Up Till Now (28 page)

I’m not certain that the studio realized when they agreed to let Leonard direct the third film,
The Search for Spock,
that they were also committing to allowing me to direct the next
Star Trek
movie.

During the years we were making
Hooker, Star Trek
had become one of the most successful movie franchises in history. The first film,
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
, had grossed more than $100 million and, when the merchandising revenue was added, it was one of the most lucrative films in history. Apparently Paramount learned a very important lesson from that first film:
Star Trek
fans were so loyal they didn’t have to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money. In fact, the less they spent the more they could make. So Paramount cut the budget for the second film drastically and hired the very talented Nicholas Meyer to write and direct it. What he tried to do was bring some additional humanity—and humor—to the crew. As he said,
“I tried through irreverence to make them a little more human and a little less wooden. I didn’t insist that Captain Kirk go to the bathroom, but did
Star Trek
have to be so sanctified?”

Wooden? I thought that was another chapter of my life? Bathroom? Truthfully, I don’t remember seeing a restroom aboard the
Enterprise
. Consider it immaculate elimination.

Whatever Nick Meyer did, it worked:
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
opened with the largest weekend gross in movie history. By this time Captain James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock had taken their place among America’s legendary fictional characters. And probably among Vulcans, too. They were certainly better known than any of the real astronauts. I think I probably resisted completely embracing Jim Kirk for a long time. Like Leonard, I hadn’t wanted to be identified as him for the rest of my life, but that had ended a long while earlier. I had come to realize all the wonderful things being Captain Kirk had done for my life—and, in fact, continued to do. I remember once we were shooting in the desert and had a very early call. I told the wardrobe girl, “Give me my uniform and I’ll put it on at the house so I don’t have to come any earlier for wardrobe. I’ll just wear it to the set.” So at 4 A.M. I was racing across the desert to our location. I was way over the speed limit, figuring there wasn’t another car on the road in the entire state. It turned out there was one other car—and he had lights and a siren. Yes, Officer, good morning.

Being Hooker, I knew that when you were stopped by a police officer the proper way to respond is to follow his orders, show the officer that you aren’t being belligerent, and acknowledge that the officer is the boss—make sure he knows you know it. And if that doesn’t work, then it’s okay to beg.

So I got out of my car dressed in my uniform, ready to be amenable. The officer was actually wearing dark glasses in the middle of the night, so I couldn’t see his eyes. But he looked me up and down and sort of frowned and asked, “So where are you going so fast at four o’clock in the morning?”

I told him the truth. “To my spaceship.”

He sighed and said, “Okay, go ahead and live long and prosper.” Then he turned around and sent me on my way.

When Paramount began discussing the third film, Leonard negotiated a deal similar to the one he’d made to appear on
Hooker
: he agreed to appear in the movie only if he directed it. The studio readily agreed, but truthfully I didn’t know how to respond. It was sort of like your brother becoming your father. Or your wife becoming your...the captain of your spaceship. It just upset the delicate balance that two actors in leading roles—who had forged a close friendship—had successfully managed to work out over many years. In other words, it wasn’t fair!

When I read the first draft of the script I didn’t like it. Spock appeared only briefly, and my role was relatively small. I just didn’t believe Trekkies would accept a story in which neither Kirk nor Spock dominated the action. I invited Leonard and our producer, Harve Bennett, up to my house to discuss the script. Remember that meeting, Leonard? “It was tense, very tense.”

Thank you, Leonard. It was tense, very tense. As we went through the script I asked for certain changes. I was very protective of Kirk. Mostly, though, I wanted to get some sense of how Leonard and I were going to work together. Leonard told me, “What’s good for you, Bill, is good for
Star Trek
. My intention is to make a damn good
Star Trek
movie, and to do that I need you to come off well.”

Oh, I get it. Clearly we were on the same 120 script pages. But it turned out that everybody was somewhat concerned about how Leonard and I would get along. Early in production I had a scene in which I received the devastating news that my son had been killed by a Klingon raiding party. It was a tremendously emotional scene, and initially I didn’t quite know what I was going to do. To help me focus Leonard asked everyone not essential to the filming to leave the set. And as soon as they were gone I shouted at him, “I’m not going to do it your way.”

“The hell you’re not,” he shouted right back at me. “You’re god-damn well going to do it the way I tell you. So go stand over there
and shut up. Come on, you’re just the actor and I am the director of this motion picture.”

I suspect the phrase “just the actor” gave it away. Everybody started laughing at that remark—no actor is “just the actor”—and any lingering tension that existed on the production disappeared. Once again the picture did very well, extremely very well, so Paramount immediately began planning the fourth movie. Originally, this was the film that I was supposed to...

Hold it, do you hear that? Shhhh, just listen. Hear it? No, you probably don’t, not unless you have tinnitus, which I do. And which Leonard also has. This was something else that both of us got from
Star Trek.
During one of the episodes Leonard and I were standing too close to a large explosion. It is the kind of thing that happens often on sets, most of the time with no problem. But afterward my ears started ringing, as did Leonard’s, and both of us years later developed a medical condition called tinnitus, a constant sound that you hear that never goes away. For some people it can be a ringing tone. For others, like me, it’s more like the hiss of a TV set that’s not tuned to any channel. Millions of people suffer from it; it can be caused by anything from an explosion, continued exposure to a loud sound—many World War II airmen and rock musicians have it, for example—it can be a reaction to a medicine or caused by one of many illnesses or it simply can be a function of age. Millions of people live with it without much problem, but for more than seven million people it’s debilitating. It makes it impossible to lead a normal life. There is no simple cure. And in extreme cases it can even lead to suicide. I developed one of those extreme cases.

There are parts of the world in which tinnitus is said to be the voice of God. In remote parts of China it is considered a sign of great wisdom. In rural Turkey it is considered good luck. But not in the San Fernando Valley. There it’s considered a real problem. And it was driving me crazy.

I had a loud sound in my ear and it would never go away. I consulted several doctors, I had all kinds of tests. I kept thinking, this
has got to stop, but it didn’t. I’ve gone through several different programs; the one that worked for me is called habitation. This is a machine that produces what is called white noise, a sound you can’t hear normally. For some reason if they can reproduce the sound you’re hearing in your head on this device the sound waves are canceled out. I remember the moment they reached my level: imagine being trapped in a mine and rescuers break through and you can see the sunlight! That’s what it felt like to me. I was given my life back. I wore a device similar to a hearing aid which continually piped white noise into both ears. After several months my brain got accustomed to the sound and I was able to wean myself off it.

There are doctors who tell patients they can cure them with an operation. I suppose on occasion an operation can work, but generally it doesn’t. The majority of people eventually simply get accustomed to the sound and are no longer consciously aware of it—unless they think about it or some guy writes about it in his autobiography.

I know how devastating it can be waiting to get used to it. It can take months. I’ve done volunteer work with the American Tinnitus Association, which does research and is a very good resource. At one point they gave me a list of potential contributors and asked me to call them. Many of the people I called responded in the same way: Who is this, really? No, you can’t be you. Really?

How do you prove you’re yourself on the phone? I certainly wasn’t going to offer to sing a chorus of “Rocket Man.” I remember having a long conversation with one man who was having difficulty adjusting to tinnitus. It was destroying his life, he said. It was inescapable. Eventually he volunteered to contribute $45,000. He asked me to call him again a week later.

I did, and this time a woman answered. When I asked for this man she explained, “I’m sorry, but he committed suicide two days ago.” Committed suicide? It was devastating. I’d had suicidal thoughts myself. But as I tell people suffering from this condition, time is the best treatment. They will become habituated. I have, they will.Please, listen.

So. As I was writing, I was supposed to direct the fourth
Star Trek
film,
The Voyage Home
. But because I had obligations to
T.J. Hooker,
I couldn’t do it. Leonard also directed this one. As we had occasionally in the past, in
Star Trek IV
we went back in time. A deadly probe was approaching the Earth, sending out strange signals. These high-pitched beeps turned out to be an attempt to communicate with whales, which had long been extinct. So we were assigned to return to Earth of the 1980s to capture two whales and bring them home to the future. Spock, of course, was completely out of his century and had great difficulty dealing with the illogic he found in 1980s San Francisco. Once, for example, after he’d attracted too much attention with his odd behavior I explained, “Oh him? He’s harmless. Part of the free speech movement at Berkeley in the sixties. I think he did a little too much LDS.”

In another scene my love interest, Dr. Gillian Taylor, asked Spock, “Are you sure you won’t change your mind?”

To which he replied logically, “Is there something wrong with the one I have?”

Chekov had a similar problem. An FBI agent interrogating him asked, “Name?”

“My name?” Chekov asked.

The agent replied sarcastically, “No,
my
name.”

Chekov was stumped. “I do not know your name.” “You play games with me, mister,” the agent threatened, “and you’re through.”

Chekov smiled. “I am? May I go now?”

The film cost $25 million to make and earned almost $150 million. It was by far the highest-grossing
Star Trek
film—which certainly made it a difficult movie to follow. And it was my turn.

I began by settling on a concept: the crew of the
Enterprise
goes in search of God. And instead we find the devil. I wanted Kirk and Spock and Bones to go to hell. Filmically. I wanted to explore the whole philosophical question of God and the devil and man’s relationship to their worship, a subject that had fascinated me for a long time. And here I was being given a clean slate. What do you want to do, Shatner? God and
Star Trek
. That’s a jaw dropper. I had it all worked out in my mind, McCoy falls into the grip of the devil.
Spock and Kirk go to hell and are able to get out through the tunnel of Hades and are running for the safety of the
Enterprise
when we hear McCoy calling for our help. And we have to turn back out of love for our partner. That was my idea: Kirk and Spock explore Dante’s
Inferno
. I could visualize us crossing the burning River Styx, pursued by living gargoyles, fleeing into the depths of collapsing cities. The thought of creating hell on film was incredibly exciting to me. Heaven and hell, love and hate, God and the devil, that was the movie I wanted to make. I wrote a three-page outline and submitted it to Paramount. And they loved it. Yes, this is damn good. This is what we want to do.

It had to be approved by Roddenberry. He turned it down. I tried to do a God story, he said. It’s not going to work. You alienate everybody. Nobody knows what God is, everybody has a different concept of God. Yes, the studio agreed with him, this is what we don’t want to do.

No God story? I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to do a God story. Then someone suggested, what if an alien thinks he’s the devil? Maybe that would work. Yes, the studio agreed, if an alien thinks he’s the devil we can do it.

Roddenberry agreed, as long as it was an alien and not really the devil.

I had my story. We go in search of God and find an alien who claims to be the devil and we believe he’s the devil but he’s not the devil. That would work. What I realized only after the movie was completed and I’d made the first of many compromises was that I’d already destroyed my concept. It was no longer God and the devil; it’s a psycho alien who is a devil worshipper. Every step of the way in making a movie there are compromises and this was my first one. But at least I had my basic plot.

And then I created my Big Bang ending. Now this was really going to be spectacular. Kirk was going to be running up a mountain to escape and the alien-devil’s minions were going to come out of Hades in pursuit. What a concept! I knew they couldn’t simply come out of the ground—they would be thrust out like rocks from a volcano.
Yes! Smoke and fire streaming out of their mouths. I could see it. I described it to the special-effects people. They loved it. Smoke and fire! Everybody loved it. “How many rock people can I have?” I asked.

“We’ll get you ten,” they said.

Unbelievable! That’s better than the Furies. They’re smoking and flames are shooting out of their mouths and they’re chasing Kirk. They’re four-legged animals. I drew up some sketches of these rock men exploding. This finale was going to be bigger and better than anything ever seen on
Star Trek
. So I’ve got a great beginning, a strong story, and a great ending. I know I can fill in the rest. And I’m going to direct it. This is going to be the start of the next phase of my career.