A brief guide to star tr.., p.29
A Brief Guide to Star Trek, page 29
Jendresen’s script had strong support from CBS Paramount studio president Donald DeLine, but fell out of favour with the studio brass when he exited the project to be replaced by Gail Berman (no relation to Rick). Jendresen blamed a ‘classic case of Hollywood regime change’ for the death of his ‘big and epic’ Star Trek movie: ‘A project is greenlighted [sic] by one regime, and by the time it is delivered there’s a coup d’etat.’ Even before the screenplay was dropped, Rick Berman had confirmed studio reservations that the new Star Trek outing featured no established Star Trek characters.
Even though Star Trek: The Beginning proved to be a false start, the name of Chase recurred as the lead character in another unseen Star Trek project. Believing that the cost of any new live-action TV series or movie was holding back the development of a new Star Trek outing, a trio of professional fans, David Rossi, Doug Mirabello and comic book artist José Muñoz, proposed a new animated Star Trek series. CBS Paramount declared some interest in the project and allowed the trio to develop concept artwork and write scripts for five ‘mini-episodes’. The idea, under the title Star Trek: Final Frontier, pushed the Star Trek timeline further forward into the future, post-Star Trek Nemesis. A new Enterprise was to be captained by Alexander Chase, embarking on a new mission to ‘seek out new life and new civilisations’ in an unknown region of space. An entire crew complement, complete with artwork representations, was developed for the proposed series. The idea was shelved, however, when studio head Gail Berman declared her preference for a radical new Star Trek movie – and this one would genuinely go back to the beginning . . .
Chapter 13
Future Imperfect: Star Trek (2009)
‘Gene [Roddenberry was] asked, “What’s going to become of Star Trek in the future?” He said that he hoped that some day some bright young thing would come along and do it again, bigger and better than he had ever done it. And he wished them well.’ Richard Arnold, Gene Roddenberry’s assistant
Among the three biggest science fiction entertainment franchises of the twentieth century, Star Trek had the shortest time out of production, cumulatively. The four-year wait between the end of Enterprise and the arrival of J. J. Abrams’ 2009 movie was surprisingly short compared to those endured by fans of Doctor Who and Star Wars.
The earliest, Doctor Who, began in 1963 in the UK and ran uninterrupted until 1989. A one-off TV movie followed in 1996 before a full ongoing TV series started in 2005. The gap between the original series and its continuation was sixteen years.
Star Wars began with a trilogy of movies between 1977 and 1983. A series of bestselling novels by Timothy Zahn in the early 1990s relaunched then-dormant Star Wars fandom and led to the release of CGI-upgraded special editions of the original trilogy in 1997, with a brand new prequel trilogy of movies released between 1999 and 2005. Those were followed in 2008 by a hugely successful weekly CGI-animated TV series, The Clone Wars.
Star Trek had a mere ten-year break (with the exception of the short-lived The Animated Series) between the last episode of The Original Series and the arrival of The Motion Picture in 1979. From then until 2005 Star Trek was in continuous production, either as movies or TV series.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, prequels to existing film and television entertainment properties were in vogue, especially in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. The first use of the term ‘prequel’ in movies is connected to the sections of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film The Godfather Part II, which were set before the events of the previous film. The 1979 movie Butch and Sundance: The Early Days was a prequel, but it was the work of filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg that was to popularise the concept and cause Hollywood to indulge wholesale in the prequel process.
Lucas and Spielberg used the term ‘prequel’ to chronologically position the second Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) before the first movie in the series, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). It was with the Star Wars prequel trilogy, however, that the concept really entered the mainstream of blockbuster filmmaking. The urge to go back and explore the origins of characters or events already seen was the narrative driving force behind many sequels (such as Red Dragon (2002) and Hannibal Rising (2007), both prequels to 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs), while several sequel films since the year 2000 numerically tagged as ‘2’ were looks back at events before those of the first movie (Vacancy 2, The Scorpion King 2, Internal Affairs II . . .). Following Star Trek: Enterprise, Caprica (setting up the rebooted Battlestar Galactica) and Spartacus: Gods of the Arena were prequel TV series. Origin stories or major franchise reboots would also provide fertile ground for sequels and re -imagining, especially of comic book characters, as in Batman Begins (2005).
For his part, Gene Roddenberry had first mentioned the notion of making a film that took place before his Star Trek TV series as early as 1968, at the World Science Fiction Convention. Star Trek movie producer Harve Bennett had repeatedly promoted the idea of an origin story for Kirk, Spock and McCoy as part of his Starfleet Academy concept. Although a Star Trek prequel idea (with all-new characters) had come to fruition in the Enterprise TV series, it had been deemed a failure. The idea of setting up the universe fans were familiar with was still seen as fertile ground, though, with Rick Berman pursuing development of Erik Jendresen’s Star Trek: The Beginning script.
Most of these concepts had steered clear of the most obvious Star Trek prequel concept of them all, one most likely to have popular appeal to mainstream audiences: the reinvention of Kirk, Spock and McCoy (as boldly suggested in J. Michael Straczynski and Bryce Zabel’s Star Trek ‘reboot’ concept for television from 2004). It had taken a long time for the executives at Paramount to accept that the time was right for this approach, but with the failure of Enterprise they almost immediately embarked upon the search for a new creative team who could reinvent classic Star Trek from first principles as a block-buster movie.
By 2006, due to corporate takeovers and restructuring, the rights to make new Star Trek were held by two different com -panies. Essentially, Paramount Pictures (owned by Viacom) retained the movie option, while CBS now controlled the Star Trek television franchise. Paramount chief Gail Berman decided that the right place for a dramatic reinvention of Star Trek – despite the failure of Nemesis – was on the big screen, not on television, following the declining fortunes of Voyager and Enterprise. Part of her approach was to remove the control of big screen Star Trek from those who’d been making the television version. Her aim was to turn over Paramount’s valuable property to experienced blockbuster moviemakers, rather than exhausted television producers. Berman negotiated with CBS to give Paramount a clear eighteen-month run at developing a new Star Trek feature film before the television company could even think about developing a new television series (as part of the deal, CBS retained all Star Trek merchandising rights). The question was, what kind of film would the new Star Trek be and who could Berman task with creatively driving the project?
Writer, director and producer J. J. Abrams already had strong connections with Paramount, having directed 2006’s Mission: Impossible III to great critical acclaim and box office success. Abrams had a track record creating cult TV series that also had broad mainstream appeal in spy-thriller Alias (2001–6) and the mystical island castaway drama Lost (2004–10). Abrams had previously written screenplays for the movies Regarding Henry (1991), Forever Young (1992) and Armageddon (1998), as well as an unproduced Superman script in 2002. He’d followed Mission: Impossible III with the weird science TV series Fringe (from 2008). To Gail Berman, Abrams was just the right kind of maverick left-field talent needed to bring new life to the moribund Star Trek franchise.
Abrams himself was a casual Star Trek fan. He was born in June 1966, just two weeks after the final draft script for Harlan Ellison’s acclaimed episode ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ had been completed. For Abrams, Star Trek was Kirk, Spock and McCoy – the core characters he’d grown up watching during syndication reruns throughout the 1970s and into the first series of Star Trek movies in the early 1980s. He regarded everything else as ‘separate space adventures with the name Star Trek’.
Abrams felt that the later incarnations of Star Trek had turned inwards. ‘At a certain point it seems like Star Trek stopped trying to reach a bigger audience’, he said to SFX magazine. ‘They decided, “let’s just cater to our fans”. This movie is not meant to be a continuum of that way of thinking, this is very much “let’s start over”.’ The director had also admitted to a strong preference for the action-adventure format of the first Star Wars trilogy to Star Trek’s more cerebral content. Abrams signed on as producer of the Paramount Star Trek reboot, turning over the development of the script to his team of Lost and Fringe writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who’d also scripted Mission: Impossible III and Transformers (2007)).
According to Abrams, his interest in Star Trek came from the fact that it was ‘about exploration of the stars, not about conquering worlds, but discovering them, exploring them and understanding them’. He told Empire magazine, ‘[The Original Series’] problem was they had a space adventure, but never had the resources to actually show the adventure. Doing this movie with the resources we had and the technology that exists now gave us the chance to make something fast-paced, full of action and visually stunning, but also tap into what made Star Trek great.’
All concerned felt that the best approach would be a ‘clean’ reboot of Star Trek, returning to first principles as outlined by Gene Roddenberry in his creation of The Original Series. However, as fans of the original show, Orci and Kurtzman knew how important actors like Shatner, Nimoy and the late DeForest Kelley were to Star Trek fans. With that in mind, they set out to develop a reboot of Star Trek that would allow for the re -invention of the classic Kirk–Spock–McCoy trio for a new twenty-first-century audience, but would also in some way manage to incorporate all that had gone before. They were not prepared to simply dump over forty years of storytelling.
For Abrams, the characters were key to his reinvention of the franchise. ‘[There’s a] feeling of broken and interesting characters in Kirk and Spock’, he told SFX magazine. ‘[We show them] coming together in a way that is unexpected and ultimately throw them into a massive adventure. The approach was to take inspiration from what was in The Original Series and then filter it through what is relevant and vital for now. The goal was not to make it cool or different, but to make it real, with characters that feel true and emotional, like there’s a piece missing from them and they’re up against something significant and the stakes are high. It was fun to figure out a way to make the relationship between Spock, Kirk and Bones [McCoy] come to life.’
The writers hoped that the possible involvement of someone from The Original Series would put the seal of approval on the new Star Trek for many sceptical fans. From the original key trio, due to the death of Kelley in 1999, Orci and Kurtzman were left with Shatner and Nimoy, and they felt that Spock was the more iconic and useful of the two remaining characters. The presence of the character they dubbed ‘old Spock’ or Spock Prime would also tie into Nimoy’s last appearance on The Next Generation in the two-part ‘Unification’ story from 1991, although Nimoy himself professed not to recognise the connection. That storyline had also featured the Romulans, now chosen by Abrams as the villains for the new film in preference to the Klingons, whom he considered overused as well as problematic due to their non-villainous status from The Next Generation onwards. At that point Abrams was unaware that the Romulans had featured as the major villains in the most recent Star Trek movie, Nemesis, and that the film had been a huge box office failure. He claimed he’d been ‘disconnected’ from the franchise when that movie was released.
According to Abrams, the casting of Leonard Nimoy was ‘critical if we’re going to look at reintroducing these characters . . . [this film must] both please the fans and those who have never seen Star Trek. Having Leonard in the film shows that this film exists in a continuum of Trek history, as opposed to an absolute page one reinvention.’ Nimoy, who had retired from acting in 2000 to pursue photography, claimed he was happy to play Spock once more as he admired the work of Abrams and the film offered an ‘essential and interesting Spock role’. Re-energised by his work on the movie, and continuing to work with Abrams and his team, Nimoy would go on to guest star regularly in the pivotal role of William Bell on Abrams’ Fringe.
Although it had been much used throughout Star Trek, the writers of the new movie decided that time travel would be the best device they could use to begin a new story built around Kirk, Spock and McCoy and yet involve a character from The Original Series. Time travel would bring Spock Prime into contact with younger versions of Kirk, Spock and McCoy, allowing the old and new storylines to connect, and could then be forgotten in any subsequent films which would follow the adventures of the new characters without any overt connections to the past. ‘One of the reasons we wanted to break with the original Star Trek timeline was it felt restrictive’, Abrams told MTV.com. ‘The idea, now that we are in an independent time-line, allows us to use any of the ingredients from the past – or come up with brand new ones – to make potential stories.’
Orci and Kurtzman drew inspiration from many elements of past Star Trek in working out their new approach, including spin-off novels not always thought of as canon by fans. Knowing that the continuity of The Original Series had itself been inconsistent, the writers set out to cherry-pick the elements they felt they needed to launch a new version of classic Star Trek without necessarily being slavish to established details. For example, it had long been established that the Enterprise had been constructed in Earth orbit, but the movie would instead depict the ship being built on the ground in Kirk’s home state of Iowa.
In order to appeal to a mainstream audience perhaps un -familiar with the detailed universe created over many decades, Abrams and his creative team deliberately set out to simplify Star Trek, stripping out the technobabble of The Next Generation and replacing it with the action-adventure appeal of the first Star Wars movie. Humour and sex appeal were also key to Abrams’ recreation of Star Trek, elements that had been missing from some of the spin-off shows. The central characters – Kirk, Spock and McCoy – were reduced to archetypes, almost fulfilling the popular clichés that resided in the mainstream imagination. The characters of these new versions of the core Star Trek trio were easily delineated through their chief characteristics, summed up by their well-known catchphrases used in the 1987 novelty song ‘Star Trekkin’’ by The Firm.
The question was, who could play these iconic characters? Which modern film stars or character actors could fill the well-worn roles of Kirk, Spock and McCoy and stand the comparisons with Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley – especially as whomever was playing young Spock would be acting directly opposite the original. While it wasn’t quite the big show-business event predicted by Straczynski and Zabel’s reboot proposal, there was much media interest in the casting process for the all-new Star Trek.
‘It was hard in ways I didn’t anticipate’, said Abrams to SFX magazine of casting the movie. ‘I thought [finding the right actor for] Spock would be impossible, yet he was the first person we cast.’ Although the film would feature three versions of Spock (including Jacob Kogan as child Spock and Nimoy as Spock Prime), the focus was heavily on actor Zachary Quinto, who secured the task of reinventing the half-human, half-Vulcan Enterprise science officer. Quinto, who’d come to prominence as Sylar in the superpowers TV series Heroes, came to Abrams’ attention thanks to an interview in which he expressed interest in the role. Many commentators had pointed out Quinto’s curious physical resemblance to the young Nimoy. Quinto wore a blue shirt (reflecting Spock’s usual outfit on The Original Series) and flattened his hair to more resemble Spock for his audition. He was aided in taking on the persona of Spock by make-up and hair tricks that emphasised his Nimoy-lookalike characteristics, although he did claim, ‘There’s no question I was born to play the Spock role’. The only other actor who’d been publicly connected with the part was Oscar winner Adrien Brody.
The most prominent candidate to inherit William Shatner’s role as the captain of the Enterprise was Matt Damon, who met with J. J. Abrams to discuss the role. Deciding that Damon was too old for the role of Kirk as written, the pair discussed having him play Kirk’s father in the opening section of the film, a part that Damon turned down and went to Thor’s Chris Hemsworth instead. The new Captain Kirk was to be played by Chris Pine, then best known for romantic comedies like The Princess Diaries 2 (2004) and Just My Luck (2006). Abrams had not seen Pine’s initial audition for the part (a performance Pine had described as being awful), so re-auditioned him alongside Quinto (by now already cast as Spock). Quinto and Pine already knew each other as they frequented the same Los Angeles gym. Having won the role, Pine sought (and obtained) the approval of Shatner, and then immersed himself in studying Star Trek history. He finally gave up researching and watching old episodes, as he feared his performance would become an imitation of Shatner’s when what he wanted to do was explore Kirk’s ‘humour, arrogance and decisiveness’, while bringing a touch of Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford to the character.
One of the last parts to be filled for the movie was the final piece in the puzzle of the central Star Trek trio, Dr McCoy. Among those considered for the role were Oscar-nominated Gary Sinise, who, like Damon, was eventually deemed too old for the role. Abrams chose The Lord of the Rings star Karl Urban, who’d previously worked with writers Orci and Kurtzman on the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess. Urban had been a fan of Star Trek all his life, setting out not to provide a ‘carbon copy’ of DeForest Kelley’s McCoy but instead to honour Kelley while ‘bringing something new to the table’. For Abrams, Urban was a man of previously hidden talents: ‘Karl Urban surprised the hell out of me by coming in and being crazy good and funny in a way I never thought or knew he could do and blew my mind. He is far more versatile than anyone knows.’
