by Edward Gross
I love the Star Trek IV score. I think it is a worthy heir to the music written for many of the original series’ lighter episodes, such as “Shore Leave” and “The Trouble with Tribbles.” From the opening trumpet statement of Courage’s fanfare, to the militaristic main theme, to the quasi-baroque B-theme for the whales, with its contrapuntal descending lines, I find the score inventive, and most important, fun! It’s pretty much the only Trek feature-film score you can honestly say is fun. I love the Russian theme for Chekov’s escape from the navy ship Enterprise, and the jaunty romp for the sequence where they break out of the hospital. I also find the use of Courage’s theme on the reveal of the Enterprise-A at the end one of the best quotes of the original music in the film series. Even the somewhat dated use of the eighties jazz-fusion band Yellowjackets for the Market Street sequence in San Francisco has its charms.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
The only thing I don’t like about Star Trek IV is Leonard Rosenman’s score. It’s too bad they couldn’t have James Horner back to complete the trilogy. It’s too fantastical. I don’t have anything from that score on my iPod.
JOE KRAEMER
It’s very much the redheaded stepchild of the film scores, and I’ve never been able to figure out why. The score for IV is almost completely devoid of the dark galactic musical explorations of Goldsmith’s contributions, the obsessive intensity of Horner’s scores, or the overwhelming sense of dread in Eidelman’s score for VI. Instead, Rosenman constructed a more traditional score that pays homage to the series’ sixties TV roots with its stacked brass pyramids and delightful woodwind melodies—compare Chekov’s Russian music in this film to Finnegan’s Irish music in “Shore Leave.”
PETER KRIKES
The experience was a real roller coaster for us, but it was the most successful in the series. That’s a wonderful feeling.
STEVE MEERSON
We were both delighted that we were a part of something that will go on forever, and I also think it said some things that needed to be said. There are some important messages there, and being allowed to have that forum was very exciting. It’s hard for me to say this, but it was worth all the aggravation.
RALPH WINTER
The movies endure. I’ve spoken to elementary schools about what I do and when they read off some of the credits, the kids get excited about The Voyage Home. It reminds me that those kids weren’t even thought of when we made the movie, and yet they can still enjoy what the movie is about today. It’s the lasting effect of what we do as storytellers.
LEONARD NIMOY
The feeling on the first film was that we had to do a “motion picture.” Nick Meyer brought a jauntiness back to it. I tried in Star Trek III to do a dignified job of resurrection, and do it with a sense of mysticism, a sense of wonder and, above all, to really capture the loyalty of these people for each other; their willingness to sacrifice themselves and their careers for the purpose of helping Spock. Having done that, I really wanted to have a good time. Somebody had been constantly dying in the films, and this time I said, “Nobody’s going to die. I don’t want anybody hitting anybody” or any of that stuff. If anybody was going to be injured, it was going to be accidental. I insisted that there be no bad guy. We had done two pictures in a row with black-hat heavies, and I didn’t want a bad guy anywhere. Circumstances would be the problem. Lack of awareness, lack of concern. Ignorance would be the problem. Not a person. With this one we’ve really gone full circle and come home, which is why, in a sense, we called it The Voyage Home. We’re saying, “Enjoy yourself, have a good time, and don’t mind us as we drop off a few ideas along the way.”
GOD COMPLEX
“WHAT DOES GOD NEED WITH A STARSHIP?”
Given the box-office success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, anticipation was high for its June 9, 1989, follow-up. With William Shatner availing himself of the so-called favored-nations clause in his Paramount deal—guaranteeing him anything Leonard Nimoy contractually gets and vice versa—he was ready to take the helm of the newest voyage of the Enterprise as director. Additionally, he tasked himself (as was his contractual right) to develop the story line for the film alongside producer Harve Bennett.
Unfortunately, despite the lofty aspirations of everyone involved, Star Trek V was reviled by fans and greeted by critical brickbats upon its release, much of it attributable to the subpar visual effects provided by Associates & Ferren, along with studio-mandated humor to “lighten up” the rather dour proceedings in the hopes of duplicating Star Trek IV’s incredible box-office success.
With a lackluster domestic gross of only $52,210,000, The Final Frontier’s title almost proved prophetic for the future of the original motion-picture franchise.
RALPH WINTER (executive producer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
All the years working on the Star Trek movies were terrific. It was very enjoyable and good people. We had fun. We had challenges like any movies, but it was sort of can’t-do-anything-wrong years. But Star Trek V almost killed the franchise. There were so many problems with that movie. It just didn’t resonate with the audience and Larry Luckinbill, who played Sybok, is a great actor, but it all came off a little too operatic and a little too interior. There wasn’t a bad guy to battle who seemed to be as strong. It seemed to be a remake of a TV show, and the audience responded that way.
HARVE BENNETT (producer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
I would say the Star Trek trilogy probably stands because of its centering on the life, death, and resurrection of Spock. This film is continuous only in the sense of time. What we are trying to do in each picture is explore other angles and other undiscovered depths of these very legendary and familiar characters. And that’s not too easy, because you reach a point where you say, “How much more can we explore these people?” But remember, these people are also aging, which they did not do in the series. So as they age, they are revealing more and more of their back- and foreground stories. That’s where the challenge is for me: to try to keep mining these relationships.
Star Trek V also has with it an imperative of going back to deep space. Star Trek II, III, and IV were all, to some extent, manageable in terms of budget, shooting time, and scope. With Star Trek V we came to the space imperative and we had some very, very difficult appetites: planetary and construction appetites, things you have to show and places you have to go, and an alien here and there. All these things make the cost and complexity of the film more difficult.
DAVID LOUGHERY (writer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
Something I’ve noticed in all sequels, and it’s true of the Bond films, certainly. Each time you make another movie, they get more and more abstract. The situation gets kind of broader and stranger and sort of out of control a little bit, because, basically, you’ve done the thing so many times that you’ve always got to try and do something a little bit more the next time. This is always a problem with sequels in that they get bigger and the themes increase and get larger, too, and you get farther and farther away from the truly basic appeal of the films, which are the characters that we’ve fallen in love with. If you can do a great drama that just takes place between these characters in one room, the audience wouldn’t give a shit. They’d love it. They’re not really that interested in the spaceship effects, but we keep trying to get bigger and bigger. You know, “Let’s go visit God” and all these gigantic things.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor/director, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
I took the TV evangelist persona and created a holy man who thought God had spoken to him. He believed God had told him, “I need many followers, and I need a vehicle to spread my word through the universe.” The vehicle he needed became a starship, which the holy man would captain when it came to rescue some hostages he had taken. Finally the Enterprise arrives at the planet where God supposedly resides, in the center of the universe. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the holy man are beamed down to the planet. It’s like drawings of Dan
te’s inferno, like a flaming hell. When God appears, he seems like God … but gradually, in a conversation between God and the holy man, Kirk perceives that something is wrong and begins to challenge God. God gets angrier and angrier and begins to show his true colors, which are those of the Devil. So essentially that was my story: that man conceives of God in his own image, but those images change from generation to generation, therefore he appears in all these different guises as man-made gods. But in essence, if the Devil exists, God exists by inference. This is the lesson that the Star Trek group learns. The lesson being that God is within our hearts, not something we conjure up, invent, and worship.
DAVID LOUGHERY
Paramount liked Bill’s outline, but they thought it was a little too dark. After the success of Star Trek IV, they wanted to make sure that we retained as much humor and fun as possible, because they felt that was one of the reasons for the big success of that film. They wanted us to inject a spirit of fun and adventure into the story. They just wanted a balance between the darker elements and some of the lighter stuff. Everybody felt they’d had their romp and now they were getting a little more serious again, but let’s keep that spark alive.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I think when comedy comes out of story it can be enormously affecting and successful. When it’s a sidebar or artificially transplanted onto your story, then it’s not as successful. What happened with Star Trek V is that we had comedy that either had nothing to do with the story—like the campfire scenes—or it somehow diffused the dramatic moments, like the climax of the story when Kirk is saying “What does God need with a starship?” In Star Trek IV, it was the perfect marriage.
DAVID LOUGHERY
One particular change that resulted was in the character of the holy man, Sybok. Originally he was a very messianic, possessed kind of figure who was willing to trample anyone who got in his way, but he began to remind us too much of Khan and we had to take him in a different direction. It would have been easy to write Sybok as a black-hat, but that was, again, too much like Khan.
HARVE BENNETT
The problem with Star Trek V was to take a talented and wonderful man, Bill Shatner, and try and dissuade him from doing the story he wanted to do. I had not wanted to do Star Trek V. I was told Bill was going to direct it, and I said fine, and then Bill had story approval, which I said was a terrible situation—especially once I heard the story he wanted to do.
RALPH WINTER
Star Trek V was not a good movie. After the success of IV, we were all sort of smoking our own publicity shots and thought everything was going to work out just fine. From a variety of things, the production, the visual effects were horrible and Bill was committed to direct because he agreed to let Leonard direct IV. But Leonard had that gene and Bill didn’t. And Bill hasn’t gone on to do much else in directing. It’s a different skill set. And it wasn’t bad. Bill was very enjoyable to work with; we had a lot of fun. I laughed more on the production of that movie than anything I’ve worked on. But ultimately it just wasn’t good storytelling. It was too interior. It actually, in some ways if you think about it, was kind of a remake of the first movie. But we were blinded and didn’t see all of that ourselves.
EDDIE EGAN (unit publicist, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
I don’t think he was the guy who should have been at the helm of that movie and the way he works affected every aspect of it. But, look, we’ve all been in work environments where there are people in a work dynamic that everyone sort of just skirts around and doesn’t want to deal with. Then you finally give up dealing because of that, and the best thing to do as a boss is to remove that person from the mix, because it’s ruining the dynamic of the larger group. Here, you had a guy—and I’m not saying negative or positive about him—who had that kind of dynamic. He’s argumentative and has a very, very healthy ego, and an ego fueled by watching his costar reap the benefits of directing the previous two movies. Unfortunately I just think he wasn’t as collaborative as Leonard is by nature. I think Bill is more of a seat of the pants kind of guy. He’s not going to take time to think about things. He’s just going to show up that day and say, “Let’s try this,” and a lot of Star Trek V feels that way.
WILLIAM SHATNER
What the final result was, was the final result. I have certain regrets, but I feel in total that a lot of the vision was there. I made one major compromise at the beginning, which was mitigating the original idea of the Enterprise searching for God. The enormous thrust of the idea was eviscerated and that was my first compromise. It seemed that was a necessary one due to the fact everybody was very apprehensive about the obvious problem. I thought [the film] was flawed. I didn’t manage my resources as well as I could have, and I didn’t get the help in managing my resources I could have. I thought it was a meaningful attempt at a story and it was a meaningful play. It carried a sense of importance about it.
DAVID LOUGHERY
It became one of those three-week skull sessions where Harve, Bill, and I sat in a room and came up with a story line that Paramount approved, and then I went ahead and wrote the screenplay, which went through many, many rewrites, as these things often do.
The idea of God and the Devil was reflected in the script’s earlier drafts. Those drafts were much cleaner and more comprehensible in terms of the idea that you think you’re going to Heaven, but you turn out to have found Hell. We weren’t literally saying Heaven and Hell, but we were suggesting the idea that it was, like, “Wait a minute, is this God or the Devil?” without saying specifically that it’s either, but instead is an alien entity that has tapped into our perceptions about where they’re going.
We wanted to challenge the audience’s imagination and expectations when they realized that this is what Sybok’s divine mission was. We really wanted the audience to stir around, look at each other, and say, “Are they serious? Can they possibly mean that we’re going to see God?” Because, for me, Star Trek is the only arena in which you might actually try to do that. Star Trek has always been big enough to encompass almost any kind of concept, so we thought when we dropped the bomb and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to see God,” it would be something the audience would be excited about and say, “Gee, maybe they will … who knows?” We did, however, run into some problems, one with Gene Roddenberry.
GENE RODDENBERRY (executive consultant, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
I would have not done it that way. I suggested the idea that saved it in a small way—let what they find be a powerful alien who thought it was God. Originally, the alien was God, a very bad idea. No one person made it terrible, and no one wanted it to be terrible.
DAVID LOUGHERY
Maybe when Gene wrote The God Thing back in the 1970s he turned around and figured that it didn’t work, and it wouldn’t work the way we were doing it either. I just don’t know. We managed to pull off something that is able to tread the line.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Gene did come down strongly against the story and set up circumstances that were negative and unfortunate. There’s nothing wrong with a good story about the search for the meaning of life. That’s basic to any great storytelling, no matter what form it takes, whether it’s the Bible or a myth or a fairy tale. I was hoping to be able to accomplish that with Star Trek V.
DAVID LOUGHERY
I don’t think it was too controversial and I don’t think anyone was too radically upset by what we did, although it seems to me that Star Trek was always meeting God in some way or another. The idea permeated many of the old episodes, and it certainly played a part in the first movie.
HARVE BENNETT
If the logline in TV Guide does not interest you, then it’s a pretty good indication that the premise of the story is not interesting. The logline of Star Trek V is “Tonight on Star Trek, the crew goes to find God.” If you saw that in an episode of anything, you’d say “That’s a hoot, isn’t it?” No one is going to find God, because that�
�s like finding the fountain of youth, which was, incidentally, Shatner’s backup story.
DAVID LOUGHERY
Beyond the whole God concept, I was also thinking of the Kirk, Spock, and McCoy relationship. One of the things that occurred to me is that if you look at Star Trek, you see these three men who are in middle age and their lives have been spent in space. They’re not married, they don’t have families, so their relationship is with each other. They represent a family to each other, maybe without always acknowledging it. That, to me, was the most attractive thing, saying “What is family?” If it’s not three people who care about each other, I don’t know what it is.
The only scene that I can think of that never changed at all, and it was one of the first scenes I wrote, was that campfire sequence. I know there are a lot of people who were kind of upset by that scene, but I love it. It was pure character, and I think that’s why I wanted to do Star Trek in the first place.
The evolving screenplay became the story of the Vulcan Sybok abducting representatives from the Federation as well as the Klingon and Romulan empires, and using them as bait to lure a starship. Naturally that starship is the Enterprise, which Sybok (who improbably turns out to be Spock’s half brother), utilizing great prowess in Vulcan mind control, gains command of. By freeing crew members from their greatest personal pain, he is able to recruit his army of followers. Even Spock and McCoy are swayed to his side, leaving Kirk to take on Sybok alone.
The last was a plot point that didn’t sit well with either Leonard Nimoy or DeForest Kelley, who not only felt their characters wouldn’t betray Kirk, but that their “greatest pains” (in Spock’s case, his half-human, half-Vulcan heritage; and in McCoy’s, performing an act of euthanasia on his slowly dying father) were ill-conceived.
DAVID LOUGHERY
One of the smart things we did early on was bring Leonard and De in to go over the script, because we wanted their input. These guys have lived with these characters, at that time, for more than twenty years and have very strong opinions on what their characters would and wouldn’t do. There were problems with this, too, however. As originally conceived, only Kirk held out against Sybok, which gives you more of a one-man-stands-alone kind of thing, betrayed by his best friends. Leonard and De objected and it was changed. Suddenly there were three guys against Sybok. When you start doing that kind of stuff, bit by bit you remove and dilute the real strength of the original vision and finally you end up with a bit of a mishmash. It would have been great for Kirk to have squared off against Spock in some way. But you find the script beginning to accommodate the needs of the actors, who know their characters and say, “Spock wouldn’t do that.” It’s kind of indefensible. You don’t really have an argument that can turn them around on something like that.
