#star trek ii the wrath of khan
(Clockwise from the bottom) Model shop supervisor Steve Gawley, effects co-supervisor Ken Ralston, camera assistant Sel Eddy, and stagehand Bill Beck unpack the model of the refit Enterprisefor use in the filming of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. The 1/120th scale model was originally used for Star Trek: The Motion Picture and had been built by Douglas Trumbull’s Magicom under the supervision of Jim Dow.
According to Susan Sackett’s The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, building the Enterprise was a costly endeavour in time and money — it took 14 months and $150,000 to build (around $600k in 2022) — but advancements in plastics allowed the highly-detailed 8-foot-long ship to weigh in at just 85 pounds, making it quite a bit easier to position for filming. For comparison, Dow said, the Millennium Falcon miniature used in filming Star Wars had been roughly four feet by four feet in size and weighed over 300 pounds.
That said, it was still massive, with Industrial Light and Magic’s Ralston telling Kay Anderson from Cinefantastique: “I hate the Enterprise model. I think it’s made out of lead. It took eight guys to mount it for a shot and a forklift to move it around.” (He would work out some of that anger with the ship later.)
It was also finicky enough that, Trumbull revealed in an interview with American Film magazine, ILM reached out to him to help get its lighting up and running again. This vindicated the special effects pioneer a bit; his company had underbid ILM by $1.5 million for the Star Trek II contract but had lost out because Paramount had wished to seal their relationship with Lucasfilm after the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
(Of note to some nitpickers like myself is the fact that some contemporary behind-the-scenes accounts, including the one from which this photo was taken, there is talk of the model being made of metal. There’s enough evidence to contradict this in various interviews from people who worked on the films over the years that I feel comfortable saying that they’re wrong.)
Photo scanned from my personal collection. It originally appeared in the July-August 1982 issue of Cinefantastique.
Post link
Director Nicholas Meyer and Leonard Nimoy talk on the set of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.
In an interview with Stephen Payne and Nicholas Briggs that was printed in Starburst #162 (February 1992), Meyer was characteristically upfront about his role in writing the movie that many have credited with saving the Star Trek franchise:
“Yeah, I wrote it. My name isn’t on it. What happened with that film is curious. They said ‘We’re waiting for draft number five to come in, and then we’ll send you the draft’…and then I never got it. Ten days went by and I called up Harve Bennett, and I said, ‘What happened to you guys?’ and he said, ‘Well, the draft came in and we don’t like it.’ I said ‘Well, send it to me.’ He said ‘No, no, no you don’t understand. It’s 160 pages of nothing.’ So I said, ‘What about draft four, send me draft four.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. All five drafts are merely five different attempts to get a different Star Trek movie, they are unrelated to one another.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, send them all up.’
“So I sat and read these things, and then I called Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin who was his partner on the project. And I pulled out a yellow legal pad and said, ‘Here’s my idea. Let’s sit down and make a list of everything we like in these five drafts. It could be a character, could be a plot point, could be a story…let’s make a whole list. And then I’ll write a new screenplay that accommodates all the things we like.’
“I’d never done it before, but this is a whole story about being young and foolish — that’s the point of this story! So they said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea, the only problem is that if we don’t have a screenplay in 12 days, Industrial Light And Magic, which is supposed to be doing the effects for this picture, will not guarantee delivery of the shots in time to be in theaters in June ‘81.’ I said, ‘If we can do this now I think in 12 days we can have a screenplay. Certainly good enough for ILM to know what they’re going to be doing.’ And they said, ‘We couldn’t even make your contract in 12 days.’ I said, ‘Forget about contracts, forget about all of that, because there’s not going to be any movie if we don’t shut up and start working. I will not be on it as the writer of record, because we don’t have time for any of that. These guys have written it. These guys have been paid. Let me go to work on the things that we like.’
“When my agent heard this, I thought he was going to kill me. He got very angry. But that’s how it came to be written, and I forget whose name is on the finished screenplay. But in 12 days, we had taken the things we liked: Kirk finds his son, the Genesis plan, Khan comes back — there was a scene aboard a simulator, which was on page 50 of one screenplay, I moved it to the first scene in the movie…and then with a real piece of inspiration, we put Spock in the simulator and killed him off in the first scene of the movie!
“So, we took story elements and ideas from five screenplays and then I wrote my own story. So I wrote and directed too. I think I’m entitled to claim that.”
Photo scanned by Movienutt and downloaded from moviestillsdb.com
Post link
Front cover for Town Mook’s 1982 Super-Visual Magazine, Issue #8, devoted to the third part of a “complete visual guide of Star Trek,” something of a treasure trove for fans in Japan at the time. It’s laden with episode images and synopses for the Original Series, a guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series, material about the making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and a preview of Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. There’s even a full-color guide to the guest stars of Star Trek, with a heavy focus on the women.
If I were less precious about the magazines I spent over $40 on, I’d break the spine on this 110+ page guide to scan it, but, alas, I am not less precious about my expensive Japanese magazines.
Scanned from my personal collection.
Post link
Director Nicholas Meyer (with trademark cigar) addresses a group of background players in the torpedo bay set while filming Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan.
Prior to directing The Wrath of Khan, Meyer had previously written a screenplay for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,based on his own novel of the same name, and handled screenwriter and directorial duties on the time travel epic Time After Time, based on a college friend’s uncompleted novel.
When asked by Allen Asherman about how he was contacted about directing the second Star Trek feature film, Meyer recounted: “The project was offered to me by a woman named Karen Moore. She was not empowered to confirm the offer; she was the first person who broached the subject. I’ve known her since she was about twelve…she’s a friend of mine, and she was at my house for dinner. She was working at Paramount Pictures at the time, and she said there were two very nice fellows making this movie, harve Bennett and Bob Sallin, and they had a good script…would I be interested. Then I went in to meet Harve and Bob, and got along very well. Then they showed me the first movie and I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this, because I’ve got to be able to do as good as this.’”
(Quote source: Allan Asherman’s The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, published in 1982 by Pocket Books.)
Photo scanned from my personal collection.
Post link
The medical tunic that DeForest Kelley sported in Star Trek: The Motion Picture andStar Trek II: The Search For Spock is up for auction at Heritage. With five days left and an opening bid of just $8,000, this gives you all plenty of time to rummage through your couch cushions and break open your Tellarite piggy banks.
(If you want to economize, the opening bid for a wrist communicator from Star Trek: The Motion Picture is just $1,000.)
Post link
Weird compliment but ok
