his office to tell them The Next Generation was cancelled and they were out of a job, were instead given the task of writing the film. Berman also worked with former Next Generation producer Maurice Hurley to develop possible story ideas, intending to develop two film scripts simultaneously and prioritize whichever was most promising. Executive producer Michael Piller turned down the opportunity to develop ideas, objecting to what he saw as a competition for the job. Moore and Braga's script was ultimately chosen. The writers spent weeks developing the story with Berman, before taking a working vacation in May 1993 to write the first-draft screenplay, completed June 1. Moore described Generations as a project with several required elements. Berman felt that having the original cast of the previous Star Trek films felt like a "good way to pass the baton" to the next series. The studio wanted the original cast to only appear in the first minutes and Kirk only recurring at the end of the film. Other requests included a Khan Noonien Singh-like antagonist, Klingons, and a humorous Data plot. At one point, the writers toyed with the idea of pitting the two crews against each other. "We were obsessed with the poster image of the two Enterprises locked in combat: Kirk vs. Picard, One Must Die!" said Moore. Ultimately, the writers could not come up with a plausible explanation for such a conflict, and abandoned the idea. In the initial draft of the screenplay, the original series cast appeared in a prologue, and Guinan served as the bridge between the two generations. The opening shot would have been the entire cast crammed into an elevator, happy to be back together. The Enterprise-D's destruction also appeared—the saucer crash had first been proposed by Moore as the conclusion to part one of a sixth-season cliffhanger story that was scrapped. Kirk's death was developed in Braga, Moore, and Berman's story sessions. Moore recalled that "we wanted to aim high, do something different and big... We knew we had to have a strong Picard story arc, so what are the profound things in a man's life he has to face? Mortality tops the list." After the idea of killing off a Next Generation cast member was vetoed, someone suggested that Kirk die instead. "We all sorta looked around and said, 'That might be it,' " Moore said. The studio and Shatner had