The View from the Bridge (34 page)

When we reconvened I found myself in a huge room populated by over thirty men and women whose job it was to help sell
Star Trek VI
. Reams of computer printouts confronted me. I picked up the first title—I forget what it was—read it slowly and then asked what the assembly thought of it. No one seemed very taken so I went with deliberation onto the second name,
Bridge to Tomorrow
. “Any takers?” I inquired. Silence. As I prepared to go on to
Bridge
number three of what looked to be ten thousand possibilities, Barry London interrupted.

“You win,” he smiled. And so did I.

The film opened on December 6, 1991, to excellent notices and a huge box office. (One reviewer was so enthusiastic he wondered why the original cast didn't simply keep going.) I think we broke another opening weekend record, and among Monday's congratulations was a call from Lucia Ludovico in marketing. “Thank God we didn't change your title!” she exclaimed. I had to smile at the thought the title had made any difference one way or the other.

Some months later, while I was getting my teeth cleaned, my dentist told me how much he enjoyed the movie. In acknowledging his kind remarks through all the instruments jammed into my mouth, I marveled yet again at how we had managed to predict the Soviet coup.

“Come again?” said Dr. Brown.

“Well,” I pointed out, “you know that this was basically a movie about the Wall coming down. The Klingons were stand-ins for the Russians. We called Gorbachev ‘Gorkon' and so on and basically staged the coup before the one that actually happened in the USSR. . . .”

He regarded me with a puzzled demeanor.

“Huh,” he conceded at length, “I guess I'll have to look at the movie again.”

And we had worried about being too obvious.

I made a few subsequent alterations for the VHS and DVD release, mainly to improve a sequence that I felt I had bungled in the cutting (the scene where Scotty stumbles on an important clue in the empty officers' mess) and adding some quick cutaways to the conspirators' faces for clarity when Valeris reveals their names under compulsion in the Vulcan mind meld. It is a curious reality of film that audiences frequently have difficulty learning the names of characters. They may have no problems with Indiana Jones or Lawrence of Arabia, but subsidiary names tend to mean little. (When we describe
North by Northwest,
we invariably refer to Cary Grant, not Roger Thornhill.) When Valeris reluctantly identifies her coconspirators, I realized—belatedly—that it would help the audience if they could
see
the faces belonging to those names. Surely Admiral Cartwright, when you saw him as embodied by Brock Peters, would pack more of a wallop for viewers than a conspirator whose name rang no bells. I hadn't made Cartwright part of the conspiracy by chance, either; I loved the idea of going against the stereotype movies had embraced of African Americans as flawless heroes in the Sidney Poitier mold and thought it would be stingingly politically incorrect to include Cartwright among the traitors, a decorated Starfleet officer, one we knew and trusted from an earlier movie.

No wonder Gene Roddenberry had been so dismayed by the script.

But aside from these minor improvements, I resisted the temptation to fiddle and I refused to let the DVD promoters title the slightly altered movie the “director's cut,” as I felt the changes were so minimal that such a label would amount to deceptive advertising.

The passage of time has, however, altered my perceptions of the film itself. While I am still pleased to find it entertaining, there can be no doubt that part of what we intended has dated in melancholy and chilling fashion. At the end of
The Undiscovered Country
, we learn that the conspirators were in fact a cabal comprised of Federation members and Klingons acting in concert to preserve a cold war status quo. “People can be very frightened of change,” Kirk sums up, and we cut to the stricken expression on Valeris before she is led off, under guard. Our point at the time certainly anticipated a wonderful new chapter in human history once the cold war was over. According to our view, people frightened of change were just scaredy-cats.

In fact, however, a wonderful new chapter in human history is not what has occurred. Instead, we got 9/11 and a resurgent form of human horror, terrorism, in which incalculable destruction is visited upon us not by dictators and armies but rather by crazies with box cutters and primitive but lethally destructive capabilities. The age of the suicide bomber was at hand. How long before that bomb would prove to be a nuclear one? Was this any improvement on the cold war era or is it not, in fact, much worse? As awful as MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was, no one was actually destroyed. But as of 2001, the world became an infinitely more dangerous place—all of which now leads me to wonder if the conspirators of
Star Trek VI
were not more justified than we gave them credit for being. Knowing what I now know (in the famous formulation of Senator Clinton), would I still maintain that Valeris, Cartwright, and their Klingon counterparts were misguided in their attempts to thwart détente between the Federation and the Klingon Empire?

I also confess to being troubled by the Vulcan mind meld, clearly a form of torture, wherein Spock attempts to forcibly extract vital information from the traitor, Valeris. In light of the Bush administration's treatment of “enemy combatants,” I blush.

PART 3

POST TREK

FIFTEEN YEARS

By 2009, when
this book is published, almost twenty years will have elapsed since the release of
Star Trek VI
. Much has happened since then—to the world; to
Star Trek
. And to me. I have worked on multiple scripts, some of which, like
Sommersby
,
Voices
,
The Informant
(aka
Field of Blood
),
The Human Stain
, and
Elegy
, were eventually filmed, for better or worse. Behind each of these titles lies tales of hard work, high hopes, dreary frustrations, and memorable people. I once saw a slip of paper on which were written the five stages of movie production: (1) Wild Enthusiasm; (2) Total Confusion; (3) Utter Despair; (4) Hunt for the Guilty; (5) Punishment of the Innocent. I wrote many screenplays—some I consider equal to if not superior to those that were filmed—that never saw the cinematic light of day. Just a lot of chopped-down trees. This is not unusual. In the '90s movies themselves were undergoing a transition whose momentum was gathering steam. At first, competition from such venues as television was offset by the bonanza that was DVD, but as time passed, it became clear that the monopoly movies had once enjoyed with the general public was being steadily eroded by competing and insistent claims on its attention, including hundred-channel television, video games, and latterly, the Internet. Also, as big corporations swallowed up the studios and burdened them with their huge corporate debt, the choices about which movies to make became increasingly conservative, driven by market demographics rather than instinct or guts or passion or taste. Once upon a time, before Eve gave Adam a bite of the Apple and there was Knowledge, film studios would make movies out of all kinds of stories. “Hey, this tale of sheep drovers in Australia seems cool,” etc. But as the bean counters, those descendents of Eve, applied their—alleged—Knowledge, films now must fit into genres: the gross-out teen comedy, the slasher flick, the comic book translation, etc. Quirky was starting to look like polar bears on melting ice seeking solid ground. Older filmgoers were alienated by louder, more bombastic soundtracks, unrelenting special effects, and puerile scripts. For a while the independent market provided these moviegoers with an alternative, but with Pay-Per-View and Netflix, many preferred to simply stay home. Movie criticism languished in the absence of films worth writing about, and soon newspapers, struggling themselves, cut costs by sacking voices to which—they argued—no one was paying any heed.

Watching movies at home, on a screen however large and a sound system however noisy, is simply not the same thing as seeing them in a theater. My dad used to say that watching movies on TV was like getting kissed over the telephone. What's missing in seeing a film on television is a central component of what it means to be human—the assembly. Whether it's at a church, at a play, or at the movies, the idea of losing your identity at a gathering of others—known or unknown to you—while sharing a common experience, a journey, an event, is uniquely human, and in my opinion we abandon such practices at our peril. Gatherings are important, and certainly better than going through life with ear buds. Never mind the theology or medium in question, concentrate on the part where you rub shoulders with strangers. Cities are places you walk or ride the subway, places where you look at people, they look at you; you don't pass them on the freeway at seventy miles an hour. At the end of a performance of Beethoven's Third, you and the audience have shared an adventure, at once individual and collective. The experience makes you a better person. Don't ask me how or why, but it does. There isn't any movie shown on televsion that wouldn't be better in a movie theater. Art is fragile—it can be interrupted by crying kids, the telephone, the neighbors, what have you. Gatherings, whether for music, church, plays, films, or ballets, are experiences to which you must make a commitment and in making that commitment, in leaving your home to devote yourself to that communal experience, you reaffirm your humanity.

Speaking for myself, the career artery in which I work has narrowed. I am still absorbed by stories, which I thought would never go out of fashion, dating as they do back to Homer. But lately narrative has been replaced by rides. Endless action sequences, unrelated to character or plot, are just a different kind of pornography, one in which standalone episodes of violence are substituted for standalone episodes of sex. The stories that nominally link these episodes are of little interest because—at least to me—they are unconnected or unrelated to life, which is what appeals to me. I am interested in heroes, not superheroes. Caped crusaders and movies that end with the word “Man” strike me as rather pathetic attempts to dial out an encroaching reality that most Americans appear unwilling to confront. The movies I am interested in making—and watching—are all attempts to confront reality, however quirky, peculiar, hilarious, or unpleasant. Even in (my)
Star Trek
s, as Kirk remarks, everyone is human. Tell me a story.

Of course franchise films have endured, and that includes
Star Trek
. After
VI
came
VII
,
VIII
,
IX
,
X
, none of which I saw on their release, partially because I was afraid I would like them better than my own, and I was petty enough to be frightened by this possibility. Eventually I did find myself watching them—for a segment on
Star Trek
villains for yet another DVD repackaging in which I had agreed to participate—and at first my worst fears were confirmed. I thought the other films looked better, in many cases were better acted, with superior effects, etc. Later, I gained some perspective and decided mine were just as good and my actors had a certain esprit de corps that struck me as pretty much inimitable.

I have said that this is not a travel book; nonetheless it is the account of a journey and every life journey throws you IEDs.

Shortly after we returned from India in 1987, Pierce Brosnan's wife, Cassie, was diagnosed with cancer, from which she later died.

In January of 1992 my own wife was also diagnosed with breast cancer and died a year and a half later, aged thirty-six, leaving me the widowed father of two daughters, aged three and six. Directing a film during that period was out of the question; I wasn't sure I could even frame a sentence. Some have marveled at my bad luck at losing my mother and then wife to cancer, but this isn't how I found myself feeling about it. However sorry I felt for myself, I felt worse for Lauren and our children, so prematurely and horribly separated.

There followed several years of which I have only the haziest recollection, and during which I am sure I made little sense. Brushing my hair or teeth seemed weirdly unimportant, and writing was a financial necessity, nothing more. At the beginning I thought about killing myself but quickly realized that even if I'd had the nerve, I couldn't really entertain the idea: I had two children for whom I was responsible. I was annoyed with them at the time, failing to recognize their gallantry and the example they set until later. I can never repay my debt to them for teaching me how to endure. But here I can at least acknowledge it.

The only project that resonated with me was the first one I was offered following Lauren's death: HBO commissioned me to write and direct an adaptation of
The Odyssey
, a tale that had been my favorite since the age of five when an uncle of mine had told it to me as an ongoing bedtime story. I knew this material inside out, and it wrote itself. In the process I realized I was also writing my autobiography, the story of a man trying to get back to his wife; more, it was the tale of a man punished for his inability to distinguish between cleverness and wisdom. Yes, it wrote itself.

Brosnan and I would lunch in Westwood on a regular basis and compare widowers' notes. Occasionally we'd include other guys whose wives had died, but mainly it was just the two of us, taking each other's pulse. At one of these lunches he started to talk about Cassie and soon tears were rolling down his cheeks. I brought up Lauren and shortly I was weeping, too. At this point, while sobbing into our gazpachos, a lovely girl with a great bosom walked by and we both instinctively turned to admire her. Then we looked at each other, caught in the act, and began to laugh while still crying.