The Lead (William Shatner), the Director (Nicolas Meyer), and the Executive Producer (Leonard Nimoy) of “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country”.
It’s rumored that Leonard Nimoy was offered the reigns of the Star Trek franchise as a whole in the wake of this film, coupled with Gene Roddenberry’s death. He turned such down, if said offer was extended. I wonder what Trek would have been like with Nimoy at the helm for the next decade instead of Rick Berman?
Kim Cattrall as Valeris, alongside an unidentified background player in a publicity photo for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Valeris was not originally part of the conspiracy that causes so much trouble for the Enterprise and her crew. In Denny Martin Flinn’s original screenplay, there was a complicated tracking sequence that climaxed with Kirk, Spock and Scotty coming across the conspiracy after they break into a secret Klingon base. Unfortunately, this was estimated to add up to $5,000,000 to the movie’s budget — money that the studio didn’t want to spend.
Director Nicholas Meyer cut this (expensive) portion of the film and streamlined the reveal of the conspiracy, allowing the production to use existing sets while saving some runtime in the end.
In Starlog #205, Flinn talked to Craig W. Chrissinger about how Meyer’s rewrite handled this: “With the cutting of the cabal scenes, it was necessary to come up with something a little more intriguing, and Valeris was right there. When I read it, I liked it. It didn’t bother me at all. If anything, it’s nice to have good and evil represented in all races because that’s much more in line with reality. There sometimes is an ambiguity in Star Trek because you don’t want just white hats and black hats. I guess there are some bad apples on Vulcan, too.”
Flinn then went on to give readers a bit more detail about the character’s origins in the production: “Valeris originally was, in fact, Saavik, but we couldn’t get Kirstie Alley for the role. Kirstie was already on the Paramount lot doing Cheers, so both Nick and one of the executives made calls to her. I don’t know any of the details, but the next thing I knew, we were changing the name to Valeris.”
(As to why the production didn’t simply move down to the next available Saavik, Robin Curtis? No idea. Maybe Meyer just liked working with Alley and wanted her back.)
frontier001
ultrakillblast
tybarious-ii
theyboldlywent
sleepy-crocuta