The View from the Bridge (11 page)

My attitude toward television has always been ambivalent, to say the least. The constant interruption of the stories by commercials makes it hard for me to watch. The only shows I could stand were the comedies of my childhood:
Your Show of Shows
(Sid Caesar),
You'll Never Get Rich
(
Sgt. Bilko
), Ernie Kovacs,
The Honeymooners
, etc. The rest, as Hamlet might have said, was PBS.

On the other hand,
Star Wars
had recently come out and knocked my socks off (along with everyone else's), and the idea of doing a big-screen space opera had its appeal. I use the word “opera” advisedly. I am an unabashed opera fan and I recognized in Lucas's work, along with John Williams's ersatz Richard Straussian score and its enormous contribution to the goings-on, a cinematic opera, a sort of
Ring
Lite.

Bennett, who was tactful enough to laugh at my jokes, sipped beer from a bottle and showed me several episodes of the original
Star Trek
. I confess what I saw did not particularly excite me; neither did the first
Star Trek
movie, released in 1979. I couldn't quite place (not having Bennett's analytical mind) what it was I found so off-putting and could only grope toward insight. My groping took the form of noting all the things I didn't like: the uniforms, the acting, the sets, the solemnity.

Bennett then showed me “Space Seed,” the television episode that introduced the supervillain Khan, and I did respond to that: Ricardo Montalban was a great actor and like most great actors was wasted in roles beneath his talents. When Bennett, who spoke in clipped, foreshortened English, not unreminiscent of
Star Trek
dialogue (“Message, Spock?”), suggested using Khan as a character in the new film, I began to become interested.

The reasons Paramount was intent on making a second
Star Trek
film are by now well-known: despite the fact that the original motion picture had been a “runaway” production, costing an astounding forty-five million dollars (in 1979!) and despite the fact that it had received indifferent notices, the movie wound up in profit, close to eighty-three million dollars. Barry Diller, then running the studio with Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, realized that if they could make another, better film, at a reasonable budget, they might develop a franchise to rival Lucas's. The first
Star Trek
had been a torturous learning process, originally to be helmed by Phil Kauffman and designed by the great Ken Adam; disagreements about scripts and budgets sent both men packing. Eventually the film was directed by Robert Wise, whose impressive credits included editing
Citizen Kane
and directing such successful films as
The Day the Earth Stood Still
and
West Side Story
(with Jerome Robbins), as well as the indestructible
The Sound of Music
.

The second
Trek
attempt had subsequently been farmed out to the television division of Paramount, headed by Gary Nardino, who would undertake to make the film for a quarter of the original movie's budget.

These considerations did not escape me. I didn't know if I could make a great movie (my jovial editor on
Star Trek II
, Bill Dornisch, wanted to call his production company “Miracle Pictures”—their soubriquet:
“If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle!”
) but I began to see that even if I made an okay one that cost a fraction of the original, it would be a shrewd career move.

Bennett explained that draft five of the screenplay would be arriving in two weeks and offered to send it to me. I said fine and went home, where my mind began to toy with the idea of my outer space
singspiel
, featuring the redoubtable Montalban.

Other events intervened—including some involving
Conjuring
, never far from the forefront of my consciousness—before I realized that a month had passed and a
Star Trek II
script had yet to appear at my door. I rang Bennett and asked him what had happened. He chuckled awkwardly and said, “Kid”—his usual term of address for me—“my tit's in a ringer.”

“Come again?” I'd heard him; I just couldn't process the locution.

“I can't send it to you,” he explained. “It isn't any good.”

In my naïveté, this was the last thing I had expected to hear. Several “beats” (as screenwriters are fond of writing) of silence must have followed.

“Kid?”

“Well, what about draft four?” I inquired, remembering he had referred to the latest pass as five.

A second chuckle on the other end of the line. “Kid, you don't get it. Draft four, draft three, and all the rest—these are unrelated attempts to get a second
Star Trek
script, and none of them works.”

“Let me read them,” I said before realizing that I'd said it.

“There's no point.”

The conversation continued in this vein, but I persisted—why, I am no longer certain. All I can offer is that the space opera idea wouldn't let me go, and Karen Moore's words about learning how to direct hadn't ceased reverberating in my cerebellum, either.

A day or so later a car drove up, and a ton of scripts were hefted in my direction. I began with draft number five. As Bennett had described, it was a failure. Reading it made me feel as if I was watching the episodes again, and I had no particular interest in, much less affection for them. I didn't understand the world, the people, or the language.

I picked up draft four with the same result, then doggedly plowed through the rest. The process must have taken a couple of days. Not only were the scripts uninvolving, but I happen to be a slow reader.

Idly I did some calculating. Figure at least two months, more likely three, to write a film script—there had been
five
of these attempts. That probably represented a cumulative year's fruitless gestation. Now add the standard contractual studio “reading period” of six weeks, and what I was reading had taken even longer. The attempt to get a second
Star Trek
feature in the works may have consumed upward of two years.

Write us another
Star Trek
movie
. What marching orders had the studio given each of these writers? Any? Too many? Were there themes or ideas they had been offered, or did their labors represent merely their own imaginations and initiative? I didn't think to ask. What difference would the answer have made? In any case, as I have since learned, studio memos are never signed, thus avoiding the assignment of responsibility. Script notes typically arrive attributed to some collective euphemism, such as FROM: THE GROUP but that's as far as anyone goes since the heyday of David O. Selznick. Years later, when Paramount asked me to write other
Star Trek
s, they never specified storylines or themes, so it is reasonable to suppose they hadn't on
Star Trek II
. Just make us another one. Later, as I recall, I would give them the general idea to approve, but it related to the area and subject matter, rather than the specific plot. Whatever it was, they always said okay. Things are quite different today; today the studio wants a complete précis of the proposed film before authorizing the script. They want the story broken down by scenes in something referred to as a “beat sheet.” (I am not very good at creating the “beat sheets” because I don't know how the film will break down until I have written it.)

One thing was certain: after all of their work and chopped-down trees, there were bits and pieces of interest in each of the five drafts I read, but no theme, character, or situation was sustained such that it added up to anything. (Maybe beat sheets would have helped.)

Two years for bits and pieces seemed to me an awful lot of dry wells, but what did I know? (Nothing, as it turned out; years later, on
Fatal Attraction
, I again marveled at studios' stubbornness about getting what they'd made up their minds to have. I could never figure out, half the time, why they chose to make the movies they did. David Picker, for years head of United Artists, once acknowledged that if he'd made all the movies he'd passed on and passed on all the films he'd made, he would probably have scored about the same. But on the other side, for every ridiculous financial disaster, we find ourselves grateful for stupendous follies that somehow got filmed thanks to the same incontrovertible zeal, movies that today number among cinema's triumphs. Think
Darling Lili
vs.
Reds
.)

Disappointed and disheartened after my perusal of the five
Star Trek
scripts, I prepared to write the whole thing off and went back to my routine, such as it was. In those days, after feeding my dogs, I rolled down from my home in Laurel Canyon to the public tennis courts in the Valley and slammed the ball around with Gary Lucchesi, who had, following Stan Kamen's untimely death, succeeded him as my agent. Lucchesi thrashed me with regularity before heading off for William Morris. I was an enthusiastic but inept player—rallying brilliantly in practice but always clutching when points were at stake.

While Lucchesi was cutting deals for his other clients, I was being psychoanalyzed. It must have been driving from tennis to my analyst's couch that two ideas began to take shape in my mind. The first involved a niggling association at the back of my brain that had been there since I first began watching the episodes and the original movie.
Star Trek
vaguely reminded me of something, something for which I had great affection. It took me quite a while before I realized what it was. I remember waking with a start one night and saying it aloud:

“Hornblower!”

When I was a teenager I had devoured a series of novels by the English author C. S. Forester (author of
The African Queen
and
Sink the Bismarck!
, among other favorites), concerning an English sea captain, Horatio Hornblower, and his adventures during the Napoleonic wars. “Horatio” as a first name was the giveaway; Hornblower was clearly based on Lord Nelson, though I've recently learned his surname derived from that of Hollywood producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr., a friend of Forester's. There was also a beloved movie version, Raoul Walsh's
Captain Horatio Hornblower R. N.
, starring Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo. (In the picaresque film, Hornblower faces off with the malignant and memorable El Supremo. Watching the film later as an adult, I understood that El Supremo, the frothing megalomaniac, was a racist caricature, the more so as he was played by a Caucasian in “swarthy” face, the UK-born Alec Mango. Khan Noonian Singh, by contrast, was a genuine [if oddly named] superman, embodied by a superb actor who happened to be Hispanic. Khan was a cunning, remorseless, but witty adversary—his true triumph being that audiences adored his Lear-inflected villainy as much as they responded to Kirk's enraged heroism.)

Hornblower has had many descendants besides Kirk. Another Englishman, Alexander Kent, wrote a series of similar seafaring tales, and Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin novels are an upmarket version of same—Jane Austen on the high seas—one of which became the splendid film
Master and Commander
. Still another Englishman, Bernard Cornwell, produced a land-locked version of Hornblower in the character of Sharpe, a swaggering, blue-collar hero of the Peninsular War.

I asked myself, What was
Star Trek
but Hornblower in outer space? The doughty captain with a girl in every port and adventure lurking in each latitude? Like Hornblower, whose gruff exterior conceals a heart of humanity, Kirk is the sort of captain any crew would like to serve under. Like his oceanic counterpart, he is intelligent but real, compassionate but fearless, attractive to women but not precisely a rake. For prepubescent (and for that matter postpubescent) boys such as myself, Hornblower-Kirk conceals the sort of Lone Ranger-d'Artagnan-Scarlet Pimpernel hero we liked to fantasize about being, the steady guy with a dashing secret identity. Hornblower-Kirk's secret identity was folded into his own persona, but the notion still holds. (A case might also be made, I suppose, that James Bond is yet another offspring of Forester's hero.)

Once I was possessed of this epiphany, a great many things fell readily into place. I suddenly knew what
Star Trek
wanted to be and how I could relate to it. The look of the film and the natures of the characters—even their language—suddenly became clear. And doable. I would write a Hornblower script, simply relocating in outer space.

That left the question of the script itself, and therein came my second brainstorm. I invited Bennett and his producing partner, Robert Sallin, to sit down with me at my place, where I laid it out for them.

Sallin, who owned his own commercial-producing company, was a dapper, diminutive ex-military man with a clipped, Ronald Colman mustache and agreeable manners. He and Bennett had been close friends at UCLA, and the
Star Trek
project was seen by Bennett as a chance for them to work together. (By the time the film was finished, they would no longer be speaking.)

They listened as I explained my Hornblower thesis and notion of reconfiguring the look and language of the original series. I didn't like the idea of everyone running around wearing what looked to me like Dr. Dentons and couldn't make out why people said “negative” when they meant “no,” or why no one ever read a book or lit a cigarette.

In this, I was ignorant of
Star Trek
's history and more especially of the contribution of its originator, a former bomber, later a Pan Am pilot, and later still a policeman named Gene Roddenberry. As producer, Roddenberry had been in charge of the original 1979 movie, made a decade after the original television series left the air. In the wake of its disastrous cost overruns Paramount had apparently reached an accommodation with him, whereby he was not to participate in the making of the second film but would receive a credit. The original film's difficulties appear to have been concentrated in two areas: (1) a script that kept mutating (I was told that cast members received pages changes stamped not by the day but by the
hour
, as in, “Did you get the 4:30 changes?”) and (2) endless difficulties over the special effects. Nowadays, thanks to computer-generated imagery, much of what once consumed millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours seems like child's play. But listening to Douglas Trumbull detail what went into creating Stanley Kubrick's even earlier
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), one understands that all this eye candy had to be figured out literally frame by frame, utilizing endless trial and error by multiple FX houses as they experimented with spaceship models, how to photograph them convincingly, get rid of wires, create the illusion of activity inside them (would you believe tiny projectors, reflecting images off mirrors bounced
inside?
), etc. Special effects houses need huge sums of money for equipment to start up and later geeks to man them, change them, break them, and reconceive them.