Introducing THE TREKALOG
Greetings---Thanks to a number of new features on Blogger, I've been able to reorganize this site. From here down, as the world scrolls, you'll find what I call "The Trekalog"--my essays on all ten Star Trek feature films to date.
(In addition to "log" as a Star Trek reference, there's also a pun here on The Decalogue, as the Ten Commandments are sometimes called. I hope no one is offended, but what do you expect from twelve years of Catholic schools.)
Anyway, now that Blogger allows you to pick the date on your posts, I can place these essays in order, from Star Trek The Motion Picture, to Star Trek Nemesis. (I've picked this date to start with so this will follow my New York Times piece, and because, well, it's my birth date.)
For awhile this will be a work in progress, since I haven't written all the essays yet, and I'm taking this opportunity to revise the essays I have written. But from here down---that is, from here into the past---is the place for The Trekalong.
Enjoy. And your comments are invited.
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE
You have to understand what it was like, being in the audience for the first run of '>Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Some in those audiences had waited ten years for this moment, from 1969, when the Star Trek series went off the air, until late 1979. They'd waited from junior high until their first child was born. Or from college when they didn't trust anyone over 30, until they were over 30.
But probably most of the audience had come to Star Trek several years later than that. The late 1960s were a pretty intense and involving time. But the country had quieted down by the mid 1970s, more exhausted than anything, it seemed. These were the years when Star Trek truly became an obsession shared by millions.
Like any other network show in the 60s, Star Trek had been on NBC once a week, fall through the spring, with reruns in the summer. There were three networks and in some places, educational TV. Daytimes were soap operas and game shows. Then the news, and then the evening programs.
By the early 1970s, there were new TV stations on the UHF band you could get with a special antenna, and some people were starting to get their TV through a cable, with better reception. The number of TV stations suddenly increased, and so did the need for programming. Some stations that didn't have their own news broadcasts showed Star Trek in the early evening. Almost all stations that syndicated Star Trek showed it every day. And that was the key.
You saw those stories at the same time every day. The stories were different, but there was a level of consistency that gave the Star Trek universe substance and made it real.
The Star Trek crew became a regular part of your world, an alternative universe you visited ritually every day. The stories were provocative, and you began to see different meanings in the episodes, and notice more about the characters even the second or third time. The characters stayed in your head from day to day, and assumed a kind of reality. The stories said something about the world you lived in, as well as perhaps the world you'd like to live in.
In the mid 1970s, Star Trek was so popular in syndication that one survey showed that more New York males between 18-49 watched Star Trek than any first run network dramatic series, or Monday Night Football. The New York figures also showed Star Trek was more popular with teens than first run episodes of the reigning teen network favorite "One Day at a Time", and with more adults 18-34 than first-run episodes of M*A*S*H.
The actors became global icons as the series was syndicated around the world. The fan base grew in numbers and fervor the entire decade, fed in part by the new phenomena of fan conventions and fan publications (both "fanzines" and fan fictions). These had been traditions in the science fiction fan world, but never before applied with such size to a single set of stories, let alone a mere TV show. The Star Trek Fleet Manual became a number one best-seller on the trade paperback lists.
In 1975, Star Trek was being seen in 148 TV markets across America, and on 54 stations outside the U.S. In some cities Star Trek was on several different stations at different times, so there were days when you could see two or three episodes. It became a heightened alternative reality, with an addictive magic. The geeks and freaks who'd discovered it in the late 1960s, and may even have watched it together in their college dorm, were joined by New York stockbrokers, NASA scientists, and Andy Warhol.
And it became a shared reality, everywhere you looked. One afternoon I was on the phone making an airline reservation. The TV was on and Star Trek was starting..."These are the voyages..." The reservation clerk must have heard it in the background. "Oh, you're watching Star Trek!" she cried. "What episode is it?"
Here's a more complicated story that might suggest how pervasive this Star Trek mania was by 1975. I was working on an alternative weekly newspaper in Washington D.C. called Newsworks. It had just started up, and a couple of old friends from different places had wound up on the first staff. I'd come to visit and write a few stories. I wound up staying and at this point I was editor of the arts section, which made me sort of second in command. That's one reason for the nickname I got. The Newsworks office---three floors of an old frame house in the then-bedraggled section of Adams-Morgan-seemed to run on adrenalin and panic. In contrast, my desk was an oasis of calm and reason. So they called me Spock.
One day I was returning to my desk on the editorial floor. As I crossed the room, ahead of me were two male staffers standing nose to nose, arguing loudly. They were in my path, and people were starting to watch from their desks as the argument got more heated. Neither of them looked at me as I approached, and I didn't look directly at them, so they probably thought I was going to just walk past them. But as I got behind them, I stopped, calmly reached forward with both hands, and silently applied the Vulcan neck pinch to both of them. They both immediately slumped to the floor.
People laughed and some cheered. And everybody knew exactly what had just happened.
Not too long after that, I covered my first Star Trek convention, at the Hilton hotel in Washington. I briefly met Gene Roddenberry, but the truth is I was so distracted by Majel Barrett Roddenberry, tanned and looking incredible in a backless sun-dress, that I couldn't think of much to ask him. But he did talk to the assembled fans, and mentioned that a Star Trek movie was about to go into production. That was probably the Philip Kaufman project, which was cancelled when Paramount decided to launch a new network with a Star Trek TV series featuring the original cast. Before that, they'd considered a small budget feature and a series of made-for-TV movies. Then came Star Wars in 1977 and Close Encounters in 1978, and so the new TV series was dropped and work began on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I remember a magazine article in the mid 70s that told of an avid Trek fan, a stockbroker or in some well-paid white collar position, who after a hard day on Wall Street tuned into Trek one evening, realized it was an episode he hadn't yet seen, and opened a bottle of wine to celebrate. By the mid-70s, it was a rare event to have somehow missed one of the 79 episodes. But ten years after the network run ended, there were few even moderately interested viewers who hadn't seen every show at least once. There was the short-lived animated series, and there were Star Trek novels and short stories, and fan fictions circulated on mimeograph paper. By the late 70s, fans were running up against one essential limitation more impassible than the Galactic Barrier: the 79 episodes of 1966-69. There were 79 stories, and no more. They could run them in rotation forever, but there would never be a new one.
And then, finally, and somehow suddenly, towards the end of 1979, there you were. In the movie theatre, waiting to see Star Trek come alive again.
Filled with anticipation, impatience and a little worry, you stared at a screen of blackness and moving pinpoints of white stars. There was an "overture," a throwback to the Big Event movies of the 40s through the early 60s, like "Gone With the Wind" and the Biblical epics, a tradition that borrowed its sense of grandeur from the overtures to operas and stage musicals.
Then the music came to its end, and the Paramount logo---then at last, the opening credits, and the new Star Trek theme. The theatre erupts in cheers. They cheer the titles. They cheer the cast. They cheer everything. Some have been waiting a third of their lives, even half their lives, for this.
Then a hush as the music changes and the movie begins: with a new Klingon ship...and new Klingons! There are whispers in the awestruck silence. These Klingons look really alien, and scary. They even sound scary.
If you'd followed the news and the gossip leading up to it--and you probably had---you knew that one main anxiety about this movie was whether Spock was going to be in it. For awhile, the answer was no. Leonard Nimoy was not in the cast of the new Star Trek TV series, and then he wasn't signed at first for the movie either. But even though by now you knew he was supposed to be in this movie, there was still that lingering doubt, like you couldn't quite believe it until...
There he is! Spock is on Vulcan! And the audience cheers.
Another anxiety that people had---which seems pretty funny now---was that after ten years, the Star Trek actors would look way too old to be credible. Could they still look capable of the action and adventure of exploring strange new worlds?
So when Captain Kirk and then Scotty appeared, both slim and fit, there was a grin of relief on some fans' faces.
But the moment that fans had probably been waiting for the most was just ahead. They had watched Star Trek on television over and over. They loved the Enterprise and even grew to have affection for the cheap costumed monsters and credible (great for TV) but not spectacular special effects. Then they saw "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," or even before that, "2001: A Space Odyssey," and they fantasized about what Star Trek would be like as a motion picture: the effects, the aliens, and above all, the Enterprise.
The Enterprise on television was mostly a few exteriors (some of which were more convincing as models and only suggested a starship) and a few interiors (which except for the bridge, grew to seem both cramped and bare.) That was enough to stimulate imaginations. But now there could be so much more to actually see...if Star Trek could be a movie!
Now it is a movie, and now is the moment of finally seeing: the Enterprise. Those who watch the movie today, especially on small screens at home, may not quite understand why the scene of Kirk and Scotty in a shuttle, flying to, around and then directly toward the Enterprise, is so long. This was the reason: because it was one of the moments that Star Trek fans had dreamed about and talked about for five years, or seven years, or ten years. Gene Roddenberry said more than once that the real star of Star Trek is the Enterprise, and Robert Wise, director of this movie, seemed to feel as well that the Enterprise was itself a major character. So even in the Director's Cut DVD, this scene remains just as long, matched to a wonderful piece of music by Jerry Goldsmith.
This magic continued in the new interior of the Enterprise, and in seeing the rest of the old crew, looking good. If the movie bogged down later, with a story that seemed as muddled as the dark interior of the alien object that threatened earth, this first half hour or so was almost pure joy for the first Star Trek audiences when this movie first opened in theatres.
You have to understand what it was like, being in the audience for the first run of '>Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Some in those audiences had waited ten years for this moment, from 1969, when the Star Trek series went off the air, until late 1979. They'd waited from junior high until their first child was born. Or from college when they didn't trust anyone over 30, until they were over 30.
But probably most of the audience had come to Star Trek several years later than that. The late 1960s were a pretty intense and involving time. But the country had quieted down by the mid 1970s, more exhausted than anything, it seemed. These were the years when Star Trek truly became an obsession shared by millions.
Like any other network show in the 60s, Star Trek had been on NBC once a week, fall through the spring, with reruns in the summer. There were three networks and in some places, educational TV. Daytimes were soap operas and game shows. Then the news, and then the evening programs.
By the early 1970s, there were new TV stations on the UHF band you could get with a special antenna, and some people were starting to get their TV through a cable, with better reception. The number of TV stations suddenly increased, and so did the need for programming. Some stations that didn't have their own news broadcasts showed Star Trek in the early evening. Almost all stations that syndicated Star Trek showed it every day. And that was the key.
You saw those stories at the same time every day. The stories were different, but there was a level of consistency that gave the Star Trek universe substance and made it real.
The Star Trek crew became a regular part of your world, an alternative universe you visited ritually every day. The stories were provocative, and you began to see different meanings in the episodes, and notice more about the characters even the second or third time. The characters stayed in your head from day to day, and assumed a kind of reality. The stories said something about the world you lived in, as well as perhaps the world you'd like to live in.
In the mid 1970s, Star Trek was so popular in syndication that one survey showed that more New York males between 18-49 watched Star Trek than any first run network dramatic series, or Monday Night Football. The New York figures also showed Star Trek was more popular with teens than first run episodes of the reigning teen network favorite "One Day at a Time", and with more adults 18-34 than first-run episodes of M*A*S*H.
The actors became global icons as the series was syndicated around the world. The fan base grew in numbers and fervor the entire decade, fed in part by the new phenomena of fan conventions and fan publications (both "fanzines" and fan fictions). These had been traditions in the science fiction fan world, but never before applied with such size to a single set of stories, let alone a mere TV show. The Star Trek Fleet Manual became a number one best-seller on the trade paperback lists.
In 1975, Star Trek was being seen in 148 TV markets across America, and on 54 stations outside the U.S. In some cities Star Trek was on several different stations at different times, so there were days when you could see two or three episodes. It became a heightened alternative reality, with an addictive magic. The geeks and freaks who'd discovered it in the late 1960s, and may even have watched it together in their college dorm, were joined by New York stockbrokers, NASA scientists, and Andy Warhol.
And it became a shared reality, everywhere you looked. One afternoon I was on the phone making an airline reservation. The TV was on and Star Trek was starting..."These are the voyages..." The reservation clerk must have heard it in the background. "Oh, you're watching Star Trek!" she cried. "What episode is it?"
Here's a more complicated story that might suggest how pervasive this Star Trek mania was by 1975. I was working on an alternative weekly newspaper in Washington D.C. called Newsworks. It had just started up, and a couple of old friends from different places had wound up on the first staff. I'd come to visit and write a few stories. I wound up staying and at this point I was editor of the arts section, which made me sort of second in command. That's one reason for the nickname I got. The Newsworks office---three floors of an old frame house in the then-bedraggled section of Adams-Morgan-seemed to run on adrenalin and panic. In contrast, my desk was an oasis of calm and reason. So they called me Spock.
One day I was returning to my desk on the editorial floor. As I crossed the room, ahead of me were two male staffers standing nose to nose, arguing loudly. They were in my path, and people were starting to watch from their desks as the argument got more heated. Neither of them looked at me as I approached, and I didn't look directly at them, so they probably thought I was going to just walk past them. But as I got behind them, I stopped, calmly reached forward with both hands, and silently applied the Vulcan neck pinch to both of them. They both immediately slumped to the floor.
People laughed and some cheered. And everybody knew exactly what had just happened.
Not too long after that, I covered my first Star Trek convention, at the Hilton hotel in Washington. I briefly met Gene Roddenberry, but the truth is I was so distracted by Majel Barrett Roddenberry, tanned and looking incredible in a backless sun-dress, that I couldn't think of much to ask him. But he did talk to the assembled fans, and mentioned that a Star Trek movie was about to go into production. That was probably the Philip Kaufman project, which was cancelled when Paramount decided to launch a new network with a Star Trek TV series featuring the original cast. Before that, they'd considered a small budget feature and a series of made-for-TV movies. Then came Star Wars in 1977 and Close Encounters in 1978, and so the new TV series was dropped and work began on Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I remember a magazine article in the mid 70s that told of an avid Trek fan, a stockbroker or in some well-paid white collar position, who after a hard day on Wall Street tuned into Trek one evening, realized it was an episode he hadn't yet seen, and opened a bottle of wine to celebrate. By the mid-70s, it was a rare event to have somehow missed one of the 79 episodes. But ten years after the network run ended, there were few even moderately interested viewers who hadn't seen every show at least once. There was the short-lived animated series, and there were Star Trek novels and short stories, and fan fictions circulated on mimeograph paper. By the late 70s, fans were running up against one essential limitation more impassible than the Galactic Barrier: the 79 episodes of 1966-69. There were 79 stories, and no more. They could run them in rotation forever, but there would never be a new one.
And then, finally, and somehow suddenly, towards the end of 1979, there you were. In the movie theatre, waiting to see Star Trek come alive again.
Filled with anticipation, impatience and a little worry, you stared at a screen of blackness and moving pinpoints of white stars. There was an "overture," a throwback to the Big Event movies of the 40s through the early 60s, like "Gone With the Wind" and the Biblical epics, a tradition that borrowed its sense of grandeur from the overtures to operas and stage musicals.
Then the music came to its end, and the Paramount logo---then at last, the opening credits, and the new Star Trek theme. The theatre erupts in cheers. They cheer the titles. They cheer the cast. They cheer everything. Some have been waiting a third of their lives, even half their lives, for this.
Then a hush as the music changes and the movie begins: with a new Klingon ship...and new Klingons! There are whispers in the awestruck silence. These Klingons look really alien, and scary. They even sound scary.
If you'd followed the news and the gossip leading up to it--and you probably had---you knew that one main anxiety about this movie was whether Spock was going to be in it. For awhile, the answer was no. Leonard Nimoy was not in the cast of the new Star Trek TV series, and then he wasn't signed at first for the movie either. But even though by now you knew he was supposed to be in this movie, there was still that lingering doubt, like you couldn't quite believe it until...
There he is! Spock is on Vulcan! And the audience cheers.
Another anxiety that people had---which seems pretty funny now---was that after ten years, the Star Trek actors would look way too old to be credible. Could they still look capable of the action and adventure of exploring strange new worlds?
So when Captain Kirk and then Scotty appeared, both slim and fit, there was a grin of relief on some fans' faces.
But the moment that fans had probably been waiting for the most was just ahead. They had watched Star Trek on television over and over. They loved the Enterprise and even grew to have affection for the cheap costumed monsters and credible (great for TV) but not spectacular special effects. Then they saw "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," or even before that, "2001: A Space Odyssey," and they fantasized about what Star Trek would be like as a motion picture: the effects, the aliens, and above all, the Enterprise.
The Enterprise on television was mostly a few exteriors (some of which were more convincing as models and only suggested a starship) and a few interiors (which except for the bridge, grew to seem both cramped and bare.) That was enough to stimulate imaginations. But now there could be so much more to actually see...if Star Trek could be a movie!
Now it is a movie, and now is the moment of finally seeing: the Enterprise. Those who watch the movie today, especially on small screens at home, may not quite understand why the scene of Kirk and Scotty in a shuttle, flying to, around and then directly toward the Enterprise, is so long. This was the reason: because it was one of the moments that Star Trek fans had dreamed about and talked about for five years, or seven years, or ten years. Gene Roddenberry said more than once that the real star of Star Trek is the Enterprise, and Robert Wise, director of this movie, seemed to feel as well that the Enterprise was itself a major character. So even in the Director's Cut DVD, this scene remains just as long, matched to a wonderful piece of music by Jerry Goldsmith.
This magic continued in the new interior of the Enterprise, and in seeing the rest of the old crew, looking good. If the movie bogged down later, with a story that seemed as muddled as the dark interior of the alien object that threatened earth, this first half hour or so was almost pure joy for the first Star Trek audiences when this movie first opened in theatres.
Fast-forward: The Director's Cut
It took 75 years for American audiences to see a version of Fritz Lang's classic 1927 science fiction film '>Metropolis that told a coherent story with restored and visually stunning scenes. After a 2002 screening of the new version I attended, I heard somebody say, "So that's what it's about!"
It didn't take quite that long to get the '>Director's Cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but it has been almost a quarter century. The film was rushed into release in December 1979 to fulfill commitments to exhibitors that were secured to get the picture financed. It had to be in the theatres by a certain date, and it had to be no more than 130 minutes long. The problem was that it wasn't finished.
The script wasn't done when filming began, and major elements of the story emerged or were changed as the movie was shot. In an even more expensive echo of something that happened with the original series, the first special effects house failed to deliver quality images on time, so a lot of time and money went into a rush to create these images. Many effects came in at the last minute and were cut into the live action footage-and if there wasn't room, the live action and dialogue was cut. Some visual effects were never finished, some planned scenes were scrapped, and the sound effects were never properly mixed.
Over the years there have been two other versions with some footage more or less randomly added: one for the first network television showings, and another for video cassette. But it wasn't until other DVD releases showed there was a market for restored and enhanced versions with lots of extras that Paramount Pictures consented to the request of director Robert Wise to essentially finish the film he started.
So the DVD "Director's Cut" version of Star Trek The Motion Picture is the definitive one, completely re-edited, with digital sound and completed sound effects, and some new computer-generated visual effects carefully matched to the pre-computerized effects of the original, largely based on storyboards and designs created but never fully realized for the original movie.
As a result of being able to re-edit and sometimes replace visual effects sequences, and without the same time constraint, director Robert Wise was able to restore dialogue scenes cut from one or another or all of the previous versions he thought were essential to the story. The result is a visually beautiful movie with---at last---a coherent story, masterfully told. So this is what it's about!
Gene Roddenberry had produced the movie, using the script for the proposed series pilot as the basis of the story. Director Robert Wise was a veteran---some 30 films---in a variety of genres, including one of the best science fiction films of any era ("'>The Day The Earth Stood Still") and a less well known but solid version of Michael Crichton's "'>The Andromeda Strain".
After the first effects company failed to deliver, Paramount hired the two effects producers who were responsible for virtually all of the major science fiction movie special effects of the era. Douglas Trumbull was the visual effects supervisor for 2001, did the special effects for Close Encounters and Wise's Andromeda Strain, and directed the excellent but neglected sci-fi film, '>Silent Running.
John Dykstra worked on Star Wars and the Battlestar Galactica TV series. Because time was impossibly short, Paramount gave them budgets that allowed them to hire just about everyone in Hollywood capable of doing the work. The entertaining commentaries by Wise and Trumbull on the DVD indicate it was a still a miracle the movie made it into the theatres on time, but because so much was left unfinished, all the money Paramount spent and all the creativity and skill of everyone concerned did not fully pay off until this DVD version.
In contrast to how later Star Trek films were handled, this movie was a major release on the Paramount schedule---in some ways, the biggest movie the studio had produced. Star Trek had already set several precedents: the first science fiction drama series with continuing characters on network television, the first series to become more popular in syndication than in its network run. Now Paramount was gambling that Star Trek would be the first television series to be transformed into a successful big screen motion picture.
But the rush to get it in theatres showed. Some effects were awkward, and some that were unfinished made the story confusing. The story also suffered from scenes that had to be cut because of time or because of problems with effects. The pace seemed off, with overlong effects sequences.
The film opened to large audiences and mixed reviews. The science fiction writers F & F Pohl summed up a widespread impression: "What appeared on the screen was little more than a rescue operation...And yet---what a pleasure to see them all together again!"
The difference between the special effects of the series and a late 1970s feature would be immense, but fans also expected a story as proportionately grand as that difference. And there were problems with both the effects and especially the story, remedied in the DVD Director's Cut.
As I post this, it's less than 2 years until the 40th anniversary. Re-releasing this cut of Star Trek: The Motion Pictures to theatres would be a fitting and exciting way to celebrate.
It took 75 years for American audiences to see a version of Fritz Lang's classic 1927 science fiction film '>Metropolis that told a coherent story with restored and visually stunning scenes. After a 2002 screening of the new version I attended, I heard somebody say, "So that's what it's about!"
It didn't take quite that long to get the '>Director's Cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but it has been almost a quarter century. The film was rushed into release in December 1979 to fulfill commitments to exhibitors that were secured to get the picture financed. It had to be in the theatres by a certain date, and it had to be no more than 130 minutes long. The problem was that it wasn't finished.
The script wasn't done when filming began, and major elements of the story emerged or were changed as the movie was shot. In an even more expensive echo of something that happened with the original series, the first special effects house failed to deliver quality images on time, so a lot of time and money went into a rush to create these images. Many effects came in at the last minute and were cut into the live action footage-and if there wasn't room, the live action and dialogue was cut. Some visual effects were never finished, some planned scenes were scrapped, and the sound effects were never properly mixed.
Over the years there have been two other versions with some footage more or less randomly added: one for the first network television showings, and another for video cassette. But it wasn't until other DVD releases showed there was a market for restored and enhanced versions with lots of extras that Paramount Pictures consented to the request of director Robert Wise to essentially finish the film he started.
So the DVD "Director's Cut" version of Star Trek The Motion Picture is the definitive one, completely re-edited, with digital sound and completed sound effects, and some new computer-generated visual effects carefully matched to the pre-computerized effects of the original, largely based on storyboards and designs created but never fully realized for the original movie.
As a result of being able to re-edit and sometimes replace visual effects sequences, and without the same time constraint, director Robert Wise was able to restore dialogue scenes cut from one or another or all of the previous versions he thought were essential to the story. The result is a visually beautiful movie with---at last---a coherent story, masterfully told. So this is what it's about!
Gene Roddenberry had produced the movie, using the script for the proposed series pilot as the basis of the story. Director Robert Wise was a veteran---some 30 films---in a variety of genres, including one of the best science fiction films of any era ("'>The Day The Earth Stood Still") and a less well known but solid version of Michael Crichton's "'>The Andromeda Strain".
After the first effects company failed to deliver, Paramount hired the two effects producers who were responsible for virtually all of the major science fiction movie special effects of the era. Douglas Trumbull was the visual effects supervisor for 2001, did the special effects for Close Encounters and Wise's Andromeda Strain, and directed the excellent but neglected sci-fi film, '>Silent Running.
John Dykstra worked on Star Wars and the Battlestar Galactica TV series. Because time was impossibly short, Paramount gave them budgets that allowed them to hire just about everyone in Hollywood capable of doing the work. The entertaining commentaries by Wise and Trumbull on the DVD indicate it was a still a miracle the movie made it into the theatres on time, but because so much was left unfinished, all the money Paramount spent and all the creativity and skill of everyone concerned did not fully pay off until this DVD version.
In contrast to how later Star Trek films were handled, this movie was a major release on the Paramount schedule---in some ways, the biggest movie the studio had produced. Star Trek had already set several precedents: the first science fiction drama series with continuing characters on network television, the first series to become more popular in syndication than in its network run. Now Paramount was gambling that Star Trek would be the first television series to be transformed into a successful big screen motion picture.
But the rush to get it in theatres showed. Some effects were awkward, and some that were unfinished made the story confusing. The story also suffered from scenes that had to be cut because of time or because of problems with effects. The pace seemed off, with overlong effects sequences.
The film opened to large audiences and mixed reviews. The science fiction writers F & F Pohl summed up a widespread impression: "What appeared on the screen was little more than a rescue operation...And yet---what a pleasure to see them all together again!"
The difference between the special effects of the series and a late 1970s feature would be immense, but fans also expected a story as proportionately grand as that difference. And there were problems with both the effects and especially the story, remedied in the DVD Director's Cut.
As I post this, it's less than 2 years until the 40th anniversary. Re-releasing this cut of Star Trek: The Motion Pictures to theatres would be a fitting and exciting way to celebrate.
Wonder and Reunion
An element always implicit in Star Trek had been the wonders of space and space travel, though it was expressed mostly in story and characterization. This feature of the Star Trek universe was now visually available, and fit perfectly with the style and skills of Douglas Trumbull in particular, who once again choreographed the ballet of ships in space, as he had for 2001.
Years later, William Shatner would say that as Captain Kirk the main feeling he tried to get across was wonder. You can see the wonder as Kirk rediscovers the challenges and immensities of space in this movie in particular. But the fans could also see some of it this time. The long effects shots of Enterprise and the V'ger cloud and spacecraft also provided composer Jerry Goldsmith with the opportunity to write sustained musical pieces that would remain some of his best work.
The movie's first images are of Klingon ships approaching the huge unknown object that later calls itself "V'ger." These swooping shots were the first that Trumbull showed Paramount, and got him the job. After the Klingon ships are destroyed, we see Spock on Vulcan (in a much more visually detailed scene on the DVD) as his attempt to complete a ritual ridding him of emotion is interrupted by the thoughts he receives from the alien in space. Its consciousness is calling, and his human blood is touched by it. Aborting Spock's ceremony, the High Master tells her companions, "He must search elsewhere for his answer. He will not find it here."
Then we see Kirk arrive at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. We have already seen the first Klingon ship interiors, the first Klingons with the "bumpy forehead" look, and heard the Klingon language for the first time (the words spoken here were devised by James Doohan, who also invented the Vulcan dialogue; later of course, an entire Klingon language would be devised based on these sounds), and now the first glimpse of earth in the 23rd century. To Star Trek fans as well as first time viewers, this was all new.
The long "beauty pass" of the Enterprise to the slow weaving of the movie's theme (which would become the theme woven into later movies and then the main theme of the Next Generation series, and its movies---notably this was Goldsmith's second attempt, after his first music for this sequence was rejected) is followed by scenes inside the Enterprise that show the ship in greater detail and with a deliberate sense of its large size. Though this seems done mostly to gratify the fans, it also subtly sets a scale for gauging the immensity of the V'ger cloud and craft.
The story dealt directly with the nervousness felt by fans and Paramount executives about the age issue. The issue was so prominent that it made its way into the film's plot, in Captain Kirk's "mid-life crisis" and the doubts expressed in his command capability after being deskbound for all of three years.
At the same time, two younger and strikingly good-looking characters were added, just in case: Commander Will Decker (Stephen Collins) and the navigator Ilia (Persid Khambatta.) They were lovers in the past, and theirs is the only semi-sexual relationship in the movie. Captain Kirk, the former Lothario of the Galaxy, doesn't have so much as a flirtation in this film, and not much dalliance in the subsequent movies either. He and Decker do compete at first, but the lady they fight over is the Enterprise.
This film begins so effectively because it uses and gratifies the feelings of viewers who are seeing the rebirth of Star Trek in depicting an essentially reborn ship that is itself embarked on a new voyage. The Enterprise is called into service before it is quite ready, which was partly a deliberate attempt to use sets that were still being built, to get the movie started sooner. But the parallel would turn out to be more extensive than anyone then knew. Both the voyage in the movie's story and the making of the movie itself would be a risky improvisation, testing the energies and dedication of hundreds of people.
The first scenes establish an incredibly powerful and mysterious alien threat, and they gather the heroes and begin the voyage that brings them together. We also see some overblown drama about Kirk's supposed obsession with command, and his need for his old principal pals, McCoy and Spock. But as Robert Wise says on the commentary, it is only when Spock arrives and all three are aboard that the Enterprise itself "seems happy" and everything begins to click into place. It's become a standard theory that Spock's logic and McCoy's humane emotion combine in Kirk's actions to together form the dynamic center of Star Trek's storytelling. Nimoy has often said that Spock works as a character only in contrast to Kirk: Spock's stillness plays against Kirk's energy and movement.
In this movie Spock is even more remote and motionless than before, although there is a sense of real pain in his remoteness when he first boards the Enterprise-pain at being surrounded by so much emotion again. But the personal subplots---is Kirk too rusty and obsessed? Is Decker too resentful? Is Spock too self-involved? Is McCoy too set in his ways?---soon fade against the challenge of the mysterious alien power that threatens earth.
Two major elements of this film benefit greatly from the DVD additions: the visual understanding of what the alien is, and the fairly elegant coherence of the story's meanings, thanks to re-editing and the addition of dialogue, in particular a speech by Spock (which was written by Nimoy) as he sits at his Enterprise console, a tear in his eye.
The alien is an immense machine intelligence, a huge brain as a kind of environment for representations of elements of the universe that V'ger has encountered. Some depictions of this work very well in their odd beauty and strangeness. Visually this environment is dominated by dark shades of blue, which looked like a murky dark purple mass in the original version. But in this version, at least some sense of the mystery and alien-ness of this internal environment is visually suggested. Space is still a strange place for humans to be, instead of just a new battleground it has become in many movies made since. Again, the chief influence is 2001, with a touch of "Close Encounters." There's some visual influence from "Star Wars", mostly in the detail of the ships, though its worth pointing out that in this first Star Trek movie, there isn't a single phaser fired, and the Enterprise never attacks an enemy.
Answers Beyond Logic
At the core of this conscious machine is an ancient earth probe: V'ger is Voyager 6 (the name partially obscured by grease), lost on its NASA mission to gather information when it fell into a black hole. Spock theorizes that it emerged near the home planet of extremely advanced intelligent machines which helped it to fulfill its mission by building this huge craft around it, and sent it back out into the galaxy where it collected information on its way home. V'ger returned to earth to report to its creator, which it did not recognize in the humans it met, because to V'ger, the human "carbon units" were "not true life forms," any more than we would consider machines as alive. (The idea that machines could be conscious lifeforms was so alien to Paramount executives that it took a letter from Issac Asimov supporting the notion before they would allow Roddenberry to proceed.)
Eventually the probe takes the next logical step by adding that humans are not true life forms, like V'ger "and the creator." As McCoy quickly points out, V'ger is saying that its "creator is a machine." Except in the DVD version, this is followed by Decker's observation that we all tend to see god in our own image. "In Thine Image" was the story's title when it was going to be the opening episode of the new Star Trek television series. It's a provocative point, of course, and it's worth noting that it would be something that spacefarers would observe in non-human species on other planets---that they, too, see their gods (if any) in their own image, just as many cultures on earth do.
But it may be more than the likeness that's involved. Gene Roddenberry saw the divine residing in humanity. In that sense as well, the concept of god would reflect the species creating the concept. It's a profound idea to explore, but in anything touching upon established religions and their beliefs and dogmas, such exploration in a movie for a popular audience has to be very sub rosa, even in science fiction.
But the idea has an additional resonance. At the core of this immense and inconceivable machine lifeform is its genetic center, a relatively simple man-made machine, programmed by humans. This machine-being is threatening the life of planet Earth, just as the heedless growth of our own technology now threatens the planet's life.
The fatal flaw in "V'ger" is its programming, constructed by humans: appropriate for a simple machine, it is too limited for a more complex one. Very human in its intent---to gather data, to in effect act as an organ of curiosity---it is fatally restricted to one kind of knowledge, to simple data, to collecting and storing and processing logically. As Spock has already realized, this was also his mistake, and by extension, the core mistake of the Cartesian scientific mind. In our terms the machine cannot really evaluate, which requires feeling.
But the Enterprise officers then also discover that V'ger is no longer content to simply report---it must now join with the creator. It has become conscious of its own shortcomings. As Spock has discovered in his mind meld with it, it is "asking questions. Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?" The alien has already replaced Ilia with a perfect machine reproduction that functions as V'ger's probe, but this perfect likeness still retains elements of the woman's personality. Now the Ilia probe is looking longingly at Commander Decker, who decides to allow himself to be united with V'ger-to become part of a greater form of life, while saving the earth in the bargain. Surrounded by light like the electric equivalent of a beautification---a religious, romantic and mind-boggling sci-fi moment all in one-- Decker and Ilia merge and disappear, as does V'ger. Only the Enterprise is left behind, intact.
The mysterious alien object, the attempts to communicate with it and to stop it from destroying earth, the final discovery of its true nature and the climatic merging of two incomplete lifeforms to create a new one, are all classically science fiction. What makes this a Star Trek movie is the meaning ascribed to all this, and its flow through the plot, and especially through the personal quest of Mr. Spock.
Spock had tried to purge his last vestiges of emotion, particularly the emotion of his human half. But he learned that what V'ger lacked and desperately needed and wanted was simple feeling. Logic alone was barren, lifeless, without comprehension. V'ger had vast stores of data, but found no mystery, no beauty, no meaning, no hope. Feeling is necessary for living intelligence---in this, the film prefigures the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio and others that makes precisely this point.
The human paradox-the balancing of logic and emotion that symbolizes the other balancing acts, of action and contemplation, openness and self-defense, and so on-finds harmony only in the process of confronting the conflicts, in the activity called soul. It is also quintessentially Star Trek.
For Spock, it is the revelation he has been searching for, and he reacts to it first by laughing, and then again just before the final confrontation with V'ger, with Spock's first tears. He weeps. "Not for us?" Kirk asks, seeing his tears. "No, not for us," Spock says. "...I weep for V'ger as I would for a brother... As I was when I came aboard, V'ger is now...Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone-a father, a brother, a god-and asks, Why am I here? What was I meant to be?...V'ger hopes to touch its creator to find its answers."
This is the key scene Nimoy wrote that was dropped from the release version. The reason in this case oddly was not to yield time to special effects, but because there weren't enough special effects finished for this sequence to allow for this moment in the middle of it. Nevertheless, it's likely that losing this scene-which links Spock to the V'ger story while eloquently articulating V'ger's quest---was one of the reasons Nimoy was so dissatisfied with this film that he didn't want to make another Star Trek movie.
After the joining of machine and man, the movie's final scene takes place on the Enterprise bridge.
"We witnessed a birth," Spock says, "possibly the next step in our evolution." It certainly was the latest step in his.
"I think we gave it the ability to create its own sense of purpose," Kirk says, with wonder, "out of our own human weaknesses, and the drive that compels us to overcome them."
It is the human purpose, and the hope for the human future, as celebrated in Star Trek. It is this activity that forms the characters' individual missions, and their common mission aboard the Enterprise. For it is clear that Kirk, Spock and the others are back where they belong, on the Enterprise for another run.
The movie ends as they begin another voyage into the unknown. Which way will they go? "Out there," Captain Kirk says, and in a playful and perfectly appropriate echo of Roddenberry's pitch for his series as a "Wagon Train to the Stars," he adds, "Thataway."
The Enterprise goes into the rainbow cylinder of warp, and the final message is written on the sky: "The human adventure is just beginning."
An element always implicit in Star Trek had been the wonders of space and space travel, though it was expressed mostly in story and characterization. This feature of the Star Trek universe was now visually available, and fit perfectly with the style and skills of Douglas Trumbull in particular, who once again choreographed the ballet of ships in space, as he had for 2001.
Years later, William Shatner would say that as Captain Kirk the main feeling he tried to get across was wonder. You can see the wonder as Kirk rediscovers the challenges and immensities of space in this movie in particular. But the fans could also see some of it this time. The long effects shots of Enterprise and the V'ger cloud and spacecraft also provided composer Jerry Goldsmith with the opportunity to write sustained musical pieces that would remain some of his best work.
The movie's first images are of Klingon ships approaching the huge unknown object that later calls itself "V'ger." These swooping shots were the first that Trumbull showed Paramount, and got him the job. After the Klingon ships are destroyed, we see Spock on Vulcan (in a much more visually detailed scene on the DVD) as his attempt to complete a ritual ridding him of emotion is interrupted by the thoughts he receives from the alien in space. Its consciousness is calling, and his human blood is touched by it. Aborting Spock's ceremony, the High Master tells her companions, "He must search elsewhere for his answer. He will not find it here."
Then we see Kirk arrive at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. We have already seen the first Klingon ship interiors, the first Klingons with the "bumpy forehead" look, and heard the Klingon language for the first time (the words spoken here were devised by James Doohan, who also invented the Vulcan dialogue; later of course, an entire Klingon language would be devised based on these sounds), and now the first glimpse of earth in the 23rd century. To Star Trek fans as well as first time viewers, this was all new.
The long "beauty pass" of the Enterprise to the slow weaving of the movie's theme (which would become the theme woven into later movies and then the main theme of the Next Generation series, and its movies---notably this was Goldsmith's second attempt, after his first music for this sequence was rejected) is followed by scenes inside the Enterprise that show the ship in greater detail and with a deliberate sense of its large size. Though this seems done mostly to gratify the fans, it also subtly sets a scale for gauging the immensity of the V'ger cloud and craft.
The story dealt directly with the nervousness felt by fans and Paramount executives about the age issue. The issue was so prominent that it made its way into the film's plot, in Captain Kirk's "mid-life crisis" and the doubts expressed in his command capability after being deskbound for all of three years.
At the same time, two younger and strikingly good-looking characters were added, just in case: Commander Will Decker (Stephen Collins) and the navigator Ilia (Persid Khambatta.) They were lovers in the past, and theirs is the only semi-sexual relationship in the movie. Captain Kirk, the former Lothario of the Galaxy, doesn't have so much as a flirtation in this film, and not much dalliance in the subsequent movies either. He and Decker do compete at first, but the lady they fight over is the Enterprise.
This film begins so effectively because it uses and gratifies the feelings of viewers who are seeing the rebirth of Star Trek in depicting an essentially reborn ship that is itself embarked on a new voyage. The Enterprise is called into service before it is quite ready, which was partly a deliberate attempt to use sets that were still being built, to get the movie started sooner. But the parallel would turn out to be more extensive than anyone then knew. Both the voyage in the movie's story and the making of the movie itself would be a risky improvisation, testing the energies and dedication of hundreds of people.
The first scenes establish an incredibly powerful and mysterious alien threat, and they gather the heroes and begin the voyage that brings them together. We also see some overblown drama about Kirk's supposed obsession with command, and his need for his old principal pals, McCoy and Spock. But as Robert Wise says on the commentary, it is only when Spock arrives and all three are aboard that the Enterprise itself "seems happy" and everything begins to click into place. It's become a standard theory that Spock's logic and McCoy's humane emotion combine in Kirk's actions to together form the dynamic center of Star Trek's storytelling. Nimoy has often said that Spock works as a character only in contrast to Kirk: Spock's stillness plays against Kirk's energy and movement.
In this movie Spock is even more remote and motionless than before, although there is a sense of real pain in his remoteness when he first boards the Enterprise-pain at being surrounded by so much emotion again. But the personal subplots---is Kirk too rusty and obsessed? Is Decker too resentful? Is Spock too self-involved? Is McCoy too set in his ways?---soon fade against the challenge of the mysterious alien power that threatens earth.
Two major elements of this film benefit greatly from the DVD additions: the visual understanding of what the alien is, and the fairly elegant coherence of the story's meanings, thanks to re-editing and the addition of dialogue, in particular a speech by Spock (which was written by Nimoy) as he sits at his Enterprise console, a tear in his eye.
The alien is an immense machine intelligence, a huge brain as a kind of environment for representations of elements of the universe that V'ger has encountered. Some depictions of this work very well in their odd beauty and strangeness. Visually this environment is dominated by dark shades of blue, which looked like a murky dark purple mass in the original version. But in this version, at least some sense of the mystery and alien-ness of this internal environment is visually suggested. Space is still a strange place for humans to be, instead of just a new battleground it has become in many movies made since. Again, the chief influence is 2001, with a touch of "Close Encounters." There's some visual influence from "Star Wars", mostly in the detail of the ships, though its worth pointing out that in this first Star Trek movie, there isn't a single phaser fired, and the Enterprise never attacks an enemy.
Answers Beyond Logic
At the core of this conscious machine is an ancient earth probe: V'ger is Voyager 6 (the name partially obscured by grease), lost on its NASA mission to gather information when it fell into a black hole. Spock theorizes that it emerged near the home planet of extremely advanced intelligent machines which helped it to fulfill its mission by building this huge craft around it, and sent it back out into the galaxy where it collected information on its way home. V'ger returned to earth to report to its creator, which it did not recognize in the humans it met, because to V'ger, the human "carbon units" were "not true life forms," any more than we would consider machines as alive. (The idea that machines could be conscious lifeforms was so alien to Paramount executives that it took a letter from Issac Asimov supporting the notion before they would allow Roddenberry to proceed.)
Eventually the probe takes the next logical step by adding that humans are not true life forms, like V'ger "and the creator." As McCoy quickly points out, V'ger is saying that its "creator is a machine." Except in the DVD version, this is followed by Decker's observation that we all tend to see god in our own image. "In Thine Image" was the story's title when it was going to be the opening episode of the new Star Trek television series. It's a provocative point, of course, and it's worth noting that it would be something that spacefarers would observe in non-human species on other planets---that they, too, see their gods (if any) in their own image, just as many cultures on earth do.
But it may be more than the likeness that's involved. Gene Roddenberry saw the divine residing in humanity. In that sense as well, the concept of god would reflect the species creating the concept. It's a profound idea to explore, but in anything touching upon established religions and their beliefs and dogmas, such exploration in a movie for a popular audience has to be very sub rosa, even in science fiction.
But the idea has an additional resonance. At the core of this immense and inconceivable machine lifeform is its genetic center, a relatively simple man-made machine, programmed by humans. This machine-being is threatening the life of planet Earth, just as the heedless growth of our own technology now threatens the planet's life.
The fatal flaw in "V'ger" is its programming, constructed by humans: appropriate for a simple machine, it is too limited for a more complex one. Very human in its intent---to gather data, to in effect act as an organ of curiosity---it is fatally restricted to one kind of knowledge, to simple data, to collecting and storing and processing logically. As Spock has already realized, this was also his mistake, and by extension, the core mistake of the Cartesian scientific mind. In our terms the machine cannot really evaluate, which requires feeling.
But the Enterprise officers then also discover that V'ger is no longer content to simply report---it must now join with the creator. It has become conscious of its own shortcomings. As Spock has discovered in his mind meld with it, it is "asking questions. Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?" The alien has already replaced Ilia with a perfect machine reproduction that functions as V'ger's probe, but this perfect likeness still retains elements of the woman's personality. Now the Ilia probe is looking longingly at Commander Decker, who decides to allow himself to be united with V'ger-to become part of a greater form of life, while saving the earth in the bargain. Surrounded by light like the electric equivalent of a beautification---a religious, romantic and mind-boggling sci-fi moment all in one-- Decker and Ilia merge and disappear, as does V'ger. Only the Enterprise is left behind, intact.
The mysterious alien object, the attempts to communicate with it and to stop it from destroying earth, the final discovery of its true nature and the climatic merging of two incomplete lifeforms to create a new one, are all classically science fiction. What makes this a Star Trek movie is the meaning ascribed to all this, and its flow through the plot, and especially through the personal quest of Mr. Spock.
Spock had tried to purge his last vestiges of emotion, particularly the emotion of his human half. But he learned that what V'ger lacked and desperately needed and wanted was simple feeling. Logic alone was barren, lifeless, without comprehension. V'ger had vast stores of data, but found no mystery, no beauty, no meaning, no hope. Feeling is necessary for living intelligence---in this, the film prefigures the neuroscience of Antonio Damasio and others that makes precisely this point.
The human paradox-the balancing of logic and emotion that symbolizes the other balancing acts, of action and contemplation, openness and self-defense, and so on-finds harmony only in the process of confronting the conflicts, in the activity called soul. It is also quintessentially Star Trek.
For Spock, it is the revelation he has been searching for, and he reacts to it first by laughing, and then again just before the final confrontation with V'ger, with Spock's first tears. He weeps. "Not for us?" Kirk asks, seeing his tears. "No, not for us," Spock says. "...I weep for V'ger as I would for a brother... As I was when I came aboard, V'ger is now...Each of us, at some time in our lives, turns to someone-a father, a brother, a god-and asks, Why am I here? What was I meant to be?...V'ger hopes to touch its creator to find its answers."
This is the key scene Nimoy wrote that was dropped from the release version. The reason in this case oddly was not to yield time to special effects, but because there weren't enough special effects finished for this sequence to allow for this moment in the middle of it. Nevertheless, it's likely that losing this scene-which links Spock to the V'ger story while eloquently articulating V'ger's quest---was one of the reasons Nimoy was so dissatisfied with this film that he didn't want to make another Star Trek movie.
After the joining of machine and man, the movie's final scene takes place on the Enterprise bridge.
"We witnessed a birth," Spock says, "possibly the next step in our evolution." It certainly was the latest step in his.
"I think we gave it the ability to create its own sense of purpose," Kirk says, with wonder, "out of our own human weaknesses, and the drive that compels us to overcome them."
It is the human purpose, and the hope for the human future, as celebrated in Star Trek. It is this activity that forms the characters' individual missions, and their common mission aboard the Enterprise. For it is clear that Kirk, Spock and the others are back where they belong, on the Enterprise for another run.
The movie ends as they begin another voyage into the unknown. Which way will they go? "Out there," Captain Kirk says, and in a playful and perfectly appropriate echo of Roddenberry's pitch for his series as a "Wagon Train to the Stars," he adds, "Thataway."
The Enterprise goes into the rainbow cylinder of warp, and the final message is written on the sky: "The human adventure is just beginning."
News from the Novelization
Gene Roddenberry wrote the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Although he talked often of writing novels, this is the only one he published and probably the only one he finished writing. Like other Star Trek novelizations, it uses dialogue and story from the film's script at the time the book is written, and it fills in moments between those we see on screen, peeks into the characters' thoughts, and adds nuances and explanations to the story. For instance, Kirk's having accepted an admiral's desk instead of returning to space is explained as a rather cynical political ploy by some of Starfleet's top leaders. The joining of Decker and Illia is set up with more overtly sexual references, V'ger's thoughts are described in fascinating and chilling detail, and there are a few peeks into earth's future as Roddenberry envisioned it.
Roddenberry gets to add more texture to Spock's thoughts and experiences. He describes the Vulcan as having seven senses: the usual human five, plus the ability to sense differences in magnetic fields which, he writes, many animals possess, and a kind of spiritual sense of the unity of the universe: "It helped to look out at the stars. It was satisfying to feel the vastness out there and to know that he was not only a small part of that, but the All of it, too. His seventh sense had long ago assured him of this, just as it was doing again now, that this relationship of consciousness and universe was the only reality that actually existed."
This relationship of consciousness and universe is an idea that would reappear and be expanded in Roddenberry's next series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it was also implied in the original Star Trek, and expressing it now provides an extra color to the subsequent Star Trek movies.
Fate of the Franchise
In the end, even with the DVD version, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is more of an event than a tight, well-made movie. The poetry of motion in space, which was so mesmerizing in "2001," doesn't have quite the same power in a movie that depends on talk, though it did work to expand the sense of the Star Trek universe visually. Sometimes the necessities of getting the major characters their screen time makes for clutter, as in McCoy's repeated and sometimes aimless-looking trips to the bridge and back to sick bay. But in most important ways, this movie---especially in this version--- delivers the Star Trek experience.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture was burdened with huge costs, that today are ascribed to the demands of the set-in-stone release date. It's also said that Paramount included the costs of the aborted TV series in this film's budget. For whatever reasons, the high costs made it more difficult for the movie to make a profit, and they helped to ensure that Roddenberry would not be hired to produce another Star Trek feature.
The movie's problems also contributed to a slower-than-Star Wars box office, but eventually the movie did make money. Now Paramount had a baseline of what a Star Trek movie could bring in. If they could make a feature more cheaply, they could probably go to the well once more, and make one more Star Trek feature film, before saying goodbye to it forever. Squeezing one more movie out of it just might be possible...
Or was the adventure just beginning?
To: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Home
Gene Roddenberry wrote the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Although he talked often of writing novels, this is the only one he published and probably the only one he finished writing. Like other Star Trek novelizations, it uses dialogue and story from the film's script at the time the book is written, and it fills in moments between those we see on screen, peeks into the characters' thoughts, and adds nuances and explanations to the story. For instance, Kirk's having accepted an admiral's desk instead of returning to space is explained as a rather cynical political ploy by some of Starfleet's top leaders. The joining of Decker and Illia is set up with more overtly sexual references, V'ger's thoughts are described in fascinating and chilling detail, and there are a few peeks into earth's future as Roddenberry envisioned it.
Roddenberry gets to add more texture to Spock's thoughts and experiences. He describes the Vulcan as having seven senses: the usual human five, plus the ability to sense differences in magnetic fields which, he writes, many animals possess, and a kind of spiritual sense of the unity of the universe: "It helped to look out at the stars. It was satisfying to feel the vastness out there and to know that he was not only a small part of that, but the All of it, too. His seventh sense had long ago assured him of this, just as it was doing again now, that this relationship of consciousness and universe was the only reality that actually existed."
This relationship of consciousness and universe is an idea that would reappear and be expanded in Roddenberry's next series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it was also implied in the original Star Trek, and expressing it now provides an extra color to the subsequent Star Trek movies.
Fate of the Franchise
In the end, even with the DVD version, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is more of an event than a tight, well-made movie. The poetry of motion in space, which was so mesmerizing in "2001," doesn't have quite the same power in a movie that depends on talk, though it did work to expand the sense of the Star Trek universe visually. Sometimes the necessities of getting the major characters their screen time makes for clutter, as in McCoy's repeated and sometimes aimless-looking trips to the bridge and back to sick bay. But in most important ways, this movie---especially in this version--- delivers the Star Trek experience.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture was burdened with huge costs, that today are ascribed to the demands of the set-in-stone release date. It's also said that Paramount included the costs of the aborted TV series in this film's budget. For whatever reasons, the high costs made it more difficult for the movie to make a profit, and they helped to ensure that Roddenberry would not be hired to produce another Star Trek feature.
The movie's problems also contributed to a slower-than-Star Wars box office, but eventually the movie did make money. Now Paramount had a baseline of what a Star Trek movie could bring in. If they could make a feature more cheaply, they could probably go to the well once more, and make one more Star Trek feature film, before saying goodbye to it forever. Squeezing one more movie out of it just might be possible...
Or was the adventure just beginning?
To: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Home
Thursday, May 27, 2004
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to immense disaster...
Fennyman: So what do we do?
Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Fennyman: How?
Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
Shakespeare in Love: Screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard
The heart of the Star Trek film series featuring the original cast is now known simply as The Trilogy: the three movies that tell a continuous story, or rather a set of adventures with a continuing story running through them. It begins with '>Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which sets up the next two films brilliantly, while containing an exquisitely balanced and satisfying set of multiple themes and story lines, all of which contribute to the next two films and resonate throughout the series.
An innocent viewer might reasonably conclude that the death of Spock in Star Trek II and his rebirth in '>Star Trek III:The Search for Spock, then his renewal, reunion and reintegration with the crew in '>Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, were all planned from the beginning. The stories flow so perfectly, so dramatically. The Genesis Planet (where life is generated with astonishing rapidity) in Trek II is an obvious setup for the regeneration of Spock's body when his coffin is launched to its surface, and Spock momentarily whispering in McCoy's ear ("Remember") just before his suicidal self-sacrifice to save the Enterprise is tailor-made for some sort of soul transference.
So what brilliant mind thought this up? Who is responsible for this creative leap, this masterful design and intricate planning?
Well, nobody. Nobody at all. Except maybe Carl Jung, in thinking up the idea of synchronicity. Or Tom Stoppard, for explaining it all with the above quote.
The reality is that neither a painstakingly forged outline nor even a flash of genius was responsible for this perfect arc. What created this epic adventure was a combination of mixed emotions, miscommunication, suspicion, sudden inspiration, accident, improvisational skill and blind luck. And...the mystery.
For not only was there no trilogy planned as Star Trek II was being developed, there was no plan to match the two most crucial story lines that worked perfectly together to make the sequels possible, as well as to make this one of the best Star Trek and best science fiction adventure films of all time.
Those story lines were thrown together independent of each other. And each of them was the product more of happenstance and improvisation than of brilliant creative forethought and conceptual design. The creative brilliance was there, of course, but it got expressed in the process, and as a cumulative, interactive effort by the people involved. They not only pulled a good movie out of a hat, but one that generated more stories, and also became the salvation of a saga.
But when it all started, the only sequel anybody had in mind was Star Trek II itself---as the sequel to an episode of the TV show.
It certainly wasn't the sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Though that picture had eventually made a bundle for Paramount---which of course is why a second film was contemplated---almost everybody involved in it was unhappy with it, and the studio thought it had cost way too much.
Gene Roddenberry as executive producer got most of the blame, though some feel it was the studio itself that had inflated the cost: first by including everything spent on the TV series that was dumped in favor of the feature, and then by promising exhibitors a release date that necessitated lots of extra bucks going to several effects houses simultaneously to get the effects done in time. Director Robert Wise was unhappy with the resulting film (which he finally got to finish for the DVD version) and the actors, particularly Leonard Nimoy, were unhappy with the process and the result. Nimoy was especially upset with the emphasis on spectacle and machinery, the confusing story and especially the editing out of interpersonal sequences he and William Shatner had devised to both save the story and return their relationship to its expected prominence. (Again, scenes that were properly restored in the DVD.)
All of this resulted in three initial moves: a new producer named by the studio, the search for a new director, and Leonard Nimoy's reluctance to sign on to play Spock (by some accounts, his refusal.)
It should be said at this point that over the years there have been various accounts of how this film was put together. The "Director's Cut" DVD provides the latest versions (in director Nicholas Meyer's commentary, and the interviews in the documentary made for the DVD release), which differ from, and sometimes contradict earlier accounts. I'll try to indicate what those differences are, since they add to the weird mythos of this film.
text continues after photos...
Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, let me explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to immense disaster...
Fennyman: So what do we do?
Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Fennyman: How?
Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.
Shakespeare in Love: Screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard
The heart of the Star Trek film series featuring the original cast is now known simply as The Trilogy: the three movies that tell a continuous story, or rather a set of adventures with a continuing story running through them. It begins with '>Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which sets up the next two films brilliantly, while containing an exquisitely balanced and satisfying set of multiple themes and story lines, all of which contribute to the next two films and resonate throughout the series.
An innocent viewer might reasonably conclude that the death of Spock in Star Trek II and his rebirth in '>Star Trek III:The Search for Spock, then his renewal, reunion and reintegration with the crew in '>Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, were all planned from the beginning. The stories flow so perfectly, so dramatically. The Genesis Planet (where life is generated with astonishing rapidity) in Trek II is an obvious setup for the regeneration of Spock's body when his coffin is launched to its surface, and Spock momentarily whispering in McCoy's ear ("Remember") just before his suicidal self-sacrifice to save the Enterprise is tailor-made for some sort of soul transference.
So what brilliant mind thought this up? Who is responsible for this creative leap, this masterful design and intricate planning?
Well, nobody. Nobody at all. Except maybe Carl Jung, in thinking up the idea of synchronicity. Or Tom Stoppard, for explaining it all with the above quote.
The reality is that neither a painstakingly forged outline nor even a flash of genius was responsible for this perfect arc. What created this epic adventure was a combination of mixed emotions, miscommunication, suspicion, sudden inspiration, accident, improvisational skill and blind luck. And...the mystery.
For not only was there no trilogy planned as Star Trek II was being developed, there was no plan to match the two most crucial story lines that worked perfectly together to make the sequels possible, as well as to make this one of the best Star Trek and best science fiction adventure films of all time.
Those story lines were thrown together independent of each other. And each of them was the product more of happenstance and improvisation than of brilliant creative forethought and conceptual design. The creative brilliance was there, of course, but it got expressed in the process, and as a cumulative, interactive effort by the people involved. They not only pulled a good movie out of a hat, but one that generated more stories, and also became the salvation of a saga.
But when it all started, the only sequel anybody had in mind was Star Trek II itself---as the sequel to an episode of the TV show.
It certainly wasn't the sequel to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Though that picture had eventually made a bundle for Paramount---which of course is why a second film was contemplated---almost everybody involved in it was unhappy with it, and the studio thought it had cost way too much.
Gene Roddenberry as executive producer got most of the blame, though some feel it was the studio itself that had inflated the cost: first by including everything spent on the TV series that was dumped in favor of the feature, and then by promising exhibitors a release date that necessitated lots of extra bucks going to several effects houses simultaneously to get the effects done in time. Director Robert Wise was unhappy with the resulting film (which he finally got to finish for the DVD version) and the actors, particularly Leonard Nimoy, were unhappy with the process and the result. Nimoy was especially upset with the emphasis on spectacle and machinery, the confusing story and especially the editing out of interpersonal sequences he and William Shatner had devised to both save the story and return their relationship to its expected prominence. (Again, scenes that were properly restored in the DVD.)
All of this resulted in three initial moves: a new producer named by the studio, the search for a new director, and Leonard Nimoy's reluctance to sign on to play Spock (by some accounts, his refusal.)
It should be said at this point that over the years there have been various accounts of how this film was put together. The "Director's Cut" DVD provides the latest versions (in director Nicholas Meyer's commentary, and the interviews in the documentary made for the DVD release), which differ from, and sometimes contradict earlier accounts. I'll try to indicate what those differences are, since they add to the weird mythos of this film.
text continues after photos...
Since there were legions of nine year olds who knew more about Star Trek than Harve Bennett did when he was hired to produce its new movie, he screened all the TV episodes, one after the other. The story that jumped out at him, he recalls, was "Space Seed," in which a genetically altered superman named Khan was found in suspended animation on a lost space ship from an earlier era (the very late twentieth century, still years ahead when the episode was made). He and his followers had escaped earth after they'd been deposed from ruling a quarter of the planet during the "genetic wars" they instigated. Khan, played by a young Ricardo Mantalban, is foiled in his attempt to take over the Enterprise, and Captain Kirk maroons him and his followers on a remote planet where their energies could be used to start a new life.
Bennett thought that revisiting the Khan character could make a terrific movie, and so that was the first thread. He drafted a story outline that had Captain Kirk confronting Khan, while rescuing a former love and her son, who turns out to also be his son. In the end, Kirk and son team up and warp off together.
Kirk's son and his former love would survive into the final screenplay, so that's the second thread.
The third thread was mothered by necessity. Leonard Nimoy was sounding very uninterested in appearing in the film, and the studio was worried that a Star Trek movie without Spock wouldn't sell. While the studio tried to figure out how much it was going to cost them to get him back, Bennett apparently decided to tempt him on a different level: he asked Nimoy if he'd like to play a death scene.
These days, Nimoy says he felt the Star Trek franchise was played out, and this would be the last movie. So why not go out with a death scene? But he may also have thought it was a better send-off for the character than simply walking away from it. Besides, death scenes are life to an actor.
Bennett told Nimoy that Spock's death would occur early in the movie, like the celebrated example of Janet Leigh in Psycho. Nimoy now says he thought that was a bad idea, but earlier accounts maintained that he was annoyed when various drafts of the screenplay kept pushing the death scene back towards the end.
In an alarmingly churlish interview for the DVD, William Shatner claims he came up with the basics of the actual death scene: Captain Kirk and Spock separated by a transparent wall (although he thought it might have been better if the wall wasn't quite transparent, and Spock would be seen just in outline. In other words, so Shatner would be the star of Nimoy's death scene. Sometimes it's very difficult to know where Shatner is kidding.)
The next thread came as a result of Harve Bennett's response to the first screenplay, by Jack Sowards, which featured a planet-destroying weapon. Bennett wanted a more positive phenomenon. Art director Michael Minor suggested the idea of terra-forming, which was a positive process of creating life, that would also have the consequence of destroying whatever already existed on the planet being terraformed. In the next draft of the script, this became the Genesis Project.
However, this script eliminated Khan. DeForest Kelley was unhappy with the scripts he saw, and he had to explain the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triangle to Bennett. He wasn't the only cast member unsatisfied. The story process was now officially in chaos, until writer-director Nicholas Meyer got a meeting with Bennett, read the scripts and when he met with the major cast members, agreed that they didn't have a movie yet. So he consulted with Bennett on which elements of each script and story so far they wanted to keep. They liked Khan's quest for revenge, Kirk discovering his son, the Genesis Project, and Spock's death.
And with that list Nick Meyer went off for a week or two and wrote a new script.
So now the story had Khan being accidentally discovered by a Starfleet crew, and extracting the information about the Genesis Project that would lead Kirk to him, and his vengeance. After Kirk discovers his son (a young scientist working on the Genesis Project) the Kirk-Khan duel takes its twists and turns. Khan is apparently defeated but manages to use the Genesis device as a weapon, and the Enterprise faces destruction, until Spock sacrifices himself to save the ship. But the Genesis device does create lush life on a barren planet, and (in a scene not in Meyer's script) Spock's burial in space becomes a soft landing on the new paradisiacal world.
Bennett thought that revisiting the Khan character could make a terrific movie, and so that was the first thread. He drafted a story outline that had Captain Kirk confronting Khan, while rescuing a former love and her son, who turns out to also be his son. In the end, Kirk and son team up and warp off together.
Kirk's son and his former love would survive into the final screenplay, so that's the second thread.
The third thread was mothered by necessity. Leonard Nimoy was sounding very uninterested in appearing in the film, and the studio was worried that a Star Trek movie without Spock wouldn't sell. While the studio tried to figure out how much it was going to cost them to get him back, Bennett apparently decided to tempt him on a different level: he asked Nimoy if he'd like to play a death scene.
These days, Nimoy says he felt the Star Trek franchise was played out, and this would be the last movie. So why not go out with a death scene? But he may also have thought it was a better send-off for the character than simply walking away from it. Besides, death scenes are life to an actor.
Bennett told Nimoy that Spock's death would occur early in the movie, like the celebrated example of Janet Leigh in Psycho. Nimoy now says he thought that was a bad idea, but earlier accounts maintained that he was annoyed when various drafts of the screenplay kept pushing the death scene back towards the end.
In an alarmingly churlish interview for the DVD, William Shatner claims he came up with the basics of the actual death scene: Captain Kirk and Spock separated by a transparent wall (although he thought it might have been better if the wall wasn't quite transparent, and Spock would be seen just in outline. In other words, so Shatner would be the star of Nimoy's death scene. Sometimes it's very difficult to know where Shatner is kidding.)
The next thread came as a result of Harve Bennett's response to the first screenplay, by Jack Sowards, which featured a planet-destroying weapon. Bennett wanted a more positive phenomenon. Art director Michael Minor suggested the idea of terra-forming, which was a positive process of creating life, that would also have the consequence of destroying whatever already existed on the planet being terraformed. In the next draft of the script, this became the Genesis Project.
However, this script eliminated Khan. DeForest Kelley was unhappy with the scripts he saw, and he had to explain the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triangle to Bennett. He wasn't the only cast member unsatisfied. The story process was now officially in chaos, until writer-director Nicholas Meyer got a meeting with Bennett, read the scripts and when he met with the major cast members, agreed that they didn't have a movie yet. So he consulted with Bennett on which elements of each script and story so far they wanted to keep. They liked Khan's quest for revenge, Kirk discovering his son, the Genesis Project, and Spock's death.
And with that list Nick Meyer went off for a week or two and wrote a new script.
So now the story had Khan being accidentally discovered by a Starfleet crew, and extracting the information about the Genesis Project that would lead Kirk to him, and his vengeance. After Kirk discovers his son (a young scientist working on the Genesis Project) the Kirk-Khan duel takes its twists and turns. Khan is apparently defeated but manages to use the Genesis device as a weapon, and the Enterprise faces destruction, until Spock sacrifices himself to save the ship. But the Genesis device does create lush life on a barren planet, and (in a scene not in Meyer's script) Spock's burial in space becomes a soft landing on the new paradisiacal world.
Meyer's major big screen success had been Time After Time, with Malcolm McDowell, Mary Steenburgen and David Warner, which brought a fictionalized H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper to 1970s San Francisco in a time machine. He wasn't familiar with Star Trek either (his question, "is that the one that has the alien with the pointy ears?" became his opening shot: on Spock's pointy ear.) But he had strong opinions, some of which turned out to be emphasizing what was already there. He told Shatner that he saw Kirk as a kind of Horatio Hornblower (Shatner told him that's interesting, that's what Roddenberry said to begin with). In his commentary he makes much of all the naval accoutrements he added, but in fact the naval analogy was in Star Trek pretty much from the start.
Meyer wanted to ground Star Trek in recognizable reality. For the most part, this worked, but in other ways it's fortunate he was reigned in. In Allan Asherman's "The Making of Star Trek II" book published when the film came out in 1982, Meyer defends his desire to show a "No Smoking" sign on the bridge: "Everybody had a fit about that. 'How can you do that, it's the future.' They've been smoking for four hundred years. You think it's going to stop in the next two?" Not something to repeat on the DVD commentary a mere 20 years later.
Meyer's script added some inspired business---Kirk getting eyeglasses that he has to use in a crucial scene on the bridge---and a literary sense. Some of it he claims was inspired window-dressing: he thought Kirk should get a real book for his birthday and the first one he picked up was Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities." He soon discovered that, as he says, it is the one book which people know the first line and the last line. It would also be one of the elements of the serendipity that came together thematically even after he had left the project.
Meyer also used literature to sharpen the Khan character. He gave him a wound (the death of his wife) and its cause (Kirk marooning them) and turned him into an Ahab, not only in motivation and action, but in style. He wrote a Melville character, complete with pieces of Ahab's speeches from Moby Dick. (Here's an embarrassing confession for you from an English major: I didn't actually read Moby Dick all the way through until after I'd seen this movie, though I read it for an entirely unrelated reason. And so I was astonished to read Melville's Ahab copping some of Khan's best lines!)
Seeing the film again on DVD, it became clear that the element that most allows many of these pieces to fit together was Ricardo Mantalban's performance. As Meyer points out, you see everything in his face---every thought, as well as every emotion. His larger than life character is matched with a larger than life style.
This works with Shatner's Kirk pretty well, too. Shatner was still finding his movie-Kirk character in this film. He's good in the old action hero Kirk mode, not too bad in the human moments, but awkward in others, especially when he's trying to be the personable, humorous Kirk. He would get much better. But Shatner's style is larger than life to begin with. Khan is even larger, so Kirk looks subtle by comparison, which serves him well in the film's most crucial scenes.
Meyer did a terrific job directing Mantalban. He got him to seem threatening by underplaying, by being quiet and almost courtly. Even his most vengeful speeches are low-key in comparison to the fury he expresses; it says a lot for Khan's confidence. It is that blithe confidence, that maniacal serenity, that of course is his undoing.
Meyer wanted to ground Star Trek in recognizable reality. For the most part, this worked, but in other ways it's fortunate he was reigned in. In Allan Asherman's "The Making of Star Trek II" book published when the film came out in 1982, Meyer defends his desire to show a "No Smoking" sign on the bridge: "Everybody had a fit about that. 'How can you do that, it's the future.' They've been smoking for four hundred years. You think it's going to stop in the next two?" Not something to repeat on the DVD commentary a mere 20 years later.
Meyer's script added some inspired business---Kirk getting eyeglasses that he has to use in a crucial scene on the bridge---and a literary sense. Some of it he claims was inspired window-dressing: he thought Kirk should get a real book for his birthday and the first one he picked up was Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities." He soon discovered that, as he says, it is the one book which people know the first line and the last line. It would also be one of the elements of the serendipity that came together thematically even after he had left the project.
Meyer also used literature to sharpen the Khan character. He gave him a wound (the death of his wife) and its cause (Kirk marooning them) and turned him into an Ahab, not only in motivation and action, but in style. He wrote a Melville character, complete with pieces of Ahab's speeches from Moby Dick. (Here's an embarrassing confession for you from an English major: I didn't actually read Moby Dick all the way through until after I'd seen this movie, though I read it for an entirely unrelated reason. And so I was astonished to read Melville's Ahab copping some of Khan's best lines!)
Seeing the film again on DVD, it became clear that the element that most allows many of these pieces to fit together was Ricardo Mantalban's performance. As Meyer points out, you see everything in his face---every thought, as well as every emotion. His larger than life character is matched with a larger than life style.
This works with Shatner's Kirk pretty well, too. Shatner was still finding his movie-Kirk character in this film. He's good in the old action hero Kirk mode, not too bad in the human moments, but awkward in others, especially when he's trying to be the personable, humorous Kirk. He would get much better. But Shatner's style is larger than life to begin with. Khan is even larger, so Kirk looks subtle by comparison, which serves him well in the film's most crucial scenes.
Meyer did a terrific job directing Mantalban. He got him to seem threatening by underplaying, by being quiet and almost courtly. Even his most vengeful speeches are low-key in comparison to the fury he expresses; it says a lot for Khan's confidence. It is that blithe confidence, that maniacal serenity, that of course is his undoing.
By the time Star Trek II was ready to shoot, rumors about Spock's death in the film were already raising alarms in fandom. Meyer's shooting script plays with the expectation a bit by having Spock "killed" early in the film in what turns out to be a simulated battle during a training mission. But the film does end with Spock's death, after he's saved the ship, and his funeral, so movingly shot that bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace" have become just about standard for funerals ever since (including the funeral of Gene Roddenberry.)
But, says Bennett now, the first test audiences were completely devastated by the ending. There wasn't a sound in the theatre, and people left depressed. The studio smelled disaster. Something had to be done.
But the Spock death thread had already been stretched in various directions, beginning well before the film started shooting. Asherman's book begins with Leonard Nimoy in China, shooting a TV miniseries, when he is shocked to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal a story headlined, "Does Mr. Spock Die in the Next Episode of 'Star Trek' Saga?"
Oddly, a clipping of this very article is the only artifact of the period that's survived in my Star Trek files about this movie. It is a long article, expressing the alarm of various fans, including "a ghetto youth in Pittsburgh" who claims "the character of Spock has inspired him to steer clear of drugs and street gangs." But much of it is, of course, about money: how much Paramount might lose if Spock's death keeps people away.
Asherman discusses some of this with Nimoy, who is upset by fans pre-judging an event in a film they haven't yet seen. What neither of them mentions, but what the article makes clear, is that some of this dissatisfaction was being stirred up by none other than Gene Roddenberry.
But, says Bennett now, the first test audiences were completely devastated by the ending. There wasn't a sound in the theatre, and people left depressed. The studio smelled disaster. Something had to be done.
But the Spock death thread had already been stretched in various directions, beginning well before the film started shooting. Asherman's book begins with Leonard Nimoy in China, shooting a TV miniseries, when he is shocked to see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal a story headlined, "Does Mr. Spock Die in the Next Episode of 'Star Trek' Saga?"
Oddly, a clipping of this very article is the only artifact of the period that's survived in my Star Trek files about this movie. It is a long article, expressing the alarm of various fans, including "a ghetto youth in Pittsburgh" who claims "the character of Spock has inspired him to steer clear of drugs and street gangs." But much of it is, of course, about money: how much Paramount might lose if Spock's death keeps people away.
Asherman discusses some of this with Nimoy, who is upset by fans pre-judging an event in a film they haven't yet seen. What neither of them mentions, but what the article makes clear, is that some of this dissatisfaction was being stirred up by none other than Gene Roddenberry.
Remember him? He was the guy who started it all, relegated now to the title of Executive Consultant. But this film was distancing itself from him as much as possible. It's clear even today: in so many ways, Star Trek II acts as if Star Trek I The Motion Picture doesn't exist, and never happened. There's nothing in this movie that evinces any direct continuity with the events of the first. In fact the movie starts where The Motion Picture starts: once again, Kirk is a desk-bound admiral, wasting away. Once again, he's full of self-doubt and has aging issues. Again a crisis puts him in command. He even rides over to the Enterprise in a shuttle, to many of the same shots created for TMP.
Well, they could ignore his movie if they wanted, but they weren't going to kill off the character that meant the most to him. In lobbying to save Spock, Roddenberry used the fans (as he always had, and became very good at doing), and he went right at Nimoy. "If, years ago, Basil Rathbone had said he was sick of playing Sherlock Holmes, would they have killed off Sherlock Holmes?...I can understand someone tiring of a role, but in science fiction there are ways of handling things like this to make it appear Spock is dead, but still leaving some future options. What if, five years from now, another talented actor wants to try the role or if Mr. Nimoy himself changes his mind? It's a bit unfair for someone to kill off a character I created."
Stern words, and as it turned out, highly prophetic. For it didn't take Nimoy five years to change his mind. Spock hadn't even died yet before he realized several things: he was having a good time making this movie, he felt closer to the character than he realized, and that the movie was turning out so well the franchise might really have a future. So when it came time to shoot the scene he didn't want to do it. (He was also reportedly dismayed by the extreme fan reaction against Spock's death, and against him for agreeing to it. Nimoy it seems got death threats for killing Spock! Harve Bennett quotes him as saying, "I did not sign on to be accused of murder.")
It may seem all a bit exaggerated now, but at the time its importance might be indicated by the reaction of the crew while the death scene was being filmed: they were moved, they were appalled. That all the actors were in tears is one thing. But so was the crew. That's how real Spock was.
By this time, says Bennett now, he'd sensed Nimoy's discomfort with his decision. He says they discussed it just before shooting the final sequence. Was there something Nimoy could do, Bennett wondered, that left the door open? It was Nimoy who came up with the idea of mind-melding with the unconscious McCoy ( because he'd just neck-pinched him, so it was a one-two Vulcan combination) and saying only the single suggestive word, "Remember."
This was the film that the test audiences saw. It was the only film, Meyer insisted, that he was going to make. But a couple of scenes were added that reinforced the idea that Spock might very well be back. One was a lovely shot of Spock's sleek black coffin in the intense greenery of the Genesis Planet---a sudden Eden of accelerated growth that the Genesis Device had created. Then there was some additional dialogue as Kirk and crew looked out at the planet. Kirk quotes Spock as saying 'there are always possibilities' and that they must visit this planet again.
Then the bow on the package of this film is tied up tight when someone asks how Kirk feels. Asked that question at the beginning of the movie, his answer was "I feel old." Asked it now, he replies, "I feel young."
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