Therefore, in Ellison’s story, Kirk falls in love with a woman he already knows must die. And he does this in a very short time span, since we do not meet Edith until just past the halfway point in the story. Also, it is not Kirk who makes the great personal sacrifice of allowing Edith to be run down by the truck; the Captain cannot bring himself to stop Beckwith from saving her. Spock must do it.
A heartbroken Kirk returns from the past with Spock and Beckwith. The latter is punished by the Guardians and sent back into the vortex to materialize “in the heart of a sun” and to experience his own death over and over throughout eternity.
Later, on the Enterprise, a saddened Kirk receives a visit from Spock, who tells his captain, “No woman was ever loved as much, Jim. Because no woman was ever offered the universe for love.”
Even with such profound differences between this story and the one filmed, this “City on the Edge of Forever” was a startling and highly dramatic tale. But it was also clearly the blueprint to an expensive production. And there were things that were happening within the story -- things Kirk was doing -- that didn’t fit the mold Roddenberry wanted for his series’ lead. Ellison was asked to revise his story outline ... for free.
“The writing of the [revised] outline seemed to take a long time,” Dorothy Fontana recalled. “Other stories came in. Then scripts. Weeks went by. No Ellison.” (64-7)
It took five weeks, in fact, for Ellison to deliver his revised outline, and then another two to revise it again, the latter dated May 13. Of this, Fontana said, “It was delivered with glad cries of enthusiasm from Gene Roddenberry, Desilu, and NBC.” (64-7)
The court martial was out. Instead, after killing LeBeque, Beckwith beams himself down to the planet. Kirk and Spock, with Yeoman Rand and a security detail, follow. At Roddenberry’s request, to save money, Ellison removed any reference to environmental suits and breatherpaks. Another substantial change deals with the information given to Kirk and Spock by the Guardians. The giant, aged aliens do not name Edith in this version. They do not talk about specifics. Instead, they speak in generalities and parables.
In this version, Spock spots Edith (her last name now being Keeler) in the beginning of Act III where she leads a street corner revival. She speaks to the crowd of “disgruntled derelicts” about the “brotherhood of man; about the need to trust; the need to love.” From here, the story progresses in much the same way as the previous drafts.
After reading the revised outline, Justman wrote to John D.F. Black:
Don’t ever tell Harlan ... but this outline is beautifully written. The fact that it may become rather difficult to achieve the effects that he has written into the story is another matter…. The time vortex is described as a shimmering pillar of light set between the grey-silver rocks. It would be nice if we could find a cheaper time vortex.... On page 10, the Earthmen reel back in astonishment as the behemoth bulk of a giant wooly mammoth bursts out of the foliage within the time vortex device. At the same moment, Bob Justman reels back in agony, as he does not believe that there is any color stock film available on mastodons bursting out of foliage. Or even giant wooly mammoths.... Plenty sets, plenty speaking parts, plenty extras, plenty locations, plenty shooting time, plenty money, plenty night-for-night shooting, plenty screams from management accompanied by dire threats and reflections upon our immediate ancestry. (RJ28-1)
It was now late May. The first episode to film, “The Corbomite Maneuver,” was going before the cameras and, despite the frightful costs projections, Justman recalled how Roddenberry immediately put Ellison on assignment to go to script so that no more time would be lost. Roddenberry had done this before with Theodore Sturgeon (“Shore Leave”) and Robert Bloch (“What Are Little Girls Made Of?”).
The Writers Guild, at this time, allowed a freelance writer two weeks to deliver a First Draft teleplay. Producers almost always pushed to get the script sooner. Ellison took three weeks to deliver, not as long as some remembered but, nonetheless, late. Justman recalled, “We’re in full production and rapidly running out of usable scripts and we still hadn’t seen anything from Ellison. Because I’d worked with him in the past on The Outer Limits, I knew that he was a real procrastinator when it came to actually writing his scripts. He had trouble getting started because, let’s face it… writing is an excruciating process.” (94- 4)
Mary Black said, “Harlan wasn’t just a procrastinator; he was somebody who always had something more interesting to do.” (17a),
“Harlan always had 40 things going,” said John D.F. Black. “He was doing a book and he had this short story he had to get in, or whatever. At one point, Harlan was supposed to deliver, was supposed to deliver, was supposed to deliver ... and he was ill or he was this or he was that…. The story just wasn’t finished.’” (17-4)
Fontana remembered, “Harlan was going through an emotionally-intense and difficult period -- the breakup of one of the shortest marriages on record. On the other hand, we needed a script. Desperate measures were called for. Roddenberry set aside a desk in the assistant directors’ room and asked Harlan to come in and work on the script in the studio. Every day.” (64-7)
John D.F. Black said, “Dear little Harlan. I like him. Even when we were going through all of that. He always wanted to be on the set. Always. First he wanted an office on the lot. So we got him one -- a little bitty office at the end of the hall, and he had it all to himself. Then he installed his portable record player so he could listen to his jazz records as he was writing -- or supposedly writing.” (17a)
Ellison said, “They had me in my little office back in the wardrobe room on the first floor of the old building. It was like a closet. So I’d go to the set all the time and I got to be good close friends with Leonard Nimoy and Grace Lee Whitney.” (58)
Black remembered, “Harlan would be in there with this rock and roll playing very loud, with the casting people trying to have readings and saying, ‘Turn it down, Harlan!’ I couldn’t hear people in my office on the telephone and I’d tell him to ‘Turn it down!’ At one point, I guess the second or third day that he was there, I walked down the hall, because the [Rolling] Stones were playing -- loud. I knocked on the door and there wasn’t any answer. I opened the door and Harlan wasn’t there!” (17-4)
Nimoy, Ellison and Shatner take a break while filming “Mudd’s Women” on Stage 10 (Courtesy of Harlan Ellison)
Black found Ellison on the set, having his picture taken. It was snapped during the filming of “Mudd’s Women,” with Ellison sandwiched between a grinning Kirk and Spock. Black recalled, “I said, ‘Harlan, you’re supposed to be writing. What are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I came over here for lunch with the company.’ ‘Harlan, it’s 3:30 in the afternoon. The company has lunch at 2.’ ‘Well, I wanted to see what they were doing.’ I said, ‘Harlan, please go back to the office and finish the story.’ So Harlan walked back with me, went into his office and the record goes on again.... When I went down to see how he was doing, the record was playing and Harlan wasn’t there. He had gone out the window. Bobby Justman was of the mind that we should nail the door and the window shut.” (17-4)
Again, in Ellison’s defense, the total time period which all remembered as being both long and tortured was, in fact, only three weeks.
Fontana said, “Harlan did spend some time visiting the set, but that’s considered necessary research for a writer. When a show hasn’t been on the air yet, freelance writers must have an opportunity to study the actor’s speech patterns and delivery, the little gestures and nuances each one brings to his or her role, and -- most of all -- the character relationships which are being built episode by episode.” (64-7)
Mary Black added, “Okay. Fair enough. He was researching. But he really just liked to be in the middle of it; which is why he would always be on the set. When we had our long evenings catching-up, writing stuff, Harlan would show up. Sometimes he’d show up before Bob Justman left, and he would bump heads with Bob about whatever. Other times
we’d go in there after Bob had left for the night. Bob’s office had a bathroom, and a couch -- it was more comfortable than John’s office. So the three of us would end up in there and Harlan would set up surprises for Bob Justman on his recording machine. I remember he opened the door to the john and had the microphone down into the depths of the toilet and repeatedly flushed it for Bob to hear when he came in the following morning. Harlan was always playing. He was constantly looking to have a good time. He was almost dodging the work. Bob would come in from lunch and find Harlan asleep on the couch in his office. He was a person who didn’t have any boundaries.” (17a)
Justman vividly recalled the day he came to work and, instead of flushing sounds on his tape machine, he found a finished First Draft teleplay. It was on June 7 (script dated June 3). He remembered thinking, “‘I’ve got a script!’ I’m smiling and I go to my office to give it a quick read. I stop smiling. Harlan’s script is brilliantly written, but completely unusable. At first glance, I can tell it’s going to be hugely expensive, and at the same time, his Enterprise characters are speaking incorrectly and, more importantly, behaving incorrectly.” (94-4)
Case in point: When Kirk and Spock first arrive in New York City, 1930, they see “penniless men” listening to an “Orator” who is inciting them to riot. The Orator howls, “What kind of country is this, where men have to stand in bread lines just to fill their bellies? I’ll tell you what kind -- a country run by the foreigners! All the scum we let in to take the food from our mouths, all the alien filth that pollutes our fine country.” Hearing this, Spock says to Kirk, “Is this the heritage Earthmen brag about? This sickness?” Later, after Kirk and Spock flee an angry mob incited by the Orator, and take refuge in the basement of a building, Spock says, “Barbarian world!... As violent as any aboriginal world we ever landed on. My race never had this. We went to space in peace. Earthmen came with all of this behind them.” Kirk fires back, “And that’s why you hit space two hundred years after us!” Spock counters, “Try to tell me Earthmen uplifted my race. Tell me that, and use Beckwith as an example of nobility.” An angry Kirk retorts, “I should have left you for the mob!”
The conflict was present, but the “voice” of Star Trek was not. Despite knowing there would have to be a sizable dialogue rewrite, Justman told John D.F. Black:
Without a doubt, this is the best and most beautifully written screenplay we have gotten to date, and possibly we’ll ever get this season. If you tell this to Harlan, I’ll kill you. (RJ28-2)
But there was much bad news in Justman’s memo. He warned:
We cannot afford to make this show as it presently stands…. What we have to do is find a way to retain all the basic qualities contained within this screenplay and then make it economically feasible for us to photograph it. This is an eight-day show to my way of thinking. I would like to try for seven. (RJ28-2)
Ellison revised his script, begrudgingly. He later said, “You must understand that working in television can be a singularly crippling and brutalizing thing for the creative spirit, particularly if a writer perceives himself as something more than merely a hack or a creative typist who is helping to fill network airtime in order to sell new cars and deodorants. So a writer who cares about his work puts in small touches, special scenes, lines of enriching dialogue, that give him his reason for writing it. Almost all of those touches were excised in the name of straight action sequences. Their loss diminished the value of the script enormously. At least for me.” (58-6).
Ellison was working faster now, taking only a week to submit his next draft. But he was not making all the changes the producers were asking for. A bemused John D.F. Black said, “Harlan didn’t know anything about the production side. He knew half of what I knew, and I didn’t know anything.” (17-4)
Justman, writing a memo to Black, said:
Cordwainer [Harlan] has made the oft-repeated statement that this show will cost 98 cents to shoot. Please keep him out of my office. I know that he will try to convince me that this show will cost 98 cents to shoot. I have been down this road before with Cordwainer. He did a segment of The Outer Limits entitled “The Glass Hand” [sic] which you may be aware of. Prior to the shooting of “The Glass Hand,” Cordwainer was complaining that we were emasculating his handiwork. Emasculated or not, this show went on to win a Writers Guild Award and was also one of the best Outer Limits that we shot in two seasons. Tell Cordwainer that if he insists upon arguing budget with me, in the future I shall have to restrict him from my couch.... I will have him taken away by the “Civil People.” (RJ28-2)
Mary Black said, “Bob and Harlan had a kind of running battle, because Harlan would write things that were absolutely beyond belief in terms of budget. And Harlan would always explain about how it would, of course, be possible for Bob to achieve it, and sometimes Harlan would show up before Bob went home and they would have a kind of mock battle. I remember Harlan standing on Bob’s desk yelling at him. Not surprisingly, in the area of budget.” (17a)
On August 15, after two months of what Justman remembered as “much telephonic prodding,” Ellison turned in a second revised script -- the official 2nd Draft, dated August 12. Ellison typed “Revised Final Draft” on the cover page.
Justman immediately wrote a memo to Gene Coon, who was beginning his first week as producer, telling the new show-runner:
As you may know, this property was first assigned March 16, 1966. We received this draft yesterday and today is August 16, 1966. Simple arithmetic gives us the information that it has been five months since the property was first assigned. As it presently stands, this latest draft is no more inexpensive to shoot, in my opinion, than the previous version. (RJ28-3)
There were other concerns. Justman’s memo warned:
Although Harlan’s writing is beautiful, it is not Star Trek that he has written. It is a lovely story for an anthology television series or a feature…. I have been as frank as I possibly can be with regard to my comments on this version of the screenplay. I have not intended to be brutal in any way. It has been my experience in the past that somehow Cordwainer has gotten hold of my memos prior to my discussing them with him.... I would greatly appreciate it if Cordwainer could no longer obtain any of my memos with regard to his work in the future. (RJ28-3)
Roddenberry later said, “I think Harlan’s a genius but he’s not exactly the most disciplined writer in the world. He had my Scotty [sic] dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that!” (145-1)
Ellison, still burning in the mid-1990s over this statement, fumed: “I gotcha Scotty right here, Gene. Anybody who ever read that script knows there’s no Scotty selling drugs. Or any of the other horse puckey that has been spread for more than twenty-five years.” (58-2)
The crew member dealing drugs was Beckwith, not Scotty. And Beckwith was a non-regular. Regardless, and even though no one had asked him at the time to take it out, it was Ellison’s idea to make a member of the crew -- of Gene Roddenberry’s crew -- a pusher.
Roddenberry complained, “Also, he wrote it so that it would have cost $200,000 more than I had to spend. He just wrote huge crowd scenes and all sorts of things. I tried to get him to change it and he wouldn’t.” (145-1)
Justman, on the side of management, said, “Gene tried to reason with Harlan. So did I, but we both struck out.” (94-4)
According to William Shatner, he was sent to Ellison’s home on Roddenberry’s behalf to see if the famed writer was cooperating and making the changes that had been requested.
“I failed miserably,” Shatner admitted. “I can remember getting inside the house and being yelled at throughout my visit. Harlan was very irate and within a rather short period of time he’d thrown me off his property, insane with anger at Justman, Roddenberry, and Coon. I was just the messenger, but he was out to kill me, too.” (156-8)
Ellison said, “It all boiled down to Shatner not liking that Leonard had more and better lines than he did. He would count lines of dialogue, literally. He s
at on the sofa in my living room and did that. And he would always give you some hyperbolic rationalization why Leonard should not have three lines on a page where he [Shatner] only had one. And it never made any sense at all, but you got the sense after a very short time that either you made the changes or he would go back and rat you out, which is what he did with Roddenberry. He went to Roddenberry and said, ‘Well, it’s an uneven script and I’m not getting my due and you’d better get in there and do some rewriting.’ And Roddenberry chose Shatner over Nimoy, always. He didn’t know where the gold laid in that show.” (58)
At this point, Steve Carabatsos replaced John D.F. Black as Story Editor. Now it was his job to follow Gene Coon’s instructions and fix the script.
Dorothy Fontana said, “The original script was a hell of a script. If it had been just an episode of The Outer Limits, it would have been fine. But it’s not the best Star Trek script, because it doesn’t involve the characters as deeply as they should be involved in an episode. The love story was there, but you didn’t get to meet Edith Keeler until the third act. You might have seen her, but she never got to meet Kirk until Act Three. And that’s too late. And the person who goes through to distort the time line was a crewman who was addicted to a narcotic, ‘the Jewels of Sound.’ You’ve never seen him before. You see him in the teaser and then he’s gone. And then you pick him up later in the story, and they have to get him.” (64-1)
In the Carabatsos version, the drug-dealing and drug using crew members were eliminated and, instead, McCoy became the catalyst who brings Kirk and party to the planet’s surface for their encounter with the Guardian of Forever. As seen in the filmed episode, Sulu is injured on the bridge and McCoy is called to treat him. The ship shudders, and McCoy falls, hitting his head and being knocked unconscious. In sickbay, he is given an injection of adrenalin and suffers from “adrenalin poisoning.” And this is why, in a maddened state, he beams himself to the planet.
These Are The Voyages, TOS, Season One Page 94
