Star Trek: The Motion Picture turned out to be a hugely deflating experience for critics and audiences, save the most hard-core Trekkies who would go down with the starship. Still, Paramount ended up recouping the film’s massive $45 million budget—and then some—thanks to its barrage of tie-in toys and knickknacks. The studio’s hard-nosed boss, Barry Diller, wanted a sequel right away. His conditions that the second Trek installment be not only better but also a lot cheaper weren’t open to debate. Neither was the participation of the show’s creator and one-man brain trust, Gene Roddenberry: He wasn’t going to be invited along for the ride, having ruffled more than his share of feathers during the making of the movie. But there was enough bad blood to go around. When asked if he would be interested in directing another Star Trek film, Robert Wise, the director of the first chapter, replied, “I don’t believe so. I think having done it once was quite enough.” Even Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, was privately calling The Motion Picture “a disaster.”

If Roddenberry was indeed going to be shut out of Star Trek II, no one had told him. The show’s creator immediately began tapping out a script for the sequel that had the Enterprise going back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Paramount brass thought it was a hacky idea—one of those knotting-the-ribbon-of-history tropes that Trek had already trotted out in episodes like the Harlan Ellison–penned “City on the Edge of Forever” back in the show’s first season in 1967. As Roddenberry continued to write away, Diller was already instituting a changing of the guard. To ensure that the Trek sequel’s budget was kept at a responsible number, he assigned it to the studio’s TV division. Finally, Roddenberry was informed that he would now be given the title of “executive consultant” on the picture, which was essentially a fancy way of saying that he had been kicked upstairs. Any clout that he once had was now gone. His new ceremonial title gave him an office on the Paramount lot and, nominally, the right to approve the sequel’s script. But the message was clear: he was now the keeper of the Trek flame in name only.

Taking Roddenberry’s place on the bridge was a battle-tested television veteran named Harve Bennett. Born Harve Fischman, Bennett had been a radio “quiz kid” as a child growing up in Chi-cago in the ’40s. From that early age, broadcasting had worked its way into his blood. Bennett would log successful tenures at both CBS and ABC, where he produced the hit miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man and oversaw such Nielsen juggernauts as The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. And while few would have described his taste as “sophisticated,” Bennett’s reputation for fiscal responsibility bordering on parsimony was well known through- out the industry.

Bennett had only been working on the Paramount lot for two weeks when he was summoned to Diller’s office in 1980. There, he was surprised to find not just Diller but also studio president Michael Eisner and its terrifying capo di tutti capi, Gulf + Western chairman Charles Bluhdorn. Through a Viennese accent every bit as thick as his horn-rimmed glasses, Bluhdorn asked his newest underling point-blank what he had thought of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Bennett wondered if this was a trick. He’d hated the movie, but he also knew that the powerful men he was now standing before had given it their blessing. Bennett decided that if he was going to go down, he was going to go down telling the truth. “I said, ‘I thought it was boring,’” Bennett later recalled. Bluhdorn smiled, revealing a mouth full of teeth as big as piano keys, and began to laugh. He asked Bennett if he could make a better picture. To which Bennett replied, “Well, you know, yeah, I could make it less boring—yes, I could.” Finally, Bluhdorn asked if Bennett could produce a Star Trek movie for less than $45 million. Feeling emboldened, Bennett replied, “Oh boy, where I come from, I could make five movies for that.” Again, the piano keys flashed. Bluhdorn’s next words weren’t a question but rather an order: “Do it!”

The budget for Star Trek II was pegged at $12 million, nearly a quarter of the original’s price tag. Diller was even flirting with the idea of making it as a TV movie. Not that Bennett cared. There were more immediate hurdles to negotiate. For starters, Leonard Nimoy had already made it crystal clear that he wanted nothing to do with another Trek movie. Meanwhile, potential directors, scared off after the butt-numbing first film, were turning down the studio left and right. As for Bennett, well, if anyone had bothered to ask, he would have had to tell them that he knew next to nothing about the show or its history. He knew that he would have to get up to speed, fast.

In his marathon viewing sessions of the Trek back catalog, Bennett said that he had been especially transported by one episode in particular: the twenty-second episode of season 1, titled “Space Seed.” In it, Kirk matches wits with a genetically bred superman named Khan Noonien Singh, played by Ricardo Montalbán. The episode seemed to have it all: a taut script, surprising plot twists, and a first-rate black-hat villain. Best of all, the ending was left as wide open as a set of ellipses with the momentarily defeated Khan sent into deep-space exile. Kirk ends the episode by asking aloud, “I wonder where Khan will be twenty years from now?” Bennett realized that he had been handed a neatly wrapped gift. For the first time in months, he felt bullish. He sat in his new office on the Paramount lot and began outlining the story on a yellow legal pad that ran just two paragraphs, but the beats were in place. Star Trek II would be a tale of revenge, mortality, and making peace with the past.

Bennett brought in an outside writer to help him flesh out his broad strokes—a TV journeyman he knew from his movie-of-the- week days named Jack Sowards. Together, the pair would tease out a screenplay that already included a high-tech MacGuffin called the Genesis Project, a futuristic terraforming device that could rapidly transform lifeless planets into lush, habitable ones. It was the ultimate example of Federation optimism and peace. But in the wrong hands, like Khan’s, it could also be a weapon of mass destruction. When they were happy with their first draft, the two men duly messengered the script across the lot to Roddenberry, who read it and immediately saw red, firing off an irate memo to the studio brass calling it a betrayal of the show’s core philosophy. Roddenberry went even further, arguing that it would ruin Star Trek. Bennett knew this was nonsense. The ravings of a man who was simply trying to piss on his turf and scare trespassers away. It didn’t matter, though. No one in a position of power at the studio was listening to Roddenberry at this point.

Next, Bennett’s thoughts moved on to the prickly matter of Nimoy. His gut told him that embarking on a Star Trek movie without Spock was unthinkable. Not that he had many cards to play. In fact, the only one he could think of was to appeal to Nimoy’s vanity. Years earlier, Bennett and Nimoy had worked together rather happily on a TV movie at Universal. There was an ounce of goodwill between them. So Bennett cold-called the actor at home and asked if the two could meet over lunch. According to Nimoy, his reaction was something along the lines of: Oh shit, here we go again . . . Para- mount’s campaign to woo the reluctant Vulcan back into the fold was about to begin. After months without that lunch ever being scheduled, Bennett found himself unexpectedly invited to a social gathering at Nimoy’s home. The two men exchanged small talk as Bennett patiently waited for his opening. Then Nimoy gave it to him. The actor nonchalantly asked how the screenplay for Star Trek II was coming along. Bennett knew that Nimoy saw himself as a serious actor. It was part of the reason why he had always had such a complex love-hate relationship with the franchise. So Bennett leaned in, lowered his voice to a whisper, and said to his host, “How’d you like to have a great death scene?” Nimoy laughed and shook his head with amused incredulity. Then he replied, “You son of a bitch, let’s talk.”

As Bennett suspected, the Spock’s-death gambit got Nimoy’s attention. To a man like Nimoy, it would present the ultimate acting challenge, allowing him the opportunity to once and for all shake off the albatross of the character with a definitive exit while providing the dramatic closure he craved. As for Bennett, the ploy would allow him to make Star Trek II the way it needed to be made—the only way it could be made—with the participation of the series’s most iconic character. Bennett’s original concept was to have Spock perish somewhere in the second act of the sequel. He called it “the Psycho moment.” No one would see Spock’s death coming. Audiences would lose their minds. And the buzz that would swirl around the film would be deafening. Star Trek II would be the summer movie you had to see.

Bennett began toying with other ideas to squeeze into the story. Aside from Spock’s death, the return of Khan, and the Genesis Project, he flirted with the notion of introducing an estranged son for Kirk. After all, it was hard to imagine that there wasn’t at least one somewhere in space after all of Kirk’s recreational cavorting with various green-skinned alien temptresses. Also batted around was the idea of introducing an entirely new crew of young, fresh-faced cadets aboard the Enterprise who would make the old guard feel their age and spur them on to wrestle with their middle-aged regrets. Among them would be a young female Vulcan recruit named Saavik and a nephew for Scotty, who possessed his uncle’s ingenuity and sure hand in the engineering room.

This second draft of the screenplay, which was going by the title Star Trek: The Genesis Project, was unwieldy. To help make sense of all the disparate threads and spin them into a single cohesive narrative, Bennett brought in the veteran Star Trek writer Sam Peeples for a third draft. He was stupefied when Peeples turned in his rewrite. Virtually all of his and Sowards’s best ideas had been mysteriously jettisoned. There was no longer any there there. In fact, their most inspired idea, the return of Khan, wasn’t even in the movie. Worse, it read like a very long television episode rather than an actual movie movie. Peeples was quickly shown the door. Crestfallen by weeks of wasted time and expense, Bennett put the task of honing the screenplay aside and switched his focus to another pressing matter: finding a director. Diller had made it clear that he wanted a Star Trek sequel, pronto. Bennett would find one—and solve all his script nightmares in the same lucky stroke.

Nicholas Meyer was no Trekkie. But the thirty-five-year-old writer-director had recently come to be regarded as a rising Hollywood talent. Bennett hit it off with Meyer immediately. He told him that the latest draft of the Star Trek II script—the Peeples script—would be finished in ten days. Bennett promised to send it to Meyer to see what he thought. But after two weeks went by, the fidgety Meyer began to wonder where the new screenplay was. He’d been lukewarm on the idea of directing the sequel at first, but as time passed, he started sparking to it. He had begun immersing himself in old episodes of the show and even put himself through the punishment of watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Recalls Meyer, “I looked at the first film and . . . knew we could do it for a quarter of the cost, so we would probably end up looking like heroes!”

After not hearing a peep from Bennett, the newly excited Meyer finally picked up the phone and called him. The executive producer had a dour tone in his voice. He told Meyer to forget it. Peeples’s draft had come in, and it was “a hundred and eighty pages of nothing.” Meyer told him to send it up to his house anyway. Meyer couldn’t argue with Bennett’s assessment of the script. It was a hundred and eighty pages of nothing. But Meyer was still interested. The director asked Bennett to send him all the previous drafts. Maybe there was still a way to salvage things. And after a few days of cherry-picking the best ideas from each, Meyer asked Bennett and his second-in-command, producer Robert Sallin, to come up to his house to chat. When they arrived, Meyer pulled out a yellow legal pad, and suggested that they make a list of everything they liked best from all five drafts right then and there. Then Meyer said, “Once we’ve finished that, I’ll write a new screenplay in which we’ll incorporate all the things we liked.”

Bennett and Sallin couldn’t believe Meyer’s enthusiasm. Their white knight had arrived just in the nick of time. Because apart from Nimoy, and apart from the script, there was still a third ball teetering in the air—the film’s special effects. In short, the effects house that Paramount had contracted for the film, Industrial Light & Magic, had informed Bennett that they would need a finalized shooting script in the next twelve days if they were going to meet the studio’s release plans. But when Bennett mentioned this fact to Meyer, the director replied that it would be no problem. Without a writing or directing deal in place—Meyer didn’t ask for a penny or even a screenplay credit (much to his agent’s dismay)—he got to work. Peppering in allusions to Herman Melville’s saga of vengeance, Moby-Dick, Meyer worked on vampire’s hours, fueled by coffee and cigars. Twelve sleepless days later, he turned in what would essentially become the shooting script for Star Trek II. Bennett felt like a condemned man who’d just received a last-minute stay of execution from the governor.

All the stubborn puzzle pieces finally seemed to be locking into place: the script, the special effects deadline, and now, thanks to a new two-picture contract with Paramount (specifically two non- Trek pictures), Nimoy would now be returning for Star Trek II. Then, just when everything seemed to be on track, all hell broke loose. Word of Spock’s top-secret death had leaked. Only seven key executives on the film were let in on the hush-hush plot shocker. But somehow word had managed to trickle out to a small handful of outraged sci-fi fanzines, who would run with the story.

Right away, Bennett and Meyer knew that Roddenberry had to be the leaker. Who else could it have been? After all, Roddenberry’s vehement protests about killing off the character were already a matter of record thanks to the irate memos he had dashed off. It was like Paramount’s very own version of the Pentagon Papers. The studio brass was frantic. And within days, furious letters from the Trekkie nerd herd demanding to know how they could possibly kill off Spock began pouring in to the Paramount mail room. One in particular that read, “If Spock dies, you die,” summed up the tone of the hate mail. The studio was flooded with phone calls. Petitions were signed. “Save Spock” ads appeared in newspapers. Some conspiracy theorists suggested that the studio leaked the rumor deliberately to goose business. Meanwhile, some hyperventilating Paramount execs started to have second thoughts about the sensational storyline. But it was too late now. Eventually, Meyer was able to cool things down by arguing that it would not only be good for business but also that it had given him a new idea: he would move Spock’s death to the final reel of the film rather than waste it in the middle. If done correctly, it could even give the movie a bittersweet, three-hankie elegy to end on. A grace note with real power.

Roddenberry couldn’t have known it at the time, but if he was indeed the man to leak the news of Spock’s death to the press, he had unwittingly handed Bennett and Meyer a poignant third-act climax that was far better and packed more pathos than anything they’d been able to come up with on their own. One that would turn Star Trek II from just another cash-grab sequel into a franchise-resuscitating classic.

What had begun as a few outraged articles in the niche sci-fi press quickly snowballed into a national news story. The Paramount-owned TV show Entertainment Tonight conducted a poll of whether burying Spock was a bad idea. Not surprisingly, the results overwhelmingly said that it was. At that point, it didn’t even seem to matter anymore whether Gene Roddenberry was the one who was responsible for the leak. The damage was done.

While luring Leonard Nimoy back onto the bridge of the Enterprise for Star Trek II had initially been the main focus of Bennett’s attention—and the chief source of his agita—new, unexpected snags began popping up almost daily. As Meyer’s final draft (or what he thought was his final draft) was being circulated to the rest of the franchise’s regular cast members, Bennett was shocked to learn that not everyone was as in love with his script as he was. George Takei hemmed and hawed about beaming aboard, saying that his character, Sulu, was little more than “a talking prop” as written. DeForest Kelley was equally underwhelmed by Bones’s presence—or lack thereof—saying that the role was “not meaningful.” And William Shatner, perhaps the only star whose participation was as critical as Nimoy’s, registered his displeasure, immediately calling for an impromptu story conference with Meyer and Bennett. At the time, Shatner said that he was ready and willing to walk unless certain changes were made to the script, specifically Kirk’s smattering of less-than-heroic moments. But when asked about his protestations years later, he admitted that his original misgivings with Meyer’s Star Trek II screenplay had more to do with still feeling burned by how god-awful the first film had turned out than having anything to do with Meyer’s plans for the second. “I most likely scrutinized it with a real chip on my shoulder and an overwhelming attitude of ‘You won’t fool me again,’” he said. “Nick’s script probably had two strikes against it before I even opened the plastic cover.”

Meyer would quickly prove to be a born problem solver and diplomat. He worked into the wee hours beefing up Sulu’s and Bones’s scenes while addressing Shatner’s myriad concerns, handing them all fresh rewrites the next day with a smile. Even though the Star Trek II script was now theoretically completed, Meyer made sure to keep it malleable enough that it could be punched up and improved on the fly. One late addition would be the sequence that would become the movie’s bravura opening set piece—the Kobayashi Maru no-win scenario. Fully aware that the franchise’s fans would be sitting on the edge of their seats nervously awaiting Spock’s death (some armed with rotten produce, no doubt), Meyer came up with the ultimate audience fake-out. He would lead moviegoers into thinking that Spock had bit the dust in the very first scene of the film as the Enterprise comes “under attack” and Spock falls to the floor, “critically injured.” Of course, it all turns out to be a simulated battle exercise—a fiendishly clever deke. “We’d ‘kill’ Spock in the first three minutes, expose his death as merely part of a training exercise, then move on with the story,” says Meyer. “Then, later, when the audience had gotten swept away by Khan and the Genesis Project, we could sneak Spock’s death back into the action as a genuine surprise.”

With all the principal cast members finally on board, Bennett moved on to the supporting cast. The talented young actor Merritt Butrick (who would die tragically from AIDS at age twenty-nine in 1989) was brought on as Kirk’s son, David. Bibi Besch was added to play David’s mother, Genesis Project scientist Carol Marcus. And Kirstie Alley, making her big-screen debut, donned pointy ears to play the stoic Vulcan cadet Saavik. As for Khan, well, Ricardo Montalbán was now nearly fifteen years older than when he had appeared in “Space Seed.” And thanks to his recurring role as the white-suited master of ceremonies Mr. Roarke on the TV show Fantasy Island, he was hardly the embodiment of a strapping, intergalactic he-man anymore. Or so everyone had reason to think. But it turned out that Montalbán was probably in better physical shape at age sixty-one than he had been during his first rendezvous with Kirk back in 1967. So much so that the leathery pecs that Khan flashes in Star Trek II would lead many critics to incorrectly assume in print that the actor was wearing some sort of sculpted prosthetic breastplate, when in fact, he truly was that jacked. Being asked to resurrect the fiery Khan was exactly what Montalbán had been looking for. He asked Bennett for a copy of “Space Seed” to help him get reacquainted with the character. The actor would later say of watching it: “I started going back in time and I could once again remember the set, the lighting, Gene Roddenberry, and I started to remember what I did as an actor back then . . . Khan began returning to me.”

The biggest complaint of Star Trek: The Motion Picture had been that it was too enamored of its own sugar-shock special effects. And that it had done so at the expense of the returning char- acters and their banter and interplay, which is what fans had been pining for during its long hiatus. That grievance was still reverberating in Bennett’s and Meyer’s ears two years later. And they were hell-bent on making sure that it wouldn’t be voiced again. Not that they could have afforded to go to the mat on costly special effects anyway. With only $12 million to work with, they knew that on Star Trek II, less would have to be more. This, of course, was a bitter pill to swallow at Industrial Light & Magic. Told that they were being given a pared-to-the-bone budget, they immediately called up their competitor Douglas Trumbull, whose company, Entertainment Effects Group, had worked on The Motion Picture. But still annoyed about losing out on the big contract for Star Trek II, Trumbull refused the competition’s request for assistance. Realizing that he had to somehow find a way to stuff ten pounds of effects into a cheap, five-pound paper bag, Meyer looked everywhere to find ways to save money. Then someone informed him that Paramount had held on to all of the sets from the previous film. They were just waiting to be salvaged from a storage hangar. Meyer raided them like spare parts. The eight-foot-long model of the Enterprise was brought out of dry dock and reused, as was the mothball-festooned set of the ship’s bridge. Although money would be lavished on a model of the Reliant, the spaceship that Khan hijacks, its interiors would end up being those of the Enterprise, just redressed to look a bit shabbier and lit a bit darker. As for ILM, they would accomplish miracles with what little they were given. For instance, the brief sequence where we see the Genesis device bring life to a barren planet would go down in history as the first completely computer-generated sequence in a feature film. ILM had boldly gone where no one had gone before.

But just when Meyer was foolish enough to think that the path to production had been cleared of nettlesome obstacles, he found himself being drawn into a new brawl. This time over the film’s title. Although Meyer’s screenplay was called Star Trek II: The Undiscovered Country—a reference to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech—it was not to be. Allusions to Shakespeare apparently didn’t put butts in seats. Without Meyer’s knowledge or consent, Paramount’s New York–based head of marketing, Frank Mancuso, vetoed the title and rechristened the film Star Trek II: The Vengeance of Khan. And to be honest, that title isn’t half bad, even though Meyer loathed it. When he found this out, the director called Mancuso directly and let him have it. Meyer heard that his film’s title had now been changed again. It was now Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He hated that, too. And this time, he wasn’t alone. Says Meyer, “I remember being called into a marketing meeting in Barry Diller’s office, where in a rage he said, ‘No- body knows what the word wrath is! How the hell did we wind up with this ridiculous, stupid title?!’” Nine years later, Meyer would claim a belated victory when he directed Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Principal photography on The Wrath of Khan would finally kick off on November 9, 1981. On the Paramount lot, the soundstage being used for the film was in total lockdown. But some wondered aloud that now that Spock’s death was public, what was left to protect? The first five days of shooting mostly focused on Khan and his ragtag cult of Botany Bay survivors aboard the Reliant. And Montalbán admitted that he was scared to death walking onto the set the first day. With one of his foul, ever-present cigars in his mouth, Meyer reassured the actor that he was nailing it. Then, a few days later, the old familiar faces from voyages past returned, even though Takei, still not sold on the size of Sulu’s role in the movie, still hadn’t signed his contract. Still, no one would be more nervous on the set of The Wrath of Khan than the legendary Vulcan who was about to meet his maker at the end of the shoot. Until then, it felt like a high school reunion in a way that The Motion Picture had not. This time around, everyone felt relaxed and loose. “We had a great time making the movie,” Nimoy said. “I felt like the cohesion of the characters was working again, and that we really knew who we were again. I was having such a good time that when we were getting ready to start shooting Spock’s death scene, I thought, I may have made a big mistake.”

When it was eventually time for the death scene, Nimoy said that he was so overcome with emotion that he nearly walked off the lot. He was almost looking for an excuse not to do it. In the scene, Spock sacrifices himself to save the lives of everyone else aboard the Enterprise. It was the ultimate act of humanity by the original crew’s only nonhuman. In order to fix the ship’s damaged warp drive, Spock goes into the engine room, which is flooded with radiation. Spock fixes the warp drive just in the nick of time, but he dies from radiation poisoning. As he dies, a wall of glass separates him from his best friend, Kirk. He tells the captain not to grieve. His decision to save the Enterprise and everyone on it was logical. It was a chilling moment. And on the set, every last member of the cast and crew found themselves breaking into tears. Then, on the second take, Nimoy decided to try something different on Bennett’s urging. Nimoy was told to say something mysterious and potentially meaningful as Bones tries to stop him from going into the engine room that might just leave the door ever-so-slightly ajar for a possible return in Star Trek III, should there be one. When the cameras rolled again, this time he performed a Vulcan mind meld with the doctor and told him, “Remember.” It was just vague enough to give the fans a shred of hope.

After a twelve-week shoot that ended in February of 1982, Meyer was informed that he would have an accelerated timetable to edit the film. No one had bothered to mention this to him before now, but Paramount had already booked The Wrath of Khan into theaters on June 12. “When I finally did the math, I said, ‘This is insane. There’s no time to edit this movie!’” says Meyer. The director would not see daylight for the next seven weeks, during which time he cut two human-interest subplots from the film: one involving Scotty’s nephew; the other a romance between Kirk’s son, David, and Saavik. Meyer hated to see them go, but he was convinced that the scenes were dragging the film’s pace. ILM’s special effects hadn’t fully been put into the movie yet (although Meyer had cleverly recycled some Enterprise footage from the first film) and James Horner’s score had not been recorded yet, but the bullish director felt that he was ready to screen his rough cut to Paramount’s most powerful executives, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Even so, what happened next is something that Meyer would never forget. “Very late in the business, maybe nine weeks before the picture was due to open, Barry Diller saw the movie for the first time. And when it was over, he said, ‘Wait a minute. I didn’t know this movie was about the death of Spock. You can’t kill Spock!’ And I said, ‘What? You had the script, it’s a multimillion-dollar movie—you must have known.’ Oh, he was real bent out of shape.”

A month before The Wrath of Khan opened in theaters, a preview screening was held in Kansas City. Meyer says he was against the idea. And sure enough, the next evening on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson walked out on stage to deliver his monologue and said, “Well, it’s out: he dies.” No one in America needed to ask who “he” was. Everybody knew who he was talking about. Whipped into a tizzy, Paramount’s publicity department went into spin mode, suggesting that they had shot more than one ending to the film even though they hadn’t. Meyer, for one, refused to play along, knowing he’d look like an idiot. But there actually would end up being an alternate ending to Star Trek II . . . or at least an altered one. Bennett had always been troubled by the finality of Spock’s death in the engine room. Despite the scene’s emotional force, not to mention the added power of Spock’s coffin being jettisoned into the void of space following Kirk’s devastating eulogy, Bennett thought it felt too final. And the reactions of the movie’s test audiences seemed to bear this out. In a meeting with several Paramount executives, Eisner suggested that the film needed a resurrection: “When we have the death scene, we have Good Friday, but we don’t have an Easter morning.” Bennett took the idea and ran with it, suggesting that Spock’s coffin ends up landing on the lush, green, newly formed Genesis planet—a world of rebirth. The door closed by Spock’s death wasn’t just ajar now, it had been kicked wide open.

The New York Times’ Janet Maslin kicked off her review of The Wrath of Khan, thusly: “Now this is more like it: after the colossal, big-budget bore that was Star Trek: The Motion Picture, here comes a sequel that’s worth its salt. The second Star Trek movie is swift, droll and adventurous, not to mention appealingly gadget-happy. It’s everything the first one should have been and wasn’t.” As for the ever-contrarian Pauline Kael, well, she simply called The Wrath of Khan “wonderful dumb fun,” which, to Meyer’s ears, couldn’t have sounded more like a flat-out rave considering the source.

By the end of its runs, Star Trek II would beam off with $79.8 million. Granted, that figure was less than the first big-screen Trek adventure had earned in 1979, but made on a quarter of The Motion Picture’s budget, it would not only prove to be far more profitable (something Diller valued above all else) but also that the franchise would continue to live long and prosper for years to come. After years of headaches, Meyer and Harve Bennett could finally breathe a sigh of relief; the Trek faithful had put down their picket signs and turned out. And better yet, they seemed to love what they saw.

Excerpted from the book THE FUTURE WAS NOW: MADMEN, MAVERICKS, AND THE EPIC SCI-FI SUMMER OF 1982 by Chris Nashawaty. © 2024 by Chris Nashawaty. Reprinted by permission of Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan.