The View from the Bridge (14 page)

A film editor in many ways resembles a psychoanalyst. In each case the director (or analysand) turns over the raw footage—dailies in one instance, free associations in the other—and these, in turn, are “assembled” by the editor or psychoanalyst, who then plays them back for the director/analysand. If the editor is good and understands the material and the director, what he shows you is recognizable as what you intended. You will tweak it here and there but you know you've been understood. If he's a
great
editor, he will take it further than you dreamed, finding, in the footage that you were so busy accumulating, the moments and “beats” you didn't even know you'd captured. The scene he plays back for you is richer, more textured than you'd imagined. Conversely, if he's a bad editor or the wrong one for this particular job, the result of his assembly is unrecognizable—you haven't been understood. (All this, incidentally, applies to the psychoanalyst, as well, who is stitching together the dailies from your head.)

Robert Fletcher was our costumer—again, a legacy, but one that made sense. He knew from
Star Trek
but he was a flexible, thorough professional and was excited, I believe, to be turned loose to rethink the uniforms of the Starfleet crew for the first time since the original series. For Khan and his genetically engineered shipmates, we settled on a sort of Hell's Angels from Outer Space look. Joe Jennings, our production designer, was another experienced
Star Trek
hand, but the chance to breathe new life into familiar material, to rethink the look of
Star Trek
's world, even if not entirely from scratch, got his juices flowing as well.

I have a theory that art thrives on restrictions: It's when you haven't the money or the facilities to bring off your project that you are obliged to be imaginative and creative. When painters came to grips with the fact that paintings don't move, that they exist in only two dimensions, they had to find ways to give the sense of movement to their pictures and to provide the illusion of depth. One might even argue that without censorship there would be no art, for what are metaphors, similes, allegories, symbols, etc., but attempts to circumvent the limitations placed on what we can say or show? One of my all-time favorite movies, the Laurence Olivier-directed
Henry V
, made on a shoestring during World War II, exploits its lack of resources by emphasizing them. The film acknowledges (as Shakespeare's play also acknowledges) the fact that “this cockpit” cannot “hold the vasty fields of France.” By starting in a re-creation of an Elizabethan theater and letting the Chorus urge us, “On your imaginary forces, work!” we, the audience, get to contribute to the film, fleshing out its two-dimensional sets (taken from the Duc de Berry's
Book of Hours
), until the battle of Agincourt, where cinematic realism is finally allowed to prevail (but never entirely—instead of realistic battle sounds, William Walton's music is there to remind us, yet again, that something has been left to our imagination).

Our production manager was the amazing Austen Jewell, who had performed the same function for me on
Time After Time
. Sometimes referred to as the unit production manager, or UPM, he prepares the budget (and sometimes the first shooting schedule as well). The UPM hires the key crew after consulting with the director and producer(s). The UPM is responsible for managing the production and making sure department heads keep to their respective budgets. He/she monitors the daily progress of the shooting schedule. Nowadays the title is occasionally gussied up to something called “line producer.” Jewell was well-named, a taciturn but dryly humorous taskmaster who was a living, one-man history of the movies. He played the child in Von Stroheim's
Greed
(1924) and was one of two street toughs who gave the Little Tramp a hard time in
City Lights
(1931; the other “tough” was future director Robert Parrish); later still Jewell was Chaplin's first AD on
Monsieur Verdoux
(1947) and countless others over the next forty years, including his chores as UPM on the Christopher Reeve
Superman
(1978). Watching and listening to him on
Time After Time
, I had learned the etiquette of a film set. There are codes of conduct behind and before the cameras. (Does the star stick around to deliver his off-camera dialogue to the day player?) I was humbled and envious that Jewell had lived his entire life on one set or another.

Robert Wise's nephew, Doug Wise, was my first AD. Calm and professional, whatever opinions or reservations he may have held concerning my revisions of his uncle's
Star Trek
work, he never once uttered them. A good “first” is the director's right arm, his expeditor, strategist, enforcer, and cocon spirator. I never could get below the surface of Doug's professionalism, which is perhaps for the best. For all I know, Doug Wise had no interest whatsoever in
Star Trek
; his interest was in a smooth-running shoot and he let nothing interfere with that goal.

I began to meet other members of the cast: Leonard Nimoy (Spock), DeForest Kelley (Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy), George Takei (helmsman Mr. Sulu), Nichelle Nichols (communications officer Uhura), James Doohan (Mr. Scott, aka “Scotty,” chief engineer), and Walter Koenig (Commander Pavel Chekov). These folks were uniformly supportive. They didn't hold my inexperience as either a director or a
Star Trek
watcher against me but tactfully pointed out things in the script that they felt were uncharacteristic or untrue of their roles—
So-and-so would never say this line in these words
, etc. More adjustments were made.

The cast of
Star Trek
, almost to a man (or woman), I felt, harbored ambivalent feelings about their roles and participation in the series. The crew of the
Enterprise
had been struggling actors of greater or lesser talent when fate had selected them for a television series. For sixty-seven episodes, those roles had paid their bills (this was before residuals) before the show was canceled.

And then something unprecedented had happened. The fans, as we all know by now, would not let the series die. Years passed and finally—in the wake of
Star Wars
—Paramount decided to take the cast out of mothballs, dust them off, and pay them again.

The phenomenon of an actor chafing at being exclusively identified with one role is not new. Eugene O'Neill's father had been driven almost mad (and arguably to drink) because the public was interested in him only when he played Edmond Dantès, aka the Count of Monte Cristo. For years Sean Connery struggled to escape the embrace of James Bond. What
was
possibly unique in theatrical annals was an entire cast yoked together by the same imperative. For better. For worse. Forever. Whatever they thought about the series, about science fiction, about the characters themselves, or about one another, they were joined to their on-screen personae at the hip for eternity. Nowhere is their ambivalence more clear than in the titles of two of Leonard Nimoy's books:
I Am Not Spock
(1975) and—almost twenty years later—
I Am Spock
(1995). Perhaps the most amusing approximation of the cast's collective feelings is to be found in the hilarious film by Dean Parisot and David Howard,
Galaxy Quest
, which deftly sends the embittered cast of a
Star Trek
-like TV series off on an actual interstellar adventure, as the show's ambivalent “actors” come to grips with their divided feelings about the roles that have enslaved them, concluding, finally that, like turning eighty, it's not so bad when you consider the alternative.

Kelley, Nimoy, and Shatner had the longest résumés. Atlanta-born Kelley had appeared in such Western fare as John Sturges's
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
and Fred Zinneman's
The Men
before his lengthy television career; Nimoy's résumé before
Star Trek
was almost exclusively in television, where the Boston native appeared in everything from episodes of
Perry Mason
to
Sea Hunt
to
Broken Arrow
,
Highway Patrol
,
The Untouchables
,
Mission: Impossible
,
Rawhide
,
Tales of Wells Fargo
,
Wagon Train
,
Bonanza
, ad infinitum.

Originally a stage actor, Shatner's initial appearances in live television, were followed by several features, among them Richard Brooks's unfortunate adaptation of
The Brothers Karamazov
and Stanley Kramer's
Judgment at Nuremeburg
, before also becoming a television stalwart in such shows as
Naked City
,
The Defenders
,
The Dick Powell Theatre
,
Boris Karloff's Thriller
,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, and, most memorably, an episode of
The Twilight Zone
.

Like Shatner, James Doohan (Scotty) hailed from Canada and specialized in television, appearing in
Gunsmoke
,
Gallant Men
,
Twilight Zone
,
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
,
Ben Casey
, and
The Fugitive
, among tons of others.

George Takei, born in California, spent part of his youth during World War II interned in a
Nisei
camp in Arkansas before going the TV route in
Twilight Zone
,
The Gallant Men
,
Hawaiian Eye
,
Assignment: Underwater
,
Perry Mason
, etc. In addition to his role as a nonvillainous Japanese officer aboard the
Enterprise
(he played the other kind in
Return from the River Kwai
), Takei was silently representing another minority on American television, one that had yet to emerge from the closet, though on satellite radio with Howard Stern, he has not been shy discussing his love life (or, for that matter, his opinion of William Shatner).

Walter Koenig was born in New York. His television career included episodes of
The Untouchables, Combat, Ben Casey
, and
General Hospital.
By an unlikely coincidence, Koenig and I had attended the same high school. Although we were some years apart, I was often tempted to compare notes about various teachers with him.

Nichelle Nichols (née Grace Nichols), from Illinois, started as a singer with the Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton bands before being cast in her groundbreaking
Star Trek
role, the first African American to appear on “equal” footing with a white cast. Instead of “the maid,” Nichols played an officer, and more racial barriers fell when she shared the first interracial television kiss with Shatner in one of the original episodes.

It is probable, if not inevitable, that the paths of these actors crossed on all those television shows before their
Star Trek
encounters.

But it is their work in
Star Trek
for which most are likely to be remembered. I suppose the wonder is that the
Star Trek
cast was not more embittered, that they managed to retain their freshness, their hospitality to a stranger, and their enthusiasm despite the knowledge that—for better or worse—this was what they would always been known for.

There were newcomers to the second
Star Trek
film, as well. I hired a girl from Wichita with striking blue-gray eyes, who said she was fixated on Spock, to play the Vulcan beauty, Lieutenant Saavik. (She
was
fixated, too—Kirstie Alley told me she used to sleep wearing her Vulcan ears.) Bibi Besch (who later acted for me to great effect in my television movie
The Day After
) played a former sweetheart of the libidinous Kirk, while a young actor named Merritt Butrick played their illegitimate son. Our ensemble was rounded out by the great Paul Winfield, who played Captain Terrill of the
Reliant
. As I've observed, one of the great treats in the movie business is that you sometimes actually get to meet your dreams. After seeing Winfield in
Sounder
, I longed to tell this wonderful actor how much he had affected me with his performance—and now I got to do just that.

The only major cast member with whom I did not get to spend time before the commencement of shooting was Ricardo Montalban. He was busy filming his television series,
Fantasy Island
. We managed only a brief lunch at the Paramount commissary, during which I found him replete with gentlemanly—one is tempted to say “formal”—but guarded courtesy. Actors are typically suspicious of new directors (“Is he crazy?”) until set at ease. Or not. Actors are fragile, their feelings easily bruised, and they have a sixth sense for when the man or woman in charge doesn't know how to drive the bus—or where it's heading. Has no sense of direction, you might say.

Mexican-born Montalban could claim the longest résumé of anyone in the cast. His work began with Mexican features in 1942 before wartime shortages of leading men in California brought him to Hollywood. Montalban had also twice appeared on Broadway to acclaim, in Shaw's
Don Juan in Hell
and in the musical
Jamaica,
opposite Lena Horne. He danced in the latter show, managing to conceal a limp, the result of a spinal injury incurred in 1951 when a horse rolled over him during the filming of
Across the Wide Missouri.
I was intimidated to meet him, and his reserved manner didn't assuage my awe. I discussed the role and gave him a copy of
Moby-Dick
, concluding, “It's all in this book.” He thanked me with the same formal politesse and went back to his Island. We were not to see each other again before shooting started, and I hadn't an inkling of what a good friend he was to become.

I had to find a composer for the film, but it couldn't be the great Jerry Goldsmith, who had done the rousing score for
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, as there was no way our budget could afford him. When I wasn't meeting, greeting, rewriting, and making a thousand decisions connected with the film's preparation, I was listening to cassette tapes containing samples of undiscovered, aspiring composers who used this device as a means of auditioning.