Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504940
28 FA L L 2 0 2 3 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y and designed for the theater. "This is one of the ways in which we feel the project seems to mirror the movie itself, which is all about transcendence and becoming something greater and moving on to sort of the next stage of evolution. The movie itself has done that and it's been the advances in the technology—both visual and audio—that have allowed it to have that growth. We didn't really expect it when we had the premiere at Paramount and other screenings. People would say, 'Oh my God, I cried. I related so much to it. I was so interested in it and engaged by it, and I cried at the end.' I'm like, 'Wow, is this the same movie we're talking about that was released in 1979?' "In 2000, when we did the first revisions with Bob Wise, he actually said, 'I know we went back in and did some looped lines of things where we're going to make some changes and we looked and looked and couldn't find it then. And this time around, there it was, they found it. We had it all and the unexpected thing about it is that it's all Bob sitting in the booth with the actors, and you're hearing them talk and you're hearing him direct them. And again, the clarity of it because the dialogue in the original mix is very pinched and limited sounding. Now you're hearing it in the raw clarity as recorded. So, a mixer could go in, adjust the balance and the perspective exactly where it needed to be, sort of just unfettered. "Most of the bridge dialogue was ADR, mainly because the monitors on the bridge that you see giving readouts were achieved by little 16mm projectors behind the stage of the wall projecting up into the screens. They blimped and masked with pillows and anything else they could to try to mask the sound. There's very little production dialogue on the bridge or really anywhere in the movie. I don't think the last three reels of the picture have one single line that's not looped. "When the dialogue is clearer, your attention is held more. Otherwise, sometimes your attention drifts off. But if the dialogue is really present and you're engaged and you're seeing something [with such] clarity on a big screen and you can really see the subtlety in the actors' performances, you're more engaged by it. So, something unquantifiable happened. While we had our to-do list, we were not really grasping what the cumulative impact of all the little fixes would be. Some of them were visual fixes, things like taking the flicker out of the monitors and things like that. It's like, okay, it's because this bothers me in this shot, so let's fix that. But not until you've done 40 of those and the movie is playing, and you suddenly realize you're engaged and it's working and you're forgetting that you're watching a movie which is where you always want to get something [to]. "We had not expected such a cumulative impact of a type that's difficult to articulate. I had sat through the thing so many times that I thought, okay, I'll just shake hands and smile through my mask and say hello to everybody and we all sit down and then I'll just kinda tune out. Well, the movie starts, and I am just riveted by it. I'm like, 'Oh my gosh.' And then the idea of having the room full of people, which was the first time in a couple of years that we'd been in a room full of people [due to the pandemic], that's when it dawned on me that something new has really been given birth to here. And, as I said, it's very much like what happens in the movie itself. We were mirroring that. "Basically, this release editorially is the same as the 2000 revisions. There was one additional shot put in that I just couldn't get from for visual effects standpoint in 2000, it just wasn't working. So finally, we got it this time. It's when Spock hits his thrusters and he's going into V'Ger. It also enabled us to get rid of the clumsy music edit that had been necessitated in '79 when they didn't get the shot that was supposed to be there. "The one scene Robert Wise had wanted back in the picture more than any other was the scene where Ilia takes away Chekov's pain. She knows how to touch, and everybody else struggles with touching. They're great at interfacing with their buttons and their consoles, but they are awkward with each other, and they have to learn how to be human again. [We did] whatever we could do to bring more focus to the story that probably would have come out had there been L-R: Producer David C. Fein, visual effects supervisor Daren Dochterman, and producer Mike Matessino