The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, Volume 1

by Edward Gross

  WALTER KOENIG

  I felt it was too similar to Star Trek II in terms of the major conflict. The bad guys wanted the bomb and we are trying to keep them away from it. It lacked a soul and a real emotional center, and it was not as good a story as Star Trek II. The one thing that was the saving grace of the picture was the destruction of the Enterprise.

  As with every film, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock encompassed a wide range of production challenges, many of which were met and others that were … attempted. Like its predecessors, the film was shot on soundstages rather than on location.

  LEONARD NIMOY

  The shooting began on August 15, 1983. It was forty-nine days of shooting during which the biggest problem I had was lack of sleep. I went to bed at nine o’clock or nine-thirty, set the alarm for five o’clock or five-thirty, and would be up at three o’clock, the head going with ideas. I was just so supercharged and wired. It was a constant tiredness of the best kind.

  HARVE BENNETT

  Nimoy is three yards and a cloud of dust. Fundamental. Here’s the camera—shoot a movie. Willy Wyler shot like that. It works when the actors are working well, and the Trek family adored Leonard.

  CHARLES CORRELL (director of photography, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock)

  Originally, when we were in preproduction on this picture, I was opposed to doing all the interiors inside on stages. Unless you really work hard and are able to control everything, things can take on a kind of phony look. I thought that we should go to the island of Kauai to do the Genesis Planet. The other shots that concerned me were of Vulcan. My original feelings were that I wanted to take those scenes out to Red Rock Canyon just above the Mojave and really shoot at sunrise. In the early days of Star Trek everything they did was inside on stages.

  Most of Trek I and II were also done on stages. The producer, Harve Bennett, and the director, Leonard Nimoy, decided to stay with that format. Most every film shot today is done on locations. It isn’t often that you get to do a whole show where they use massive stages and huge sets. The Genesis Planet was on Stage 15 at Paramount—probably one of the largest stages in Hollywood. Because it had to literally collapse in places during the earthquake, it was built sixteen feet off the floor. The main part of the floor was rigged so that rocks would shoot up out of the ground. They were on catapults. Trees were rigged to fall and start fires. The ground would belch. It was massive, and Bob Dawson, our special-effects supervisor, did a great job. He must have had twenty or thirty people on the set the days we shot the planet destruction.

  KEN RALSTON

  One thing that is tough about Trek movies—some of the shots are so long, almost endless. Not at all like Star Wars where everything is ten frames long and you can get away with murder on some shots. Trek shots hang on for a long time and the mistakes show up a lot more. You have to take a little more care with the effects aspect of it.

  CHARLES CORRELL

  I took a look at a lot of the old shows that were shot by Gerald Finnerman, and I noticed that they created a science-fiction feeling in those days by incorporating a great deal of color. Sometimes there was a purple feeling in places or they would use a red gel or blue or orange. They utilized the color and that gave the shows a real sci-fi touch. Then I looked at the two features that preceded this one. They both had their own flavors, but I thought that there was something about the original show that wasn’t in either of these features. That touch of color or the overuse of color is what is missing.

  LEONARD NIMOY

  There is no question in directing yourself that you need help. [Harve Bennett, William Shatner, director of photography Charles Correll, and others] are people off camera I’ve come to trust. I cannot emphasize enough that you don’t make these pictures alone. You sure need an awful lot of talented support. In some cases, there is simply the fact that there are things going on behind you that you cannot see as an actor.

  The biggest problem I had, and this is really silly, but it happens that it was the scene in the sick bay of the Bird of Prey. Spock is unconscious and McCoy is talking to him. Now, not only am I in the scene but I have to play the scene with my eyes closed. So I can’t even look to see if the actor I am playing the scene with is looking anything like I think he should look. It drove De Kelley crazy. He swears that I was trying to direct him with the movement and flutter of my eyelids. It was very difficult. In a sense, I was very pleased and relieved that the design of the story allowed me to do a minimal amount of performing.

  HARVE BENNETT

  Next time you see the film, there is a scene during the stealing [of] the Enterprise sequence when civilian clothes are seen for the first time. The first time you see Chekov, well, we didn’t see his costume objectively next to Kirk’s macho jacket and Bones’s marvelous pants. But all of a sudden we see Chekov onstage and he has this great Little Lord Fauntleroy white collar. We got by it without reshooting the day with a series of clever cheats. We got a new collar, picked up close-ups on the black turtleneck for the rest of the picture. But he still has it in the master shot. Bob Fletcher, our costume designer, did Bones from his Georgia background, Kirk from his admiration of naval flyers and stuff like that. This was supposed to be Chekov’s admiration—get this—of the poet Pushkin. Now that’s a fine hobby for a Russian space person to have, but Pushkin is always drawn in his great Byronic collar from that period and it looks darn silly. So that one shot with the collar still exists.

  WALTER KOENIG

  That little pink suit [I was wearing] was interesting because I thought it was kind of ridiculous looking. Robert Fletcher patterned it after some Russian artist who dressed that way. We had shot some footage with it and Michael Eisner looked at the dailies and said he didn’t like it and Leonard came up to me and said, “We’re going to take you out of the costume.” I said, “Thank God,” and he said, “Why didn’t you say something?” I was a little bit irritated, thinking, “Why the hell didn’t I say anything?” It was because I was so into this mind-set that I was just the hired help and had no input. It never occurred to me that I might say, “I don’t like this” and that’s probably my fault.

  JAMES HORNER (composer, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock)

  I was involved with Harve just about every day, as I was with Leonard. He had a lot of input into the score. Leonard and I met on several occasions and had multiple conversations. The things he said he liked best about Star Trek was the romantic, beautiful music; the sensitive stuff in Star Trek II, not the big, bombastic stuff, and this is exactly the stuff in Star Trek II that I liked the best. So the whole score for Star Trek III is exactly that. It was much more romantic and much more wistful and sweeping than Star Trek II was.

  Star Trek III is a sensitivity epic. It was much more of a character film. There are a lot of action sequences in it that are wonderful. My score for Star Trek III is so much better than Star Trek II. It’s just so much more elegant. It’s a completely different type of film and the whole mood the score portrays is one of searching and emotionalism as opposed to the rather heroic, bombastic Star Trek II.

  Obviously the film is called The Search for Spock, so I used Spock’s theme somewhat. I used the theme of the Enterprise and Kirk’s theme. That’s the thing, when you have a film that’s an ongoing series and you have the same characters. You are basically committed. That was something I was aware of when I was writing Star Trek II. I was writing in the view that I will have to reuse themes in Star Trek III.

  DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

  The best thing about III was Dame Judith Anderson as a Vulcan priestess. Everybody loved Dame Judy and that was the second time I met her. I first met her when I was a college student and she was doing Hamlet. It was a very obscure thing and she toured the college circuit and was magnificent. Years later they cast her in this and what a damn treat. There’s actually a photograph of me sitting in her chair on the set because the back of the chair said, “High Priestess.” It was the perfect place for me to park my keister.<
br />
  LEONARD NIMOY

  In the editing process, specifically, the most interesting challenge was how to tell the story and in what sequence. Having seen it on the screen in its rough-cut form, we all came to the conclusion that there was something about the juxtaposition, scene to scene, idea to idea, character to character; it wasn’t quite in its proper order. The jigsaw puzzle hadn’t quite fallen into place. Gradually we worked our way toward it and discovered what the picture turned out to be. The flow just didn’t want to come to life until we repositioned certain of the opening scenes. For example, what we came to call the caper, which was the gathering of the samurai to steal the Enterprise. In its original form, it was scattered in pieces through the first third of the film and they were all wonderful, fun pieces. But somehow, when you cut away from each of the happenings, it was always as though the fun was being interrupted. When you get back to it, you have to get geared up to have fun again. And suddenly that little piece would be over and you were being interrupted and taken away from the story again.

  The one major reconstruction that took place in editing was to put much, if not all, that caper together as a piece so that once we start with the idea of Bill Shatner walking up and saying, “The answer is no, I am therefore going anyway,” it starts.

  Production was temporarily halted when a fire swept through several soundstages on the Paramount lot, damaging part of the Genesis cave soundstage, but it was quickly extinguished. The press latched onto a story in which William Shatner, brandishing a hose, helped douse the fire. Director of photography Charles Correll mused at the time that he wished the stage had burnt down so they could have shot the scenes on location in Hawaii instead, as he had lobbied for, rather than a soundstage.

  DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

  It wasn’t a joy to shoot. Right down to the fire on the set. There were a couple of fires at Paramount that seemed convenient. At Paramount, it’s old timber. Very flammable. There was a Western Street at one point and then there was a fire and then there was no Western Street. There was a point in time when there were two or three fires back to back. And the one that was threatening our stage was the second or third fire. The Angie stage went up right after the wrap party. One fire threatened one of the Star Trek sets, which was pretty frightening. The firemen were great because Paramount is such a tinderbox they were there in a heartbeat. If that fire had taken out that stage, that would have been a very expensive blow to Star Trek III. There were news cameras around and at one point I’m watching TV and there’s Shatner in the midst of the firemen. I think he actually was holding a water hose.

  RALPH WINTER

  Stage 15 burned on that movie. Shatner was there on the news and helped put it out. It wasn’t staged, but Bill was not helping with the garden hose. It was a very hot fire and it burned right to the ground. Years of lead paint, which was toxic.

  SUSAN SACKETT

  It had no effect at all upon the filming of Star Trek III. It turned into a nice [piece of] publicity for William Shatner, who was shown, fire hose in hand, saving Paramount single-handedly.

  EDDIE EGAN

  I don’t think a fire department would let an actor wearing a polyester uniform man a hose during a major fire.

  While not the critical darling that Wrath of Khan had been, The Search for Spock had a comparable box-office gross, much to the delight of the studio. Outside of the destruction of the Enterprise, the fans were certainly pleased—though perhaps not as pleased as most of the participants.

  WALTER KOENIG

  After III, I was looking forward to working with Leonard Nimoy on IV and that turned out to be a very nice experience as well.

  LEONARD NIMOY

  I wasn’t making a personal statement. The major theme in this film is about friendship. What should a person do to help a friend? How deeply should a friendship commitment go? What price should people be willing to pay? And what sacrifice, what obstacles, will these people endure? That’s the emotion line of the film. For me, that’s its reason for existence.

  HARVE BENNETT

  For me, this movie is about honor and friendship and decency and values higher than the complex value system we have inherited since the atomic age. It’s a return to innocence.

  DeFOREST KELLEY

  I enjoyed watching Star Trek III more than I did Star Trek II. This one comes closer to the TV series than the others. I have had full confidence that Leonard could direct Star Trek, or for that matter, anything he wanted to had he been given the opportunity. Leonard is the kind of director who will accept input from you because he knows that we know and feel certain things about our characters.

  DAVID GERROLD

  Star Trek III is a dreadful movie. There’s no story there. It’s still a wonderful picture because the characters are so wonderful, the scenes are so wonderful, and it’s crisply directed. You don’t care how bad the story is. You go and look at the first three films, and the stories are all silly, and the pictures are all wonderful because the characters are good.

  DAVID A. GOODMAN (consulting producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)

  Nimoy’s direction is very amateur and TV-ish and he doesn’t really create a world. But on the flipside of it, you have three ships in that movie that have been in all the incarnations of Star Trek. It’s a testimony to Industrial Light and Magic that the work they did on that is so amazing: the Bird of Prey, the Excelsior, and the science vessel. The work that was done on a low budget was so good that lesser people have relied on that work for years—which says something about the level of work that was going on. I thought Christopher Lloyd didn’t feel like a Klingon to me and I loved that his dog is terrible, but I’ve still watched it dozens of times.

  DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

  Leonard’s a good director. I think he did a better job outside of Star Trek than in. He did a really good job directing Three Men and A Baby.

  EDDIE EGAN

  It looks more like a TV movie than the first film did, which was just a result of Paramount trying to squeeze as much as they could out of this thing that was printing money for them. It certainly suffers from budget restrictions, whereas Nicholas Meyer found ways to work around that.

  If you look at Star Trek II, they were very smart about how they did things, minus a few places like the Genesis Cave and that horrendous effect when you finally see it. That was redone at the last moment when the head of Paramount saw it and refused to let the picture be released that way.

  FRED DEKKER (consulting producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)

  The plotting, the mission, the character work, it felt very much like a continuation of The Wrath of Khan, which is a movie where I feel like every decision was the right one. Search for Spock was emotionally and tonally and storywise just a continuation of it, so I ate it up with a spoon. I’ve also come to the conclusion that Star Trek II doesn’t work as well if you haven’t spent hundreds of man-hours with these characters like I have. Eventually, I want to show it to my wife, to my kids, to my grandson. But unless you’ve spent a lot of time with Spock being Spock, his death is probably not going to have a huge impact on you. If you have, it’s devastating as much as it is with any human.

  LEONARD NIMOY

  On Star Trek III, I felt that film was really about camaraderie. It was about commitment to friendship and loyalty amongst a band of people. During the course of the designing and framing of it, I kept saying to Charlie Correll, who filmed it, that I wanted it operatic. I wanted fire, storms, great passions. This is not just about life, it’s about commitment, personal need, and demands. Richard Schickel in Time magazine said, among other things, that was the first space opera really worthy of the name. I was so happy to see that, because I had really been talking Wagner—Sturm und Drang.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  The best moment for me in Wrath of Khan outside of the action and Spock’s death is when David goes into Kirk’s quarters and Kirk says, “I poured myself a drink, would you like one?” And David’s voice is shaking and he goes, “I�
�m proud to be your son.” He hugs him. It’s a great moment. Or the scene when they’re on Regula and Kirk goes, “How am I feeling? Old.” What happened? The problem with Star Trek II to Star Trek III is at the end of Star Trek II, Kirk is rejuvenated. He feels young. The beginning of Star Trek III, he’s depressed again. It’s so somber for the first twenty or thirty minutes until they steal the Enterprise, which was fun. It’s the best scene in the movie.

  DAVID A. GOODMAN

  Stealing the Enterprise is one of my favorite sequences in any of the movies. I wish it actually was longer. That’s a movie in and of itself.

  RONALD D. MOORE (writer, Star Trek: First Contact)

  I liked that they were advancing the story and characters in what became a trilogy, which is really unique in a movie franchise property. They had really taken the characters on a journey and moved them forward and changed them. It broke my heart that they destroyed the Enterprise … that was almost as hard as Spock’s death. Because I was still connected to the idea that it was the original ship, which had been overhauled and it was still the five-year-mission ship. That meant a lot to me, so when it was destroyed, it was a great loss. Part of my childhood went with it. They get it back, but it was never the same. That ship was gone. There were other ships called Enterprise, but the emotional connection that it was the original ship was missing after that.

  RALPH WINTER

  We tried to make sure there was actually meaning and value in what the story and journey was about. That was important, particularly to Harve, who was our caretaker and anchor in all things Star Trek. We also did this in III with the creation of the Klingon language. It was actually a friend of Harve’s, Marc Okrand, who was doing subtitles for ABC. He was doing the live closed-caption stuff. We instructed him on how to develop that Klingon language and he went on to do The Klingon Dictionary. They quote all that made-up language now on The Big Bang Theory. It all started with Marc Okrand and Harve Bennett.