The Outsider Who Saved Star Trek

[Maurice]

I was alive AND an adult when TWOK came out and I can tell you that not everyone thought TWOK was "it" for Star Trek. People who have a grasp how movies are made, even then, understood that if a film is successful enough it will often spawn a sequel. Sure, Paramount may not have had plans for another film after TWOK while it was being made, but that's typical of Hollywood: "let's see how it does and if it goes like gangbusters, let's talk about making another."

As to the actor's perceptions of if it would be the last film, that's their perception. It doesn't reflect what was going on in Paramount's management, which most of them probably had little to no interaction will.

 

[GhostFaceSaint]

Well anyway I am not going to post on my this, own thread anymore because I have gotten nothing but "Star Trek II sucks!", "The USSR collapsed in '89 with the fall of the Berlin wall!" (two completely different events), and conversations totally unrelated to the topic; Nick Meyer. I posted this thread to get some thoughts on what Meyer did for Trek since his memoir is coming out and all I get are arguments, I am done...

 

[Maurice]

Except that you never steered the conversation in that direction. You put out blunt assertions then argue it when people disagreed.

Here's how I'd approach the topic:

What do *I* think Nick Meyer contributed to Star Trek? Offhand I'd say...

• Getting it back to its adventure roots.
• Giving TWOK a sense of energy and immediacy and energy that was lacking in TMP.
• Getting a decent performance out of Shatner and not allowing him to ham it up too much in TWOK.
• Taking a mess of a script for TWOK and making it hold together (albeit the thing is full of plot and logic holes)
• Helping make a successful "crossover" picture with TVH that brought Star Trek to a broader audience than it had had for a while. It's the humor in the 1986 scenes that's why people remember the film, not Harve Bennett's on-the nose "serious people in space" stuff that bookends it.

What do *I* think Nick Meyer contributed to science fiction?

• Virtually nothing, except for contributing to making a handful of successful genre films.

I could list what contributions he made that were bad, but that's not the topic (yet).

Agree or disagree? Anyone else? Thoughts? Additional points?

 

[plynch]

. . . at a time when many at Paramount were saying that the second feature film would be the final one.

Can you document that? Just recently on this forum I read different people asserting that TMP (though garnering ambivalent reviews) made enough dough that the studio was willing to keep making 'em. No ultimatum that the franchise had just one more chance. They switched to the t.v. side of producers (so I've read) since TMP went WAY over budget due to effects, and t.v. producers (Bennett) could do it on the cheap. A slap in the face to Roddenberry supposedly, with him originally being a t.v. guy himself and now being passed over.

So - does Meyer maintain Trek was given one last chance after TMP? I'm wondering where that idea is coming from.

 

[EEE]

I still say the outsider who really saved Star Trek was the syndication scheduler. Think about it. Seriously. When you watched it in syndication, what time and day of the week was it? What was it scheduled against? What is the aspect that is most credited with killing Star Trek's original run?

I wish I could remember his name... Star Trek was lucky he liked it or saw it's potential and bought the syndication under the (then) usual minimum number of episodes for syndication. But his scheduling is what kept Star Trek going and ultimately giving it a life of it's own. There wouldn't have been ANY movies without him, much less any more series.

Star Trek was going to get a second chance at TV with "Star Trek: Phase II" but then when "Star Wars" came out in '77 the exec's at Paramount were asking themselves 'what do we have that we canturn into a film, and of course they had Roddenberry's Star Trek, so really you can also thank George Lucas too. There would be no big budget film for Trek without Wars paviing the way.

Yes, thanks to the outsider who really saved Trek, it was going to get a second chance. But then Star Wars' success screwed it all up. No, I won't thank Star Wars. It did nothing for Star Trek, but screw us out of more screen time of the original crew (excepting Spock).

(I'd take even a single 20+ episode season over 6 movies any day of the week. And if it had done well... years of "TOS II" over 6 movies? It's a no-brainer math equation for TOS gluttons.)

 

[trevanian]

Star Trek was going to get a second chance at TV with "Star Trek: Phase II" but then when "Star Wars" came out in '77 the exec's at Paramount were asking themselves 'what do we have that we canturn into a film, and of course they had Roddenberry's Star Trek, so really you can also thank George Lucas too. There would be no big budget film for Trek without Wars paviing the way.

I don't know if you are checking 'your' thread anymore, but you are completely wrong here. PHASE II came about months AFTER SW released ... what was cancelled the same month SW came out was PLANET OF THE TITANS, an unmade Trek FEATURE FILM.

 

[plynch]

I personally consider Star Trek VI to be just as cool as "The Seven Percent Solution" if not cooler because it predicted the fall of the Soviet Union!

It is hard to predict something that has already happened. Meyer had even done another picture about the subject before TUC, COMPANY BUSINESS.

Argh, you beat me to it. VI was reflecting current events - a valid thing, something TOS did - not predicting the future.

 

[plynch]

I still don't think Trek needed saving. TMP did great box office -- why Paramount ordered another one.

But I'd have liked to see more films in the TMP vein/style. A matter of taste, ok? (This is a WAY more argumentative thread than it needed to be.) I like II, but its effect was to spawn too many defeat-the-current-bad-guy Trek movie clones (as someone noted above), which would include III, Gen, FC, INS, NEM, of yeah, and XI.

I am hopeful JJ might save Trek from THAT trap with Trek XII, but I don't know if it is well-founded hope.

 

[Maurice]

I was trying to steer the conversation back to the subject but no one took the bait!

 

[Sharkey]

I was trying to steer the conversation back to the subject but no one took the bait!

Too little, too late, and too literate.

 

[EEE]

I was trying to steer the conversation back to the subject but no one took the bait!

I've been on subject... the outsider who saved Star Trek. It's the first post that was off subject. *grin*

 

[Tuxedo Dragon]

I still don't think Trek needed saving. TMP did great box office -- why Paramount ordered another one.

But I'd have liked to see more films in the TMP vein/style. A matter of taste, ok? (This is a WAY more argumentative thread than it needed to be.) I like II, but its effect was to spawn too many defeat-the-current-bad-guy Trek movie clones (as someone noted above), which would include III, Gen, FC, INS, NEM, of yeah, and XI.

I am hopeful JJ might save Trek from THAT trap with Trek XII, but I don't know if it is well-founded hope.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture only made three million more then its budget. It was considered a disapointment. Thats why they replaced Gene with Harve Bennett. They knew the franchise had potential but they wanted someone else to take it in a new direction. At that point it was unclear how far the series would go. It depended on the success of Star Trek 2. A series of films like TMP just wasn't possible. And probably would have killed the franchise for a long time.

 

[CoveTom]

^ Not necessarily. TMP did a good box office. But it's budget was, for the time, outlandish. There is plenty of responsibility to go around for that. Roddenberry, as the producer, gets a nice big share of the blame for not managing the production properly. In fact, there probably should have been another producer in there all along managing the production, since the nitty gritty details of production were never Roddenberry's thing. Some of the blame also has to go to Paramount's wacky accounting, which charged all of the expenses of the aborted Phase II television series to TMP's budget, even though they were separate projects.

In any case, had another Trek movie been made in the style of TMP, and done comparable box office, but been made in a responsible and budget-conscious manner, it could have been just as successful as Wrath of Khan was. In fact, the only reason TWOK seems so much more successful than TMP is because it was made on an $11 million budget, while TMP was on a $46 million budget.

In the end, though, I don't have alot of gripes about the TOS movies? Why? Because we got six movies that represented at least four different styles of storytelling, showing the range that Trek could encompass. We had high-concept sci-fi in TMP and attempted to some degree in TFF, we had action/adventure space opera in TWOK and TUC, we had intimate character drama in TSFS, and we had straight comedy in TVH. The TOS movies, like TOS itself, did not stick to one particular formula over and over again.

My beef is with the TNG movies, which feel into the trap that you have to have the same basic formula over and over again. There has to be lots of action, lots of 'splosions, or it can't be successful. We have to have action hero Picard. There has to always be comedy. Etc. Etc.

 

[trevanian]

I still don't think Trek needed saving. TMP did great box office -- why Paramount ordered another one.

But I'd have liked to see more films in the TMP vein/style. A matter of taste, ok? (This is a WAY more argumentative thread than it needed to be.) I like II, but its effect was to spawn too many defeat-the-current-bad-guy Trek movie clones (as someone noted above), which would include III, Gen, FC, INS, NEM, of yeah, and XI.

I am hopeful JJ might save Trek from THAT trap with Trek XII, but I don't know if it is well-founded hope.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture only made three million more then its budget. .

Wrong, TMP made more than 2.5 times its budget, possibly almost 4 times its budget, depending on which decade you find the info.

 

[plynch]

In any case, had another Trek movie been made in the style of TMP, and done comparable box office, but been made in a responsible and budget-conscious manner, it could have been just as successful as Wrath of Khan was.

I think you're right.

In the end, though, I don't have a lot of gripes about the TOS movies? Why? Because we got six movies that represented at least four different styles of storytelling....

Nice point.

My beef is with the TNG movies, which feel into the trap that you have to have the same basic formula over and over again. There has to be lots of action, lots of 'splosions, or it can't be successful. We have to have action hero Picard. There has to always be comedy. Etc. Etc.

Totally right!

 

[Anwar]

The problem with the TNG movies was that they were made when they weren't really necessary. TNG had a great conclusion with "All Good Things" and there just wasn't any real need for movies when there were already two other shows on TV at the time. All they did was spread things out too thinly for an already split audience. The TOS movies at least were made to revitalize a cancelled show and had no competition (though Bennet did blame TNG for TFF's failure).

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Meyer made one real good Trek movie and one tired, lame and pretentious one.

I was alive AND an adult when TWOK came out and I can tell you that not everyone thought TWOK was "it" for Star Trek. People who have a grasp how movies are made, even then, understood that if a film is successful enough it will often spawn a sequel.

Most everyone I knew at the time who saw the movie assumed immediately that there would be another one - first because the film opened very successfully and secondly because the ending set up a sequel (and at least some of us were aware that the ending had been recut and extended deliberately to suggest one).

Paramount was waiting to see how the box office stacked up before okaying a sequel, and Bennett and company were laying the groundwork for one during editing of TWOK (the aforementioned ending). Actors are not good sources for information about what the decisionmakers on these things are up to - they're generally the last to know what's really going on.

 

[Too Much Fun]

Meyer made one real good Trek movie and one tired, lame and pretentious one.

Which one are you insulting here? "The Undiscovered Country"? I thought both "The Wrath of Khan" and "The Voyage Home" were very good.

 

[Maurice]

Meyer made one real good Trek movie and one tired, lame and pretentious one.

Which one are you insulting here? "The Undiscovered Country"? I thought both "The Wrath of Khan" and "The Voyage Home" were very good.

Meyer didn't make TVH, he was just a writer on it.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Meyer made one real good Trek movie and one tired, lame and pretentious one.

Which one are you insulting here? "The Undiscovered Country"?

I'm expressing an opinion of TUC. I don't think much of the movie, in any respect other than a little of the visual design.