A Brief Guide to Star Trek

entailing recasting the core
Star Trek
crew, solving the Shatner problem. Nimoycould even appear in the movie as the older Spock, either as a narrator in a narrative wraparound or through some time travel device, allowing him to actually take part in the action. The new executive team at Paramount was apparently open to taking the
Star Trek
movies in this direction.
    They also had other, more outré ideas for
Star Trek
. One of the biggest stars Paramount had in the mid-1980s was Eddie Murphy. Nimoy had actually approached Daniel Petrie Jr, writer of Murphy’s star-making movie
Beverly Hills Cop
(1984) to work on
Star Trek
when the concept of featuring Murphy in the
Star Trek
movie was tabled. Outgoing Paramount executive Jeffrey Katzenberg described this as ‘either the best or worst idea in the world’. Nimoy and Bennett were tempted by the notion as a way of attracting non-
Star Trek
fans to the fourth movie, although they were also wary of the fact that Murphy’s comedic presence might unbalance the film and even lead to
Star Trek
being ridiculed. Murphy himself claimed to be a huge
Star Trek
fan and was very positive about the idea of being included in the film. Writers Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes worked on a Murphy-centric screenplay that would see him play a contemporary college professor who believes in aliens and meets the
Enterprise
crew in a series of comedic encounters. In the end, Murphy opted to make
The Golden Child
(1986), having decided he didn’t like the
Star Trek
role offered, claiming he’d rather play an alien or a Starfleet officer. It also seems that business sense ruled the day at executive level at Paramount – there was little point combining two multi-million-dollar franchises (
Star Trek
and Eddie Murphy) into one when separately they’d bring in twice as much revenue.
    The Eddie Murphy detour cost seven months of development time in 1985, and in the end Nimoy and Bennett returned to their ‘time travel to the past to save the future’ idea, this time with Admiral Kirk part of the action as Shatner was back on board, having negotiated a larger financial compensation package (which Nimoy also benefited from, thanks to their shared ‘favoured nations’ clause). Writer–director Nicholas Meyer wasbrought back into the
Star Trek
fold to help script the fourth movie after opting out of number three as he felt ‘I didn’t want to resurrect Spock’ as such a move ‘attacked the integrity and the authenticity of the feelings provoked by his death. However, by the time we got to
IV
, Spock was alive, it was a de facto thing, and on top of that my friends were in trouble.’
    The first order of business was to decide exactly what the ‘MacGuffin’ – Alfred Hitchcock’s term for an otherwise insignificant plot motivator – from the past needed to save the future would be. Several things were considered, including violin-makers and oil drillers, or the cure to a disease that could only be found in the rainforests (extinct in the future). It was Nimoy’s reading of a book about the extinction of animal species that set them on the path to whales. Having humpback whales extinct in the future, but needing to retrieve some from the past, seemed like an idea that would give the film a wide appeal beyond just
Star Trek
fans. The addition of mysterious whale song to the film helped to secure the story: a destructive space probe in the future threatens the Earth while seeking an answering whale song to its signal. Kirk, the newly resurrected Spock, McCoy and the crew use the Klingon Bird-of-Prey ship to slingshot around the sun in an effort to travel to the past in order to bring some living whale samples back to the future. Everyone involved in the project recognised that the opportunity for culture clash moments between the twenty-third-century humans and those from 1986 would allow for a lot of natural comedy without the star casting of Eddie Murphy.
    So it proved:
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
was released on Thanksgiving weekend, 26 November 1986, to huge critical acclaim and astonishing box office receipts. The first five days saw the movie gross $39.6 million in the US, against the production budget of just $21 million. Globally, the film was a huge success, totalling $133 million at the worldwide box office. Originally scheduled for release at Christmas, Paramount head Frank Mancuso had suggested bringing the film forward toThanksgiving, a switch that gave the film greater