Starbase972: Shalom Mr. Bennett. Your original name is Fischman, are you Jewish?

Bennett: Yes, yes.

Starbase972: From both sides?

Bennett: My father was born in the Ukraine, what is now the Ukraine, and came to the United States when he was 5, my mother was born in the United States, of Russian parents.

Starbase972: Oh, so you’re Russian.

Bennett: I’m definitely a Russian… You know, we took Star Trek IV to Moscow during Glasnost…

Starbase972: That must have been an exciting place for you.

Bennett: It was an incredible experience. We titled it with Russian subtitles, but the picture played exactly the same way in Moscow as it had in the United States. The jokes were the same, it was absolutely a wonderful international experience.

Starbase972: We already had the experience of seeing that Star Trek is a very international thing.

Bennett: My name, of course, is Chaim, you see where "Harv" comes from. But Harv was really – on my birth certificate it says Harvard. And the reason it says Harvard is because my father's name is Shmuel-Yoel, which he translated as Yale. So when I was born, my mother who was a reporter in the height of Chicago's print journalism in the 30's, my mother had a sense of humor and she named me Harvard because he was Yale. Fortunately, my brother was not named Princeton (laughing). My brother has a biblical name – Ruel, and that is Moses' father in law, and in the Bible it's spelled Reuel.
So, that’s my background.

Starbase972: We saw that you filmed A Woman Called Golda here in Israel. Do you remember anything from your visit here?

Bennett: Oh ho ho ho… I’m writing my memoirs now, and that’s about four chapters of my time in Israel, and my time with Ingrid (Bergman), and my time in the Knesset, the whole thing. The first thing I noticed, which you might be interested in, was that the film played differently in Tel-Aviv than it did in Jerusalem.

Starbase972: In what way?

Bennett: Well, in Tel-Aviv we had an audience largely of theatrical people, movie people – actors. And they laughed a little bit harder, they’re a little bit more wild. Than we ran it in the Knesset, in Jerusalem, and I sat next to Teddy Kollek, the long time mayor of Jerusalem who had have lunch with me and said “You know, I’m not looking forward to this because she and I didn’t really get along very well”, and I said "well, OK…" So, I sat next to Teddy Kollek, for four hours we were watching the mini series of 'Golda', and he was weeping through three of the four hours. So now the lights come up, and I said: “Mr. Mayor, you didn’t think you would be involved with this movie”, and he said: “No, no, no, it’s good for Israel”, which it was (Laughing).
So yes, I had marvelous memories there. The Mayor of Tel-Aviv at the time was a man called Shlomo Lahat, and one day he said: “You want to go with me to Beirut?”, I said: “Beirut?!”, right in the middle of one of the wars there, in Lebanon. I said: “Why would we want to go to Beirut?”, and he said: “oh, oh, we’ll go, we'll go to the gasino”.
I said: “What’s a gasino?”, he said: “Gasino, gasino, where you gamble” (Laughing), and I got it, I suddenly got it. And sure enough they went, and they went, right into war torn Lebanon, they went to the gasino.
Anyway, I had a wonderful time. The one little story you’ll appreciate, is that in Tel-Aviv, the man who played Moshe Dayan (Yossi Graver), was greeted with laughter… They said he’s a homosexual. I think they got sick by a homosexual playing Moshe Dayan.

Starbase972: I think it’s still controversial about that…

Bennett: All I know is that he played the part very well.

Starbase972: Well, he is a great actor.
Next question: how do you even go about writing a script?

Bennett: There is no easy answer to that. Sometimes it’s very hard, very painful, sometimes it’s very easy. The easiest one I ever wrote was Star Trek III, which was The Search For Spock. I wrote that in five weeks.

Starbase972: Is that because you already thought about it during the writing of Star Trek II?

Bennett: Yes, not only had I thought about it, but everything about the story was already clear. As a matter of fact, I wrote the last scene, first. That’s how clear it was where we were going. Now, to answer your question, when you are writing a script you have to know where you’re going, and the problem in writing a script is finding that out. If you happen to get that pathway, that highway, early in your thinking and discussion with your friends and comrades, the script goes faster. Sometimes, writing parts of the script is easier. In that case the road was very clear, in other cases it was very difficult.

Starbase972: So you’re saying it’s harder to write a script when you don’t have an idea.

Bennett: It’s not the idea, it’s the road on which the idea travels, which is called a story.

Starbase972: What does a producer do in a movie? We have a director and a producer, and people don’t always know the difference.

Bennett: (Laughing) Well, no question is ever asked more often of me and others, than that, “What does a producer do?”
My best answer to you is that on my birthday this year, my son who is a film editor, he and his wife gave me a T-shirt. What it says is: “I cause things to happen”. And I said “this is wonderful, where is this from?” and he said “don’t you remember? When I was a young boy I said ‘what does a producer do?’ (Laughing), and that was your answer”. So I’ll stick by that answer.
The reason it’s so difficult to answer is because there are so many kinds of producers. There are producers who are strictly those who give you the money, they are really the investors. They like to take the credit which says “I produced this because I gave you the money”. That’s one kind of producers. Here in Hollywood, the studios in their contracts with the unions are called the producers. So a studio can be a producer. In television, the function of a producer is different than it is in feature pictures in that a producer in television is also a writer. In fact the name has been changed recently in Hollywood. People no longer call people like me "producers", they call us "show runners" of a particular television show. In that sense a producer is the chief of staff, in the military sense. That’s probably the best over all description. The chief of staff is responsible for the whole thing, but not necessarily the person who is on the stage with the actors. In my case, and in the case of any individual producer, it is determined by what you do best. What I have always done best was write and edit, so that’s my kind of producer.
But I’ll stick with my son’s T-shirt (Laughing).

Starbase972: In the 70's you worked on a number of series' that we know well like The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman. How was it working on them, on the idea, with the people?

Bennett: My first television show was The Mod Squad, I don’t know if you saw it in Israel. On the early 70's, I did The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. It's interesting, many people think of me as a science fiction writer-producer. Actually, I don’t consider myself that. I consider myself someone who writes and produces about heroes, heroes and heroines, so for me The Six Million Dollar Man was because he was so heroic a character and same with The Bionic Woman. These are larger then life people doing good things for the world. So you see, that unites one each to 'Golda', and one each to Star Trek, because 'Golda' is not science fiction, Star Trek is, but what is the same, is the central character forcing change. In the same decade I did all my Star Trek movies and 'Golda', I also did a mini series here on Jesse Owens. You know who I am talking about, he was a great black athlete who won the track Olympics in Berlin in '36 and embarrassed Hitler.

Starbase972: That’s interesting, that's a very special point pf view.
In the last years we see a lot of re-makes in the movies for old series'. Would you want to see a sort of re-make to your series?

Bennett: Ammm… no.

Starbase972: That's decisive

Bennett: Well, I think that television series' are unique to their time. Specifically Mod Squad was a great reflection of the turmoil in this country during the Vietnam War, it was the emergence of the hippie movement and of a distrust of adults and government, it was a social revolution, and that series reflected that. It would seem odd to this generation.

Starbase972: To our generation.

Bennett: Yeah, yeah. In The Six Million Dollar Man at the time we did it, we had some remarkable visual affects which were more imaginative than real. I'll give you an example: in all of the 6 years of The Six Million Dollar Man you never really saw him running fast. You only saw him running in slow motion so that was a poetic way of saying 'slow is fast', it works, but today with modern special affects, they are much more literal about what you can do on the screen. I haven’t seen Mr. Cruise's Mission Imposable 3, but I am told that they used a device that actually speeds up his running without him running, you do it when you do it and you take what is available and then you move on.

Starbase972: We go back to something connected to Israelis – How did you get to working on A Woman Called Golda?

Bennett: That's a good question. That was back some years actually. When I was at another studio, that property passed over my desk and I said I wanted to do it, but the studio passed, and they sold it to Paramount. Lo and behold 10 years later I'm in Paramount.

Starbase972: Good for us!

Bennett: Yes (laughing), and I'm in the middle of doing the Star Trek movies. 'Golda' was not done on a network, it was the first major project, an original mini series, that was done for syndication. A network we call UPN here, but at the time there was no network to carry 'Golda' it was carried on individual stations who later formed into a network. Amazingly, it was the first syndicated project. In a couple of years later with the explosion of cable and cable networks, now you have a 100 places you can watch television, 200 stations so that's all changed so dramatically in the United States, but in its day, 'Golda' was a very pioneering effort and I was delighted to get a chance to get it back 10 years after I first saw it.
So I called the one man in my life who had never failed me, he died last year. His name was Harold Gast. "Harold, can you write this, I got my hands full of Star Trek III". He said "yes" and he not only wrote it, he did all the research, he was in Israel for about 4 months. He had some very interesting sessions with Moshe Dayan, I do remember that, who wanted to be the star of the movie. But anyway he did the most brilliant script, and the real story was we were trying to cast it. The studio said, "well, how about Elizabeth Taylor?", and I said "yes, she can do it, she had the talent and we could use the makeup, but it would be a stunt, people will say, 'ho there's Elizabeth Taylor playing Golda' ".
Most of my career my secretary named Sylvia Rubinstein and she came in one day and she said "did you see the special on Ingrid Bergman last night?", I said "yeah, I did". She said "She could play Golda now". I said, "my god, you're right". Because she had become… you know the word matron? Matron implies middle to late middle age female large of size, and she had that look about her now, she was no longer the Ingrid Bergman of legend, she was an exotic lady and I said "she would be great". And a friend of ours was active in some international charity, and found herself sitting next to Ingrid in London. And proposed this to her and she scoffed, she laughed, she thought it was funny, you know, for her. But she said "well have him call me", so I did. We talked, she said "you know, I respect this woman so much, I don't want to do her dishonor". I said "I appreciate that very much". She said "I have never played behind a mask". That’s an actor's way of saying "I've never hidden myself with make-up", and she said "I don’t know if I could do it…" I said "you're Ingrid Bergman, you are one of the greatest actresses of all times; of course you can do it…", "Well, I don’t know… Well, I'm not sure…", she began sounding like Golda! (laughing) So she said "let me think about it."

What I did not know was she didn’t only think about it, she went to Israel, she visited Golda's grave, she talked to her son, she talked to Dayan, I think, and she did a lot of research, and one day I am sitting in my office, and Sylvia Rubinstein comes in, and she is radiant. And she says "ammmm phone call" and I said "yes", she said "it's, it's, it's, it's… Ingrid Bergman". I said "Wonderful, put her through, yeah". She says "hello, Harv", I said "yes Miss Bergman". "Well. Now listen. I have been thinking, and… I'd like to do that but again, you know, I don’t know if I can, so what I would like to… would you test me?". I said, "I don’t believe what I'm hearing, the greatest actress of my time, is asking me to do screen test?", "Yes, yes. A screen test." and I said "if that's what will convince you of what we all know, yes, of course." So we did. We screen tested her in London, two weeks later. And in doing that, I know I'm going on, but it's precious memories, in doing that I called the London office of Paramount, and I told them "we need to screen test Ingrid Bergman, and I need a great photographer, who's available?". And the man in London said "it's been slow here, let me see who's on the list". He says "we have Freddie Young…", I said "stop! Freddie Young junior? like the son of the great…?", "No no, this is Freddy". I said "Freddy Young? Who did Zhivago? Lawrence of Arabia? and Bridge on the River Kwai?" He said "yes, Freddie". I said "sign him please!" (laughing) and Freddie young, who had worked with Ingrid on a picture, met her when she was on the set, they were happy to see each other.
He shot the test, which I still have.
We ran it for her. She was a chain smoker, by the way, right to the end, Ingrid was. And she sat in the front row, and we sat behind her, and she smoked about 4 Marlboro cigarettes and watched herself and than the lights came up, she turns round and says: "well, if you still want me, I'm yours!" and we all went back to her apartment and got drunk on champagne (laughing). At the time, non of us knew that had lymphatic cancer, and she had a limited time to live. She knew it but we didn't.

Starbase972: Maybe that’s why she so contemplated on that, maybe she didn’t want to commit herself to something she couldn’t finish.

Bennett: Yeah, I never thought about that particular argument but it can be very wisely, that could be, that could very well be… I'll tell you one more story, and then I'll… shut up (laughing)
I was on a London street for the last shot of the picture, that was a London hotel, posing as a Chicago, Illinois, USA hotel. And it's when she's in United States raising funds in 1946 for the coming war. The scene is very simple, she comes out of this hotel to a waiting cab, with her assistant, a man, and she's going to take the cab to another fund raising in another hotel – she raised 54 million dollars, it's incredible. She walks across the street, the camera pulls back, and she gets to the cab, and he says: "Golda, you have a speech in half an hour… do you know what you're going to say?" and her line is "I'll know what to say when time comes". Okay. So it's 3 in the afternoon, in October in London, and the sun is going down, we're losing the light, and Ingrid walks across the street, and she blows the line. Cut!

Starbase972: The simple line is always the hardest.

Bennett: Yeah, it’s a simple line, so she does it again. So she did it another time and she blew the line. And she saw Freddie Young looking at his filter, looking at the sun setting slowly, and she knew it – such a professional, she knew everything that was going on – so she turned around, and she said it in a loud voice, to nobody, but to everybody, she said: "I know what the line is, but if I say it, the picture will be over". Because it was the last scene in the mini series. And we all were stunned by that, and realized only later, that she really meant that it would be the end of her career. So she said "let's go" and with great energy, she did it perfectly.

Starbase972: In the movie 'Golda', a lot of Israeli actors participated. Was it your decision to put them there? Did you pick them by yourself? Do you remember anyone in particular, aside for Yossi Graver, who played Moshe Dayan?

Bennett: No. I had very little to do with the casting. My friend Harold Gast, who wrote it, was the line producer. And by line producer, go back to your other question, a line producer is the man who is on the stage, and who takes care of all of the arrangements, including all the physical arrangements of shooting. And Harold had more to do with casting than anyone else, also the director was an English man and he was very involved in the casting. The one piece of casting that I remember doing was – I suggested, everybody thought was great, I suggested the actor José Ferrer, I don’t know if you know him, but he was most famous for his Cyrano de Bergerac (in Cyrano et d'Artagnan, 1964) and I suggested him for Sadat. And he was cast to do Sadat. Now, while we were filming 'Golda', Sadat was assassinated, and Ferrer called a week before he was supposed to shoot, and his agent called and said "he doesn't want to go. He's afraid to go and play Sadat". Well, my personal feelings about it were that he was a coward, but that's my personal feelings. Anyway, we recast instantly and we were better for it. The man who played Sadat was Robert Loggia. He was in An Officer and a Gentleman, if you ever saw that. Anyway, he was so perfect as Sadat, and in the 3 days he had to prepare, he called Sadat's tailor in New York, and he ordered 3 suits from that tailor including – Sadat, if you remember from pictures, he always wore a very unique outfit. It was a blue shirt with a white collar, and sometimes it was a white shirt with a blue collar. And it was his trademark.

Starbase972: He did have a thing for Israel, it's our colors.

Bennett: (Laughing) Isn't that funny, it's your colors, your colors, that's right.

Starbase972: White and blue are our colors.

Bennett: And that was my big casting contribution, and he was terrific.

Starbase972: And now to Star Trek. You didn’t come to Star Trek from the beginning.

Bennett: No, no. By beginning you mean the series.

Starbase972: How did you come about to working on the movies?

Bennett: Well, first of all, you have to know that The Mod Squad, my first series, was responsible for knocking Star Trek off the air.

Starbase972: Shame on you!

Bennett: Yeah, shame on me. I had never seen Star Trek. I've seen, I knew who the people were, and I saw pieces of episodes, but I have never seen it. Because you watch your own show. You don’t watch what's on the other network.

Starbase972: Not necessarily, we just had Claudia Christian from Babylon 5 and she said she never saw Babylon 5, it's that simple. It's not necessarily that you watch what you do.

Bennett: Really? Yeah, that’s true. The thing about television is that when you're an actor or producer or writer or director, when you work in television you do not have an audience. Yes, you have millions of people, but you can't see them, hear them or feel them.
So, when you make the transition, and get a chance to do feature pictures, it is a wondrous thing, because you can go into the theatre, unknown, and sit in the back, and listen to the audience respond. Which is really what theatre is all about. The feedback of the audience is missing in television, and it makes it antiseptic, it makes it, sometimes, unrewarding.
Okay. So I get to Paramount in 1980 under a big television contract, 'cause I had now all these television hits. And I'm there one week and I'm called down to the office of my old friend Barry Diller who is running Paramount then. And in the office is what we used to call "the Austrian P. T. Barnum" – Charles Bluhdorn. An Austrian immigrant, an incredible businessman who built Gulf and Western (Industries), and bought Paramount. And Charlie Bluhdorn is sitting there in the room, he's a legend.  "Oooo, wow. What am I doing here?" And he's introduced to me, and he says "so, they say you're good!" I say "oooo, well, thank you." In the room is Michael Eisner, an assistant of mine at ABC while I was in the network, and Diller. He said "did you see Star Trek The Motion Picture?" and I said "yes", because then I remembered I've seen it with my kids who were then 5, 6. And it was the only movie that they kept wanting to get up and go to the bathroom, and they kept wanting to get Cokes and they said "when will it be over? when will it be over?". And finely, one of my kids said "daddy, it's boring!".

So now here is this super businessman, who owns the studio, saying "what did you think of it?". Because of where I come from, because I'm a child of the greatest generation, because I lived through World War II as a boy, and because my family had wonderful ethics and though I was not raised orthodox, I was raised tribally to do the right thing. A lot of reasons for my success is that I usually told people the truth, so, in this case, I said "well, I thought it was boring." And he turned to Michael Eisner and he said "you see, by you, bald is sexy", and obviously Eisner had something to do with casting Persis Khambatta ("Ilia") in Star Trek The Motion Picture and shaving her head, which must have annoyed Bluhdorn and he's the boss. I thought "oh boy, now my 3 years here in Paramount are going to be pretty much awful", because I've already alienated Eisner. Before I could even think these things, Bluedorn turns back to me and says "could you make a better picture?" and I said "yes, yes I could" and then, you're going to pardon my language, it is not Yiddish (laughing), he says "can you make it for less than 45 fucking million dollars?". And of course in that time that was a huge amount, today it's 6 times that to make a movie, but it was the largest overrun in Paramount history at the time. I said "wow! Mr. Bluhdorn, where I come from, meaning television, I could make 4-5 movies for that" and he said 2 words, he said "do it!" And that was the end of the interview and that’s how I got to do Star Trek! Now, I rush to the office, and I said to Sylvia "Sylvia, what have I done? I've never seen Star Trek!", and the next 3 months I ran every Star Trek's 16 mm prints in little rooms in the back of Paramount. There were no tapes, certainly there were no DVD's, just 16 mm data prints, and I saw every Star Trek.
And I got it. I thought that one third of the series' episodes were brilliant, one third were okay, and I thought one third were terrible. But that is a very good average, for a television series. Trust me on that because it's so hard to keep being clever and inventive and new when you're running amount one a week, it just very difficult to keep fresh.

Starbase972: I think that the fans from the hardest core ever never did such a marathon of episodes everyday.

Bennett: This is right. And then I realized why Star Trek was such a continuing success. And the theory was that those who watched it were so loyal, that there were enough of them to make it a network success, in the 60's, because to be a network success you had to have 10 million viewers, a round number. Well, there are numbers indicated that about 7 million people were watching Star Trek. Star Trek goes off the air. It goes into syndication in the 70's, and suddenly it got huge numbers in syndication. Why? In my opinion, because the same 7 million people wanted to see it again. Now, Star Trek: the Motion Picture, in spite of its cost, was seen by many millions of people. There, and in the other movies, I think what happened was that the 7 million people, more or less, saw it many times, over and over. So the loyalty of the Star Trek fans outran that numbers. It became mathematics and suddenly I understood why you could not have enough to win in a certain place, but you can have more then enough to win in another venue. Anyway, I fell in love with what I call the triangle of Kirk, Spock and McCoy. That to me was what made Star Trek work, because it was kind of like the clash between McCoy's passion, Spock's cold logic and Kirk's job to bring the two together and find the solution. So that’s what guided me. The next thing that guided me was that the one episode which said to me, it screamed to me, "make a sequel, there's more to the story then they did", was Space Seed. Space Seed was Ricardo Montalban as Khan and if you remember at the end of the thing they deposited him somewhere out in the flying universe on a deserted planet. The last line of Space Seed was a massage from Mount Sinai to me. Kirk says "I wonder what he'll be doing 20 years from now" (laughing). Well, if that isn't a song cue, if that isn't a direction, I don’t know what is. The man was a super intellect, he was cryogenically resuscitated, he was a superman, what a wonderful villain. And Montalban was alive and well. So that was the inspiration when you're going back to your question of "how do you write a script?". On Wrath of Khan, that was a relatively easy idea. Working the story out was more difficult. And it was the talented writer-director, Nick Meyer, who came into it late, he came into it on recommendation of a friend. Nick, he's a genius, Nick took the pieces of what we had and did the most remarkable job of putting it together and making sense out of it. And then of course he directed it, and very well.

Starbase972: But he didn't sit down and do a marathon like you did?

Bennett: He had never seen Star Trek. No, he'd never seen it on television. I mean, like me, he knew what it was, and he knew who the characters were, but he had never. One of the things about Wrath of Khan that I think made it better was that Nick was very cynical about the Star Trek fans rigidity. "My God, haven't they got better things to do?" kind of attitude. "Get a life" attitude. And I, because I had now spent 3 months and had great respect for what that have been done, I felt I was now responsible to these people, to the fans, because I have accepted this commission, and I saw what they saw, so I became the conservative. "You know you can't do that because the fans will be very upset", and he would say "who are they?!" and I said "they are the people that made this thing live through 20 years".
Anyway, those two attitudes resulted in some changes, but they all turned up pretty much for the better. For example, the most obvious one is, he wanted to change the uniforms. But the uniforms that Star Trek II had persist to this day as better uniforms for the show, the maroon with the strike, the naval uniform. You got to admit that was more handsome than a T-Shirt (laughing). And that style derived directly from what Roddenberry originally talked about, but never had the budget to do, he said he was doing a naval epic in space. He was doing Horatio Hornblower – the British navy novel series. But with the budget he had, he had just cut corners everywhere, so the customs became T-shirts and sweatpants.

Starbase972: It's a good thing because then Kirk wouldn't have been able to tear his shirt everytime. You can't tear a naval uniform, it doesn't tear well, but T-shirt does.

Bennett: (Laughing) that’s right!

On the interview's second part, that we will be publish soon, Mr. Harve Bennett tells about the fun in The Voyage Home (IV), the problems of The Final Frontier (V), the relationship with Roddenberry, the unproduced script and the resemblance to the 11th movie and the future.

Conduction, English proof reading & Translation to Hebrew: Vered Klein
Editing & Questions: subatoi
Transcription: Shira Saphier & subatoi

Produced and written by: Harve Bennett – Published prior to the interview (Hebrew only)

Starbase972 in English & Other interviews we had