“WHAT DOES GOD NEED WITH A STARSHIP?”
Given the box-office success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, anticipation was high for its June 9, 1989, follow-up. With William Shatner availing himself of the so-called favored-nations clause in his Paramount deal—guaranteeing him anything Leonard Nimoy contractually gets and vice versa—he was ready to take the helm of the newest voyage of the Enterprise as director. Additionally, he tasked himself (as was his contractual right) to develop the story line for the film alongside producer Harve Bennett.
Unfortunately, despite the lofty aspirations of everyone involved, Star Trek V was reviled by fans and greeted by critical brickbats upon its release, much of it attributable to the subpar visual effects provided by Associates & Ferren, along with studio-mandated humor to “lighten up” the rather dour proceedings in the hopes of duplicating Star Trek IV’s incredible box-office success.
With a lackluster domestic gross of only $52,210,000, The Final Frontier’s title almost proved prophetic for the future of the original motion-picture franchise.
RALPH WINTER (executive producer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
All the years working on the Star Trek movies were terrific. It was very enjoyable and good people. We had fun. We had challenges like any movies, but it was sort of can’t-do-anything-wrong years. But Star Trek V almost killed the franchise. There were so many problems with that movie. It just didn’t resonate with the audience and Larry Luckinbill, who played Sybok, is a great actor, but it all came off a little too operatic and a little too interior. There wasn’t a bad guy to battle who seemed to be as strong. It seemed to be a remake of a TV show, and the audience responded that way.
HARVE BENNETT (producer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
I would say the Star Trek trilogy probably stands because of its centering on the life, death, and resurrection of Spock. This film is continuous only in the sense of time. What we are trying to do in each picture is explore other angles and other undiscovered depths of these very legendary and familiar characters. And that’s not too easy, because you reach a point where you say, “How much more can we explore these people?” But remember, these people are also aging, which they did not do in the series. So as they age, they are revealing more and more of their back- and foreground stories. That’s where the challenge is for me: to try to keep mining these relationships.
Star Trek V also has with it an imperative of going back to deep space. Star Trek II, III, and IV were all, to some extent, manageable in terms of budget, shooting time, and scope. With Star Trek V we came to the space imperative and we had some very, very difficult appetites: planetary and construction appetites, things you have to show and places you have to go, and an alien here and there. All these things make the cost and complexity of the film more difficult.
DAVID LOUGHERY (writer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
Something I’ve noticed in all sequels, and it’s true of the Bond films, certainly. Each time you make another movie, they get more and more abstract. The situation gets kind of broader and stranger and sort of out of control a little bit, because, basically, you’ve done the thing so many times that you’ve always got to try and do something a little bit more the next time. This is always a problem with sequels in that they get bigger and the themes increase and get larger, too, and you get farther and farther away from the truly basic appeal of the films, which are the characters that we’ve fallen in love with. If you can do a great drama that just takes place between these characters in one room, the audience wouldn’t give a shit. They’d love it. They’re not really that interested in the spaceship effects, but we keep trying to get bigger and bigger. You know, “Let’s go visit God” and all these gigantic things.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor/director, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
I took the TV evangelist persona and created a holy man who thought God had spoken to him. He believed God had told him, “I need many followers, and I need a vehicle to spread my word through the universe.” The vehicle he needed became a starship, which the holy man would captain when it came to rescue some hostages he had taken. Finally the Enterprise arrives at the planet where God supposedly resides, in the center of the universe. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the holy man are beamed down to the planet. It’s like drawings of Dante’s inferno, like a flaming hell. When God appears, he seems like God … but gradually, in a conversation between God and the holy man, Kirk perceives that something is wrong and begins to challenge God. God gets angrier and angrier and begins to show his true colors, which are those of the Devil. So essentially that was my story: that man conceives of God in his own image, but those images change from generation to generation, therefore he appears in all these different guises as man-made gods. But in essence, if the Devil exists, God exists by inference. This is the lesson that the Star Trek group learns. The lesson being that God is within our hearts, not something we conjure up, invent, and worship.
DAVID LOUGHERY
Paramount liked Bill’s outline, but they thought it was a little too dark. After the success of Star Trek IV, they wanted to make sure that we retained as much humor and fun as possible, because they felt that was one of the reasons for the big success of that film. They wanted us to inject a spirit of fun and adventure into the story. They just wanted a balance between the darker elements and some of the lighter stuff. Everybody felt they’d had their romp and now they were getting a little more serious again, but let’s keep that spark alive.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I think when comedy comes out of story it can be enormously affecting and successful. When it’s a sidebar or artificially transplanted onto your story, then it’s not as successful. What happened with Star Trek V is that we had comedy that either had nothing to do with the story—like the campfire scenes—or it somehow diffused the dramatic moments, like the climax of the story when Kirk is saying “What does God need with a starship?” In Star Trek IV, it was the perfect marriage.
DAVID LOUGHERY
One particular change that resulted was in the character of the holy man, Sybok. Originally he was a very messianic, possessed kind of figure who was willing to trample anyone who got in his way, but he began to remind us too much of Khan and we had to take him in a different direction. It would have been easy to write Sybok as a black-hat, but that was, again, too much like Khan.
HARVE BENNETT
The problem with Star Trek V was to take a talented and wonderful man, Bill Shatner, and try and dissuade him from doing the story he wanted to do. I had not wanted to do Star Trek V. I was told Bill was going to direct it, and I said fine, and then Bill had story approval, which I said was a terrible situation—especially once I heard the story he wanted to do.
RALPH WINTER
Star Trek V was not a good movie. After the success of IV, we were all sort of smoking our own publicity shots and thought everything was going to work out just fine. From a variety of things, the production, the visual effects were horrible and Bill was committed to direct because he agreed to let Leonard direct IV. But Leonard had that gene and Bill didn’t. And Bill hasn’t gone on to do much else in directing. It’s a different skill set. And it wasn’t bad. Bill was very enjoyable to work with; we had a lot of fun. I laughed more on the production of that movie than anything I’ve worked on. But ultimately it just wasn’t good storytelling. It was too interior. It actually, in some ways if you think about it, was kind of a remake of the first movie. But we were blinded and didn’t see all of that ourselves.
EDDIE EGAN (unit publicist, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home)
I don’t think he was the guy who should have been at the helm of that movie and the way he works affected every aspect of it. But, look, we’ve all been in work environments where there are people in a work dynamic that everyone sort of just skirts around and doesn’t want to deal with. Then you finally give up dealing because of that, and the best thing to do as a boss is to remove that person from the mix, because it’s ruining the dynamic of the larger group. Here, you had a guy—and I’m not saying negative or positive about him—who had that kind of dynamic. He’s argumentative and has a very, very healthy ego, and an ego fueled by watching his costar reap the benefits of directing the previous two movies. Unfortunately I just think he wasn’t as collaborative as Leonard is by nature. I think Bill is more of a seat of the pants kind of guy. He’s not going to take time to think about things. He’s just going to show up that day and say, “Let’s try this,” and a lot of Star Trek V feels that way.
WILLIAM SHATNER
What the final result was, was the final result. I have certain regrets, but I feel in total that a lot of the vision was there. I made one major compromise at the beginning, which was mitigating the original idea of the Enterprise searching for God. The enormous thrust of the idea was eviscerated and that was my first compromise. It seemed that was a necessary one due to the fact everybody was very apprehensive about the obvious problem. I thought [the film] was flawed. I didn’t manage my resources as well as I could have, and I didn’t get the help in managing my resources I could have. I thought it was a meaningful attempt at a story and it was a meaningful play. It carried a sense of importance about it.
DAVID LOUGHERY
It became one of those three-week skull sessions where Harve, Bill, and I sat in a room and came up with a story line that Paramount approved, and then I went ahead and wrote the screenplay, which went through many, many rewrites, as these things often do.
The idea of God and the Devil was reflected in the script’s earlier drafts. Those drafts were much cleaner and more comprehensible in terms of the idea that you think you’re going to Heaven, but you turn out to have found Hell. We weren’t literally saying Heaven and Hell, but we were suggesting the idea that it was, like, “Wait a minute, is this God or the Devil?” without saying specifically that it’s either, but instead is an alien entity that has tapped into our perceptions about where they’re going.
We wanted to challenge the audience’s imagination and expectations when they realized that this is what Sybok’s divine mission was. We really wanted the audience to stir around, look at each other, and say, “Are they serious? Can they possibly mean that we’re going to see God?” Because, for me, Star Trek is the only arena in which you might actually try to do that. Star Trek has always been big enough to encompass almost any kind of concept, so we thought when we dropped the bomb and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to see God,” it would be something the audience would be excited about and say, “Gee, maybe they will … who knows?” We did, however, run into some problems, one with Gene Roddenberry.
GENE RODDENBERRY (executive consultant, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
I would have not done it that way. I suggested the idea that saved it in a small way—let what they find be a powerful alien who thought it was God. Originally, the alien was God, a very bad idea. No one person made it terrible, and no one wanted it to be terrible.
DAVID LOUGHERY
Maybe when Gene wrote The God Thing back in the 1970s he turned around and figured that it didn’t work, and it wouldn’t work the way we were doing it either. I just don’t know. We managed to pull off something that is able to tread the line.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Gene did come down strongly against the story and set up circumstances that were negative and unfortunate. There’s nothing wrong with a good story about the search for the meaning of life. That’s basic to any great storytelling, no matter what form it takes, whether it’s the Bible or a myth or a fairy tale. I was hoping to be able to accomplish that with Star Trek V.
DAVID LOUGHERY
I don’t think it was too controversial and I don’t think anyone was too radically upset by what we did, although it seems to me that Star Trek was always meeting God in some way or another. The idea permeated many of the old episodes, and it certainly played a part in the first movie.
HARVE BENNETT
If the logline in TV Guide does not interest you, then it’s a pretty good indication that the premise of the story is not interesting. The logline of Star Trek V is “Tonight on Star Trek, the crew goes to find God.” If you saw that in an episode of anything, you’d say “That’s a hoot, isn’t it?” No one is going to find God, because that’s like finding the fountain of youth, which was, incidentally, Shatner’s backup story.
DAVID LOUGHERY
Beyond the whole God concept, I was also thinking of the Kirk, Spock, and McCoy relationship. One of the things that occurred to me is that if you look at Star Trek, you see these three men who are in middle age and their lives have been spent in space. They’re not married, they don’t have families, so their relationship is with each other. They represent a family to each other, maybe without always acknowledging it. That, to me, was the most attractive thing, saying “What is family?” If it’s not three people who care about each other, I don’t know what it is.
The only scene that I can think of that never changed at all, and it was one of the first scenes I wrote, was that campfire sequence. I know there are a lot of people who were kind of upset by that scene, but I love it. It was pure character, and I think that’s why I wanted to do Star Trek in the first place.
The evolving screenplay became the story of the Vulcan Sybok abducting representatives from the Federation as well as the Klingon and Romulan empires, and using them as bait to lure a starship. Naturally that starship is the Enterprise, which Sybok (who improbably turns out to be Spock’s half brother), utilizing great prowess in Vulcan mind control, gains command of. By freeing crew members from their greatest personal pain, he is able to recruit his army of followers. Even Spock and McCoy are swayed to his side, leaving Kirk to take on Sybok alone.
The last was a plot point that didn’t sit well with either Leonard Nimoy or DeForest Kelley, who not only felt their characters wouldn’t betray Kirk, but that their “greatest pains” (in Spock’s case, his half-human, half-Vulcan heritage; and in McCoy’s, performing an act of euthanasia on his slowly dying father) were ill-conceived.
DAVID LOUGHERY
One of the smart things we did early on was bring Leonard and De in to go over the script, because we wanted their input. These guys have lived with these characters, at that time, for more than twenty years and have very strong opinions on what their characters would and wouldn’t do. There were problems with this, too, however. As originally conceived, only Kirk held out against Sybok, which gives you more of a one-man-stands-alone kind of thing, betrayed by his best friends. Leonard and De objected and it was changed. Suddenly there were three guys against Sybok. When you start doing that kind of stuff, bit by bit you remove and dilute the real strength of the original vision and finally you end up with a bit of a mishmash. It would have been great for Kirk to have squared off against Spock in some way. But you find the script beginning to accommodate the needs of the actors, who know their characters and say, “Spock wouldn’t do that.” It’s kind of indefensible. You don’t really have an argument that can turn them around on something like that.
DeFOREST KELLEY
When the scene was first presented to me, it was a little harsher. Once we smoothed it out, I still knew it was going to be a difficult scene to do, and I felt if it didn’t come off exactly right, we could be in trouble.
WILLIAM SHATNER
After De read the script, he didn’t want to do the scene. So I took him to lunch and tried to convince him it would work. I said, “De, this is the best scene you’ve had to play in a long time.” He’s such a wonderful actor, and I really felt he hadn’t had a chance recently to show what he was capable of doing. Finally, after much talking, I convinced him to do it.
DeFOREST KELLEY
I don’t know whether the public realizes it or not, but a character that people have watched for so many years was being stripped in front of them of a very private and secretive situation that took place in his life. That moment of McCoy’s privacy in Star Trek V would have been divulged to Kirk before anyone. His opening line, “Oh my God, don’t do this to me,” meant so many things: he knew that it was happening to him there, in front of these people. Plus the fact that he had to relive it again was tough.
WILLIAM SHATNER
His one stipulation was that we add an explanation of why McCoy committed the euthanasia. We added a short bit of dialogue where Sybok asks, “Why did you do it?” and McCoy answers, “To preserve his dignity.” With these new lines, De felt that McCoy’s motivations were clearer and more understandable.
DeFOREST KELLEY
The more I looked at it and studied the scene, the more important it became to me, because it’s a topic that goes on today. I thought it would be interesting to lay it out in the presence of a motion-picture audience and let them decide within themselves what is right or wrong.
Along with the challenges inherent in realizing the flawed screenplay were myriad production problems, including the originally conceived finale. In that sequence, a horde of gargoyles are released on “God’s” planet and attack the landing party. Captain Kirk must also confront a giant rock man, a concept successfully realized many years later in Galaxy Quest to more comedic effect. As a result of budgetary issues, all these elements were excised from the final film.
WILLIAM SHATNER
I didn’t have the sense to hoard my money for the grand finale. I was very busy spending wonderful dollars fighting for effects in the opening. I’m not that much of a neophyte not to know that you need a good opening, but I hurt my finale by not having enough money. Nothing I could do to the studio would make them say, “Here’s another three million dollars for more gargoyles and special effects,” which it needed.
DAVID LOUGHERY
When the torpedo came down and explodes the hole, it’s like the bottle is uncapped and the imps spill out, free, and chase our characters back to the shuttle. That was our original concept. A movie, especially a movie like this one, goes through so many transformations from original story to final film. Because of all the hands involved in the making of these movies, it sometimes starts to take on a committee atmosphere to moviemaking. Things don’t turn out exactly the way you originally wanted them to, but there are reasons for that.
WILLIAM SHATNER
I was required to reduce the budget, and I kept slicing away at the ending. I didn’t realize until we got there how much of the ending I had lost and what a disservice I had done to the film. That was lesson number one.
RALPH WINTER
We never ran out of money. We ran out of good ideas and good execution. What we thought with the rock creature was just completely silly and we bagged it. It became obvious that it was just silly and it would have been more expensive. On some of these movies, the third act doesn’t get developed at the same pace.
DAVID LOUGHERY
We certainly wish we could have hung on to some of the concept. That sequence got lost when it became financially impossible for us to create the gargoyle creatures. You’re always sorry to see those things go, because your imagination is one thing and the budget is something else. In various places, we had to make certain cuts and rearrangements based on how much we could afford.
HARVE BENNETT
Basically, I was called in to control Bill’s appetites. They were extravagant because he didn’t know anything. He had spent all those years in front of the camera, and believed because he had directed T.J. Hooker and Leonard had done it, he could too. Bill would come in and present a concept and he thought he was discovering the wheel. It’s funny how first-time directors try to be pioneers in the craft.
WILLIAM SHATNER
It’s like youth. I wish I were able to say it was because of my youth. A first-time director knows no boundaries, and it’s not knowing them that you shatter them. Rather than accepting the status quo, I tried to break boundaries and make the camera do things that it wasn’t supposed to, not because I didn’t know how, but I thought that by standing firm and being as adamant as possible it would happen. But there came a point where I had to compromise. I was rushing around trying to save what I thought was my movie, but I had spent days and weeks with Harve telling him the story and him telling me his version of the story and the script, and we worked in a very close and intimate way. It got to the point where we were talking about the death and birth of people close to us, and there were times where tears passed between us in the intimacy of his office. These moments are part of Star Trek V for me. If anybody else is doing another trip, that’s their problem.
ANDREW LASZLO (director of photography, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
Working with Bill was a great incentive, because, frankly, when an outsider directs a Star Trek movie, I don’t think it measures up. If they had called me and said, “We’d like you to shoot this film and it’ll be directed by so-and-so famous director,” the attraction would have been a great deal less. The reason I was attracted by the aspect of Bill directing the film is that he has been Star Trek, he is Star Trek. You remove him from the scene and there is no Star Trek. Who understands Star Trek better from the point of view of its special audience than the person who is Star Trek? I also wanted to do it because it was part of a very famous and well-known series, and having done a couple of those before, such as First Blood and Poltergeist II, I wanted to get another one under my belt.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Technically, it went well, I thought. We hired a lot of different people. We went to New York and got other special-effects people. So we experimented and I had to learn a great deal, not only about film but the politics of film.
ANDREW LASZLO
We were both under different kinds of pressure having to do with the tightness of the schedule and different ways of doing things. And this sometimes pitted us against each other. I understood that Bill was under tremendous pressure, this being his first big movie, especially since he hoped to match the success of Leonard Nimoy. Sometimes these pressures resulted in creative differences, but we managed to do the film not in spite of them, but because of them. It was a great experience and somehow, as we went through it together, we became good friends.
WALTER KOENIG
I read the script in Harve’s office and I was trying to be diplomatic, because we had already had problems in terms of discussing story, and I told him, “Don’t you think coming back and doing the campfire scene at the end is sort of gilding the lily?” He said, “Yes, I do, but he wants to shoot it that way and in the editing, we’ll pull it way back.” That didn’t happen, but that’s what he said to me.
HARVE BENNETT
It was a passive premise. The chore became to make the trip as interesting as possible, and to that extent we succeeded. The film was real good until the moment when the inevitable truth poked its head out and said, “Hey, this isn’t God,” and everyone said, “We knew that all the time, but we were having a good time up until then.”
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
Bill worked very, very hard and he directed it as well and as capably as any of our other films. He was not riding on a good script. If you’re not riding on a good script, you’re the person people point fingers at. And he was responsible. It was his story. I’ve had that experience. I did a movie for Paramount [Funny About Love] that didn’t work at all. I wasn’t successful with the script.
DAVID LOUGHERY
In retrospect, you look back from the distance of a number of years, and I’ve always felt—it was always in the back of my head—that one of the problems is that it’s a reactive story rather that an active one. What I mean by that is that our guys are kind of required to stand by and be dragged along on somebody else’s quest. In this case, Sybok’s. It’s sort of his quest and his passion, and Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the crew are dragged along almost as though they were a supporting cast to this guy. If it had been Kirk who suddenly had this vision of God and hijacked his own ship and turned against the Federation, then you’ve got this much more active, passionate kind of story.
LEONARD NIMOY
I complained. I said, “I think you’ve got some problems here,” and the message I got back is “We know what we’ve got and we know what we want to do.” Having sent in my notes, once they got them it’s not my place to say “You must do the following.” Once the tank starts rolling, it’s tough to stop it. It’s very interesting. You cannot draw a rule and say “It must be done this way.” Sometimes things bubble together and sometimes they don’t, even though you’ve got very well-paid and professional people doing the job. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and that’s why some pictures succeed and some pictures fail.
WALTER KOENIG
I didn’t initially feel the project was doomed. Bill’s a bright man. He understands the camera very well. I don’t think he has as good a story sense as he does of camera and how to direct. I never said I felt the picture failed because of his direction. It failed because of the story concept. I don’t think it was well thought out. We had the same problem we had on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. We had an antagonist who changes, who goes through a metamorphosis, and suddenly the guy that we’ve been booing and hissing is one of us and we introduce a whole other character to be an antagonist at the end of the story without building to this and without ever having a sense of learning to fear and to hate the evil entity.
JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)
All we needed, and all of us say this, was a good script. Unfortunately, we didn’t have one in V, and even that made pretty darn good money for an ordinary movie. It was just a very bad script and a lot of things were badly done. He was not up to the task, there’s no doubt about that, and one of Bill’s problems is that Bill thinks of Bill whereas with Leonard, he thinks of the show and he thinks of himself second.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Yes, the cast loved Leonard, and why not? He’s a very lovable person. I don’t know why, a couple of people of the cast—and they’ve never said it to my face—didn’t enjoy making the film with me.
WALTER KOENIG
What it speaks to is that the supporting cast doesn’t have the influence with the executives in the front office that the big three do. Originally, Leonard and DeForest’s characters fell sway [to Sybok’s mind control] and Kirk was the only one that didn’t and they objected rightly, but the rest of us weren’t in a position to object. In my case, the onus was pretty much off of me because you didn’t see me convert and the consequences of the conversion. I abhorred the idea because it was really a religious conversion the way it was originally written, which was particularly objectionable. The holier-than-thou sort of stuff was almost a Moonies kind of thing.
EDDIE EGAN
I think these actors have told these stories so many times that they actually believe they happened. Is Bill a larger-than-life actor with an ego? Absolutely. Are the others? Absolutely. But they’re not the hero of this story. No one would ever construct a story that is equal part Kirk, Spock, McCoy, or Scotty. It wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t know who to focus on. They were brilliant actors playing supporting roles, and it’s not something I think they ever acclimated themselves to in the structure of the movies as opposed to how they are hailed and received and applauded at conventions. People take little Shatner bits and exaggerate them. He was a guy with a job. He just wasn’t as gregarious as the others and Leonard was more gregarious than he was, because Leonard is just more curious about people and he likes conversations. But I really think that a lot of the situation is telling a story so much that you now believe it, and it’s like the Brian Williams effect. Every time you tell it, you add a layer to it until it implodes.
So the idea that they should be equal is nuts. I mean, even DeForest Kelley, the nicest man on Earth who could have taken some issue with not being a true trinity, knew his place and knew what his character was. And that character was designed and welcomed as the voice between the hot head and the logical one. He was happy to be that voice.
RALPH WINTER
We were one of the few who have actually been able to shoot anything inside of Yosemite. That’s a national treasure. They were terrific. We left it better than we found it and they were happy with us. We got some spectacular footage. The second-unit director who did all the climbing footage up El Capitan is the father of the lead singer of Maroon 5. I remember him giving me a tape of his son’s band.
ANDREW LASZLO
We went to great expense and a lot of difficulty to visit various locations, including Yosemite National Park and Trona Pinnacles. The opening sequence, a variation on the long-lens shot of Omar Sharif riding his camel toward camera in Lawrence of Arabia, as well as some of the later sequences, were shot in the California desert where we built an entire little town that was supposedly on this hostile, arid planet. We actually landed the shuttlecraft by suspending it from a huge construction crane. Not only does it land on the sand dunes, but a second later the rear hatch opens and out pop a bunch of marines who jump over the camera, followed by the crew of the Enterprise. We did that in a single shot. Everything becomes very difficult when you work in the sand—vehicles can’t move, especially those that can transport and then lift a very large eight-thousand-pound object.
HARVE BENNETT
We did some reshooting. We did do a day and a half that Bill directed to tie certain things together, compared to hundreds of other movies that go out and shoot five weeks and millions of dollars. You’re speaking about a day and a half of pickup shots. There was an absence of understanding with the Klingons. There was no understanding about why the guy [Klaa] apologizes to Kirk. That was necessary because of the evolution of the Klingon relationship in The Next Generation.
DAVID LOUGHERY
One of the things that was cut out of the movie is that the reason Captain Klaa was so passionate about chasing down Kirk was that he not only wanted that feather in his cap, but because there was still a bounty on Kirk’s head. That was a thematic thing that would have joined into the next movie. Then they had this ridiculous reshoot that was done without me in which Kirk comes aboard the Enterprise. In the original script he walks in on the Bird of Prey, the chair turns, and here’s Spock. They have this embrace—“Please, Captain, not in front of the Klingons”—and there’s a big laugh. But they went back and shot this bit where Klaa is forced to step out and say, “I apologize.” Their thinking there, I guess, is that he had gone off on his own after Kirk. That was something that bugged me. The only thing I do get out of it that’s really pleasurable is that during that reshoot, which was two or three months afterward, in the close-up of Bill his face looks about ten pounds fatter than in the previous shot. So there’s a little bit of revenge there, although I don’t blame Bill for that. Or anybody, really. It’s just one of those situations where they felt they had to plug a hole.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Having done a quick course with Joseph Campbell, I’ve realized the magic of Star Trek is to provide a mythology that this culture doesn’t have. As he pointed out, mythology relates man to his environment and tries to explain some inexplicable dilemmas and the dichotomies that face us. Because of the construction of our culture, we don’t have time for that because all of us are busy solving these problems with science. I think mythology is best served by an individual, along with his hearty band of brothers, as was done so many times, so well by the Greeks.
Not since the Robert Abel debacle on Star Trek: The Motion Picture had visual effects proved to be such a detriment to one of the features. For Star Trek II, III, and IV, the studio relied on the safe choice of George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic. For Star Trek V, the producers turned to East Coast–based Associates & Ferren to create the film’s elaborate visuals. But unlike on the 1979 film—when the studio fired Abel and replaced him with Douglas Trumbull and John Dykstra’s Apogee, who created some of the most stunning visual effects of all time—Paramount had no appetite this time for incurring any cost overruns, and as a result accepted the largely amateurish special effects. After Star Trek V, ILM was again hired for every Star Trek movie up until Nemesis, on which they were replaced by Digital Domain.
RALPH WINTER
I took a lot of personal hits about that and I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility and it hurts. At the time, I made the decision on what I felt would be best for the picture. It was not a capricious decision. It was based on testing we all did. There were a number of people involved in that decision, but I was leading the process. I felt like we were going to get something better and, in the beginning, we did … but it didn’t work out that way.
BRAN FERREN (visual effects supervisor, Associates & Ferren)
There was a lot of time wasted on this film. Ultimately, every model we received from Paramount had to be completely refurbished prior to shooting. We had to have Greg Jein build some new ones while we created five planet landscapes and moons as well. One entire side of the Enterprise model was spray-painted matte gray, destroying the meticulous original paint job. We had to go in and fix it before we could shoot it, which took two painters and assistant about six weeks to do.
WILLIAM SHATNER
We had problems that we might not have had if we had different personnel. I followed other people’s leads because I did not have firsthand knowledge of these things, but I was in on the decision so I make no excuse for that. It’s an instance where my lack of experience showed.
RALPH WINTER
We were high on the success of IV. We thought we could no wrong. David Loughery, the writer, had done a lot of good movies. It was all within the construct of what Bill and Harve wanted to do. And Leonard was a part of that. But we almost killed the franchise. My part in killing it almost was the digital effects. I was reacting against the high costs of ILM, and so we went with another company. Bran Ferren sold us on a lot of cool technology at the time. He’s a brilliant man. Ultimately, he was a mile wide in terms of his ability and intelligence, but the follow-through and infrastructure of actually delivering fell apart. And so, in the crush of trying to get that work done, he just didn’t have the infrastructure to make it happen. All of his film had to go through one machine to get all the work out and we couldn’t do it in time, so he had to compromise. The effects on that movie are dreadful. ILM knows how to deliver. The chance we took to save money and get fresh ideas is just too difficult to do on a franchise big-budget movie. It almost ended my career and the franchise. I took a lot of heat for it. You know: “How could you let this happen?”
HARVE BENNETT
That’s peripheral. You should have seen ILM’s tests for God. They were silly. We went with the creative judgment that Bran had a more vigorous attack to help us sell the illusions, and it was a picture, as discussed, that needed fancy footwork. In addition to that, it is only correct to note that by the time we were ready to start, ILM was overcrowded. We would have been the fourth or fifth major picture, and we would have received at their hands, not withstanding our relationships, the D team instead of the A team. That was an important consideration. All the people we had worked with [before] were booked.
KENNY MYERS (makeup effects supervisor, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
How do you make God? When they said we had to make God, I went crazy! Our first question was whether to go for that classic Jesus look, or for an alien look. The first thing Bill suggested was to think of the audience—a lot of baby boomers—and their ideas of God. We decided we needed something people could immediately identify with, so we chose Charlton Heston’s Moses combined with God as depicted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling as the look that would sell most people. It’s that long flowing white-haired look combined with that very fatherly, smooth talker that just makes you feel comfortable.
BRAN FERREN
A project like Star Trek allowed us to fuse a lot of different technologies together simultaneously—integration of transportable data files from computer graphic systems to electron microscopes to optical printers—that actually worked rather well on a project like this. It’s the only way we could have done it all in three months. Still, it was a fun project to do. But it would’ve been nice to have had a year.
WALTER KOENIG
No matter what my differences are with Bill, each time he has said he would do one of these films, no matter how outrageous the discrepancies in salaries are, I breathe a sigh of relief and say thank you, because I know the pictures wouldn’t be made unless he was there and he knows they wouldn’t be made, and that’s why he’s so difficult sometimes.
RALPH WINTER
I had a great time with Bill. He was terrific and a lot of fun. I enjoyed it a lot.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (coexecutive producer, Futurama)
Almost every line of dialogue is a cliché: “They don’t make them like they used to; the right tool for the right job; I know this ship like the back of my hand.” It’s terrible writing.
JAMES DOOHAN
The only reason that I agreed to it was they had spent two hundred thousand dollars on that set. I can tell you for certain that it took at least thirty-five takes for me to build up to that scene where I knock myself out. I’m usually called “one-take Doohan,” but I was not happy, and nobody was happy with Bill.
WALTER KOENIG
My main concern was [whether] Bill was going to manipulate us and to reinterpret our characters. In fact, he was quoted in Starlog as saying he’s had things he wanted to change in our characters for years and this is our opportunity. A more pretentious comment I couldn’t believe, and I was very upset about that, and I was angry, and I told George and Nichelle and Jimmy if at any point he picks on any of us, I’m walking off the set. I will not stand for that, he cannot do that to us. I had heard stories about him from T.J. Hooker when he directed, and even when he didn’t direct, how he had caused grief for other people, and that’s what I was anticipating.
I had underestimated Bill again … he was so cordial and so generous with his approbation that it became almost a gag. I would say, “Yessir, Captain,” and he would say, “Walt, wonderful, wonderful!” He was very affirming and very supportive. I knew the part would be small, he’s talked about how the big three is what carried the TV series and that he wanted to do an episode of the series on a bigger level. So I knew the part was going to be very small, but as it is I still had more to do on Star Trek V than I did on Star Trek VI. I only worked eight days on the picture, so I didn’t have any time to develop an animosity, and the way he dealt with us was very pleasant.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
I saw Star Trek V on the day it came out. I went to the GCC Northeast Philadelphia where I grew up and felt like I had seen the “Spock’s Brain” of Star Trek movies. What the hell was that? It was embarrassing. “Row, row, row your boat.” The special effects were awful. “Jim, please, not in front of the Klingons.” I mean, c’mon, it was bad. I walked out of that movie with my phaser between my legs. Just embarrassed. I cannot watch Star Trek V. It is unwatchable to me … like Generations, Insurrection, and Nemesis.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
McCoy is watching Kirk on El Capitan in the beginning of the movie, and he’s got twentieth-century binoculars, and Kirk is tiny and falls off the mountain. McCoy starts running and he gets there immediately. There are a couple of good action scenes in the beginning, but in general, the casting is terrible. I liked the idea of Nimbus III. I’ve always liked those things in Star Trek where we’re shown that not everything works out great. And the ending is terrible. I know the plans had him being chased by rock monsters, but the ending doesn’t seem to make any sense.
I’m also not a religious person, but it takes the cheap way out saying God “is right here, the human heart.” It’s like you’re just going to dismiss thousands of years of human religion with that? Either explore it and say something or just stay away from it—but I still watched it way too many times.
RONALD D. MOORE (supervising producer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
It seemed cheap on the screen technically. It didn’t look like it was made as well as the other movies; the visual effects were terrible. The story was just not compelling and it felt silly at some points. It was indulging silliness—not humor, but just silliness. I just didn’t think it worked. The “row, row, row your boat” scene is nice and it’s sweet and sentimental, though it’s turning up the saccharine level pretty high, but you could deal with it. If everything else in the movie had worked, it would have been regarded as just a sweet wonderful little scene in a good movie, but as it is, it set the tone that they were going to a weird silly place.
HARVE BENNETT
The appetite for Star Trek movies was seriously impacted by the success of Next Generation, not destroyed, just kind of subdivided, and the feeding frenzy we experienced on Star Trek II, III, and IV did not exist on V, even if it had been a better movie.
RALPH WINTER
If you develop a story that says “We’re going to look for God,” right away you might be disappointed because what you find may not be what you think you should find. So that’s very tough story material to grab a hold of.
RONALD D. MOORE
When I was doing an interview for the Shatner documentary on The Next Generation, David Gerrold was there and was saying to Shatner as I walked in the door that “What does God need with a starship?” is one of the great Kirk lines … and it’s one of the greatest lines in cinema. I just remember thinking, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Really?” I didn’t buy that line at all. He said it and I went, “Really?” It felt like they’d strained to get to this point where he can say this line.
WILLIAM SHATNER
It took me a while to take another look at Star Trek V. In the end, I think I learned a great deal directing a multimillion-dollar picture like that. It was an enormous responsibility to be in control of that much money, and I realized that I hadn’t spent the money wisely in allowing for a big finale. I’d blown it in the first half and had nothing in the second.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN (writer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
Part of working on sequels is adding to something that already exists, and what exists works real well, so don’t fuck it up. That’s a tremendous responsibility. With Star Trek I, the studio said, “If it hadn’t cost us forty-five million dollars, we would have made more money.” It bombed critically too, and it was Harve Bennett who came along and got back to what had driven the episodes, which is a bit of action-adventure with a strong guest star. One was a bore and V also suffers terribly from something that is a dangerous formula to film. If you spend two hours telling people “Wait until you see what’s around this corner,” you had better have something around that corner to show them, whether it’s a monster or a concept of God or whatever the hell it is. They were big letdowns.
RALPH WINTER
Three or four weeks after we finished shooting, Bill goes, “I’m done. I’ve cut the movie together and I’m done.” I looked at Harve and we just shook our heads, because you need time in the cutting room to retell the story and shape it. But there is no way you can do it in a three-week period. That’s the first indication that we were in trouble. We needed more time and more work and we had to figure it out. And then you have to take a chance of putting your baby out there ahead of time to a crowd and seeing what they say. That’s always hard.
WILLIAM SHATNER
Directing film is a wild adventure for anyone equipped to do it. I made compromises on Star Trek V thinking I had to do that, that’s the nature of the business.But the line where you do not compromise I couldn’t tread because of a number of factors, not the least of which is my own nature. I got to learn when it’s time to stand and when it’s time to turn. That, really, for a knowledgeable person in the business is a more important lesson than where the camera is and how to play a scene and what your establishing shot is. Those mechanics of making a film no longer become a point of discussion, it’s automatic, it’s there creatively. I had the most joyful time of my life directing Star Trek V.
RALPH WINTER
Recently, I noticed the front page of The New York Times showcased some guys that are free-climbing El Capitan with no ropes. I tweeted Bill Shatner, saying, “Check out the front page of The New York Times. I think you did this in the future.”