Captain's Log: William Shatner's Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

by William Shatner, Lisabeth Shatner

Chronicles William Shatner's starring role in the movie and includes photographs of the entire film process

Genres: Star Trek, Nonfiction, Memoir, Media Tie In, Biography

224 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1989

About the author

William Shatner is the author of nine Star Trek novels, including the New York Times bestsellers The Ashes of Eden and The Return. He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including Get a Life! and I'm Working on That. In addition to his role as Captain James T. Kirk, he stars as Denny Crane in the hit television series from David E. Kelley, Boston Legal -- a role for which he has won two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe.

Reviews

[kesseljunkie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The final rating doesn’t reflect how *fascinating* this book is to read, especially decades after the much-maligned film was released. It loses some style marks, and probably because the apparent glossing-over of some since-revealed issues with the film is readily apparent. It’s also a bit too enthusiastically non-critical as it’s written by a daughter who obviously wanted to paint her dad in the best light possible. Still, some fascinating stuff and I’m really glad I revisited it this many years later.

[Nicolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this way more than is reasonable. I've always loved Star Trek V, in spite of it's goofiness. It was interesting to get a better idea of Shatner's original epic plan. I would have liked to have seen the movie as he originally envisioned it. The book doesn't have much of an ending, but other than it was a very enjoyable read.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charting the making of “Star Trek V”, this has the great benefit of being written by the directors daughter, so she has almost unlimited access to the production - the downside to that, of course, being that she’s never going to be critical of her Dad. Shatner, in general, comes over well and he’s clearly liked by his cast and crew, though some are not backward about telling him when he’s gone wrong (especially his producer and Leonard Nimoy). Clearly cataloguing the penny-pinching that severely hinders the final product, this nonetheless does a decent job of covering the nuts and bolts of production, even if the post-production aspect is very quickly glossed over. A big plus for the book is it’s layout - a slightly oversized paperback, this isn’t filled with big pictures and artwork and doesn’t have ANY pictures of people sitting around a computer monitor and pointing at the screen. Well worth a read, moreso if you’re a Trekkie, I enjoyed it and would recommend it.

[Christian Robshaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

Captain's Log: William Shatner's Personal Account of the Making of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier as told by Lisabeth Shatner is a book with an excruciatingly long title, written by Shatner's daughter, Lisabeth. She's there throughout the production of Star Trek V, from early meetings, through pre-production, filming and postproduction. Since the book came out in 1989 alongside the film it doesn't cover the release and mostly negative reception of the film, which would have been interesting to see.

Regardless, it's a fascinating look at how something like a Star Trek film, which seems like a sure bet, can fall apart at basically every stage. This isn't how it's presented; it's essentially a Paramount promotional item so the tone is neutral-to-positive on every aspect of production, but it's easy to read between the lines, especially with the advantage of reading it now rather than at the time.

First, the scripting phase seems like a case of too many cooks. Bill Shatner wants to make an ambitious, philosophical and epic film in line with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Harve Bennett and his collaborator David Loughery are more concerned with making sure the film is relatively crowd-pleasing and can be made on a reasonable budget. The higher-ups at Paramount want it to be funny, because Star Trek IV was funny and it did well. It's never explicitly mentioned, but someone somewhere clearly wanted to make sure that it had a Star Wars-y action-adventure feel. Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy aren't credited as producers or writers, but they too give feedback on what's in keeping with the Trek universe and Spock's character, respectively, and veto certain aspects. Through this process, we get to watch the script being committee-ed to death.

Then throughout preproduction and production, essentially everything goes wrong. I like William Shatner, but it's clear that he's in over his head, learning the ropes as director while on the job, and a production on this scale really isn't the place for that. The crew are consistently behind schedule, the budget is continually chipped away so that sequences like the climax get smaller and smaller (from cherubim that turn into demons, to an army of Rockmen, to three Rockmen, to one Rock Man to nothing), there are continual failures of communication, and plenty of catastrophes that, in fairness to Shatner, are just bad luck (e.g. a Teamsters strike). Again you have to read between the lines but it's clear that Shatner takes out his frustration on the people around him and this creates a sour atmosphere. He doesn't seem to allocate time well, and quite a few intended location shots aren't finished in time. These then have to be reworked so they can shoot them at the studio instead.

The ingenuity of the special effects people often impresses me as they improvise solutions to tricky problems, yet it also seems like a failure of planning. The director and the people behind him shouldn't be planning these sequences until they're sure of how to achieve them. For a film with so much studio interference going on, it also feels like it was a frustratingly amateurish production.

This is a good book to read even (probably especially) if you don't like the film as it eventually turned out. It's a really interesting look at how a process of continual compromise, interference from all corners, budget problems, and all kinds of miscellaneous problems can come together to "kill" even the most ostensibly straightforward, commercial film project. That's a classic Hollywood story that plays out again and again over the decades (e.g. Alien 3, Justice League, etc.), but you don't usually get a first-hand account like this.

For the record, though, I quite like Star Trek V. I certainly don't think it's the disaster it's often made out to be, and I find it more ambitious, more consistently entertaining, and more true to the spirit of Trek than Search for Spock (which is still OK-to-good) or any of the TNG movies.

[Wendell T. Wumplepuss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun, engaging account of William Shatner's directorial debut. A little confusing occasionally as it's written by his daughter, Lisabeth, as his account - so the changes in perspective tripped me up here and there. I like seeing what the film could have been and the good cheer on the set. Underappreciated movie and novel adaptation!

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having just finished Mr. Shatner’s Up Till Now I chose to read this account of making Star Trek V and was pleased to see both accounts were consistent. I also appreciated that this story was an accurate and truthful depiction of the process of making a film, blemishes and all.

[H. Givens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not great literature or anything, and hardly an honest analysis given its status as "book about famous actor as told to his daughter to help market directorial debut," but it's still cool to read the how-tos, technical difficulties with specific scenes, etc. I like the director's/main actors' visions of what the movie was supposed to be a lot more than how it turned out, really. They talk a lot about humor to balance out the seriousness, but they took it too far and an inherently serious story about god turned into an inherently funny story about a cinematic attempt to depict god. But that has nothing to do with the book, the point is that while there isn't really an in-depth personal look here, you do get behind-the-scenes explanations from the actors as well as the different technical departments, and that stuff interests me.

[Tedi31]

Bought: May 31, 2014
Location: Booksale (Makati Cinema Square)
Price: P60

[Norman Howe]

Science-Fiction