’s a gyp, trying to get people to spend more money to buy it again.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Scotty stands there … he holds the body of Midshipman Preston. Why has he come to the bridge instead of taking the injured man to sick bay? Starship personnel, even distraught uncles, should react at least as logically as twentieth-century sailors.
