“I went into one of the executive’s offices and I saw an ‘X3’ script, and I immediately knew it was a lot fatter,” Vaughn said. “I was like, ‘What the hell is this draft?’ He went, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ and I’m like, ‘No, no. I’m the director. I’m worrying about this draft.’ He wouldn’t tell me, so I grabbed it literally — it was like a crazy moment — opened the first page, and it said, ‘Africa. Storm. Kids dying of no water. She creates a thunderstorm and saves all these children.'”
Vaughn continued, “[I said] ‘What is this?’ [They said] ‘Oh, it’s Halle Berry’s script.’ I went, ‘OK, because she hasn’t signed up yet.’ ‘But this is what she wants it to be, and once she signs up, we’ll throw it in the bin.'”
While Vaughn said the idea of Storm going to Africa was a “pretty cool idea,” he did not stand by the tactic of misrepresenting the storyline to Berry.
Something similar happened to Whoopi Goldberg when she was hired for Star Trek Generations. They said she would be actively working with Nichelle Nichols, who ultimately had nothing to do with the project. In the opening scene when she is rescued from The Nexus by Chekov her reaction of shock is genuine because she was told up until that point that it would be Nichelle who was starring in that scene and was genuinely surprised to be across from Walter Koening instead.
Hollywood sucks.
While she may have been told Nichols would be in the film when she signed on, she didn’t fucking “find out” when they were literally filming the actual scene, you absolute pancake. That is not even remotely how film production works.
The surprise would, at the latest, have happened the day before when Goldberg might have noticed Nichols wasn’t on the call sheet, but in reality probably far before that during the normal course of production communications. Jfc
Pancake… lol
Oh wow, I had never heard that about the production of the Generations movie before but that’s a really fucked up thing to do. Particularly because Whoopi Goldberg was at the height of her fame during ST:TNG’s TV run. She was only on that show because she loved Star Trek. Frankly, at that point in her career she was easily “above” being on a basic cable syndicated TV series.
Nichelle was the reason she was so into Star Trek. She was her idol more or less. It was really empowering to Whoopi to see a black woman on the bridge and it gave her tons of hope for the future.
Didn’t it all go downhill from there tho?
Oh that’s very interesting. The script was actually written for it to be Kirk/Spock/McCoy rather than Kirk/Scotty/Chekov, but Nimoy and Kelley both said no because they were happy with where TUC left things for the TOS crew - which is why (for example) Chekov ends up running sickbay despite no evidence before of him having any medical training.
I’d never heard they had a version claiming Uhura would be there too.
Gonna need a source on that “surprise” story