UP THE ACADEMY

“I AM A GRADUATE OF STARFLEET ACADEMY; I KNOW MANY THINGS.”

After the box-office implosion of Star Trek V, producer Harve Bennett sold Paramount on a plan to reboot the franchise with a prequel film, The Academy Years, that would show how Kirk, Spock, and McCoy first met at Starfleet Academy—a film that he would direct. In many ways anticipating J. J. Abrams’s reinvention, The Academy Years would have starred a new cast replacing the pricey original ensemble. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy would have reprised their roles in bookends designed to introduce and end the film. At the time, the announcement was greeted by much antipathy on the part of creator Gene Roddenberry and the fans as well as the original cast, which feared losing a lucrative gig. Its ultimate cancellation marked an acrimonious end to the Harve Bennett era of Star Trek.

DAVID LOUGHERY (writer, The Academy Years)

Every time they went to make one of these Star Trek movies, the producers and the studio always ran into the same problem in getting the original cast together. The reasons for that are money, power, creative differences, ego, health, unavailability … all of those things.

RALPH WINTER (producer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)

I had pitched Harve an idea, The Academy Years, at his daughter’s bat mitzvah. I remember saying to him we shouldn’t make Star Trek V. We should make Star Trek V, VI, and VII. We’ve just demonstrated with Star Trek III that we can do a young Spock. We should see how these guys meet the first time. And build something that would be a reboot of this with younger characters to pick up with when these older characters don’t want to do this as much. He loved the idea. We followed up on it. We got the studio excited about it. David Loughery wrote a script and it was terrific. It was set in Huntsville, Alabama. It was the training ground for Starfleet Academy. It was young Kirk and Bones and Spock, who was the first off-worlder to attend. The three of them become friends and they’re all the extremes that were presented in the TV series. Spock is überlogical, Kirk is the ladies man and always out there, and Bones is trying to be a medical student.

HARVE BENNETT (producer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)

A proposal was made to me that we could do Star Trek in the beginning, which was Ralph Winter’s idea. Let’s do them at the academy. That picture seems to have worked in a variety of incarnations including Top Gun.

DAVID LOUGHERY

Harve always had this ace up his sleeve, which was if we can’t get everybody together for one of the Star Trek movies, we should do a prequel.

HARVE BENNETT

I suggested we develop a series of films to be another franchise, another tentpole that we could open. We could do a prequel and find out how Kirk and Spock met at Starfleet Academy. When we were doing Star Trek V, we got the studio to approve work on the script. It is an excellent story, but it has been misperceived. It’s a great story finding out about this young cocky character on a farm who goes to flight school and meets up with the first alien that comes from Vulcan and how they meet the other characters. It would have been a gift for the fans on the twenty-fifth anniversary.

DAVID LOUGHERY

When I heard about the idea, I thought it was terrific. Not from the point of view of recasting, but from the point of view of storytelling, because I worked so closely with these characters on Star Trek V that the idea of doing an origin story—where you show them as young cadets and kids—was tremendously exciting. What it was, was a real coming-of-age story. In outline form, it was the story of Kirk and Spock meeting for the first time as cadets here on Earth. We’ve got a young Jim Kirk, who’s kind of cocky and wild. He’s not exactly what you might think starship-captain material might be. He’s like one of these kids who would rather fly hot planes and chase girls. Spock is this brilliant, arrogant, aloof-to-the-point-of-obnoxiousness genius. It’s the mask he’s hiding behind to cover his own conflicting human emotions. He’s an outcast, he left Vulcan in shame against his father’s wishes, and like all adolescents, he’s trying to find a place to fit in, but he keeps screwing it up.

Over the course of this story, which is one year at Starfleet Academy, Kirk and Spock are sort of put to the test and they begin as rivals and end up as friends and comrades who learn that they have to combine their talents for the first time to defeat a deadly enemy. In the final scene, where they say good-bye at graduation and go their separate ways, we’re able to see the legends that these two boys are going to grow up to become.

HARVE BENNETT

We did the best we could on V and when it was over, I went to see [studio president] Ned Tanen, who was the last of the decisive people at Paramount before the bean counters took over, and he said, “Well, are we going to do another one?” I said it was time to do the prequel, and he said, “Do it.” It was later that everybody else asked for long meetings. Our model, or mock-up, was Santa Fe Trail, a Warner Bros. movie made in 1940 about John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. We gave Kirk a genuine love affair with an eighteen-year-old, her first. The girl dies heroically. Kirk, insane with grief, performs his first heroic act against all odds. And Spock saves the day in a struggle with racist overtones, getting the medal of honor. The prequel story ends over the grave of his lost love, giving some insight into why Kirk never falls in love again for the rest of the Star Trek series. At the end of the film, while the older Kirk is contemplating her passing, Spock beams down and asks him if he’s going into teaching or back to the ship. They have a sentimental exchange and Bill says, “Beam me up.”

DAVID LOUGHERY

We felt that there was a powerful story there, one that the audience would be interested in. We’re always interested in young Indiana Jones and young Sherlock Holmes, and how they started and come to be who they are. This was sort of the way to explain Kirk and Spock and where they came from.

HARVE BENNETT

We had a better movie and we had a film that would have allowed them to make the same Star Trek VI eighteen months later.

WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)

I think there was a fat chance of that happening. I can’t read Harve’s mind, but if The Academy Years had done well, they would have gone on with that group. If it hadn’t, they probably would have abandoned the whole project.

HARVE BENNETT

It meant a lot to me because I came out of UCLA film school wanting to be a director and other winds blew me to other ports. It was a desire of mine to direct, and it was accepted by the studio and, the fact is, part of the deal was for us to do a Star Trek VI, with the original cast after The Academy Years.

DAVID LOUGHERY

Harve really wanted to do it. He wasn’t really interested in producing anymore.

GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, Star Trek)

I didn’t like it. Who was going to cast the new Kirk and Spock? I could have done so if I thought it was a good idea, but it didn’t fit in with the rest of Trek. It wasn’t good. Some of it was like Police Academy. You could hardly do this without the magic of a group of characters tailored for Star Trek, which this was not.

RALPH WINTER

Gene just stomped his foot and threatened the studio to not support the movie or endorse it. And they needed his endorsement for the core fans. They listened to that. But he didn’t have any veto power.

DAVID LOUGHERY

We were really caught off guard and surprised by the fans who reacted so negatively to the idea of this movie. Somehow they conceived it as a sort of spoof or a takeoff. That’s where we got off on the wrong foot. The fans had misinformation, which may have been put out there by people for their own reasons. Certainly if we were going to make a movie like that, it meant that Walter and whoever wouldn’t get that job a year or two down the line that they had come to expect. I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do know that the misinformation released had people convinced that we were going to do a cross between Police Academy and The Jetsons. But I think it’s traditional that the fans have objected. Harve’s always been smart enough to double-cross them. Give them what they’ve objected to, but surprise them with something that makes it good and works out.

JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”)

I was impressed with Harve when he first came in and did Star Trek II and III, but I think he got a little greedy. He wanted things his own way. He wanted to take over Star Trek for himself. He obviously did not realize the strength of the old cast. The whole thing would have been starting out as if from scratch. I think it was [Paramount CEO Frank] Mancuso who didn’t realize we were not going to be in it. When he found out, [he] said good-bye, Harve.

HARVE BENNETT

There was pressure from a lot of people not to do this. I don’t think there was any question that the self-interest of the supporting cast was not served by it. And if I was George Takei, I would do exactly what he did, and if I were Jimmy Doohan, I would be a really unhappy man. The only one I’m really furious at though is Jimmy Doohan. He said I was fired and I can’t abide lies. I was offered one and a half million dollars to do Star Trek VI and said, “Thanks, I don’t wish to do that. I want to do The Academy.”

WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)

Harve was striving to find an answer for the studio’s question: “Are these guys too old to continue?” So he tried to find a solution as a storywriter and he must have said here’s a way of going. Apparently everybody agreed, but at some point they shut him down after preparing this production for a year, and he got very upset about it and left. I wasn’t too clued in on the politics of what was happening. I had heard about the prequel and was considering my options, but it was never approved and we didn’t know whether or not there would be another Star Trek until the last second.

HARVE BENNETT

My last words to Frank Mancuso before he was asked to leave [by the then recently installed head of Paramount, Stanley Jaffe] was if it was a question of anyone’s concerns about my directing, I’d back off on that. They then offered me Star Trek VI and gave me a pay-or-play commitment to direct and produce The Academy Years afterward. My position was, and I think it was correct, that they would pay me to do VI and make the movie which would have been a real big, fat check for me and never make The Academy Years. To be paid off because the movie I might have done, which is being done by others, would close the franchise was not my intention. I had a life, it’s not like I hadn’t done anything else before Star Trek. The Star Trek curse is something that the poor supporting cast has to live with, but I don’t.

RALPH WINTER

The Academy Years may have looked like a mistake, but look at the franchise as a whole. We had a successful series of feature films, then a new television series, and with the [original] film series ending, it made sense to start a new series of films. You could have opened a whole new frontier. When Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, the people said, “This will never work, how can we have a new captain? It will never equal Kirk and Spock.” But they achieved their own success. It could have been the same with a prequel cast.

HARVE BENNETT

The Academy Years, like Star Trek IV, would have reached beyond the cult. It would have interested people who had never seen a Star Trek film which did not exclude the regulars, but it simply said, “If you don’t understand what it’s all about, come see how it all began.”

GLEN C. OLIVER (film critic, Ain’t It Cool News)

Colored by more than a few shades of Top Gun, the screenplay was filled with tremendous moments of warmth and heart—and focused heavily on its characters’ journeys toward understanding themselves individually, and recognizing their potential as a group. It is as character-centric as The Wrath of Khan or The Search For Spock, and features the same unapologetic devotion to exploring the human condition demonstrated by those titles. Despite a few misplaced, miscalculated attempts at humor, there’s a lot of truth in Loughery’s work in The Academy Years—touchingly, surprisingly, admirably so at times. This would’ve been a very nice and affecting origin story when factored into the broader framework of the franchise, and that it didn’t make it to screens remans highly regrettable.

DAVID LOUGHERY

I had an overall deal at Paramount and I thought that if I wrote it while we working on Star Trek V, it would be a great way to kind of balance my time, because we were shooting one Star Trek and working on the possibility of another one. It was never seen as a way to replace the original cast. Harve had always described it as a lucky strike extra. A special kind of present. And also, we realized that if things went along as planned, we could get it out for 1991 and the twenty-fifth anniversary as sort of a special gift to the fans, a look back. There was no reason why one couldn’t continue to make Star Trek films with the original cast. It was just something that we thought could be done separately and as a bonus.

I would say I wrote three drafts over a period of about a year and a half. The first draft, the studio loved it. We thought, “Great! This is fantastic.” They wanted a few minor changes, but we were really excited. But then, gradually, the studio kind of became reluctant in terms of setting a start date, and also, by that time, I think Star Trek V had come out and been a little bit of a disappointment and they were wondering whether they wanted to make any kind of another Star Trek movie at one point. Also, there were changes in the Paramount administration and a couple of the people who had really been supporters of the prequel left. Then I guess the studio started to think that they could squeeze one more Star Trek with the original cast.

RALPH WINTER

Harve was an elder statesman. He was a gentleman and he taught me a great deal about how I produce movies today. He was a writer-producer that comes out of that television tradition. He left all the production things to me. He didn’t care about that as much as he cared about what the story is about and how is it going to be clear to the audience. If anything, he was too nice. But unfortunately we disagreed at the end of Star Trek V. He wanted to do the picture that we had developed, but ultimately Frank Mancuso wanted to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary. And so he wanted a movie with the original cast and Harve wanted a movie with a young cast. He drew a line in the sand and didn’t participate in Star Trek VI. But that script, Paramount owned it, and then J. J. took off with it and updated a lot of stuff in the first movie that is clearly, if not an homage, a redevelopment of that script.

In the opening scene of the screenplay we developed were cornfields and a mailbox that is flapping back and forth in the wind and it says, “Kirk” on the mailbox. It sits on that for a moment, and then you hear something in the distance, and coming right at camera is a crop duster. A futuristic crop duster. And this young kid is at the wheel of it trying to fly it like a fighter jet. And he crashes it into the farm and burns it down. That’s the opening of the Star Trek screenplay. We felt like we had something worthwhile and Harve put his job on the line. That’s how much he believed in it.

HARVE BENNETT

It’s forever marketable, because it deals with Spock and Kirk at seventeen, eighteen. It deals with the origin of prejudice against Vulcans, the invention of warp speed, the origins of the show. We were not only right there on this, but we were ready to cast it. I wanted Ethan Hawke to play Kirk—he hadn’t even done Dead Poets Society yet. And I said, “I want John Cusack to play young Spock.” He was then in his early twenties, but could have played teenaged, but they didn’t see it. Martin Davis at Paramount said, “We can’t do a picture without the real Kirk and Spock,” so I put in something in the beginning in which the real Kirk and Spock appeared and told the story, then we flash-forwarded to them at the end. But that wasn’t enough. They said the audience would be frustrated. I disagreed. They said they needed something for the twenty-fifth anniversary and it had to be something else. My term was up and I said, “Get somebody else.” To this day, it’s hard for me to talk about, because not only would it have been the biggest grosser of all, but it would have spawned yet another franchise.