Up Till Now: The Autobiography

them. Many of the people I called responded in the same way: Who is this, really? No, you can’t be you. Really?
    How do you prove you’re yourself on the phone? I certainly wasn’t going to offer to sing a chorus of “Rocket Man.” I remember having a long conversation with one man who was having difficulty adjusting to tinnitus. It was destroying his life, he said. It was inescapable. Eventually he volunteered to contribute $45,000. He asked me to call him again a week later.
    I did, and this time a woman answered. When I asked for this man she explained, “I’m sorry, but he committed suicide two days ago.” Committed suicide? It was devastating. I’d had suicidal thoughts myself. But as I tell people suffering from this condition, time is the best treatment. They will become habituated. I have, they will.Please, listen.
    So. As I was writing, I was supposed to direct the fourth Star Trek film, The Voyage Home . But because I had obligations to T.J. Hooker, I couldn’t do it. Leonard also directed this one. As we had occasionally in the past, in Star Trek IV we went back in time. A deadly probe was approaching the Earth, sending out strange signals. These high-pitched beeps turned out to be an attempt to communicate with whales, which had long been extinct. So we were assigned to return to Earth of the 1980s to capture two whales and bring them home to the future. Spock, of course, was completely out of his century and had great difficulty dealing with the illogic he found in 1980s San Francisco. Once, for example, after he’d attracted too much attention with his odd behavior I explained, “Oh him? He’s harmless. Part of the free speech movement at Berkeley in the sixties. I think he did a little too much LDS.”
    In another scene my love interest, Dr. Gillian Taylor, asked Spock, “Are you sure you won’t change your mind?”
    To which he replied logically, “Is there something wrong with the one I have?”
    Chekov had a similar problem. An FBI agent interrogating him asked, “Name?”
    “My name?” Chekov asked.
    The agent replied sarcastically, “No, my name.”
    Chekov was stumped. “I do not know your name.” “You play games with me, mister,” the agent threatened, “and you’re through.”
    Chekov smiled. “I am? May I go now?”
    The film cost $25 million to make and earned almost $150 million. It was by far the highest-grossing Star Trek film—which certainly made it a difficult movie to follow. And it was my turn.
    I began by settling on a concept: the crew of the Enterprise goes in search of God. And instead we find the devil. I wanted Kirk and Spock and Bones to go to hell. Filmically. I wanted to explore the whole philosophical question of God and the devil and man’s relationship to their worship, a subject that had fascinated me for a long time. And here I was being given a clean slate. What do you want to do, Shatner? God and Star Trek . That’s a jaw dropper. I had it all worked out in my mind, McCoy falls into the grip of the devil.Spock and Kirk go to hell and are able to get out through the tunnel of Hades and are running for the safety of the Enterprise when we hear McCoy calling for our help. And we have to turn back out of love for our partner. That was my idea: Kirk and Spock explore Dante’s Inferno . I could visualize us crossing the burning River Styx, pursued by living gargoyles, fleeing into the depths of collapsing cities. The thought of creating hell on film was incredibly exciting to me. Heaven and hell, love and hate, God and the devil, that was the movie I wanted to make. I wrote a three-page outline and submitted it to Paramount. And they loved it. Yes, this is damn good. This is what we want to do.
    It had to be approved by Roddenberry. He turned it down. I tried to do a God story, he said. It’s not going to work. You alienate everybody. Nobody knows what God is, everybody has a different concept of God. Yes, the studio agreed with him, this is what we don’t want to do.
    No God story? I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to do a God story. Then someone suggested, what if an alien thinks he’s the devil? Maybe that would work. Yes, the studio agreed, if an alien thinks he’s the devil we can do it.
    Roddenberry agreed, as long as it was an alien and not really the devil.
    I had my story. We go in search of God and find an alien who claims to be the devil and we believe he’s the devil but he’s not the devil. That would work. What I realized