KHAN GAME

“I REPROGRAMMED THE SIMULATION SO THAT IT WAS POSSIBLE TO SAVE THE SHIP.”

Star Trek: The Motion Picture, despite largely scathing reviews, grossed an astounding $11,926,421 its opening weekend on 857 screens, eventually topping $139,000,000 worldwide. Shortly thereafter Gene Roddenberry began work on a treatment for a sequel.

“We know a little bit more about how to use Trek in motion pictures,” said Roddenberry at the time. “The second run in anything is easier. If you’ve ever played golf, the second try you can always sink the putt. It’s the first shot at the hole … The sequel story is much more intra-crew, intra-character. It has many more of the difficult decisions that Kirk always had in the TV episodes, decisions about morality and ideals. It’s good Star Trek. It would have made a good three-parter on the TV show—if I’d had the money to do it.”

Stung by criticism of the first film, Roddenberry was intent on revisiting elements of Star Trek that had proved so popular in the past: time travel, the Klingons, and Sarek and Amanda, Spock’s parents. In his sixty-page treatment dated May 21, 1980, Roddenberry proposes an outrageous story, presaging the similarly themed Next Generation film First Contact, in which the Enterprise, returning home to Earth, encounters bodies floating in space, some are naked, others are in space suits. Discovering a survivor, they realize history has been changed by the Klingons and the Federation eradicated. Only those who have traveled at warp speed are immune to the changes in the time line.

Starfleet doesn’t exist and the Earth is now inhabited by a vicious race of protohumans. The Enterprise conceals itself behind the moon with the arrival of the vicious Klingons, who have used the Guardian of Forever from “The City on the Edge of Forever” to change time. While visiting the former site of Starfleet Headquarters, Amanda is brutally raped and Sarek sacrifices his life to save Kirk and Spock from the Klingons in the hopes they can reverse the changes to the time line. The Enterprise returns to the Guardian planet and follows the Klingons back in time, despite an attempt by the Klingons to block the time gate, to shield a small Klingon scout ship that returned to 1960s Earth. The Enterprise manages to make it through, but is damaged and crashes in northern Canada, where a U-2 spy plane mistakes it for an alien ship. As a result, JFK cancels his trip to Dallas and is not assassinated, prompting a visit to the Oval Office by James T. Kirk himself, who comes face-to-face with the then president.

Ultimately, the Enterprise is able to repair the time line and return to the twenty-third century, leaving behind a very much alive President Kennedy but with the addition of a newfound wife for McCoy as a result of their interference in Earth’s past.

HARVE BENNETT (executive producer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

Gene opposed every one of the Star Trek films on the grounds that they were not good Trek. He now takes credit for having been the spiritual father of the best one, Star Trek IV, because he had told us to do a time-travel story. The fact is we had rejected a time-travel story about coming back to try and stop the assassination of Jack Kennedy, and that story, for good reason, was thrown out years before because it, like going to see God in Star Trek V, was a story with an impossible preconclusion. You knew that even Kirk couldn’t stop that, and if he did, how would we explain that now? And why is Jackie married to Onassis? And on and on, and we said, “No, we don’t want to do that story.” He flooded everybody with reprints of that thing, which he had written, God knows when, and he fought tooth and nail right down to the $110 million domestic gross, and he said, “Well, I told them to do time travel in the first place.”

SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)

The proposal was written as a separate story back in about 1980, right after Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released. Basically, the studio was a bit leery of having Gene as a producer on the next Star Trek because they had to find a scapegoat for their failure to hold back costs on the first movie, and it was outright their fault. They ran ten million dollars over budget insisting we stick with Robert Abel and Associates when they failed to produce anything for us. Some people at the studio felt that they would rather not be involved with that producer, they wanted to bring in somebody else rather than Gene Roddenberry, which is basically what they did.

The story itself had to do with going back in time through the time gate, they are tracked by the Klingons, who go back in time, and they follow them there and they try to rescue the Earth. Somebody thought it had something to do with they had to kill Kennedy, which was not true. It happened around that time in history. As with Edith Keeler, they had to allow history to unfold the way it was meant to unfold, and that was the involvement with the Kennedy thing. I really don’t know why they didn’t do it. It was a damn good story.

SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)

After the Klingons go back in time to ruin humanity’s future, the Enterprise goes back to stop that from happening. But they make things worse by accidentally revealing themselves to Earth’s inhabitants, and the problems keep snowballing from there.

The biggest snowball is that the Enterprise has materialized in November of 1963, just days before President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and in effect prevented this turning point of the twentieth century. So now the Enterprise will have to go back in time again even further, but not before Kirk has a heated exchange with Kennedy, who is then beamed aboard the ship.

While there is certainly a cool factor in seeing Kirk encounter another U.S. President after Lincoln in “The Savage Curtain,” there’s no power to the punch at the end the way “City on the Edge of Forever” had, and it ends up being a pointless, emotionally uninvolving voyage.

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

There were persistent rumors that Star Trek II was going to be a time-travel story about going back to the Kennedy assassination, and Spock was going to be the shooter on the grassy knoll for some reason. There were fans whom were up in arms and writing these really angry letters, “If Spock is the shooter on the grassy knoll, I will never watch again.”

EDDIE EGAN (unit publicist, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

There was a version written which was more or less the ending of “The City on the Edge of Forever,” but instead of Kirk suddenly stopping McCoy from grabbing Joan Collins’s character, something happened in Dealey Plaza and some aberration in time was causing things not to occur correctly. Spock appeared behind the fence and fired the shot and everything returns to normal. Of course, the attitude of the studio was mostly just horror; that you can’t make a movie like that. Their thoughts about Gene were “It’s just in bad taste and we don’t like you, anyway, so go away.”

SCOTT MANTZ

Boy, what a mess. Paramount was wise to toss it to the side in favor of the greatest Trek movie of them all, The Wrath of Khan. Interesting that while Wrath served as a sequel to one of the most popular original-series Trek episodes of all time, so did GR’s treatment. In this case, it was a sequel of sorts to the Citizen Kane of Star Trek episodes, “The City on the Edge of Forever.”

And just like “City,” the script dealt with Kirk and Spock going back in time to restore the future. As a result, the story seems awfully redundant of “City,” despite all the bells and whistles that a big-budget feature could provide.

HARVE BENNETT

Gene is frequently a historical revisionist, and he uses a phrase that is difficult for anybody else to refute: “That is not Star Trek.” When a man of his eminence and his position says that, especially in my early days, I didn’t want to go against the church. But the fact of the matter is he uses that phrase whenever he chooses to. It makes no sense. He fought the character of Saavik savagely, saying you couldn’t intermarry Vulcans and Romulans, that it was not possible. It had never been done, and he would cite everybody from Arthur C. Clarke to Isaac Asimov, who he would always run to and they would always say, “Yes, Gene, you’re right.” I am not a science-fiction writer. I just tell good yarns. You get into a situation where you say, “I’m not Heinlein, I’m not Clarke.” I’m just a pop artist trying to tell a story here.

When I signed on, the phrase that was in my mind, and that I’ve used a lot, is that the franchise was a beached whale and it was my task to resurrect it, to give it CPR and to return to the central thing that had made people so loyal to the series for decades.

RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)

Harve said that Star Trek was a beached whale, one that he had rescued and breathed new life into. That really hurt Gene. When Gene said at one point during a disagreement, “over my dead body!,” Harve had said that that was fine with him. Gene did his best to try to work things out with Harve where and when he could, but Harve made it very difficult for him. Gene did his best not to be a thorn in Harve’s side, but at times found that he had to.

DAVID GERROLD (writer, “The Trouble with Tribbles”)

After Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the studio looked at what the picture earned and said, “If we had brought this picture in for nine million dollars, we would have made a lot of money. We have the sets standing, the actors will be available to us. If we could do inexpensive Star Trek movies…” So they call in Harve Bennett and said, “We’re going to have you do a Star Trek movie for TV. If it turns out well, we’ll release it theatrically.”

After Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Gene had no clout. It was a critical disaster and for a while it looked like it was going to be a financial disaster. I don’t know what the details were, but essentially they looked at the box-office results and said, “Take Gene out of the saddle.” They kicked him upstairs and said, “Gene, you will be executive consultant. We’ll give you an office and we’ll have you approve all of the scripts, but your creative control over Star Trek is over because we can’t afford you.” They were probably a lot more tactful than that, but that’s what they did.

EDDIE EGAN

There were some people there who had been on the TV side of things, the Desilu side, which became part of Paramount, and people who had known Gene back then who would roll their eyes anytime his name came up. The reason, and this has been well established, is he was a pain in the ass on the series and was quick to take credit but was rarely around for the hard work. There was a lot of that in evidence apparently during the making of the first movie. Certainly I observed that given his reduced role on the three sequels I worked on. He just wasn’t a producer in the sense that a picture of that size and inherent value needed.

HARVE BENNETT

Any time a guy loses a command and is still hanging around, it’s difficult. The fact of the matter was that Gene had already done that during the series; in the third year he had left to do other things. In this instance it began on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, where he was superseded and overruled many times during the final stages when the studio took over the massively rising budget, and the problems with the special effects and so forth.

DAVID GERROLD

The only success he’s ever had in his entire life was Star Trek, and he likes being the Great Bird of the Galaxy. He believes his own publicity. He’s a legend in his own mind.

EDDIE EGAN

When you talked to Roddenberry, he always kind of looked at you with his head cocked, like he was waiting for you to say something wrong or to piss him off. He’s just one of those guys whose mind had an area that was completely brilliant, but the larger part of his mind was his personality and an insecurity that just got in the way all the time. It limited his ability to enjoy his success and feel recognized for the brilliant things he did, and the good things he did for people. His insecurities and his inability to focus seemed, to me, to be his biggest challenge.

GENE RODDENBERRY (executive consultant, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

My contract gives me the total right to produce and write all motion pictures. But I did Star Trek seventy-nine times. I just can’t be a creature of Star Trek all my life. I wanted to see bright, new people come in and put a good stamp on it and add certain differences. As the consultant, they sent me everything from the first story idea to the final draft of the motion picture. I also saw dailies and rough cuts and all of that. I made my comments to them. I told them the only time I would say “No, stop, I refuse to put my name on it” is if they should break any of the very basic things about Star Trek. Affection for all life-forms or if they should land on a planet and start zapping creatures there because they’re different. I certainly wouldn’t insist on taking my name off or breaking the contract merely because they don’t have quite the uniform I like or merely because they want to crash the Enterprise. If you’re going to have good people, you’ve got to give good people some latitude to do it their way.

EDDIE EGAN

When you’re the creator of the show or the writer of the original concept, you have to be consulted and engaged on a certain level. There are no parameters for that engagement, but when the second movie started, Paramount made it very clear to him that they were declaring the parameters. He would be shown the scripts, he could review dailies, he could comment on a cut, but it was Paramount’s final and absolute decision whether or not to cooperate or ignore.

He definitely had weird things written into his contract on the movies. I remember seeing an abstract of his rights once, and someone had actually thought of a clause that said the intensity of the musical fanfare, under Roddenberry’s on-screen credit, could be no less than that of the musical fanfare when Shatner’s name was on the screen. I don’t know if that was actually carried through, but he thought of that, and had it papered [into his contract].

HARVE BENNETT

I came to Paramount with no anticipation of doing feature pictures at all. I was here to do television. But the second week I got a call from [studio president] Barry Diller, who used to be my assistant at ABC, and Michael Eisner, who used to be a counterpart of mine at ABC in New York, and running the entire operation was the great immigrant, Charlie Bludhorn, who built Gulf & Western and bought Paramount. Barry calls me in and says, “Will you come to a meeting in my office?”

They asked me what I thought of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I said it was boring. Bludhorn turned to Eisner and Diller and said, “Aha! By you guys bald is sexy.” To me he said, “Do you think you can make a better movie than that?” I said, “Yeah, I could.” He said, “For less than forty-five fucking million dollars?” “Oh,” I said, “where I come from I can make a lot of movies for that.”

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN (assistant to Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin)

Star Trek I had been a financial drain on the studio and a drain on the actors, who were none too pleased at the end of it. It just went on forever and it cost a lot of money, so Paramount said, “We’ll make another Star Trek, but it has to be on a television budget and a television schedule.” And that was the mandate that was given to Harve and, ultimately, to Bob Sallin, who was the line producer. Bob Sallin staffed it with people that knew how to work on schedule and on budget. It was brought in as promised, and the amazing thing was that it was the antithesis of the Star Trek: The Motion Picture situation. Everybody had fun.

Harve Bennett’s involvement in Star Trek first began in 1980, when he was brought over to Paramount to produce for their television division. Born Harve Bennett Fischman, Bennett was a child genius who was one of the original radio and TV Quiz Kids. His successful television producing career included stewarding The Mod Squad and later The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. He had previously served as a network executive at CBS and, later, ABC, where among the numerous shows he oversaw was The Long Hunt of April Savage, starring Robert Lansing, which Gene Roddenberry had produced for Sam Rolfe. During the production, Roddenberry and Bennett sparred heavily, and Roddenberry had him thrown off the set. Bennett, however, would eventually have his “wrath.”

In 1980, after a recent series of wildly over-budget Hollywood films, including Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Heaven’s Gate (the latter decimating United Artists), Paramount knew they had to produce the next Star Trek film on a substantially lower budget. Chairman Charles Bludhorn, along with Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, realized the best way to do this was to hire an experienced television producer. Some early rumors had the low-budget Star Trek II pegged as being a movie-for-television then known as The Omega Factor.

HARVE BENNETT

Someone conceived the idea of giving this kind of film to the people whose background and training was essentially in the more cost-conscious area of television. They chose wisely, because they picked good storytellers and not just people who make pictures for controlled budgets. However, it was never seriously a television project. The minute the script began shaping up, it was clear to all that we had something terrific.

GARY NARDINO (president of production, Paramount Pictures)

When I was assigned the responsibility to do STII because of the bad economic situation they had on TMP, I invited Harve, who I had already brought in to the studio to do Star Trek. You went from a $44 million Star Trek movie to the one they assigned me to supervise that we did for $13 million and it made almost as much money as the first one. We delivered a good movie in that genre as well as good finance. It was done under the production auspices of television. That transition from STII to STIII was how I became executive producer of Star Trek III and I went on from there and did comedies and Harve kept on doing Star Trek.

GERALD FINNERMAN (director of photography, Star Trek)

Harve Bennett called me and he said he didn’t realize I had done the show. I was under contract to Columbia for a few years and had done a lot of projects for Harve including From Here to Eternity, the miniseries that he was nominated for an Emmy for. He said that he had not realized that I had done Star Trek until he had read the book The Making of Star Trek, and we talked about the possibility of me doing Star Trek, but at that time they didn’t know whether it was going to be a feature or television and I didn’t want to do television.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

I was working in the administration building, and the guy who would ultimately be the executive producer of Star Trek II, Harve Bennett, is seeing my boss on a regular basis because he’s working with her. He’s sitting outside her office and he says, “My girlfriend really wants me to do Star Trek II, the studio has asked me to do it, and I don’t speak Star Trek.” I said, “Well, I do.” We started talking about it and he started showing me some story ideas, and the next thing I know, I’m the first person hired to be on Star Trek II. I was the assistant to the producers, Harve and to Bob Sallin. I took a gigantic cut in pay. I knew I had to do this. I always looked at my time at Paramount as grad school. I ultimately spent seven years there, and the last two years were working on Star Trek. I had the time of my life working on Star Trek II. There was just a surprise around every corner and I had a blast.

HARVE BENNETT

The main thing that rang false about the first film was that the characters had gone twenty years and hadn’t aged, which, to my way of thinking, was totally unbelievable. I felt a major element in future films would be to have the characters age and to focus on what they were going through as people as they did so. At one point, I even sat down with Shatner and told him point-blank that there was a real danger in having a middle-aged Kirk running around like a thirty-year-old.

I am the same age as Shatner, and was going through my own time of change. I wouldn’t have dared try to look like I was twenty-five, and I was aware of how silly Bill looked radiating this gauzy look. Even Leonard had too much makeup—he had Lillian Gish lips [in The Motion Picture]. I decided Star Trek II was going to be gritty, about people and how they cope with aging.

ROBERT SALLIN (producer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

Before I joined Harve on the project, I sent him a lengthy memo. I had studied Star Trek I and I pinpointed a lot of the fundamental weaknesses of the first film. First and foremost, I felt it was too much a special-effects picture and that the humanity of Star Trek just wasn’t there. Let the special effects support it, as any effect should support basic storytelling, not be driven by the effects, which so many science-fiction films are. I felt that the look of the picture from a design point of view had been all wrong, the lighting was too flat and uninteresting.

HARVE BENNETT

What I saw that I liked about Star Trek were the relationships between the three men, and the sense of male bonding and family and the ethics, the morality—though there are times and episodes, and I can’t trace who is responsible, when Trek was as kinky a show as ever came down the pike. They had Kirk play an entire episode as a woman.

ROBERT SALLIN

I made a very strong point about one thing. I said, “Let’s not attack this as though it’s another film project or another television project. I want to interview every member of the crew. I want to make sure that these guys are not only mentally competent, but I want an attitude here. I want an attitude that we’re all in this together.” As corny as it sounds, I wanted to make sure we had a great time making this film.

MICHAEL MINOR (art director, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

Harve wanted something uplifting, something that would be as fundamental in the twenty-third century as the discovery of recombinant DNA is in our time. Then something just came to me and I said, “Terraforming.” Harve asked, “What’s that?” and I told him it was the altering of existing planets to conditions which are compatible to human life. I suggested a plot, just making it up in my head while talking on the phone. The Federation had developed a way of engineering the planetary evolution of a body in space on such a rapid scale that instead of eons you have events taking place in months or years. You pick a dead world or an inhospitable gas planet, and you change its genetic matrix or code, thereby speeding up time. This, of course, is also a terrible weapon. Suppose you trained it on a planet filled with people and speeded up its evolution. You could destroy the planet and every life-form on it. Harve liked the idea a lot. At the story conference the next day, he came over, hugged me and said, “You saved Star Trek!”

ROBERT SALLIN

I applied some old commercial-production techniques. I storyboarded everything. I had a chart made which listed, by scene, every special effect and optical effect, and I timed each one. I designed and supervised all the special effects. Mike Minor, our art director, sat up here in my office and did the storyboards. Then I held meetings with four or five optical-effects companies, and some of those meetings ran over three hours. I gave them thorough information, so that when the movie was finished, the amount of deviation from the plan was very slight. On this film it was more like I was codirecting as well as producing, and I was the visual-effects supervisor.

In the first movie there were quite a few problems with special effects. Because I knew how to handle and manage production, I was left very much alone by the studio. They were all a little intimidated by what had gone on previously, and the idea of special effects escalating the way they did on Star Trek I was a major fear and concern. This time we came in so close to budget that you couldn’t go out for a decent lunch on the difference.

MICHAEL MINOR

I laid out four different features in storyboard. Literally different plots, different characters, different events, different effects. I put in maybe four hundred man-hours before we settled on what we used to get bids for the effects.

When he first got involved, Bennett had written a one-page story concept titled “War of the Generations,” which was presented to Paramount executive Gary Nardino in November 1980. A month later, it was expanded into an outline and then a script by Jack Sowards, which in turn would be continuously rewritten by him and Bennett. “The War of the Generations” involves Admiral Kirk taking command of the Enterprise to rescue a lost love from a rebellion on a distant Federation planet. In the process, Kirk is captured by the leader of the rebels, revealed as his own son, who sentences him to death. Before Kirk can be killed, the shadowy hand behind the rebellion is revealed: Khan Noonian Singh and his band of eugenically bred superhumans on Ceti Alpha V. Khan’s true intent is to capture a Federation starship (shades of STV) and conquer the United Federation of Planets (ironically, this is similar to an early unrealized concept for Star Trek Beyond, the latest in the Bad Robot produced film series, where Khan would have manipulated the Klingons into conquering Earth). In the end, Kirk and his son join forces to defeat Khan, leaving them in the coda to “together, boldly go where no man has gone before.”

HARVE BENNETT

After considering other writers, I found out that Jack Sowards, a great movie-of-the-week writer, was a Star Trek fan. We talked and he clearly knew more about Star Trek than I did, so I hired him. Jack and I went to work, and I say we went to work because the process is like this: you talk, and you rap, and the responsibility is that the writer records, in whatever fashion he chooses, the fruits of the give-and-take of this process. His task is then to go and make it become a script.

JACK B. SOWARDS (writer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

For me, I think the biggest problem is that I started working on the show in December 1980. I met Harve at his house and he had a page of a story worked out. It was a good idea. In other words, somebody gives you a good idea and you say, “Oh, hell, you do this, you do this,” and it just sets you off. April 11, 1981, was the Writers Guild strike deadline and we were always working against that deadline. When you’re doing a feature, three months is not a long time, so we were always working under that deadline. As a matter of fact, on April 10, I handed in the final draft of my script. That was one of the downsides. We knew that the writers were going to go on strike and I couldn’t write beyond that point.

HARVE BENNETT

What we started with was, “Who is the heavy? Who is the black hat? We won’t make this picture unless there is a black-hat heavy.” You know the solution the writers and producers came up with: Khan.

“Space Seed” kept haunting me. I thought it was fabulous. I had seen Ricardo Montalban when I was a little boy, while visiting a soundstage at MGM, and he was doing his first dance with Cyd Charisse. I was there to interview him as a Quiz Kid reporter. He always fascinated me. And “Space Seed” spoke to me. I called Ricardo, who was in the midst of shooting Fantasy Island. We had lunch and he was charming. “You write theeese for me!” he said in that wonderful accent.

JACK B. SOWARDS

I thought “Space Seed” was wonderful. Ricardo Montalban is a classically trained actor. Anybody who can deliver those lines has got to be. Most actors in town would mumble them, but the man knows just how far to go. If you’ve watched Fantasy Island or his movies, there’s a smoothness. In this, he was something totally different and he knew just where to go with it without going over the edge. He is Khan. He brings that sort of macho arrogance to it, and you believe this is a genetically engineered man who is stronger, smarter, and brighter. A hero is nothing without a villain. If you overcome a slug and a snail, you haven’t done anything. If you overcome something like Khan, a hero is defined.

NICHOLAS MEYER (director, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

The story that I was told about the death of Spock was that Leonard, having been disenchanted with the first motion picture, wasn’t eager to do any more Star Trek and that as a way of enticing him or exciting his interest was Harve Bennett promising him a great death scene. That’s all I know. I have to say at this point I have no memory after all these years of any of these five other scripts of Star Trek II. I remember two things: I think one script had people singing “Happy Birthday” to Spock in Vulcan. And I remember that there was a simulator sequence in one of the scripts. I don’t remember how Spock died in anything. He probably always died somewhere near the end. My idea was to have him die in the first scene.

LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)

There have been times when I’ve been concerned about the future of my career, because of the identification with the character. But I never had a confrontation with the studio in which I’ve said I would never play the part again. My only concern with Star Trek has been that if we’re going to do it, we do it well. I don’t want to just do a rip-off Star Trek title just because people will pay to see it. If it’s going to be good, I wanted to be there. I’d hate like hell to see a great Star Trek movie hit the screen and not be in it. I’d feel very jealous. [At the time] I really was adamant that I would not work on Star Trek II because I had been so frustrated with the other and I was feeling very negative about the whole thing.

JACK B. SOWARDS

When Harve and I had our first meeting, Harve said, “Look, Nimoy has refused to do it.” I said, “You want Nimoy to do it?” He said, “Yeah,” and I told him to dial Nimoy’s number. He picked up the phone, dialed the number, and said, “What do I say?” I said, “You say, ‘Leonard, how would you like to play your death scene?’” And Leonard’s comeback was, “Where does it come in the picture?” Harve looked at me and said, “Where does it come in the picture?” And I said, “Right up front. Right in the very beginning.” A minute or two later Harve hung up and said, “Leonard will do it.” Of course when we wrote it, it came in the very beginning. But every time we wrote a little bit more, we moved it back and we moved it back and we moved it back until it came at the end.

HARVE BENNETT

Spock is the most important character. I’ve always thought that. Remember The Man from U.N.C.L.E., in which the real star was David McCallum, but Robert Vaughn was the star and matinee idol? Bill is the centerpiece, but the thing that makes it work is this extraordinary oddball who makes the show unpredictable. Agreeing on Spock’s death was the beginning of an evolution that got so convoluted that its resemblance to the final film is, of course, a process.

LEONARD NIMOY

[Harve] caught me completely by surprise with that one. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, “Well, maybe that’s the honest thing to do. Finish it properly rather than turn your back on it.” So, eventually, we agreed Spock would die. There was a lot of controversy over whose idea it was and why. It was even said that it was the only way I would do it and that it was in my contract that Spock would die! It got to be a messy situation.

When Harve and I started to explore the idea, I thought back to the first season of Star Trek, when the Spock character had taken root and been widely accepted. The whole concept of his lack of emotionality, his control of emotions, was a very interesting and important part of the character. Dorothy Fontana, who was a writer on the series, came to me on the set one day and said, “I’m going to write a love story for Spock.” I told her she couldn’t do it, because it would destroy the character, destroy the whole mystique about whether or not he’s emotional. The whole story we’d been telling was that he was completely in control of his emotions. She said, “I have an idea that might work, and I’m going to try it.” She did, and wrote “This Side of Paradise,” a beautiful episode in which Spock fell in love. At the end of it, there was a bittersweet parting and it was all over. And he had gone through this fantastic experience.

With Jack Sowards officially on board, Bennett’s initial outline was expanded into a full treatment dated December 18, 1980. In the story, the Federation has ceased colonization of new worlds and Starfleet is solely tasked with protecting and developing the territories within its existing realm. On one such world, the society’s youth is being coaxed to rebellion by a mysterious “Teacher.” Aboard the Enterprise, Spock is killed at the very beginning of the film attempting to shutdown a damaged warp engine. After Spock’s meaningless death, Kirk comes aboard the Enterprise and upon examining Spock’s personal logs realizes that Spock was attempting to reengage with his emotions after his encounter with V’ger in TMP.

Shortly thereafter, the Enterprise encounters a refugee ship with Diana, an old flame of Kirk’s with whom he had a son, unbeknownst to Kirk but known to McCoy. Kirk arrives on the rebellious planet, encountering his son, and is blamed for the carnage, only to discover the mysterious Teacher’s identity: Khan, who is able to marshal massive psychic abilities to manifest illusions, much like the Talosians in “The Cage,” around Kirk and David.

In his next version, Sowards introduced the character of Janet Wallace from the TOS episode “The Deadly Years” (a former Kirk love interest whose son David Wallace would be an antagonist in this version) as well as the first mention of Saavik, the male Vulcan first officer aboard the Enterprise. It is also the first time that Commander Terrell is introduced as is the Reliant, which attacks the Enterprise. The Omega weapons system, which would later become the Genesis Device, is also introduced here as the object of Khan’s obsession.

In February of 1981, Sowards elaborated on his previous outline and turned in a first draft of what was now entitled “The Omega System,” in which Kirk is a vice admiral and Uhura is his assistant. While Khan remains the villain, his wife, Marla McGivers, introduced in the TOS episode “Space Seed,” is still very much alive. By April of 1981, Sowards’s new rewrite was now entitled “The Genesis Project.” Janet Wallace is gone, replaced by Carol Baxter and her son, David. In this draft, Spock makes it midway through the picture before his death. Khan and Marla McGivers were the only ones who survived being stranded on Ceti Alpha V, but Khan is still able to project images into people’s minds.

That evolving screenplay had several significant elements that would ultimately make it into the final draft: first, it was a sequel to the original-series episode “Space Seed,” in which Khan has escaped from Ceti Alpha V and is seeking vengeance against Kirk. Additionally, the story would feature the death of Spock.

The screenplay would also deal with a midlife crisis for Kirk as he attempts to recapture the man he once was, while simultaneously being reunited with former love Carol Marcus and meeting his son, David, for the first time. All of this would be played out against the backdrop of the the Genesis Device, created for terraforming but which has the power to destroy worlds if used for more sinister purposes.

ROBERT SALLIN

Kirk goes through a great deal of introspection and reflection on his life. In a sense, he’s having a midlife crisis. Throughout the film we exposed and plumbed the interpersonal relationships that were established back on the series.

JACK B. SOWARDS

The only thing we had to do with the characters was let them age. They’re a good set of characters you can move anywhere, and these actors are so good. They’re so used to working with each other and they have such a rapport. It’s almost as if they can read each other’s minds. They know when the cue’s coming and how to play it, and it’s a pleasure to work with people like that.

Work on the screenplay continued over the next several months, though no one seemed to be entirely satisfied. By July of 1981, an attempt at finding fresh blood led Bennett to original-series writers David Gerrold, Theodore Sturgeon, and Samuel A. Peeples, the latter of whom wrote an outline and eventually a screenplay that pretty much utilized all of the existing elements of the scripts written by Sowards and Bennett with the exception of Khan. Instead, he introduced the aliens Sojin and Moray.

HARVE BENNETT

Sam Peeples had done outstanding work in other areas when I was at ABC. He had done two pilots that I had been involved with, and I thought he could write robustly. I brought him in, he read the script, and I said, “Sam, you know more about Star Trek than I do. I want you to fix this.” He said, “I know just what to do.” The result was his script.

Entitled Worlds That Never Were, submitted in July 1981, and eschewing the characters of Khan and McGivers for his new antagonists, Peeples’s script also has Spock, not unlike Obi-Wan Kenobi, reaching out from beyond the grave to talk to Kirk and McCoy, imparting crucial information that saves the day. Shortly thereafter, a script was developed, dated August 24, 1981, entitled The New Star Trek, consisting of a pastiche of ideas from the various outlines (with the first mention of Saavik as female and half-Romulan) that preceded it, including the aforementioned scene in which the crew sings happy birthday to Spock in Vulcan.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

It was a no-win scenario for whoever walked in there. They actually had me reading SF writers and suggesting some of the best SF writers in the business. It was a dream job: I was being paid to sit there and read for a while. But Harve went to a couple of previous Star Trek writers and it didn’t work.

HARVE BENNETT

Star Trek writers came in with supreme egos. I had worked with many of them before and found them, like most science-fiction writers, very unyielding to comment. Harlan [Ellison] was in a class by himself. He gave me an outline on The Mod Squad that would have cost twenty million dollars to produce. When I asked him to think reasonably, he responded as if I were questioning Allah. I worked with D. C. Fontana on Six Million Dollar Man and had a similar experience. I said, “Hey, we’re not doing Chekhov here.”

ROBERT SALLIN

Neither the Jack Sowards or Samuel Peeples script worked. It felt like television. It felt like a long television episode, and I didn’t believe that the underlying humanity and the relationships between the people were very strong. There was a lot of intergalactic weirdness in the scripts which I felt was defeating.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES (writer, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”)

I didn’t like the basic premise. My personal objection to the original version was simply that it was cast too much in the mold of the 1967 Star Trek episodes. When Gene Roddenberry and I first discussed his project, long before the first pilot script was written, I was much taken by Gene’s imaginatively pragmatic approach. Extrapolation was the key to the visual reality he sought after. But somehow, along the way, pragmatism became dogma and only what had been used before was acceptable. This, I believe, is the major fault of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It is far too easy to be influenced by the traditions Star Trek has initiated. Tradition and déjà vu and nostalgia cannot be major influences in the new Star Trek. It is common sense to use the basics that have proven so right, but it is also common sense to open our minds to the very expansive creativity that brought Star Trek to us in the first place.

It’s for this reason I didn’t hesitate to break old barriers, try new themes, ideas, dialogue, and characterizations. Star Trek had grown and expanded its horizons. The “heavies” in this version is a good example. They are not representations of “evil” or “good.” They were, perhaps, the first totally alien concepts used in Star Trek—one more departure from traditional themes—beings from another cosmos. Their universe is not ours; their motivations are hidden from us. But within the projected limitations of their own environment, they are logical and normal.

In the end, though, I was never actually given an assignment and never asked for one. I wasn’t happy with what I wrote and neither was the producer, so it just died.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Then Harve took a swing at it, but it didn’t work. He sweated bullets over it. He worked on it. But Harve was a TV executive first and foremost. Then he became a producer. This was a job for a pure writer, in my not so humble opinion. It’s not slamming Harve. This was just not his forte. I’ll tell you how he did it, he hired the right people. He may not consider that his greatest talent. But frankly his greatest talent was assembling the right team on Star Trek II. Star Trek III was not as successful because they replaced a lot of the people.

ROBERT SALLIN

I had a lot of sleepless nights about the process. I knew this script just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel right as a Star Trek picture, and at its core it didn’t feel right as anything good. I was getting pressure from the studio: “We’re going to be filming such and such a date,” and we just didn’t have anything that made any sense. I just thought it would look like a Saturday-morning television show if we did something like this. It had no stature, no quality, no uniqueness to it.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Harve is not a natural-born writer, but he wanted to write the screenplay. Not a good idea.

ROBERT SALLIN

Jack was a much more solid writer and made huge contributions to the script. But even then, Harve was always rewriting Sowards. He used to throw all of these versions of the script into what he called the arbitration box. I knew nothing about this kind of thing. What that was, to a certain point, was that Harve eventually took that to the Writers Guild and submitted it in an attempt to receive the sole writing credit. This is true. They rejected him. That was not too cool.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

So, between Harve writing it and before that some writers that were hired that couldn’t deliver, they had gone through their story money and there was none left. The studio was not going to shoot the final draft that Harve turned in. It was awful. He’s not a great writer, but when you’re that close to Star Trek you really want to put your fingerprints on it as much as possible. I don’t question his desire to do that, but Nicky Meyer is a real writer.

JUDY BURNS (writer, “The Tholian Web”)

Harve Bennett, who had hired me several times to do The Six Million Dollar Man, called me and asked if I wanted to rewrite the Jack Sowards script for The Wrath of Khan. I read it, gave him all of my suggestions, and said, “You’re really into this and love it so much, why don’t you rewrite it yourself?” He said, “Maybe I will,” and that’s what he did. I could kick myself now that I didn’t rewrite it, because almost everything I suggested to Harve was used in the rewrite.

Since Leonard Nimoy wanted Spock to die, I said to Harve, “You mustn’t kill Spock in such a fashion that he can’t be brought back.” It was such a final idea originally that it was impossible to bring him back. He also died in such a way that there was no emotional impact on the viewers, and I said what they were missing in that script was the relationship between Spock and Kirk, which was so critical and which ultimately ended up in the scene between the two of them as Spock is dying. Originally, that scene didn’t exist. Those were specifically my notes, all five pages of which had to do with character, because Harve had never done Star Trek before. Thank God he found Nicholas Meyer, a very good character person.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Bob Sallin came in, looked at me, and mind you, I’ve just taken a huge cut in salary to do this. I’m practically living on friends’ sofas. And he says, “I’ve got bad news. We’re going to be out of a job in a week because the studio is not going to shoot Harve’s script and they’re not going to give us any more money for development.”

ROBERT SALLIN

I had put together a list of about thirty or forty directors, and I was almost universally turned down. Nobody wanted to touch Star Trek, nobody wanted to do a sequel, no one wanted to do science fiction or anything with special effects. I was dumbstruck. One day my secretary suggested Nick Meyer.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

I said to Bob Sallin, “The development executive on this is Karen Moore. Karen Moore is very good friends with Nicholas Meyer. Nicholas Meyer has directed one movie, he’s a fledgling director but I know he’s a really good writer. What if you hire him as a director and he quietly rewrites the script?” Now, ultimately, Nicky did not quietly rewrite it, but Bob thought that was a good idea and he didn’t have any others at the time.

NICHOLAS MEYER

There was a movie that I wanted to make and tried to make for fifteen years, based on a book by a Canadian author named Robertson Davies called Fifth Business. I didn’t want to do anything else. I wound up doing Time After Time, and people said if you do this and it’s a hit, then they’ll let you do Fifth Business. So Time After Time was a hit, but it wasn’t a big enough hit, and they weren’t going to let me do this because at that time no one had heard of or was interested in Robertson Davies.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

When Bob Sallin came back to the office at the end of whatever meeting that he took in the administration building and he looked at me and he said, “I’ve got some bad news for you. We’re going to be out of a job in a week,” that’s when panic became the mother of invention and I strongly suggested they look at hiring Nicky and then he took that idea back and it flew. He had nothing to lose, and they sold that idea and they hired Nick to direct it and, of course, Nick obviously rewrote the entire script and wrote a great script. Bob had had a long history in the commercial business and had worked with all of the best cinematographers. And the concept was to surround Nick with the best. And to be there to prop him up, and it worked.

NICHOLAS MEYER

I was sitting in my house in Laurel Canyon just vegetating. I had a childhood friend who was now an executive at Paramount. She’d come on board with Louis Malle for Pretty Baby and had done such a good job for him that the studio hired her. It was a Sunday, and my recollection is that we were flipping burgers on a grill, and my friend Tony Bill was there, and Karen said, “What are you doing?” And I said, “I’m waiting.” And she said, “If you want to learn how to direct, in my opinion, you ought to direct and not just sit up here holding your breath because you’re not getting your way. Maybe what you ought to do is go down and meet Harve Bennett because he is going to make the next Star Trek movie and I think you guys would get along.”

I said, “Star Trek? Is that the one with the guy with the pointy ears?” And she said, “You’re such a snob. Just meet the man, why don’t you?” And if this had been my mother talking I probably wouldn’t have gone but, for whatever reason, she got through to me, and so I went to see Harve on the Paramount lot. As I recall, he cracked open a couple of beers and we sat there and we had a long conversation about it.

ROBERT SALLIN

I went to see Nick, had an interesting conversation, and then brought Harve over. I admired Nick’s writing, but I wasn’t keen on his directorial ability. But I did like the way he wrote and his sense of story was fabulous. So I took Harve over and we had a long meeting. Afterward, Harve turned to me and said, “You know, if we go with him, he’s going to be trouble.” I said, “What do you mean? He’s great.” Well, Harve perceived something which I didn’t, which was that [Meyer] has a very substantial ego. He’s a very intelligent guy and not without talent. I pushed and I said, “I think we really have to do this, because we don’t have anyone who is even remotely interested in doing this.” The long and short of it is that we did it, and when Nick read the various versions of things that Harve was struggling with, he realized that the thing simply didn’t work. It was his uncredited rewrite that we actually shot. He gets, as far as I’m concerned, all the credit. He really did a masterful job of taking these disparate parts and brought them together into something that was cogent, made sense, and was an entertainment.

NICHOLAS MEYER

Harve showed me the first movie and some episodes, and I remember thinking that it all pleasantly reminded me of something I always liked. It took me a while to remember and it was probably in the middle of the night I woke up thinking, “Oh yes, you used to love those C. S. Forester books about Captain Hornblower.” And I said, “This is Hornblower in outer space,” and that’s when everything really clicked into place.

HARVE BENNETT

I think—and this is where Nick and I part ways with Gene—that Star Trek is a naval show; always was and always will be.

NICHOLAS MEYER

Roddenberry definitely averred or opined that Star Trek was not a naval operation, not a military operation, it was a sort of a Coast Guard, is how he put it. And I thought watching these episodes that that didn’t seem to be the case. This was definitely a form of gunboat diplomacy, in which the Federation was a yardstick of correctness. Would we weep for Hamlet if we didn’t know what the fuck he was on about? We understand perfectly, that’s why we keep doing it. Would we suck in our breath, awestruck at the sight of the Michelangelo David if we didn’t understand the idealized human form? It’s all the same. And it doesn’t seem, aside from certain technological advancements, the world has substantially changed. People are still making fists and cutting off each other’s heads. And, in that sense, my version of Star Trek was a gloomier, darker version. But the people were still the same people. They were just having to confront a less optimistic reality.

HARVE BENNETT

When I saw The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, I was so impressed with the screenplay that I went out and read the book, and I was even more impressed with the book. Nick read my rewrite of Sowards and Peeples and said, “This has promise. What if…”

NICHOLAS MEYER

Harve said he was going to send me draft five of the script, and I woke up one day and said, “What happened to that script?” It never showed up. I called Harve and he was sort of embarrassed and said, “I can’t send it to you. I don’t like it. It’s not good. And it’s 178 pages.” I said send it anyway and he sent it. I didn’t know what I was reading and I said, “Well, what about draft four?” And he said, “It’s just five different attempts to get a different Star Trek movie.” So I said to send them all. This van shows up and there were all these scripts and even though I read very slowly, I read all these different scripts—and along the way a dim idea had begun to percolate through me. Philosophically, I said that I was simply going to take these characters more seriously and more literally than anyone has ever taken them before.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Nick was hired. And Nick didn’t even know it came from me to the extent that he bought a washer and dryer for Karen Moore’s house to thank her.

NICHOLAS MEYER

I sat down with Harve Bennett and his producing partner Robert Sallin, they’d been at UCLA together, with a yellow legal pad which is never very far away from me, and said, “Why don’t we make a list of all the things that we like in these five drafts? A major plot, a minor plot, a sequence, a scene, a character, a line of dialogue, it doesn’t matter. Then I’ll try to fashion a new screenplay that accommodates as many of these things as possible.” They didn’t seem to like my idea and I said, “What’s wrong with what I just said?” They started telling me this whole thing about ILM, the special-effects house, needs a script in twelve days or they can’t get delivery of the visual effects in time for the release of the movie. And I said, “What release?” because it was only the second movie I’d ever been involved with as a filmmaker. And I thought, “Holy cow, they’d already booked this thing into theaters.” Twelve days? I don’t know why I wound up saying, “I think I can do this in twelve days, but we’ve got to get going, guys.”

They still weren’t happy and I said, “Well, now what’s the problem?” And they said, “The problem is we couldn’t even make your deal in twelve days,” and that’s when I made my fatal error of forgoing money and credit on the writing of it because I just thought, “If we don’t get going on this now, then there’s no movie.”

ROBERT SALLIN

It is, in all candor, Nick’s uncredited rewrite that is on the screen. Contrary to what the critics may say, Harve made contributions, I made contributions, but it was Nick’s final version that we used. Nick never took credit for it, and he told me his agent said he was crazy.

NICHOLAS MEYER

I don’t remember what happened in those twelve days; I must have gone into some kind of alternate state of being, because I really don’t remember anything except that my back was killing me at the end of it because I was bent over a Smith Corona portable electric.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Some writers are particularly good, and for me it was a joy watching Nick fix this thing on the fly, because it was like an advanced college class on screenwriting. It was screenwriting 303. It wasn’t 101. It was brilliant watching him strip away the stuff that just was unnecessary and get to the basic through line, telling a good story simply and making it a tight, clean script. The way I learned to write, right down to the word, if there’s no reason for it, don’t put it in. It’s got to serve a purpose. And a lot of that I learned from watching Nicky work. And believe me, Nicky and I are not exactly friends, but he is a real writer. He has technique and he’s got chops, and he knows what to do and how to fix a script.

NICHOLAS MEYER

Screenwriting, for me anyway, always amounts to a form of short-order cooking. I thrive on that kind of front burner, walking into the propeller, you’ve got to do it, so do it. There’s a certain adrenaline by-product that, if you’re lucky, infects the actual end result. I’ve taken long periods of time to write scripts and they’ve come out well, but certainly in the case of the second Star Trek movie, that working under the gun, as it were, was good for it.

To some degree, the same is true of IV and probably VI. Movies didn’t always take so long to get made; they just used to happen faster. Nowadays they do draft after draft after draft of things and the life gets squeezed out of them, the spontaneity gets squeezed out of them, the intuition gets squeezed out of them. The advantage I had in writing those scripts is that there wasn’t time to be second-guessed by a bunch of executives or people saying, “Well, what if we did this?” and everybody sticking in their oar. It just worked out that you had to kind of go with your gut and go, go, go … or there wasn’t going to be any movie.

HARVE BENNETT

Star Trek has enormous snob appeal. It purports to be a program for the bright. If you watched Trek it was like going to a Mensa meeting. If you compare the shows of the sixties, as to intentions and content, a Star Trek alongside a Starsky and Hutch or Bonanza, you have something that aspired to as high as TV would allow it to go. It was smart.

NICHOLAS MEYER

I’m not terribly interested in space. But I was interested in real ships—Run Silent, Run Deep, frigates blasting each other. I wanted the characters to look like sailors, not like they were wearing pajamas. I wanted the Enterprise to be reminiscent of a tin can. These are not comfortable places, so let’s rip up the carpet, put in more instrumentation, electronic bosun’s whistles and ship’s bells. I did what I could to echo a nautical frame of reference.

GEORGE TAKEI (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”)

When I first got the script and saw the kind of participation Sulu had, I saw that he wasn’t much more than a talking prop. There was no character there, and I decided that I just couldn’t go back under those conditions. My heart just wouldn’t be in it. I told this to Harve Bennett and Nick Meyer and they understood, but the script was already written and there wasn’t much that they could do with it at that point … Harve understood the problems and had a few scenes added that bolstered my part a little, but I was still unhappy. Filming was due to begin soon and a decision had to be made. So they made certain promises and I was on the set the first day of filming without even a contract. The first shots included me on the simulation bridge, so I was locked in. Unfortunately, when the film came out, some of the little scenes, which would have added to my character, ended up on the cutting-room floor.

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

At first I turned it down. I strongly disliked the earlier script that had been handed to me. I felt it was a busy story and didn’t work, so I had a big conversation with Harve Bennett. He was upset. I said I would rather not be in it, because the role was not meaningful, and the script was just not a good Star Trek script. He said, “What do you think we should do?” “I think you should hire a writer who has written for Star Trek before and rewrite it!” He looked at me funny and said, “Well, who would you hire?” I said, “Gee, Harve, I don’t know, I’m not in that line of work.”

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

It was a dysfunctional family reunion. De is such a gentlemen who couldn’t care less. What a lovely human being. De tended a garden; he carried a picture of his shih tzu in his wallet. He pulls out the picture of his dog like he was pulling out a picture of his kid. He was a sweet man. De was just above it all; you couldn’t say or do anything that would shake him. The only time I saw him a little on edge was when we were doing ADR [additional dialogue recording], because De was a little older than the rest of them. He felt that his voice wasn’t strong enough, so he really got into ADR and pumped everything up beautifully. He had that big career in westerns and stuff before Star Trek began. He was on another level. He appreciated Star Trek but it didn’t define him.

WILLIAM SHATNER

I was nervous about it. Especially after the first film. The success of your performance, essentially, rests in the words. Everything rises and falls on the script. When a script is good, it takes a heroic effort to ruin it. As this script developed, I swung wildly from awful lows to exalted highs. I began to realize that the movie might be good.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

John Belushi was on the set one day studying Shatner. He did a brilliant Shatner imitation on Saturday Night Live. He was perfecting it. He was just sitting there watching Shatner. I said to the associate producer, “Don’t let him go because The Blues Brothers just played the wrap party for Laverne & Shirley and I wanted to get them for our wrap party,” so I dropped everything and ran over, and Belushi had gone. They let him go and that night he died.

NICHOLAS MEYER

I have always thought, to the extent that I’ve had any clear thoughts about Star Trek, that it was something that for one reason or another never quite fulfilled its promise. Either because in terms of a TV show, they couldn’t afford the sets or the effects, or because in the first movie they dropped the ball somewhere. This was an opportunity to make something right that had never quite been on the nose before. The more specific you get, the better. It was not necessary for me to see Admiral Kirk go to the bathroom, but I said why couldn’t he read a book?

At which point I grabbed the first book off my shelf, which was A Tale of Two Cities, and for some reason or another, I just stuck with that, which was interesting because it’s the one book that everybody knows the first and the last line to. That became the bracket of the movie and also somehow became the theme of the movie. Leonard and Shatner got excited, because they always felt in some way that they had the Sydney Carton–Charles Darnay relationship going on between them. That’s very specific, and from the book we got the glasses, which was specific, too … and real! From all of that came age. Interestingly enough, Star Trek II is not very much about science fiction, the Genesis Planet aside. Its themes are entirely earthbound—death, aging, friendship.

DeFOREST KELLEY

I feel that Meyer brought it to life and really made it a kind of Star Trek script. When he sent me that draft, I said, “That’s more like it,” and I went with it.

WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)

I never wanted to be teased by the prospects of another film. I remember reading the script and thinking this can’t be true, this is so nice for my character. It came out of the blue for me. I had no reason to believe that they were going to elaborate on what I had done in the past. I kept holding my breath when I was reading it and thereafter, wondering whether or not it was all going to come apart somehow.

NICHOLAS MEYER

When Bill Shatner first read the screenplay that I had written for Star Trek II, he thought it was a disaster, and we had this meeting. I was so upset that I just kept jumping up to go pee. I didn’t know whether it was the humiliation or rage or what. And Bill said, “Are you okay?” And I said, “Oh yeah, indigestion.” It wasn’t indigestion.

When he finally left, I was just crestfallen and thought, “This is never going to happen.” And Harve sat there and said, “Well, yeah, but what he really said was only this.” And he broke it down into these bite-sized pieces. And when I stopped panicking and realized the value and the insight and the precision of what Harve had isolated, I thought “Oh.” I went home, and twelve hours later I’d turned the thing around again and Bill was happy. He just wanted to be the first guy through the door.

In my relations with Harve, he was always the mentor and I was always the kid, which I thought suited us both. I said this to Harve at the time that he didn’t give himself enough credit sometimes for being Harve Bennett. There was a kind of insecurity or inferiority thing going on as opposed to the rather thoughtful and well-read and diligent person that he was. And very, very smart. He was one of those kids that went on the radio because he was a kid genius.

RALPH WINTER (postproduction supervisor, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

Harve was very calm about all that stuff. That was the statesman in him. He was able to manage all those emotions and everything else very well. A lot of the stuff that I learned from him is you need a calm presence on the set to give the crew and everyone else confidence that not only you know what the hell you’re doing, but that the ship is heading in the right direction.

WILLIAM SHATNER

Nick Meyer had written a script and we were in love with the script and impressed by his creative ability. So even though it was only the second picture he had directed, we felt that his imagination should be given full flower. And so here he was. He had written the script, but he hadn’t directed very much. Whatever help we could give him was offered and he would accept it or not accept it, depending on whether he thought we were correct.

NICHOLAS MEYER

In the case of the cast, they had a lot of ideas about how their characters behaved or spoke. But I never viewed them in an adversarial capacity once Bill decided that he loved the script. There were times when they would get bent out of shape over something, but it was all over the course of a day’s work. I remember having a close-up of Nichelle Nichols at the end of the day and she said that’s not fair, because no one looks their best at the end of a day. It was only my second movie, so I wasn’t thinking in those terms. I remember Leonard didn’t like the set of his cabin on the Enterprise. And you know what? He was right. In that sense, it was a totally professional series of exchanges. I was treated with respect and they liked me more than not. And I think what they really liked was the script. Because they liked the script and I had written it, they were inclined to give me the benefit of the doubt.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Try telling him what to do. I dare you. Nicky is Nicky. He is larger than life. His persona is much larger than Bill’s. Nobody can tell Nicky what to do. Bill could have tried, but he would have failed miserably. And why mess with it? They were getting a great product. Only a total freaking moron would say you need to rewrite that scene because there is not enough of me in it. I saw none of that going on.

ROBERT SALLIN

I watched dailies. Remember the scene in the container on the sand planet where Khan and his followers are living? Khan delivers this fabulous speech and there are all of these cutaways to reactions. I looked at it and realized that Nick shot it with the wrong screen direction. I was livid. I went to the set and found out a couple of people had warned him about it and he ignored them. I went to Nick, controlling myself, and said, “All of that stuff you shot of the reactions is going to have to be reshot.” He said, “Why?” and I explained it to him. He said, “I’m not doing a picture about screen directions.” How do you like that? We reshot it. That was the kind of thing I was dealing with a lot.

Remember when they open the picture with the training exercise? The exercise fails and Shatner comes through the door with the light behind him. My feeling was that his arrival has to be like the Second Coming. I had a discussion with Nick about how to do it, and I said, “You must put the light directly in line with the lens so that the figure of Shatner blocks it and is surrounded by the fingers of light and smoke and it all comes out equally.” I go up to San Rafael with ILM, I come back, and Shatner’s off to one side and it looks terrible. Again, I went to Nick and said, “That shot doesn’t work.” “Why? Why?” “Because you didn’t do what I suggested and it doesn’t work. It’s not appropriate for this key moment. Here’s how it has to be.” I explained to him again what had to be done and he said, “That’s fine. I’m going to get credit for it anyway.”

WILLIAM SHATNER

By the time we were ready to shoot, I knew Wrath of Khan would be great. We had ILM for the effects, so the movie couldn’t look bad. We also had a very human Star Trek-ian script. It was a wonderful working experience. It was as if the years between this film and the old show never existed.

At one point, production was rocked by public outcry following media announcements that in Star Trek II, Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock was going to die. The shocking thing is that the leak came from an inside source.

ROBERT SALLIN

The studio did not generate any of the rumors about Spock’s death. People have assumed that when this movie was conceived the first thing the studio did was to run out and create the rumors that Spock was going to die, to get the Trekkies excited and generate publicity. I know that the position of the studio brass was that they would just assume nobody said anything. Early drafts of the script were stolen and made their way into the hands of fans, and that fueled the furor.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Gene Roddenberry was none too happy we were going to kill off Spock. He didn’t hide that. The big shocker for everybody was toward the end of principal production Leonard coming back and saying, “You know, I had such a good time with this I’d be willing to do one more.” That was where they decided to add a scene to give them an avenue into Star Trek III. Nicky Meyer had no problem splattering green blood all over the place when it came to killing Spock. There was an attempt by Harve to keep everything under wraps. We did not want this leaking out, but it did leak out.

SUSAN SACKETT

Some things Gene fought for and did not get and would very much like to have had. In the second movie, for example, he fought very desperately against any attempt to kill the Spock character, and he was overruled.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

There were only like six or seven copies of the story outline that were circulated and only two people who needed to know. Harve came to me and said, “I need you to devise a way that if somebody leaks this we might be able to track it back to the person who leaked it.” It was a typo. Everybody had a distinct typo. Literally it was like a period snuck into each page. That’s what I did.

Harve said, “Don’t tell me what you do, just do it.” So I did. I sort of embedded my own little special code. At the time, we were using typewriters, but this rudimentary code actually worked because at one point it was leaked, it was published, and instead of retyping the text it was just photographically put out there in one of the rags. And so Harve came in and plunked a newspaper in front of me and he said, “Okay, track it!” And I could. I went back to his office. I said, “Here’s the legend. Here’s whose copy this was. Now what are you going to do about it?” It was Gene’s.

Gene never knew anything about this. I never told him. I can say with 100 percent certainty that it was Gene’s copy that was leaked. There was nothing Harve could do about it because it was Gene’s copy.

JOEL ENGEL (author, Gene Roddenberry: The Myth & Man Behind Star Trek)

Gene Roddenberry’s treachery caught Harve by surprise, given that Harve thought he had GR’s approval and imprimatur. It didn’t occur to him that GR might leak a plot point to undermine Harve’s work. And it’s telling that GR couldn’t imagine Spock’s rebirth. My recollection is that they didn’t have a working relationship, since there was nothing for GR to do but sit there like Jabba the Hutt and have the scripts and rough cuts brought to him for his amusement. Roddenberry was indulged to stop him from unleashing the dogs of war, the fans.

HARVE BENNETT

In those days fanzines were the equivalent of the Internet. They’re still out there, but in those days there were like a hundred thousand subscribers to such publications, and after the first outline of Star Trek II was distributed within Paramount, within two weeks every fanzine was crying, “They’re going to kill Spock!” That was followed by a massive write-in campaign. I think they sent a hundred thousand letters saying don’t kill Spock, and put a terrible crimp in the most difficult problem I had, which was convincing Leonard Nimoy to get back into the ears. Leonard wanted nothing to do with the next feature, having had a bad experience on The Motion Picture. So I had convinced him by telling him he was going to get the greatest death since Psycho—the genius Hitchcock kills the largest star in the picture a third of the way through, and no one could believe it. Suddenly it was no longer a Janet Leigh vehicle.

Anyway, I said, “That’s what we’re going to do to you; no one will know and they will be scared shitless.” He said, “Ooh, I like that,” and his actor side said, “That is a great death scene, and I’m through with it. I’m not Spock.” But now we’re confronted with the world knowing we’re going to kill him, so that ended that surprise. I then had to really convince Leonard that we could make it work, and told him how. By that time, though, Leonard had regained his enthusiasm, reading with Bill, and he’d met some of the cast again and there was a certain warmth that was reentering the whole franchise. He said, “You fix it that way and I’m aboard,” so that ended that problem. But I will forever know who ratted us out and he did it again, by the way, when we destroyed the Enterprise in Star Trek III.

I was so frustrated with that, I said, “The hell with it,” and two weeks before Star Trek III was released, the promo department said, “Oh, you’ve got to see our trailers; our trailers are so terrific for Star Trek III.” In the trailer they proclaim it as the “final voyage of the starship Enterprise.” The first thing, “BOOM!” and the ship blows up ten seconds into the trailer. The Enterprise is blowing up before your eyes. So that ended that surprise, but these are the vicissitudes of doing it in the Hollywood system.

NICHOLAS MEYER

We were sitting in one of those little screening rooms at Paramount looking at test footage of something. I was sitting behind Harve and we were all still mumbling about getting letters and flak about killing Spock. And the simulator scene in my script had already been written and I had started off the movie with it. But without the death of Spock. So I said, “We kill him in the simulator right at the beginning.” And Harve whirled around and he went, “That is brilliant!”

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Starting out with the Kobayashi Maru was great because it threw all of the really hard-core people off. It was just a publicity thing. They were not really killing Spock. After the simulator scene, Kirk saw Spock and asked, “Aren’t you dead?”

HARVE BENNETT

Moving Spock’s death to the end of the film made it stronger, and if I thought Gene knew what he was doing, and knew the long-range results, I would honor him fully. But it was accidental. It did, however, let us set up the nobility of the real death.

EDDIE EGAN

The letters and phone calls that came in from people were more outraged at the idea of Spock’s death than they were happy that Paramount was making another movie. They always sort of considered Paramount to be this monolithic evil corporation that didn’t care about Star Trek at all. I would say to these people, some of whom I became very friendly with over time, “You have to understand, they’re making another movie. If they hated Star Trek, they wouldn’t make another movie. They barely made a dollar on the last one.” That became part of my job. It was like holding the virtual hands of these people over the phone and just responding to letters and talking to fans, as well as these sorts of normal customary duties of publicity.

WALTER KOENIG

Harve Bennett had given me a copy of the script and asked me to do a Trekkie run [for accuracy to series canon] based on some comments I had made on an earlier draft where they had Spock dying in the first act, and I said this was absolutely unconscionable; this is the climax of your story. He’s not one of these guys in the red shirts. I guess he was reasonably impressed with that, because he then asked me to do a Trekkie run and there was some dialogue about Khan saying, “Mr. Chekov, I remember the face”—which he couldn’t possibly have since I wasn’t on the series when he did that episode. I was faced with the ethical dilemma of mentioning it to Bennett or letting it go. I chose survival as opposed to ethics and I didn’t mention it and, in fact, Ricardo didn’t even know it. He didn’t know that he hadn’t met me before.

NICHOLAS MEYER

Montalban had the longest credits of anybody, and if you watch him at his best in certain movies, he’s a fantastic actor. He was the only one who couldn’t come to rehearsals. We rehearsed the movie around my dining room table and he was doing Fantasy Island. So I didn’t really know him. I had lunch with him and that was it. And you know, directors always want to know one thing about the actor: Is he crazy? How crazy? Am I going to live or do I have to pull the boat over the mountain? Ricardo was a very courteous, very polite, very well-bred gentlemen.

He came to the set the first day ready to work and in full makeup. We had this whole six-page monologue about who he is and why he’s so pissed off at Kirk at having been marooned on this planet. I thought, “Let’s try to film it in one shot. Let the camera sort of dance around him and let him work up a head of steam.” A head of steam is what he worked up, all right, because when we first were doing it, he was screaming and bellowing. This is only the second movie I’ve ever directed, this guy’s got more credits than I’ve got inches in height, and I thought, “What to do, what to do?”

While they’re lighting I asked him into his trailer and to have a little conversation. I remember saying, “You know, Laurence Olivier said that an actor should never show an audience his top because once you show your top, they know you’ve got no place else to go.” And he said, “Ah, I see, you’re going to direct me. That’s good. I need directing, I don’t know what I’m doing up there.” And then he proceeded to regale me with some choice Mervyn LeRoy stories. “Ricardo, Lana, make it a good scene!” That wasn’t very helpful to him.

RICARDO MONTALBAN

When I started to articulate the words of Khan for myself, I sounded like Mr. Roarke and I was very concerned about it. Then I asked Harve Bennett to send me a tape of the old show that I did. I ran it two or three times. When I first saw it, I didn’t even remember what I did. On the third viewing, a strange thing happened to me and I started reliving the moment, and the mental process that I had arrived at, at that time began to work in me and I associated myself with that character more and more.

Now this character presented a different problem. The original character was in total control of the situation. Guided simply by his overriding ambition. The new character, however, was now obsessed. He was a man obsessed with vengeance for the death of his wife, for which he blamed Kirk. If he was bigger than life before, I felt he really had to become bigger than life almost to the point of becoming ludicrous to be effective. If I didn’t play it fully and totally obsessed with this, then I think the character would be little and insignificant and uninteresting. The danger was in going overboard. I had to be, if not deranged, then very close to it. I had to find a tone of really going right to the razor’s edge before the character becomes a caricature.

NICHOLAS MEYER

I remember saying apropos of Khan, “You know, the thing about a crazy person is that a crazy person doesn’t have to raise their voice because you just never know what they’re going to do … next!” And I sort of lashed out with my arm around his neck and then he understood, he got it. And then it was just a question of endless fine-tuning. He would look at me before every take or after every take and go, “Too much, too little?” It was like driving a Maserati, you just didn’t have to do much to get the response.

WALTER KOENIG

Working with him was a pure delight. He was always there for your close-up. I remember Nick saying something to him about his performance needing fine-tuning, and I thought, “Oh shit, here it comes.” Instead he says, “Ah, you’re right.” It was beautiful. That’s the way every theatrical experience should be and with us, unfortunately, it wasn’t.

Wrath of Khan was a delight from start to finish and one of the greatest delights was working with Ricardo Montalban and Paul Winfield [who played Terrell, captain of the starship Reliant], and not being on the Enterprise having to be judged by our leading man, not having scenes reblocked by our leading man, which I found very oppressive. I’m working with actors who give as well as take. Totally professional.

ROBERT SALLIN

Leonard and Bill have been doing this forever and they know these characters. It’s not that they weren’t delivering performances, because they were. But then Ricardo comes on to the set. We had him for ten days, and the first shot was a master shot that ran almost ten minutes; a full reel of film. Man, he was phenomenal. Just a delight. So after that day, suddenly everybody sharpened up a lot, because he was so good. He had raised the bar.

RALPH WINTER

In The Wrath of Khan there was never an on-camera scene in the same room with Ricardo Montalban and Bill Shatner. It was all on viewscreens. It was all ship-to-ship and there was never any face-to-face encounter. You can’t do that today.

NICHOLAS MEYER

They should have met. Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth the First never met and playwrights have been putting them together ever since.

JACK B. SOWARDS

Kirk and Khan may not have met in the film, but they did in my script. You bet your ass. In my script, Khan was more of a mystic than Attila the Hun. I invested Khan with certain powers. He could make you see things which didn’t actually exist. It was a battle of wills, which Kirk ultimately wins when Khan realizes he cannot control his mind. Nobody wins the fight and it ends up as a fight in space with the ships. It was a twelve-page fight that they simply took out and threw away. The fight would have required a lot of special effects, because it was really a mind attack by Khan on Kirk and Kirk’s being able to resist it. He would take it to different places. They would be on a shore somewhere, fighting with whips. They would be in a stone room of a castle. When you got into the whole thing, it was a very expensive process, so I can understand their dropping it. But not the face-to-face confrontation. I could never understand that.

RICARDO MONTALBAN

I don’t think this was a drawback. Actually, that was an element that was interesting. It was difficult as an actor, but that separation of the two ships gave it a really poignant touch to the scenes. The fact that being so strong, there was such pressure knowing that he can’t get his hands on Kirk. I didn’t mind that. I minded as an actor. I wish William Shatner and I had somehow been able to respond to each other at the time. The actual situation, though, I thought was a plus. We left the audience wanting them to get together and we don’t.

Beyond Ricardo Montalban, perhaps the greatest standout was the first starring role for now veteran actress Kirstie Alley, who portrayed the half-Vulcan, half-Romulan Lt. Saavik in The Wrath of Khan. “I liked the Star Trek TV series,” Alley related at the time. “In fact, I’ve been rehearsing Spock for some years now. I would pretend that I was his daughter. Every week, every episode, I’d sit there thinking, ‘I should play Spock’s daughter.’ I mean, I could arch my eyebrows as good as Leonard Nimoy. Whenever I’d watch the show, I’d write dialogue for myself so I could actually take part in the story. When Leonard said a line, I’d respond. So when I was told about the part, I was very excited. I went in there and acted like Spock. Then Nick Meyer said, ‘Boy, you have him down. Did you know that?’”

ROBERT SALLIN

I thought Kirstie Alley was a really nice young lady, but I became concerned as I saw her working on the set with Shatner and Nimoy. I went to the honchos and said, “You have a brand-new actress here. Shatner and Nimoy are going to chew her up and spit her out.” Back in the days of the television series, Shatner used to take other people’s dialogue and make it his. Leonard and Shatner are really top-level actors, really good actors, and she was just beginning.

I didn’t want her to get buried, so I suggested that we get her an acting coach to work on the rough spots or just someone she could talk to, because Nick was not that kind of guy. He couldn’t provide that kind of support for an actor. So I pushed it. I took her to lunch and as gently as I could made the suggestion. She said, “Oh, sure, that would be helpful.” She was really nice about it. We hired a really good guy who was with her for two or three weeks and it helped her settle in and deal with the process.

EDDIE EGAN

On the film there were the usual tensions with the newcomers, like Kirstie Alley. By the nature of being new, there’s attention that’s focused on the character or their story line and that means there’s attention taken away from one of the original cast member’s story line. I remember them all being very cordial. Not Bill so much, because Bill is Bill. But Kirstie persevered. She had a rough go the first few weeks. People were not pleased with her performance. There was talk that they were going to have her voice replaced for the entire movie. They actually didn’t do that, but they did have her rerecord most of her role in looping just to get some infliections that weren’t present in the production audio.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

My greatest regret is that I couldn’t find a way to steal Khan’s necklace. I thought that was the best piece that had ever been created. I don’t know where it ended up, but if you ever find it I want it. The uniforms were particularly nice. [Wardrobe supervisor] Agnes Henry had done such a tremendous job on the uniforms, and as such the pins were disappearing left, right, and center, which was driving up their budget.

They started stitching them onto the outfits so it was more difficult to steal and that didn’t work. I started getting phone calls from the administration building asking us to liberate pins for certain people. So I would call the stage and they would steal a pin here and there and it would go to the administration building. Finally, I started bitching to Leonard. I said, “You know what, I’ve stolen a pin for every goddamn person in this place. I got nothing.” So Leonard stole a pin for me and now I have a pin that was officially stolen by Nimoy.

NICHOLAS MEYER

The studio didn’t interfere at all because there just wasn’t time. I had, on the one hand, Harve Bennett. I also had Austen Jewell, who was the production manager. The things that happened I didn’t know about until later. Robert Sallin tried to have me fired. He didn’t like the way the movie looked. My job was ultimately saved by Michael Eisner.

ROBERT SALLIN

I’m not proud of myself for this, but it really was a result of never having produced a major picture on a major lot before. We were three days into shooting and we were a week behind. I didn’t know what to do. I called Harve, who was in London doing A Woman Called Golda. He had nothing to do with the running of Khan at all, except the script. I finally had a meeting with Michael Eisner and told him I thought we were going to have to replace the director and he said, “We can’t fire him, because no one will want to work at Paramount.” I was a director and there was no way I would be a week behind in two or three days. Especially on a film like this one that had so many conditions placed on it because of what happened with the first movie. I just felt that pressure all the time. Needless to say, this didn’t rocket me to the top of Nick’s best buddy list. But I had always tried to just help him; I wanted to get that picture to be the best picture that could be made, and certainly a terrific Star Trek experience. That was my focus. The rest of the stuff was how you got there.

RALPH WINTER

I remember the ending of the movie when we previewed it; the first ending where Spock dies was a downer. It was depressing, and I remember being in Gary Nardino’s office with all the executives. It was Eisner, Katzenberg, Diller, a bunch of people there, and really, that’s where the idea came from for the final shot that was added on the Genesis Planet, actually Golden Gate Park, of discovering the casket and raising the possibility that Spock could return. That ending is what shaped the movie, and when we shot that and previewed it, it made all the difference. It gave you a hopeful ending and it led to another movie.

EDDIE EGAN

That door was not open in the original script. He was gone. But as [Nimoy] worked on the picture and began to enjoy himelf and feel like they were getting back in the groove, he used that to his advantage. He said, “If I go this way and we agree that there’s a possibility that Spock will come back, I’m going to ask for something.” Obviously that was directing the third movie.

The events of The Wrath of Khan culminate with Spock’s attempt to save the Enterprise from destruction, and in the process he is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. Spock’s selfless decision results in the character’s poignant passing. There is, however, an enigmatic moment offered an instant earlier where he uses a Vulcan nerve pinch to render McCoy unconscious, places his hand on the doctor’s face, and utters the ambiguous word “Remember.”

LEONARD NIMOY

I found myself being moved by the scene very early, at about the point where Kirk says to Scott something about you have to get us out of here in three minutes or we’re all dead. You see Spock hear that and react. I’m already feeling emotional about what’s coming. I really came within a hairbreadth of walking off the lot rather than playing the scene. The day we were going to shoot it, I was very edgy about it and scared of it. Scared of playing it, almost looking for an excuse not to, finding something to pick an argument about. It was a very tense time. And I still feel that way seeing it. It’s a moving scene and I’m pleased with it in the context of the film. I’m glad we did it. I think we did it well. I think we did it honestly and sincerely.

NICHOLAS MEYER

The question in my mind was not whether Spock died, but whether he died well. His death needed some organic relationship to the rest of the movie, and a plausible connection to whatever else was going on. If we did that, I don’t think anyone would question it. On the other hand, if the movie suddenly turned around a corner on two wheels and “we fulfill Nimoy’s contract by bumping off his character which he has grown tired of playing,” if indeed that was the scenario, which I have never heard, that wouldn’t be so good. That rumor that we were going to have more than one ending, that we were going to let the audience decide … that was all bullshit. Art is not made by committee … and it’s not made by voting.

SUSAN SACKETT

I don’t know if that ending with a suggestion of hope is a cop-out, but it’s something that Gene fought for badly. He did not want to see his character killed off without having any hope. Having his molecules blasted all over the universe would have made it very difficult for him to ever return as that character. Gene created that character and he did not create the demise of that character, and he wanted it so that there would be some way to recall that character when needed, and that was the reason for the open-endedness.

NICHOLAS MEYER

The scenes which were the most difficult, or at least the most wrenching to do, were the death of Spock [sequences]. Everybody stood around the stage in tears, which was very surprising to me because I was not that experienced as a movie director and I was amazed at how moved they were. The next day at the dailies, same thing. Everybody cried. I come from the “less is more” school of thinking. You can have somebody point to something and say “Look at that!” and you don’t have to cut to what he is pointing to. In fact, you can raise considerable tension by not showing the audience what the character sees.

For example, once Spock enters the reactor room I deliberately didn’t cut back to him for a long time. After hearing “You can’t go in there, you can’t go…” you gotta be wondering, “What’s happening to him?” You want to see what’s going on there. It’s a matter of choice, of taste. I would rather underplay and let the audience’s imagination rise to meet something halfway. From what I’ve seen of the series, I tend to think they overacted or showed too much. My attitude has changed perceptibly. I don’t know whether it was the actors themselves or the characters, but I finally thought, when I was watching the death scene and I realized that I was choking up, I thought, well, we have now transcended the subject matter. This is no longer simply about a man with pointy ears … which is how I felt because I didn’t know it that well.

HARVE BENNETT

We went to the mat only when I said that as keeper of the franchise, I have to give people an ambiguous hope. Nick said, “No, the opera is over, the fat lady has sung, and Carmen is dead.” I think he was wrong. There wouldn’t have been a Star Trek III or IV, which were pretty good pictures. Spock was a secret weapon. He is the pivot, the true uniqueness of the show.

WILLIAM SHATNER

I don’t know whether the Star Trek series could have gone on without Spock. It certainly would have been different and probably not as good. The Spock–Kirk interrelationship is really the key to so much for the way the stories are told.

HARVE BENNETT

I’m the guy who brought the Bionic Woman back to life after she was dead, dead, dead, so I’m an old hand at how you can change course if everybody wants you to. In fact, it would be fair to say that no matter how big the stories of Star Trek, the fact remains it is still a series. It is a continuing adventure with the same characters and has the matrix and nature of a television series, which is that the characters have to keep coming back and you have to keep making them fresh by exploring new avenues of their lives. That’s the tough part of making series-oriented material.

ROBERT SALLIN

One of the major conflicts Nick and I had in the making of the picture was the whole idea of planting the seed that Spock might come back. It was not in the original script, that idea of going back to the planet. Nick hated the idea, but the studio wanted it because they were getting so much flak about killing Spock.

NICHOLAS MEYER

I fought very hard to make him dead, and the shots that imply a resurrection—the vision of the casket on the Genesis Planet—were done over my dead body, with my enormous objection. I objected so strenuously, and went to such lengths, that a producer on the film referred to me as morally bankrupt. He said, “You’d walk over your mother to get this the way you wanted,” and I said, “You know, I think you’re right. I don’t believe you can bring a dead person back to life.” Having seen Star Trek III, I still don’t believe it. But okay, he’s back, Leonard is back and since it’s Leonard, I’m happy.

HARVE BENNETT

The last weeks of Star Trek II were frenetic because of an organized campaign: Don’t Kill Spock! And the studio panicked that this would affect the box office. Nick Meyer was steadfastly going to walk off the picture. He said that we said we would kill him, so we’re going to kill him. Leonard was getting threatening letters. This was a serious thing, and I felt that the compromise we had to make was that we made an ambiguity out of the ending by saying, “There are always possibilities.”

RONALD D. MOORE

It totally choked me up. I was there with my high-school sweetheart and we got out and I was very quiet, and I was crying and she was, too, and we couldn’t believe it had happened. We couldn’t believe they’d done it, and it was beautifully done, and I kind of knew they were probably going to bring him back but at that point I didn’t want them to. When they announced the title of the third one, I was kind of disappointed. I love the character, but I just felt like it was taking something away from this experience that I’d just had, that had touched me and moved me really deeply, because I loved the characters and I loved him and I loved Kirk. I felt the pain of that loss and what that meant, it really affected me, and then in the very next movie they were going to wipe it away. I felt like it was taking something from me rather than giving something back. It was a cheat, and one of the things I thought when I saw Wrath of Khan originally was how bold it was not to cheat, how bold it was to actually kill one of these characters and to make it stick and not have them wave a magic wand like they did on the TV series and have Bones or someone come back at the end. So I was really kind of bummed that they weren’t going to stick with it and keep going and deal with the consequences in the Star Trek universe.

WILLIAM SHATNER

Bringing back somebody from the dead loses validity. I think that as a dramatic device a time warp does the same thing for me. To go back in time is to rob you of the essential jeopardy. It should be life and death and if it’s death, it should be death.

NICHOLAS MEYER

The only other run-ins I had with the studio were over the title. The title of the movie was The Undiscovered Country. And they wanted to change it to The Vengeance of Khan. I knew that wasn’t going to work because George Lucas was doing a movie at the time called Revenge of the Jedi. And we wound up where we wound up.

GENE RODDENBERRY

It was an exciting picture. I had many problems with it, though. They were very lucky they had the actor they did in Ricardo Montalban to play Khan since it was not a well-written part. “I will chase you through the moons of Jupiter” and so on. In the hands of almost any other actor, it would have gotten snickers from the audience. Montalban saved their ass. Khan was not written as that exciting a character, he was rather flimsy. The Khan in the TV episode was a much deeper and better character than the movie Khan, except that Montalban pulled it off.

HARVE BENNETT

Gene is a remarkable visionary and a very bad supervisor of other writers. He alienated some really creative people who were doing their very best to make his show a hit. That’s the summation of what my perspective is. I had very little to do with him in the movies, because I was fortunate enough to have a mandate from Paramount to not pay any attention to him, which is easier said than done because he is a master manipulator of a loyal and large following. It’s like the Bolshevik party. It isn’t that there were so many of them, it’s that they were so smart and so vociferous.

In a September 29, 1981, memo to Bennett, Roddenberry expressed a bit of frustration over the situation between them: “You have never requested nor even made it possible for me to act in any way as ‘Executive Consultant’ on this movie. Or even as ‘Infrequent Advisor.’ You did not ask my comments on the story … neither did you ask for my comments on the writer selected; we never discussed director other than your calling me the day before his name was announced. Although I may have sometimes wondered if you could not have profited from at least some of my experience, I am neither embarrassed [nor] annoyed over the way you clearly preferred for it to be. You are the man running the Star Trek II movie and I accept your right to run it your way.”

While he felt that certain criticisms of the script were “fairly unimportant,” there was a concern that certain philosophical tenets of Star Trek be maintained, particularly where it came to celebrating the differences between species rather than seeing them as a detriment. “If Star Trek slides into becoming just a routine ‘space battle show’ (an SF form which the critics now consider ‘tiresome’), then I have no doubt but that Star Trek will slide downhill rapidly. In this case, I am doubly concerned because I have an interest in this property remaining valuable. However, there are some areas of script comment which I consider the most important of all—examples of these are things like Star Trek’s avoiding the use of violence in story solutions, maintaining the importance of the Prime Directive, continuing our reminders that to be different does not mean that something is ugly or to think differently does not mean that someone is necessarily wrong. It seems to me that there is something very decent and very necessary in saying such things to people, especially today.”

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

The studio would only do it on their terms. Gene was between a rock and a hard spot. Either he does it according to their liking, which is to take the check, and smile, and be a friendly consultant, or it doesn’t get done. So I think Gene made the right decision. It was not easy for him. Couldn’t have been tougher. He handled it well. As well as he possibly could. Harve kept Gene in the loop as much as possible. Gene’s office was just a stone’s throw away from ours. We didn’t see a lot of him once the movie was shooting.

HARVE BENNETT

One thing about Roddenberry: as he aged, he somehow became disassociated with the very thing he wanted the show to be. For example, his concept was nautical, the officers are addressed as “mister,” a naval tradition. There’s a captain, tactical officer, gunnery officer, all that stuff. Engineering is below, and he, in his words, described Star Trek as Horatio Hornblower in space. Okay. Makes enormous sense. And Kirk is Hornblower. Now we start, and from the first outline in addition to the leakage, he whined and complained that we were making a militaristic show. It was frustrating. The studio promised, “We’ll handle him, don’t worry about Gene, we’ll handle him.” Ha! I would call occasionally and I would say, “Hey, you guys said…” and they’d say, “You’re doing fine. See you later!” So it did fall on me to respond to his long, haranguing memos. Once in a while he’d pop in an idea, in a long haranguing memo, and we’d use it. And we’d thank him for it. But essentially he was our opponent in so many ways.

RALPH WINTER

It was clear from people like Leonard and Bill Shatner, when they dedicated the Gene Roddenberry building, that they were going to talk about people like Harve Bennett and Gene Coon, who have made this thing successful. There were so many times when there were problems and someone didn’t know how we would get by, and it would fall on Harve to solve it. Harve is absolutely the unheralded guy to save the series of films.

NICHOLAS MEYER

The history of human endeavor has frequently [been] comprised of certain institutions which are based on two archetypes. There’s a guy who comes along and, with a certain kind of messianic fortitude and charisma, conjures up a universe out of nothing, hot air, if you’ll pardon the expression. He makes it happen. Usually, he never stays around to run it.

The task is always turned over to a can-do type who is distinctly lacking in messianic qualities, but is a very good organizer. Jesus Christ presumably founded the Christian faith. But it seems like it was either Peter or Paul who got the thing rolling as a business. Star Trek would not have existed without Roddenberry. There’s no question about that. I have no wish in any shape or form to detract from the magnitude of his accomplishments, but I also think that nothing can stay the same forever. For things to grow, there have to be these Joshua types, of which I suppose I am one, who pick up the burden and carry it. Maybe we carry it clumsily … or in the wrong direction … but we fucking carry it.

RALPH WINTER

Gene kept sabotaging us. It was too bad. I remember a fight on the second movie; Nick wanted David Marcus to wear a sweater over his shoulder, wrapped in the fashion of the time. Backward over his neck. Roddenberry hated that. Nick also had a “No Smoking” sign on the bridge of the Enterprise. And he and Roddenberry went round and round about no smoking because, Roddenberry said, “No one is going to smoke in the twenty-third century.” And Nick said, “People have been smoking for hundreds of years and they will for hundreds of years.” And they were at it on the set. They were arguing and yelling, it was bizarre. But that was part of Gene’s view of the future and utopia and what he believed.

GENE RODDENBERRY

I also objected to other little things. Remember when the eel came out of Chekov’s ear? What did Kirk do? He had a look of disgust on his face and grabbed his phaser and went “zap.” Now, how dare he destroy a life-form that had never been seen before! It needs studying. They had him act like an old woman trampling on a tarantula. Now that’s not the Kirk we built up for three years. So many of those fine little things in the episodes, hundreds of them, are what gave Star Trek its quality. Unfortunately, they began doing those things incorrectly in that movie. There was also a great deal of violence. But yet, it was exciting—exciting photographically. I’m grateful that it did what it did.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

Gene did have the most interesting group of friends that showed up at the set. Buzz Aldrin was a trip. Unfortunately he showed up on a day when they were throwing fireballs on Star Trek II and the fire marshal had the set closed down. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t go to set. I said, “Fire marshals have it closed. Come back tomorrow.” And he literally said, “Don’t you know who I am?” So, I started laughing and said, “You’ll burn up like the next one.” But Gene was always in contact with people at JPL. He really had a sense of staying in touch with scientists and keeping apprised of that stuff and so we would have people like Aldrin show up that were guests of Gene’s.

For Star Trek II, the film’s diminished budget made it impossible to rehire composer Jerry Goldsmith (an Academy Award nominee for Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Instead, Meyer and Sallin took a chance on a relative newcomer, James Horner, whose films at the time largely consisted of low-budget sci-fi for horror-meister Roger Corman, including Humanoids from the Deep and Battle Beyond the Stars.

ROBERT SALLIN

I went to Joel Sill, who was the music person at the studio. I said, “Joel, I’d like to listen to some tapes. What I don’t want is musical wallpaper. I want someone who’s young, who is eager for this, and somebody who is technically accomplished. I don’t want that stuff I hear on television.” He gave me twenty-five or thirty tapes that I took home and listened to every single one. There were some big names there, too, by the way. I heard this one and I came back and said, “This is my guy.” He smiled and said, “I’m so glad. I’ve been trying to get him in here for years.” His name was James Horner.

JAMES HORNER (composer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)

I felt it was very important musically to bring the audience back to ground zero, as it were. There are certain givens: the Enterprise is a given, Kirk is a given, Spock is a given, Uhura is a given, and the fanfare theme, that theme is a given. I felt I was fighting an instinct not to use it, and I thought it would be very interesting to use it. I talked it over with Harve [Bennett] and we all agreed it would be good to use it. I remember when audiences first heard the music and heard the whole buildup in the main titles, and they went crazy. They were cheering. I chose to use it in a very haunting way when Spock dies. I just wanted “Spock’s Theme” and the Star Trek theme and all my themes to be playing simultaneously there. That was a very emotional section.

ALEXANDER COURAGE (composer, Star Trek)

James Horner has used it here and there, pieces of the fanfare and all that, because he was told to. It’s that simple. I know a lot of people around town and I go into the store and they know I have written it and they say, “Are they going to use your theme in the picture?” I say, “Well, I guess so,” and they say, “They’d better!” So that’s generally the way it seems to have worked.

JAMES HORNER

When I was asked to do Star Trek II, I made a promise to Harve Bennett. He asked me to do number three, if and when it was made. I made that promise to him and it was a promise I kept. I have mixed feelings about doing large orchestral scores. It’s great for the ego, but artistically, it’s not that fulfilling. As soon as you try and bend the producer and try to get him to take some chances, they get very nervous because it’s so expensive. The recording session for Star Trek was upward of four hundred thousand dollars when you had a ninety-piece orchestra for six days.

JOE KRAEMER (composer, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation)

I’d also heard Elmer Bernstein was first hired to score Trek II, but left after he saw a rough cut, and it was at this point Horner was brought on board. Horner certainly capitalized on the opportunity—I think his score for II is the high point of his career.

LUKAS KENDALL (editor, Film Score Monthly)

Want some real trivia? Two major film composers have made cameos in Star Trek. James Horner is a crewman holding a vacuum cleaner in Star Trek II. And in the original series, Basil Poledouris is a security guard (“Obsession”), Klingon (“Errand of Mercy”), and Nazi soldier (“Patterns of Force”). Basil was a film student at USC and he and his friends used to be Hollywood extras.

NICHOLAS MEYER

When it came time to do the DVD version of the movie or the television version or whatever it is, the studio loses all interest in it and you get to do what you want. I had a movie that worked really well by this time, and the public and critical reception of the movie had already established that, so the question was, do I really want to do a so-called director’s cut, and the answer was no.

But I did have a couple of issues where they had made a mistake. It was battles that I had lost at the time. And one of them was the whole notion that Scotty’s nephew was killed in the engine room explosion and that’s why he’s so flipped out. And I just put it back in. But there weren’t a lot of those. There weren’t enough of them to say this is the director’s cut. I just thought that’s a gyp, trying to get people to spend more money to buy it again.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Scotty stands there … he holds the body of Midshipman Preston. Why has he come to the bridge instead of taking the injured man to sick bay? Starship personnel, even distraught uncles, should react at least as logically as twentieth-century sailors.

While production on the film went relatively smoothly, the relationship between old college friends Robert Sallin and Harve Bennett was becoming more acrimonious, much of it stemming from the fact that Sallin was being credited as producer while Bennett had the title executive producer. On television, executive producers were considered a show’s guiding force, but on film, it’s a far less prestigious title usually reserved for financiers, line producers, and executives and not the actual filmmakers.

ROBERT SALLIN

Harve was incensed that I was credited as producer, and I said, “That’s because I’m producing. That’s what you hired me for and that’s the job I’m doing.” His idea was that everybody worked for him and he was the guiding genius behind this film, and he just wasn’t.

After production wrapped, I was called up to a meeting with Gary Nardino and he said, “We’d like you to stay on and produce more Star Trek pictures.” I said, “What about Harve?” and they said, “We want him doing television.” Precise words. I wanted to think about it, but I came back and said, “I can’t. No matter how much of a disagreement I have with Harve, I cannot do that to someone who gave me this opportunity.” So I walked away. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake. When you’re on a major lot in Hollywood, it’s quite a power base. Again, I didn’t understand how the game was played. I thought it was all about making films. It’s about making deals.

The film opened on June 4, 1982, and was an immediate smash. In response, the studio’s president of distribution, Frank Mancuso, sent a Western Union telegram to the principals to congratulate them on their success: “This weekend ST: TWK set motion picture history. ST 2 grossed $14,347,221 in 1,621 theatres, making it the biggest 3 day opening in motion picture history. I wanted to share this information with you and thank you for all your cooperation which allowed us to make history together.”

MANNY COTO (executive producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)

I totally loved Khan, but I was skeptical at first. When I heard it was going to be Ricardo Montalban returning as Khan, I was like, “Really? From Fantasy Island?” It was kind of a joke. But of course, that immediately faded away the minute he appeared on-screen. It was one of the greatest introductions of all time.

DEBORAH ARAKELIAN

You piss off any given fan of any given show, they will scream, rant, and rave, but they won’t boycott it. They’ll go see it because they can’t believe you’re actually doing it. When I was sitting in the first showing in Westwood and Leonard’s chair goes empty, oh my God. There was a woman in the back who went, “Oh my God, they’re doing it! They’re doing it.” They are screaming at the screen. It was beautiful. It was fabulous. It was great.

WALTER KOENIG

If you can point to one single element that makes this film successful, it is the presence of a formidable, worthy antagonist. You can’t have conflict unless you have something to butt up against. V’ger was more like something you were in awe of. Ricardo Montalban, on the other hand, did a wonderful job with the character of Khan. Not only is he a presence in terms of villainy, but he’s also a character of depth. Even when you hate him, you feel a certain sympathy toward him. That, to me, is extraordinary. Nick Meyer was quoted as saying that he wanted to direct Montalban in King Lear and I can believe it.

LEONARD NIMOY

In doing [Star Trek: The Motion Picture], somebody, somewhere decided that if we’re going to do a motion picture, it must be different than what we did on TV, so we must now start to work out the differences. We’ll change the color of the bridge, the wardrobe, the attitudes of the characters. It seemed to me that somebody was watching 2001 a lot, and getting into a cerebral, futuristic trip rather than an adventure romp, which is what Star Trek is built on. Maybe it’s because they felt that people would not pay to see in the theater what they had seen on TV, that they would want something different. My opinion is that if we can do the best Star Trek episode ever done, well produced and well acted, and put it on the big screen, it will work. What happened on Star Trek II is that our perspective of what Star Trek is really supposed to be has been verified. The audience has said, “Yes, that’s right.”

GEORGE TAKEI

In The Wrath of Khan we have genuine drama because of the confrontation of two strong, cunning, inventive adversaries who are driven to an inevitable collision. You know that they are not going to avoid each other, that there is going to be some dramatic confrontation. Ricardo Montalban is an awesomely well-suited adversary for Kirk.

DeFOREST KELLEY

In my mind, there’s no comparison [between the first two films]. It’s not easy to convince the studio that, as successful as Star Trek was, the fans nevertheless had a deep feeling about the characters, and that you can’t ignore it. In my opinion, that was the mistake that was made with the first film, ignoring the relationships that were so popular in the TV series.

JAMES DOOHAN

To me, this movie is Star Trek the way it should be. The first one was just some grandiose idea that somebody had. There is gorgeous action going on at all times. The characters all have some great things to say. It’s a beautiful blend of all of the good things that were in all of the good shows that we had in the series.

EDDIE EGAN

It was a very interesting experience working on that film in terms of just knowing these people personally that I had seen on the screen for so many years. And seeing Paramount itself just being so buoyant about it. Moviemaking is hard work and a lot of it is boring, but there was a lot of camaraderie on the set and everyone just seemed to have a sense that what they were doing could result in something really meaningful in terms of the legacy of Star Trek and, more optimistically, for the future of Star Trek.

ROBERT SALLIN

For all of the problems we had with Nick, he was a first-rate writer. It was his pulling together the dangling components. He shaped it, he did the whole thing in like ten or twelve days. He just took it and did it and I praise him for it. If we hadn’t stumbled onto him, I don’t know what we would have done.

NICHOLAS MEYER

A lot of people said Star Trek II was such a terrific movie and had a lot of unkind things to say about Star Trek I, but I don’t think they realize that Star Trek II wouldn’t have been so good if someone hadn’t gone boldly where no one had gone before and showed us, in effect, what not to do when it was really important. It’s damn hard work to make those movies and I’m not going to look down my nose at any of them.