Director Nicholas Meyer and Leonard Nimoy talk on the set of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. I

Director Nicholas Meyer and Leonard Nimoy talk on the set of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. In an interview with Stephen Payne and Nicholas Briggs that was printed in Starburst #162 (February 1992), Meyer was characteristically upfront about his role in writing the movie that many have credited with saving the Star Trek franchise:“Yeah, I wrote it. My name isn’t on it. What happened with that film is curious. They said ‘We’re waiting for draft number five to come in, and then we’ll send you the draft’…and then I never got it. Ten days went by and I called up Harve Bennett, and I said, ‘What happened to you guys?’ and he said, ‘Well, the draft came in and we don’t like it.’ I said ‘Well, send it to me.’ He said ‘No, no, no you don’t understand. It’s 160 pages of nothing.’ So I said, ‘What about draft four, send me draft four.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. All five drafts are merely five different attempts to get a different Star Trek movie, they are unrelated to one another.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, send them all up.’“So I sat and read these things, and then I called Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin who was his partner on the project. And I pulled out a yellow legal pad and said, ‘Here’s my idea. Let’s sit down and make a list of everything we like in these five drafts. It could be a character, could be a plot point, could be a story…let’s make a whole list. And then I’ll write a new screenplay that accommodates all the things we like.’“I’d never done it before, but this is a whole story about being young and foolish — that’s the point of this story! So they said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea, the only problem is that if we don’t have a screenplay in 12 days, Industrial Light And Magic, which is supposed to be doing the effects for this picture, will not guarantee delivery of the shots in time to be in theaters in June ‘81.’ I said, ‘If we can do this now I think in 12 days we can have a screenplay. Certainly good enough for ILM to know what they’re going to be doing.’ And they said, ‘We couldn’t even make your contract in 12 days.’ I said, ‘Forget about contracts, forget about all of that, because there’s not going to be any movie if we don’t shut up and start working. I will not be on it as the writer of record, because we don’t have time for any of that. These guys have written it. These guys have been paid. Let me go to work on the things that we like.’“When my agent heard this, I thought he was going to kill me. He got very angry. But that’s how it came to be written, and I forget whose name is on the finished screenplay. But in 12 days, we had taken the things we liked: Kirk finds his son, the Genesis plan, Khan comes back — there was a scene aboard a simulator, which was on page 50 of one screenplay, I moved it to the first scene in the movie…and then with a real piece of inspiration, we put Spock in the simulator and killed him off in the first scene of the movie! “So, we took story elements and ideas from five screenplays and then I wrote my own story. So I wrote and directed too. I think I’m entitled to claim that.”Photo scanned by Movienutt and downloaded from moviestillsdb.com -- source link
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