Harve Bennett

Before working on the Star Trek film series, Harve Bennett produced and wrote mostly for TV series. Maybe you remember The Mod Squad, The Invisible Man, and The Bionic Woman? Okay, unless you're sixty years old, you probably don't remember any of those, but Bennett's TV work was well received in the days of wooden TVs and rabbit ear antenna.

So well-received that Paramount called him up to the big leagues to work on the Star Trek franchise in the early 8's. There, he proceeded to crush it.

According to Khan director Nicholas Meyer, "one of Bennett's gifts was the ability to analyze shows and figure out what made them compelling." Bennett thought Star Trek: The Motion Picture was boring, and he decided the series needed to refocus on the interactions of its three main characters: Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. (Source)

Although he didn't write the screenplay for The Wrath of Khan, Bennett did pen the original treatment where he renewed focus on the characters over the spectacle.

For The Search for Spock, Bennett decided to continue that trend. He wrote his original draft in six weeks, then titled Star Trek III: Return to Genesis. He would later say it was "one of the easiest scrips he'd ever worked on as he started with Spock's line near the end, "Your name is Jim," and just worked backwards." (Source)

While the closing line remained intact, the original script was way different from the film we all watched. In Bennett's original, Genesis remained stable and Spock's adopted home. It also featured a Romulan mining party and a civil war on Vulcan. (Source)

Nimoy would make the switch to Klingons later, and Romulans wouldn't get the chance to be the proper villains in a Star Trek film until 2009.

The script was well received and the film proved a success, so Bennett returned to write Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. His scripts for Trek II, III, and IV would all get nods in the science fiction award circuit, including all three receiving Hugo nominations in their respective years.

And the The Final Frontier earned him a Screenplay nomination for the Razzie Award in 1990. Guess they can't all be winners.

Still, Bennett is batting .750 when it comes to Trek, and that's not a shabby success average at all.