My secret Star Trek story

Between the Hollywood hype machine and fans’ enthusiasm, the best stories about making the various Star Trek TV series and movies are well known, often even to non-fans. But I happen to have been lucky enough to be in the room when one particular little-known story was first told properly. I finally had an itch to tell the story on Twitter, where it got a lot of love, so with the Recent Unpleasantness I thought I should paste it in here.

As a Los Angeles teenager in the 1980s I paid to attend a talk by Nicholas Meyer & Harve Bennett, because I was nerd enough to know that Meyer had directed The Wrath Of Khan, which Bennett had produced before going on to produce and also write The Search For Spock. (Meyer would laster return to write & direct The Undiscovered Country, but that was still years in the future.)

They told great odd inside baseball stories. How they had carpeted the set for the bridge of the USS Excelsior and were astonished to have finally solved sound recording problems which had plagued the the Enterprise bridge. The details of the snafu which put spoilers in the TV ads for Search For Spock. Nerd stuff.

Harve Bennett said a thing about William Shatner which has stuck with me as part of thinking about film actors. Shatner was a better actor than his detractors say, but Bennett admitted that Shatner's real strong suit was something else, something more rare. He was a born movie star.

Meyer replied with a comment he has made in public many times since. He found that the secret to directing Shatner was to wear him out a bit with lots of takes. Shatner would get bored, and when he got bored it would make him become more subtle and interesting. For example, Meyer said, in the prefix code scene in Khan, Shatner could not resist a funny, hammy line reading at the climax: “Heeeere it comes!” A dozen takes later, he had the terrific — and much funnier — dry delivery of that line which went in the movie.

Bennett picked up that point to say that on the set for The Search For Spock — which Leonard Nimoy had directed — that Nimoy seemed to know something about getting good performances out of Shatner. He pointed to the scene where Kirk learns that Kruge kills Dr. David Marcus — “you Klingon bastard, you killed my son” — and said that Shatner’s first take had been hokey and terrible. Wreck-the-movie level bad. So Nimoy, says Bennett, goes up to Shatner and looks him in the eye and says just a few words. Then he steps behind the camera, they shoot the scene again, and Shatner is incredible. When he gets the word about David’s death, he looks like he got punched hard in the chest. Boom. Cut and print!

Meyer is amazed by this story, and asks what the heck Nimoy had said. Bennett says he desperately wishes he knew. It took maybe fifteen seconds for him to say it. What could it possibly have been? A mystery.

They tell some more stories. And then a tech for the venue comes up and whispers something in Meyer’s ear, and he says to us, “He said he might drop by and we didn’t think he would really have time. But … Leonard Nimoy is in the house.”

Whoa.

Nimoy takes the stage and since this is not a fan convention — we are cinephiles, the refined, erudite nerdcool nerds who came to see not actors but rather writer / producer / director guys talk shop — we keep it chill and hold our standing ovation down to a tasteful forty-five seconds.

Nimoy does a bit of his Charming Nimoy thing but, again, this is more a Hollywood industry event so he quickly turns to talking nuts-and-bolts about directing The Search For Spock as a lucky way to get in to directing feature films, since it meant he got to work with material and actors he understood so well. “Like for example, the first take we did of this scene didn’t work at all. I was really worried. It was the scene where Kirk gets the news that the Klingons have murdered his son.”

Nimoy does not see it but all of us in the audence do: Harve Bennett has this look on his face like he is going to burst into flames.

Nimoy tells us, “So I go up to Shatner and I say something to him I think this group will understand. ‘Bill, this is the only time I will ever give you this direction. This time? Take it as far as you can.’”

Magic.