The View from the Bridge (12 page)

But none of the foregoing altered the parameters of the universe Roddenberry had set up. He was emphatic that Starfleet was not a military organization but something akin to the Coast Guard. This struck me as manifestly absurd, for what were Kirk's adventures but a species of gunboat diplomacy wherein the Federation (read America, read the Anglo-Saxons) was always right and aliens were—in Kipling's queasy phrase—“lesser breeds”? Yes, there was lip service to minority participation, but it was clear who was driving the boat.

Ignorant, as I say, or arrogantly uninterested in precedent, I was intent on refashioning the second movie as a nautical homage.

“And the script?” Bennett prompted quietly.

“Well, here's my other idea,” I told them, taking a deep breath and producing a yellow legal pad from under my chair. “Why don't we make a list of everything we like in these five drafts? Could be a plot, a subplot, a sequence, a scene, a character, a line even . . .”

“Yes?”

“And then I will write a new script and cobble together all the things we choose.”

They stared at me blankly.

“What's wrong with that?” I had been rather proud of this idea.

Now they glanced at one another before answering.

“The problem is that unless we turn over a shooting script of some sort to ILM [Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas's special effects house, contracted by Paramount to provide shots for the movie] in twelve days, they cannot guarantee delivery of the FX shots in time for the June release.”

I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly.

“June release?
What
June release?”

That was when I was informed that the picture had already been booked into theaters—a factor that, in my ignorance, had never occurred to me.

I thought again. I must have been really stoked by this point, because the next thing that popped out was:

“Alright, I think I can do this in twelve days.” Why I thought this, I cannot now recall.

Again they looked at me, then at each other, and then down at my rug, as if something inscrutable was written there.

“What's wrong with that?” I demanded.

Bennett sighed. “What's wrong is that we couldn't even make your
deal
in twelve days.”

I blinked. I was still relatively new to the business—this would be only the second film I'd directed—and none of this made any sense to me.

“Look,” I countered impatiently, “Forget about my deal. Forget about the credit. Forget about the money. I'm just talking about the writing part, not the directing,” I inserted with emphasis. “All I know is that if we don't do what I'm suggesting, make that list right here, right now—there isn't going to be any movie. Do you want the movie or not?”

What would have happened had I not made this offer? Clearly the film would have been canceled for the nonce, the booking dates forfeited. Whether the studio would have plowed forward with yet another script for an opening in another season is a question no one can answer.

Everything changes with hindsight. Do I remember what happened next? I recollect their astonishment, but perhaps this is mythopoesis. I mean, who knew I would ever be
trying
to remember this stuff? What I
do
know is that we then made the list. It included Bennett's original happy notion of using Khan (from the “Space Seed” episode, wherein Kirk rescues the genetically enhanced Khan and his followers, only to have Khan attempt to seize control of the
Enterprise
and, failing, marooned by Kirk along with a female member of the
Enterprise
's crew who has fallen for him, on an asteroid or some such location); the Genesis Project (creating planetary life); Kirk meeting his son; Lieutenant Saavik (Spock's beautiful Vulcan protégée); the death of Spock; and the simulator sequence (in which the
Enterprise
, under Saavik's command, appears to be attacked in what later turns out to be what we would today call a war game; this sequence originally occurred—minus Spock's participation—in the middle of one of the drafts). All these materials were culled higgledy-piggledy from the five different drafts that I never—to the best of my recollection—consulted again.

“Why can't Kirk read a book?” I wondered, staring at the titles on my shelves. I pulled down
A Tale of Two Cities
, funnily enough the only novel of which it can be said that everyone knows the first and last lines.

Bennett and Sallin left and I went to work.

TWELVE DAYS

When my agent
and cheerful tennis partner, Mr. Lucchesi, learned what I was doing, I thought he would have a seizure. Lucchesi had once considered studying for the priesthood, but this episode must have confirmed his wisdom in abandoning the clergy. He was in no mood to turn the other cheek. The idea that I had offered my services for nothing was not only illegal; from his standpoint it was unprofessional and made a mockery of his function.

“You must be out of your fucking mind,” was his poetic rejoinder.

As it happened, being psychoanalyzed at the time, I had ample opportunity to explore my motives. While my original logic seemed clear enough (if there was to be a film we had to get on with it; we effectively had no choice), it soon became apparent that my unconscious reasoning in offering to be the anonymous author was not as simple as it appeared. In doing the whole script sub rosa, I was essentially letting myself off the hook in case it didn't work. The strategy was akin to that I used for my tennis game—the part where, when it didn't count for points, I could be brilliant. My enthusiasm and my passion are frequently misconstrued as confidence—arrogance, even. The fact is, I've never had a lot of confidence. By arranging to write the script in this fashion my confidence—or lack of it—was not at stake. If I bombed, who was to know? It wasn't a real tennis game.

And anyway, it would all be over, yea or nay, in twelve days.

It is hard, bordering on impossible, to reconstruct precisely what happened during those twelve days. There were no computers then, so I worked on yellow legal pads and my Smith Corona portable electric. Making changes involved scissors, paste, and a Wite-Out eraser that was applied with a small brush. Soon my hands were covered with the sticky stuff, along with paper cuts.

The process involved no sleep.

As I worked, juggling the plots, subplots, and characters we had agreed upon—materials first imagined in bits and pieces by five disparate authors—trying to weave them into a cohesive whole, it felt as if I were fiddling with a Rubik's Cube. With this difference: I cannot work the Rubik's Cube, but in the case of the script, the pieces arranged themselves fairly easily. Not being a
Star Trek
aficionado, I labored in blissful ignorance, including—for example—Mr. Chekov in the tale, even though fans subsequently delighted to point out that Chekov was not a member of the
Enterprise
's crew in the television season when the Khan episode took place. (He was there, I would insist, but occupied on another deck—the
Enterprise
is a colossally large vessel. I had crossed the ocean on the original
Queen Mary
and knew how easy it would be to miss someone in her crew of five hundred, let alone passenger complement of three thousand.) I was not burdened by “reverence” for the series, as people have often wondered. Indeed, reverence was not an emotion that ever crossed my mind. Far from being sacrosanct, I was of the opinion that
Star Trek
could stand some fixing. I made up rules as I needed them and wrote my own dialogue.

Around this time, word leaked that the film would involve the death of Spock, a leak that I later learned some people had attributed to a disgruntled Roddenberry. Amid all the discussions that followed, I off-handedly suggested that we put Spock in the simulator sequence that would now open the film, and kill him off from the get-go. I thought I was being funny, but Bennett jumped on the idea, so I threw Spock into the sequence, killing him in scene one as a way of disarming the audience's expectations.

I was writing the movie I wanted to see, my own adventures of Captain Hornblower.

Later, reflecting on my
Star Trek
experiences at various panel discussions, I found myself likening the series to the Catholic mass. That is to say, like the mass, there are certain elements of
Star Trek
that are immutable, unchangeable. The mass has its Kyrie, its Sanctus, Agnus Dei, Dies Irae, and so on. . . .
Star Trek
has Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Klingons, Romulans, etc., and the rest of the universe Roddenbery bequeathed us. The words of the mass are carved in stone, as are fundamental elements—the
Enterprise
, Spock, the transporter beam, and so forth—in
Star Trek
.

It is the music to which they are set that differentiates one mass from another (yes, I know, there's a different text for requiem masses, but you get the idea). Mozart's
Coronation Mass
bears scant resemblance to Bach's
Mass in B Minor
, which, in turn, is nothing like the African
Missa Luba
. Similarly, each
Star Trek
episode (whether on television or film) is distinguished by the writing and directing personalities of those who create them. It is they who provide the new music to the
Star Trek
words, or, to switch metaphors, the wine may be new but the shape of the bottle is always the same. I was pouring my own brew into the bottle of
Star Trek II
, trying to fill it without breaking it. (Later, on
Star Trek VI
, I
did
wind up breaking it and found myself in a melancholy face-off with Roddenberry himself.)

And as I was putting the pieces together, I became aware of something else: certain themes in the story were beginning to emerge like the details of a brass rubbing, the consequence of plot juxtapositions I had made with no time to justify them. I was fiddling with that Rubik's Cube as fast as I could, trying juxtapositions and flinging them around with no more than instinct and intuition to guide me, because there wasn't time to write stuff down on three-by-five cards and stare at them on a bulletin board (something I've never done, in any case; it all stays in my head, somehow). These themes were friendship, old age—and death. As I became aware of these ideas—implicit in the new narrative—I began writing
into
them, so to speak, investigating, developing, and sharpening the story's implications as I discovered what they were. It's hard to explain the intuitive process and always very frustrating when the studio executive—or the fan—wants to know, Why did you do such-and-such? The artist goes a lot (most?) of the time on intuition. On his or her gut. Why is Kirk given a copy of
A Tale of Two Cities
? Because that was the book I grabbed off my shelf? Yes, but in the end, it also somehow became an organic part of the movie. According to Socrates, artists are like children, who make no sense except when they create, at which point they go into a kind of trance, during which time they take dictation from God—and this they term “inspiration.” Afterward they are hard put to explain how they achieved what they did or the reasoning behind intuitive or “inspired” choices. So instead, they offer up colorful anecdotes, which may or may not be true. (W. S. Gilbert liked to tell people he got the idea for
The Mikado
when a Japanese sword hanging over his desk fell and almost decapitated him—colorful, to be sure, and possibly true, as well—but hardly revealing of anything germane to how he wrote
The Mikado
.)

Even as this book. I don't claim to have taken dictation from God (I'd never be able to keep up), but I was probably in some kind of a trancelike state, sleep-deprived and pumping adrenaline like an oil well gusher. I think neurologists refer to this as a State of Flow.

I remember wondering vaguely, as I worked, what my father, who, I was sure, had never even
heard
of
Star Trek
, would make of this movie. How to explain this world to that urbane New York shrink? I began the script with a title,
“In the 23rd century . . .
,” as a clue for the uninitiated, but as the years have passed I have come to the realization that it was not merely my father whom I was attempting to orient, but also myself. Writing what became
The Wrath of Khan
was an ongoing attempt for me to translate the
Star Trek
universe into one that made sense to me. If fiction is the lie that tells the greater truth, it is as well to remember that fiction
is
a lie, what some folks would call a whopper or a stretcher or bullshit. How do we make the lie convincing? By loading it with circumstantial elements that
are
true (“Merely corroborative detail intended to lend artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” as Pooh-Bah has it in
The Mikado
). Without this kind of help—speaking for myself—much of science fiction will fail to convince. We try to blur the point at which the truth blends into the lie. If done correctly, the audience fails to notice the moment when they slip the bonds of reality and embark on the fantastic voyage. If done well, they are so involved that they miss the moment when they willingly agree to suspend disbelief.

The finished script of the second
Star Trek
movie revolves around a training cruise aboard the
Enterprise
, supervised by a reluctant Kirk, who, promoted to admiral, is now a depressed desk jockey, brooding about his age. Unbeknownst to the
Enterprise
and her youthful complement, another Federation starship, the
Reliant
, inadvertently lands on what is thought to be a desolate planet, searching for a place to help conduct a mysterious scientific experiment under the supervision of Kirk's old flame, Carol Marcus. The planet, however, proves to be inhabited by the treacherous Khan, whom Kirk had marooned there with his followers and wife years before. Thirsting for vengeance, Khan and his band hijack the
Reliant
and lay a trap for Kirk, who now finds himself marooned beneath the surface of another planet, where he rediscovers Carol and is introduced to the son he never knew he had. The climax of the film is a “submarine” battle (minus sonar) between Kirk and his nemesis in a lightning-splattered nebula, in which Spock sacrifices his life to save his captain, his friend, and the crew of the
Enterprise
, in the process miraculously rejuvenating Kirk.