A brief guide to star tr.., p.14
A Brief Guide to Star Trek, page 14
Bennett had to first persuade Nimoy to return once again if they were to seriously pursue the option of resurrecting Spock. After each Star Trek movie Nimoy had considered himself to be finished with the character. The actor always had a confused relationship with his Vulcan creation (to the extent that he issued two autobiographies at different times, one called I Am Not Spock and another titled I Am Spock). If Nimoy had not fully grasped the implications of the brief ‘Remember’ scene, he did understand the meaning of the surprise appearance of Spock’s burial tube on the Genesis planet (a scene added by Paramount and not shot by Meyer) in the closing moments of The Wrath of Khan: he would be wanted once again to play Spock.
The two key Star Trek stars who returned for The Wrath of Khan managed to gain pay-or-play deals (meaning they would be paid whether the projects proceeded or not) for two additional non-Star Trek acting projects from Paramount as part of their negotiations. Nimoy knew what his deal-breaker would be this time around: he wanted to direct. Nimoy recalled that he (and Shatner) had campaigned for the opportunity to direct episodes of the original Star Trek TV series back in the 1960s – but had been consistently turned down, although Shatner was scheduled to helm a late season three instalment that was never made due to the show’s cancellation. Now Nimoy saw his opportunity: in return for reviving Spock in Star Trek III, he wanted to direct the movie.
Expecting to meet studio resistance, Nimoy was pleasantly surprised to find much support for the idea among the Paramount executives, including Harve Bennett (Nimoy had previously directed a TV movie that Bennett had produced, The Powers of Matthew Starr). Perhaps more surprising was the support of studio boss Michael Eisner. According to Nimoy’s I Am Spock memoir, Eisner immediately latched on to the promotional aspects of the idea: ‘Leonard Nimoy directs the return of Spock? I love it!’ Nimoy noted of Eisner’s reaction, ‘He was so enthusiastic, I went totally slack-jawed.’ Eisner even asked Nimoy if he’d like to write the script, but the actor was content to leave that task to Harve Bennett.
Picking up the story threads planted in The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock reveals that the ‘Remember’ scene saw Spock implant his ‘katra’ (his essential essence) within McCoy’s psyche during the mind-meld as a back-up, in case he perished attempting to save the Enterprise. Realising this, Kirk and his crew steal the Enterprise in order to retrieve Spock’s body from the Genesis planet and reunite it with his katra. In the process they come into conflict with hostile Klingons, led by Kruge (Christopher Lloyd), who are after the secrets of the Genesis device. Kirk’s newly found son David Marcus is killed, and the Enterprise is destroyed.
As far back as The Motion Picture, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had enjoyed a ‘favoured nations’ clause in their contracts, meaning each would be offered the same benefits as his co-star. Shatner therefore expected to also direct a film in the Star Trek movie series, regarding that as a benefit to be shared. Starting work on The Search for Spock, Shatner admitted to finding being directed by his co-star difficult and awkward until he got used to the situation. The absence of Spock from much of the movie allowed Nimoy to focus on his work behind the camera. The third film in the series finally offered a prominent role to DeForest Kelley as Dr McCoy, the incongruous and unexpected carrier of Spock’s katra. The rest of the regular Star Trek cast all had their moments, but none beyond the three central bridge characters really had a chance to make any significant impact.
Once again Bennett’s TV production habits kicked in and he decided to open the film with a series of clips from the previous movie to remind audiences of the key story threads, the same way a TV series might open a new episode that built on last week’s developments. The difference with the Star Trek movies was that audiences would go years between instalments. In writing the screenplay, Bennett had the film’s ending in mind from the beginning. It was obvious that the crew would find and resurrect Spock, so Bennett came up with the ‘Your name is . . . Jim’ line to signal that Spock’s consciousness had survived. As a result the movie is perhaps rather predictable with all the dramatic high points fairly well telegraphed, even though Bennett took the opportunity to feature the Klingons as big screen adversaries.
Following the ageing and death themes of The Wrath of Khan, Bennett introduced a more optimistic friendship and commitment theme to The Search for Spock. The film would be about the central trio of Star Trek characters’ commitment to each other. Kirk is prepared to break the rules to save Spock, while McCoy – despite his comic antagonism to his Vulcan friend – takes on the burden of carrying his katra. For his part, Spock had enough faith in Kirk and McCoy to trust them to bring him back from beyond death. While Roddenberry objected to story developments such as the destruction of the Enterprise, he remained silent about the apparent introduction of Christian sacrifice and resurrection themes to his previously usually anti-religious series.
Produced on a slimline $16-million budget, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock opened on 1 June 1984, competing with other summer blockbusters that year including Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins and Ghostbusters. Breaking the record-making weekend gross of the second Indiana Jones movie released the week before, The Search for Spock recovered its production budget in its opening weekend. The movie went on to gross $76.5 million in the US, reaching a total of $87 million worldwide.
The third Star Trek movie was not as widely acclaimed as The Wrath of Khan, with critics praising its sense of grand space opera, while commenting on the movie’s lower production values. Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, called the movie ‘Good, but not great’, while USA Today praised the film as the best of the three and the closest in spirit to the original TV series. Nimoy’s direction was approved of by the majority of critics, with Newsweek acclaiming The Search for Spock as the best-paced of the three movies to date. However, the shock dramatic developments of David’s death and the destruction of the Enterprise were criticised by some as obvious and manipulative moves. Fans broadly welcomed the further adventures of the Enterprise crew, but for most the third film did not trump The Wrath of Khan as the best Star Trek movie.
Many of the ideas developed for the first Star Trek movie had involved time travel. One of the best episodes of the TV series – Harlan Ellison’s ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ – had seen Kirk, Spock and McCoy travel to Earth’s past for an adventure. For the fourth Star Trek movie, which would conclude the trilogy begun with The Wrath of Khan, Bennett resolved to send the Enterprise crew back to contemporary Earth. This gambit would not only give the often otherworldly Star Trek series a direct connection to its contemporary audience, but it would also help with the budget if scenes could be shot in an environment requiring no ‘futuristic’ set dressing.
Working on the story together, Leonard Nimoy (who would again direct following the success of The Search for Spock) and Harve Bennett set out to develop a film with an environmental theme: not only were environmental problems gaining mainstream attention in the mid-1980s, but the idea seemed to fit with one of Star Trek’s original successful ploys. The new film would tackle a contemporary subject in the futuristic dressing of Star Trek, just as many episodes of the original series had taken on 1960s social and political concerns wrapped up in a space opera setting.
Another thing both storytellers agreed on was that Star Trek IV needed a more light-hearted tone than the high drama of the previous two movies. While the stakes would be high and there’d be plenty of incident, it was felt that the Star Trek characters had been put through the emotional wringer in The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, so the fourth movie would go lighter on them. All the pair had to do was settle on what the story would actually entail – they only knew that some element from their past (the audiences’ present) would need to be retrieved by the Enterprise crew to save their future.
Before much further progress was made on these ideas, however, the project was dealt a body blow. William Shatner was no longer interested in playing Kirk. ‘I was being “difficult”, at least according to the studio’, wrote Shatner in Star Trek Movie Memories. ‘I steadfastly refused to sign on the dotted line for our new film, holding out partially in an effort to make up for two decades’ worth of nonexistent residuals [payments for repeat screenings of TV episodes] and merchandising revenues. [I cited] the fact that our previous three films had earned the studio well over a quarter of a billion dollars.’
Initially it looked like Shatner’s gambit would not pay off. A change at the top of Paramount meant that new executives were in charge of the Star Trek movies. Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had both left to run Disney, and Barry Diller had gone to Fox, finally achieving the dream of Paramount’s fourth TV network elsewhere. The new head of the studio was distribution man Frank Mancuso, with Ned Tanen supervising motion pictures and Dawn Steele appointed head of production. While all were committed to continuing the Star Trek motion picture franchise, none of them was wedded to the successes and failures of the past movies, so they were open to new directions.
Faced with a missing-in-action Admiral Kirk, Nimoy and Bennett had to come up with an alternative plan. Bennett’s first suggestion was one that would resurface many times over the next two decades in connection with a variety of Star Trek projects. He suggested a prequel movie chronicling Kirk and company’s time at Starfleet Academy, their pre-Enterprise adventures. This would require the characters to be younger, thus entailing recasting the core Star Trek crew, solving the Shatner problem. Nimoy could even appear in the movie as the older Spock, either as a narrator in a narrative wraparound or through some time travel device, allowing him to actually take part in the action. The new executive team at Paramount was apparently open to taking the Star Trek movies in this direction.
They also had other, more outré ideas for Star Trek. One of the biggest stars Paramount had in the mid-1980s was Eddie Murphy. Nimoy had actually approached Daniel Petrie Jr, writer of Murphy’s star-making movie Beverly Hills Cop (1984) to work on Star Trek when the concept of featuring Murphy in the Star Trek movie was tabled. Outgoing Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg described this as ‘either the best or worst idea in the world’. Nimoy and Bennett were tempted by the notion as a way of attracting non-Star Trek fans to the fourth movie, although they were also wary of the fact that Murphy’s comedic presence might unbalance the film and even lead to Star Trek being ridiculed. Murphy himself claimed to be a huge Star Trek fan and was very positive about the idea of being included in the film. Writers Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes worked on a Murphy-centric screenplay that would see him play a contemporary college professor who believes in aliens and meets the Enterprise crew in a series of comedic encounters. In the end, Murphy opted to make The Golden Child (1986), having decided he didn’t like the Star Trek role offered, claiming he’d rather play an alien or a Starfleet officer. It also seems that business sense ruled the day at executive level at Paramount – there was little point combining two multi-million-dollar franchises (Star Trek and Eddie Murphy) into one when separately they’d bring in twice as much revenue.
The Eddie Murphy detour cost seven months of development time in 1985, and in the end Nimoy and Bennett returned to their ‘time travel to the past to save the future’ idea, this time with Admiral Kirk part of the action as Shatner was back on board, having negotiated a larger financial compensation package (which Nimoy also benefited from, thanks to their shared ‘favoured nations’ clause). Writer–director Nicholas Meyer was brought back into the Star Trek fold to help script the fourth movie after opting out of number three as he felt ‘I didn’t want to resurrect Spock’ as such a move ‘attacked the integrity and the authenticity of the feelings provoked by his death. However, by the time we got to IV, Spock was alive, it was a de facto thing, and on top of that my friends were in trouble.’
The first order of business was to decide exactly what the ‘MacGuffin’ – Alfred Hitchcock’s term for an otherwise insignificant plot motivator – from the past needed to save the future would be. Several things were considered, including violin-makers and oil drillers, or the cure to a disease that could only be found in the rainforests (extinct in the future). It was Nimoy’s reading of a book about the extinction of animal species that set them on the path to whales. Having humpback whales extinct in the future, but needing to retrieve some from the past, seemed like an idea that would give the film a wide appeal beyond just Star Trek fans. The addition of mysterious whale song to the film helped to secure the story: a destructive space probe in the future threatens the Earth while seeking an answering whale song to its signal. Kirk, the newly resurrected Spock, McCoy and the crew use the Klingon Bird-of-Prey ship to slingshot around the sun in an effort to travel to the past in order to bring some living whale samples back to the future. Everyone involved in the project recognised that the opportunity for culture clash moments between the twenty-third-century humans and those from 1986 would allow for a lot of natural comedy without the star casting of Eddie Murphy.
So it proved: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was released on Thanksgiving weekend, 26 November 1986, to huge critical acclaim and astonishing box office receipts. The first five days saw the movie gross $39.6 million in the US, against the production budget of just $21 million. Globally, the film was a huge success, totalling $133 million at the worldwide box office. Originally scheduled for release at Christmas, Paramount head Frank Mancuso had suggested bringing the film forward to Thanksgiving, a switch that gave the film greater life in the holiday period leading up to Christmas.
The fourth Star Trek movie was a huge crossover success with the plight of the whales, the contemporary setting and the accessible character humour all attracting a sizeable non-fan audience to the film. The Washington Post dubbed the picture ‘immensely pleasurable Christmas entertainment’, while the New York Times felt the latest instalment had ‘done a great deal to ensure the series’ longevity’. Again, there was much comment on how the film was true to the critics’ memories of the TV series, while having the characters play up to their reputations in the popular imagination proved a masterstroke in bringing in a wider audience. An easy to engage with contemporary issue in the possible extinction of the whales (and other species) made the film relevant to broad 1980s audiences, without being environmentally preachy. Above all, The Voyage Home was a great slice of entertainment that would be well remembered by all who saw it.
Following The Voyage Home was always going to be difficult. Given that Leonard Nimoy had directed two hugely successful entries in the franchise, it might have been expected that he’d continue with the fifth. However, due to the parity between Nimoy and his Star Trek co-star, it was clearly now Shatner’s turn to be the driving force behind a Star Trek movie. It seems likely this was part of the negotiation that had brought Shatner back on board to star in Star Trek IV – that he’d be the one behind the camera on Star Trek V. Shatner also took the opportunity to develop the storyline for the fifth movie, as Nimoy had done for the fourth. Overseeing the production, as on the previous movies, was Harve Bennett, even though he had attempted to opt out of the series after The Voyage Home.
In developing his storyline, Shatner was inspired by the sight of growing numbers of tele-evangelists prospering in American culture. Shatner was entranced by the fact that people like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and Jimmy Swaggart were not only hoodwinking (in his opinion) millions of Americans into believing their Christian-inspired storytelling, but also getting many of them to part with their hard-earned cash so the tele-evangelists could live high on the hog. Shatner combined the figure of a preacher who hears the word of God with one of Gene Roddenberry’s earliest ideas for a Star Trek film – the Enterprise’s quest for God – to come up with a plot for Star Trek V. The ‘God’ eventually discovered would be an all-powerful alien being that Kirk and company would have to defeat.
This idea, and the resulting script from writer David Loughery (Dreamscape), did not meet the same positive reception from the studio and Star Trek cast members as the previous movie. Under Shatner’s initial direction Loughery had crafted a story that promoted Kirk at the expense of the other main characters: while they fell for the proselytising of the unicorn-riding, Vulcan mystic Zar (later revised to be Sybok, the previously unknown half-brother of Spock), Kirk was the sole hold-out for reason and the only one who could save them all. Specifically causing discontent were the scripted actions of Spock and McCoy, who allow Sybok to take command of the Enterprise because they buy into his mystical vision. In the process they betray Kirk, although he has to rescue them from themselves by the climax. Naturally, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley were not impressed by this take on their characters and (as Shatner had done on Star Trek IV ) they asked for substantial script revisions.
Having previously objected to the death of Spock in The Wrath of Khan and the destruction of the Enterprise in The Search for Spock, this time Roddenberry objected to the entire basis for William Shatner’s Star Trek movie in a series of memos and letters. Writing to Shatner, Roddenberry stated, ‘I simply cannot support a story which has our intelligent and insightful crew mesmerised by a 23rd-century religious charlatan.’ In a memo to Harve Bennett, Roddenberry was even blunter in his assessment of the proposed storyline: ‘It is not Star Trek! [This] will destroy much of the value of the Star Trek property.’ He also sent a summary of his feelings on the matter to his lawyer, Leonard Maizlish, to prepare him for any dealings with Paramount. ‘The errors of property format, science and fact in this movie story are nothing less than shocking’, wrote Roddenberry. In a later memo to Shatner and Bennett, he explained that in his opinion the suggested story ‘demeans and degrades Star Trek with subject matter that it has assiduously avoided in the past . . . Please abandon this story laden with mesmerisation, pop psychology, flim flam betrayal, a lack of power, a lack of humour. Please do something with the ingredient that is the hallmark of Star Trek . . . believability.’ Roddenberry even recruited authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke to his cause, but it was all to no avail. While Roddenberry could clearly see that Shatner’s storyline for Star Trek V was in no way a suitable follow-up to the crowd-pleasing and immensely successful The Voyage Home, no one else at Paramount appeared to agree (or at least appeared willing to take on the might of Shatner’s contractual arrangements and considerable ego). Although the script went through many revisions and was improved in Roddenberry’s eyes, the fundamental basis of the storyline was so flawed he felt the film was beyond salvaging.
