Talking About 'Star Trek': In 'Star Trek III: The Search for Spock', why didn't Kirstie Alley reprise her role as Lt. Saavik?

Kirstie Alley as the original Lt. (j.g.) Saavik. Photo Credit: Paramount Pictures via Wikipedia

In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, why didn't Kirstie Alley reprise her role as Lt. Saavik?

During the pre-production phase of the making of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, producer Harve Bennett and director Leonard Nimoy intended to ask Kirstie Alley to reprise her role of the Vulcan officer, Lt. Saavik, from the previous film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Bennett, Nimoy, and many of Star Trek II’s fans liked Alley’s performance, which had been her film debut, and they wanted her to come back for The Search for Spock and, perhaps, other sequels as well.

The problem was that when Alley signed the contract with Paramount for Star Trek II, the document had no provisions for sequels or spin-offs. Whether this was an oversight on the part of Paramount’s legal division or a reflection of the studio’s prevailing notion that Star Trek II was going to be the last movie of the franchise, I can’t say. For whatever reason, the “sequels availability” clause was not there when Alley put her signature on the appropriate line of her contract.

The upshot of this development was that when Paramount realized that, “Hey, maybe the series is not over and we can make more of these movies,” Alley thought she could leverage her popularity with Star Trek fans and ask for a salary increase for Star Trek III.

The studio, which had kicked Gene Roddenberry “upstairs” to a mostly ceremonial post of “executive consultant” after he and his producing team allowed the cost of making Star Trek: The Motion Picture to soar into the $44 million zone with fair-to-middling results, wasn’t thrilled with Alley’s requests for more money to play Lt. Saavik again. (To put this concept into perspective, 20th Century Fox produced Star Wars in 1976 for an estimated $11 million.) 

Paramount, like every other film studio on Earth, is a business enterprise, and one of the reasons that its head, Michael Eisner, had hired Harve Bennett (whose previous bailiwick had been in television) was to keep costs down.

I don’t know the exact details of how much Alley was asking for during the negotiations with Bennett and the studio; one account at the time claimed that Alley and her agent, Michael Levine, wanted the actor to be paid 10 times what she had earned for Star Trek II, while Leonard Nimoy said she had asked for a salary that was higher than DeForest Kelley - an actor who had been with Star Trek since the Original Series’ first aired episode, The Man Trap.

These demands did not sit well with anyone involved in the decision-making process. The studio, after all, had set a budget of $16 million to make Star Trek III; acceding to Alley’s demands for more money was not in the cards. Alley, who was well aware of Saavik’s popularity among Star Trek fans and the character’s substantial screen time in Star Trek III, didn’t want to be talked into taking a smaller paycheck.

The film had to start filming by a certain date in order to meet the studio’s deadline for a June 1984 release, so Nimoy decided that the only way to go without having to rewrite the screenplay was to recast the role. Exeunt, Kirstie Alley, enter Robin Curtis.