by Edward Gross
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I think there was a fat chance of that happening. I can’t read Harve’s mind, but if The Academy Years had done well, they would have gone on with that group. If it hadn’t, they probably would have abandoned the whole project.
HARVE BENNETT
It meant a lot to me because I came out of UCLA film school wanting to be a director and other winds blew me to other ports. It was a desire of mine to direct, and it was accepted by the studio and, the fact is, part of the deal was for us to do a Star Trek VI, with the original cast after The Academy Years.
DAVID LOUGHERY
Harve really wanted to do it. He wasn’t really interested in producing anymore.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, Star Trek)
I didn’t like it. Who was going to cast the new Kirk and Spock? I could have done so if I thought it was a good idea, but it didn’t fit in with the rest of Trek. It wasn’t good. Some of it was like Police Academy. You could hardly do this without the magic of a group of characters tailored for Star Trek, which this was not.
RALPH WINTER
Gene just stomped his foot and threatened the studio to not support the movie or endorse it. And they needed his endorsement for the core fans. They listened to that. But he didn’t have any veto power.
DAVID LOUGHERY
We were really caught off guard and surprised by the fans who reacted so negatively to the idea of this movie. Somehow they conceived it as a sort of spoof or a takeoff. That’s where we got off on the wrong foot. The fans had misinformation, which may have been put out there by people for their own reasons. Certainly if we were going to make a movie like that, it meant that Walter and whoever wouldn’t get that job a year or two down the line that they had come to expect. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do know that the misinformation released had people convinced that we were going to do a cross between Police Academy and The Jetsons. But I think it’s traditional that the fans have objected. Harve’s always been smart enough to double-cross them. Give them what they’ve objected to, but surprise them with something that makes it good and works out.
JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)
I was impressed with Harve when he first came in and did Star Trek II and III, but I think he got a little greedy. He wanted things his own way. He wanted to take over Star Trek for himself. He obviously did not realize the strength of the old cast. The whole thing would have been starting out as if from scratch. I think it was [Paramount CEO Frank] Mancuso who didn’t realize we were not going to be in it. When he found out, [he] said good-bye, Harve.
HARVE BENNETT
There was pressure from a lot of people not to do this. I don’t think there was any question that the self-interest of the supporting cast was not served by it. And if I was George Takei, I would do exactly what he did, and if I were Jimmy Doohan, I would be a really unhappy man. The only one I’m really furious at though is Jimmy Doohan. He said I was fired and I can’t abide lies. I was offered one and a half million dollars to do Star Trek VI and said, “Thanks, I don’t wish to do that. I want to do The Academy.”
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
Harve was striving to find an answer for the studio’s question: “Are these guys too old to continue?” So he tried to find a solution as a storywriter and he must have said here’s a way of going. Apparently everybody agreed, but at some point they shut him down after preparing this production for a year, and he got very upset about it and left. I wasn’t too clued in on the politics of what was happening. I had heard about the prequel and was considering my options, but it was never approved and we didn’t know whether or not there would be another Star Trek until the last second.
HARVE BENNETT
My last words to Frank Mancuso before he was asked to leave [by the then recently installed head of Paramount, Stanley Jaffe] was if it was a question of anyone’s concerns about my directing, I’d back off on that. They then offered me Star Trek VI and gave me a pay-or-play commitment to direct and produce The Academy Years afterward. My position was, and I think it was correct, that they would pay me to do VI and make the movie which would have been a real big, fat check for me and never make The Academy Years. To be paid off because the movie I might have done, which is being done by others, would close the franchise was not my intention. I had a life, it’s not like I hadn’t done anything else before Star Trek. The Star Trek curse is something that the poor supporting cast has to live with, but I don’t.
RALPH WINTER
The Academy Years may have looked like a mistake, but look at the franchise as a whole. We had a successful series of feature films, then a new television series, and with the [original] film series ending, it made sense to start a new series of films. You could have opened a whole new frontier. When Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, the people said, “This will never work, how can we have a new captain? It will never equal Kirk and Spock.” But they achieved their own success. It could have been the same with a prequel cast.
HARVE BENNETT
The Academy Years, like Star Trek IV, would have reached beyond the cult. It would have interested people who had never seen a Star Trek film which did not exclude the regulars, but it simply said, “If you don’t understand what it’s all about, come see how it all began.”
GLEN C. OLIVER (film critic, Ain’t It Cool News)
Colored by more than a few shades of Top Gun, the screenplay was filled with tremendous moments of warmth and heart—and focused heavily on its characters’ journeys toward understanding themselves individually, and recognizing their potential as a group. It is as character-centric as The Wrath of Khan or The Search For Spock, and features the same unapologetic devotion to exploring the human condition demonstrated by those titles. Despite a few misplaced, miscalculated attempts at humor, there’s a lot of truth in Loughery’s work in The Academy Years—touchingly, surprisingly, admirably so at times. This would’ve been a very nice and affecting origin story when factored into the broader framework of the franchise, and that it didn’t make it to screens remans highly regrettable.
DAVID LOUGHERY
I had an overall deal at Paramount and I thought that if I wrote it while we working on Star Trek V, it would be a great way to kind of balance my time, because we were shooting one Star Trek and working on the possibility of another one. It was never seen as a way to replace the original cast. Harve had always described it as a lucky strike extra. A special kind of present. And also, we realized that if things went along as planned, we could get it out for 1991 and the twenty-fifth anniversary as sort of a special gift to the fans, a look back. There was no reason why one couldn’t continue to make Star Trek films with the original cast. It was just something that we thought could be done separately and as a bonus.
I would say I wrote three drafts over a period of about a year and a half. The first draft, the studio loved it. We thought, “Great! This is fantastic.” They wanted a few minor changes, but we were really excited. But then, gradually, the studio kind of became reluctant in terms of setting a start date, and also, by that time, I think Star Trek V had come out and been a little bit of a disappointment and they were wondering whether they wanted to make any kind of another Star Trek movie at one point. Also, there were changes in the Paramount administration and a couple of the people who had really been supporters of the prequel left. Then I guess the studio started to think that they could squeeze one more Star Trek with the original cast.
RALPH WINTER
Harve was an elder statesman. He was a gentleman and he taught me a great deal about how I produce movies today. He was a writer-producer that comes out of that television tradition. He left all the production things to me. He didn’t care about that as much as he cared about what the story is about and how is it going to be clear to the audience. If anything, he was too nice. But unfortunately we disagreed at the end of Star Trek V. He wanted to do the picture that we had dev
eloped, but ultimately Frank Mancuso wanted to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary. And so he wanted a movie with the original cast and Harve wanted a movie with a young cast. He drew a line in the sand and didn’t participate in Star Trek VI. But that script, Paramount owned it, and then J. J. took off with it and updated a lot of stuff in the first movie that is clearly, if not an homage, a redevelopment of that script.
In the opening scene of the screenplay we developed were cornfields and a mailbox that is flapping back and forth in the wind and it says, “Kirk” on the mailbox. It sits on that for a moment, and then you hear something in the distance, and coming right at camera is a crop duster. A futuristic crop duster. And this young kid is at the wheel of it trying to fly it like a fighter jet. And he crashes it into the farm and burns it down. That’s the opening of the Star Trek screenplay. We felt like we had something worthwhile and Harve put his job on the line. That’s how much he believed in it.
HARVE BENNETT
It’s forever marketable, because it deals with Spock and Kirk at seventeen, eighteen. It deals with the origin of prejudice against Vulcans, the invention of warp speed, the origins of the show. We were not only right there on this, but we were ready to cast it. I wanted Ethan Hawke to play Kirk—he hadn’t even done Dead Poets Society yet. And I said, “I want John Cusack to play young Spock.” He was then in his early twenties, but could have played teenaged, but they didn’t see it. Martin Davis at Paramount said, “We can’t do a picture without the real Kirk and Spock,” so I put in something in the beginning in which the real Kirk and Spock appeared and told the story, then we flash-forwarded to them at the end. But that wasn’t enough. They said the audience would be frustrated. I disagreed. They said they needed something for the twenty-fifth anniversary and it had to be something else. My term was up and I said, “Get somebody else.” To this day, it’s hard for me to talk about, because not only would it have been the biggest grosser of all, but it would have spawned yet another franchise.
THE FINAL ROUNDUP
“ONLY NIXON COULD GO TO CHINA.”
With studio president Frank Mancuso passing on The Academy Years, it was full speed ahead for Star Trek VI, an anticipated swan song for the original cast with plans to pass the baton to The Next Generation in the next film. Unfortunately for the studio, the twenty-fifth anniversary was rapidly approaching and there was no script, no director, and no producer after Harve Bennett walked away from what would have been a lucrative gig. Paramount quickly enlisted star Leonard Nimoy as the film’s executive producer and he, in turn, recruited writer-director Nicholas Meyer into the fold to deliver a film on a highly accelerated production schedule.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN (cowriter, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
Frank Mancuso had called Leonard into his office and said, “Leonard, help me make this film.” At that point, Leonard was the producer, writer, the director, the star, and it was up to him to discharge those duties or pass them on to other people. Mancuso apparently knew he could trust him to get the whole thing going and to get it going quickly. That had something to do with Star Trek V. Let’s face it, nobody wanted to have anything to do with anybody who had anything to do with V, except as necessary. I don’t think Star Trek V was entirely Shatner’s fault by any means. Moviemaking is a very collaborative business, but no one was happy with it.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I was supposed to come in and pitch Frank Mancuso my idea for Star Trek VI [“In Flanders Fields”]. I ended up submitting it on paper. I had three of the characters dying in the story. I thought we were all done. Certainly after Star Trek I, I thought we were done.
MARK ROSENTHAL (cowriter, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
We—Larry Konner and myself—were under contract at Paramount, and the feeling was that they were not going to do another Star Trek movie. The guys were getting old and Star Trek V was a disappointment. There was a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and no one wanted to go out like that. They knew the twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up, and we were approached by the vice president of production, Teddy Zee, who called us up and said, “Frank Mancuso has spoken to Leonard. Leonard was still upset because of the last one and he was floating out the idea of one last adventure.” He asked us what we thought about it. The reality was that I am a Trekkie and my partner is incredibly non-science-fiction oriented. We were kind of a yin-yang, but we liked that idea, because Larry would provide good balance.
RALPH WINTER (producer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
Bill had a good time directing Star Trek V and we stumbled. I’m sure Bill feels hurt by the results of that, but he’s a big guy. He knows what happened and he’s got his head held high and he’s fine.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
I felt a sense of loss that I couldn’t be the problem solver. I would have loved to have been immersed in those very same problems and bring to bear what I had learned on the previous film. But on the other hand there was a sense of tremendous relief, as I was only too aware of the pressures on Nick Meyer both from a production point of view and a political view from the studio, and as time would get short, the anxiety that was involved in trying to get it done on time. I was very sensitized to the things he needed to accomplish.
MARK ROSENTHAL
Our initial response was that we should do something where The Next Generation has to come back in time and work with the classic cast. The poster would be Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Brent Spiner. That would have easily been a hundred-million-dollar film. Feelers were put out on that and there were some very strong negative responses. The TV department was totally against it. The TV series was doing extremely well, and everyone was afraid that the old guys’ egos would get involved and they would say that it was a sign of a lack of confidence that they could carry the film. So that was the end of that.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor/producer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
The Berlin Wall had come down. The Russian government was in severe distress. Communism was falling apart. These changes were creating a new order in our world. I thought there would be a kind of dialogue, a new thinking of these relationships. Realizing that over the twenty-five-year history of Star Trek the Klingons have been the constant foe of the Federation, much like the Russians and Communists were to democracy, I wondered how we could translate these contemporary world affairs in an adventure with the Klingons. I thought it would be ideal since the Klingons were a parallel for the Communist bloc, the “Evil Empire.” It just made sense to do that story.
MARK ROSENTHAL
The main thing we were concerned with was that we had never really gotten details about the Klingon Empire. There was a whole question of whether we should go to the actual home planet. What happened was that they felt in terms of budget, re-creating the entire planet would be impossible, so it became this prison concept. The original idea was to go to the actual capital city. I still think this was a better idea, but you can see how this process happens.
The first Star Trek had a horrendous budget and it was a bad movie. Paramount began to realize that the Europeans did not grow up with Star Trek, so there’s a very small market for it. The studio always feels that they have to make their money in a domestic situation, which for a big-budget special-effects movie is tough. When you write, you try to come up with stories that take place in one ship, because that’s pretty cheap to do. When you start talking about sets and locations, the budget gets very high. Leonard decided that he didn’t want to direct this movie. We knew that Nick was interested. He was negotiating an overall deal with Paramount and we were pretty much left alone and began writing.
NICHOLAS MEYER (cowriter/director, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
I had just had a terrible experience making a movie, Company Business, in which I had my nuts handed to me. It was ghastly. And so the idea of climbing back on a horse, any horse, was really important and I
thought I probably couldn’t have a friendlier horse than the Star Trek horse. I had absolutely no idea what a Star Trek movie would be. I never do. I never get many ideas, and the ideas I get, most of the time stink.
I was on Cape Cod with my family where I go every summer for a couple of weeks, and Leonard, who hails from Boston, flew to Provincetown for the day. And it was a very pleasant day. We walked up and down the beach and he said, “I have an idea for another Star Trek movie.” And he said, “You know the Klingons have always been our stand-in for the Russians.” And I’m thinking, “Did I know that?” It seemed obvious the moment he said it. And he said, “The wall is coming down, and what if the wall came down in outer space? Who am I if I have no enemy to define me?” And all he needed to do was prime the pump. Leonard went back to California and I thought, “Okay, we’re off and running.” And then he called me and said, “This is very strange but they hired two other guys.”
MARK ROSENTHAL
The wonderful thing about Star Trek was that it was always sort of an allegory of the United States and the Soviet Union. We had two meetings with Leonard and Teddy [Zee], where we said the film should be about a peace with the Klingons and that it would be a nice parallel to reality. We were always arguing politics, so we thought this would be an opportunity to get some allegory in there. In other words, if it had been a movie like the first one, about a satellite coming back, we would not have done it. I think Star Trek works best when it’s an allegory.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I still was the director on the project and it was really strange. And then I got a call from one of the executives, John Goldwyn, who said, and I quote, “The boys are having a little trouble getting started.” And I said, “What do you mean they’re having a little trouble getting started? Send them to London, because that’s where I live and I’ll talk them through it.” Which may not have been the right thing. I probably should have touched base with Leonard to see what he thought, but I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Probably not very smart.
