The View from the Bridge (15 page)

It was a dispiriting exercise. So much of what I heard sounded the same, which is to say generic, devoid of personality, much the way modern automobiles seem to be boxy replications of themselves, no matter what brand name is stuck on them. When you listen to Beethoven you do not imagine you are listening to anyone else, and while it is a truism that good film composers must be adroit quick-change artists, the best of them always retain the stamp of their own personas, no matter what subject they are charged with embodying musically. Dmitri Tiomkin sounds like Tiomkin, whether he's accompanying the Old West, ancient Egypt, or the isles of Greece. To the degree that I wanted a score that would be the “voice” of our film, I wanted a composer who
had
a voice.

I can no longer recall the particular circumstances under which I found myself listening to the music of someone named James Horner, but I remember paraphrasing Wagner, who, when he heard Bizet, grudgingly conceded, “Well, at last, here is someone with ideas in his head.”

I met and hired master Horner, a quiet young man who spoke with a vaguely English accent, acquired, as I learned, from years spent at school in England, during the time his father, Harry Horner, had worked as a production designer there. Young Horner had studied at the Royal College of Music before pursuing a PhD at UCLA. I asked James (somehow one did not think to address him as Jim or Jimmy) to listen to Debussy's
La Mer
and told him I wanted a score that suggested the sweep of the ocean—nautical but nice, I added.

He smiled, but I couldn't tell if he thought that was funny. Later I discovered he had his own droll sense of humor. When I asked during a subsequent recording session if a certain passage he composed for the movie didn't smack of Prokofiev's
Alexander Nevsky
, he squeaked, “Whatdya want from me? I'm a kid; I haven't outgrown my influences.”

While all this was going on, a dilemma was unfolding between Harve Bennett and Bob Sallin, his college friend, whom Harve had hired to produce the film. This was another instance where Bennett's inexperience with the world and nomenclature of features did him harm. In television the key credit is executive producer. He is the main honcho; the producer title in television, by contrast, usually indicates what features refer to as the line producer (aka UPM), a lesser title bestowed on those who see to it that the trucks show up on time, are parked in the right places and that shooting permits have been obtained. Line producers are responsible for the physical logistics of the shoot.

Bennett had offered Sallin the title of producer, retaining the executive producer title for himself, unaware that the coveted credit in feature films was the former. Realizing his mistake, he contacted me and asked what I thought was the honorable thing to do. Sallin was sticking to the letter of his offer and wished to retain his producer title.

I was no more experienced in these matters than Bennett but I said what I felt, namely, that a deal was a deal and that if Sallin was taking Bennett up on his original offer, I felt he was obliged to stick to it. In any case, I assured him (rightly as it proved), everyone would know that
Star Trek II: The Undiscovered Country
was Harve Bennett's production.

Did Harve ever actually ask if Bob would change titles with him? Did Bob turn him down flat? I have no idea and am not likely ever to learn.

Young Horner came over to play themes for the movie on my piano. They sounded good to me. Henceforth while I was filming, those tunes would echo in my head. I was somewhat frustrated to learn of the studio's insistence that we use the fanfare from the original television series, composed by Alexander Courage, which I had never really liked. But the studio had so far stayed out of my hair to a surprising degree. and I had already learned that you must pick your battles. After all, it was only eight notes . . .

Years later, a new recording was made of the music that the English light classics composer Robert Farnon had written for the movie
Captain Horatio Hornblower R. N
. I was astonished to hear something that sounded, at least to me, very like the
Star Trek
theme leap out (much more effectively, I might add) in the opening bars.

Yes, indeed, Gene Roddenberry had certainly been a Hornblower fan.

Before shooting was to commence, I badly wished to rehearse, though in this desire I was swimming upstream. My background was in live theater, and I knew and understood the value of rehearsals. Rehearsals allow the actors to be freer on set when the meter is running. They have already become familiar with the script, with one another (admittedly hardly necessary for most of them in this case) and with the director. In rehearsals there is opportunity to experiment, to discover what lines need adjusting or can be deleted altogether. Actors like to rehearse, but agents wish them to be paid for it, which studios are (typically) reluctant to do. The result is that rehearsals are encouraged to be clandestine affairs, conducted off the lot, largely dependent on the professional good will (and pride) of the performers. Normally, a play rehearses for six weeks before opening. Most movie rehearsal periods are nothing like that long—nor should they be. Movies are a species of short-order cooking; rehearse too much and you lose the spontaneity whose absence the camera is prone to detect. The exceptions to this rule are chariot races and dance numbers. Movie rehearsing must therefore strike a middle ground, something between a read-through and individual scene work. While some directors—Mike Nichols, for example—request and receive extensive rehearsal time when they ask for it, the most I could hope for would be three or four days spent in Laurel Canyon around my dining room table. Montalban was unavailable for these sessions, but all the other actors showed up, and we noshed on deli eats while we read aloud, discussed, and then broke into smaller groups to work on specific scenes. I wanted to have my cheesecake and eat it, too, which is to say, while being “true” to the original
Star Trek
characters, I wanted to expand their range of feelings and emotional possibilities, not defined by their jobs or plot functions but by their natures and how this would influence their reactions to particular events. I knew I couldn't achieve this with all seven characters but I could certainly try making things more earthbound in terms of recognizable human reality.

We made many dialogue trims. Speeches or lines I had written I was now told by the actors could be “done with a look,” and this was all to the good. One thing I had learned watching
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
and directing
Time After Time
: too much dialogue and your film is in danger of becoming static. Movies must move, and faces as well as actions can often do the work of words. In fact, I have since computed that the attrition rate for dialogue in a screenplay of mine, between the first draft and the answer print, i.e., finished movie, is 50 percent. Half the words will go, and you will save yourself time and money if you lose as many as possible before the cameras start rolling. Cutting out the words in the editing room is possible, even inevitable, but cutting them beforehand is usually better.

There is another advantage to rehearsals. They allow the director to get to know his actors, how best to support them, exploit their strengths, conceal their weaknesses, absorb their work habits and personality quirks. Who will need help, and how best to give it? Who is likely to be best on take one? Who will need more takes? Who thrives on encouragement and coaching; who needs to work out problems and solutions for himself; etc.

I learned as well that though the crew of the
Enterprise
functions in space as a crack team, equal to any of the challenges it must confront, once off camera and subject to earth's gravitational pull, the cast was a microcosm of any other society, riven by factionalism, allegiances, and jealousies. These people were not only joined at the hip to the characters they played, they were anatomically connected to each other, as well. But because they were professionals, they made the best of it. They carried human baggage and toted it the best they knew how. (There was at least one solid friendship among them: Shatner and Nimoy, whose relationship had begun as rivalry early on, evolved from a competitive modus operandi into a mutual admiration society that endured long after the series' cancellation and the last of the features.)

Conversely, rehearsals allow the actors to know and grow comfortable with the director. As I intimated earlier, the one question cast and crew always need answered when there's an unfamiliar hand at the helm is: is he or she crazy? This person is in charge of the film and of my performance. Does he know what he's doing? Or are we being led over a cliff on some kind of suicide mission as a result of which I'll never work again—assuming I live? (Think Klaus Kinski dragging that steamboat over a jungle-covered mountain in South America in Werner Herzog's
Fitzcarraldo
if you want help visualizing how crazy crazy can get.)

The studio, as I have noted, pretty much left me alone. Studio conduct has changed a lot since then. In the beginning the studios were fiefdoms run by those for whom film was a passionate personal concern as well as a business. Those illiterate, mostly Russian immigrants for whom film was a fundamental means of communication never lost their enthusiasm for the medium. At private screenings they talked and argued about a film's merits or possibilities. But as corporations with their bean counters absorbed the studios into their spreadsheets and the prize became only the bottom line (admittedly costs skyrocketed as the years passed, as the studios' monopolies on theater chains were broken up, etc.), studio control over filmmaking became ever tighter. I'm not sure what purpose this has served (most films continue to stink or lose money), but when
Star Trek II
was made, the front office took no interest in who was cast as the maid. I was given a free hand to make the movie my way, with the studio content to let me show it to them when I'd finished my cut, at which point they would weigh in.

Later, I would learn that matters had not been quite that simple, but I will relate this revelation at the point I experienced it.

Shooting finally got underway on November 11, 1981, and went pretty smoothly for our allotted twelve (five-day) weeks. We almost had to replace our sound mixer, who was seemingly defeated by the baffling acoustics of our damned
Enterprise
bridge set with its domed overhead panels spreading echoes all over the place (and making it equally hard to light). But otherwise we quickly fell into a rhythm and began plowing ahead. Gayne Rescher proved more than equal to the task; the
Enterprise
looked like a real ship, and the lighting enhanced the claustrophobic feel of a submarine. Kirk and company had never looked better.

Unlike a television series, where casts and crews may continue together for years, each film crew is a one-time family, come together for a specific number of months, after which it will disintegrate, never to be reconstituted in exactly the same way again. Its personal dynamics and workings are therefore unique. Hollywood crews are renowned for their seamless perfectionism though as I've noted, unlike their European counterparts, they are hesitant to stray outside their purviews.

Of course there were hiccups. I had saved a close-up of Nichelle Nichols for the end of the day, and she was understandably distressed at being photographed when she was tired. In another instance, Leonard Nimoy was deeply disappointed by the set for Spock's stateroom. I had to agree with him, kicking myself when he pointed out the chintzy use of what looked like Sparklett's Water pointillism on the walls, so out of keeping with what ought to have been something mysterious and haunting, especially given Spock's place in this particular story. This is a perfect example of the director's need for perpetual vigilance. The attention to every detail, to all the moving parts, is unremitting and crucial and I had dropped the ball. Keeping track of incessant and myriad details, lighting, schedules, temperaments, weather, props, performances, vision—these relentless claims on the director's concentration are part of what is so exhausting about the director's job. Also what makes it so exhilarating.

(On
Star Trek VI
, I made sure Spock had a stateroom worthy of his character.)

And then there was Khan. Because of his television schedule, it was necessary to shoot Montalban's scenes first, even before the rest of the
Enterprise
and her crew appeared. We had begun filming with the “other” Starship, the
Reliant
, and her crew, and now segued into our bigger-than-life villain as he hijacked that ill-starred vessel.

Initially Montalban had thought his role rather too small, but as he reread the script he realized, “When I am not there, they are always talking about me,” an observation that served to reassure him. He was also concerned that he would wind up playing Khan as Roarke (from
Fantasy Island
), but as he slipped into makeup and costume, such concerns fell by the wayside. He was Khan and then some . . .

The question I am most often asked about the movie is whether that chiseled sculpture was indeed Ricardo Montalban's actual torso. For the umpteenth time: those pecs are his.

Montalban was the wild card, the one actor with whom I had never rehearsed, and he showed up looking splendid in his muscular décolletage for his first day of work, which, as it happened, was one of the most difficult.

Khan, marooned with his followers on Ceti Alpha V by Kirk, confronts an astonished Chekov and Captain Terrill of the
Reliant
with a six-page monologue that serves the dual purpose of explaining to those unfamiliar with the original episode just who he is and why he is so enraged by Kirk's abandonment of him and his followers. In the original television episode “Space Seed,” Kirk punished Khan and company for attempted mutiny, by marooning them on a habitable planet, never realizing that subsequent to the
Enterprise
's departure the planet's orbit was altered by a nearby supernova. The once live-able place had now become a desert and Khan's people had begun dying, one by one, including his beloved wife. I had seen the television episode once and been struck by the fact that Khan had seduced one of the
Enterprise
's crew, who devotedly shared his exile. The idea that she might now be dead, in addition to explaining her absence in the movie, struck me as a plausible springboard for Khan's rage. Working backward from this premise, I built up in my mind an offstage love story that had come to tragic grief and over time shaped Khan's monomania where Kirk was concerned. Working on the script, I had tried to imagine what cargo Kirk had allowed Khan to take with him into exile and concluded that books must have been among the resources permitted him. What books from the library aboard the
Enterprise
(it was at this point I recalled absently asking Bennett and Sallin why no one in
Star Trek
ever read a book) would Khan have chosen? Somewhat heavy-handedly, I had selected narratives of fallen angels—
Paradise Lost
,
King Lear
, and
Moby-Dick
. How many times must Khan, with his “superior intellect,” have read and reread those tormented tales? How much time did he have to absorb and identify with their doomed protagonists? Plenty.