Up Till Now: The Autobiography

cook and made us a wonderful dinner. Believe me, her potatoes were the best potatoes I’d ever eaten. It’s worth going to Hoboken to eat these potatoes; believe me, no one has ever made potatoes...
    Afterward he took us into his studio and created God in a tank of oil. It was a mixture of various oils swirling in a large oil lamp–like device. “If we shoot it tight,” he explained, “we can get an image...”
    We were all so seduced by this great meal and perhaps some wine that we offered him the assignment. Maybe we didn’t have Industrial Light and Magic, but we did have this guy in New Jersey whose wife was a great cook.
    What we should have done was use her potatoes. If we had mashed them just right it would have looked more like God than the images he created for us.
    We just didn’t have the budget to put the movie I saw in my mind on film. In the opening scene in Yosemite, for example, I was supposed to be climbing a sheer cliff. I had a camera on a plateau, looking straight down three thousand feet as I climbed up. I was wearing a safety harness so it wasn’t dangerous, and as long as I didn’t look down I was okay. The problem we encountered was that because the camera films in two dimensions it was impossible to get a sense of the true height. In fact it looked like it was about six feet down. I needed to drop some rocks so the camera could follow them all the way down to give the audience a sense of the actual height, but climbers in Yosemite are prohibited from throwing stones down. I solved that by having some rubber rocks made. As I climbed up, I was going to dislodge them and the camera would track them all the way to the bottom. Unfortunately, these rubber rocks had to weigh almost nothing so they would not pose any danger to people below. In fact, they were so light that when I touched them they floated away in the breeze. I had a large pile of floating rocks. And, obviously, completely useless.
    We never did find an appropriate ending. After we’d finished shooting I had to search through all the footage to find something, anything, that I could use to construct the final scene. Somehow we managed to put something together, but it was a poor compromise. From the beginning to the end the entire film was a compromise. As a result Star Trek V:The Final Frontier just wasn’t that good. I wasn’t terribly dissatisfied with it, there were some very good moments in it. The quality of a science-fiction film depends almost completely on the story and its special effects. In this film the tacky special effects actually hurt the story. Most of the reviews were disappointing, but the New York Times review was complimentary: “Scene for scene Mr. Shatner’s direction is smooth and sharply focused.” The film grossed $70 million, more than double what it cost to make; so it was profitable even if it wasn’t an artistic success.
    The night we opened was one of the most glorious evenings ofmy life. I sat in the back of a sold-out theater watching the glow from the screen highlighting people’s heads. And they sat there entranced by my work. It was a magic trick. I’d created it out of an idea, a thought. An idea that eventually employed hundreds of people and entertained millions. My idea, my dream. And in the sense of taking a simple thought and transforming it into a complex product it was an overwhelming experience.
    I loved directing, and I certainly wasn’t soured on the process. In the future I just had to be leaner and smarter. The lesson I’d learned was that the company runs on the strength and personality of the director. I had been too timid. Early on we’d spent a considerable amount of time trying to visualize God. I needed creative help but nobody came up with any ideas. The producer, rather then being helpful, took out on me whatever frustrations he was having dealing with the studio. Rather than being supportive, he was destructive. For example, I had recently seen The Wizard of Oz and in desperation I suggested that the face of God appear in a whirlwind. In front of the entire crew the producer snarled, “For Christ’s sake. I bet you saw The Wizard of Oz .”
    Of course I had to admit it. But I was furious. For no reason, except perhaps his own ego, he had humiliated me in front of the cast and crew. If he didn’t show me respect, why would any of them? What I should have said to him was, “How dare you talk to me that way. If you don’t like the idea, that’s one