The View from the Bridge (19 page)

Something in his expression told me this was not the moment to hesitate.

“You've been robbed,” I said quickly, “and if you appeal, I'll go in there as a witness.”

Which, surreally enough, was exactly what happened. I felt as if I was one-upping Tom Sawyer, who got to observe his own funeral. In my case I got to deliver the eulogy as well. “Gentlemen, this script, one of the swellest it has ever been my privilege to read, let alone direct,” and so on.

One of the reasons credits are so hotly and frequently contested is the pernicious system of awarding bonuses tied to the amount of screen credit received. If a writer gets sole credit, so much more money; half credit, less; and so on. In the end, Bennett and Jack B. Sowards (author of one of the five original screenplay drafts), received story credit and Sowards received the sole screenplay credit.

At a meeting in Michael Eisner's office, Barry Diller fumed at the title of the movie. “No one knows what the fuck ‘wrath' means!” he shouted, glaring at me. “How did we wind up with this stupid title?”

“Don't look at me,” I responded. “The title is the handiwork of Mr. Mancuso in New York.”

We showed our cut of the film to Eisner and company. Shots were still missing, and there was a musical “temp” track in place of Horner's anticipated score, but it was evident the studio was much pleased. The buzz continued to grow. I was spared the ordeal of sitting through the movie in the executives' presence (I always have trouble watching my own work, anyway; all I can see are mistakes), but I did screen the cut for myself and sat there, trying to figure out what I had done—or failed to do. It was no use; I couldn't be objective. I couldn't make head or tail of the movie, except to know every cut, every line, every scratch on our very scratched-up work print. I had no idea what the studio's enthusiasm was based on. I might as well have been looking at the thing through the wrong end of a telescope.

The studio's notes, when they arrived, were few and mostly reasonable. One interesting plot issue they felt needed to be addressed: In the present cut (and script) of the film, Kirk is aware that he has an illegitimate son. But given the fact that in the previous twenty years (which is to say, throughout the period covered by the series and first movie) no mention has been made of this fact, Kirk emerges as a schmuck for having ignored the boy all this time. The studio felt this was not only unsympathetic but perhaps also implausible, and requested that the scene in which Kirk and David meet be reshot so as to resolve this. Kirk's line, “Why didn't you tell him?” delivered to the boy's mother would now be changed to, “Why didn't you tell me?” which would require Carol to present a rationale for having completely cut Kirk out of David's life. This made sense to me, and we reshot the exchange. Reshooting is a surreal feeling. The cast and crew have long departed, the sets have been dismantled, etc., and now a skeletal version of all must be reconstituted. Sometimes key components are no longer available, which coerces you into close-ups. If your cameraman is now off on another film, someone must attempt to replicate his style and use the same lenses, but you can usually spot the difference in the lighting or framing when you watch the finished film. A battle I lost involved eliminating the identity of midshipman Peter Preston (as Scotty's nephew); also Kirk's line, “Midshipman, you're a tiger,” which they felt came out sort of gay. In subsequent versions of the film, I managed to restore Preston's identity without Kirk's questionable line reading.

Our first “public” showing, or preview, took place on the lot at the Paramount Theater. Because of the secretive nature of our film's plot, all
Star Trek II
's previews were likewise held on the lot. (For all I know, the viewers had to sign loyalty oaths.) First screenings, before no matter how friendly an audience, are among the most terrifying parts of the filmmaking process. When we had first screened
Time After Time
, my intestines entwined themselves like a horse's, and I would have colicked if I could. The same symptoms obtained now: I stood in the back of the theater and fought the urge to flee to the men's room and be sick. That Hydra-headed monster, the audience, can, on a whim, destroy you and all you've worked for.

True, some things can be fixed; that's what previews are for. With plays in “tryouts” you can rewrite; in film you can reedit or reshoot if necessary (if you can afford it). Here, though, we faced a greater challenge: How would an audience react to the death of a beloved character?

We had no idea how the audience would in fact respond to Spock's death but we all knew the moment when they would be bluntly reminded that it was imminent: a shot of Spock's empty chair on the bridge after he'd quietly gone below in an effort to save the ship. Suddenly the opening scene came back to them and they remembered: this is the movie where Spock dies. If they were going to throw things, this was when they'd do it.

There was dead silence at the sight of that chair.

And there always would be. What one audience does, every audience does. Similarly, if a joke doesn't work with one audience, it will never work with any audience.

The audience giggled at the SCENE MISSING slugs but otherwise was enrap tured by the film beyond anything I could've imagined. The movie played like gangbusters, with the audience laughing, cheering, and weeping in all the right places. You could hear people sobbing throughout Spock's death.

At the end, they were simply stunned.

Was this what we wanted?

I had certainly thought so.

But by this point another thought began percolating through everyone's head. As enthusiasm for the film mounted, some people were beginning to think beyond
Star Trek II
. It was not a foregone conclusion that we had saved the franchise—the film could always flop—but the question was now being asked: What If? And, as a corollary, how could there be another
Star Trek
movie without Spock? Kirk might well be the anchor of the series, but it was hard to escape the conclusion that Spock was its most popular character. Was there any way of keeping him alive, or, failing that, bringing him back to life or, at the very least, hinting at that possibility? Instead of stunned silence, should we heed Harvey Milk's credo: you gotta give them hope?

Something to cheer about?

It is hard to describe how infuriated I was by what I took to be these crass commercial considerations. I had by now come to realize how devoted the show's fan base was, how seriously people took the idea of Spock's death, something for which I had fought long and hard, confident in the belief that, if it proceeded organically, it would be more than justified; it would be inevitable. From my point of view, bringing him back to life would constitute a complete dry hustle of people's emotions, an unforgivable breach of trust. Yes, we'll get you all worked up, we'll wring tears at the passing of Spock, and then we'll reveal it was all a crock. Someone once observed that Americans like their tragedies with happy endings, an idea that I found morbidly repellent as it negated the tragedy in the first place.

Bennett's concern—possibly influenced by his overall deal on the Paramount lot (he would be here when the rest of us had cleaned out our offices), but also perhaps the product of his shrewd analytical abilities—was whether the film was making a mistake when it simply deprived people of anything that could be construed as “hope.”

Pick your battles, I learned—and this is the battle I picked. I did not want the death of Spock to end in a betrayal of the audience's emotional investment in that moment. In this I had no hesitation in believing that I was in the right. I fought the proposed idea of hinting at Spock's resurrection every way I knew how. I argued against it. I stalled. I lied. I refused to cooperate, trying to let the clock run out against the moment when it was time to cut negative or miss our release date.

I even came up with what I thought was an elegant compromise. At the beginning of each
Star Trek
television episode, we hear Kirk's voice-over in the log of the
Enterprise
: “
These are the continuing voyages of the starship Enterprise; her ongoing
[originally
“five-year”
]
mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations . . . to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

I proposed letting Spock's sepulchral voice read these lines at the end of our film. The audience wouldn't know how he came to be saying them—was it his ghost speaking?—but they would get the idea of Spock's own “ongoingness.”

But bigger gears had been set in motion than I could clog. My Spock log-entry idea was merely incorporated into a more literal hint that he was—somehow—not dead.

When Bennett indicated he would go along and try to come up with a satisfying compromise, I viewed it as a cave-in. Bennett, by contrast, was a realist. He had an overall studio contract and explained it to me like this: “Kid, you're the squadron leader, no question. But I'm the base commander. And after you're long gone, I'll still be here.” Trying to make other movies, he didn't need to add.

“Don't you know who you are?” I countered, passionately. “You're Harve fucking Bennett! They
need
you. If you take a stand, we'll win!”

In the end Bennett, admittedly conflicted but obliged to take the long view, came up with the scenario that pleased everyone (except me, of course): first a shot was added in the engine room: Spock's fingers splayed on Dr. McCoy's unconscious face right before Spock enters the lethal radiation chamber as he utters the somber admonition “Remember,” and later Spock's coffin, shot from within a photon torpedo, would land on the Genesis planet, and Kirk would vow to return to see what had become of it. “If Genesis is indeed life from death,” he would proclaim, “I must return here . . .” blah, blah. . . .

Since I refused to shoot it, Sallin was dispatched to San Francisco with a team to film the surface of the Genesis planet with Spock's coffin lying among the bull(shit) rushes in a botanical museum. At one point, he and I had an explosive encounter—again in the Paramount parking lot—in which he yelled, accusing me of being “morally bankrupt” and added for good measure, “You'd walk over your own mother to get the film your way.”

“I would!” I admitted at equally high volume. “But as long as anybody around here is filing for Chapter 11, maybe you should go over your own accounts and look into the business of trying to get me fired.”

And so on.

In the end none of my stonewalling did any good. Sallin's San Francisco footage looked beautiful, and when James Horner added music to help sell it, Bennett saw the result and wept. “I don't know if it's right or wrong,” he confessed, “but I believe it.”

Horner's music did indeed crown the movie, with or without what I viewed as its vulgar compromise. Music is always added at the end of the process, and if it works it is one of the most exciting parts of making a film. Sound
always
dominates image. If you doubt this, simply drive around town (or country) and listen to your radio. The music will determine the character of the landscape, never the reverse. Show a laughing girl bounding across a field of yellow daisies and underscore that child with Chopin's “Funeral March” and you will know the kid is doomed to die of an incurable disease. Horner's music captured the essence of the film; he even made sense of
Star Trek
's fanfare.

But oh, the satisfaction when you subdue the beast. Comedians talk about “killing” an audience, “knocking them dead,” and I understand the sense in which the relationship is an adversarial one. And when the monster is defeated, when you have a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand people eating out of the palm of your hand, laughing or crying at your command, you can pound your chest like King Kong. The delirious sense of accomplishment is nonetheless the high that we in the theater—any theater—are constantly chasing, the reason we're going through all this hell in the first place: to make strangers laugh or cry. Nothing is more important to us. To outsiders, such a goal may seem absurd, puerile, incomprehensible—but only because they haven't inhaled the opium of a smash. The bliss is ultimately indescribable, but Sondheim's song, “It's a Hit!” comes closest to capturing the feeling.

And once you know your film plays, once you have ironed out every last frame so that it works from beginning to end (rarely!), you can relax and revel in that power, that high.

How calm, how serene you are watching that celluloid unspool . . .

Later I attended another showing of the film in the executive screening room with Harve Bennett, Gary Nardino (head of the television division), and Paramount chairman Barry Diller. When the lights came up, the others waited in silence for Diller's reaction.

“I didn't know this movie was about the death of Spock,” he began. “You can't kill Spock.”

This was less than a month before the film was to open. Bennett stared at the floor, Nardino gazed at the ceiling, or perhaps it was the other way around. Regardless, neither man spoke.

I wanted to ask how it was that the boss of a studio with this much money involved (admittedly less than 25 percent of the previous film's gargantuan budget) could not have been bothered to read the script, but I confined myself to replying, “Yes, you
can
kill him—if you do it well.” I had all the courage of the preview audience's convictions.

“And another thing,” Diller went on as though I hadn't spoken. “The reconciliation scene between Kirk and his son doesn't work.”

“In your opinion,” I responded, my intestines contracting and my heart pounding so that it could be heard across the room.