Writing The Wrath of Khan

Whatever its weaknesses, Star Trek: The Motion Picture had been a box-office success. So it was no surprise Paramount Pictures wanted a sequel.

It did not want to repeat the drama that had accompanied making the first film. Nor did it want another wave of disappointing reviews. Star Trek fans may have welcomed the franchise’s foray into feature film; others had been less impressed.

Among them was Charles Bluhdorn, president of Paramount’s parent company Gulf+Western. In a meeting with the studio’s top two executives, Barry Diller and Michael Eisner, and one of its most recently hired producers, Harve Bennett, Bluhdorn bluntly asked Bennett’s opinion of The Motion Picture. When Bennett said he had found it boring, Bluhdorn asked if he could make a better Star Trek movie — and for less $45 million? (Which was roughly how much Paramount had spent on the first one.)

Bennett said yes, and with that Star Trek was taken out of the hands of Gene Roddenberry and put in the care of a man who would go on to produce not just one, but three of its most acclaimed motion pictures (as well as Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.)

The War of the Generations

Bennett’s first challenge was coming up with a story. The Motion Picture had lifted Star Trek’s style and tone to something more epic and cerebral. The sequel would have to capture some of The Original Series’ humor and heart.

Bennett watched all original Star Trek episodes for inspiration. He found something in “Space Seed”: a villain. Bennett was struck by Ricardo Montalbán’s performance as decided Star Trek II would bring back Khan.

In November 1980, Bennett finished his draft of Star Trek II: The War of the Generations. In this story, Kirk is called to investigate a rebellion on a Federation world. En route, he saves a woman he once loved and learns that their son — whom he never knew he had — is one of the leaders of the rebellion. Upon arriving at the planet, Kirk is captured and sentenced to death by his own son before we learn that Khan is the mastermind behind the uprising. Kirk joins forces with his son to fight Khan and the film ends with Kirk’s son joining the crew of the Enterprise.

Bennett had also decided aging would be one of the film’s major themes. In the drafts that followed, Kirk was consistently confronted with a son he knew little about, Spock was often preoccupied with death and, in the later versions, McCoy struggled with his feelings for a much younger woman.

But he still had to turn his outline into a workable script. Bennett hired Jack B. Sowards for the task: the author of several TV movies and a self-confessed Star Trek fan.

Sowards immediately made a major contribution. Bennett had left Spock out of his story, since Leonard Nimoy was unenthusiastic about doing another Star Trek. Sowards believed that they could persuade Nimoy to return: he suggested that Bennett tell the actor Spock would die one-third into the film. The opportunity to play his death was too good for Nimoy to pass up and he agreed to come on board.

From this point on, all the scripts featured Spock’s death, although its timing would gradually be pushed toward the film’s dramatic conclusion.

Project Omega

Sowards had only a few months to write a script before a writers’ strike was called in April 1981. By late February, he had produced a first draft that expanded Bennett’s outline and added several vital elements. This script introduced the idea that the Federation was preparing to test a terrible weapon known as the Omega System.

The film opened with Captain Clark Terrell and his first officer, Pavel Chekov, beaming down to Ceti Alpha V, which had been selected as the test site, to make sure the planet was as dead as sensors suggested. Starfleet knew that Kirk had left Khan and his people stranded on this planet but was amazed to discover that he and a handful of his followers, including Marla McGivers, had survived.

A vengeful Khan takes control of Terrell and Chekov and uses them to take control of Project Omega. Terrell claims that Kirk had ordered the Omega System to be loaded onto the USS Reliant, which was a Constitution-class starship like the Enterprise, and insists that it was going to be used against the Klingons. Project leader Janet Wallace contacts Kirk, who orders the Enterprise to set course for Gamma Regula IV, the planet where the project is headquartered.

As Enterprise approaches the planet, its engines are badly damaged and Spock sacrifices his life to get them back online in time for Kirk to fight the Reliant. Khan and Kirk first fight a psychic battle in a variety of exotic locations, using quarterstaffs, whips and swords. The film ends with a pitched space battle in which Kirk defeats his enemy with superior tactics.

Genesis

At this point, Art Director Michael Minor made an invaluable contribution. Roddenberry’s peace-loving Federation developing a planet-killing weapon didn’t sit well with Bennett. “Harve wanted something uplifting,” Minor told Cinefantastique in 1982.

Then something just came to me, and I said, “terraforming.” Harve asked, “What’s that?” And I told him it was the altering of existing planets to conditions which are compatible to human life. I suggested a plot, just making it up in my head while talking on the phone. The Federation had developed a way of engineering the planetary evolution of a body in space on such a rapid scale that instead of eons you have events taking place in months or years. You pick a dead world or an inhospitable gas planet, and you change its genetic matrix or code, tehreby speeding up time. This, of course, is also a terrible weappon. Suppose you trained it on a planet filled with people and speeded up its evolution. You could destroy the planet and every lifeform on it. The Federation is involved with playing God, but at the same time trying to take barren dead planets and convert them into lovely worlds.

Bennett didn’t just like the idea; he loved it. At a story conference the next day, he hugged Minor and thanked him: “You saved Star Trek!” In recognition of the device’s Biblical power, the Omega System became Genesis.

By April 10, Sowards had produced an updated draft of the script that incorporated the change. In this version, Janet Wallace had become Carol Baxter and Spock’s death had been pushed even later into the story. During the final battle, Khan fires the Genesis Device at Enterprise but hits a planet, which is reborn while the two ships fight it out.

This draft also included the first version of the simulator sequence in which “Savik” (then a young Vulcan male officer, who was Captain Spock’s first officer on the Enterprise) fails to rescue the Kobayashi Maru. When Savik questions him about this failure, Kirk suggests that the test may be a “no-win scenario.”

Running out of time

Although this draft contained many, if not most of the elements of the final script, Bennett and Robert Sallin, who had by then joined the team as a producer, were not quite satisfied. To their minds, the script did not have the epic sweep needed for a major film. They called on Samuel A. Peeples, who had written “Where No Man Has Gone Before” for The Original Series. His script omitted the character of Khan and replaced him with two powerful aliens called Sojin and Moray, who had been exiled from another dimension and possessed god-like powers.

While Peeples was working on his script, Bennett and Salllin found a director they liked in Nicholas Meyer. A week or so before the last draft was due to be delivered, the three met, and Bennett and Salllin promised they would be back in touch as soon as they had the new script in their hands.

Meanwhile, time was becoming a critical factor. Industrial Light and Magic told the producers they needed a script within weeks to start preparing their visual effects if they wanted a release before the summer of 1982.

By the time the final Peeples draft arrived, Bennett and Sallin knew they could not film it. “We were off in some weird directions and I was really very concerned,” Sallin told Star Trek: The Magazine years later.

It did not feel like a motion picture to me. Some of these ideas were too derivative and were too small in their scope. There wasn’t anything underlying it. It was more about people shooting fire and things like that, as opposed to a real story.

Three weeks after their last meeting, Meyer called Bennett and asked where the script was. Although reluctant to share what they had, Bennett sent Meyer the draft. Like the producers, Meyer was underwhelmed. He called Bennett and Sallin and asked them to come to his house with all the different drafts of the script. The three made a list of the things they liked from each version. From that list, Meyer would write the screenplay himself.

Meyer’s rewrite

In two weeks, Meyer got the scenes in the right order and put the story into his own words. “I was only interested in cobbling together and cannibalizing various parts that seemed useful,” he later explained.

What I fall in love with is the story. I never looked at the scripts again, so there were no words that were appropriated. It all had to be in my own language and in a way that I could understand it.

Meyer, who had written five middlingly successful movies, and directed one, had strong opinions about what made drama and was determined that, despite its futuristic setting, Star Trek should make sense to a twentieth-century audience.

Asked by Star Trek: The Magazine to quantify his approach, Meyer gave two examples. First: he brought humor to the project.

I think that putting humor into a serious movie makes the serious stuff more serious and the humor becomes more of an explosive release.

The other important decision he made was something he had thought about when Bennett and Sallin first invited him to direct:

I had the haziest notion of what Star Trek was, because I didn’t really watch the show on television. I finally latched onto the idea that Captain Kirk and friends were really an outer-space version of novels that I had loved as a kid, by C.S. Forrester, called Captain Horatio Hornblower. So I said, “OK, this is Hornblower in outer space; I’ve got it.” When I wrote the script in twelve days it was very, very, very navy, or, as my late wife used to say, “Nautical but nice.”

Family

Almost from the start, Bennett had suggested the passing of time as a major theme for Star Trek II. McCoy’s love interest did not survive Meyer’s rewrite, but Kirk coming face to face with an unknown son, and a life lived without family, did. Sallin told Cinefantastique:

Throughout the story, Kirk goes through a great deal of introspection and reflection on his life. In a sense, he’s having a midlife crisis.

Years later, in an interview with Trekmovie, Sallin elaborated that the first film had felt “remote”.

I didn’t care about the people. I did not care what happened to them. So I felt, and Nick [Meyer] agreed, to make the focus about human beings. The story is not about sci-fi or some obscure person with mystical powers, it is about human beings and the drama about Kirk getting old and things like that.

By cutting demigods and psychic battles from the film, Meyer freed up screen time for moments of less galactic scale that nevertheless resonated stronger with the audience: McCoy and Kirk celebrating the admiral’s birthday “like a funeral”; Carol and Kirk reminiscing about the choices they made in the Genesis cave; and, of course, the death of Kirk’s closest friend.

By the end, Kirk knows he has a family after all, and had all along. So do we. And so did Bennett, who would go on to produce three more Star Trek pictures with this critical insight in mind.