The View from the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood Hardback - 2009

part 1
Pre Trek

prologue
a funeral

It was December of 1982 and Verna Fields was dead. The woman known as Mother Cutter, editor of Jaws, had died, aged sixty-four, of cancer and a memorial service was being held at the Alfred Hitchcock Theater at Universal Studios. I had known Verna socially and like many other young directors, I had benefitted from her counsel, support, and advice. She would take me to lunch and afterward treat me to an expensive cigar from the humidor of a nearby tobacconist. "Verna," I would protest, "how are you paying for this?" She'd grin merrily behind large glasses. "I'm wooing you, baby, I'm wooing you." She was a brilliant editor so of course after Jaws they'd made her an executive and stuck her behind a desk, which you might say was like promoting Captain James T. Kirk to Admiral. What a waste.

Anyway, there we all were, crammed into the intimate Hitchcock Theater, listening to Ned Tanen, head of Universal and a devoted friend of Verna's, deliver the eulogy. Tanen, who had a mercurial temperament and was as prickly as the cacti that he loved to grow, opined that Verna Fields had been the only decent human being in this dirty, rotten stinking town—or words to that effect. The thing about funerals, I find as a rule, is that you don't listen to such speeches critically. People say some outlandish or exaggerated things, carried along in the currents of emotion and the moment, so I don't suppose I blinked at Ned's impassioned words. I just sat there and felt sad thoughts.

It was only later, standing alone outside the theater, surrounded by people chatting together in little knots while waiting to leave for cold cuts at Verna's house, that I became aware of someone else speaking. If this were a film and we were mixing this scene, the voice that impinged on my idling consciousness would be dialed up slowly and would go something like this:

" …;biggest crock of shit I ever heard in my life—mind you: I take a backseat to no man where my affection for Verna Fields is concerned but I don't think I would have lasted thirty years in this business if I hadn't found it to be populated by some of the kindest, most loyal, generous, talented, and loving people I could ever hope to meet in this or any other lifetime."

It was as if someone had thrown cold water on my face. The speaker, when I turned to look, was Walter Mirisch, a producer whose list of great movies is probably as long as George W. Bush's war crimes.

Yes, I thought, decisively. This is true. I hadn't been in the business anything like thirty years—it was more like ten—but since my arrival in Los Angeles, a stranger in a very strange land, I had met with as much kindness, generosity, and support as I had found anywhere else. Maybe more. Me and Blanche DuBois.

early days

And in those ten years I had certainly needed (and continue to need) all the help I could get. One group I came to envy as I got to know them were children of those already in the business. Not that all of them were happy or even prospered, but like medieval stonemasons or shipwrights, they seemed to be part of a familial continuity that I didn't possess. There was Steven-Charles Jaffe, for instance, who with his father, Herb, produced the first film I wrote and directed, Time After Time. I envied father and son their professional bond. Herb told me, "I am a lucky man; I get to see my son every day." I had no such family anchor in Los Angeles. For years I was always conscious of being on my own in California, the boy who had run away to join the circus that was movies. Nobody from the world in which I grew up was in "show business." The children of my parents' friends followed their footsteps and became doctors or lawyers or went into "business" (whatever that was); I was the only one I knew who wanted to go to Hollywood and make movies. I must have set the fashion, for later everyone did. I don't think movies at that time were even regarded as a profession. The famous stars and directors hadn't studied to become filmmakers; they had sort of fallen into it. Second unit directors had begun as cowboys. Some were in fact Indians.

In the years to come I would meet and become friends with many people in the business whose fathers or mothers had been in it before them. This conferred a kind of tradition on the whole enterprise, or at least to my way of thinking a legitimacy that I sorely lacked and missed. My own family never quite understood what it was that I was doing or attempting to do, even though it was tacitly acknowledged that I wasn't fit for much else. My father always was an astute and subtle critic of anything I wrote, a wonderful editor, but there his involvement ceased. In the years that followed, no matter how successful I became, or even how proud they were of my success, my parents never made it their business to master the nomenclature or glossary of terms that would have enabled them to better understand what I had to tell them about my life.

"Mom, I'm in preproduction."

"Uh huh. What's that?"

And so on.

I was born in Manhattan on Christmas Eve, just after the end of the war. My parents were a rather glamorous pair, a handsome psychoanalyst and his concert pianist wife, and postwar New York, if you were cut of such cloth, was definitely the place to be. I wasn't named Nicholas because of any religious association—my parents were in fact third-generation nonpracticing Jews—but rather in honor of my maternal grandfather, a Russian violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. And when I say, "nonpracticing," I am understating. Neither my father nor I was bar mitzvahed. I never attended temple or religious school and never had the inclination. I was born without the religion gene. I was raised in an atmosphere of undoubted privilege and culture, fell in love with Mozart by age five, and thought Jews were people who read books with hard covers. My father was witty and also an excellent pianist. Once I heard him accompany Leontyne Price in the living room of our brownstone (shrewdly purchased east of yet-to-be gentrified "Thoid" Avenue, which then still had its elevated subway line); another time, in Princeton, after a filling Thanksgiving dinner, he did the same for Einstein, who soloed on a squeaky violin. (Sitting next to the great man at dinner, I complained I had a hair in my turkey. "Not so loud," he counseled me, "everyone else will want one.") Were we rich? I once asked my father. "We're comfortable," he explained, which was precise. Rockefellers we were not, but my father earned what he needed to live in what he might have characterized as a civilized fashion. My father, like his father, thought of himself as a liberal in the Jeffersonian tradition. He twice supported the candidacy of Adlai Stevenson. Years later, in my autobiographical novel, Confessions of a Homing Pigeon, I depicted my parents as circus acrobats, performing without a net, which is how they must have appeared to me.

I happily absorbed everything that was thrown at me—theater, music, books—until it was time to go to school. It was there that my difficulties commenced. Today, I would've been diagnosed with some form of ADD, but at the time there seemed merely a mysterious disconnect between an evident intellectual capacity and an ability to translate it into any sort of academic prowess. I had difficulty focusing on anything in which I was not passionately interested. This certainly included math, where the numbers went all fuzzy and refused to stay steady in my head while I tried to add them, but also other issues and subjects that required concentration, organization, or the citing of specific examples to illustrate my point. I could read for hours and did—but only the books that I wanted to read. I loved building model boats and could likewise spend hours at a time on them. Talk about concentration. I was crazy about plays, opera, ballet, art, dinosaurs, movies, and musicals—all of which you could trip over in New York—but my eyes would glaze over when the teachers started to talk. It's not that they were bad teachers, either; I went to a very sophisticated school. They were very good teachers; I was just a very bad pupil. I couldn't keep up. My mind wandered into narratives, some of my own invention, others culled from Jules Verne, Dumas, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Hardy Boys, the Lone Ranger, Rodgers and Hammerstein. I repeated fourth grade, which didn't do wonders for my self-esteem.

Occasionally, I was taken to places or events where my parents thought a necktie was de rigueur. This article of apparel I loathed at first sight, and many red-faced struggles were involved in slamming me into it. I sometimes think I longed to make movies because I was sure you didn't need to wear a necktie. (In fact, old photos of many directors at work reveal them to be wearing neckties, so perhaps the dispensing of neckwear was more a generational transition—my time had, simply, come.)

When I was about ten, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, though this dreadful fact was kept from both of us by my father. She was told, instead, that she had a cyst removed. My father edited a volume of essays by doctors entitled, Should the Patient Know the Truth? He contributed an essay of his own to the collection, in which he asked, "What Patient, What Truth?", pointing out that how and what is communicated to the terminally ill patient may ease or increase his distress and ability to cope with his fate. He used the (unidentified) example of my mother, in which, encouraged by her cyst diagnosis, she did not die within the predicted three months but instead lived almost three years before succumbing (hideously) at age forty-five. I was in the room with her when she drew her last, gasping breath at around ten in the evening. In trying to prepare me for this moment, my father had explained some months earlier what was going on and said he would need me to be strong. I interpreted this—wrongly, I now suspect—to mean that I must not cry. And sov I didn't. I told myself, as I listened to her rasping breaths in the low-lit room, surrounded by sorrowful relatives, that I must remember everything that happened, so one day I could write about it. The result, I think, was not a fortunate one, for in that moment of decision, I converted myself from a participant to an observer. When she was dead—the rasping abruptly ceased—I reached out and placed my hand on my mother so that I would know what it was like to touch a dead person. (It was like touching a dead person.) I did indeed remember everything, though, interestingly, I never did write about it.

Years of psychotherapy followed, paralleling my high school years. My grades were never cause for congratulation, though I gradually attained my own cachet. By the time I was a senior and all that peer conformity had begun to wear off, one or two girls actually began to take an interest in me. If high school had gone on another year, I would have ruled.

My mother and I were never particularly close—I don't think she ever quite knew what to make of me, especially since, while I was crazy about music (where my knowledge was becoming encyclopedic), it was clear that, with my numerical dyslexia, I would never become a musician. But my father and I had much in common. True, I exasperated him with my forgetfulness and academic failures—he was a Harvard man, class of '32—but we loved music and movies and books together. We were dedicated Marxists. He preferred A Night at the Opera but I knew Duck Soup was funnier. When I was twelve he took me to see the Mike Todd movie of Around the World in Eighty Days, and I had my first religious experience. I had always loved movies, even other Jules Verne movies (I was nuts for the Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea—still am), but this was different. The theater lobby sold a souvenir program book, which I still have, in which can be found an article titled: you too can make a motion picture—no previous experience necessary. Rereading the article now, I recognize that it was a sort of sarcastic piece, intended to trumpet the staggering statistics behind Todd's production. All you need is six million dollars and 68,000 people in fourteen different countries…; etc. But the sarcasm at the time was lost on me.

You too can make a motion picture—no previous experience necessary. I showed the article to my dad and told him I wanted to make a movie. As it happened, we had an 8mm wind-up Revere camera that my father used for our home movies. I wanted him to help me make my own film of—what else?—Around the World in Eighty Days. I would write the script and play Phileas Fogg, of course; my best friend, Ron Roose, son of a psychoanalyst colleague of my father and oddly born on the same day as me, would play the loyal valet, Passepartout, etc.

I am not sure why my father fell in with this plan. It is certainly true that he was an artist manquè himself, who would later publish two splendid full-length biographies (one of Joseph Conrad, the other of Houdini), and something of my scheme must have stirred promptings he had long ignored. Ultimately, the film took five years to make. It was shot on weekends and over Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations and involved my father driving a host of hyperkinetic kids in costume to various locations—Central Park, Cape Cod, Cowboy City, New Jersey—and somehow pulling the thing together. He told me he would lie awake at night devising shots and silly bits of business, clearly enjoying himself. We shot out of sequence, of course, like a real film, compelled by necessity, so that the cast aged and shrank as we assembled the scenes. I edited the film with my cousin Bob on our kitchen table. The result was an eighty-minute masterpiece that seemed to charm everyone who saw it. Now matter how hard I fought with my father throughout my fraught adolescence, work on the film went on, and I think it held us together as well as setting my feet on the path they would follow for the rest of my life.

My movie schooling was completed when my father remarried. Leonore brought few material possessions with her when she moved into our house, but one of them was choice, and I got custody of it: a large Zenith (black and white, of course) TV found its way into my room. Any chance of academic advancement went right out the window with this part of my stepmother's "dowry." In those far-off times, television stations ran endless late-night movies from all eras, and I sat and watched every one of them, staying up till all hours and learning about…; what? Damned if I know. Having a good time. Escaping. Memorizing the names of the actors, the cameramen, the composers and directors, whoever they were. With my memory and capacity to absorb what interested me, I shortly became an autodidact of this arcane world. Who cared? Nobody except me.

I could probably write a(nother) book entitled Everything I Know I Learned from the Movies. (Or Everything I Know I Learned from the Backs of Record Jackets.) Unlikely as it may seem, I was one of those people who actually derived knowledge from the content of movies. I did the same thing with comic books. There used to be something called Classics Illustrated, a series that was more or less what its name implied, comic book versions of every great book you ever heard of. The optimistic idea of whoever was behind the project was self-evident: if you liked the comic, try going on to read the book, which was exactly what I did every time. To this day—for better or worse—many of the original illustrations in those comics still inform my visualization of Moby-Dick or A Tale of Two Cities.