Star Trek was huge for me growing up and my desire to write screenplays careened with the fact they were about to make a Star Trek feature film. This would have been in 1978 when I was sixteen going on seventeen.
Being a big fan of the show I wanted to try to write a script that I could visualize on the big screen. And I did. But it was a bit, uhm, on the short side. It was 22 pages, written in pen (first draft in pencil) on the lined paper we used in school. I thought it captured the characters and even had a BIG theme.
I titled it Star Trek: Call To Viraluss and the story centered around the Enterprise being, well, called to a sector of space, along with several other alien races (Klingons, Romulans, Gorns, Tellurites, Andorians) where they all battle it out. None of them could figure out why they were all there and it turned out a Supreme Being had called them together. They try to obliterate each other as well as the Being but things keep going wrong and it’s Kirk and crew who finally take a different tact, one in which ultimately has James T becoming the peacemaker.
Did they encounter God? In some ways, perhaps, but my sixteen year-old mind was having a hard time dramatizing such a large idea. Little did I know that a year later when Star Trek – The Motion Picture came out that it would deal with very similar issues. I think they call that parallel development. Only they had the right length screenplay and a lot more money.
I had a wonderful teacher who read the mini-script and was very supportive but also encouraged me to expand the length and delve more deeply into the theme I was chasing. The thought of writing anything longer than 22 pages (which came out to about 15 typed pages) seemed herculean and almost unfathomable.
A friend who was in college also read it and liked the character bits. But he had a little trouble with the science. I remember him knifing his finger through the air in short bursts, saying, “So let me get this straight; all these ships are in this small, closed section of space and they’re all going warp five and six around each other like blurred pinballs? I don’t think so…” And when he got to the end with Kirk talking to the Supreme Being he howled and looked at me saying, “You have got to be kidding? Star Trek will never meet God.” Yeah, well Shatner sure tried with Star Trek V but who am I to nit-pik?
In all honesty, it was a howler. But I learned something from writing Call To Viraluus. I learned to finish a piece of writing from beginning to end without abandoning it. This would come in handy later when I fell out of love with a piece I was working on but persevered and finished it, which almost always brought me back into the fold of the story. Secondly, writing something at such a young age and trying for scope and large meaning even though I was woefully unsuccessful, taught me to aim high. More than likely you’ll never reach all of your writing goals on a novel, script or story. But if shoot for the moon and don’t quite Fosbury Flop over the bar, you’re still stretching yourself and the story. And that always needs to be the case. Lastly, I learned that writing a screenplay wasn’t this secret, mystical thing. It was something doable. It would just take a heap-o-load of practice.
So now when I see Kirk and company on TV or in one of their films, I always think, Kirk as messenger and trading dialogue with God…that could still work.
Which is quickly followed by the echo of my friend’s laughter which I can still hear…
