The View from the Bridge by Nicholas Meyer Page B

himself along with others. At some point I learned Bennett had been a child radio star on a program called Quiz Kids . A native of Chicago, he’d migrated to Los Angeles, where he’d found a great deal of success in the world of television, having produced The Mod Squad , The Bionic Woman , and The Six Million Dollar Man, none of which I had seen.
    My attitude toward television has always been ambivalent, to say the least. The constant interruption of the stories by commercials makes it hard for me to watch. The only shows I could stand were the comedies of my childhood: Your Show of Shows (Sid Caesar), You’ll Never Get Rich ( Sgt. Bilko ), Ernie Kovacs, The Honeymooners , etc. The rest, as Hamlet might have said, was PBS.
    On the other hand, Star Wars had recently come out and knocked my socks off (along with everyone else’s), and the idea of doing a big-screen space opera had its appeal. I use the word “opera” advisedly. I am an unabashed opera fan and I recognized in Lucas’s work, along with John Williams’s ersatz Richard Straussian score and its enormous contribution to the goings-on, a cinematic opera, a sort of Ring Lite.
    Bennett, who was tactful enough to laugh at my jokes, sipped beer from a bottle and showed me several episodes of the original Star Trek . I confess what I saw did not particularly excite me; neither did the first Star Trek movie, released in 1979. I couldn’t quite place (not having Bennett’s analytical mind) what it was I found so off-putting and could only grope toward insight. My groping took the form of noting all the things I didn’t like: the uniforms, the acting, the sets, the solemnity.
    Bennett then showed me “Space Seed,” the television episode that introduced the supervillain Khan, and I did respond to that: Ricardo Montalban was a great actor and like most great actors was wasted in roles beneath his talents. When Bennett, who spoke in clipped, foreshortened English, not unreminiscent of Star Trek dialogue (“Message, Spock?”), suggested using Khan as a character in the new film, I began to become interested.
    The reasons Paramount was intent on making a second Star Trek film are by now well-known: despite the fact that the original motion picture had been a “runaway” production, costing an astounding forty-five million dollars (in 1979!) and despite the fact that it had received indifferent notices, the movie wound up in profit, close to eighty-three million dollars. Barry Diller, then running the studio with Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, realized that if they could make another, better film, at a reasonable budget, they might develop a franchise to rival Lucas’s. The first Star Trek had been a torturous learning process, originally to be helmed by Phil Kauffman and designed by the great Ken Adam; disagreements about scripts and budgets sent both men packing. Eventually the film was directed by Robert Wise, whose impressive credits included editing Citizen Kane and directing such successful films as The Day the Earth Stood Still and West Side Story (with Jerome Robbins), as well as the indestructible The Sound of Music .
    The second Trek attempt had subsequently been farmed out to the television division of Paramount, headed by Gary Nardino, who would undertake to make the film for a quarter of the original movie’s budget.
    These considerations did not escape me. I didn’t know if I could make a great movie (my jovial editor on Star Trek II , Bill Dornisch, wanted to call his production company “Miracle Pictures”—their soubriquet: “If it’s a good picture, it’s a Miracle!” ) but I began to see that even if I made an okay one that cost a fraction of the original, it would be a shrewd career move.
    Bennett explained that draft five of the screenplay would be arriving in two weeks and offered to send it to me. I said fine and went home, where my mind began