A Brief Guide to Star Trek (20 page)

Working on the story together, Leonard Nimoy (who would again direct following the success of
The Search for Spock
) and Harve Bennett set out to develop a film with an environmental theme: not only were environmental problems gaining mainstream attention in the mid-1980s, but the idea seemed to fit with one of
Star Trek
’s original successful ploys. The new film would tackle a contemporary subject in the futuristic dressing of
Star Trek
, just as many episodes of the original series had taken on 1960s social and political concerns wrapped up in a space opera setting.

Another thing both storytellers agreed on was that
Star Trek IV
needed a more light-hearted tone than the high drama of the previous two movies. While the stakes would be high and there’d
be plenty of incident, it was felt that the
Star Trek
characters had been put through the emotional wringer in
The Wrath of Khan
and
The Search for Spock
, so the fourth movie would go lighter on them. All the pair had to do was settle on what the story would actually entail – they only knew that some element from their past (the audiences’ present) would need to be retrieved by the
Enterprise
crew to save their future.

Before much further progress was made on these ideas, however, the project was dealt a body blow. William Shatner was no longer interested in playing Kirk. ‘I was being “difficult”, at least according to the studio’, wrote Shatner in
Star Trek Movie Memories
. ‘I steadfastly refused to sign on the dotted line for our new film, holding out partially in an effort to make up for two decades’ worth of nonexistent residuals [payments for repeat screenings of TV episodes] and merchandising revenues. [I cited] the fact that our previous three films had earned the studio well over a quarter of a billion dollars.’

Initially it looked like Shatner’s gambit would not pay off. A change at the top of Paramount meant that new executives were in charge of the
Star Trek
movies. Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had both left to run Disney, and Barry Diller had gone to Fox, finally achieving the dream of Paramount’s fourth TV network elsewhere. The new head of the studio was distribution man Frank Mancuso, with Ned Tanen supervising motion pictures and Dawn Steele appointed head of production. While all were committed to continuing the
Star Trek
motion picture franchise, none of them was wedded to the successes and failures of the past movies, so they were open to new directions.

Faced with a missing-in-action Admiral Kirk, Nimoy and Bennett had to come up with an alternative plan. Bennett’s first suggestion was one that would resurface many times over the next two decades in connection with a variety of
Star Trek
projects. He suggested a prequel movie chronicling Kirk and company’s time at Starfleet Academy, their pre-
Enterprise
adventures. This would require the characters to be younger, thus entailing recasting the core
Star Trek
crew, solving the Shatner problem. Nimoy
could even appear in the movie as the older Spock, either as a narrator in a narrative wraparound or through some time travel device, allowing him to actually take part in the action. The new executive team at Paramount was apparently open to taking the
Star Trek
movies in this direction.

They also had other, more outré ideas for
Star Trek
. One of the biggest stars Paramount had in the mid-1980s was Eddie Murphy. Nimoy had actually approached Daniel Petrie Jr, writer of Murphy’s star-making movie
Beverly Hills Cop
(1984) to work on
Star Trek
when the concept of featuring Murphy in the
Star Trek
movie was tabled. Outgoing Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg described this as ‘either the best or worst idea in the world’. Nimoy and Bennett were tempted by the notion as a way of attracting non-
Star Trek
fans to the fourth movie, although they were also wary of the fact that Murphy’s comedic presence might unbalance the film and even lead to
Star Trek
being ridiculed. Murphy himself claimed to be a huge
Star Trek
fan and was very positive about the idea of being included in the film. Writers Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes worked on a Murphy-centric screenplay that would see him play a contemporary college professor who believes in aliens and meets the
Enterprise
crew in a series of comedic encounters. In the end, Murphy opted to make
The Golden Child
(1986), having decided he didn’t like the
Star Trek
role offered, claiming he’d rather play an alien or a Starfleet officer. It also seems that business sense ruled the day at executive level at Paramount – there was little point combining two multi-million-dollar franchises (
Star Trek
and Eddie Murphy) into one when separately they’d bring in twice as much revenue.

The Eddie Murphy detour cost seven months of development time in 1985, and in the end Nimoy and Bennett returned to their ‘time travel to the past to save the future’ idea, this time with Admiral Kirk part of the action as Shatner was back on board, having negotiated a larger financial compensation package (which Nimoy also benefited from, thanks to their shared ‘favoured nations’ clause). Writer–director Nicholas Meyer was
brought back into the
Star Trek
fold to help script the fourth movie after opting out of number three as he felt ‘I didn’t want to resurrect Spock’ as such a move ‘attacked the integrity and the authenticity of the feelings provoked by his death. However, by the time we got to
IV
, Spock was alive, it was a de facto thing, and on top of that my friends were in trouble.’

The first order of business was to decide exactly what the ‘MacGuffin’ – Alfred Hitchcock’s term for an otherwise insignificant plot motivator – from the past needed to save the future would be. Several things were considered, including violin-makers and oil drillers, or the cure to a disease that could only be found in the rainforests (extinct in the future). It was Nimoy’s reading of a book about the extinction of animal species that set them on the path to whales. Having humpback whales extinct in the future, but needing to retrieve some from the past, seemed like an idea that would give the film a wide appeal beyond just
Star Trek
fans. The addition of mysterious whale song to the film helped to secure the story: a destructive space probe in the future threatens the Earth while seeking an answering whale song to its signal. Kirk, the newly resurrected Spock, McCoy and the crew use the Klingon Bird-of-Prey ship to slingshot around the sun in an effort to travel to the past in order to bring some living whale samples back to the future. Everyone involved in the project recognised that the opportunity for culture clash moments between the twenty-third-century humans and those from 1986 would allow for a lot of natural comedy without the star casting of Eddie Murphy.

So it proved:
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
was released on Thanksgiving weekend, 26 November 1986, to huge critical acclaim and astonishing box office receipts. The first five days saw the movie gross $39.6 million in the US, against the production budget of just $21 million. Globally, the film was a huge success, totalling $133 million at the worldwide box office. Originally scheduled for release at Christmas, Paramount head Frank Mancuso had suggested bringing the film forward to
Thanksgiving, a switch that gave the film greater life in the holiday period leading up to Christmas.

The fourth
Star Trek
movie was a huge crossover success with the plight of the whales, the contemporary setting and the accessible character humour all attracting a sizeable non-fan audience to the film. The
Washington Post
dubbed the picture ‘immensely pleasurable Christmas entertainment’, while the
New York Times
felt the latest instalment had ‘done a great deal to ensure the series’ longevity’. Again, there was much comment on how the film was true to the critics’ memories of the TV series, while having the characters play up to their reputations in the popular imagination proved a masterstroke in bringing in a wider audience. An easy to engage with contemporary issue in the possible extinction of the whales (and other species) made the film relevant to broad 1980s audiences, without being environmentally preachy. Above all,
The Voyage Home
was a great slice of entertainment that would be well remembered by all who saw it.

Following
The Voyage Home
was always going to be difficult. Given that Leonard Nimoy had directed two hugely successful entries in the franchise, it might have been expected that he’d continue with the fifth. However, due to the parity between Nimoy and his
Star Trek
co-star, it was clearly now Shatner’s turn to be the driving force behind a
Star Trek
movie. It seems likely this was part of the negotiation that had brought Shatner back on board to star in
Star Trek IV
– that he’d be the one behind the camera on
Star Trek V
. Shatner also took the opportunity to develop the storyline for the fifth movie, as Nimoy had done for the fourth. Overseeing the production, as on the previous movies, was Harve Bennett, even though he had attempted to opt out of the series after
The Voyage Home
.

In developing his storyline, Shatner was inspired by the sight of growing numbers of tele-evangelists prospering in American culture. Shatner was entranced by the fact that people like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and Jimmy Swaggart were not only hoodwinking (in his opinion) millions of
Americans into believing their Christian-inspired storytelling, but also getting many of them to part with their hard-earned cash so the tele-evangelists could live high on the hog. Shatner combined the figure of a preacher who hears the word of God with one of Gene Roddenberry’s earliest ideas for a
Star Trek
film – the
Enterprise
’s quest for God – to come up with a plot for
Star Trek V
. The ‘God’ eventually discovered would be an all-powerful alien being that Kirk and company would have to defeat.

This idea, and the resulting script from writer David Loughery (
Dreamscape
), did not meet the same positive reception from the studio and
Star Trek
cast members as the previous movie. Under Shatner’s initial direction Loughery had crafted a story that promoted Kirk at the expense of the other main characters: while they fell for the proselytising of the unicorn-riding, Vulcan mystic Zar (later revised to be Sybok, the previously unknown half-brother of Spock), Kirk was the sole hold-out for reason and the only one who could save them all. Specifically causing discontent were the scripted actions of Spock and McCoy, who allow Sybok to take command of the
Enterprise
because they buy into his mystical vision. In the process they betray Kirk, although he has to rescue them from themselves by the climax. Naturally, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley were not impressed by this take on their characters and (as Shatner had done on
Star Trek IV
) they asked for substantial script revisions.

Having previously objected to the death of Spock in
The Wrath of Khan
and the destruction of the
Enterprise
in
The Search for Spock
, this time Roddenberry objected to the entire basis for William Shatner’s
Star Trek
movie in a series of memos and letters. Writing to Shatner, Roddenberry stated, ‘I simply cannot support a story which has our intelligent and insightful crew mesmerised by a 23rd-century religious charlatan.’ In a memo to Harve Bennett, Roddenberry was even blunter in his assessment of the proposed storyline: ‘It is not
Star Trek
! [This] will destroy much of the value of the
Star Trek
property.’ He also sent a summary of his feelings on the matter to his lawyer,
Leonard Maizlish, to prepare him for any dealings with Paramount. ‘The errors of property format, science and fact in this movie story are nothing less than shocking’, wrote Roddenberry. In a later memo to Shatner and Bennett, he explained that in his opinion the suggested story ‘demeans and degrades
Star Trek
with subject matter that it has assiduously avoided in the past . . . Please abandon this story laden with mesmerisation, pop psychology, flim flam betrayal, a lack of power, a lack of humour. Please do something with the ingredient that is the hallmark of
Star Trek
. . . believability.’ Roddenberry even recruited authors Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke to his cause, but it was all to no avail. While Roddenberry could clearly see that Shatner’s storyline for
Star Trek V
was in no way a suitable follow-up to the crowd-pleasing and immensely successful
The Voyage Home
, no one else at Paramount appeared to agree (or at least appeared willing to take on the might of Shatner’s contractual arrangements and considerable ego). Although the script went through many revisions and was improved in Roddenberry’s eyes, the fundamental basis of the storyline was so flawed he felt the film was beyond salvaging.

There were other pressures on Paramount. The studio was keen to capitalise quickly on the success of
The Voyage Home
with another movie, while the looming 1988 Writers Guild of America strike was threatening to curtail any new film’s development time. They also had a new
Star Trek
TV series in
The Next Generation
to promote and wanted the film to drive viewers to the TV show, and vice versa. The rush into production, with an underdeveloped script and an inadequate budget and time scale meant that the finished film suffered immensely, just as Roddenberry had foreseen it would. The original climax on the ‘planet of God’, Sha Ka Ree, (meant to sound like Sean Connery, the former James Bond whom Shatner hoped would play Sybok) was to feature an attack upon the
Enterprise
crew by a rock monster. The effects used to create the sequence were, however, considered too poor for a major motion picture and this climax was abandoned. Shatner later admitted of his rock
man, ‘Our guy in the silly rubber suit ultimately just looked like . . . well, a guy in a silly rubber suit. I realised that the already compromised ending of my movie was now in serious trouble.’ In post-production Shatner attempted to save the scene: ‘My God effect looked cheesy, and the hastily concocted light blob, designed to replace our disastrous rock man, was truly disappointing. Harve [Bennett] and I tried to scrape up the funds to reshoot the ending, but found the studio purse strings tightly knotted. [This] hastily thrown together ending left us dead in the water. It was the ruination of that film.’