Tracing Star Trek Insurrection
Tracing and exploring the creation of Star Trek Insurrection is one way of opening a book written by writer Michael Piller, who died in 2005 of cancer, leaving behind hundreds of hours of Star Trek. Piller was a writer on Star Trek: The Next Generation under Rick Berman and he helped him create Deep Space Nine, becoming a well-known and respected Trek writer in the process. He began writing his book FADE IN: The Making of Star Trek Insurrection – A Textbook on Screenwriting from Within the Star Trek Universe in 1997 when he began work on Insurrection but it was only quietly published after his death thanks to his wife Sandra, and I had to dig to find a copy in order to review what he wrote about the movie, the writing process, and Hollywood productions. Today, it’s more readily available on Amazon and online, which are copies based on the pre-published version. If you read the book or hear accounts of Piller’s work with others, you can tell he is like a teacher, giving back to future writers and providing advice to help them avoid future trappings.
Fade In was a journal of stories about Piller’s writing process during Insurrection. However, Insurrection was not a normal type movie. It was a tentpole project for Paramount, who wanted to continue the franchise after First Contact, so it had a production date and release date before Piller even started working on it. Something like that is not the norm, but the script and story still had to be tight, in order to for the movie to be successful. There were a lot of expectations. Thanks to First Contact, Berman got the chance to develop Insurrection and brought on Piller immediately to write the script.
Berman’s idea for Insurrection was to create a movie based around a classic story in the public domain. The Prisoner of Zenda was Piller’s first attempt to adapt a classic story into the Star Trek world, but this idea ultimately fizzled. Berman and Piller agreed on a tone next, which was light and humorous, and they were shooting for the feel as in the Voyage Home. They next decided on adapting Heart of Darkness, which is a strange choice in my opinion, considering the tone they were going for. The actual “pitch” for this first draft was nothing like the movie as it was released, as demands of the story morphed the script and warped it from Heart of Darkness into a quirky comedy science fiction moral dilemma. Fade In chronicles all this like a timeline of events, and it’s fascinating.
Piller began working on the script in May of 1997, after completing a series of meetings about the pitch. Patrick Stewart wanted to be a classic “hero”, after being put through the wringer in Generations and First Contact, so now I know why there’s no serious personal drama where Stewart’s character is involved. The original treatment is written out in Piller’s book and it’s very interesting and a much more straightforward adventure than the final version. The Treatment included the Romulans as villains, a whole sub-plot about Data dealing with the rising demands of being more human thanks to his emotion chip, and other really interesting ideas. They stripped out all these ideas, except for a few, such as the fountain of youth idea, which is in the final version.
Berman shot down more of Piller’s ideas and called the Treatment too political. They turned back to Heart of Darkness and warped the Data character into Colonel Kurtz, who was insane in his defense of the natives. You can see this in the final version, though it’s been given the comedy treatment for final release, and it’s nothing like Heart of Darkness. The first drafts did have little bits for Georgi regaining his eyes Berman wanted to leave in, but the Romulans were dropped and the whole thing was reworked until it simply became about revenge. The script was submitted to the studio in November 1997 and their reaction was very positive, according to Piller. They especially loved the scene of Georgi seeing his first sunrise, which survived to the final version. However, the studio thought the stakes weren’t high enough for this one-planet story, and I think they’re still correct after seeing the final movie. It’s meh. In fact, most of the studio’s feedback is spot on. They really didn’t like the second act, though they complemented the humor of Worf’s “puberty” for some reason and liked some other strange stuff.
In the end, Star Trek Insurrection was only a mild success for the studio and had a divided reception. Personally, I think the movie has soured with time, because studios have convinced themselves that “action” attracts the big numbers, not the romance or humor found in Insurrection. My opinion is that the movie is too cheesy, but it’s not as bad as some people make it out to be. Piller warns us about this trend at the end of the book (because he’s a smart guy), that audiences and studios want “set pieces” and “eye candy” more than ever, but this type of movie is at the expense of character development and story. This is kinda why I hate Star Trek Into Darkness, because it’s just one long action movie with a lot of faux-Star Trek elements that contrast Roddenberry’s vision, the vision maintained so carefully by Piller. Overall, Piller was proud of his work on Insurrection, and I can respect him for that, despite the movie’s flaws, because it really tries to be unapologetically Star Trek.
