For no apparent reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about my early days at Star Trek, back when the Hart Building (above, photo by Ethan Calk) boasted an elevator paneled in faux walnut, and the ghost of Orson Welles was stalking secretaries on the third floor. Maybe it’s because the newest film in the franchise has begun shooting, or maybe it’s because I’m just getting up there in years and starting to think back on ye olde glory days.
In any case, a blog certainly provides a handy forum for the occasional memory dump, and since there are still a fair number of people out there interested in all things Trek, I thought I’d put down some of the experiences I had in the Hart Building now rather than saving them all for that fanciful day when I attempt to write the tell-all memoir that rips the lid from the pot of science fiction stew and lets the greasy fat boil to the surface like.... well, you get the idea.
The Hart Building was the only place where the writers of Next Gen were housed (or confined, depending on how you looked at it). No other production offices were located in the building, which loomed over the Paramount dining room and commissary, nor were any other members of the production especially eager to enter the premise since the comings and goings into our building were easily monitored from the windows and balcony of the vaguely Stalinistic structure of the facing Cooper Building directly across the way, and visiting the writers was something that was very much frowned upon from on high.
Cooper housed the central offices for the production, and was the place everyone eventually made pilgrimage to seek additional monies or approvals. There was something about climbing the steep staircase to the second floor of Cooper that seemed to suck the joy out of your day as you prepared to do battle of one form or another upon entering the soulless conference room or the corner office of the Executive Producer. Cooper was a battlefield, plain and simple and the people who lived and worked there day after day tended to have their version of the thousand meter stare peeking out from eyes eternally red-rimmed from too many late nights spent trying to get shooting wrapped before going into overtime.
In the Hart Building, we tended to view the denizens of Cooper as the People Most Likely To Get In The Way of the Story. Scripts were inevitably labeled as too expensive and too long, and production meetings were essentially exercises in finding creative ways of saying that any given set could not be built in the time and budget allowed and why couldn’t the action be moved into the Ready Room? Not to mention, the dread process of giving script notes was also doled out in Cooper, and thus the entire structure soon became the focal point of our collective psychic loathing. Many were the days when the third season writing staff would look out the windows from the fourth floor corner office of the writing team of Hans Biemler and Richard Manning (later to become my own office) and gaze down on Cooper with bitter recriminations and sometimes outright hatred for what had been done to one of “our” scripts “over there.”
At some point, Hans and Ricky discovered that it was possible to actually tell which page of a script was being discussed in Rick Berman’s office with a pair of binoculars and this led to covert gatherings whenever we knew that Michael Piller had been summoned for a “Rick Meeting.” We would crowd the window and trade the two pair of binocs usually at hand to get the perfect view of the script in question, which would invariably be on the coffee table in front of Rick’s chair, while Michael’s sneaker shod feet would just be visible. Rick’s script notes were sometimes visible in his thick red pencil and we would follow along with our copies as he would point to a line of dialog and begin gesticulating with varying degrees of animation, depending on the severity of the note. This went on for some months, until Rick remodeled his office and added shutters to the windows, which brought an end to regular surveillance.
The Hart Building itself was one of the older structures on campus and it certainly showed its age in ways large and small. One of the more charming leftovers from the golden era of the studios was the fact that at least four of the offices had full-blown wet bars still in them. We often marveled at the idea that the three martini lunch was not only countenanced, but also brought back and continued in one’s office. Unfortunately, the big offices with the bars weren’t ours to stock, and we had to make due with single bottles of Chinaco tequila or Jack Daniels hidden away in drawers and were, in truth, more talked about than consumed. The elevator was its own horror; a tiny cubicle, barely able to accommodate four adults, paneled in something godawful, and featuring a slow, noisy, clanking as it chugged its way through the vertical plane and gave everyone a fit of claustrophobia whenever the de rigueur comment about being trapped there during an earthquake was made. (Years later, the elevator was replaced with a newer and presumably, safer model, but during construction it was learned that the entire fourth floor was a hasty add-on slapped atop the building some time in the distant past. As one of the workers observed, “During a real quake, the entire fourth floor would probably slide right the hell off.”)
In that first year, I occupied the smallest and least desirable office: fourth floor, hard by the stairs, a space quite literally the size of a walk-in closet, with a lovely view of a rooftop and back alley. One desk, one guest chair and a small bookcase cramped the space to the point where few ever came to visit for more than ten minutes. My computer was a dinosaur even by the standards of 1989, with amber letters glaring out from a black screen, and a double-bank of 5 1/2 inch floppy drives. Printing could be had down on the first floor but required walking said floppy down there and waiting on a printer to free up. Phones were thankfully push-button, but still in the generic Ma Bell set-up with a red hold button and five white lines, only two of which actually worked. While the typing pool was still technically in business at Paramount, its days were clearly numbered and few writers were actively using its services. Some writers on staff were still hand writing scripts on yellow legal pads and handing them off to secretaries (“assistants” then only just coming into vogue) but most of us were using Microsoft Word with a Scriptor Style sheet to write our episodes. The many intricacies of the Style sheet eluded me, but basically it was a way to format all the scripts in a uniform way and yet still required a Script Coordinator to sort through all the various bugs and errors that would crop up in every script.
Reams of paper floated about the building and clogged every office. Each script would go through multiple revisions, from story outline to final shooting draft and keeping the pages of your script current was a daily chore until you rated a share of some secretary/assistant’s time. Added to the sometimes hourly delivery of colored script pages were call sheets, shooting schedules, story memos, production memos, budget memos, and various other documents that may or may not have been delivered to the right office with cryptic titles like “Actor Day Out of Days,” all of which meant that every writer’s office was covered in a perpetual blanket of paper.
I began the habit early on of collecting and saving every last scrap of Trek related paper that came into my possession, on the theory that I may not be around these offices for very long and I should hold onto everything I could get my hands on. Ten years later, this impulse would result in very large fire hazard in my garage and my casting about for some institution to take this material off my hands and that’s how it came to be in the possession of the University of Southern California’s Film and Television Library where it resides to this day. I’ve often thought of going down there and going through those old three-ring binders to refresh my memory of those early days, but, of course, I never have. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s too much time and too much of a hassle or it’s because I’m afraid of having to read my own early drafts.
Probably both.