“THERE BE WHALES HERE.”
Until the release of J. J. Abrams’s 2009 reimagining, The Voyage Home was the most successful Star Trek film of them all. With little violence and humor that harkened back to classic episodes like “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “A Piece of the Action,” Star Trek IV brought with it an eco-friendly message at its heart and a cautionary warning about endangered species—in this case, the imperiled humpback whale. Additionally, its fish-out-of-water-story of twenty-third-century characters stuck in the San Francisco of 1986 was an irresistible premise that its filmmakers milked to the fullest. Although dismissed by some die-hard fans as too whimsical and slight to be considered among Star Trek’s greatest adventures, there’s little doubt that the success of Star Trek IV would ensure that the franchise would continue to live long and prosper for many years to come.
EDDIE EGAN (unit publicist, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
The difference from the studio perspective on this film was that it was a full-fledged movie again with a movie budget, supervised by the movie group. Everyone was just incredibly excited about the potential of the story and the fact that it could take place outdoors on real locations for a legitimate reason.
I think the studio realized that they had imposed limitations on the films in terms of how they looked and recognized what the audience expects to see in a movie theater. Just the fact they were able to use different kinds of lenses made a big difference in how the movie looks, plus they could use cranes and dollies and things like that that they weren’t able to use on the previous two movies. At that point, the studio was convinced that this could be a continuing series of films and it was given first-class treatment.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor/director, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
I was asked to do Star Trek IV before Star Trek III even opened. I had had some constraints on Star Trek III. I was told flat out that they wanted my vision on this one. “This is a Leonard Nimoy film.” That being the case, Harve and I were asked to develop a concept. I went off to Europe to work on The Sun Also Rises. While I was there, I also wrote a seven- or eight-page outline of what I thought the film could be about. Harve came over and we collaborated on the material … it went in as the very first concept.
HARVE BENNETT (cowriter/producer, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
In moving through the trilogy, I confess that every one of the major tricks I learned in television, I used. Here are the three tricks of the trilogy: Star Trek II, in television we call that the “bottle show.” The “bottle show” in television takes place in an elevator that’s hopefully trapped between two floors. Or it takes place in a mine shaft where people are desperately coming to try to save you and you have to stay down there and talk a lot. Sixty-five percent of the film was on the Enterprise bridge in one incarnation or another. It was also the Reliant bridge, and that is an incomparable savings in terms of time, dollars, and moves. We’d shoot a scene, move the people out, repaint it, and it would now be the Reliant.
Star Trek III was the classic television, “the leading actor loses his memory” show. I did that on Mod Squad, Six Million Dollar Man, Bionic Woman. You usually do it when your leading actor is exhausted or needs a rest. He’s in a coma-like state. In Star Trek III, we had a man who was directing the movie, and who had never directed a feature before, and we felt that to act and so forth would kill him. We had our choice of how to utilize that asset and what we did was we spent most of our money building one great set, the Genesis Planet, and the story became “let’s find him while he directs.” For Star Trek IV we decided to use local location. We had to add some size to the picture, so what do we do? We go out. How do you go out in the twenty-third century? You come to the twentieth century.
LEONARD NIMOY
We decided early on that we wanted to do a time-travel story. When I say “we,” I’m talking about Harve Bennett and I. We were asked by the studio to come up with a story, and our very first conversation was about doing time travel, which we both agreed was a good idea. We also felt that we should lighten up. The picture should be fun in comparison to the previous three.
STEVE MEERSON (cowriter, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
We sat in a room with Leonard and Harve. Leonard told us that he wanted to do a departure, although they weren’t sure what they wanted to do.
LEONARD NIMOY
When we started out to do this picture, I went to three universities—the University of California, Santa Cruz; Harvard; and MIT—to talk to three different professors who are physicists, scientists, and futurists. I spent several hours talking to them about their immediate concerns for the future of the planet. We talked about their ideas for potential contact with extraterrestrials. What it might be like. Where it might come from. How it might come. How we would deal with it. The philosophy of it. And the immediate impact on the sociology of the planet, the religions of the planet. I had some great times.
PETER KRIKES (cowriter, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
They wanted to do a film sort of based on “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Leonard started talking about plankton, cells, that cells become plankton, that things eat plankton, and then whales entered the conversation. We said, “Why not make it as simple as the whale and the whale song?” That was our idea, though that’s not to say Leonard hadn’t done research on whales, because he had.
LEONARD NIMOY
I was also in touch with Edward O. Wilson. In his book Biophilia, he tells us we could be losing as many as ten thousand species off this planet per year—many of them having gone unrecorded. We won’t even have known what they were and they will be gone. He touches on the concept of a keystone species. If you set up a house of cards you may be able to pull away one card successfully … and another card successfully. But at some point you are going to get a card that is a keystone card. When that one is pulled away, the whole thing will collapse.
The same might be true of species: a planetary imbalance might be caused by the destruction or loss of just one. Our tendency is to say, “Here’s this pressure group pestering us—but things aren’t really bad yet. Let’s pay attention to the things we really have to.” But when the ozone question or the species question or whatever gets really bad, we’ll turn to scientists and say, “Okay, here’s the money, God damn it. Fix it!”
They, at some point, may have to come back and say, “It’s too late. We cannot do that anymore, there was a time when we might have…” There is a fantasy that if we did have a holocaust kind of war on this planet, those who are left could eventually rebuild the planet. It’s simply not true. They could never again reach the technical accomplishments that we have reached.
STEVE MEERSON
Leonard had mountains of information on various things. We were hired in February of 1985 and between that time and May or June, Peter and I did several outlines of what eventually became the story. Harve and Leonard took our outline and went through it step by step with the studio executives, and we got the go-ahead to start writing.
LEONARD NIMOY
What we set out to do, frankly, was very dangerous. I was trying to service a lot of masters. I wanted to continue and wrap up some threads that were left over from Star Trek III. At the same time I wanted to make an entirely different kind of film. Those ideas seemed in opposition to each other, but I think we pulled it off.
RALPH WINTER (executive producer, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
It was Leonard’s idea about saving the whales as opposed to, as he famously said, “trying to save the snail darter.” Saving whales made it a bigger movie.
LEONARD NIMOY
At the same, I wanted to make a film that would be accessible and enjoyable to people who had not seen Star Trek III in order to enjoy this picture. I also wanted to make it accessible to people who don’t go to Star Trek movies. I wanted to make it a movie-movie. It starts out like a Star Trek movie and then makes a left turn. It is intentionally very different. I felt very strongly about the fact that II and III were really two of a kind. They both were played with black-hat heavies. We are the good guys and they are the bad guys and we have to beat them. I really wanted to make a change in that.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
I didn’t know Leonard that well, but one day I was chatting with his secretary in the outer office and he says, “What kind of questions do you think Spock should try to solve in a puzzle in the movie?” and I said, “Ask him to disprove God.” He didn’t run with it.
LEONARD NIMOY
The first movie had no comedy at all. The second film had a little. The third film had a little. But there we were dealing with a lot of serious drama. There was a lot of life and death going on. I just felt it was time to lighten up and have some fun. That meant that if we were going to do time travel, the best thing we could do was come back to contemporary Earth, where we could have some fun with our people. They would more or less be a fish out of water on the streets.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
We discovered something in Star Trek IV that we hadn’t pinpointed in any of the other movies and it just shows how the obvious can escape you. There is a texture to the best Star Trek hours that verges on tongue-in-cheek, but isn’t. There’s a line we all have to walk that is reality. It’s as though the characters within the play have a great deal of joy about themselves, a joy of living. The energy, that joie de vivre about the characters seems to be tongue-in-cheek but isn’t, because you play it with the reality that you would in a kitchen-sink drama written for today’s life.
LEONARD NIMOY
We were talking about the idea that if alien intelligence was trying to contact us, it would probably take quite a long time for us to know what it is saying, and for us to communicate with it. I became intrigued with the idea that there was some lack of communication that was causing the problem. [I was] aware that humpback whales sing this unusual kind of song, which we don’t understand but which obviously means something to them. It’s quite a complex structure, and that’s very interesting.
We don’t know, and we may never know, what the communication is all about, so suppose that something in the twenty-third century is trying to communicate with them and they’re gone. That’s how it all happened, and it’s a hell of a lot more interesting and challenging, cinematically, to come back to the twentieth century to pick up a pair of whales than it is to pick up a plant or insect.
HARVE BENNETT
We went through every writer we could think of. We finally found Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes, whose work was highly regarded. Nothing came of it. Some of that, in fairness to them, was because we had saddled them with what appeared to be a male character that we thought was going to be Eddie Murphy at one time.
STEVE MEERSON
Eddie Murphy was going to play a college professor who taught English, but a professor who we probably all had in the sixties or seventies, who’s a little bit wacky and believes in extraterrestrials. Every Wednesday, he would open up his class to a discussion and the room would light up with conversation.
HARVE BENNETT
Now, the meeting with Eddie Murphy was a little bizarre. He had a separate meeting with Leonard. Leonard said, “He’s a little strange in a room.” So he came in with two guys, good-looking guys, and they were all in black leather. [We] told Eddie this story and he thought about it for a while and he said, “It’s good. Let me see a script,” and walked out. We sat there and thought, “Wouldn’t it be terrific to have Eddie in this movie?”
Later, the studio started getting very anxious for a very good reason. Here you have a franchise called Star Trek and it performs in a certain wonderful way. Here you have a franchise called Eddie Murphy and it performs in an even bigger way. Why not take them together and form one franchise? Bad economics, because you are probably diminishing by compositing. So the studio was resistant to it, but Eddie has a certain amount of clout, and he said that he hadn’t decided whether he wanted to do it or not, and so much of the development of the story was with the very distinct possibility that Eddie Murphy was in it.
PETER KRIKES
He would play whale songs, and it was the whale songs he played in the classroom that the ship locked on to. That was in the first draft we wrote, but the second draft was different. After you write a first draft of anything, once the director, the cast, and the producers come aboard, everything changes, and not necessarily for the better. But the tone was pretty much a reflection of what was in the movie. For example, there was a scene where the Eddie Murphy character was trying to convince the Catherine Hicks character that aliens do exist on Earth. In the first draft, Hicks was a newswoman and there was a marine biologist as well. Gillian Taylor was ultimately a marriage of about three characters. Murphy believed in aliens and saw them beam into his classroom.
STEVE MEERSON
It was the boy who cried wolf. No one would ever believe him, so he took it upon himself to follow the crew, and in one scene, he lifted a phaser from Kirk, took it back to the newswoman and said, “See, they really do exist.” And she says, “What’s this?” and casts the gun aside, accidentally activating it. The phaser lands on the floor and her cat jumps off the couch. We follow her to her bedroom and she goes to sleep. The cat keeps phasing things out of the apartment by hitting the phaser, and when she wakes up, she sees that all the furniture is gone.
EDDIE MURPHY (actor, comedian)
I’m a Trekkie. I’ve always loved Star Trek and have wanted to do one of the films. I wanted to be in Star Trek and that’s where they got the idea of coming back in time to Earth in 1986.
PETER KRIKES
We were given two instructions: keep Eddie Murphy in mind for the guest star, and make sure that the character of Admiral Kirk is the driving force behind every aspect of the story.
STEVE MEERSON
The approach we were told to take is that Kirk really had to be the one to lead everyone. Not necessarily that he had to actually have the idea to do something, but it had to appear as if he had the idea. I think the perfect example in the movie is when Spock goes into the belly of the Bird of the Prey to use the computers and learns that the alien probe is emitting the sound of whale songs. It’s Kirk who has the idea to go back through time, although Spock is the one who plants the suggestion in Kirk’s mind. Kirk verbalizes it, and that’s the way it had to be played. We were told Bill had to be the leader at all times. In that scene, if you’re reading it, you say, “It’s Spock’s idea,” but on film Spock’s discovery that it’s humpback whales is not as important as Kirk’s idea of going to get them.
PETER KRIKES
Visually, the scene between Spock and his father at the end is another example. You kind of ask, “Why is Kirk standing there listening to this?” He has to be a part of everything.
STEVE MEERSON
I know a lot of the cast wasn’t happy about Eddie Murphy possibly being cast. I think all of those guys became terrified that Eddie would blow them off the screen. They also got a lot of negative mail from the fans.
HARVE BENNETT
When Eddie Murphy fell out, we had to readjust the script. But by then it had turned to paste. It just didn’t work. Essentially we didn’t have a script we felt good about or one that was even submittable to the studio.
STEVE MEERSON
Actually, every beat of the film’s first, second, and third acts is exactly the same as our script. The only thing that changed slightly was that our Eddie Murphy character and the marine biologist were combined.
EDDIE MURPHY
The script was developed, but we eventually dropped the idea. Golden Child came along and I decided to do that film instead, because I thought it would be better for my career. In retrospect, I think I might have been better off doing Star Trek IV.
PETER KRIKES
If you look at our script and the movie you saw, basically everything is still there, like Eddie Murphy going to meet the aliens in the park to bring them gifts, and he runs into the invisible ship … which is what Catherine Hicks did when she ran into the park to find Kirk. The structure really is exactly the same.
Also, she grabbed Kirk’s waist and is beamed aboard the Bird of Prey with him. In the script, Murphy says good-bye to Kirk who starts to beam out, then grabs him by the ankles and is transported aboard. He goes back to the twenty-third century and salutes Kirk when they get the Enterprise-A. You know when Spock nerve-pinches the guy on the bus? In our draft, that took place in an underground subway system.
You can’t imagine the frustration of them trying to take all the credit for something that was completely blocked out for them. Plus, they removed a lot of the emotional qualities that we thought it would have.
PETER KRIKES
There was a scene with Kirk on the bridge of the Bird of Prey. They cut out five lines where Kirk says to Saavik, “Have you told him yet?” And she says, “No. I’m taking a maternity leave.”
STEVE MEERSON
That’s why she’s standing with Amanda when the Bird of Prey leaves. Because Amanda knows Saavik is carrying Spock’s kid. All they did was cut out five lines of dialogue, and you lost that whole thing.
PETER KRIKES
One of the things we had in our earlier drafts that they took out was what happened when they first went through time. Instead of the horrible time sequence that looks like Russian science fiction, we had them using the slingshot effect around Jupiter and Mars. Also, when they first appeared in the twentieth century, they were in a fog, and as they lowered, the monitors picked up all of the cheering and applause. As they come out of the fog, they find themselves over a Super Bowl game and everybody thinks it’s a halftime show. Then, they cloak and disappear.
STEVE MEERSON
I like our ending better. Our sequence of events was similar. After the shuttle has picked them up and Earth is saved, we cut to this little chamber where they’re waiting to stand trial. They discuss whether or not they would do everything the same if they could … and they say they would. We cut away to Spock and Sarek, who have that same talk that they had in the movie. It was originally much more bonding, but they removed about half a page of dialogue, which changed things quite a bit.
PETER KRIKES
Basically, Sarek was saying, “You’re half human and I’ll never understand that, but I accept you.”
STEVE MEERSON
Everyone is confused, saying to the pilot, “Where are you taking us?” That’s when the pod rises and you see the new Enterprise-A. It would have been much more emotional, instead of saying “You’ve been exonerated for this, this, and this,” you could have done it in three sentences, and with everyone cheering, screaming, and yelling, it would have been an emotional high. Harve likes bookends, which is why the film begins with a trial and ends with a trial. That was always a point of contention between the three of us, that you didn’t need to do that sequence again because it would be understood why. You could just take them to the ship so that everyone would be on a high, rather than waiting for it to happen. Structurally, I think they made a mistake.
PETER KRIKES
They also took out a scene we wrote which dealt with the people’s mortality and age.
STEVE MEERSON
My favorite scene we wrote was between Bones and Scotty, where they talk about the fact that they’re getting too old to be doing this. I personally think they [DeForest Kelley and James Doohan] would have loved to play it. It was two guys sitting on a park bench in Union Square, completely out of time and space, saying, “We’re really getting too old. If we ever do make it back, maybe we ought to give it all up and retire.” Then, they both decided that they’ll never retire, because there’s more to life than sitting on your duff.
HARVE BENNETT
I remember saying, “Well, I know it’s corny, but it would be better if the marine biologist was a woman. Kirk hasn’t had a woman to play to, which he does so wonderfully. The whole series is the woman of the week. Remember that whale special we saw where the girl was bidding adieu to the whale who had to leave Marineland because the female was pregnant, and they could not keep them, and they had to send them back to the sea, and she was bereft? That’s the lady.” Leonard thought it was great. So now we’re getting down to where we’ve got a movie to make and whole new script to write. That’s when we were fortunate enough to find that Nicholas Meyer was available.
NICHOLAS MEYER (cowriter, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
The other script, which I never read, involved Eddie Murphy. I got this call from [Paramount executives] Dawn Steel and Ned Tanen who said, “We have a situation, we’re going to start this movie and we just threw out the script and we need your help and it’s your friends.” I remember going to meet with Harve and Leonard and saying, “What is it?” And Leonard said something like, “It’s something nice.” And then they told me the story. And very quickly I could see how it broke down into the bookends in outer space before the journey. And then there’s the middle part on Earth. Harve said, “You write the middle part on Earth and I’ll write the other parts.”
DONALD PETERMAN (director of photography, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
Star Trek always was filmed mostly on a stage before, and they could never use long lenses because it’s impossible to get back far enough. On this one, because we shot in San Francisco, we tried to make it a little different by using really long lenses as much as we could. We tried to stay away from all the cliché places. We used the bridge, because that’s part of establishing the story, and when we shot downtown we showed part of the Transamerica Building, but we didn’t go to Fisherman’s Wharf, we stayed around the gritty parts of the city.
Leonard was all dressed in his robes and with his ears on, behind the camera directing the cast—and then he’d step into the scene. It’s okay when Robert Redford does it, because he looks like a normal guy, but when you have a guy with long pointed ears, it’s different. The most interesting thing about it is that we finally got the Star Trek stars out on location.
NICHOLAS MEYER
When I realized they went to San Francisco, I also thought, “Well, hey, I’ve done this movie before with Time After Time. Couldn’t they go someplace else?” I suggested Paris. And for whatever reason, they said no, they couldn’t go to Paris. Maybe the whales wouldn’t fit in the Seine.
LEONARD NIMOY
We were off the soundstages for the first time. The first three pictures were almost exclusively on the soundstages. In Star Trek I, we were off the soundstage for a couple of days, on Star Trek III we were off for a couple of nights for the Vulcan exterior scenes. To get off the soundstages on this one was very invigorating. It gave a lot more energy to me and the cast of the picture. I had a little bit more time. I shot Star Trek III in forty-nine days, and on this one I had fifty-three. Actually, I had fifty-seven—and I came in four days early.
RALPH WINTER
Being on the street in San Francisco with Leonard, the famous five corners place, and a couple of others where we had a camera hidden in a van where Chekov was asking innocent bystanders as they came where the nuclear “wessels” are was hilarious when we were shooting it. We had fun doing it.
DONALD PETERMAN
We also shot in San Diego for a while on the U.S.S. Ranger, the same aircraft carrier that was used in Top Gun.
RALPH WINTER
It was real-world environments that you hadn’t seen, and time travel allowed us to do that. Nick had done Time After Time and so he was particularly sensitive about what you can and can’t do.
We did some other local locations in L.A. with the transparent aluminum factory and the Apple computer. I wrote that joke for Harve and Leonard. When Scotty picks up the mouse and speaks into it, I said this would be hilarious. They didn’t really understand it, so I wrote a little of that scene. We couldn’t get Apple to play ball with us and donate some computers, but we ended up using the Apple computer anyway. It felt right, the perfect fish out of water from the twenty-third century coming back and not understanding what computers could do. We shot some of the stuff on the ground in Golden Gate Park, which was Will Rogers State Park in Santa Monica.
EDDIE EGAN
It was a week and a half or so in San Francisco, and things became very tense there between Leonard and Harve. I don’t actually know what precipated it, but the last month of the production was not a particularly happy time for Leonard. There were things going on in his personal life that were distracting him, and just the size of the production was a little hard for him to wrap his head around sometimes. I don’t know the details, but I do know that at one point Leonard banned Harve from the set.
RALPH WINTER
We also did a lot of old-fashioned effects. For the finale, when they’ve returned to the future and crashed in the bay, we opened up the water tank at Paramount to do the storm—which had not been used in decades. We cleared out that parking lot, we swept it, washed it down, and Michael Lantieri, who was brought on to be the special-effects guy who had worked at Imagineering at Disney, developed a track below the water and it would have a hump on it and a tail. He found a twenty- by forty-foot-deep hole in the tank that had never been used. It had been filled up with sand. He was poking around with an iron bar and the bar went through and there’s a very thin asphalt cap on it. When we dug it out, we realized Paramount built that tank in the twenties or thirties and it had tie-downs and everything, so we used that for building sets.
When Bill goes down underwater to free the whales, that’s really Bill doing a lot of that stuff. We built those sets dry and then we filled them with water. The tank hadn’t been used in years. We had to call Jimmy the plumber out of retirement, because nobody knew how to turn on the pump. It held over a million gallons of water which had to be filtered, heated, and disinfected. In April of ’86, when we were shooting, it was warm outside, so it became the studio swimming pool during lunch hour. The water was only three or four feet deep but a lot people came out and ate their lunch with their feet in the water. We used giant jet fans and fire hoses, smoke machines to create all that fog and put the cast out there in wet suits and hosed them down and created that storm sequence right there. Very old-fashioned filmmaking.
DONALD PETERMAN
We had another unit in Hawaii, right off Maui, photographing live whales. There’s a man and his wife there who have a license to allow photography of humpback whales. You have to have a license to get your boat close to them because of the possibility you’re going to ram into one of them or scare them. So we cut above the water and got these shots.
RALPH WINTER
It was the first Star Trek movie to really get out on location. We spent more than the third movie, we spent twenty-one million dollars, so we had a bigger budget for some of the things that made it feel large. For instance, we spent over a million dollars on the whales. With particular cetacean experts who knew how whales move, what they look like, what the skin texture was. ILM did such a good job on those whales, those whales went on tour for a year or more around the world to museums because the expertise, the art, and science of what they had done was very good. We had a guy who did the basic research for that and he’d been a leading research guy. He just applied the same kind of discipline to this.
One of the reasons we think that it really didn’t win visual-effects awards is people didn’t really understand how good it was. We did do some live photography of whales out in the Pacific. We gave Mark Ferrari and his wife, Debbie, a sixteen-millimeter camera and sent him out into the Pacific because he was a researcher, and the federal law says you can’t get within a thousand yards of a humpback whale. It’s against federal guidelines. So Mark knew that, but with the zoom lens they were able to capture some breaching whales where they come out nose first and then they fall on their back and make that big splash. So there’s three shots in the movie of real humpback whales doing that. And that’s what Leonard wanted.
The remainder of all the whale work in the movie is done in a pool in northern California where they turned off the filter and turned off the pump and put in a very fine dirt that gives it a little more texture. It makes it feel more like you’re in the ocean. Sometimes movies do a bad job of the water being too clear. This wasn’t too clear. The whales were sort of like windup bathtub toys. Slowing that down, overcranking the camera, gave it a majestic quality, and all of these shots were done in a pool.
We had some federal game-reserve person who came to the studio, and they wanted to screen the movie because they heard there was some violation of the thousand-yard rule. We had a screening and the guy during some of the pool shots said, “I know that is in Hawaii, I know where he shot this.” I shut down the screening. I said, “You’re wrong. That’s in a pool in northern California. If you can’t tell that from the real stuff we can’t trust that you know what you’re talking about.” That really added size and scale to that movie that the previous movies didn’t have, and it was effects in the real world. It wasn’t space effects. That was a big difference that helped contribute to the success of that movie.
NICHOLAS MEYER
It was fun in a weird way. This may be my fanciful recollection, but I don’t think I felt a great deal of pressure. The easiest thing for me to do is write dialogue, which is not always what movies are about but, in this case, it was such a no-brainer. It was a comedy and I don’t get to write a lot of comedies.
HARVE BENNETT
Nick and I had written the final script of Star Trek II in ten days. This one we wrote in about twenty, and it was very simple to do it that way because I took act one and act three and Nick took act two. Now, if you think about that in structural terms, I got us into the dilemma and into time travel, he carried us through San Francisco, and I got us back. That was like breathing for me, because it’s pure Star Trek. Then we swapped pages and I rewrote him a little bit and he rewrote me a little bit and we put it all together and had a script.
Nick always said, “You know the problem with this script is you’ve got five endings.” And he was right, we did have five endings. He said, “Why don’t you have the whales save the Earth and let that be the end of the picture?” “No,” I said, “that’s the end of the picture for the hoped-for extended audience who’s never seen Star Trek before. But for people who have seen Star Trek before, we have a trilogy to complete. So, we’ve got to get them back, get them off the hook, and give them the Enterprise back so that when we finish this picture, we have brought the franchise back to square one and it can go anywhere it wants to go. That’s only fair. Besides, that’s what the fans want.” So that’s what we did. We kept every ending.
NICHOLAS MEYER
In my version of the script originally, when they all leave to go back, she [Gillian] didn’t leave. She said if anyone’s going to make sure this kind of disaster doesn’t happen, somebody’s going to have to stay behind, which I still think is the “righter” ending. The end in the movie detracts from the importance of people in the present taking responsibility for the ecology and preventing problems of the future by doing something about them today, rather than catering to the fantasy desires of being able to be transported ahead in time to the near-utopian future society of the Star Trek era.
RALPH WINTER
We had a great time. The punk on the bus, Kirk Thatcher, was Leonard’s assistant, and Leonard gives him the nerve pinch to quiet him down and the bus cheers. We had a hilarious time with that. And then the so-called music coming out of the boom box was our sound-effects designer Mark Mangini and Kirk Thatcher. The two of them composed this song called “I Hate You” and the name of their group was Edge of Etiquette. We had a lot of fun on the side doing all that stuff.
CATHERINE HICKS (actress, “Dr. Gillian Taylor”)
I’m really proud of Star Trek IV, and that’s coming from a non-Trek fan. I must have been on another channel as a kid. I’ve started watching the show since and I’m getting a crush on Spock. But while we were shooting, I deliberately didn’t rent the movies, because I thought I would use my total ignorance of Gillian’s character. She doesn’t know what’s going on either.
DeFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy”)
I have always felt from the very beginning that the core of Star Trek was the family. It was always this group of people who were working in this bizarre-type world together. That’s what made the show successful. One of the greatest mistakes in the first motion picture was that they neglected the people.
CATHERINE HICKS
I loved her line “I have no one here,” before she jumps into the transporter beam. I don’t know why, it just touches me. It’s poignant and sad. At the time I didn’t know it, but seeing the film I realized that was my favorite line. My favorite moment, even though I’m not playing it, is when William Shatner as Kirk quotes D. H. Lawrence. Something comes across the ages. It’s such a surprise that this man knows that—it makes us kindred spirits for one second.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I loved the script. I read it in Harve Bennett’s office and I chuckled and I said this is wonderful, and it was the only time that I really felt confident that I knew what I was talking about. I didn’t see how it could miss. What great fun. It seemed to have everything for mass entertainment approval. For the first time, I felt my dialogue was indigenous to character and only Chekov could say those lines; they were written for him. We had a big crossover audience which accounts for the $109 million domestic that we did. It had wonderful comedy moments, and the scene between Bill and Leonard and Catherine Hicks in the truck is classic. It’s spontaneously done even though it may have been shot four or five times—the anachronisms of being three hundred years out of time just worked beautifully as far as I was concerned.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (executive producer, Family Guy)
The cast is at the top of their game in that movie, they’ve never been better. Especially Shatner and Nimoy, so that’s really what you’re enjoying. The comedy still works for me, and there’s a moment where Spock mind-melds with the whale. You buy that he’s actually talking to a whale and the whale understands. That’s also the magic of Star Trek, you believe in it, you believe in him and it works. It’s those little details that make the movie stand above the others in a lot of ways.
LUKAS KENDALL (editor, Film Score Monthly)
The most unusual Star Trek movie score is Leonard Rosenman’s for Star Trek IV; Rosenman and Nimoy were good friends. I remember, as a kid, thinking, “Why is there Christmas music in Star Trek?” But it captures the spirit of the movie—that was the first time that Star Trek was acknowledged as meaningful American pop culture, not just some goofy TV show. It remains the last Star Trek score to be nominated for an Oscar.
JOE KRAEMER (composer, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation)
I love the Star Trek IV score. I think it is a worthy heir to the music written for many of the original series’ lighter episodes, such as “Shore Leave” and “The Trouble with Tribbles.” From the opening trumpet statement of Courage’s fanfare, to the militaristic main theme, to the quasi-baroque B-theme for the whales, with its contrapuntal descending lines, I find the score inventive, and most important, fun! It’s pretty much the only Trek feature-film score you can honestly say is fun. I love the Russian theme for Chekov’s escape from the navy ship Enterprise, and the jaunty romp for the sequence where they break out of the hospital. I also find the use of Courage’s theme on the reveal of the Enterprise-A at the end one of the best quotes of the original music in the film series. Even the somewhat dated use of the eighties jazz-fusion band Yellowjackets for the Market Street sequence in San Francisco has its charms.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
The only thing I don’t like about Star Trek IV is Leonard Rosenman’s score. It’s too bad they couldn’t have James Horner back to complete the trilogy. It’s too fantastical. I don’t have anything from that score on my iPod.
JOE KRAEMER
It’s very much the redheaded stepchild of the film scores, and I’ve never been able to figure out why. The score for IV is almost completely devoid of the dark galactic musical explorations of Goldsmith’s contributions, the obsessive intensity of Horner’s scores, or the overwhelming sense of dread in Eidelman’s score for VI. Instead, Rosenman constructed a more traditional score that pays homage to the series’ sixties TV roots with its stacked brass pyramids and delightful woodwind melodies—compare Chekov’s Russian music in this film to Finnegan’s Irish music in “Shore Leave.”
PETER KRIKES
The experience was a real roller coaster for us, but it was the most successful in the series. That’s a wonderful feeling.
STEVE MEERSON
We were both delighted that we were a part of something that will go on forever, and I also think it said some things that needed to be said. There are some important messages there, and being allowed to have that forum was very exciting. It’s hard for me to say this, but it was worth all the aggravation.
RALPH WINTER
The movies endure. I’ve spoken to elementary schools about what I do and when they read off some of the credits, the kids get excited about The Voyage Home. It reminds me that those kids weren’t even thought of when we made the movie, and yet they can still enjoy what the movie is about today. It’s the lasting effect of what we do as storytellers.
LEONARD NIMOY
The feeling on the first film was that we had to do a “motion picture.” Nick Meyer brought a jauntiness back to it. I tried in Star Trek III to do a dignified job of resurrection, and do it with a sense of mysticism, a sense of wonder and, above all, to really capture the loyalty of these people for each other; their willingness to sacrifice themselves and their careers for the purpose of helping Spock. Having done that, I really wanted to have a good time. Somebody had been constantly dying in the films, and this time I said, “Nobody’s going to die. I don’t want anybody hitting anybody” or any of that stuff. If anybody was going to be injured, it was going to be accidental. I insisted that there be no bad guy. We had done two pictures in a row with black-hat heavies, and I didn’t want a bad guy anywhere. Circumstances would be the problem. Lack of awareness, lack of concern. Ignorance would be the problem. Not a person. With this one we’ve really gone full circle and come home, which is why, in a sense, we called it The Voyage Home. We’re saying, “Enjoy yourself, have a good time, and don’t mind us as we drop off a few ideas along the way.”