by Edward Gross
One of these gents showed up in London, stayed a couple of days with a yellow legal pad on his lap. Back in those days it wasn’t an ice planet, it was a sand planet. [Studio executive] David Kirkpatrick said, “I’m tired of sand.” And we later changed it to ice. And then they weren’t happy with that script, and finally I was being brought back to write it. In the meantime, my wonderful assistant and sometimes screenwriter Denny had fallen gravely ill. I decided that I would cowrite it with him; it would give him a reason to get through radiation and all that other stuff. I could tap into all his wonderful stuff and he’d make some money. At this point, Paramount was not in a position to say anything but yes. They didn’t know who he was. It didn’t matter.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
Nick was involved with Company Business in London and wasn’t going to be able to write the screenplay in time to get the film into production for the release date that would coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary. So he told Paramount that the only way he could do it is if he could cowrite the script with me, and that’s how it came about. He was kind enough to trust me, and while he was in London we communicated via computer. When we turned in our first draft, the studio green-lighted it.
MARK ROSENTHAL
Leonard at one point went to see Nick, after we had had all our meetings. What he did was present our story to Nick. I know Nick honestly believed that the story came from Leonard, but that was after three months’ work. We know Nick’s a writer. We weren’t naïve about it. We knew he would rewrite whatever we did, but we didn’t expect them to try and freeze us out.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Leonard said to me, “Let’s make a movie about the wall coming down in outer space.” His statement just spoke to me. What I wanted to do with it was to widen the world of Star Trek before closing out the series. The thing I’ve learned from these movies is that your only chance of succeeding is not to repeat yourself, not to try the same exact thing. I didn’t want to go mano a mano because I had done that with II, and I didn’t want to make a comedy because I felt IV was the most broadly comedic of any of them. So I thought, “I want to make an ensemble piece and I want it to be a political thriller.”
WILLIAM SHATNER
It was a very good idea. It’s a classic Star Trek idea in that the important issue of the day is incorporated in the story of Star Trek, and by doing so—and because we put it into the future—we’re able to comment on it as though it has nothing to do with today, yet it makes a commentary.
MARK ROSENTHAL
At one point we had a discussion about using Chernobyl, and that really opened the floodgates. Then we began to look at specific events. Everyone was paranoid that someone is going to try and sabotage the peace between the Soviet Union and the United States. Why not have the same thing occur between the Klingons and the Federation? It all kind of led to the idea of assassination. What if Gorbachev was assassinated and the blame fell on Kirk? That was really the key.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Star Trek in many ways tends to reflect what’s going on in the real world. At its best, Star Trek appears to function as pop metaphor, taking current events and issues—ecology, war, and racism, for example—and objectifying them for us to contemplate in a science-fiction setting. The world it presents may make no sense as either science or fiction, but it is well and truly sufficient for laying out human questions. Removed from our immediate neighborhoods, it is refreshing and even intriguing to consider Earth matters from the distance of a few light-years. Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—for better or for worse, in sickness and health. In truth, Star Trek doesn’t even pretend to show us other worlds, only humanity refracted in what is supposed to be a high-tech mirror.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
When Star Trek relies on science fiction, it’s a big failure. Maybe that’s part of why nobody likes Star Trek I and V very much. Gene Roddenberry originally called Star Trek “Wagon Train to the stars,” because westerns served the purpose in our society of being morality tales about good guys versus bad guys and, in many cases, in those thousands of westerns it was irrelevant that the setting was the old West. What was important and great in a movie like Shane, for instance, was the story of the individual in society, and Star Trek is best when it’s a morality play. That’s what Gene called the original episodes, so when Leonard came up with the idea that the Klingons could stand in for the Russians and we could deal with the end of the Cold War, we were home free in terms of fundamentals that we knew worked.
MARK ROSENTHAL
I can tell you that from April to August of that year we developed the story and the screenplay, and suddenly we were pushed off. It’s funny, too, because Larry and I are a couple of lefties and anyone who knows us knows we wrote the story.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The studio had a whole bunch of notes and suggestions which I unwisely did not pass on to Leonard, because I told myself, “Let him make up his own mind without the promptings of the studio.” But he was very pissed off and he thought I was duplicitous. Maybe I was. I think I just wanted him to not have their notes and just do his notes. We ironed it out and eventually that’s how the script was written. I never saw what the other gents had done. I’m so susceptible, so easily influenced that, as in the case of Star Trek VI, I knew if I saw it I’d never shake it out of my skull.
MARK ROSENTHAL
One of the things that Nick changed in the movie is there’s this relationship between Spock and Valeris. We said, “Look, Spock was already killed in one movie, so we can’t do that. If this is going to be the last movie, let’s do something really shocking. Let’s break the mold a little bit.” In fact, I remember in the first meeting with Leonard, we sat and watched the Robert Bly tape about old warriors.
Bly is an American poet who started the men’s groups that go out into the woods. His position is that there are no positive male guardian figures, and one of his theories is that the old warrior in tribal society has to teach the young warriors how to do things.
We kind of watched that tape and said, “These guys are old warriors now, let’s really make it that they’re at the end of their career.” I very much wanted to have Kirk fall in love with Saavik, a Vulcan, so that they would produce a people who would be like Spock, who himself had a human mother and a Vulcan father. I thought it would be a wonderful way to bring the characters and their relationships to a close. Obviously they changed that to Spock falling in love. Frankly, I don’t feel it’s as satisfying.
RALPH WINTER
Nick is real smart. He’s such a good writer. He’s really committed to his work and he works very hard and pushed everybody and the envelope. Leading the troops, he challenged everyone to put out their best, and we had a good time doing it. He’s terrific and he does things that seem a little unorthodox. He brings a class and sophistication to the material that is great.
MARK ROSENTHAL
We had done a couple of things which they kind of simplified. Instead of Kirk just going to the Klingons, he was arrested by Sulu and turned over to them, which was a very dramatic moment for Sulu. We also wanted to do this thing where while he was in prison, some of the characters they had met over the twenty-five years would be there, which we felt really would have tied up the entire series.
We also discussed the fact that the Klingons are this aggressive race. Originally, they supposedly had this reptilian background. In regards to this whole thing about Kirk and his search to uncover the conspiracy behind the assassination, we come upon more primitive Klingon tribes who had an almost religious representation for the Klingons. They would be much more primitive and violent. We were going to do a whole thing on the anthropology of the Klingons, but all of that was dropped because it would have been too expensive.
The other thing that we did, which Nick changed, was if you look at the second movie which he directed, he dropped in all of those references from Moby-Dick and A Tale o
f Two Cities, but this whole thing with Shakespeare in Star Trek VI … I think it got carried away. What we did was we had a literary reference from a wonderful poem called “The Idle King,” and it was about Ulysses and the end of his life, where he and his crew are very old and they decide to go off on one last voyage, and it was very clearly a voyage to death. You know, old men rowing the boat again. So we had this bit where Kirk mentions it to Spock. Then Kirk is turned over to Sulu who turns him over to the Klingons, only it turns out that the president of the Federation arranged it all secretly so Kirk let himself get arrested. Ours had a little more twists and turns. We had this thing where Kirk at the beginning is talking to Spock about the Trojan horse, and the way they get him out is they let the Klingons capture the Enterprise, which they seem to have abandoned. But they’ve stowed away, like Ulysses and the Trojan horse, and that’s how they free Kirk. So we had different literary references. I think that ours was a lot more textured. All of the beats of the story were worked out in the script. Then Nick came in with Denny. There was a lot of budgetary simplification.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Frank Mancuso and [Paramount chairman] Martin Davis took me to lunch when I was living in London, at Claridges, and proposed a sixth Star Trek movie that Leonard was going to executive-produce for a budget of thirty million dollars and I said okay. When I arrived in America, I walked into a meeting with [president of the Motion Picture Group] David Kirkpatrick and [Paramount Pictures president of production] Gary Lucchesi and they said, “Now, we’re talking twenty-five million dollars.” I said, “In London, Frank said thirty and that’s what I agreed to.”
I knew what had happened in the interim, which was that the feature division had just had flop after flop after flop, and they were forty-million-dollar movie flops. They were running scared, but I did the math for them. I said, “Look, here’s the problem: you have fourteen million dollars above the line [for cast, directors, producers fees, and screenwriters] in this movie just for starters. You have four and half million dollars in special effects, and these are all the numbers from Star Trek V. You have two and half million in post, whatever it was. And I’m willing to live with all of that at thirty, but don’t ask me to make Star Trek VI for less than Star Trek V, because the money isn’t there. Where’s the movie going to be? I added it up and you have two million dollars left to make the movie!” And they said, “Would you excuse us for just a minute?”
They walked into another room leaving [producer] Steve Jaffe, Ralph Winter, Leonard, and me sitting in Lucchesi’s office. They came back in and said twenty-seven million, and I said, “You’re confused. I’m not negotiating with you. I’m just giving you information. This can’t happen.” They accused me of not being a team player and I responded, “Oh, please. Don’t give me the not-team-player thing. I’m going to go to Frank Mancuso and I’m going to lay out these numbers and let him make up his own mind what we’re doing here.” Which is what I did. I went to Frank and I laid it all out in black and white and I showed him the [budget] top sheet for every Star Trek movie starting with the 1979 one, which I think was forty-five million dollars. And I think Star Trek II was eleven million dollars. And each one after that was 41 percent more expensive than its predecessor. I said the only exceptions to this are II, which was made for 25 percent of I, and VI which I’ll make for the same price as V, but I can’t make it for less and here’s why. He was very courteous; he heard me out. I left and he canceled the movie.
STEVEN-CHARLES JAFFE (producer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
We were at a budgetary impasse and everyone resigned themselves to the fact that it was not going to happen. I went home and was very, very upset about it, because this meant a lot to me for personal and professional reasons. I just couldn’t go to sleep. I grew up watching Star Trek on television, and doing this movie was a private honor. A lot of us took pay cuts and people say, “You took a pay cut on Star Trek—that’s Hollywood, not personal.” It meant a lot to us and the more we got involved with it, the more we were emotionally involved. I’m very happy to say I had a big part in making sure the movie got made. It was all teamwork.
NICHOLAS MEYER
What saved it was a phone call from Stanley Jaffe [the new head of the studio, no relation to Steven-Charles Jaffe] while I was throwing things in a box to leave my office and wondering what I was going to do about the rent on the house and stuff. He said, “I hear you got problems.” “Well, I need five million dollars.” And he said, “You got it.” And that was the end of that.
RALPH WINTER
Bill and Leonard made concessions to get this picture made because they wanted to make it. We all did. Everyone made concessions, and frankly, Nick and Steven and I deferred a significant portion of our salaries to get this picture made, because we believed the story was worthwhile.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I told them it would take fifty-five days. They said, “You have fifty-one,” and I yelled and screamed and they finally gave me fifty-three … and I came in at fifty-five.
WALTER KOENIG
They deferred part of their salaries. That’s not the same as taking points. This was guaranteed, I hasten to add. The sixth movie was: “Let’s cash in on the twenty-fifth anniversary; maybe there’s still some tread left on the tire.” But it’s true the studios were backing down from big-budget films. Paramount had just gotten burned with Godfather III.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I remember at one point when we were filming the peace conference in the film; by this time everybody knew that the film was pretty damn good. John Goldwyn, who was the executive on the film, was looking at some of the chairs that we were using in this meeting and he just shook his head and said, “We should have given you the money.”
LEONARD NIMOY
I’m a Roddenberry disciple. He was very much involved. I went to him for regular meetings on this script. Every time we had a draft, I met with him and we discussed it. He was very intrigued with the idea that we would be exploring the relationship with the Klingons. He was concerned in this particular story about the prejudice question, and it is an interesting issue. Sometimes when you show people showing a prejudice, even though your intention is to show that they’re wrong, there are going to be people who identify with them.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Without seeing himself in relation to Roddenberry as the heir or the keeper of the flame, Leonard knew how these movies worked, he knew the shape of the bottle. He was very protective of that. At one point, Kim Cattrall had posed for some still photographs on the set of the bridge of the Enterprise and they were racy photographs. She was just having fun. And he said no. He killed all of those. That was not going to be.
RALPH WINTER
I screened the movie Star Trek VI for Gene Roddenberry about a week or two before he died. He’s a character. He had a great idea and he executed the great idea, but he couldn’t follow through and he was not a people person. He was cantankerous and he had some kind of weird deal that if he found a problem with any of the scripts, they had to pay him to fix it. So he always had problems. He had to accept it. If he didn’t, they had to pay him to fix it and change it. And so he was always employed. His wife was down in the cutting room taking short ends of film prints and cutting them up and selling them for a dollar apiece. It was an odd group. But he loved the last movie. He watched it in a wheelchair covered with a blanket. He was cold and he was clearly on his way out. He had a great idea and he sponsored a great franchise.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
The man was two days away from death when he saw Star Trek VI. They propped him up in a chair. He didn’t have a clue what was going on. I don’t think he had anything in his head at that point.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I cannot at this time remember whether I knew that he was ill or not. But regardless, even if he’d been in the peak of health, it would hardly have excused the somewhat impatient and high-handed way I was dealing with him.
It’s interesting, I had quite forgotten that we’d had run-ins over the screenplay of Star Trek II as well. I didn’t recollect any of that until I was shown evidence of our correspondence. The Star Trek conception is a bottle, and into that bottle you can pour different vintages, but you’re not allowed to change the shape of the bottle. And I think that the way I see it, rightly or wrongly, is that I was sort of obeying those rules. Maybe the brew that I had put in there was a stronger brew … or stranger, but it still fit into the bottle.
LEONARD NIMOY
Here you’ve got a couple of guys saying, “What do you think of the smell? Only the top-of-the-line models can talk.” Gene was concerned about that stuff. He [Roddenberry] said, “I don’t feel good about Enterprise crew talking that way.” We pointed out these are bad people who are racists and who turn out to be assassins. “I’m just uncomfortable with a couple of guys walking around in Federation uniforms talking that way about another race.” And I understood it. It’s a danger. By and large, he was quite taken with the idea of a Klingon détente. It was his idea to put a Klingon in the Federation on The Next Generation and this was the beginning of that link.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Very famously William Gillette asked Arthur Conan Doyle if he wanted Sherlock Holmes to be put on the stage, and Arthur Conan Doyle said, “Sure.” There was a famous exchange of telegrams between Gillette and Doyle. “May I marry Holmes?” and Doyle cabled back, “You may marry him or murder him or do what you like with him.” Doyle always had very ambivalent feelings about Holmes, whom he had tried to kill off at least twice. Roddenberry was arguably much more protective and controlling about the world, the universe that he had created. And I think I was content to keep these characters as I found them. Kirk the bold adventurer, Spock the logical one, Bones the bleeding-heart liberal, and so forth. But where we differed was in our ongoing view of the human condition. Gene Roddenberry believed, or said he believed, in the perfectibility of man.
