Oftentimes when a movie bombs the director and most of those involved will claim “Executive meddling” led to a good film being turned into a bad film and it was all the director and the cast could do to prevent the faceless executives from making it even worse.
I wonder though how true it is, it seems like many times studio executives are being used as a scapegoat for a bad production. I think of Gene Roddenberry who whenever the executives left him alone started turning out crap like The Motion Picture, or seasons 1 and 2 of TNG.
Could executive meddling have saved the phantom menace, I think George Lucas had bought too much into his own hype by that point for him to listen but perhaps a note about nobody caring about intergalactic parliamentary procedures or that Jar Jar should be toned down could have gone a long way to making it a much better film.
Well Gene Roddenbury claimed for 25 years that the reason he had to drop No 1 from the Second Pilot, was since the executives did not believe a woman could be First Officer.
The real reason was that the Executives were upset at him for casting his mistress in the role, they apparently loved the idea of a female First Officer.
So, never believe a producer, director, cast member when they blame the “suits”.
It’s a balance. Most directors of successful films will happily point out sequences that were added via Executive suggestions that really did help the film.
But there are loads of Hollywood Execs who think they have creative talent when they don’t, or are desperate to include their dumb ideas to make it look like they’re contributing and therefore can justify keeping their phoney-baloney jobs for another six months. Those are the troublesome ones. The trick is to agree with them and then twist their suggestions into something else that would actually be good, so they still get to feel like they did something and the movie doesn’t actually suffer for it. Not sure if that’s easy to do, though.
It’s like when nostalgia tries to turn Return of the Jedi into a good film, but Vader AND Solo have their balls cut off, Boba Fett goes out like a punk, EWOKS…UGG UGG…A second Death Star???
Both are fairly crappy. And yet, i’ll watch both for a little if I run across it.
I heard Harlan Ellison tell Tom Snyder a great story about how the suits, having read about the Mayan calendar, wanted Mayans in ST:TMP. I heard Roddenberry say they wanted Charlton Heston as Kirk.
Roddenberry exercised a lot more direct control over Season 1 of TOS than Season 3. Which was better?
The suits have a purpose in forcing adherence to a budget. If they were so creative, they could write or direct.
…it was interesting to read these letters from Roddenberry a few days ago. I had heard that Roddenberry had been “kicked upstairs” on Kahn: and I was expecting the letter to prove that Roddenberry was a pompous ass: but I agreed with most, if not all of his points. And Kahn ended up being one of my favourite movies ever. Roddenberry’s really emphasised the Star Trek fans were not stupid and would notice the little things, and what I loved about the final film was that attention to detail.
It was interesting to read his take on the Reliant Space battle. The battle that ended up on screen was IMHO one of the two best space battles onscreen of all time (along with the Death Star Battle from A New Hope.) I watched it again on youtube the other day and it had still had me on the edge of my seat: even though I’ve seen it many times before.
In the “up next” videos on youtube was this scene from Star Trek Into the Darkness. And with all due respect to anyone who likes the rebooted movies: that scene was godawful. It could have been a sequence from a video game. Crew were just dying let right and centre: the captain was making giant leaps over corridors, just dreadful IMHO. I wish their was a Roddenberry around to write a letter to the directors/writers telling them to “reign it in.” But "Into the Darkness was the highest grossing (but only the 11th most profitable) Trek film of all time, so what do I know?
I’m no great fan on Roddenberry, but ST:TMP can hardly be used as an example of him being left alone by the executives. The suits at Paramount were in the driving seat from the beginning.
Your link does not in any way indicate that the version you appear to believe was the real version. It just presents the latter as an alternate version.