The Keys to the Kingdom (13 page)

Wise had never been especially drawn to
Star Trek,
but his wife and father-in-law were big fans. When Wise brought home the script they read it voraciously—and then recoiled in horror as they realized that the beloved character of Mr. Spock didn't appear in the film. Wise told Eisner and Katzenberg that Spock was a necessary element. At first, says an executive close to these discussions, Eisner didn't see the point: “Michael would say, ‘Who gives a fuck what this guy with the ears does?' He would tell Robert Wise, ‘Just make the movie!' Who could understand why anyone cared about
Star Trek
? We would watch the TV episodes—they were the dumbest thing you ever saw.”

Nonetheless, the studio decided to include Spock, if possible. Spock had gotten several times more fan mail than all the other characters combined when the series was on the air. But there were a few problems with bringing Spock back. Leonard Nimoy, who played the character, despised Gene Roddenberry, who had engaged him and then abruptly dropped him from another television project without explanation. And Nimoy was suing Paramount for using his likeness in all manner of
Star Trek
books, T-shirts, and assorted paraphernalia. He had so little inclination to return in a
Star Trek
movie that when his agent called to discuss the idea, he retorted, “If you ever call me again about
Star Trek,
you're fired!”

At the time Nimoy was in New York, appearing in a theatrical production of
Equus
. One afternoon, Katzenberg called and introduced himself. “I'd like to come to New York. I'd like to see you in your play,” he said. Nimoy was flattered that Katzenberg would fly all the way to Manhattan and sit through his play just to make contact with him. It seemed to Nimoy that “he genuinely wanted to be helpful.”

Two days later, Katzenberg was backstage, pressing Nimoy to join him for a cup of coffee. They talked for a couple of hours at the Backstage Deli and met three more times in the next two days. Katzenberg spent hours listening to Nimoy's grievances about Roddenberry and his fight with the studio. Finally Katzenberg asked whether Nimoy had seen the script for the movie. “No,” he said. “I'd prefer not knowing anything about this particular project.” Katzenberg said it wouldn't be a problem for Nimoy to work for Paramount even with the suit pending. “I just can't do that. I'm sorry,” Nimoy said.

Katzenberg returned to Los Angeles, and within a few days, Paramount contacted Nimoy offering to settle his lawsuit—and asking him to read the script for the
Star Trek
movie. Within a couple of weeks, the court case was resolved; that day, Nimoy received a check from the studio at five
P.M
. and a copy of the script at six
P.M
. By seven
P.M
., the studio called to set up a meeting. Katzenberg had achieved his objective. His career as Paramount's “golden retriever” was well under way.

 

STAR TREK'S
TROUBLES
—and Katzenberg's travails—were hardly over. Nimoy hated Roddenberry's ideas. (He realized, however, that if he dropped out, he'd be answering questions for years to come about being the only holdout in the
Star Trek
movie: “How could I answer those questions? ‘I didn't like the script'? ‘I hated Gene'? ‘I was angry at the studio'? I would be carrying that negative shit around with me for the next five years at least.”) Nimoy resolved to supply the creative conscience that the studio might lack. He figured, not unreasonably, that the studio was probably just trying to grab its share of post–
Star Wars
sci-fi profits.

Meanwhile, William Shatner was dieting and jogging, trying to get back into Captain Kirk's body suit. Roddenberry was making no progress on the script. Finally Eisner stepped in to help Katzenberg bully Roddenberry into collaborating with a writer named Harold Livingston, who had worked on the film earlier but left in disgust at Roddenberry's refusal to yield any creative control. By now, Livingston despised Roddenberry. “Gene,” he once said to him, “you wouldn't know a good story if it was tattooed on the end of your prick.” But for a lot of money, and with the understanding that he alone would control the script, he agreed to return.

Livingston sent a chunk of revised material to Eisner and Katzenberg. It wasn't long before Livingston got a call from an incensed Eisner, who demanded, “What is this shit?” They quickly figured out that Roddenberry had intercepted Livingston's work and substituted his own. Similar battles continued throughout the production; even as shooting progressed, Roddenberry and Livingston would send competing revisions to the befuddled cast.

Wise began rebuilding sets that had been constructed for the television show. Paramount footed the bill for the face-lift, all the while paying the cast to wait for a script. The project fell ten weeks behind schedule without a single inch of footage shot. Eisner and Katzenberg ordered Wise to start
the cameras rolling. “The script still wasn't in any kind of shape, so we had to start rewriting and shooting all at the same time,” Wise remembered later. “It was a hell of a way to make a picture.”

The only thing that seemed clear was that the
Enterprise
crew was being joined by a bald beauty, model Persis Khambatta, who provided a love interest for a young commander who had assumed control of the
Enterprise
while Kirk was absent. But without a finished script, shooting quickly bogged down. At one point Livingston quit—for the third time—and Nimoy and Shatner put their heads together to rewrite the material. Nimoy found the third act particularly problematic. “Kirk and Spock were just basically standing around on that fucking bridge [of the
Enterprise
]…for pages and pages,” Nimoy said later. The director was so discouraged that he suggested shutting down production altogether.

Instead, Nimoy and Shatner came up with a rewrite that Wise immediately embraced. The problem was getting Roddenberry to go along. When they all met, it was obvious that Roddenberry was displeased. But unbeknownst to Nimoy, Katzenberg had already decided how to deal with Roddenberry. After Livingston had quit for the third time, Katzenberg's office had called and invited him to a seven
P.M
. meeting at his office. When he arrived, Katzenberg's secretary thrust a large glass of Beefeater gin (Livingston's drink of choice) into his hand and seated him in Katzenberg's office. As she left, he heard the lock turn. “This is really strange,” Livingston reflected. “I'm locked into the fucking office.”

There he sat for the next thirty minutes. By the time Katzenberg turned up, Livingston was pretty well crocked. “You are not getting out of this office until you agree to come back and work on this picture,” Katzenberg told him. Addled though he was, Livingston could see that Katzenberg was desperate. “I used the opportunity to soak him for a big raise,” he remembered. Katzenberg then broke the news to Roddenberry that Livingston was in charge.

Nimoy and Shatner were left with uneasy feelings. “We'd won our battle, but in the process, we watched Gene Roddenberry get steamrollered,” Shatner recalled later. “There was no victory celebration.”

 

ALL THIS TIME
, Katzenberg was under tremendous pressure from the studio to get the picture on track. At one point, according to sources who worked on the lot then, he either quit or was fired and spent a couple of
days at home before production chief Don Simpson got Eisner to summon him back. But no matter what Katzenberg did, the project resisted order. Three months into shooting, the ending still hadn't been written. The cast was so punchy with exhaustion that the production actually lost an entire day because everyone was seized with giggling fits. Lieutenant Uhura's first line that day, “Captain, the alien has expelled a large object and it's headed in our direction,” struck the cast as hilarious. But Nimoy fretted that none of the humor was on the screen.

Principal photography was completed after Thanksgiving 1978, but in the ensuing months, Wise got bogged down with special effects. The release date was December 1979 and he had to scramble to make the date. This was the studio's first experience with a big special-effects movie. “We didn't know what those things were,” Diller says. “Bob Wise was a lovely man, but he didn't know, either.” The studio poured $11 million into effects, Diller remembers, “and none of it worked.” By now, the studio had spent a stunning $45 million on the picture (the average cost of a movie at the time was less than $10 million). It looked like the film was going to be a disaster.

But Paramount had a cushion. The studio had gotten theater owners to guarantee payments of at least $35 million, as long as the picture was in movie houses by December 7. As Wise rushed to finish, the bad buzz grew louder. “Once the theater owners realized that we pulled this scam off on them, none of them liked it,” Diller says. “They were all trying to get out of it and we wouldn't let them out of it and we knew, of course, that if we didn't open this picture on December 7, the guarantees would evaporate…. The movie was horrible and we were scared to death.”

“We delivered it about one minute before it was due in the theaters,” Katzenberg says. To get the prints distributed, the studio had to go to charter planes. On opening day, Diller was so relieved that he rewarded Katzenberg with a bonus—several thousand dollars in pennies. (Diller and Eisner remember that the bonus was sent to Katzenberg's house, but Katzenberg recalls being called into Diller's office.) Diller was expressing his relief that the studio was getting out of a terrible mess—but Eisner, who was still unhappy about the whole ordeal, insisted on adding an element of sarcasm.

A couple of days earlier, Shatner had attended the gala premiere in Washington. He found the movie “deathly slow” and concluded that the
Star Trek
experience had finally ended. “That'll never happen again,” he reflected.

To everyone's surprise, audiences jammed the theaters, making the pic
ture into an $82 million hit. Katzenberg, whom Diller still describes as “the little bird dog on the movie,” had survived and even triumphed. “Jeffrey spent two and a half years in
Star Trek
hell,” remembers Tom Pollock, then a high-powered attorney who represented the young executive. “His career was hanging in the balance. I remember the pain he was in.” But
Star Trek,
with its many sequels and television spinoffs, became Paramount's biggest franchise, a property worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

 

IF AN IMPOSSIBLE
dream can be realized, Charlie Bluhdorn had done it with the team that he had assembled at Paramount. Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Don Simpson, and Jeffrey Katzenberg had been joined by Dawn Steel, a marketing executive who early in her career had come up with a successful gimmick—marketing designer toilet paper—and then had gotten into trouble with Gucci for copyright infringement. Eventually, she landed a job in Paramount's marketing department. Her job was to get toy makers and other merchandisers interested in
Star Trek
products. Faced with the problem of selling manufacturers on a picture that was hopelessly behind schedule and still didn't exist, Steel invited the T-shirt and lunch-box makers to the largest theater on the lot, where she screened a multimedia presentation and managed to “beam” the crew of the
Enterprise,
one by one, onto the stage. Unbeknownst to Steel, Eisner and Simpson had slipped in to watch.

The show was a smash, and the next day in the studio coffee shop, Eisner called across the room, “Dawn, I want to see you in my office tomorrow at eleven.” Steel was nearly as petrified of Eisner as she was of Diller and feared that she had done something wrong. When she arrived, Eisner asked, “Okay, what do you want to do with your life?”

“Well, Michael, television could be very—”

“Forget what you want to do,” he interrupted. “This is what I've done. Get
Star Trek
finished up. Then you're vice-president of production in features. Congratulations.”

“I don't know anything about movies.”

“Neither does anybody else. Good-bye, good luck, and break a leg!”

Don Simpson immediately called to claim credit for her promotion. While Steel went into cold sweats about her upcoming responsibilities, she continued to press the
Star Trek
marketing. She landed two huge accounts, getting McDonald's and Coca-Cola interested in the picture. Since Shatner
and Nimoy wouldn't allow their images to be used, she came up with the idea of putting the Klingons from the movie in commercials eating Big Macs and drinking Cokes. She flew to New York to show the commercials to Diller, and when he saw the Klingons gobbling two of America's biggest brand names, he laughed. Steel was thrilled. She had never seen him laugh before.

 

AFTER ALL THEY'D
been through, Eisner and Katzenberg balked when Bluhdorn urged them to take a run at a
Star Trek
sequel. Harve Bennett—a television producer who knew Diller and Eisner from his work on
The Six Million Dollar Man, Mod Squad,
and the television miniseries
Rich Man, Poor Man
—was summoned to a meeting with Diller and Eisner and found himself face-to-face with the legendary Bluhdorn. The Gulf + Western chairman asked him what he thought of the first
Star Trek
film. “Well, I think it was really boring,” he replied.

Bluhdorn turned to Eisner and barked, “You see, by you, a bald woman is sexy!” Then he turned back to Bennett. “Can you make a better picture?” he asked.

“Well, you know, yeah, I could make it less boring—yes, I could,” Bennett replied.

“Could you make it for less than forty-five fucking million dollars?”