COVER STORY : ‘Star Trek’ Only a Show? Is This Guy Serious? : Rick Berman was hand-picked by Gene Roddenberry to take over the ‘Star Trek’ empire. Now, as he guides another starship into theaters, Berman provides a reality check on that ever-expanding universe.

In a darkened editing room, sequestered behind the eternally guarded walls of Paramount Pictures, a film image flickers on a small screen. Six men gather around an editing table, their faces a whirligig of light and color projected by the moving image.

Their eyes are transfixed on fresh footage of a miniature Capt. James T. Kirk, struggling atop a desert mountain on the uninhabited planet of Varidian Three in the finale of “Star Trek: Generations,” which opens Friday. The aging but spry Kirk, reprised by William Shatner, inches along a footbridge that clings with a tenuous grip to the mountainside.

“This is the final bridge he must cross,” producer Rick Berman tells the music composer and sound artists around him in the editing room. In moments, they will take Berman’s “notes” and begin devising the effects that will turn the action into a bone-jarring sequence in six-channel sound.

Despite assurances that 1991’s “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” was the final voyage for the original “Star Trek” gang from the 1960s TV series, Kirk and a couple others have been resurrected to pass the feature-film baton to the crew from the wildly successful TV spinoff, “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” The new movie features the epic meeting of the 23rd-Century Kirk and his 24th-Century counterpart, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart.

“You’re going to have nothing but this metal bridge moaning and creaking and screeching,” continues Berman, who executive produced the “Next Generation” series and makes his first foray into feature films with “Generations.” “I don’t know if you can see it on this, but these bolts and rivets are snapping and popping, and there’re rocks falling. So you’re going to have some fun with sounds here.”

In the scene, Kirk is not only fighting valiantly for the fate of mankind, as has become his custom, he’s also fighting for Paramount Communications Inc. Every effort is being made to assure that what’s referred to around Paramount as “the franchise” lives on. Several weeks earlier, the studio agreed to spend $3 million to return to the mountaintop location north of Las Vegas to re-shoot a seven-minute end sequence. Test screenings revealed that people rated “Generations” favorably overall but were less than enthusiastic with the finale. And Paramount reportedly wanted more heroism from Kirk.

“You’re going to have to sell this to make us really believe that he’s slipping off the bridge,” Berman says. As the bridge jerks violently several times, causing Kirk to lose his footing, Berman imitates the noises he wants to hear. “Uh! Uh! Uh! Whoa!” Kirk skids down the bridge on his back and reaches out for a chain at the last second to stop his momentum. . . .

*

“The picture is now locked!” Berman proclaims after the session ends. He shakes hands with his film editor, Peter Berger, who worked with Berman from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. the day before. The two heave a symbiotic sigh of relief. It’s three days before Halloween, and the remaining pieces of their jigsaw puzzle are finally falling into place--a jigsaw puzzle that required $30 million and nearly two years to complete.

“I feel like I’ve come up for air,” Berman says with a wide smile.

Berman’s momentary lightness of being may be well deserved, but it will pass.

The 47-year-old bears the weight of a galaxy on his shoulders. He cannot escape the destiny he inherited three years ago when “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, an optimistic science-fiction visionary with a reverential following, died and handed over the reins of a billion-dollar enterprise--replete with a universe of mythological characters and story lines spanning three decades--to an ex-documentary producer from New York.

“Gene Roddenberry laid a mantle on me, of sorts, and I feel very lucky as a result,” says Berman, who took over as the master of a franchise that now includes seven feature films, three hourlong TV series and a fourth one on the way. Berman refers to all of them as “the show.”

“What Gene wanted me to do was basically carry the ball for him, and to try to maintain his vision,” Berman says. “He saw that I had respect for his vision--not because it’s my vision. I don’t believe the 24th Century is going to be like Gene Roddenberry believed it to be, that people will be free from poverty and greed. But if you’re going to write and produce for ‘Star Trek,’ you’ve got to buy into that.”

Although “Next Generation” ended in May, Berman still executive produces two TV spinoffs. “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” set on a space station in the 24th Century, returned in September for its third syndicated season. And when the United Paramount Network launches on Jan. 16, it will depend on “Star Trek: Voyager,” a new series about a starship lost in an uncharted region of space, to lock in the viewers necessary to establish a fifth network.

“I’m like a quality-control guy,” Berman says. “My job is to keep this show good, and to keep it believable, and to keep it entertaining, and to keep whatever messages are in it true to what Gene wanted. He wanted to paint a picture of hope in the world, and I would much rather paint a picture of hope than a picture of despair.”

“Generations” marks the first time the “Star Trek” movies and TV series have been produced by the same person. Roddenberry was heavily involved with the first film, in 1979, but Paramount gave the sequels other producers and directors, including Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, the inscrutable Vulcan. Berman produced “Generations” in the same hands-on fashion he executive produces his TV series, and he shares story credit for the film.

Ever since Roddenberry’s death, hundreds of thousands of “Star Trek” loyalists have been sizing up Berman via the Internet and at conventions. And while Trekkers have taken their swipes at Berman, they have been generally supportive of what he has done.

But in producing “Generations,” the heat grew uncomfortably for the TV producer. Incessant Internet musings by fans often led to headlines the next day--including the fact that Berman reshot the well-publicized ending of his film and the fate of a key character. Whereas Roddenberry used to rally his fans with speaking engagements, Berman admits that he doesn’t entirely understand the fierce devotion some have for “Star Trek.”

“The people who talk on their computer networks all night long, or the people who go to conventions--it’s all a little overwhelming to me,” Berman says. “I can’t relate that much to people who take this a little bit more seriously than this should be taken. It is, after all, a show.”

But ravenous Trekkers clearly are. “People are always hungry for details--to the point where scripts disappear from the lot,” says Kerry McCluggage, chairman of Paramount Television Group. “Almost everything you do is subject to all kinds of scrutiny and wild speculation.” Indeed, the entire “Generations” script found its way onto the Internet months ago.

Berman says: “We have 25 million viewers who watch ‘Next Generation,’ 20 million who watch ‘Deep Space Nine,’ and hopefully just as many who will watch ‘Voyager.’ I like to think that we’re doing this show for the vast majority of fans who bring this ‘Star Trek’ family of characters into their home every week, and who embrace the ideas we try to portray on the show.”

*

After the “Generations” sound session, Berman returns to his offices where the editors from “Deep Space Nine” are awaiting him to go over an episode. Sitting behind a monitor, Berman plays back the episode, stopping the action every 10 or 15 seconds with orders for his editors to tighten a scene by cutting out a “Yes, sir” here or a reaction shot there.

“Stop--what’s that line? What does the script say?” Berman doesn’t like how Maj. Kira, played by Nana Visitor, reacts to some information. “Hearing from Sisko on a Cardassian ship is like hearing from Ollie North in Moscow. She should be surprised.” He tells his editors to ask Visitor to come in and re-record the line.

Although Berman may not be the science-fiction visionary that Roddenberry was, Roddenberry was never the executive producer that Berman has become. Roddenberry was a writer first who consistently rubbed people the wrong way as a producer. He drove his TV writers crazy because there was little dramatic conflict to be found in his idyllic vision of the future, and he routinely scrapped with studio executives who wanted to exploit his product.

Because Paramount owns the “Star Trek” franchise, the stubborn Roddenberry’s power was more perceived than real, but he always had the ability to pull his name off a project or publicly cry out if he didn’t approve of something, thereby whipping up the anger of fans. So Paramount executives treaded carefully.

Berman, on the other hand, was a fresh young vice president at Paramount in 1987 when Roddenberry lobbied the studio to release him from his contract so he could produce “Next Generation.”

He has since surrounded himself with writers and producers such as Michael Pillar, who helped him create and executive produce “Deep Space Nine,” and Jeri Taylor, who joined Berman and Pillar in the same capacity on “Voyager.” Berman gives full credit to them and his entire staff for weaving the complex web of “Star Trek,” but the buck stops with him. Every costume design, casting choice, story and script must clear Berman.

“Rick has a remarkable ability to have an awareness of everything that’s going on,” Pillar says. “I give him personal credit for saving the pilot of ‘Deep Space Nine’ in the editing room. (The raw film) was long, slow, confusing. He went in there with the editors and came out with what was reviewed universally as a terrific piece of television film.”

B erman knows all too well that ultimately all of the projects he oversees creatively must serve the financial interests of Paramount, which mines “Star Trek” like a seemingly endless vein of gold. Industry experts estimate that over its seven-season run ending in May, “Next Generation” brought in $511 million in revenue and $293 million in profit--making it one of the most successful TV shows in history. “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” were sold to TV stations with different formulas, but they are commanding nearly the same rates from advertisers.

Meanwhile, six feature films have generated close to $500 million at box offices across North America, with roughly half that going to the studio. About 23 million videocassettes have been sold domestically of the original “Star Trek” series, “Next Generation” and the feature films. The two TV series can each be seen in reruns in 75 countries. And there are 63 million books in print, more than 30 new titles published annually by Simon & Schuster, a division of Paramount’s parent company, Viacom.

“It’s a cultural phenomenon that’s really unprecedented,” observes Barry London, vice chairman of Paramount’s Motion Picture Group.

With comic books, toys, collectibles, CD-ROMs and plans for a virtual-reality mall attraction, there may be no way to calculate “Star Trek’s” actual worth. According to Paramount Licensing Group, there are at least 250 product licensees worldwide; merchandise sales have passed the $1-billion mark.

In the face of such pressures, what weighs heaviest on Berman is his debt to the man who bestowed the good fortune upon him.

“Whenever there is an instance in a story or a in piece of casting or or in the general fabric of society in the 24th Century, I always feel Gene sitting on my shoulder,” says Berman. “And if I feel that something goes against what he believed this show should be, I will fight for it.”

Yet on Berman’s office desk rests a plaster bust of Roddenberry, with a scarf around its eyes and ears. When asked why, Berman says with a sly smile: “There are things said in this room that I think he would hate to hear. Not many, just a few.”

In October, 1992, the space shuttle Columbia rose from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying the ashes of Roddenberry. Majel Barrett, Roddenberry’s widow, had flown to Houston before the mission and handed a tin containing her husband’s remains to commander James Wetherbee.

When Columbia returned, the ashes were presented to Barrett in a private ceremony in Washington. Roddenberry, a decorated combat pilot for the Army before he became a television writer, always dreamed of traveling in space.

“If he could have done it, he would have liked to have been Capt. Kirk,” says Barrett, who met Roddenberry while playing a nurse on the original series. “The next best thing would be to be an astronaut.”

When Roddenberry died of heart failure at 70, computer bulletin boards lit up for weeks, with megabytes of poetry, tributes and personal remembrances.

“One to beam up,” wrote Steve Lesnik on CompuServe, hours after Roddenberry’s death on Oct. 24, 1991. “I sit here now with the tears still in my eyes for a man I never met. . . . I find myself now missing him and hoping to do my best to make that future he began a reality.”

The starship Enterprise, as first dreamed up by Roddenberry, was essentially a 23rd-Century proscenium where Kirk, Spock and Dr. Bones McCoy played out morality tales in a future where the human spirit always prevailed. The NBC series aired for three seasons from 1966 to 1968, though it was canceled twice and brought back by viewer demand.

“ ‘Star Trek’ has become an integral part of the American mythology,” Berman says. “ ‘Star Trek’ is words like beam me up and transporters and dilithium crystals and warp speed and Starfleet and photon torpedoes and phasers , and all these things are known and understood by most people in America.”

Ironically, Berman had never watched a full episode of “Star Trek” when he signed on to produce “Next Generation.” Berman grew up in New York, dreaming of becoming an actor. While he was a senior at the University of Wisconsin studying film and television, he was invited to audition for the Yale School of Drama, but he decided to pass.

Choosing filmmaking instead, Berman returned to New York City and started working for a variety of documentary film companies, doing films for the United Nations, the National Science Foundation and United States Information Agency.

Later, Berman won an Emmy for producing “The Big Blue Marble,” an educational children’s program that aired from 1977 to 1982, mostly on PBS, and he received acclaim for a 1984 PBS special called “The Primal Mind,” examining how Native Americans perceive reality differently than Europeans do. But by the early 1980s, the documentary business was drying up, and with his wife and 2-year-old son, Berman headed to Los Angeles, where he eventually landed at Paramount in charge of current programming. Within a year, he was made a vice president with responsibility to develop TV movies.

And that’s when he was introduced to Roddenberry. At the time, “Next Generation” was just another idea for a TV show. At the time, quality dramatic programming was not being made for syndication.

Two days after meeting him, Berman received a call from Roddenberry saying that he wanted to have lunch with him. “We found that we had, in odd ways, a tremendous amount in common,” Berman says. “He had traveled all over the world. He was fascinated that I knew what the capital of Upper Volta was, and that I had been to parts of Africa and the Middle East (to make documentaries) that he had been to. So we had a lot of fun talking about faraway places with strange-sounding names.”

The next day, Berman was invited to lunch by Roddenberry’s attorney, who said, “Gene would like you to come and produce the show with him.” Berman replied: “Well, I have a job. I’m a vice president.” And the attorney said, “Do you want to be a vice president at a studio, or do you want to produce a television show?”

Berman walked to his car that night with Lucie Salhany, who was in charge of domestic television, and confessed his dilemma to her. “She looked at me and said, ‘If the show fails, don’t worry, I’ll give you a job,’ ” he says. Salhany left Paramount not long after, but she returned last month to head up the studio’s new TV network, which will be depending heavily on Berman come January.

In Berman, Roddenberry saw someone he could rely on.

“Gene created the show, and I think he wanted to distance himself from it very quickly,” Berman says. “He wasn’t interested in people who wanted to come in and fix ‘Star Trek.’ He said, ‘ “Star Trek” doesn’t need fixing.’ ”

By the third season, Roddenberry’s involvement was virtually nonexistent. He died in the middle of the fourth season, after having approved Berman and Pillar’s plans for “Deep Space Nine.”

Barrett says: “Gene brought Rick down from the white-collar world, in his blue suit and tie, and he taught him ‘Star Trek.’ There were all the people who were saying, ‘Hey, nobody can do it like Roddenberry,’ and that’s not true. Rick understands the basic idea, the prime directive, and his main objective is toward a better, kinder, more gentle world.”

But she does feel it incumbent upon her to warn Berman of the job demands. She has been locked in a legal battle with Paramount for years over merchandising rights for “Star Trek.” “Rick has been the guy behind the badge, really, for a long time. Now he’s got the weight of the empire hanging all over him that Gene had for so long. I hope he’s strong enough to take it, because we put up with it for 25 years. And believe me, they will come at you with knives drawn. I have to say, it can be horrific.”

‘It’s wonderful. It works beauti fully--all of it.” Shortly after his “Deep Space Nine” editing session, Berman is back in his office on the Paramount lot, updating Malcolm McDowell on the telephone. McDowell plays Dr. Soran, the villain in “Generations,” who wants to extinguish stars to alter the course of a mysterious energy ribbon traveling through space. He will stop at nothing to re-enter the nexus, a sort of cosmic Shangri-La that lies within the ribbon, which he involuntarily left 80 years earlier.

“We’ve been working on it night and day since we got back. It was a bitch, but it’s terrific. Congratulations to you . I’d like you and Patrick and Bill to come see it at the end of next week.”

“Generations” has been a learning process for Berman, who began developing the story almost two years ago with two of his “Next Generation” writers, Ron Moore and Brannon Braga, who wrote the screenplay.

Last October, Berman called Nimoy to direct. Nimoy drew positive reviews and big box office for directing “Star Trek III” and “IV,” and he executive produced and helped write the story for “VI.” In each case, the phone call for his services came from powerful studio heavyweights--Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Frank Mancuso--and he was involved in script development from day one. With “Generations,” Nimoy was being called by a TV producer with a finished script in hand.

Nimoy says he wasn’t comfortable with the script and wanted a major rewrite, and with a release date looming a year away, there was simply no time.

Nimoy also turned down an offer to play Spock one last time in “Generations.” Initially, the entire original crew was supposed to appear in a 15-minute prologue to the film. When DeForest Kelley also turned down an offer to come back as Bones, Berman had to take a different tack.

“Once we knew we weren’t going to have Leonard and DeForest, it seemed silly to have all the rest,” Berman says. “So we decided just to pick two. We thought it would be fun to take the biggest and the littlest. That’s how we ended up choosing Chekov (Walter Koenig) and Scotty (James Doohan)” to complement Kirk.

Berman chose a frequent “Next Generation” director, David Carson, to helm “Generations.” Berman persuaded Sherry Lansing, chairman of Paramount Motion Picture Group, to go with the untested feature director by showing her his work on the two-hour series premiere of “Deep Space Nine.”

Carson has stepped up considerably with “Generations.” The “Next Generation” episodes he directed went for around $1.7 million each--extremely high for a TV series--but “Generations” cost more than $30 million, features 200 optical effects and is, London says, one of the most heavily marketed movies in Paramount history.

Berman says he went back to re-shoot part of the ending to inject “a little more excitement, a little more action.” When asked why those elements weren’t there to begin with, Berman says: “It might have been a problem with the writing, or it might have been a problem with the directing or it was probably due to the fact that when we first wrote this movie it was much bigger than we could afford.

“There were some limitations made to the last sequence that were probably a mistake. We storyboarded this movie at five or six days longer than we had, and we had to compress the time. When you have less time to do something, you have to do it less well, especially when you’re dealing with action.”

An assessment of Berman’s work ranges from glowing to bitter, depending upon whom you talk to. Alisha Black is vice admiral and chief of staff for Starships of the Third Fleet, a writing club for about 500 Trekkers, based in Santee, Calif. “There has been a lot of debate within the club about how Rick Berman is carrying on Gene Roddenberry’s idea of the ‘Star Trek’ universe,” Black says. “I see, and so do others in the club, the ‘Star Trek’ shows going to battle, rather than going to new places and exploring, discovering new alien life. A lot of people don’t feel comfortable with it.”

“So far, everybody is very, very pleased with what Rick is doing,” counters Daniel Madsen, president of Star Trek: The Official Fan Club in Aurora, Colo. “ ‘Star Trek’ has probably become a little bit more militant than when Gene was in control solely. But it’s healthy that ‘Star Trek’ evolves and changes while staying true to Gene’s vision.”

If ratings are any indication, Berman has done very well, indeed. “Next Generation” did not become the top-rated show in syndication until after Roddenberry’s death. “Deep Space Nine,” which was about 25% off “Next Generation’s” ratings last season, has improved this season and has become the highest-rated dramatic show in first-run syndication.

Bjo Trimble, who publishes the science-fiction newsletter Space-Time Continuum, was instrumental in forming the letter-writing campaign that brought back “Star Trek” after NBC first canceled it.

She says, “Because Gene so wanted to see world peace in his time, he kind of lost track of the fact that conflict and resolution are the meat of a good story, and you can’t always have it with the giant purple magilla attacking the ship.”

With “Voyager,” the “Star Trek” franchise returns to its roots in many ways. The “Star Trek” universe has become very crowded over the last 25 years, with Klingons, Romulans, Vulcans and the whole gang in the Alpha Quadrant.

“But the original intent of Mr. Roddenberry was to have a ship alone out there in the unknown,” Pillar says. “We’re out there alone in the unknown, with none of the familiar aliens to trouble us, and a whole bunch of new ones.”

In “Voyager,” a crew of Starfleet officers on a new breed of starship, with organic components and nerve endings throughout, are blasted into the other side of the galaxy while chasing a rebel ship of freedom fighters. They must team up, the indignant outlaws and the squeaky-clean Starfleet officers, to find their way home.

“We find ourselves today as a society with a lot of problems that cannot be easily and quickly solved,” Pillar says. “I think we have the knowledge if we begin now, but we won’t see solutions in our lifetime. If you look at the ‘Voyager’ premise from that perspective, this is a journey they’re taking, which may take them longer than their own lifetime.”

The cast of characters includes a Native American, a pair of mismatched alien lovers, and a holographic doctor--who will provide the traditional function of Spock, Data and Odo by allowing the crew to reflect on their human values. And in the ongoing evolution of the series, the ship will be led by a female captain, played by Kate Mulgrew, the veteran stage and TV actress probably best known as Mrs. Columbo in her short-lived NBC series “Kate Loves a Mystery.”

Berman expects “Voyager” to be the last “Star Trek” series that he will executive produce, although he wants to continue producing movie sequels; he’s already working on story ideas for the next one. Beyond that, he has no idea how long he will lord over the “Star Trek” universe.

“When we brought in ‘Deep Space Nine,’ we had two ‘Star Trek’ shows on at the same time,” he says. “That could be perceived as getting a little piggy. Then when ‘Next Generation’ was getting ready to leave for the movies, we developed ‘Voyager.’

“I don’t know at what point America is going to cry, ‘Enough!’ I just know that we’ve got to keep pushing along and continue doing our best work and not worry too much about what’s going to happen in five years.”

It’s evening. People have gone home and the Paramount lot is mostly dark. But Berman is hovering inside a post-production house, watching reel nine of “Generations” to approve the final sound mix. Tucked at his side are five “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” scripts that he will take home and read over the weekend, and he’s upset that he may miss his son’s fencing tournament Saturday to come in and oversee the mix of three more reels.

But at the moment, his eyes are transfixed on the huge theatrical screen looming in front of him. The reel is playing out the film’s most impressive sequence, from a visual effects standpoint, featuring a spectacular crash of a starship into a planet. Berman leans over to a visitor at one point and says, “Most of the work is work. This I find exhilarating!”

The starship sheers off the tip of a mountain, then hits the ground and slides for an interminable mile, mowing down towering trees to create a wide swath through a lush forest. Afterward, the lights come up and a crew of technicians turn toward Berman expectantly.

“All right,” he says thoughtfully, “I’ve got a whole bunch of notes.”