KHAAAAAAAN! … and Me (or How I Learned to Love Star Trek - Part I)

Sometimes you’re lucky if you don’t get your first choice.

Billy Wilder wanted Mae West for the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, but Ms West wanted to write her own dialogue. Mr. Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett decided to look elsewhere, and Norma was played to the teeth by Gloria Swanson.

After the critical and mid-sized success of my directing debut, Time After Time, I was champing at the bit to film my screenplay of Robertson Davies’ novel, Fifth Business. I was in love with Davies’ novel and possibly even more passionate about my screenplay, titled Conjuring.

I took my screenplay to meeting after meeting, and no one was interested. “Not commercial,” I was told. “How can you tell if something’s commercial,” I fumed, “if it never gets made?” “Well written,” I was told, which by now I understood was the Kiss of Death.

Weeks passed; then months. It was, as I recall, a Sunday, and I was barbequing hamburgers in my backyard with Karen Moore, a childhood friend, now an executive at Paramount. Sometimes friends can tell you things you wouldn’t hear from your mother.

“Nicky, if you want to learn how to direct, you should direct and not sit up here holding your breath because you’re not getting to make the film you want. Harve Bennett has been assigned to produce the second Star Trek feature. I think you and Harve would hit off.”

“Star Trek – is that the one with the man with pointy ears?”

Karen took a breath. “Don’t be such a snob.”

I was not interested in Star Trek. In fact, I had never seen Star Trek except to click my remote at the TV when I saw the cheesy sets and the cast running around in what looked like Dr. Denton’s.

In the end, I dismounted from my high horse and trooped down to Paramount, where I sat down with Harve Bennett, who liked his beer from a cold bottle. Bennett was an experienced television producer, with hits like Mod Squad and The Six Million Dollar Man to his credit; also Rich Man, Poor Man, one of the first limited series.

Hoping to rival Fox’s Star Wars success, Paramount dragged Star Trek out of re-run mothballs and made a feature film. The film was a special fx nightmare, costing a whopping $45 million by the time of its 1979 release.

And it still made money. They asked Bennett if he could make a film as good as Star Trek: The Motion Picture for half that figure.

“I could make five films,” he answered, music to their ears.

Bennett and I got on very well. He was a casual, unaffected character who had never seen much of Star Trek either, but slogged through all the original episodes.

He showed me a couple, plus we screened the feature film.

What I saw was Greek to me. I couldn’t make heads or tails of Star Trek. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, I think it's safe to say I missed everything that was interesting or unprecedented about the show - its interracial cast, which featured women in positions of power, also racial “minorities”, all treated equally. To say nothing of television’s first interracial kiss.

Above all, I missed the implicit optimism in Star Trek’s unstated credo, that men and women of good will, regardless of race or gender, could band together to achieve noble goals.

“Draft five is coming in next week,” Bennett explained. I said I’d be happy to read it and left.

This was definitely not what I had in mind. It certainly wasn’t Conjuring.

Sometimes the back of your mind is working while the front is doing something else, maybe driving a car or picking up groceries. There was something in the back of my brain that teased. Star Trek reminded me of something that I did like – but what was it? It took a while longer, but I woke up in the middle of the night and found myself saying, “Hornblower!”

I sat up like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, blinded by a vision that suddenly made everything clear. For those who didn’t devour these novels at age 13, Horatio Hornblower is a captain in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Clearly based on Lord Nelson (Horatio is the giveaway), Hornblower has many adventures and a girl in every port, and if you’re inhaling this stuff at age 13, it’s very intoxicating. Hornblower was the brainchild of someone who called himself C.S. Forrester (who also wrote The African Queen).

Captain James T. Kirk, I realized, was nothing more than Hornblower in outer space. Battleships in space! Submarines in space!! I bet I could figure out how to do that. I’d grown up watching Run Silent, Run Deep and, more to the point, Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, the almost balletic action/pirate films directed – one might almost say choreographed - by Michael Curtiz.

Outer space be damned - I longed to run out the guns!

When I met with Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and mentioned Hornblower, William Shatner became very excited. “That’s what Gene always said!” Gene being Gene Roddenberry, the eminence grise who created the television show. Now I was really stoked. Submarines in space!

Weeks passed, and I noodled with other projects. Whatever happened to draft five of the Trek script? “I can’t show it to you,” Bennett explained when I phoned. He was more colorful than that. What about draft four or three? I queried.

“Kid,” (I was Kid back then), “you don’t get it; all these drafts are unrelated attempts to figure out another Star Trek film. They’ve nothing in common.”

“Can I read them?”

“It’s your funeral.” Back then, no one hit SEND on a laptop. A VAN drove up and disgorged maybe twenty scripts (each attempt had several drafts). I am a very slow reader, but I dutifully plowed through them all before inviting Bennett and his producing partner, Bob Sallin, to my place to hear my great idea.

I produced a legal pad. “Let’s make a list of everything and anything we like in these five scripts,” I said. “Could be a major plot, a subplot, a sequence, a scene, a character, even a line of dialogue. Whatever. Then I’ll try to write a new screenplay incorporating as many of the things we’ve listed as I can.”

They didn’t look happy. “What’s wrong with my idea?” I demanded. I’d been pretty pleased with myself.

“If we don’t have a script in 12 days, Industrial Light and Magic (George Lucas’ special FX house) says they can’t guarantee delivery of the FX shots in time for the June opening.”

“What June opening?”

“Oh,” said one a little sheepishly, “the film is booked into theatres for June –” I forget the date.

“You booked the theatres before there was even a film?” I wondered.

“How it’s always done,” I was assured.

I was now jonesing to make my space opera. “I think I can write a script in 12 days,” I offered.

They didn’t think they could make my deal in twelve days. “Forget the deal, forget the money, forget the credit,” I shouted in their faces, “Do you want the movie or not?” They tried not to look at each other.

Later, when I told my agent what I had done, he remembered he’d once contemplated becoming a priest. “Now I knew I’d made the right choice,” he realized, “because I wanted to kill you.”

I have only the haziest recollection of the 12 days in which I cobbled together the disparate elements we’d agreed upon – Kirk meets his son; Khan; the genesis project, Carol Marcus, Lt. Savvik - oh, and Spock dies (a condition Leonard Nimoy imposed on the script so as to ensure he’d never have to wear the pointy ears again. Harve promised him a great death scene). I worked around the clock on my Smith Corona portable electric, fiddling with this Rubik’s cube, scarcely knowing what I was doing. All I recall is that by the end, my back went out. I poured my dialogue like ketchup over the plots, subplots, and characters, hoping to at least create the illusion of one sensibility at work.

Along the way, like brass rubbings, certain themes popped out: the melancholy of old age; friendship; implacable hatred; death. Oh, yes, and Moby Dick. I discovered what I was writing about while I was writing it.

That draft met with approval sufficient to withstand some minor revisions, but somehow retained its essential shape. At some point in this high-speed conveyor belt, someone (Shatner?) noticed that Kirk and Khan (Neil Simon always insisted K made things funny) never go mano a mano.

“I saw that in the original episode, SPACE SEED,” (which had given Bennett the idea to bring back Khan as a supervillain), “and I don’t believe for a minute Kirk would’ve stood a chance against a genetically engineered creature like Khan,” I argued. No mano a mano. In fact, as it turned out, in the finished screenplay, the two only see each other on FaceTime.

The filming of what became known as The Wrath of Khan (the title changed over my protests – I had Barry Diller, then head, of the studio, fuming, “Who the fuck knows what ‘wrath’ means? - ) but I had more fun than should be legal with my battleships and submarines. My favorite shot in the film remains the most anachronistic: I had a torpedo “gun bay” set built so that I could run out the guns – just like Michael Curtiz did in The Sea Hawk!

“I knew the whole thing was a preposterous anachronism,” I explained to my screenwriter friend John McNamara, “but I couldn’t resist the moment.”

McNamara grew wide-eyed with indignation. “What do you mean, ‘anachronism?’ he fairly yelled, “All the power was out! They had to run the torpedoes out by hand!”

When the viewer collaborates to meet you halfway, that’s when you know you’ve accomplished your mission.

Years later, when I found myself rewatching The Enemy Below, a duel between a U.S. destroyer and a German U-Boat (improbably directed by no less than Dick Powell), I realized where the battle in the Mutara Nebula originated.

All art is cut and paste, everything descended from the guy (or gal) who first put their handprint on the cave wall.

Star Wars and its brethren are termed space operas. And I’m a huge opera fan. Star Trek II had nothing like the budget of a Star Wars movie and a mere quarter of the first Trek feature’s, but everyone loved George Lucas’ decision to ask composer John Williams for an operatic Erich Wolfgang Korngold-type score (Korngold had scored the Errol Flynn Sea Hawk/Robin Hood Warner Bros epics). Star Trek: The Motion Picture used the wonderfully gifted Jerry Goldsmith, who was laughably out of our price range.

I listened to a lot of cassette auditions and settled on a relative unknown, James Horner, who laughed at my jokes. Directors and composers often don’t share a common language, which is where the so-called “temp” track comes in. The director and his coterie paste another piece of music in places to give the composer a notion of what’s desired.

Having somewhat of a musical background, I didn’t want to compromise my composer’s instincts. “This movie’s about the navy, no matter what anyone else says. Space is our ocean,” I added, sitting beside him at my piano. “Give me Debussy’s La Mer.”

Horner gave me La Mer times ten.

Oh, and that Star Trek fanfare from the series we were instructed to retain? It can be found in Robert Farnon’s score for The Adventures of Captain Horatio Hornblower, starring Gregory Peck. Yup, Gene Roddenberry sure liked Hornblower.

And what about the undisputed star of the film? Ricardo Montalban?

Let me get something off my chest. That chest is his.

To be continued.