The making of the beloved film has become the stuff of legend \u2014 and now, in a rare interview, a key figure is shedding light on ‘Voyage Home’ as it turns 30.<\/p>\n
Thirty years ago, the crew of the Enterprise went home.<\/p>\n
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home <\/em>saw Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and their shipmates travel back to 1986 on a mission to retrieve two humpback whales and bring them forward in time to the 23rd<\/sup> century to save the Earth from an alien probe.<\/p>\n When the film debuted on Nov. 26, 1986, The Voyage Home<\/em> became a crossover hit, pleasing Trek <\/em>fans and general audiences alike. It would stand as the top-grossing Trek <\/em>film ever until J.J. Abrams’ big budget 2009 film, and it is considered the most charming (and by far, the funniest)\u00a0Trek <\/em>movie.<\/p>\n The humorous and environmentally conscious screenplay was written by the young writing partners Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes \u2014 who caught the attention of Paramount and the Star Trek <\/em>brain trust with a script for Fox called The Long Way Home<\/em>, which had some of the charm and fun the pair would bring to Trek<\/em>.<\/p>\n “They knew they wanted to make a movie that would make a statement about the environment. They knew that they wanted it to include whales. They had a notion that time travel might enter into it. But it’s basically all they had,” Meerson tells Heat Vision<\/em> of his and Krikes’ early meetings on the project with director\u00a0Nimoy, producer Harve Bennett and the rest of the team.<\/p>\n The duo wrote somewhere between seven and ten outlines, with the final one getting approval. It included a role for Eddie Murphy that never would materialized.<\/p>\n “It was always the same story that approved, but the original draft included a part for Eddie Murphy. Eddie was on the lot at Paramount at the time and arguably was the biggest star in the word. They had told us he was a huge Star Trek<\/em> fan,” says Meerson.<\/p>\n Murphy was going to play an astrophysicist at Berkeley, and the original story did not include Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks), the marine biologist and love interest to Kirk. Eventually the Murphy deal fell through and Gillian Taylor was worked into the script to replace him.<\/p>\n “At the beginning of the process, it was actually a lot of fun. As the process progressed, it became less fun, because it became more political. And I don’t say that with any bitterness. It’s just the way things work in all businesses,” says Meerson. “We began to feel like at a certain point that this was going to be taken away from us, which in fact, it was.”<\/p>\n Over the years, the writing of The Voyage Home<\/em> \u00a0has become the stuff of Trek<\/em> legend. As is common in big franchise films, the script was eventually passed to\u00a0Trek <\/em>icon (and Wrath of Khan <\/em>director) Nicholas Meyer to perform a rewrite, along with producer Harve Bennett.<\/p>\n “Harve Bennett said, ‘We need to Trek this up. You guys have done an amazing job, but we now need to Trek this up,’ ” recalls Meerson.<\/p>\n