The View from the Bridge

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

VIKING
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First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin,
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Copyright © Nicholas Meyer, 2009

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eISBN : 978-1-101-13347-7

 

 

 

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Trial lawyers will
tell you that the least reliable witnesses are eyewitnesses. I had difficulty grasping this idea until I saw Akira Kurosawa's film
Rashomon
, which succeeded in persuading me of the evanescent nature of Truth.

Truth—like Beauty—appears to lie in the eye of the beholder.

In writing this book, I have primarily used my memory, with some ancillary research to remind me of certain events and dates, but what follows must surely be taken as an eyewitness account.

In the interest of treading that fine line between tact and truth, some names have been changed.

So here goes my memoir. As the title suggests, it is about my experiences in Hollywood, making and trying to make movies, with a special emphasis on my encounters with the phenomenon known as
Star Trek
. Over the years, I've been asked a lot of questions about the
Star Trek
movies with which I was involved. Sometimes I feel like those guys in noir movies being grilled under the glaring light of a lone gooseneck lamp, while interlocutors hover in the shadows: “All right, let's go over it again” . . . “But I've told you—I've told you a thousand times, told you everything I know!” I wail. “I told you on the DVD! I told you on the Special Edition! I've told you on Blu-ray!” “Tell us again,” they insist. The temptation at such times is to embroider, for my sake if not for theirs. To vary the facts as I recall them, throw them a bone, start imagining things instead of remembering them. I will try my best to resist such temptations here.

But this book isn't just about
Star Trek
. I've taught classes in screenwriting and I've found myself reflecting on the unique perspective my background afforded me as a stranger in a strange land and the adventures I've had trying to make the movies I wanted to watch. When I started out heading for California to make movies, what I was doing was considered unusual. At best. There weren't film courses being offered in high schools back then and only a few were starting to be available in universities. Nowadays my children
study
Italian neorealism and American film noir; when I was sixteen, I played hooky watching the stuff on Broadway and 88th Street or caught it on late-night television.

Everybody got their popcorn?

PART 1

PRE TREK

PROLOGUE

A FUNERAL

It was December
of 1982 and Verna Fields was dead. The woman known as Mother Cutter, editor of
Jaws
, had died, aged sixty-four, of cancer and a memorial service was being held at the Alfred Hitchcock Theater at Universal Studios. I had known Verna socially and like many other young directors, I had benefitted from her counsel, support, and advice. She would take me to lunch and afterward treat me to an expensive cigar from the humidor of a nearby tobacconist. “Verna,” I would protest, “how are you paying for this?” She'd grin merrily behind large glasses. “I'm wooing you, baby, I'm wooing you.” She was a brilliant editor so of course after
Jaws
they'd made her an executive and stuck her behind a desk, which you might say was like promoting Captain James T. Kirk to Admiral. What a waste.

Anyway, there we all were, crammed into the intimate Hitchcock Theater, listening to Ned Tanen, head of Universal and a devoted friend of Verna's, deliver the eulogy. Tanen, who had a mercurial temperament and was as prickly as the cacti that he loved to grow, opined that Verna Fields had been the only decent human being in this dirty, rotten stinking town—or words to that effect. The thing about funerals, I find as a rule, is that you don't listen to such speeches critically. People say some outlandish or exaggerated things, carried along in the currents of emotion and the moment, so I don't suppose I blinked at Ned's impassioned words. I just sat there and felt sad thoughts.

It was only later, standing alone outside the theater, surrounded by people chatting together in little knots while waiting to leave for cold cuts at Verna's house, that I became aware of someone else speaking. If this were a film and we were mixing this scene, the voice that impinged on my idling consciousness would be dialed up slowly and would go something like this:

It was as if someone had thrown cold water on my face. The speaker, when I turned to look, was Walter Mirisch, a producer whose list of great movies is probably as long as George W. Bush's war crimes.

Yes, I thought, decisively. This is true. I hadn't been in the business anything like thirty years—it was more like ten—but since my arrival in Los Angeles, a stranger in a very strange land, I had met with as much kindness, generosity, and support as I had found anywhere else. Maybe more. Me and Blanche DuBois.

EARLY DAYS

And in those
ten years I had certainly needed (and continue to need) all the help I could get. One group I came to envy as I got to know them were children of those already in the business. Not that all of them were happy or even prospered, but like medieval stonemasons or shipwrights, they seemed to be part of a familial continuity that I didn't possess. There was Steven-Charles Jaffe, for instance, who with his father, Herb, produced the first film I wrote and directed,
Time After Time
. I envied father and son their professional bond. Herb told me, “I am a lucky man; I get to see my son every day.” I had no such family anchor in Los Angeles. For years I was always conscious of being on my own in California, the boy who had run away to join the circus that was movies. Nobody from the world in which I grew up was in “show business.” The children of my parents' friends followed their footsteps and became doctors or lawyers or went into “business” (whatever that was); I was the only one I knew who wanted to go to Hollywood and make movies. I must have set the fashion, for later everyone did. I don't think movies at that time were even regarded as a profession. The famous stars and directors hadn't studied to become filmmakers; they had sort of fallen into it. Second unit directors had begun as cowboys. Some were in fact Indians.

In the years to come I would meet and become friends with many people in the business whose fathers or mothers had been in it before them. This conferred a kind of tradition on the whole enterprise, or at least to my way of thinking a legitimacy that I sorely lacked and missed. My own family never quite understood what it was that I was doing or attempting to do, even though it was tacitly acknowledged that I wasn't fit for much else. My father always was an astute and subtle critic of anything I wrote, a wonderful editor, but there his involvement ceased. In the years that followed, no matter how successful I became, or even how proud they were of my success, my parents never made it their business to master the nomenclature or glossary of terms that would have enabled them to better understand what I had to tell them about my life.

“Mom, I'm in preproduction.”

“Uh huh. What's that?”

And so on.

I was born in Manhattan on Christmas Eve, just after the end of the war. My parents were a rather glamorous pair, a handsome psychoanalyst and his concert pianist wife, and postwar New York, if you were cut of such cloth, was definitely the place to be. I wasn't named Nicholas because of any religious association—my parents were in fact third-generation nonpracticing Jews—but rather in honor of my maternal grandfather, a Russian violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And when I say, “nonpracticing,” I am understating. Neither my father nor I was bar mitzvahed. I never attended temple or religious school and never had the inclination. I was born without the religion gene. I was raised in an atmosphere of undoubted privilege and culture, fell in love with Mozart by age five, and thought Jews were people who read books with hard covers. My father was witty and also an excellent pianist. Once I heard him accompany Leontyne Price in the living room of our brownstone (shrewdly purchased east of yet-to-be gentrified “Thoid” Avenue, which then still had its elevated subway line); another time, in Princeton, after a filling Thanksgiving dinner, he did the same for Einstein, who soloed on a squeaky violin. (Sitting next to the great man at dinner, I complained I had a hair in my turkey. “Not so loud,” he counseled me, “everyone else will want one.”) Were we rich? I once asked my father. “We're comfortable,” he explained, which was precise. Rockefellers we were not, but my father earned what he needed to live in what he might have characterized as a civilized fashion. My father, like his father, thought of himself as a liberal in the Jeffersonian tradition. He twice supported the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson. Years later, in my autobiographi cal novel,
Confessions of a Homing Pigeon
, I depicted my parents as circus acrobats, performing without a net, which is how they must have appeared to me.