Vonda N. McIntyre's Adaptations: Any notes or letters?

[David cgc]

I love Vonda. I hated that bit.

Vonda McIntyre walked (decided the garbage man’s love-life complaints were so basic they had to be from a first-timer’s attempt at a soap opera) so Diane Carey could run (have Captain Archer repeatedly think about how stupid the things he was doing were in his own internal monologue).

 

[Tallguy]

Vonda McIntyre walked (decided the garbage man’s love-life complaints were so basic they had to be from a first-timer’s attempt at a soap opera) so Diane Carey could run (have Captain Archer repeatedly think about how stupid the things he was doing were in his own internal monologue).

So it's worse than what I thought.

I need to read The Voyage Home again. I'm not sure that I have read it since 1986. (Given that it's alarming how much I remember.)

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I think the only major contradiction between the two versions is Martin convincing Emiko to make the key decision she makes on her own in the original.

Perhaps Martin is a temporal agent correcting the timeline.

 

[Tallguy]

One question answered:

There was a little bit of Saavik’s background in the screenplay (basically that she was half Romulan), but it was presented in an “As you know, George…” way that’s not great in prose and is deathly in screenplays, so I assume that’s why it ended up on the cutting-room floor. I did make a pretty big leap in back-story from there, but, like I say, there’s a good bit of space to fill between the length of a screenplay and the length of a novel.

 

[Christopher]

I think the reason they cut the half-Romulan idea from the film was that it was presented as an explanation for why Saavik was more emotional than a typical Vulcan, and the filmmakers realized that made no sense because Vulcans and Romulans are the same species and their behavioral differences are cultural, not biological. McIntyre kept the half-Romulan origin but made sense of it by inventing the backstory where Saavik was raised as a near-feral child on a prison planet and thus was never taught emotional control and Vulcan discipline until later in life.

 

[KRAD]

McIntyre also had no way of knowing they cut it from the final film. Publishing lead times are such that the manuscript is finished way before the final cut of the film is done.

 

[DonIago]

I think Godzilla: King of the Monsters! is fascinating (it needs the exclamation point to differentiate it from the 2019 Legendary film) because it almost works as a parallel account of the same events viewed from a different perspective. Aside from the occasional scene with Japanese characters speaking in badly dubbed English, and the translation changes you mention (which could perhaps be attributed to Martin's translator being inaccurate), I think the only major contradiction between the two versions is Martin convincing Emiko to make the key decision she makes on her own in the original.

If you own or can get a copy of the Criterion Collection release, it's worth listening to the commentary track for the film. It significantly increased my appreciation for it. I still feel the film is a bit goofy, but at least I gained a better understanding as to why certain choices were made.

I still feel the inserts and such are a bit clumsy, but I saw the original film first, and I suppose I might feel otherwise if I'd seen this one first. And it's obviously a product of its time; they weren't going to insert Burr directly into existing footage.

I don't recall any mention of the translator being inaccurate, but rather that the changes were made specifically to make the film more appealing to an American audience and to accommodate changes in the storyline. As a minor (and somewhat racist) example, in this film a character who's supposed to have died shows up again briefly, on the premise that to American audiences Japanese people would all look alike.

I agree that, as best I can remember, the changes are more omissions that change the nuances of the film than any introduction of contradictions.

Anyway, it was nice to listen to a commentary for a film that I was initially fairly unimpressed by, and have it elevate my opinion. I still prefer the original, but at least I understand a bit more as to why this exists and what the underlying motivations were.

 

[Tallguy]

the filmmakers realized that made no sense because Vulcans and Romulans are the same species and their behavioral differences are cultural, not biological

Which filmmakers do you think that was? When even Roddenberry was having trouble making up his mind and you have episodes like All Our Yesterdays where Spock becomes a primitive Vulcan by way of time travel, I'm not seeing Nicholas Meyer to be the one to stand up and say "But they're the exact same species!"

Of course, if I recall at the time there were complaints from fans who wanted to know why Saavik was so emotional. (Fan enough to get annoyed, not fan enough to have read the book, I guess.)

I would expect it just got cut for time and to keep the movie as lean as possible. Same with the Saavik / David relationship. (I don't think there was ever as much as McIntyre had even in Wrath of Khan, but I know there was footage from the end of the film with her flirting with David that got cut.)

 

[Greg Cox]

Fred Saberhagen's novelization of Bram Stoker's Dracula!

Which, to be fair, hit the New York Times bestseller list, which led (rather hilariously) to Saberhagen being billed on the covers of his original Dracula novels as "New York Times Bestselling Author of BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA."

Aside from that one time Tor accidentally billed him as the bestselling author of "Bram STROKER's Dracula," which made it sound like he'd novelized the porn version.

I swear, that wasn't my fault!

 

[publiusr]

What I remember the most was the feeling of sadness she captured

 

[Therin of Andor]

There's a little.

It's wild to me that I didn't even know who Richard Arnold was or that there were any paramount politics changing. (IIRC TNG had been announced but that was all.) But I knew something was different. Maybe I'm making up some memories in retrospect because for me the fact that she didn't come back for V sealed the deal in my head.

You cut my sentence there, changing my meaning completely.

"Note that there is barely any original material in the novelization..."

Up until the scene with the trash guys, there is a normal amount of extra Vonda stuff, comparable to the ST II novelization. This must have been the point that she had reached when RA came on board. RA started relieving Susan Sackett of her licensee-vetting duties. Suddenly, Vonda was asked to supply an outline for the book, but she was already using the shooting script as her outline. So she gave the Star Trek Office her ultimatum and kept writing the manuscript instead. But she essentially gave adding very much in the way of non-scripted original moments after that trash guys scene.

Up until this point, RA had been a volunteer tour guide for the Star Trek Office and was often helping out Susan with his extensive memory of Trek lore, when not working as a hotel bellboy. When I first met RA in January 1984, via a mutual friend, he was in his bellboy uniform!

A few months later, with huge profits rolling in from ST IV and approval for TNG, GR was able to reward RA for his enthusiastic dedication to Trek with a salaried position.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Ah! This is what I was thinking about above, and I had her anecdote all confuzzled -- it was Enterprise: The First Adventure Paramount wanted an outline for, not Star Trek IV.

Aha!

But something similar did happen with ST IV.

E:TFA was published September 1, 1986. The ST IV novelization came out in December 1986. Both would have been written around the same time. RA went on salary after the movie's premiere, but he was already forging his niche, taking on some of Susan Sackett's load.

(I used to hear RA's convention presentations in Australia every year, so his anecdotes are all scrambled in my mind these days.)

Yeah, I got confused. It's Kirk's reconciliation with Carol what was taken from the cut script, not the rest of the "rounding up".

Yep. "The Fearful Summons" by Denny Martin Flinn uses his unfilmed "last roundup" sequence from the ST VI script.

McIntyre also had no way of knowing they cut it from the final film. Publishing lead times are such that the manuscript is finished way before the final cut of the film is done.

Yes, she was sometimes castigated by fans for daring to add the David/Saavik connection in her ST II novelization. Then I bought a set of official ST II playing cards and there was at least one publicity still with David and Saavik in the Genesis Cave in a romantic pose.

 

[Tallguy]

You cut my sentence there, changing my meaning completely.

Oh! Not my intention at all. I continued your quote afterwards. Certainly no offense intended.

I never considered the matter of "density". That it is more dense (as it were) before the garbage men and less dense afterwards. I can see that. There is a plot thread of some crackpot following some of the crew. I've heard that this might have been some leftovers of the Eddie Murphy character.

IIRC, there are actually a couple of references to Enterprise: The First Adventure in The Voyage Home just as there are to The Entropy Effect in The Wrath of Khan.

I thought her take on the Saavik / David romance in Wrath of Khan paid off in spades in The Search for Spock. It's heartbreaking.

 

[DonIago]

No disrespect intended at all to Robin Curtis (and I'll add the standard disclaimer that I think she may have been a victim of Leonard Nimoy's direction), but I wish we'd gotten the Saavik from the novelization of TSFS rather than the Saavik we got.

Well, mostly I wish we'd gotten a movie based on the book instead of a book based on the movie.

 

[Tallguy]

No disrespect intended at all to Robin Curtis (and I'll add the standard disclaimer that I think she may have been a victim of Leonard Nimoy's direction), but I wish we'd gotten the Saavik from the novelization of TSFS rather than the Saavik we got.

It occurs to me that there is no way McIntyre could have known Alley's performance from TWOK when writing the book. The performance she gives on stage was utterly transformed at the last moment in the dubbing. (And I will always be amazed at the teamwork between at least Meyer and Alley if not who knows who else to pull that off.)

And yet when you read TWOK it reads like Alley's performance. And so does TSFS. I mean, I'm sure it's just Meyer finally getting the performance to match what he put on the page in the first place, and McIntyre's book reflecting that from the script.

However much I may be overstating, I treasure VNM's take on the character.

 

[KRAD]

It's also extremely likely that McIntyre had no idea that Saavik would be re-cast when she wrote the novelization for The Search for Spock.

 

[DonIago]

^I was having thoughts along those lines too, but I didn't really know enough about the timeline to speculate.

 

[Tallguy]

It's also extremely likely that McIntyre had no idea that Saavik would be re-cast when she wrote the novelization for The Search for Spock.

They finished filming in October of 1983. Did she write the book that far in advance?

 

[Christopher]

Maybe it's more accurate to say that McIntyre had no idea how differently Saavik would be played in TSFS. After all, it wasn't just the change in actresses, but the change in directors, since Nimoy wanted Curtis to play Saavik as more conventionally Vulcan.

 

[KRAD]

They finished filming in October of 1983. Did she write the book that far in advance?

Almost definitely. Especially in the 1980s, the lead time to publish a book if you were rushing it was 6 months, and the preferred was 9 months. The book had to be typeset and copy-edited and proofread and approved by the folks at Paramount.