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

by Edward Gross

  STEVE MEERSON

  That’s why she’s standing with Amanda when the Bird of Prey leaves. Because Amanda knows Saavik is carrying Spock’s kid. All they did was cut out five lines of dialogue, and you lost that whole thing.

  PETER KRIKES

  One of the things we had in our earlier drafts that they took out was what happened when they first went through time. Instead of the horrible time sequence that looks like Russian science fiction, we had them using the slingshot effect around Jupiter and Mars. Also, when they first appeared in the twentieth century, they were in a fog, and as they lowered, the monitors picked up all of the cheering and applause. As they come out of the fog, they find themselves over a Super Bowl game and everybody thinks it’s a halftime show. Then, they cloak and disappear.

  STEVE MEERSON

  I like our ending better. Our sequence of events was similar. After the shuttle has picked them up and Earth is saved, we cut to this little chamber where they’re waiting to stand trial. They discuss whether or not they would do everything the same if they could … and they say they would. We cut away to Spock and Sarek, who have that same talk that they had in the movie. It was originally much more bonding, but they removed about half a page of dialogue, which changed things quite a bit.

  PETER KRIKES

  Basically, Sarek was saying, “You’re half human and I’ll never understand that, but I accept you.”

  STEVE MEERSON

  Everyone is confused, saying to the pilot, “Where are you taking us?” That’s when the pod rises and you see the new Enterprise-A. It would have been much more emotional, instead of saying “You’ve been exonerated for this, this, and this,” you could have done it in three sentences, and with everyone cheering, screaming, and yelling, it would have been an emotional high. Harve likes bookends, which is why the film begins with a trial and ends with a trial. That was always a point of contention between the three of us, that you didn’t need to do that sequence again because it would be understood why. You could just take them to the ship so that everyone would be on a high, rather than waiting for it to happen. Structurally, I think they made a mistake.

  PETER KRIKES

  They also took out a scene we wrote which dealt with the people’s mortality and age.

  STEVE MEERSON

  My favorite scene we wrote was between Bones and Scotty, where they talk about the fact that they’re getting too old to be doing this. I personally think they [DeForest Kelley and James Doohan] would have loved to play it. It was two guys sitting on a park bench in Union Square, completely out of time and space, saying, “We’re really getting too old. If we ever do make it back, maybe we ought to give it all up and retire.” Then, they both decided that they’ll never retire, because there’s more to life than sitting on your duff.

  HARVE BENNETT

  I remember saying, “Well, I know it’s corny, but it would be better if the marine biologist was a woman. Kirk hasn’t had a woman to play to, which he does so wonderfully. The whole series is the woman of the week. Remember that whale special we saw where the girl was bidding adieu to the whale who had to leave Marineland because the female was pregnant, and they could not keep them, and they had to send them back to the sea, and she was bereft? That’s the lady.” Leonard thought it was great. So now we’re getting down to where we’ve got a movie to make and whole new script to write. That’s when we were fortunate enough to find that Nicholas Meyer was available.

  NICHOLAS MEYER (cowriter, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)

  The other script, which I never read, involved Eddie Murphy. I got this call from [Paramount executives] Dawn Steel and Ned Tanen who said, “We have a situation, we’re going to start this movie and we just threw out the script and we need your help and it’s your friends.” I remember going to meet with Harve and Leonard and saying, “What is it?” And Leonard said something like, “It’s something nice.” And then they told me the story. And very quickly I could see how it broke down into the bookends in outer space before the journey. And then there’s the middle part on Earth. Harve said, “You write the middle part on Earth and I’ll write the other parts.”

  DONALD PETERMAN (director of photography, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)

  Star Trek always was filmed mostly on a stage before, and they could never use long lenses because it’s impossible to get back far enough. On this one, because we shot in San Francisco, we tried to make it a little different by using really long lenses as much as we could. We tried to stay away from all the cliché places. We used the bridge, because that’s part of establishing the story, and when we shot downtown we showed part of the Transamerica Building, but we didn’t go to Fisherman’s Wharf, we stayed around the gritty parts of the city.

  Leonard was all dressed in his robes and with his ears on, behind the camera directing the cast—and then he’d step into the scene. It’s okay when Robert Redford does it, because he looks like a normal guy, but when you have a guy with long pointed ears, it’s different. The most interesting thing about it is that we finally got the Star Trek stars out on location.

  NICHOLAS MEYER

  When I realized they went to San Francisco, I also thought, “Well, hey, I’ve done this movie before with Time After Time. Couldn’t they go someplace else?” I suggested Paris. And for whatever reason, they said no, they couldn’t go to Paris. Maybe the whales wouldn’t fit in the Seine.

  LEONARD NIMOY

  We were off the soundstages for the first time. The first three pictures were almost exclusively on the soundstages. In Star Trek I, we were off the soundstage for a couple of days, on Star Trek III we were off for a couple of nights for the Vulcan exterior scenes. To get off the soundstages on this one was very invigorating. It gave a lot more energy to me and the cast of the picture. I had a little bit more time. I shot Star Trek III in forty-nine days, and on this one I had fifty-three. Actually, I had fifty-seven—and I came in four days early.

  RALPH WINTER

  Being on the street in San Francisco with Leonard, the famous five corners place, and a couple of others where we had a camera hidden in a van where Chekov was asking innocent bystanders as they came where the nuclear “wessels” are was hilarious when we were shooting it. We had fun doing it.

  DONALD PETERMAN

  We also shot in San Diego for a while on the U.S.S. Ranger, the same aircraft carrier that was used in Top Gun.

  RALPH WINTER

  It was real-world environments that you hadn’t seen, and time travel allowed us to do that. Nick had done Time After Time and so he was particularly sensitive about what you can and can’t do.

  We did some other local locations in L.A. with the transparent aluminum factory and the Apple computer. I wrote that joke for Harve and Leonard. When Scotty picks up the mouse and speaks into it, I said this would be hilarious. They didn’t really understand it, so I wrote a little of that scene. We couldn’t get Apple to play ball with us and donate some computers, but we ended up using the Apple computer anyway. It felt right, the perfect fish out of water from the twenty-third century coming back and not understanding what computers could do. We shot some of the stuff on the ground in Golden Gate Park, which was Will Rogers State Park in Santa Monica.

  EDDIE EGAN

  It was a week and a half or so in San Francisco, and things became very tense there between Leonard and Harve. I don’t actually know what precipated it, but the last month of the production was not a particularly happy time for Leonard. There were things going on in his personal life that were distracting him, and just the size of the production was a little hard for him to wrap his head around sometimes. I don’t know the details, but I do know that at one point Leonard banned Harve from the set.

  RALPH WINTER

  We also did a lot of old-fashioned effects. For the finale, when they’ve returned to the future and crashed in the bay, we opened up the water tank at Paramount to do the storm—which had not been used in decades. We cleared out that parking lot, we swept it, wa
shed it down, and Michael Lantieri, who was brought on to be the special-effects guy who had worked at Imagineering at Disney, developed a track below the water and it would have a hump on it and a tail. He found a twenty- by forty-foot-deep hole in the tank that had never been used. It had been filled up with sand. He was poking around with an iron bar and the bar went through and there’s a very thin asphalt cap on it. When we dug it out, we realized Paramount built that tank in the twenties or thirties and it had tie-downs and everything, so we used that for building sets.

  When Bill goes down underwater to free the whales, that’s really Bill doing a lot of that stuff. We built those sets dry and then we filled them with water. The tank hadn’t been used in years. We had to call Jimmy the plumber out of retirement, because nobody knew how to turn on the pump. It held over a million gallons of water which had to be filtered, heated, and disinfected. In April of ’86, when we were shooting, it was warm outside, so it became the studio swimming pool during lunch hour. The water was only three or four feet deep but a lot people came out and ate their lunch with their feet in the water. We used giant jet fans and fire hoses, smoke machines to create all that fog and put the cast out there in wet suits and hosed them down and created that storm sequence right there. Very old-fashioned filmmaking.

  DONALD PETERMAN

  We had another unit in Hawaii, right off Maui, photographing live whales. There’s a man and his wife there who have a license to allow photography of humpback whales. You have to have a license to get your boat close to them because of the possibility you’re going to ram into one of them or scare them. So we cut above the water and got these shots.

  RALPH WINTER

  It was the first Star Trek movie to really get out on location. We spent more than the third movie, we spent twenty-one million dollars, so we had a bigger budget for some of the things that made it feel large. For instance, we spent over a million dollars on the whales. With particular cetacean experts who knew how whales move, what they look like, what the skin texture was. ILM did such a good job on those whales, those whales went on tour for a year or more around the world to museums because the expertise, the art, and science of what they had done was very good. We had a guy who did the basic research for that and he’d been a leading research guy. He just applied the same kind of discipline to this.

  One of the reasons we think that it really didn’t win visual-effects awards is people didn’t really understand how good it was. We did do some live photography of whales out in the Pacific. We gave Mark Ferrari and his wife, Debbie, a sixteen-millimeter camera and sent him out into the Pacific because he was a researcher, and the federal law says you can’t get within a thousand yards of a humpback whale. It’s against federal guidelines. So Mark knew that, but with the zoom lens they were able to capture some breaching whales where they come out nose first and then they fall on their back and make that big splash. So there’s three shots in the movie of real humpback whales doing that. And that’s what Leonard wanted.

  The remainder of all the whale work in the movie is done in a pool in northern California where they turned off the filter and turned off the pump and put in a very fine dirt that gives it a little more texture. It makes it feel more like you’re in the ocean. Sometimes movies do a bad job of the water being too clear. This wasn’t too clear. The whales were sort of like windup bathtub toys. Slowing that down, overcranking the camera, gave it a majestic quality, and all of these shots were done in a pool.

  We had some federal game-reserve person who came to the studio, and they wanted to screen the movie because they heard there was some violation of the thousand-yard rule. We had a screening and the guy during some of the pool shots said, “I know that is in Hawaii, I know where he shot this.” I shut down the screening. I said, “You’re wrong. That’s in a pool in northern California. If you can’t tell that from the real stuff we can’t trust that you know what you’re talking about.” That really added size and scale to that movie that the previous movies didn’t have, and it was effects in the real world. It wasn’t space effects. That was a big difference that helped contribute to the success of that movie.

  NICHOLAS MEYER

  It was fun in a weird way. This may be my fanciful recollection, but I don’t think I felt a great deal of pressure. The easiest thing for me to do is write dialogue, which is not always what movies are about but, in this case, it was such a no-brainer. It was a comedy and I don’t get to write a lot of comedies.

  HARVE BENNETT

  Nick and I had written the final script of Star Trek II in ten days. This one we wrote in about twenty, and it was very simple to do it that way because I took act one and act three and Nick took act two. Now, if you think about that in structural terms, I got us into the dilemma and into time travel, he carried us through San Francisco, and I got us back. That was like breathing for me, because it’s pure Star Trek. Then we swapped pages and I rewrote him a little bit and he rewrote me a little bit and we put it all together and had a script.

  Nick always said, “You know the problem with this script is you’ve got five endings.” And he was right, we did have five endings. He said, “Why don’t you have the whales save the Earth and let that be the end of the picture?” “No,” I said, “that’s the end of the picture for the hoped-for extended audience who’s never seen Star Trek before. But for people who have seen Star Trek before, we have a trilogy to complete. So, we’ve got to get them back, get them off the hook, and give them the Enterprise back so that when we finish this picture, we have brought the franchise back to square one and it can go anywhere it wants to go. That’s only fair. Besides, that’s what the fans want.” So that’s what we did. We kept every ending.

  NICHOLAS MEYER

  In my version of the script originally, when they all leave to go back, she [Gillian] didn’t leave. She said if anyone’s going to make sure this kind of disaster doesn’t happen, somebody’s going to have to stay behind, which I still think is the “righter” ending. The end in the movie detracts from the importance of people in the present taking responsibility for the ecology and preventing problems of the future by doing something about them today, rather than catering to the fantasy desires of being able to be transported ahead in time to the near-utopian future society of the Star Trek era.

  RALPH WINTER

  We had a great time. The punk on the bus, Kirk Thatcher, was Leonard’s assistant, and Leonard gives him the nerve pinch to quiet him down and the bus cheers. We had a hilarious time with that. And then the so-called music coming out of the boom box was our sound-effects designer Mark Mangini and Kirk Thatcher. The two of them composed this song called “I Hate You” and the name of their group was Edge of Etiquette. We had a lot of fun on the side doing all that stuff.

  CATHERINE HICKS (actress, “Dr. Gillian Taylor”)

  I’m really proud of Star Trek IV, and that’s coming from a non-Trek fan. I must have been on another channel as a kid. I’ve started watching the show since and I’m getting a crush on Spock. But while we were shooting, I deliberately didn’t rent the movies, because I thought I would use my total ignorance of Gillian’s character. She doesn’t know what’s going on either.

  DeFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy”)

  I have always felt from the very beginning that the core of Star Trek was the family. It was always this group of people who were working in this bizarre-type world together. That’s what made the show successful. One of the greatest mistakes in the first motion picture was that they neglected the people.

  CATHERINE HICKS

  I loved her line “I have no one here,” before she jumps into the transporter beam. I don’t know why, it just touches me. It’s poignant and sad. At the time I didn’t know it, but seeing the film I realized that was my favorite line. My favorite moment, even though I’m not playing it, is when William Shatner as Kirk quotes D. H. Lawrence. Something comes across the ages. It’s such a surprise that this man knows that—it makes us kindred s
pirits for one second.

  WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)

  I loved the script. I read it in Harve Bennett’s office and I chuckled and I said this is wonderful, and it was the only time that I really felt confident that I knew what I was talking about. I didn’t see how it could miss. What great fun. It seemed to have everything for mass entertainment approval. For the first time, I felt my dialogue was indigenous to character and only Chekov could say those lines; they were written for him. We had a big crossover audience which accounts for the $109 million domestic that we did. It had wonderful comedy moments, and the scene between Bill and Leonard and Catherine Hicks in the truck is classic. It’s spontaneously done even though it may have been shot four or five times—the anachronisms of being three hundred years out of time just worked beautifully as far as I was concerned.

  DAVID A. GOODMAN (executive producer, Family Guy)

  The cast is at the top of their game in that movie, they’ve never been better. Especially Shatner and Nimoy, so that’s really what you’re enjoying. The comedy still works for me, and there’s a moment where Spock mind-melds with the whale. You buy that he’s actually talking to a whale and the whale understands. That’s also the magic of Star Trek, you believe in it, you believe in him and it works. It’s those little details that make the movie stand above the others in a lot of ways.

  LUKAS KENDALL (editor, Film Score Monthly)

  The most unusual Star Trek movie score is Leonard Rosenman’s for Star Trek IV; Rosenman and Nimoy were good friends. I remember, as a kid, thinking, “Why is there Christmas music in Star Trek?” But it captures the spirit of the movie—that was the first time that Star Trek was acknowledged as meaningful American pop culture, not just some goofy TV show. It remains the last Star Trek score to be nominated for an Oscar.

  JOE KRAEMER (composer, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation)