The View from the Bridge (29 page)

That turned out to be an understatement. Two weeks before we started Hackman wanted to be replaced. What comparable star he imagined would be available on such short notice was beyond me. Did he realize he would be leaving a lot of folks in the lurch? Did he care? MGM, the movie's financier, made it simple: if Hackman didn't show up in Berlin, MGM threatened to sue him.

So it wasn't a happy camper whom I finally got to meet, ten days before we were to start. He began by commenting on the script—the first time he'd addressed the material in the nine months since he'd agreed to perform in it—which he felt contained too much violence. (This from the man whose next film would win him an Oscar as the sadistic Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood's
Unforgiven
.)

When I demurred at Hackman's critique and mumbled something about our film being a spy thriller in which such goings-on were typical, he glared at me. “You know, you and I don't get along.”

“We don't?” I asked, in shock. “But we've only just met.” In fact we hadn't been sitting together five minutes.

For me, used to getting people to do my bidding because they liked me, and because I liked them, this was not good.

The film, which came to be known as
Company Business
, was a catastrophe, and it was no one's fault but mine. Going forward without a finished script was suicide. And while on paper, the troika of Hackman, Baryshnikov, and Meyer might have appeared promising, in reality we were all pulling in different directions, and my bouts with Hackman just about wrecked me. Going toe-to-toe with talent is not my forte. I assume that people who get to make a film are (a) doggone lucky and (b) doing this job because they want to do it. The rest of the world may be struggling with god-awful tasks such as mining coal, but here the pay is good, you're seeing the world, and you're telling a story. What could there be to act up about? Of course this is a wild oversimplification, but it does contain some truth, and that made it hard for me to understand Hackman's attitude, though I understood that three pictures back-to-back before mine had exhausted him. The only result of our inability to work in harness was that I dropped twenty pounds and lived on Valium. In truth, I didn't know what I was doing and I felt bad, especially for Baryshnikov, who had shown up in good faith; bad, too, for MGM, who had jumped at the chance to finance a film with such promising “elements.” At one point Hackman and I found ourselves sitting together in a jail cell in Maryland, waiting for the crew to show up and film a scene set there. “Well,” he allowed, “I've behaved badly on a bunch of films but I've got to admit, this one takes the cake.”

It was certainly memorable to be in Berlin during this period of convulsive change. One week you had to go through the notorious Checkpoint Charlie to get into bullet-pocked (from World War II!) East Berlin; the next week, you just sped past a bunch of broken windows where Checkpoint Charlie had stood. The world was changing.

There were a couple of sequences in
Company Business
of which I was proud, notably the tense spy swap sequence in the Berlin subway—but isolated sequences do not a good film make. A great movie is great from start to finish.
Company Business
, alas, did not come close.

Struggling with Ron in our cutting rooms outside London to make sense of virtually unusable footage, I welcomed the distraction of an invitation from Frank Mancuso and Martin Davis for lunch at Claridge's. The topic:
Star Trek VI
.

STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Over a suitably
elegant repast and clanking, heavy cutlery, Mancuso and Davis asked if I would be interested in writing and directing the last
Star Trek
film to utilize the original cast. By this time the new television series,
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, was a hit, and Patrick Stewart and friends were waiting in the wings to make their
Star Trek
feature debuts. But the studio was, as Mancuso put it, disinclined “to go out with
Star Trek V
,” a film in which they were frankly disappointed. As I understood him, it wasn't merely the film's economic performance about which he was speaking. I took him to mean it was a matter of pride to the studio to end the original cast's contribution on a more successful note critically as well as commercially.

Or perhaps that was the explanation calculated to appeal to a creative person. Perhaps they merely thought they could hedge their bets by squeezing one more film out of the surefire old hands before turning them out to pasture. Or am I being cynical?

“We're talking around thirty million dollars,” Mancuso said.

I had no idea for another
Star Trek
movie but following my devastating experience on
Company Business
, I wished I did. The cozy familiarity of the
Star Trek
family seemed very appealing after what I'd just gone through.

I agreed that thirty million was feasible and further agreed to meet with Leonard Nimoy, who would function as executive producer, to see if we could cook up a story while I took a two-week summer breather on Cape Cod.

In my excitement at being thus wooed, I neglected to inquire where Harve Bennett fit into the plan. I would have been—as I subsequently was—distressed to learn that not only would he not be a participant but that he had left the Paramount lot under bitter circumstances, as he later recounted to me.

For the previous year, preoccupied as they were with internecine power struggles within the studio, Paramount encouraged Bennett to develop and revise his own proposal for a sixth
Star Trek
movie, one that featured young Kirk, young Spock, et al., during their early days at the Starfleet Academy.

Having strung Bennett along month after month, Paramount abruptly stipulated that he produce yet another film with the old cast first and then (maybe) they would move on to his young
Trek
story. Bennett was furious that the studio had thus unceremoniously abandoned his laboriously worked-out idea in favor of that last squeeze of the orange, as proposed to me at Claridge's. Feeling betrayed, Bennett left the studio. His complaint was not that Paramount had decided in favor of another approach but rather the amount of time they had allowed him to work under the delusion that they were seriously entertaining his. Someone observed that the chief problem in Hollywood is behavior. Paramount's treatment of the man who had saved the franchise for them over the course of five movies, making who knows how much money for the studio in the process, seemed graceless at best. (It is interesting to note that the 2009
Star Trek
movie, directed by J. J. Abrams, deals with precisely Bennett's conceit: young Kirk and Spock.)

A month or so after my luncheon at Claridge's, Nimoy, a native of Boston and currently visiting his hometown, flew twenty minutes across Massachusetts Bay to spend the day with me in Provincetown. At low tide we ambled up and down the beach as Nimoy talked and I listened.

“
Star Trek
has always reflected current events,” he began, pointing out that the alien Klingon race had always been
Trek
's stand-in for the Russians, whose empire, even as we spoke, was crumbling like Alka-Seltzer. Reflecting on the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, he mused: “What about a story where the wall comes down in outer space? What is the United States without the Soviet Union? Who am I if I have no enemy to define me?”

This was all I needed. I don't get ideas on my own, but typically with me all you need do is prime the pump.

“Right,” I jumped in. “We start with a massive Chernobyl-type explosion in outer space. A Klingon moon has been destroyed, maybe ending their oxygen or energy supply—it's going to be like East Berliners streaming over the places where the Wall used to be unless there's a treaty. The Klingon Chancellor is coming to meet with the Federation to discuss the peace. It's a brave new world, and Kirk is assigned to escort the Klingon chief through Federation space to the conference. But Kirk hates Klingons because they killed his son (see
Star Trek III
) and he botches the job. The Chancellor is assassinated; Kirk takes the rap at a Klingon show trial (nifty alien courtroom scene here) and is exiled to a sand planet from which he must escape (think POW escape movie) and track down the real killers (Agatha Christie locked room mystery potential here) before more havoc occurs at the peace conference—or something like that. . . .”

Did it all come together that fast? Maybe not, but we did hammer out the basic story on the beach, after which Nimoy returned to California and I took my family back to London.

Things got weird shortly thereafter. Although Paramount approved our story idea, Nimoy called me in London a few weeks following our meeting to report that the studio had hired two other writers to write the screenplay of the story we had concocted.

Why on earth? I pondered this with him over the phone, but the one suspicion I had didn't make sense so I didn't say it aloud.

Maybe they were trying to save money? Over a
script
? It seemed penny-wise and pound-foolish. Were these writers less costly than Paramount knew me to be? (My fees as part of my on-the-lot contract were established and well known to Business Affairs.)

I was not unaware that the feature division of the studio was in trouble and had been hemorrhaging red ink for over a year, making films that lost money at forty million a pop. I knew this could not go on indefinitely and could almost hear the band tuning up for the next round of musical chairs.

In fact, the explanation was rather different. The executive in charge of
Star Trek VI
(as yet untitled) had two writers under contract to be paid for a picture—any picture—and he hadn't been able to find them one.

My deal called for me to be paid only
if
I worked, whereas these two would be owed money regardless.

No contest . . .

But Paramount's problems were small compared to those of my assistant. I got a strained phone call from Denny to tell me he had been diagnosed with cancer; a growth in his mouth, of all places. Denny, a health nut who exercised and had never smoked, would be in for the fight of his life.

And I couldn't think of a single way to be of help. The screenplay dilemma abruptly took a back place in my thoughts. In any case, there was seemingly nothing to be done except to sit tight and wait for the script I was supposed to direct and Nimoy to executive produce.

In the meantime, and from long distance, I kept track of Denny's progress and tried as well to stay in touch with his state of mind. The person next to you has just been struck by lightning. Your move. It is uniquely horrible to have someone you care deeply for in the fight of his life, and all you can do is hold his coat. If that.

A few weeks later there was more news on the screenplay front: “The boys are having a little trouble getting started,” I was told, I can't remember by whom.

“Send them to London, and I'll talk them through it,” I offered, eager to get on with things, and shortly one of them showed up, a pleasant enough fellow. He sat in my living room with a legal pad on his lap and took copious notes over three days while I led him step by step through the story, which had by now grown more detailed, as I'd had over a month to daydream about it.

When Nimoy learned that I had met the young man in London, he was furious that I had discussed “his” story without his knowledge or consent. I was surprised at his reaction because (a) I assumed that, as executive producer, he had been told of this plan (though given Paramount's convulsions at the time, it latterly made perfect sense that they hadn't bothered; see notes on behavior, above); (b) like Harve Bennett, I was now the one with an overall deal and an obligation to be helpful to the studio that had contracted me; and lastly (c) it had not occurred to me that Nimoy viewed the story as solely his. While there could be no doubt that he had shown up on the Cape with the general thematic idea, we had (or at least it seemed to me)—walking up and down the beach—fleshed out the many if not most of the subsequent details jointly. But I learned none of this festering indignation until later.

In the end the script by the two prepaid authors went the way of
Star Trek IV
's first draft, and I was asked to write the thing myself, again without consulting the discarded version.

By this point, I was mainly thinking about Denny. I now asked Paramount to hire us as a writing team for
Star Trek VI
, which I had already subtitled (once again!)
The Undiscovered Country
. I wasn't doing Denny a favor; he was a terrific writer, great with structure and witty dialogue. Why not?

By this point the studio was open to anything and didn't even blink at my request. They hired, as well, my long-time producing partner, Steven-Charles Jaffe, who had worked with me since
Time After Time
.

The question of postproduction (where the film was to be edited, the sound mixed, etc.) was left open. I wanted to finish the picture at home in London so as to be with my family. The studio tap-danced and said they would take this idea under advisement.

Star Trek VI
must have been the first screenplay written in collaboration using e-mail, with Denny and I bouncing drafts back and forth through cyberspace from LA to London. He was feeling wretched from the chemo and radiation he was forced to undergo but he had the constitution of an ox thanks to a life of dance, and the responsibility for delivering kept him from obsessing about his situation. It kept me from obsessing as well.

We showed the script to Paramount and to Nimoy, and Paramount sent me an enthusiastic memo along with some notes. I forwarded their enthusiasm to Nimoy but omitted their notes, preferring to let him reach his own independent conclusions. He later interpreted this as duplicity on my part—another black mark against me. I would have been wiser to tell him what I had done and why.