The View from the Bridge (18 page)

Spock turns out to be Jewish.

Despite whatever efforts we may make, we live in the present. What happened yesterday is done and each day the train we ride in called Life will take us further from it. Only madmen can take up residence in their memories while the future remains an undiscovered country.

But movies are different.

Jimmy Stewart memorably described movies as little pieces of captured time. This felicitous and poetic image comes as close as anything I've read to encapsulating the phenomenon of film, the idea, in effect, of putting a frame around a moment for eternity. The creation of that moment may have been meticulously prepared or it may have been simply improvised; a thousand variables may have contributed to it and God knows, more dreadful moments than magical ones have doubtless been preserved in this fashion, but the major point I'm endeavoring to make is this: what more or less took place in an instant, or a day, thanks to the phenomenon of movies, morphs into a piece of the permanent record.

In physical terms, it took about a day to film the death of Spock. In another sense that day was more than a decade aborning. The confluence of Gene Roddenberry, of Leonard Nimoy, Bill Shatner and the rest of the
Star Trek
ensemble, the work of many writers and directors, the devotion of countless legions of fans and, yes, my own happenstance contribution, all combined on that day. Some of us understood the significance (small
s
) of that eternal moment while it was unfolding; some were just doing their jobs. I am not prepared to argue that the Death of Spock ranks with
Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer
, but I think it facile to altogether dismiss its significance. I am certainly pleased to have played my small part, even as the train called Life carried me inexorably forward.

One further consequence of wearing my suit during that day's filming led to my acting debut. While directing a week or so later, I was summoned to the soundstage phone, a novelty for me. In the absence of the now ubiquitous cell phone, its primitive soundstage predecessor was typically monopolized by all sorts of people, many of them, by this point in the shoot, intent on lining up their next gigs. My call turned out to be a double novelty, for it was from a casting director named Toni Howard.

“Nick,” she greeted me. “Are you still acting?” This, I fancied, was a little bit akin to asking a man when he had stopped beating his wife. Acting? How did she know I had
ever
acted? Nonetheless, my vanity instantly aroused, I assured her that I still acted and why did she want to know? It seemed she was casting a TV movie,
Mae West
, and wondered if I might be interested in playing the young George Raft.

“It's not a large role,” she warned me. How large? I asked. One line—perfect. In January—even better. While my cast and crew dithered behind me, fiddling with lights and wardrobe, I continued to indulge myself. How did you come to ask me about playing George Raft? I asked. It turns out she'd seen a still photographer's shot of me, in my suit, riding a camera crane, my hair slicked back from my pre-opera shower.

“You look like Valentino,” Toni stated. “And, as you may know, George Raft was brought to Hollywood as a lookalike replacement for Valentino, after his sudden death.”

Vain, I grant you. Hah. I was in.

Come January, we were still mopping up what is known as “principal photography” but in actual fact all we were doing the day I departed for my one-line debut was close-ups of hands flipping switches and turning instrument dials. My crew wished me jolly good luck as I abandoned them in search of a new career.

It was a surreal experience. I had begun (typically) with grandiose notions of myself, like John Huston, doing a “guest starring” role in Otto Preminger's film
The Cardinal
and ended with cold sweats. I was mailed not the entire script but only the page with my single line, which, when I read it, I knew at once was wrong. (“
Oh, Jeez
,” I could imagine the director groaning, “
he wants to change his one line?
”) But I did have a point. My character, George Raft, was supposed to be exiting a sneak preview of his own film, when he gets accosted in the theater lobby by studio execs asking his opinion of the movie. He was supposed to snarl in reply, “Mae West stole everything but the cameras,” before stalking off. Surely, I reasoned, we know by this point that the movie's about Mae West. Shouldn't my line be, “That broad stole everything but the cameras?” “That bitch”? “That tomato”? Anything but the fearfully on-the-nose “Mae West.”

But I had other problems, such as hitting my mark—and unlike Montalban, who had effortlessly nailed twenty-three, I was too spooked to manage my one and only. During rehearsals, when it was indicated by a huge, black electrical tape cross, I experienced no difficulty. Imagine my surprise when, just prior to rolling, the big X was replaced by something the size of a beauty mark.

I have never seen my performance, which is probably just as well.

With shooting finally completed, I could concentrate on work in the cutting room.

Editing is a part of filmmaking I greatly enjoy. Like writing, where the name of the game is rewriting, I love the process of experimentation that editing affords. Though computers have simplified the mechanics of this process, even with time-consuming Moviolas or KEMs, the experiments were where the fun was. The work—no matter how electronically simplified—generally conforms to the following stages: (1) the editor strings together an assembly of what you've shot, trying to include as much as possible so you can be reminded of the possibilities; (2) the director views the assembly, after which he contemplates suicide (it is a maxim that no movie is ever as good as its dailies or as bad as its first cut); (3) the director starts slashing away and may jettison as much as an hour out of the assembly; (4) he looks at it again and still wants to kill himself but perhaps more humanely; (5) he then cuts another fifteen minutes; and so on. Eventually, he is no longer cutting minutes but seconds, endlessly refining the moments in the film, ultimately down to frames. Sometimes, hit by a brainstorm, the order of scenes is rearranged, or it occurs to someone that maybe a voice-over here or a flashback there might help and the continuity itself undergoes a transformation. You are no longer bound by the screenplay, for now the film has assumed a life of its own and you are molding celluloid instead of paper. Finally, at the end of the time contractually granted the director for his cut, the movie is turned over to the studio, and the fun ends as a tug-of-war commences. But let us leave that until its proper place.

Bill Dornisch the giggler took some getting used to. And he had a tendency to tear film, which led to a battered workprint. But he also had a sure-footed instinct about the footage itself and an impeccable sense of rhythm, essential for an editor. Unlike Bennett, with his shrewdly analytic temperament, Dornisch operated on pure instinct. He could seldom explain his choices, but they startled you with their rightness. I learned much from him when he'd offer certain truisms over his shoulder: “I can make 'em talk sooner but I can't make 'em talk faster.”

You can lose track of time in an editing room. Typically, there are no windows or, if they exist, they've been blacked out. Day, night, these distinctions become meaningless as you sit, hypnotized, before your footage, amazed at what editing can do. Show a man entering a room and smiling. Cut to a baby gurgling in its crib, and the man is a nice man, smiling at the baby. Now substitute a shot of a bloody, headless corpse, and that same man with the same smile has been transformed into a sadistic killer. If movies are a director's medium rather than an actor's (let's omit writers for purposes of this discussion), it is because the actor's performance ultimately lies in the hands of the director and his editor and, as such, is at their mercy. Whereas an actor in a play is in complete control (the director can rage from the back of the theater but he can't stop the performance once the curtain is up), here the choices—the particular takes, which close-up (if any), the length of the pauses—will determine how that performance goes over. Performances have indeed been made and lost in the cutting room. If the filmmakers start to panic over the movie, decisions may become draconian. Maybe the solution is to look at another take! This is an especially seductive notion, since we've all become so bored with the one we've been playing with all these months. The “new” take suddenly seems better, more vivid, etc., even though it typically is no such thing—merely different.

Star Trek II
was in fact the first feature film to utilize computer-generated imagery. The informational Project Genesis video presented on Kirk's monitor by Dr. Carol Marcus, was, I believe, the first time CGI found its way into a movie.

Throughout the postproduction process, each individual FX shot, like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, would trickle down from San Francisco to be viewed, criticized, redone, and eventually slipped into its proper place in the film. Until such time as the finished shot was approved, a blank piece of film was inserted with the words SCENE MISSING. Some slugs had descriptions on them (“
Enterprise
fires back”), while on others there was a crude storyboard sketch of the missing scene. I learned the hard way not to preview a movie without all the finished effects shots. No matter how many times or how emphatically you attempt to explain to the preview audience that some shots are missing or incomplete, that they must understand these are yet to be included, please ignore this, we're sorry, blah blah, when the cartoon version or the SCENE MISSING title appears instead of the real thing, audiences always erupt in laughter, bounced out of the tale.

“In Space No One Can Hear You Scream” ran the tagline of the original
Alien
movie. From a scientific standpoint, this is certainly the case. But when we viewed the ILM spaceships flying around without sound to accompany their motion, they did indeed resemble nothing so much as the plastic models they were. It was sound that gave them their heft, their gravity, if you will, even though they were in an ostensibly weightless environment. Too bad, as I had been intrigued by breaking with spaceship movie tradition and having the ships glide silently, accompanied only by music when appropriate.

About spaceship sound
inside
the
Enterprise
, I was much more certain: There had to be some. I didn't care what speculation had informed the previous movie or how silent the engines of the
Enterprise
had been heretofore. As far as I was concerned,
this Enterprise
was going to have a throbbing heartbeat. Our discussion on this subject happened to take place in one of the Paramount screening rooms, where during a pause in the conversation I became aware of a rhythmic, reverberating pounding. It was the air conditioning unit for the entire building, located next door. “Listen!” I said. “That's just how I want the
Enterprise
to sound.” Cecelia Hall, our sound effects editor, duly recorded it and used it at various volumes whenever we were anywhere inside the ship.

At some point during this period, those whispers about our film began to get louder. People who hadn't seen a frame were spreading the buzz that it was terrific. I was pleased but uneasy hearing this, mainly because I couldn't imagine how this rumor had gotten started or on what it had been based.

It was also during this period that I encountered my taciturn production manager, Austen Jewell, one day in the parking lot. Jewell, whom I had met and whose work I had so admired on
Time After Time
, asked me how the editing was coming. In the course of telling him, Bob Sallin's name came up, and Austin (at different times in his career he spelled his first name both ways) held up his hand like a traffic cop. “Don't mistake him for your friend,” he warned me. “He tried to have you fired during the first week of shooting.”

I must've stood in that parking lot with my mouth opening and closing like a goldfish's. “He—?”

“He wasn't happy with the footage so he tried to have you fired. I was in the screening room when he showed your stuff to Michael Eisner.” (Eisner was Paramount's president and chief operating officer at the time.) “Eisner said, ‘I don't know what your problem is; I only wish
Grease
looked this good,' and that was the end of it.”

We chatted for a few moments more and then Jewell got into his car, leaving me to my confused thoughts. I now recalled Sallin's disappointment with my staging of Kirk's original entrance. He had been correct about that. I liked Bob Sallin and admired his understated style. Evidently, the reverse was not the case. Or perhaps, despite liking me, he had been disappointed in my performance as director. If our positions had been reversed, what would I have done? Or, more to the point, how would I have done it? And what to do with this information now? In the end I elected to do nothing. I hadn't been fired. It was water over the dam or under the bridge or whatever it was. The film was finished, the buzz was positive, and I had bigger fish to keep frying.

It was also sometime during this period that I got a call from Harve Bennett, summoning me to his office. Wondering what excrement had now tumbled into the wind machine, I trudged wearily across the nighttime lot and sat opposite his cluttered desk.

“Kid, we have a problem,” Bennett began, pausing to sip his beer. “I've lost the credit arbitration. What do you think I should do?”

Determining screen credits on a movie is the prerogative of the Writers Guild, not the studios. The studio submits its proposed screen credits to the Guild, but the WGA has the final say. Writers may appeal to the Guild for arbitration if they feel they have been unjustly credited (or uncredited) but only on narrow, procedural grounds. There is, as I have noted, a prejudice against according a producer a writing credit on the same film. In our blithe innocence, we had placed Bennett's name on the screenplay, and now he was telling me it had been rejected and asking me what I thought he should do.