“ONLY NIXON COULD GO TO CHINA.”
With studio president Frank Mancuso passing on The Academy Years, it was full speed ahead for Star Trek VI, an anticipated swan song for the original cast with plans to pass the baton to The Next Generation in the next film. Unfortunately for the studio, the twenty-fifth anniversary was rapidly approaching and there was no script, no director, and no producer after Harve Bennett walked away from what would have been a lucrative gig. Paramount quickly enlisted star Leonard Nimoy as the film’s executive producer and he, in turn, recruited writer-director Nicholas Meyer into the fold to deliver a film on a highly accelerated production schedule.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN (cowriter, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
Frank Mancuso had called Leonard into his office and said, “Leonard, help me make this film.” At that point, Leonard was the producer, writer, the director, the star, and it was up to him to discharge those duties or pass them on to other people. Mancuso apparently knew he could trust him to get the whole thing going and to get it going quickly. That had something to do with Star Trek V. Let’s face it, nobody wanted to have anything to do with anybody who had anything to do with V, except as necessary. I don’t think Star Trek V was entirely Shatner’s fault by any means. Moviemaking is a very collaborative business, but no one was happy with it.
WALTER KOENIG (actor, “Pavel Chekov”)
I was supposed to come in and pitch Frank Mancuso my idea for Star Trek VI [“In Flanders Fields”]. I ended up submitting it on paper. I had three of the characters dying in the story. I thought we were all done. Certainly after Star Trek I, I thought we were done.
MARK ROSENTHAL (cowriter, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
We—Larry Konner and myself—were under contract at Paramount, and the feeling was that they were not going to do another Star Trek movie. The guys were getting old and Star Trek V was a disappointment. There was a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and no one wanted to go out like that. They knew the twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up, and we were approached by the vice president of production, Teddy Zee, who called us up and said, “Frank Mancuso has spoken to Leonard. Leonard was still upset because of the last one and he was floating out the idea of one last adventure.” He asked us what we thought about it. The reality was that I am a Trekkie and my partner is incredibly non-science-fiction oriented. We were kind of a yin-yang, but we liked that idea, because Larry would provide good balance.
RALPH WINTER (producer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
Bill had a good time directing Star Trek V and we stumbled. I’m sure Bill feels hurt by the results of that, but he’s a big guy. He knows what happened and he’s got his head held high and he’s fine.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James T. Kirk”)
I felt a sense of loss that I couldn’t be the problem solver. I would have loved to have been immersed in those very same problems and bring to bear what I had learned on the previous film. But on the other hand there was a sense of tremendous relief, as I was only too aware of the pressures on Nick Meyer both from a production point of view and a political view from the studio, and as time would get short, the anxiety that was involved in trying to get it done on time. I was very sensitized to the things he needed to accomplish.
MARK ROSENTHAL
Our initial response was that we should do something where The Next Generation has to come back in time and work with the classic cast. The poster would be Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Brent Spiner. That would have easily been a hundred-million-dollar film. Feelers were put out on that and there were some very strong negative responses. The TV department was totally against it. The TV series was doing extremely well, and everyone was afraid that the old guys’ egos would get involved and they would say that it was a sign of a lack of confidence that they could carry the film. So that was the end of that.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor/producer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
The Berlin Wall had come down. The Russian government was in severe distress. Communism was falling apart. These changes were creating a new order in our world. I thought there would be a kind of dialogue, a new thinking of these relationships. Realizing that over the twenty-five-year history of Star Trek the Klingons have been the constant foe of the Federation, much like the Russians and Communists were to democracy, I wondered how we could translate these contemporary world affairs in an adventure with the Klingons. I thought it would be ideal since the Klingons were a parallel for the Communist bloc, the “Evil Empire.” It just made sense to do that story.
MARK ROSENTHAL
The main thing we were concerned with was that we had never really gotten details about the Klingon Empire. There was a whole question of whether we should go to the actual home planet. What happened was that they felt in terms of budget, re-creating the entire planet would be impossible, so it became this prison concept. The original idea was to go to the actual capital city. I still think this was a better idea, but you can see how this process happens.
The first Star Trek had a horrendous budget and it was a bad movie. Paramount began to realize that the Europeans did not grow up with Star Trek, so there’s a very small market for it. The studio always feels that they have to make their money in a domestic situation, which for a big-budget special-effects movie is tough. When you write, you try to come up with stories that take place in one ship, because that’s pretty cheap to do. When you start talking about sets and locations, the budget gets very high. Leonard decided that he didn’t want to direct this movie. We knew that Nick was interested. He was negotiating an overall deal with Paramount and we were pretty much left alone and began writing.
NICHOLAS MEYER (cowriter/director, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
I had just had a terrible experience making a movie, Company Business, in which I had my nuts handed to me. It was ghastly. And so the idea of climbing back on a horse, any horse, was really important and I thought I probably couldn’t have a friendlier horse than the Star Trek horse. I had absolutely no idea what a Star Trek movie would be. I never do. I never get many ideas, and the ideas I get, most of the time stink.
I was on Cape Cod with my family where I go every summer for a couple of weeks, and Leonard, who hails from Boston, flew to Provincetown for the day. And it was a very pleasant day. We walked up and down the beach and he said, “I have an idea for another Star Trek movie.” And he said, “You know the Klingons have always been our stand-in for the Russians.” And I’m thinking, “Did I know that?” It seemed obvious the moment he said it. And he said, “The wall is coming down, and what if the wall came down in outer space? Who am I if I have no enemy to define me?” And all he needed to do was prime the pump. Leonard went back to California and I thought, “Okay, we’re off and running.” And then he called me and said, “This is very strange but they hired two other guys.”
MARK ROSENTHAL
The wonderful thing about Star Trek was that it was always sort of an allegory of the United States and the Soviet Union. We had two meetings with Leonard and Teddy [Zee], where we said the film should be about a peace with the Klingons and that it would be a nice parallel to reality. We were always arguing politics, so we thought this would be an opportunity to get some allegory in there. In other words, if it had been a movie like the first one, about a satellite coming back, we would not have done it. I think Star Trek works best when it’s an allegory.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I still was the director on the project and it was really strange. And then I got a call from one of the executives, John Goldwyn, who said, and I quote, “The boys are having a little trouble getting started.” And I said, “What do you mean they’re having a little trouble getting started? Send them to London, because that’s where I live and I’ll talk them through it.” Which may not have been the right thing. I probably should have touched base with Leonard to see what he thought, but I don’t know what I thought I was doing. Probably not very smart.
One of these gents showed up in London, stayed a couple of days with a yellow legal pad on his lap. Back in those days it wasn’t an ice planet, it was a sand planet. [Studio executive] David Kirkpatrick said, “I’m tired of sand.” And we later changed it to ice. And then they weren’t happy with that script, and finally I was being brought back to write it. In the meantime, my wonderful assistant and sometimes screenwriter Denny had fallen gravely ill. I decided that I would cowrite it with him; it would give him a reason to get through radiation and all that other stuff. I could tap into all his wonderful stuff and he’d make some money. At this point, Paramount was not in a position to say anything but yes. They didn’t know who he was. It didn’t matter.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
Nick was involved with Company Business in London and wasn’t going to be able to write the screenplay in time to get the film into production for the release date that would coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary. So he told Paramount that the only way he could do it is if he could cowrite the script with me, and that’s how it came about. He was kind enough to trust me, and while he was in London we communicated via computer. When we turned in our first draft, the studio green-lighted it.
MARK ROSENTHAL
Leonard at one point went to see Nick, after we had had all our meetings. What he did was present our story to Nick. I know Nick honestly believed that the story came from Leonard, but that was after three months’ work. We know Nick’s a writer. We weren’t naïve about it. We knew he would rewrite whatever we did, but we didn’t expect them to try and freeze us out.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Leonard said to me, “Let’s make a movie about the wall coming down in outer space.” His statement just spoke to me. What I wanted to do with it was to widen the world of Star Trek before closing out the series. The thing I’ve learned from these movies is that your only chance of succeeding is not to repeat yourself, not to try the same exact thing. I didn’t want to go mano a mano because I had done that with II, and I didn’t want to make a comedy because I felt IV was the most broadly comedic of any of them. So I thought, “I want to make an ensemble piece and I want it to be a political thriller.”
WILLIAM SHATNER
It was a very good idea. It’s a classic Star Trek idea in that the important issue of the day is incorporated in the story of Star Trek, and by doing so—and because we put it into the future—we’re able to comment on it as though it has nothing to do with today, yet it makes a commentary.
MARK ROSENTHAL
At one point we had a discussion about using Chernobyl, and that really opened the floodgates. Then we began to look at specific events. Everyone was paranoid that someone is going to try and sabotage the peace between the Soviet Union and the United States. Why not have the same thing occur between the Klingons and the Federation? It all kind of led to the idea of assassination. What if Gorbachev was assassinated and the blame fell on Kirk? That was really the key.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Star Trek in many ways tends to reflect what’s going on in the real world. At its best, Star Trek appears to function as pop metaphor, taking current events and issues—ecology, war, and racism, for example—and objectifying them for us to contemplate in a science-fiction setting. The world it presents may make no sense as either science or fiction, but it is well and truly sufficient for laying out human questions. Removed from our immediate neighborhoods, it is refreshing and even intriguing to consider Earth matters from the distance of a few light-years. Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—for better or for worse, in sickness and health. In truth, Star Trek doesn’t even pretend to show us other worlds, only humanity refracted in what is supposed to be a high-tech mirror.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
When Star Trek relies on science fiction, it’s a big failure. Maybe that’s part of why nobody likes Star Trek I and V very much. Gene Roddenberry originally called Star Trek “Wagon Train to the stars,” because westerns served the purpose in our society of being morality tales about good guys versus bad guys and, in many cases, in those thousands of westerns it was irrelevant that the setting was the old West. What was important and great in a movie like Shane, for instance, was the story of the individual in society, and Star Trek is best when it’s a morality play. That’s what Gene called the original episodes, so when Leonard came up with the idea that the Klingons could stand in for the Russians and we could deal with the end of the Cold War, we were home free in terms of fundamentals that we knew worked.
MARK ROSENTHAL
I can tell you that from April to August of that year we developed the story and the screenplay, and suddenly we were pushed off. It’s funny, too, because Larry and I are a couple of lefties and anyone who knows us knows we wrote the story.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The studio had a whole bunch of notes and suggestions which I unwisely did not pass on to Leonard, because I told myself, “Let him make up his own mind without the promptings of the studio.” But he was very pissed off and he thought I was duplicitous. Maybe I was. I think I just wanted him to not have their notes and just do his notes. We ironed it out and eventually that’s how the script was written. I never saw what the other gents had done. I’m so susceptible, so easily influenced that, as in the case of Star Trek VI, I knew if I saw it I’d never shake it out of my skull.
MARK ROSENTHAL
One of the things that Nick changed in the movie is there’s this relationship between Spock and Valeris. We said, “Look, Spock was already killed in one movie, so we can’t do that. If this is going to be the last movie, let’s do something really shocking. Let’s break the mold a little bit.” In fact, I remember in the first meeting with Leonard, we sat and watched the Robert Bly tape about old warriors.
Bly is an American poet who started the men’s groups that go out into the woods. His position is that there are no positive male guardian figures, and one of his theories is that the old warrior in tribal society has to teach the young warriors how to do things.
We kind of watched that tape and said, “These guys are old warriors now, let’s really make it that they’re at the end of their career.” I very much wanted to have Kirk fall in love with Saavik, a Vulcan, so that they would produce a people who would be like Spock, who himself had a human mother and a Vulcan father. I thought it would be a wonderful way to bring the characters and their relationships to a close. Obviously they changed that to Spock falling in love. Frankly, I don’t feel it’s as satisfying.
RALPH WINTER
Nick is real smart. He’s such a good writer. He’s really committed to his work and he works very hard and pushed everybody and the envelope. Leading the troops, he challenged everyone to put out their best, and we had a good time doing it. He’s terrific and he does things that seem a little unorthodox. He brings a class and sophistication to the material that is great.
MARK ROSENTHAL
We had done a couple of things which they kind of simplified. Instead of Kirk just going to the Klingons, he was arrested by Sulu and turned over to them, which was a very dramatic moment for Sulu. We also wanted to do this thing where while he was in prison, some of the characters they had met over the twenty-five years would be there, which we felt really would have tied up the entire series.
We also discussed the fact that the Klingons are this aggressive race. Originally, they supposedly had this reptilian background. In regards to this whole thing about Kirk and his search to uncover the conspiracy behind the assassination, we come upon more primitive Klingon tribes who had an almost religious representation for the Klingons. They would be much more primitive and violent. We were going to do a whole thing on the anthropology of the Klingons, but all of that was dropped because it would have been too expensive.
The other thing that we did, which Nick changed, was if you look at the second movie which he directed, he dropped in all of those references from Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities, but this whole thing with Shakespeare in Star Trek VI … I think it got carried away. What we did was we had a literary reference from a wonderful poem called “The Idle King,” and it was about Ulysses and the end of his life, where he and his crew are very old and they decide to go off on one last voyage, and it was very clearly a voyage to death. You know, old men rowing the boat again. So we had this bit where Kirk mentions it to Spock. Then Kirk is turned over to Sulu who turns him over to the Klingons, only it turns out that the president of the Federation arranged it all secretly so Kirk let himself get arrested. Ours had a little more twists and turns. We had this thing where Kirk at the beginning is talking to Spock about the Trojan horse, and the way they get him out is they let the Klingons capture the Enterprise, which they seem to have abandoned. But they’ve stowed away, like Ulysses and the Trojan horse, and that’s how they free Kirk. So we had different literary references. I think that ours was a lot more textured. All of the beats of the story were worked out in the script. Then Nick came in with Denny. There was a lot of budgetary simplification.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Frank Mancuso and [Paramount chairman] Martin Davis took me to lunch when I was living in London, at Claridges, and proposed a sixth Star Trek movie that Leonard was going to executive-produce for a budget of thirty million dollars and I said okay. When I arrived in America, I walked into a meeting with [president of the Motion Picture Group] David Kirkpatrick and [Paramount Pictures president of production] Gary Lucchesi and they said, “Now, we’re talking twenty-five million dollars.” I said, “In London, Frank said thirty and that’s what I agreed to.”
I knew what had happened in the interim, which was that the feature division had just had flop after flop after flop, and they were forty-million-dollar movie flops. They were running scared, but I did the math for them. I said, “Look, here’s the problem: you have fourteen million dollars above the line [for cast, directors, producers fees, and screenwriters] in this movie just for starters. You have four and half million dollars in special effects, and these are all the numbers from Star Trek V. You have two and half million in post, whatever it was. And I’m willing to live with all of that at thirty, but don’t ask me to make Star Trek VI for less than Star Trek V, because the money isn’t there. Where’s the movie going to be? I added it up and you have two million dollars left to make the movie!” And they said, “Would you excuse us for just a minute?”
They walked into another room leaving [producer] Steve Jaffe, Ralph Winter, Leonard, and me sitting in Lucchesi’s office. They came back in and said twenty-seven million, and I said, “You’re confused. I’m not negotiating with you. I’m just giving you information. This can’t happen.” They accused me of not being a team player and I responded, “Oh, please. Don’t give me the not-team-player thing. I’m going to go to Frank Mancuso and I’m going to lay out these numbers and let him make up his own mind what we’re doing here.” Which is what I did. I went to Frank and I laid it all out in black and white and I showed him the [budget] top sheet for every Star Trek movie starting with the 1979 one, which I think was forty-five million dollars. And I think Star Trek II was eleven million dollars. And each one after that was 41 percent more expensive than its predecessor. I said the only exceptions to this are II, which was made for 25 percent of I, and VI which I’ll make for the same price as V, but I can’t make it for less and here’s why. He was very courteous; he heard me out. I left and he canceled the movie.
STEVEN-CHARLES JAFFE (producer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
We were at a budgetary impasse and everyone resigned themselves to the fact that it was not going to happen. I went home and was very, very upset about it, because this meant a lot to me for personal and professional reasons. I just couldn’t go to sleep. I grew up watching Star Trek on television, and doing this movie was a private honor. A lot of us took pay cuts and people say, “You took a pay cut on Star Trek—that’s Hollywood, not personal.” It meant a lot to us and the more we got involved with it, the more we were emotionally involved. I’m very happy to say I had a big part in making sure the movie got made. It was all teamwork.
NICHOLAS MEYER
What saved it was a phone call from Stanley Jaffe [the new head of the studio, no relation to Steven-Charles Jaffe] while I was throwing things in a box to leave my office and wondering what I was going to do about the rent on the house and stuff. He said, “I hear you got problems.” “Well, I need five million dollars.” And he said, “You got it.” And that was the end of that.
RALPH WINTER
Bill and Leonard made concessions to get this picture made because they wanted to make it. We all did. Everyone made concessions, and frankly, Nick and Steven and I deferred a significant portion of our salaries to get this picture made, because we believed the story was worthwhile.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I told them it would take fifty-five days. They said, “You have fifty-one,” and I yelled and screamed and they finally gave me fifty-three … and I came in at fifty-five.
WALTER KOENIG
They deferred part of their salaries. That’s not the same as taking points. This was guaranteed, I hasten to add. The sixth movie was: “Let’s cash in on the twenty-fifth anniversary; maybe there’s still some tread left on the tire.” But it’s true the studios were backing down from big-budget films. Paramount had just gotten burned with Godfather III.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I remember at one point when we were filming the peace conference in the film; by this time everybody knew that the film was pretty damn good. John Goldwyn, who was the executive on the film, was looking at some of the chairs that we were using in this meeting and he just shook his head and said, “We should have given you the money.”
LEONARD NIMOY
I’m a Roddenberry disciple. He was very much involved. I went to him for regular meetings on this script. Every time we had a draft, I met with him and we discussed it. He was very intrigued with the idea that we would be exploring the relationship with the Klingons. He was concerned in this particular story about the prejudice question, and it is an interesting issue. Sometimes when you show people showing a prejudice, even though your intention is to show that they’re wrong, there are going to be people who identify with them.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Without seeing himself in relation to Roddenberry as the heir or the keeper of the flame, Leonard knew how these movies worked, he knew the shape of the bottle. He was very protective of that. At one point, Kim Cattrall had posed for some still photographs on the set of the bridge of the Enterprise and they were racy photographs. She was just having fun. And he said no. He killed all of those. That was not going to be.
RALPH WINTER
I screened the movie Star Trek VI for Gene Roddenberry about a week or two before he died. He’s a character. He had a great idea and he executed the great idea, but he couldn’t follow through and he was not a people person. He was cantankerous and he had some kind of weird deal that if he found a problem with any of the scripts, they had to pay him to fix it. So he always had problems. He had to accept it. If he didn’t, they had to pay him to fix it and change it. And so he was always employed. His wife was down in the cutting room taking short ends of film prints and cutting them up and selling them for a dollar apiece. It was an odd group. But he loved the last movie. He watched it in a wheelchair covered with a blanket. He was cold and he was clearly on his way out. He had a great idea and he sponsored a great franchise.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
The man was two days away from death when he saw Star Trek VI. They propped him up in a chair. He didn’t have a clue what was going on. I don’t think he had anything in his head at that point.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I cannot at this time remember whether I knew that he was ill or not. But regardless, even if he’d been in the peak of health, it would hardly have excused the somewhat impatient and high-handed way I was dealing with him. It’s interesting, I had quite forgotten that we’d had run-ins over the screenplay of Star Trek II as well. I didn’t recollect any of that until I was shown evidence of our correspondence. The Star Trek conception is a bottle, and into that bottle you can pour different vintages, but you’re not allowed to change the shape of the bottle. And I think that the way I see it, rightly or wrongly, is that I was sort of obeying those rules. Maybe the brew that I had put in there was a stronger brew … or stranger, but it still fit into the bottle.
LEONARD NIMOY
Here you’ve got a couple of guys saying, “What do you think of the smell? Only the top-of-the-line models can talk.” Gene was concerned about that stuff. He [Roddenberry] said, “I don’t feel good about Enterprise crew talking that way.” We pointed out these are bad people who are racists and who turn out to be assassins. “I’m just uncomfortable with a couple of guys walking around in Federation uniforms talking that way about another race.” And I understood it. It’s a danger. By and large, he was quite taken with the idea of a Klingon détente. It was his idea to put a Klingon in the Federation on The Next Generation and this was the beginning of that link.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Very famously William Gillette asked Arthur Conan Doyle if he wanted Sherlock Holmes to be put on the stage, and Arthur Conan Doyle said, “Sure.” There was a famous exchange of telegrams between Gillette and Doyle. “May I marry Holmes?” and Doyle cabled back, “You may marry him or murder him or do what you like with him.” Doyle always had very ambivalent feelings about Holmes, whom he had tried to kill off at least twice. Roddenberry was arguably much more protective and controlling about the world, the universe that he had created. And I think I was content to keep these characters as I found them. Kirk the bold adventurer, Spock the logical one, Bones the bleeding-heart liberal, and so forth. But where we differed was in our ongoing view of the human condition. Gene Roddenberry believed, or said he believed, in the perfectibility of man.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
The first thing I did was sit down and in two days watch all the films and some of the episodes. Since I wasn’t a Trekkie, nothing was risky for me. There was an attitude on my part that if somebody in the first draft says Klingons don’t eat with their left hand, they eat with their right, I’ll just change it. That gave me a certain amount of freedom. I didn’t worship those characters, so I was able to see them in a rather fresh light. The same was true with Nick, who, having done II and IV, knew a great deal more about it than me, but nevertheless is not constrained. He’s willing to add to the lore.
WILLIAM SHATNER
In the script there’s a wonderful line, “In space, all warriors are cold warriors.” Both sides have come to define themselves by their antagonism. “What will I be without my enemy?” The best Star Trek stories have their genesis in real life.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (coexecutive producer, Futurama)
Star Trek VI did something that Star Trek always did, which was to say something about something currently going on, but in space. It’s a movie that still holds up because, as opposed to Star Trek V, which is terribly cast, Star Trek VI is brilliantly cast. And I loved that Brock Peters, who was a good guy in Star Trek IV, turns out to be one of the conspirators. I saw Star Trek VI eleven times in the theater; there was something very satisfying about it.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
There are three kinds of people in the universe of Star Trek VI. The people who wanted peace, the people who did not want peace for their own self-interest, and then there were people like Kirk, who had lived a certain way for twenty-five years vis-à-vis the Klingons, but were intelligent enough to say, What does the future have to offer? Maybe this isn’t wrong. We were lucky to be able to see Kirk as a man who, if he was rigid at all, at least recognized his own rigidity. And, of course, it allowed us to create a character that in essence was a spokesman for the uncertainties and the whole idea of the undiscovered country. The future, being scary, got nailed down because we had a character that could say that.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The heroic thing about Kirk and the rest of the crew is their effort to acknowledge, to confront, and ultimately try to overcome their prejudice. If a man leaps into a raging torrent to save a drowning child, he performs a heroic act. If the same man leaps into the same pond to save the same child, and does so with a ball and chain attached to his leg, he must be accounted not less heroic, but more heroic for overcoming a handicap. That’s what heroism and drama is about. Kirk is more of a hero for being a human being and not less because he’s superhuman, which I never believed.
WILLIAM SHATNER
The portrayal of Kirk attempts to show a man who has spent a lifetime imbued with the idea that his mission in life is to subdue, subvert, and make the enemy submit to his nation’s or his Federation’s view. That’s his whole training and that is the military training. He learns differently, and that is the classic dilemma that Star Trek has sought to present in its most successful shows.
LEONARD NIMOY
Spock experienced prejudice growing up half Vulcan and half human. In Star Trek VI, Spock becomes an emissary against prejudice and discovers, during the course of the story, his own prejudices.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Leonard is a highly intelligent, highly professional guy who’s been around, who knows this business back and forth in ways that I certainly didn’t at the time, and I would say even now he’s several classes ahead of me. As the executive producer, he was certainly my boss, and the movie was his conception. It started off as his idea. There are certain people that you always sort of put a foot wrong with in some way … and I think I frequently put my foot wrong with Leonard.
I don’t know if he brought out the worst in me or I brought out the worst in myself. But I think I exasperated him. Sometimes justifiably and maybe sometimes not. When we were editing the movie, he took the last reel home with an editor and played with it and then brought it back, and I did not realize that as far as he was concerned, this was final cut. I thought this was his pass at it and I would take a pass at it. And he was very angry that I had played with it. And in that case, I didn’t think that was my fault. I don’t think I understood and I probably would have argued about it and said, “Can we talk about this?” But it never even occurred to me. But there were other sections where I was clearly out of line and he took umbrage.
LEONARD NIMOY
Nick Meyer is a gadfly. Nick loves to speak in headlines. I remember one day we were talking about opera and he declared, “Carmen is the greatest opera ever written!” He was saying it as if he wrote it. There is something that attributes to him in that statement. That it is his perception, and therefore it’s his baby. There is something possessive about it in the pronouncement. He’s a great PR man. Of course, that’s what he was before he wrote novels and screenplays.
NICHOLAS MEYER
During one of these movies, and I can’t remember which one it was, I somewhat grandiosely said, “Well, they don’t have any right to criticize me. I am the man who saved Star Trek.” And Leonard said, “Oh, you? You alone?” And I felt stupid the moment I’d said it. It was like I was listening to my own PR. I thought, “You sound like a jerk.”
RALPH WINTER
We went away from the visual effects on Star Trek V because we thought we were going to get something new and different from another guy, which didn’t happen. We went back to what we know is proven, and stuff that ILM did was spectacular. We were the benefactors of technology for T2. The look of the picture, the cameraman, the set dresser, the designer—everything about this film was trying to stretch and be something the other films weren’t. I was a key member of Star Trek V, and when someone talks about it, it hurts.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
The budget caused us to lose several sequences which would have been very beneficial to the film. When you’re in preproduction, sometimes what you substitute is better, so who’s really to ever know? But my original vision of the film, which certainly would have been twice as much money, was an epic action-adventure, and it became a kind of detective story action-adventure. The word epic would not be considered applicable. Money always impacts on art.
Much like films such as The Dirty Dozen and The Magnificent Seven, the film would have opened with the recruitment of its protagonists, in this case by an enigmatic Federation envoy. After the teaser sequence in which the Klingon moon Praxis is destroyed and Sulu, who has been promoted to captain of the Excelsior, informs the Federation, the retired crew of the Enterprise would have been gathered together for one final mission. In the unfilmed sequence, the envoy with a mysterious glowing hand was to arrive first at Kirk’s home during a rainy and foggy San Francisco evening while Kirk is making love to Carol Marcus, with whom he has apparently reconciled. “This sailor is in port for good,” promises Kirk. “Take a good look at my retirement pay if you don’t believe me. I can hardly afford to cross the street.” But when there’s a knock at the door, Kirk is stunned to find he’s been called back to active duty. As Kirk leaves, Carol pleads, “But he’s retired … you’re retired!”—losing Kirk once again to a mission.
Getting into a flying car with the alien, Kirk is propelled through the skyline of San Francisco to where they find McCoy inebriated at an upscale medical dinner where the doctors are lamenting about a patient who actually had the audacity to request a house call, much to McCoy’s utter disdain. Kirk is surprised to find that Sulu is registered as “still active” and Spock’s status is mysteriously “classified.”
The next stop is a hangar bay where Professor Montgomery Scott is lecturing a group of college students about Klingon technology in front of the Bird of Prey, fished out of the harbor from Star Trek IV, while a bored Chekov is found at a chess club losing to an alien. As they leave, Kirk warns Chekov about his opponent, “Never play chess with a full Betazoid,” leaving Chekov to reply, “I vas robbed.” Meanwhile, Uhura is recruited at a Federation radio station where she hosts a talk show. All of them gather at Starfleet Command for a briefing.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I loved [the roundup] and didn’t want to lose it, but we just couldn’t afford it. The movie was made under a very, very tight budget. The thing that II and VI have in common is that they’re the only two in the series that cost less than their predecessors. I run a very tight ship. We wouldn’t have gotten the movie made otherwise.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
What I had done originally was to give every one of the seven principal actors an entrance. The scenes demonstrated who those people were and what they did when they weren’t on the Enterprise. They were either retired or rotated to R & R, and it added some humanity and humor to the characters. I called it the roundup. It would have been a very effective sequence and we held on to it until the very last minute, but Paramount was saying, “We’re going to discontinue preproduction unless you cut another million dollars out of the budget.” We just had to drop fifteen pages. Maybe what I’m thinking of would have been rambling and slow and dropped in editing anyway, but there was a kind of The Over-the-Hill Gang Rides Again attitude.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I don’t think the studio was willing to spend that kind of money. They were very disappointed with the revenues of Star Trek V, which was a very expensive movie. I don’t think it lost money, but I don’t think it made the kind of money they wanted.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
Money always impacts art. Our budget was low for a science-fiction film. But it’s hard to call Star Trek science fiction. We weren’t trying to do Terminator, Star Wars, or 2001, so maybe Star Trek is better off when it comes more from drama and less from the invention of more scenes with aliens and things. In fact, I found that because Star Trek grows out of a television series, there has always been an attitude of low budget; here’s an alien planet and there’s a foam rubber rock, and there’s a red cyclorama in the background. The fans have not only put up with that but embraced it. It’s as if they’re saying, “We don’t need your high-tech jazz to tell a morality play.” Maybe it’s smarter to do Star Trek with a smaller budget and force writers and directors not to rely on fancy pyrotechnics.
For the scenes on the ice planet, Rura Penthe, Steven-Charles Jaffe, also the film’s second unit director, headed to Alaska for three days of filming to supplement the stagebound shots of the Klingon penal colony.
STEVEN CHARLES-JAFFE
It was two and a half days of very intense second unit work on a glacier, which normally would have taken a week and a half to two weeks to shoot. We were getting up at four in the morning, driving an hour, and flying an hour in a helicopter. It was ten degrees and we had one stunt man in about three and a half hours of very heavy makeup. We had a crew of thirty people and four helicopters. It was a real challenge.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Every director in the world would say, “I could’ve used more [money],” and I’m no exception. I didn’t have it and that’s the real world. You have to play the game. People may say how come we didn’t do this or that, but that’s nitpicking.
Long before he donned a Bajoran uniform aboard Deep Space Nine as Odo, actor Rene Auberjonois played the treacherous Colonel West, an Oliver North analogue, who is in league with the other conspirators, including Star Trek IV’s Admiral Cartwright, once again played by To Kill a Mockingbird’s Brock Peters.
RENE AUBERJONOIS (actor, “Odo,” Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
I almost wasn’t in Star Trek VI, because the character was almost entirely cut out. I did it because Nick Meyer is a personal friend and asked me to. I was in Scotland hiking with my wife and rushed back to get the makeup all done. I’ve played a lot of different kind of parts and I usually play villains and I love them. I remember when my son was much younger and I was doing Richard III at the same time I was doing Benson and he asked, “Why do you always play the bad guy?” and I said, “It’s because they’re usually the best part to play.”
NICHOLAS MEYER
When we were making Star Trek VI there was so much fighting in the executive offices. Frank Mancuso had been running the studio, Sid Ganis was head of production, and then Frank Mancuso left, Sid Ganis left, David Kirkpatrick left, and it was just like a musical chairs. Nobody was minding the store, so, we were left alone to make that movie. I think that a lot of times they are simply penny wise and pound foolish. They were always looking to cut the wrong corner, and the same thing with the budget for that whole movie. Where I had proved with geometric logic and hard numbers that every Star Trek movie, with the exception of II, cost 41 percent more than its predecessor, and I was proposing to do VI for the same price as V, two years later, they were still going to chop four or five million dollars out of it. It was silly.
I remember that when the movie was over and we were in the cutting room, the coup happened in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev disappeared and nobody knew if he was alive or dead. And I blush to say that we thought, “Oh, this is so cool for the movie.” We really didn’t waste a thought, certainly not that first day, on what had happened to this poor man. And I remember John Goldwyn calling and saying, “How soon can we get the movie out?” I said, “We’re waiting for three hundred special-effects shots, I don’t think we can get it out right away.” There’s a certain tunnel vision.
WALTER KOENIG
I was absolutely fucking miserable from day one on Star Trek VI. It was so disappointing to me … and I didn’t even have Harve Bennett to blame anymore. Ralph Winter is a charming, delightful, and considerate man, and I had considered Nick a booster of mine because he had written the best stuff in Star Trek IV as well as directing Star Trek II, but I found this script to be so totally devoid of any individuality for the supporting characters. It was as if you could literally have taken one long speech and taken a scissor to it, cut it into pieces, and handed it to us.
For me, it was not a wrap-up at all. I thought, at last some recognition, some attention had to be paid to the supporting characters, and given their moment. There were no first-person personal pronouns; none of us ever said “I.” It was always “Keptain, there is a ship out there,” not “Keptain, I see a ship out there and I’m worried about this.” We were there as expository vehicles, and that alone, and that was really painful. My sense of ego and identity just cried out for some opportunity to express character, and it was just not available.
RALPH WINTER
I remember on Star Trek VI I had an idea that we should do a press conference to promote the movie on the bridge of the Enterprise and we should do it with all of the cast. Leonard kind of pushed that off and said, “Do you want Jimmy Doohan to make up stuff about the engineer? And what the engineer thinks about Star Trek? Because what Jimmy Doohan does is from a script. You don’t want Jimmy Doohan writing that stuff.” It’s one thing to let Leonard and Bill do that who had more of a public presence, but with the rest of them, it could have been a disaster. I always thought that would have been a cool idea if we could have pulled it off, but the studio was afraid that if it wasn’t scripted, they were not sure what they were going to say, so it didn’t get very far.
WALTER KOENIG
I had written pages of notes before we started shooting and gave them to Ralph, who thought they were all very germane. It was not to subvert the story, but to make the words the character had on-screen at that time significant. Ralph told me he gave them all to Nick, who never acknowledged them, so every time we did a scene, I was angry. I became angry at the other actors. I didn’t blow up or scream and carry on, but I was in a state of constant agitation. I wanted this to be what the other actors apparently felt that it was, which was a wrap-up in a way that made it feel that we had grown as characters and the audience had an opportunity to really experience who we were. Ultimately, what I decided is there is a huge irony about Star Trek. It was always a show about the future, and the supporting characters were hopelessly immersed in the past. We never grew, we were the same characters we were on the television series, and we never had a chance to develop, to go into the future with the stories and the Enterprise. We were forever stuck back in the sixties in terms of the lack of dimension of the characters and the studio perspective on who we were as actors and characters.
RALPH WINTER
Jack Palance was an early choice for Gorkon, the Klingon chancellor, although David Warner did a great job for us. He’s a good actor and he fit the role so we brought him back.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Chang [the Klingon general] is not Khan. Khan is a very specific individual, and they’re not the same. You want an antagonist worthy of somebody’s steel and you want to throw people curveballs if you can.
It’s the only time other than [for] the Star Trek cast that I ever knowingly wrote for one actor, because I had this CD of Christopher Plummer doing the excerpts from Henry V. And I so fell in love with this that I thought, “I’m going to write a character based on the guy who’s doing these excerpts and then I can just get him to recite Shakespeare for me whenever I want.” I said to Mary Jo Slater, my indefatigable casting director, “Mary Jo, do not come back without Chris Plummer or I can’t make this movie.”
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
The person I had in mind for the changeling was as different as night and day from Iman. I had Sigourney Weaver in mind, but I’m not sure that we didn’t come up with a better choice. I just saw the character as a big, ballsy, space pirate; a female version of the dark side of Han Solo.
RALPH WINTER
Nick wanted to go with actors who were going to make a contribution and really wanted to work with us. That’s what attracted us to Kim Cattrall, Rosanna DeSoto, and Kurtwood Smith and, in other places, we went for a specific look, and also a good actor, Iman.
HARVE BENNETT (producer, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier)
The only serious problem that I would have never allowed if I were king was that, for the first time in the Star Trek movies, they violated the rules of some of the characters. They did not behave in character, and the reason for that is Nick always wanted to do that and I was always there to say no. I would have never had Spock do some of the things he did in that movie, and I would have never allowed Shatner to be in drag and fight with himself and to do all that stuff, because those things in the series did not appeal to me because it was like, “Look at me, I’m Bill Shatner.”
The final thing, and Nick surprised me on this, is that in Star Trek II we got away with quoting Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities because it worked and Nick had a blinding vision that this was like Moby-Dick and the whole picture became a metaphor. And it was a very good metaphor. But Christopher Plummer plumbing the depths of Shakespeare and coming up with “to be or not to be” because he ran out of other quotes, came to me like a punching bag and that pulled me out of the picture.
WALTER KOENIG
The thing I can say about Star Trek VI that it has going for it that none of the other films had is the preponderance of quality guest performers. We have some really strong people. Kim was wonderful; there’s a mind-meld scene that’s the first time a mind meld is really sexy. It’s very sensual.
KIM CATTRALL (actress, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
I took the name Valeris from the Greek god Eros, the god of strife. And we dropped the vowel because it sounded more Vulcan. I felt it was very much my own. I don’t think she’s like the other women in Star Trek. In the sixties, they were mostly beautiful women in great-looking, tight outfits with fabulous makeup and hairdos, more set decoration than real motivators in the mechanics of the plot.
NICHOLAS MEYER
I met a lot of pretty girls. It was amazing. There were some beautiful women who came out for it. But Kim was the only one who got the Vulcan-ness of it. The straight-faced “You must be very proud,” [and] “I don’t believe so, sir.”
STEVEN-CHARLES JAFFE
It’s not easy to play a Vulcan. There are a lot of people who did readings where either there was nothing there with absolutely no emotion, or there was too much. Kim was exquisite, because she had the proper balance of not showing emotion but also being very alive. You knew there was this very smart person worthy of being opposite Leonard Nimoy as Spock.
NICHOLAS MEYER
Leonard always told me that he never played a man with no emotions, but a man who always was holding his emotions in check.
KIM CATTRALL
I wanted a very definitive Vulcan woman. I was a warrior. I wanted a bold look to make it very different from what had come before. I came in to Nick after everything was settled and I said I want to have traces of Leonard, so I dyed my hair black and had it done very sixties and shaved my sideburns, because I felt my ears would look much stronger. I was a revolutionary and I wanted my appearance to reflect that. The great thing about the hairdo was the way I could just put it over my ear so you wouldn’t be able to see the ears. Then I could sort of surreptitiously put it behind my ear and that was really fun. I’ve kept all my ears. It’s a wonderful memory of having done the movie.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
There was a desire to get Kirstie Alley to play Saavik. When that looked like it was going to be impractical, we couldn’t stand around waiting for a decision—maybe the money was too much—for whatever reason. We reached a point where Kirstie Alley could not be counted on to do the film and we said, let’s forget it. Let’s create another character, which led to some nice changes.
KIM CATTRALL
I told Nick I really wanted to wear a skirt, like Uhura, since I have great legs. He said, “Kim, if I put you in a skirt, people will be looking at your legs.” And I said, “So?” The uniforms are nice, but they were made in 1982 for someone else. I really wanted a new uniform, but when they fitted me for a costume they told me they couldn’t get any more material. I didn’t want to sweat in someone’s old jacket. I had to completely reshape it so I’d look like a woman. I wasn’t into hiding things at that point in my life. I feel good about the way I look and as a woman I enjoy feeling sexy. I think in science fiction, women should look great … and so should men. That’s why people go to the movies.
NICHOLAS MEYER
The history of Star Trek is like Rashomon. I’ll give you an example. Leonard Nimoy gave an interview where he claims one of the times he got most upset with me was when we were filming the confession scene where Spock is mind-melding with Valeris to ferret out the traitors. It’s a very emotionally intense scene. And he said that I showed up on set that day dressed as Sherlock Holmes, which was very distracting and trivialized the moment. In fact, I’ve never dressed up as Sherlock Holmes … ever. I was, however, dressed in a suit and tie that day since I was going to the symphony. So it definitely was a case of our memories playing tricks on us.
KIM CATTRALL
My first scene was in sick bay. We did one of the last scenes first and it was like some wonderful fantasy. I would look over at Chekov and say, “Am I dreaming or is this true?” It’s like being caught between fantasy TV land as a kid and the reality of being a working actress—this is my character, this is my job. At the first rehearsal the cast comes up to you, and these people whom you’ve watched since you were seven or eight on television welcome you aboard. You can’t help but feel part of this unique legacy and family.
RALPH WINTER
We did some fun things in that movie with weightlessness and floating blood and all that stuff. But ultimately the story is not that good guy–bad guy classic movie like Wrath of Khan was. It was a bit more intellectual.
LUKAS KENDALL (editor, Film Score Monthly)
The musical miracle of the movies is that twice Nicholas Meyer had no money for a name composer and picked an entry-level twentysomething—James Horner (Star Trek II) and Cliff Eidelman (Star Trek VI)—and both worked out brilliantly. As great as Goldsmith’s first Star Trek score is, personally I like Star Trek II even better, with Horner’s nautical sweep and heartfelt take on Spock. That’s as good as film scoring gets. At the scoring sessions, Meyer, an avid classical music buff, recognized Horner pilfering from Prokofiev’s “Battle on the Ice” from Alexander Nevsky in “Battle in the Mutara Nebula.” He pulled him aside and asked, “What is this?” Horner sheepishly admitted, “I’m young, I haven’t outgrown my influences.”
NICHOLAS MEYER
I would work with Cliff Eidelman again in a heartbeat—he supplied that rather extraordinary score. It was a blessing in disguise. Art thrives on restrictions. It’s when you can’t simply throw money at something you can get very clever and very creative. The whole idea is that any art should leave something to the imagination. That’s where the viewer comes in; those horses tug that plow when they meet your eye. Oscar Wilde said that all art is useless, unless you impute significance to it. So I think that being unable to simply write a check to Jerry Goldsmith and have him do the heavy lifting made us do more heavy lifting. Or finding James Horner and stuff like that was good stuff. And ultimately enriched the series. It was another vintage to add to the brew.
LUKAS KENDALL
Eidelman’s score for Star Trek VI is interesting for making the “villain” music the main theme and the heroic theme secondary; usually it’s the opposite. Meyer wanted that score to be an adaptation of Holst’s The Planets, but the rights were too expensive. Today, they’d be free—it’s public domain.
CLIFF EIDELMAN (composer, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
My Klingon theme is very different. I gave the Klingons more of an ominous theme and made it the main title. It’s violently different from Holst, but the pulse is there to create a menacing idea. It gave me a theme for the opening.
When Kirk takes control one last time and as he looks out into the stars, he has that spark again.… one last time. And there’s an unresolved note, because it’s very important that he doesn’t trust the Klingons. He doesn’t want to go on this trip even though the spark is there that overtook him.
The film culminates with the final log of the Starship Enterprise-A. But in the version on screen, it’s the cast, not the characters, signing off, which proved a disappointment to some.
CLIFF EIDELMAN
They reversed the order of the names so Shatner’s is last, like an opera. It’s a minute of signing off, which is real emotional.
DENNY MARTIN FLINN
My original script read that the signatures were James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock, etc. What we were doing was offering them a chance to sign the final log. I thought that would be rather touching, especially since it was the last film [with the original cast]. But it got changed to the actors instead of the characters and I personally disliked it very, very much. One of the actors who is executive produer who shall go unnamed, liked it. I suppose he’d rather see his own name than his character’s name up on the screen. I thought no one gives a fuck about Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner and those people in any substantive Star Trek sense. Those people are Mr. Spock and Kirk and Dr. McCoy. I didn’t see any point to the actors signing their name.
RALPH WINTER
There was a sense that this was it, that we were not going to make any more, so there was that bittersweet thing. Harve wasn’t a part of that. It’s the last movie for the original cast. We were clawing at the end of that genre of film about space battles with these great galleons in space, the Horatio Hornblowers, fighting. But it seemed clear to me that we weren’t going to be able to compete with the fast moving TIE fighters of Star Wars and the need for bigger action. The action in Star Trek in television was mostly contrived. We would need to seriously reinvent it. That’s why I wanted to go back and do the 1950s Republic serial view of the future with The Academy Years, because I felt that had more marketability than to just keep going in the same direction.
WILLIAM SHATNER
In STVI we took the legacy that Gene and Harve left us, and very successfully continued making a film that Nick, who has been a leading part of the continuation of Trek, had written and directed. And there are also the rest of us who have had our input, because if we didn’t know something by now about Star Trek, we ought to be put away.
LEONARD NIMOY
I remember a story I heard about Gregory Peck and his early days. He met John Wayne for the first time. He told Wayne, who was an established star, that he had just finished making a movie. Wayne said, “Is it a good one?” And Peck said, “Yeah.” Wayne said, “That’s good. It takes two good ones out of five to keep the bicycle turning.” I thought that was a very apt remark to make. You make two good films out of every five and you will spin. If you make less than that, chances are you get to the point of diminishing returns. You start to lose your opportunities. The offers don’t come so readily. My sense of the Star Trek movies we made was that we did at least two out of every five good ones. We kept that thing spinning.
To Be Continued …
COMING THIS FALL
THE FIFTY-YEAR MISSION:
THE NEXT 25 YEARS
From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams