The View from the Bridge (30 page)

In the event, Nimoy didn't need any help from Paramount. He liked what he read but kept pushing us to make improvements. We were circling around a promising dramatic situation and then, in his view, failing to exploit it. In the story Spock has a new Vulcan protégée, Lieutenant Valeris. Originally we had hoped to lure Kirstie Alley back to reprise her character as Saavik—her backstory from the other films would have made this especially poignant—but once again she declined.

In our tale it turns out the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon (as close as Denny dared come to the name Gorbachev) is assassinated by a conspiracy consisting of Klingons and Federation members
working together
to preserve the eye-for-an-eye, cold war status quo. Better the devil you know than the “undiscovered country,” which, in this instance was an uncertain future with no cold war or cold warriors left.

The newly introduced character of Valeris proves to be one of the chief conspirators. Nimoy wanted a scene where, if she's really true to her beliefs, she must shoot her mentor after she is unmasked by him. He chuckled as he described the “shoot, if you must, this old gray head” moment he was searching for. He was a keen and clever contributor to the final draft, never satisfied with what was facile or glib. In this as in other aspects of the script, Nimoy's experience as an actor, director, and producer prevented us from getting too pleased with ourselves and kept us on our toes, always searching to see if we had mined the material for all its potential, always probing and pushing to see if we had found all that was there.

It did not escape my notice that
The Undiscovered Country
, with its deliberate parallels to the collapsing Soviet Union and what conservative Harvard political philosopher Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history,” was essentially another attempt (by me) to make a film about the demise of the USSR and the brave new post cold war world we were allegedly entering.
Company Business
had simply been a more literal version of the same movie. I could only hope the science fiction riff would turn out better than its earthbound (in every sense) predecessor.

Villains are always important in space operas, and in Khan we had created a tough act to follow. It was during this period that I spent a fair amount of recreational time listening to a new Chandos CD I had bought of Christopher Plummer declaiming passages from
Henry V
, accompanied by a fresh, stereophonic performance of William Walton's score for the Olivier film. Plummer's thrilling performance completely captivated me. For the first time that I can recall (other than for the members of the
Star Trek
cast), I tailored a role with a specific actor in mind. God knows what I would have done if we hadn't landed him. I dreamed of being around Plummer and hearing him spout Shakespeare with that trumpet voice. But how to get him to do it? All I could think of was using Shakespeare's words and sticking them in my villain's mouth. I found myself recalling the story of Nazis who claimed you had never heard Shakespeare until you had heard him in the “original (
sic
) German.” (This isn't as kooky as it sounds; Shakespeare in German is a lot better than Shakespeare in French.) I thought:
You have never heard Shakespeare until you have heard him in the original Klingon
. Thus the jovial but deadly General Chang was born.

Another aspect of the story posed a really provocative problem: How do you assassinate somebody in space? There are a million pedestrian ways to do so—guns, poison, knives, bombs, etc.—but what form of dispatch would be unique to the context of space?

Where do creative ideas come from, anyway? A question more asked than answered, in all likelihood. It is easier to describe
where
ideas originate than
why
or
how
. My own ideas tend to come infrequently and when I'm not expecting them. They come, like sleep, when I let go. I don't fall asleep by clenching closed my eyes and insisting on unconsciousness; I fall asleep when I relax. Similarly, I get ideas when I let go, when I'm thinking of or doing something else, usually something manual like the laundry, rewiring a lamp, or building a model boat. I get ideas when I am falling asleep or when I'm waking up. I get them while driving miles of boring freeway with the radio turned off; I get them sitting in the tub and watching my toes turn into prunes. I know that I have a problem to solve—in this case, a writing problem revolving around an assassination in space. Whether I stay with this consciously, insisting on an answer (clenching my eyes to fall asleep), or whether I “forget” about it while doing the laundry, some part of my brain will continue to fiddle with the task at hand . . . and then the solution will “leak” out into my consciousness.

An assassination in space . . . I don't know what I was doing when I found myself wondering—not for the first time, as it happens—about footage I had seen of the space station and astronauts aboard various shuttles. They were always weightless, which looked like a lot of fun to me.

But in all space operas there is always gravity (pardon the expression) on those space vessels. How to account for this? Evidently, there is a centrifuge or some such device on board each vessel that simulates gravity. That being the case, how is it that in the battles between spaceships, this gravity device is never hit and put out of action?

What would happen if it were? Everything and everyone not secured would simply float. Haven't you ever wondered why no chair on the bridge of the
Enterprise
has seat belts? Because people wouldn't go flying around during explosions if they did. (Planets are another matter—there's simply no accounting for the fact that in these selfsame space movies, all planets have earth's gravity.)

This was starting to interest me. I posited a pair of assassins who, having shot out the gravity device aboard Gorkon's flagship, now beam aboard in magnetic boots and make their way through helpless, floating Klingon secret service details (imagine their ray guns levitating from their holsters, just out of reach!). The killers eventually make their way to the hapless, floating Chancellor Gorkon. When he's hit, his blood (what color, what color??) will float in the stillness as motionless
bubbles
!

I was giving myself goose bumps. Thus far, I was thinking in my role as screenwriter. Now I felt a tap on my shoulder from my alter ego, the director, demanding to know how the hell I thought an effect of floating blood bubbles (of
any
color) was going to be achieved.

I told the director to get lost.
It's the movies
, I comforted myself.
In movies, you can do anything. This isn't the moment to pull your punches.

So I kept writing the most fanciful version of the sequence I could imagine and decided I would worry about how to execute it down the road. As it happened, recent technological advances of which I was then unaware would, in the end, make my floating blood simpler than I dreaded.

Eventually we had our draft, and the studio was pleased. David Kirkpatrick was now in the driver's seat (President of the Motion Picture Group of Paramount Pictures—these titles!), and his only comment was that he was tired of sand planets, so with the help of my trusty computer, the desert planet gulag where Kirk (and now Dr. McCoy as well) are exiled became an
ice
planet.

The year 1990 was ending. My wife and I—now with a second daughter—took a six-month lease on a house in Beverly Hills. In January of 1991 we showed up in Los Angeles, and on January 4, my team, consisting of Nimoy, Ralph Winter, Steve Jaffe, and myself, sat down in Gary Lucchesi's office to “confab” with him, David Kirkpatrick, and John Goldwyn, the junior exec to whom the film had been assigned.

After the requisite smiles and glad-handing, Kirkpatrick began the meeting.

“Now, we're talking about twenty-five million dollars,” he commenced, when my hand shot into the air.

“Excuse me, David, but we're talking about
thirty
million dollars. That is the figure Frank [Mancuso] mentioned at my lunch with him and that is the figure I agreed to. That is the figure that brought me to LA.”

Kirkpatrick frowned and reiterated the figure was twenty-five million, that Frank had a “vision,” which in turn was based on a formula, which derived from the calculation of how much money a
Star Trek
movie could make domestically and internationally (much less;
Star Trek
was a failure in France—the result of a penny-pinching decision years earlier to use the Canadian French Québécois dub of the original TV series, rendering it laughable in France, etc.).

“David,” I interjected, knowing perfectly well that it was the feature division's continued wretched performance in the months between my lunch at Claridge's and this present meeting that was responsible for lowering the budget on our film, “let me explain why the film cannot be made for twenty-five million dollars.

“You have fourteen million dollars
above the line,
for starters. [‘Above the line' refers to costs of starring cast, writer, director, producer, etc.] You have to pay for Shatner, Nimoy, and all the rest of the
Enterprise
crew, and this comes to fourteen million dollars. You have four and a half million dollars in special effects. This is the same effects budget as
Star Trek V
, two years ago, but I'll live with it. That brings us to eighteen and a half million dollars.”

Their faces were clouding over.

“Then,” I concluded, “you have two and a half million dollars in postproduction [editing, music, etc.], which brings us to a grand total of twenty-one million dollars, leaving only four million dollars to make an outer space sci-fi extravaganza. Where's the movie going to come from?”

Dead silence greeted this calculation. I could sense the execs wanting to trade looks but not quite daring to.

Finally Kirkpatrick spoke. “Would you please excuse us for a few minutes?” His team withdrew into his office across the hall, leaving us to twiddle our thumbs. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Eventually they returned, their faces as expressionless as jurors reentering the courtroom with a murder verdict.

“Twenty-seven million,” Kirkpatrick stated without preamble or embellishment.

“David,” I responded, trying to keep the panic out of my voice (how could I have been so foolish as to move bag and baggage to LA for six months without having an agreed-upon budget?), “you are under a misapprehension. I am not negotiating. I am giving you reality.”

I now spread out the top sheets (budget totals) of every
Star Trek
movie for their perusal. I was mightily annoyed; numbers was supposed to be their department. I was supposed to be the “creative” person; why was I having to take them through figures they should have researched long before this meeting?

“Please note:
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, 1979, cost forty-five million dollars.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
, 1982, cost eleven point two million. From then on, each successive
Star Trek
film—numbers three, four, and five—cost forty-one percent more than its predecessor.

“The only exceptions were
The Wrath of Khan
, made by me, which cost only twenty-five percent of the first film's budget, and the one I am now proposing to direct for you, which will cost exactly the same as its predecessor,
Star Trek V
, namely thirty million dollars. Allowing for inflation over two years' time, it will actually cost less than
V
, but the figure will remain thirty million. You cannot get blood from a stone.”

But you can get stony silence. Then came the hurt accusations. I was not being a team player, I was inflexible, I was noncooperative, etc. I listened to this until I lost my temper.

“This is pointless and graceless,” I said, standing. “I will meet with Frank Mancuso and give him the same facts and figures I've given you. Let him make up his own mind.”

Which is what I did. Frank, courteous, even courtly, heard me out in respectful silence some days later in his office. I produced all the numbers and took him slowly, carefully through the process, explaining the nuts and bolts of making a
Star Trek
movie in 1990.

“Obviously,” I concluded, pleased with my performance, “this is entirely your decision. I just wanted you to have all the facts from the horse's mouth.”

He shook my hand in a most civil manner and thanked me for my comprehensive explanation. I left, feeling I had made the situation perfectly clear.

He then canceled the film.

I can't remember who gave me the news, but it came at the end of a day, and I only recall being stunned. While I had recognized intellectually that this decision was a distinct possibility, once the boom had actually been lowered, it sucked the wind right out of my sails. I subsided into my chair and tried to think.

But nothing came. I would have to drive to Beverly Hills and explain to Lauren that we were stranded high and dry in Los Angeles, tethered to our house lease with no earnings in sight.

I wandered over to Gary Lucchesi's office in the administration building and sat on the floor in his office, my eyes filled with tears, my back literally to the wall. Gary looked at me not unkindly. He's an old and dear friend, but he's a realist. I had taken a gamble and lost. “If you want love, go home,” he advised me. So in the end, I did.

It was a melancholy evening, made palatable by only the cheerful un-awareness of our daughters, whose smiles and laughter took away some of the sting, though not all.

 

 

 

The next day I returned to my office to pack my things, after which I strolled around the lot in a kind of daze. I cannot now remember when or from whom I heard the improbable rumor floating across the lot that Frank Mancuso had lost his job, but I do recall vividly what happened next: I was standing in the middle of Stage 5, which we were to have used, taking a last, silent look, when the stage phone rang. Bizarre, I thought. Seeing no one else to answer it, I picked up.