The View from the Bridge (31 page)

On the other end of the line I heard Stanley Jaffe tell me that he and his producing partner, Sherry Lansing, were now running the studio.

“Kid”—it was always “kid”—“I hear you have problems,” Stanley said, after giving me the chance to digest his news.

“I need two and a half million dollars,” I explained.

“You got it,” was his answer, and
Star Trek VI
was back on again. I don't know how long I stayed on that empty stage before I began to move, slowly at first, then breaking into a run back to my office, still located in the Marx Brothers Building.

I started calling people, beginning with my wife, and relating the improbable deus ex machina that had rescued the film, shaking my head in disbelief every time I delivered my news. Stanley Jaffe, my friend and supporter since my work on
Fatal Attraction
. He was bold and decisive. Sometimes pro, sometimes con. Today was pro. Like Tanen, an experienced hand at running a studio (Jaffe had headed Paramount when he was in his twenties, his father having run Columbia), Stanley knew what the feature division needed: a hit.
Star Trek
had been halfway backed out of the starting gate when he pushed the buzzer and we were back in again, running forward, full tilt out the other side.

I've since heard it said that we got the money because Stanley's son, Steven-Charles Jaffe, was my producing partner.

As I mentioned earlier, Steven-Charles Jaffe is no relation to Stanley Jaffe.

There were other obstacles to overcome, among them the fact of our film's being the sixth in a series that was generally perceived to be played out. The critical drubbing received by its predecessor seemed to epitomize the conventional wisdom.
Star Trek VI
had a credibility problem; no one was taking us seriously. No one was going to be in a great hurry to take part in the flaccid continuation of a moribund
Enterprise
.

The possibility of this perception and the accompanying resistance to participation in the film had not occurred to me. I thought the script Denny and I had written was terrific: complicated and ambitious, managing to deliver the
Star Trek
goods (it featured an assassination in weightless space, for heaven's sake), as well as examining the post-Soviet world and its effects on inhabitants who had lived eye to unblinking eye for over half a century. Denny, who had by now thankfully almost completely recovered from his bout with cancer, was of the same sanguine view. There was, at the same time, something niggling at my brain connected with all this doom and gloom. Where had I heard all this before? Of course: when I had first reported for work on
Star Trek II
. It was funny how I always seemed to come up in the same position in the batting order.

I learned around this time that my floating blood would be a relatively simple effect to produce, thanks to advances in computer-generated imagery or, more familiarly, CGI. The more I studied this new phenomenon, visiting once more with the magicians of San Mateo, the more intrigued I became with its possibilities. The technique had come a long way from its stylized use in Carol Marcus's Genesis Planet proposal from
Star Trek II
. Used properly, the images it produced could easily pass for reality.

One person who believed utterly in the movie from the get-go was our casting director, Mary Jo Slater. She never treated it like the hand-me-down or leftover others saw. The script worked and this was a movie she wanted to see. By happy coincidence, her son, Christian, was an avid Trekker and desperate to be in the film, which we took to be a good sign. Comedian and actress Whoopi Goldberg was equally enthusiastic, and I met with her to discuss the possibility of her playing a Klingon princess. This idea, however, was vetoed by Nimoy, who felt—perhaps rightly—that a supporting cast of stars might detract from the farewell appearance of the
Enterprise
crew. (Later, Goldberg showed up as a regular on
Star Trek: The Next Generation
.)

Nimoy understood, however, that our villain needed to be top drawer. For the Shakespeare-spouting General Chang, there was only one actor possible, and I begged Mary Jo not to come back without Christopher Plummer, the actor for whom I had written the role. Mary Jo took off for Plummer like a pedigreed foxhound and returned almost bearing the prize in gleaming teeth. “Just don't bury me under a ton of makeup so I can't act,” was his only request.

Nimoy also saw the logic of a name actor of talent and presence to play Gorkon, our Gorbachev/Lincolnesque Klingon Chancellor, who foresees a brave, new, and peaceful world and who is assassinated for his vision. Parallels with the real world abounded—not only was Lincoln murdered after espousing a policy of reconciliation with the defeated South but, more recently, the Irish patriot Michael Collins had been killed by his own men for failing to obtain sufficient territory from Northern Ireland for the new republic, and Gandhi had been shot by his Hindu followers for agreeing to Partition and the creation of Pakistan. Anwar Sadat was slain by his own troops for recognizing and visiting Israel; Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was killed by an extremist Israeli for signing the Oslo accords and shaking hands with Arafat.

David Warner, the famous postwar
Hamlet
and oleaginous Mr. Blifil of
Tom Jones
, had played Jack the Ripper in
Time After Time
. He seemed perfect for Gorkon, and I cast him, failing to remember—or never knowing—that he had appeared in
Star Trek V
(in a very different role), thus making Warner the only actor to play two different parts in the original
Star Trek
feature series.

A more difficult role was that of the treacherous but oddly sympathetic Vulcan lieutenant, Valeris, who would betray Spock and the Federation. Valeris would later, at her court-martial, quote Kirk's own words regarding Klingons (“They're animals! Don't trust them! Don't believe them!”) in support of her actions. Regarding her complicity in Gorkon's murder, she would, like Brünnhilde pleading with her father Wotan in
Die Walküre
, demand of Kirk, “Did I misinterpret you?” (Coming from Valeris, admittedly, her plea is more an ironic taunt.)

As I have noted, in an ideal world Valeris should have been the stalwart Saavik, a character we had already come to love. And trust. This would have sharpened the pain of her betrayal, but absent Kirstie Alley, we decided it would be better to introduce a new character. We read a lot of actresses searching for that elusive quality that was at once alien, opaque, funny in its humorlessness, and yet touching because of its vulnerability. Valeris doesn't know how to express her misgivings about the peace conference to her mentor, Spock. She can't give voice to her own fears about the coming rapprochement with the Federation's lifelong enemies, and Spock, sounding a bit like Polonious, shuts her down. “You must have faith, lieutenant,” he admonishes. “Faith?” echoes the bewildered Vulcan. “That the universe will unfold as it should,” Spock concludes, sententiously, leaving her to her expanding terror of an unknown future in the wake of disarmament.

Kim Cattrall nailed the part and understood it so perfectly that any regrets over the loss of Saavik in the story were forgotten.

But I remained intrigued by the idea of a character from previous
Star Trek
adventures, someone we had come to trust, turning out to be one of the conspirators. I settled on Admiral Cartwright, already portrayed by the intensely sympathetic Brock Peters in
Star Trek IV
. Peters, also an accomplished singer, had played villains before, notably in
The Pawnbroker
, but as far as
Star Trek
audiences were concerned, he was Federation true blue. His racist denunciation of Klingons—akin to Kirk's own views—would be especially unnerving as Peters was an African American, and all the slurs against Klingons that he lays out at the Starfleet briefing are queasily akin to anti-black epithets from planet Earth centuries earlier. (In fact Peters's big racist speech was so repugnant to him that he experienced great difficulty memorizing it; I had to film it in sections.)

There was one other party who took the gravest possible exception to Cartwright's sentiments, and that was
Star Trek
's creator, Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry's deal on the
Star Trek
movies called for him to receive a credit (“Based on
Star Trek
created by Gene Roddenberry”) and, I assume, a salary and profit participation, but it did not include actual involvement in making the movies after
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
.

Nonetheless, there had evolved the tradition of kissing the ring, obtaining Roddenberry's blessing for each of the successive films and giving ear to his opinions. I didn't recall doing so on
Star Trek II
, when our contact was limited to a brief meeting at which we shook hands; but now, a decade and five features later, an audience had become part of the process.

In the case of
The Undiscovered Country
, Roddenberry's opinions were many and heated. He was pained and angered by the script, which depicted bigotry not only among Starfleet brass like Cartwright but also among the
Enterprise
crew, not merely Kirk (whose prejudice might be excused as being related to the death of his son at the hands of Klingons), but even ordinary Able Seamen aboard the ship complained of how Klingons “all look alike” and alluded to the aliens' distinctive odor.

I could advance explanations for what followed. I had been through the ringer on this film from the moment we had sat down in Kirkpatrick's office in early January. We hadn't even called
Action!
and I was already stressed and exhausted trying to make thirty million dollars into thirty-three. For monetary reasons we'd had to junk Denny's nifty prologue, in which the crew of the
Enterprise
, now retired, had gone their myriad post-Starfleet ways, only to be summoned back into harness for one last mission. (Uhura, I seem to remember, had her own intergalactic radio call-in show.) Salary cuts, FX cuts, wardrobe cuts (I had asked for Starfleet uniforms with pants pockets, but no)—all had taken their toll. Instead of making the film, I had been spending far too much time trying to figure out how it would be
possible
to make the film.

Nonetheless explanations are not excuses. There was no excuse for my tactless and impatient handling of Gene Roddenberry when I finally sat down to meet with this big, tired man in his offices, our respective henchmen hovering silently on the sidelines as the conversation degenerated into barely disguised acrimony. I suppose underneath it all was a conviction on my part that Roddenberry's was a specious utopian vision for which there was no historical evidence. Did he really believe in the perfectibility of man, or (as I suspected) was this just some sort of pose? I was cynical, maybe because somewhere along the line, I'd learned that Frank Capra was a Republican. I found myself straining against the shape of the
Star Trek
bottle, rewriting the words of the Mass, not merely altering the music. These were big no-nos, but I mulishly persisted, straying off the Federation reservation and not caring whether I ever found my way back to the Neutral Zone. Against Roddenberry's complaints, I dug in my heels. Where was there any evidence, I wanted to know, that bigotry had disappeared—or would disappear—in human affairs? Was racism still not a powerful force in America? Were the Serbs and Croats not intent on “ethnic cleansing”? Were not Muslims still fighting Christians? Had it not always been thus since the beginnings of man? What, I demanded, was the justification for Roddenberry's optimism? The evidence of millennia was on my side. In the meantime, I insisted, in my movie people would continue to act like human beings.

It was not, as I say, my finest hour. Roddenberry was old and in ill health, soon to die. The fact that I was tired and unwilling to revisit the screenplay when it was almost time to start shooting was of less moment than my conviction that what was in the script was correct. I left the meeting and returned to work, leaving others to mop up the damage I had done. I like to think of myself as a decent, straight-shooting person but as I write these lines, I have to admit that I am not always the person I like to believe I am.

Shortly before we started shooting, shooting of a different character began. The first Gulf War (we didn't realize then that there would be more than one) broke out and distracted us with events “back on earth.” Iraq had invaded Kuwait, Saddam Hussein having been convinced that the United States would not interfere. It was a sobering time; wars, as every generation seems fated to relearn, are easier to start than to stop. Who knew where this one would lead? But there was little to do except watch the news and continue with our work.

At any rate, that's what I told myself at the time. The odd thing about making a movie is that events beyond the film suddenly seem relevant only to the degree that they can affect the film, rendering it irrelevant or suddenly conferring it with additional resonance. As the director, you develop tunnel vision, distilling outside information through the obsessive prism of what's good or bad for the movie never mind about the world. When I made
Company Business
, rapidly unfolding international events constantly caused me to revise the script in an effort to stay au courant. I realized that with
Star Trek VI
we faced potentially the same task. After all, there had been no coup or assassination as yet in the Soviet Union, but what if there were . . . ? The Three Mile Island nuclear accident had been “good” for
The China Syndrome
as, before too long, events in the Soviet Union would be perceived as “good” for
Star Trek VI
.

Meantime, as was usual with my underfunded
Star Trek
movies, I continued to exhaust myself trying to find ways to skin the cat. I could not afford Jerry Goldsmith to write our score; I couldn't even afford James Horner, who had risen in prominence (and price) in the years since
The Wrath of Khan
. With what we had for music in our budget, perhaps I ought to play the kazoo.