The City on the Edge of Forever

by Harlan Ellison

  But, astonishingly, thereafter, every single letter or phone call or InterNet message passed along to me (I have no computer or modem or interest in wasting my life on these electronic yenta boards) congratulated me for having the (what one reader called) “ethical muscle” to tell it “like it was.” Well, gee whillikers, folks, how swell that you thought I was an icon of rectitude and justified moral indignation. I just have one question to ask:

  Where the fuck were you for thirty years while Roddenberry and his running-dogs dissed me and smeared my rep?

  But, then, I shouldn’t be rude to you. After all, didn’t you pay good money to buy my book? So let me just get on with it, and reprint my article from TV Guide. And when I return, New Horrors! New Horrors!

  Last fall, Entertainment Weekly did one of these special Star Trek issues and they ranked all 79 episodes of the original series. Number one, all-time best, most popular episode was “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Undisputedly the best episode of Star Trek.

  I wrote that episode. The words didn’t spring unbidden from Spock and Kirk’s mouths, they were written. By me. The tragic love story in which the principal protagonists of the Enterprise went back in time to New York City during the Great Depression of 1930, and Kirk watched as the woman he loved—Sister Edith Keeler—was killed…I spent most of 1966 writing and rewriting and re-rewriting.

  I watched it once, only once—when it originally aired over NBC on April 6, 1967—and have been unable to bring myself to look at it again since that evening. One would think the anger and the punch in the heart would abate after more than thirty years. But Star Trek has become as anally retentive a cult as the most obsessive True Believer could wish, and the urban myths that have been cobbled up about “City,” and my script, march on tirelessly. They are horse puckey, but on they trudge.

  In the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, there is a line that has become famous. It is this: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  That is to say, why bother with the truth when horse puckey allows the True Believers to enjoy their obsession in a state of blissful ignorance?

  I cannot tell you the truth. You would not want it, or believe it, or honor me in any way for having told it to you. Crybabies whine for the truth.

  What you want is myth and half-truth. Okay, I can do that. But what follows is only that part of the truth that will not curdle your milk. The snail on the rose remains hidden.

  Roddenberry and I sat in a booth at Oblath’s. The restaurant was nearly empty, only a few gaffers and extras sipping coffee or dumping down a late breakfast. It was sometime between ten in the morning and noon. I was working on a meat loaf sandwich, and Gene had a drink in front of him. He looked at me and said, “They’re conspiring to cancel the show.”

  Gene had called me at home and asked me to come down for “a private talk.” He didn’t want to meet at the Star Trek offices in the “E” building of Desilu Studios, which adjoined Paramount. He asked me to meet him at Oblath’s, the now-vanished luncheon joint that stood just across the narrow street from the Marathon gate of Paramount. It was always crammed with people from the studios, but not till coffee break or lunchtime. Now, we were alone, and Gene was telling me that dark and inimical forces inside NBC were plotting the demise of this new space adventure series to which I’d been devoted since Gene had invited me to be a writer for the series in late 1965.

  It was November of 1966, and they were getting ready to shoot “City” after ten months of my slow writing of the script, and after much duplicity and aggravation, and after Gene had given my work to others to rewrite—betraying the promise to me that if changes were needed, I’d be the one to make them. It was November, “City” was in preproduction, Gene and I hadn’t spoken in many weeks, and he had asked me to come to a meeting so he could confide that the network was out to kill the show.

  “I need your help,” he said.

  I wasn’t a kid. I was 32 years old, I’d already won the first of four Writers Guild awards for Most Outstanding Teleplay for my Outer Limits script, “Demon with a Glass Hand” starring Robert Culp. I’d been a professional for a decade and had already published 11 of my 62 books; I’d been on my own since I’d run away from Ohio at age thirteen. I wasn’t a kid. But I went for it. What they used to call in the carny, the okeydoke. The hustle. The con.

  Gene had an astonishing ability to tell people what they wanted to hear, to charm them into doing his bidding, all the time thinking the chores had been self-generated. I went for the okeydoke and believed (what is generally acknowledged now to be utterly untrue) that there were idiot monsters at NBC who were trying to scuttle Star Trek.

  Despite my lingering animosity at what Gene had done, and had allowed to be done, to my script, I volunteered to help save the show. And I came back to the Studio and Gene set me up in one of the vacant offices, and I created The Committee.

  I got hold of all the membership lists of the World Science Fiction Conventions from recent years, fan clubs across the country, mailing lists from antiquarian sf booksellers, a huge Rolodex of names. Then I enlisted eight of the biggest names in the world of speculative fiction—from the author of Dune, Frank Herbert, to the legendary author of Slan, A. E. van Vogt—and under a letterhead declaring us The Committee, I sent out thousands of letters asking for the help of fans and viewers, help in persuading NBC to keep the show on the air.

  To see a copy of Harlan's letter, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge

  I worked night and day in that little office. I cut the stencil, and took it to the mimeograph room at Desilu where scripts were run off on an old Gestetner mimeograph, and I actually cranked that handle for hours to create the letters of S.O.S. on the reams of light green paper Gene had provided for the purpose.

  When I hear all the toots and bleats from those who came later, that they saved Star Trek, my jaw muscles get tense.

  But I did it, nonetheless. I went for the okeydoke because I had no idea what was about to happen to me and “City.”

  I was no kid. I should have heard the sounds of lies in the night.

  Yeah, it took me an impossible ten months to get that script written. I don’t cop out on that. But I’ve written scripts as quickly as over a three-day weekend. I’ve got 50 scripts to my credit; it doesn’t take all that much time. So I have no excuse. But I do have an explanation.

  In a dopey book called CAPTAIN’S LOGS: The Complete Trek Voyages (1993), in a section devoted to “City,” the authors quote my old pal John D. F. Black, who was the story editor on Star Trek during my writing months. He wrote, “Harlan always had 40 things going. He was doing a book and he had this short story he had to get in, or whatever…”

  Johnny doesn’t seem to remember what the working situation for freelance writers was like in the ’60s. How it went, was this: the new season began in September; every show got an order for 28 to 32 segments from the networks; but they got those purchase orders earlier, in May or June. And then they would start showing the pilot episode to every writer in town. They had “cattle calls” in which you’d be sitting with twenty or thirty other scenarists, in a screening room at the studio. And after you’d seen the pilot episode they’d shot the year before, everyone would trample his gramma to get to the producer or story editor, to pitch an idea.

  And it all happened during a couple of weeks in the spring. What you would have to live on for the rest of the year was predicated on how fast, and how many, gigs you could smash’n’grab during the cattle-call fortnight. (And in them thar days, kids, the pay was a lot less. For a half hour script, it was something like fifteen hundred bucks, and for an hour-long segment, like Trek, it was maybe three grand.) So if you wanted to live above the poverty line in expensive L.A., you glommed onto three or four assignments all at the same time.

  No excuse, just the way it was.

  And I had a couple of assignments on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as well as completing the last of a feature film assignment (coinc
identally, also at Paramount). Gene came on the scene after I was committed to those jobs, but he wanted me on Trek so much, and I was so enamored of the idea of working on the first really big-time sf space adventure show…I accepted the contract.

  So it is true. I was slow. I was riding three horses at the same time. But early on, I fell in love with my story of Kirk and Spock trying to set time right, of Kirk’s great, tragic love affair, of the immutability of time and the human spirit. I threw myself into writing “City” as I had done with no other story save “Demon with a Glass Hand.” And I wrote treatment after treatment to keep up with Roddenberry’s ever-changing “script direction” and “input”—most of which came as a result of either Desilu or NBC suggesting this nitwit idea or that bonehead concept, I wrote and wrote and wrote. More than the Writers Guild regs permitted, more than I was ever paid for, more than was required. What sort of imbecile demands?

  Well, Gene called me up one day and said, “The Enterprise has to be in danger. Big danger.”

  I replied that the focus of the show was not on the Enterprise, which existed in a timeless place frozen in the chrono-stream till Kirk and Spock could either set time in the past back the way it was supposed to be…or change the future, in which the ship might not even exist.

  “No, no,” Gene said, getting troubled that I was arguing with him, as if I knew what I was doing, “we have to have a great threat to the ship in every episode. The network is asking for it.”

  “But it’s beside the point, Gene! It only wastes time and takes the viewer’s focus off the love story, which is what this is all about.”

  “You’ll have to do it!”

  So I did it. To Gene’s order, I created a sub-plot about the Enterprise being thrown into an alternate future where they had become, gulp!, space pirates. It was an unnecessary, foolish, redundant distraction…but Gene thought it would placate the suits over at NBC. (Eventually, of course, it was dropped. But it helped contribute to the myth that I had written this unshootable, incredibly expensive teleplay. Horse puckey.)

  And there was, of course, the opening, in which I had one of the ship’s complement getting a weak-willed officer to do something crooked, by tempting him with Jewels of Sound, a kind of futuristic hallucinogenic narcotic. Oh no, I was told, we can’t possibly have anyone on the Enterprise doing anything as scummy as that. Our people wouldn’t act that way.

  That was the first time I ever heard that miserable excuse for hackneyed formula writing. Our hero wouldn’t act that way. Our lead won’t allow her character to act that way. Our people wouldn’t act that way.

  No, indeed not. What they can do is act the same damned predictable way each and every week, in each and every new situation. Never mind that human beings are irrational and unpredictable and an amalgam of good and bad and smart and dumb, never mind that the most universal reason that most of us do anything, even if it gets us in trouble or messes us up, is that It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time. Never mind that making these characters unchanging gave them about as much depth as a saucer of oatmeal. Never mind that common sense tells us that if you jam a mixed crew of approximately 450 people into an interstellar tunafish tin, for extended periods, that maybe, possibly, whaddaya think someone might get just a touch cranky with someone else? You mean to tell me, I said to whomever would listen, including Gene and John and Herb Solow (then head of the studio), and Bobby Justman, who was, at the time, associate producer—all of whom tell wonderful stories about how I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and how each of them, according to them, saved this script—that all 450 of these spacefaring men and women are saints, without flaw or natural human instincts or crankiness or rotten spots in their nature? No, I was told, Gene believes in the ultimate perfectibility of the human race. (Yeah, but all them third world aliens, who were nothing more than surrogates for ghetto minorities, they could be miserable rotten sonsabitches. Talk about your White Man’s Burden.)

  Yet, with all of that in there, Gene okayed the treatment finally, and I set about the long chore of writing the script.

  So you know who it was that really sandbagged me?

  It was Shatner.

  I wasn’t a kid. I should have heard the sound of creeping actors in the night.

  Shatner had been sucking up. No, let me correct that, heaven forbid any of the True Believers get the impression that Bill wasn’t absolutely and strictly the kindest, least self-serving entity in the universe. Bill had been solicitous of my friendship. I won’t talk about that afternoon at the Hamburger Hamlet in Beverly Hills. All I’ll say is that Bill was a sharp listener, and he knew that I had won the Writers Guild award, plus all these science fiction Hugos and Nebulas, and I was coming off a feature film that (until the wretched thing, in fact, opened) gossip was predicting would make a fabulous film…and he made me his little pal, his little chum. Leonard Nimoy wasn’t like that. He was simply a good guy, and never hustled me, and we have remained friends for a quarter of a century.

  But Shatner had me conned. Butter wouldn’t melt…well, you know the rest. And I was going for the okeydoke again, silly me.

  Bill had made it clear that the moment I finished that great script everyone on the show said I was writing, he wanted to see it, wanted to hold it in his hands still warm and pulsing from the typewriter.

  I finished the script on Saturday the 28th of May, the day after my thirty-second birthday. I wrote FADE OUT and THE END and sat back and smiled and felt great compassion for Captain James T. Kirk, who would have sacrificed the entire universe, all of time and space, for the woman he loved. And I was filled with pride at having created the character of Trooper, a legless veteran of World War I, whose bravery meant nothing in the infinite flow of merciless time. Boy, I loved that damned script!

  And like the Mt. Everest of schmucks, instead of going and playing a game of miniature golf or swimming the Hellespont, I made one of the great idiot mistakes of my life. I took an actor’s disingenuous camaraderie as true friendship, and I called Shatner at his home.

  “I’ll be there in 20 minutes,” Bill said.

  I wasn’t a kid. I hadn’t just taken a dive off the turnip truck. OhBoy, if Time really could be called back!

  I heard his Harley coming down the mountain road toward my house long before he shot halfway past the driveway, decided to course-correct doing 35 on a steep slope, and laid his bike down in the tarmac with a hideous wounded-beast screech.

  The scar from his wheelie remains to this day in my driveway, though the 1994 Northridge earthquake splintered it some.

  He came limping up to the door, I opened it, and in came The Great Actor, to peruse my humble offering.

  Shatner sat on the sofa in the living room, and read the script front to back, top to bottom, page after page. I went off around the house to tend to other matters—everything having gone to hell while I’d obsessed over the dawn-to-dusk writing of “City”—and every once in a while I’d cruise past and offer him a cuppa coffee or ask if everything was cool. He was abstracted, but he indicated everything was peachykeen. It took him some time to read it. He read it close, bro, very close.

  Then, when he had finished it, he sat there for a few minutes, staring out through the sliding doors of the living room toward the watershed land behind my house. Contemplative. Then he picked up “City” and started reading it all over again.

  This went on for a couple of hours.

  And after he completed the second pass, I saw him slowly turning the pages, studying the script for something…I knew not what.

  Talk about being a Mt. Everest capacity jerk, that was me, that was I, that was the both of the not-a-kid.

  He was line-counting. The Great Actor was weighing the freight of lines spoken by his publicity nemesis on Star Trek, the enigmatic Mr. Spock, the excellent Leonard Nimoy, against how many Kirk shots there were. And let me not suggest that the ego of Bill Shatner influenced his opinion, but when he toted up the numbers in his head, and found that Lenny h
ad, what, maybe half a dozen more lines…I was on my way to an anger and a heartpunch that has lasted for thirty-five years.

  He told me how great the script was, how he couldn’t wait to play it, how he was going to tell Gene it was the best script they’d ever had for the show…and I battened on the banana oil flattery like a bad dresser buying a cheap suit. (I’m sixty-one years old. Shatner calls me “a surly young man.”)

  Shatner, of course, still limping from his flameout, went straight to Roddenberry and said he’d seen the script and it was swell, just perfectly swell, but he had a few problems with it.

  (A small digression. MY STAR TREK MEMORIES “written by” William Shatner—which is to accuracy as Le Sacre du Printemps “danced by” Harlan Ellison at the Bolshoi is to reality—had an initial printing of 250,000 copies. And though I don’t follow Shatner’s business dealings with even minuscule attention, I do know that in December of 1993 HarperCollins went back to press for another 25,000 copies.

  (That means that yet another quarter of a million gullible readers read the following fanciful interpretation of Shatner’s one and only visit to my home, as I’ve just described it to you. This is from page 219 of STAR TREK MEMORIES:

  (“Finally, when it got to the point where Justman and Roddenberry felt they were going to have to give up on the script, Gene sent me up to Harlan’s house, hoping that I might be able to reason with him, and I have to admit, I failed miserably. At the time I was rather friendly with Harlan, and I’m sure that Gene felt like maybe he’d listen to me if I went up there and told him why his script wasn’t usable. And I can remember driving up to Harlan’s house on my motorcycle, 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.”