At a screening of "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" in Hollywood Tuesday night, producers Harve Bennett and Ralph Winter spoke to an audience of writers about what made this film uniquely popular to a wide audience ... and revealed what line in the film made the Russians laugh the hardest. (No, it wasn't "nuclear wessels.")

Writer/producer Bennett and executive producer Winter were guests of the Scriptwriters Network as part of the organization's "Story to Glory Film Series" held at the upscale ArcLight Cinema, speaking before and after the screening and answering questions from the nearly packed house.

"There are so many unique things about 'Star Trek IV' among all the Star Treks that we did and those which followed," Bennett began. (Bennett produced and co-wrote "Star Trek II" through "V," and Winter produced "III" through "VI.") "The most obvious is, it's the only Star Trek that takes place now, in contemporary society," which allowed for a lot of humor to be harvested from the "fish-out-of-water" scenario, as Winter described it. Bennett qualified that even during the Original Series, there was never an episode that took place in present day, not even "that one with fighter pilot" ("Tomorrow is Yesterday"). "No, no, that was in the near now, but not the now. Here we have a movie that brings Star Trek to the now ... and we had the crew of the Enterprise standing there on Market Street and so forth."

Winter chimed in on why those San Francisco scenes worked so well, such as when Chekov asked a stone-faced cop where to find "dee nuclear wessels." "We actually put a camera in a van, and just hid, and just did those live, just to see who comes by and talk to them," Winter revealed. "Those are the reactions of real people on the street. And it was pretty funny."

It was that very juxtaposition of familiar characters from the future with the mundane affairs of contemporary life that Bennett considers "one of the great achievements of the picture." "Probably as a result of that, it is, if not the most loved, it is the most seen Star Trek movie of them all," he said.

They both were amused by the fact that while shooting on the streets of San Francisco, no one even blinked an eye at these strangely acting people in those odd outfits. "People did not come up and say, hey, it's Star Trek!" Bennett observed. The characters just blended in.

Bennett addressed another unique quality of "ST IV." "For those of you who are writers, I would like to point out something that we didn't know about until we finished the script. You all know the rules of Antagonist and Protagonist — you've got good guys, bad guys, heroes, villains — [but] in Star Trek IV, there is no Antagonist. None. There is no 'heavy' in the same way as our other films and most episodes. If there is an enemy, it is the greed of humanity. But it is not a person." He conjectured that the fishermen trying to harpoon the freed whales could be considered antagonists, but they only appear briefly, so really just represent a broader dynamic of the story.

When an audience member pointed out that he considered the Probe to be the "antagonist" of the film, Bennett replied, "The Probe is a false antagonist. When you understand the Probe's point-of-view, it's just looking for its lost 'children' or 'tribe.'"

Some discussion took place between the producers and the audience about whether the Probe "worked" as a concept, i.e., leaving its nature and origins a mystery. The group pretty enthusiastically agreed that the idea was effective just as it was, and no further explanation of the Probe was necessary. Winter expressed some reservations he had about the Probe and its design, describing it as "a flying water heater with a soccer ball." "It worked, but it was not our best moment," he felt.

In further recounting the long creative process of arriving at the story for Leonard Nimoy's second directorial outing, Bennett revealed that at one point Eddie Murphy, a big Star Trek fan who was doing a slate of movies for Paramount at the time, was going to star. However, he said, "Somewhere it dawned on all of us [at the studio] that if you have a franchise named Eddie Murphy, and a franchise called Star Trek, and you put them together, you're wasting one of them." He didn't think the combination would have worked anyway, because he was more interested in "mining the character comedy that was there in the 60's" rather than force something new on the formula. 

Bennett also credited Nicholas Meyer, who stepped in near the end of the development process to complete the script, for helping bring out the character-based humor. "No one I've written with have I had such a mind meld," he said.

Bennett went on to describe the "extraordinary" experience they had in screening the environmentally conscious film in the Soviet Union, at a time when the world was still in the midst of the Cold War. "Because of the signing of the anti-whaling moratorium worldwide, and because the Russians signed that moratorium, and because a fellow named Gorbachev came along somewhere near the end of the making of this movie, we were privileged to run this movie in Moscow at the Russian Academy." It was interesting for him to observe that the Russians laughed "at precisely all the same moments" as American audiences, but also responded heartily to two others. The first being, when the two naval officers interrogating Chekov banter, "He's a Russky." "That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life, of course he's a Russky!"

"But most of all, the line that got the biggest laugh in the picture," Bennett explained: "They're on their way to pick up the new ship — first cut inside the space shuttle, Bones McCoy is commenting on how he knows it's going to be a freighter — and he says, 'The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.' And you couldn't hear the rest of the picture!"

Winter, by the way, produced "X-Men" and "X2" starring Patrick Stewart, with another sequel planned for 2006. He is also the executive producer of "Blizzard," a Christmas fantasy directed by LeVar Burton featuring Whoopi Goldberg and Christopher Plummer which opens this December. Bennett is essentially retired from the business after an illustrious career in movies and TV, including The Six Million Man and the Emmy Award-winning telefilm "A Woman Called Golda" featuring Leonard Nimoy.