The original art from the unused Steve Chorney poster for Star Trek VI is available on eBay.
It is $20,000.
The original art from the unused Steve Chorney poster for Star Trek VI is available on eBay.
It is $20,000.
A publicity photo of Kim Cattrall as Valeris from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
It was near the end of principal photography on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country that London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts graduate (and Porky’s, Police Academy, and Mannequin star) Kim Cattrall did something that no actress had done before: she got naked on the bridge of the Enterprise. According to multiple contemporary accounts, the actress had arranged for a discreet photo session on the empty bridge set in Studio 8 of the Paramount lot with a wardrobe that featured the iconic Vulcan ears and nothing else.
In the the April 1992 issue of Cinefantastique, one anonymous crew member reported on the fallout: “Nimoy saw [the pictures] and hit the roof.” The movie’s executive producer then personally destroyed the prints and negatives from the very unauthorized shoot, fearing that if the images ever got out, they could deeply harm the franchise.
When asked about the incident by Mark A. Altman for Cinefantastique’s look at the making of the final film featuring the original cast, Cattrall succinctly replied, “I can’t talk about that.”
Photo scanned from my personal collection.
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 Nicholas Meyer & 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.
As director, Meyer opted to 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.)
Photo scanned from my personal collection.
A delightfully awkward publicity photo for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, featuring Leonard Nimoy as Captain Spock and DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard McCoy.
Talking to contemporary journalists, Nimoy pointed out that the underlying theme of his character’s journey was a particularly effective element for him: “Spock experienced prejudice growing up half-Vulcan and half-Human. In Star Trek VI, Spock becomes an emissary against prejudice and discovers, during the course of the story, his own prejudices.”
(Quote source: Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman’s Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, published in 1995 by Little, Brown, and Company.)
Photo scanned from my personal collection.
Steven Chorney’s charcoal study for a potential poster design for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
(Source: fineart.ha.com)
“I think in a way The Undiscovered Country is a very odd film in the context of what you call “the franchise.” It is without a doubt, it is the grittiest and most realistic, and most realistically bound. This is just my opinion. It was inspired by the headlines, and it was inspired by a changing world that we were trying to keep up with it, and in some cases we not only kept up with it, but we were ahead of it. And in other cases, as time has passed, we were behind. We were wrong about things. We were absolutely right about the Soviet coup, in fact, when former Soviet Union leader [Mikhail] Gorbachev was abducted and no one knew whether he was dead or alive we were already in the cutting room. We’d already killed him in the movie. In that sense, we predicted the Soviet coup and we were ahead. But in terms of what happened afterwards, and the notion that we were all destined for a much better world than it was, as Francis Fukuyama suggested “the end of history,” and that people who tried to prevent that—the conspirators—were in a sense just scaredy-cats. As Kirk says, “people can be very frightened of change.” But, in fact, the change that came is a lot more awful than what was before, so in that sense the film has dated in a weird way. There are other things about it…I find the mind meld is kind of like waterboarding to me and it’s uncomfortable to watch.”
As always, here’s hoping you and yours have a safe, happily and civilized Thanksgiving.
Publicity photos by Gregory Schwartz for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
This post made possible by this blog’s Patrons. If you’d like to help They Boldly Went continue to offer unique Star Trek content on Tumblr, please consider becoming a supporter for as little as $1 a month through Patreon.
In the December, 1991 issue of Starlog, writer Lynn Stephens asked DeForest Kelley what the most difficult aspect of working on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was and the actor quickly responded: “The hours, the long hours. We haven’t worked these hours on a Star Trek before. About the first five weeks involved Bill Shatner and myself. We were working nights — we worked all night long. They built a big prison set in Bronson Canyon, up in the mountains of Hollywood. Many films have been shot in that area.“
Kelley described the Rura Penthe prison set as ”…open up above and all around, so it required night shooting. Some very interesting things happen in there, things that the people on the ship are rather disturbed about.“
He added that his co-star in those scenes "really had a lot of physical stuff to do. It was the first time I’ve ever seen Bill Shatner draggin’.”
However, the man who played James T. Kirk had a markedly different take just two months later in the same magazine, telling Dan Yakir: “I spent five years on a TV series* in which much of it was shot at night and most of the time I was running, so everything else seems vacation-like by comparison. By working at night, I mean we would go to work at sundown and leave at sunrise. We did a lot of fights and stuff like that, but I didn’t find that exhausting.”
* Shatner is referring to TJ Hooker, in which he played the titular LAPD cop, a former detective who demoted himself in order to work the streets as a patrolman again.
UK publicity photos by Gregory Schwartz and press folder for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
This post made possible by this blog’s Patrons. If you’d like to help They Boldly Went continue to offer unique Star Trek content on Tumblr, please consider becoming a supporter for as little as $1 a month through Patreon.