The City on the Edge of Forever

by Harlan Ellison

  In his excellent nonfiction assessment of horror and science fiction, DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King reported that rumor had Harlan Ellison going to Paramount with the idea of the Enterprise breaking through the end of the universe and confronting God himself. And that wasn’t big enough, either.

  Removing tongue from cheek, the author explained the real story to King, but before discussing that, it’s important to note what writer James Van Hise wrote in his fanzine, Enterprise Incidents.

  “The story Harlan came up with,” Van Hise wrote in number eight of his magazine, “was never written down, but was presented verbally…the story did not begin with any of the Enterprise crew, but started on Earth where strange phenomena were inexplicably occurring. In India, a building where a family is having dinner, just vanishes into dust. In the United States, one of the Great Lakes suddenly vanishes, wreaking havoc. In a public square, a woman suddenly screams and falls to the pavement where she transforms into some sort of reptilian creature. The truth is suppressed, but the Federation realizes that someone or something is tampering with time and changing things on Earth in the far distant past. What is actually happening involves an alien race on the other end of the galaxy. Eons ago, Earth and this planet both developed races of humans and intelligent humanoid reptiles. On Earth, the humans destroyed the reptile men and flourished. In the time of the Enterprise when this race learns what happened on Earth in the remote past, they decide to change things in the past so that they will have a kindred planet. For whatever reason, the Federation decides that only the Enterprise and her crew are qualified for this mission, so a mysterious cloaked figure goes about kidnapping the old central crew. This figure is finally revealed to be Kirk. After they are reunited, they prepare for the mission into the past to save Earth. And that would have been just the first half hour of the film!”

  Ellison gave Stephen King a little more information on his story meeting with Paramount.

  “It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when man first emerged,” he said. “I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the Star Trek feature, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The Enterprise goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem.”

  Paramount executive Barry Trabulus “listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes,” Ellison elaborated. “Then he said, ‘You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Mayan calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?’”

  The writer pointed out that there were no Mayans at the dawn of time, but the executive brushed this off, pointing out that no one would know the difference.

  “‘I’d know the difference,’” Ellison exploded.

  “‘It’s a dumb suggestion.’ So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn’t I do it if I wanted to write this picture,” Ellison continued. “So I said ‘I’m a writer. I don’t know what the f-k you are!’ And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie.”

  Gross tells it even better. But they both omit one very important fact, and it is the omission of that fact in the Shatner-Kreski version that convinces me it was swiped from Gross: Roddenberry was in the room when I had this interchange with Trabulus. It was Gene who called me to come in for the meeting, in the very same office where we had done the series at Desilu, now Paramount.

  Because neither Van Hise nor Gross ever mentioned it—he may not have known—Kreski-Shatner assumed this was a sub rosa meeting to do a back-door around Roddenberry’s rotten first script. No way. Gene was sitting right there at the little round table in the corner near the windows, and he took part in the conversation.

  That I didn’t write it down before I told it, would only seem extraordinary to someone who didn’t know diddlyshit about how business is done in Hollywood. The Writers Guild won’t allow spec writing! You are not allowed to set down the plot before you have a deal. (There are, of course, hungry waifs who ignore this hard-won victory over Industry Greed by the excellent Writers Guild of America, who will write entire drafts of a screenplay on pure speculation. When they get it up the tuchiss, I have no pity for them.) So both Gross-Van Hise and Kreski-Shatner seeming to be startled that I “ran through a forty-five minute monologue and verbally…” is, in the case of the former, ignorance, but in the case of the latter, more than a revealing suspicion of monkey-see, monkey-do. (By the way, as a graciously offered writing note to Kreski-Shatner: the only way a monologue can be presented is “verbally”—that is, unless one is Hamlet delivering a soliloquy, or one is telepathic…out where I come from, pahdner, we call that “schoolgirl syntax.”) But that is precisely how one makes a story pitch. You put together in your head the basic storyline, and you then sell it on your feet, like a stand-up comedian, to idiots in suits who have no more idea of how a plot should be constructed than a piece of ravioli has about Euclidian geometry.

  As for my being “exhausted” after doing a mere 45 minutes…sheeeet, just ask anyone who’s been to one of my 3-hour lectures!

  And what end does this redundant exposure serve? If nothing else, it should show you, gentle reader, just how much malarkey you’ve accepted as True Word. Van Hise gets bits and snippets of half-remembered anecdotes, and publishes them without ever offering the finished copy to his sources for fact-checking. Then those mini-legends get circulated and distorted by fans who gossip and never get the specifics right (not to mention the inadvertent or purposeful warping of data on these idiot computer bulletin boards that run all night long disseminating half-baked bullshit no more valid than the National Enquirer edition of 12 November 1991 that blared the headline: STAR TREK CREATOR’S SECRET—HE DIED HATING CAPT. KIRK.) Then Edward Gross picks up the story and gets more specific, but he wasn’t there, either, so he makes the mistake of leaving Roddenberry out of the scene. And then a Shatner-puppet filches the story, attempts to rework the wording sufficiently so no one can shout, “Plagiarism!” (they needn’t have worried, neither Van Hise nor Gross has the money to sue) and sets down the anecdote with several major errors now concretized, drawing an utterly bogus conclusion that Paramount was working behind Gene Roddenberry’s back, thus reinforcing Gene’s long-since disproved claims that studio and network were out to scuttle him, a song he sang from the git-go. And it makes Roddenberry look like El Supremo, fighting off the hordes of duplicity, when in fact he was the single largest blockage in the Star Trek flow.

  But here is what I ask you to consider, and I realize now that I grow weary writing this self-vindication, as weary as you must have grown reading it: I ask you to perform two acts of simple logic. No arcane thinking, no convoluted creation of conspiracies, no long leaps between facts. Just two acts of cold, logical thinking. And they are these:

  • First, ask yourself if the depiction of the author of “City” as a writer who couldn’t handle the materials of his own story, as a mad jackanapes without professionalism, as a talent to be admired but not hired…rings true for a writer who was subsequently asked to write Star Trek I, Star Trek II, Star Trek IV and Star Trek V? And asked to write those larger, more expensive, more easily fucked-up productions by the same people who had been telling everyone Ellison was a bum!

  If I was so goddam notoriously impossible to work with, if I had such a criminal disregard for budget, if I was a cannon on the loose…why the hell did they come back to me again and again and again?

  • And second, just read the d
amned script. Read all the treatments, read the attempt I made to satisfy those subsequent demands for revision, read the actual words I wrote! Then rent the damned video, if you must, and compare. You may still go with what aired, but at least you’ll see that I wrote no Scotty selling drugs, I wrote no great crowd scenes, I wrote no space armadas! I wrote a simple and poignant love story, and I tried to say something about mortality and the importance of courage when there is no hope and the nature of friendship and the basic crapshoot that is history.

  Read, and compare. The evidence is before you.

  I don’t have the space or the inclination to run all the letters from Roddenberry to me. Nor the space to place before you all of the times Roddenberry in print declared how much over-budget my show had gone…and each time it was thousands of dollars more than the last time, like the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy holding aloft a sheet of paper and declaring, “I hold in my hand the names of 136 card-carrying Communists in the State Department!” and the next time, “The names of 258…” and the next time, “The names of 502….” But here’s a sample.

  Now, originally, I crowed like a madman at this ultimate admission by Roddenberry that, in fact, if I went over budget on “City” it was by a mere, piddling six thousand dollars! In the limited edition of this book, last year, I even went so far as to urge the reader to check out Roddenberry’s own math in his letter to me. I said, “It don’t parse, it don’t add up, it’s just simply incorrect!”

  But on closer examination—and with a determination to be as truthful as the evidence at hand compels—it is clear that Roddenberry’s budget letter presents a thorny ethical problem for me. As I pointed out, the Great Bird’s figures don’t add up. So I should caper and gibber and make hay out of this confession straight from his beak. But ethically, I’d be as bad as Roddenberry or the mooks who cobble up mythology about “City” and me. Because it’s obvious, I think, that it was essentially a typographical error.

  If you add another 6 to that 6000, you get $66,000. $191,000 + 66,000 = $257,000…which is what Roddenberry says the show finally cost. So I didn’t go over budget a stammeringly piddly six grand, but rather sixty-six grand. (And Solow & Justman’s INSIDE STAT TREK roughly confirms that budget.) But the investigative journalist Joel Angel, whose book about Roddenberry I’ve cited previously, sent me a fax after reading the limited edition of this book, and he made reference to his investigations of archives dealing with Star Trek, and he advised me as follows:

  “Though Roddenberry says in his letter to you of 6/20/67 that ‘City’ came in at $257,000, there is no documentation in the archives to substantiate it. In the first year, according to the documents that do exist, no episode cost much more than $192,000. As you will see in Herb Solow’s memo that follows, the approved budget was $185,000.

  “The only budget document I could find for the second year was Coon’s ‘Devil in the Dark,’ which ran a month before ‘City.’ Its projected cost, according to the documents, was $187,057; it came in at $192,863.

  “Some examples of third year budgets: ‘All Our Yesterdays,’ projected cost: $182,282; final cost: $183,532. ‘The Lights of Zetar,’ projected cost: $168,000; final cost: $ 173,369. ‘That Which Survives,’ projected cost: $175,000 and that’s exactly what it came in at.

  “You may also like to know that in the third year, when budgets were cut, Roddenberry approved a raise for himself on at least one script, from the standard $4500 everyone else was getting, to $5500.”

  I think it’s reasonable to assume that “City” ran $66,000 over budget…not $6000 as I trumpeted in the limited edition. But you wanna know something? Who gives a shit?! I was a freelance writer, like hundreds of others who worked Star Trek and every other television series, and it wasn’t our job to board and budget the show! That was a job for Solow and Justman and Bernie Widin and the other staff members whose job it was to oversee such things. It was the responsibility of these “experts” to advise freelancers what the budget was, and ways in which it could be met if we went over the line. And, in truth, shows go over budget all the time, even scripts written by staff writers. It was, and is, a commonplace problem in the Industry, and not one that difficult to overcome case by case. If they wanted to.

  And here’s the capper to Roddenberry’s bleats about the show going $66,000 over budget: it was the aired version, which The Great Bird of the Galaxy kept insisting was his, THAT WENT 66,000 FUCKING DOLLARS OVER BUDGET! Not my poor, miserable, inept, self-indulgent, extravagant first draft! If he couldn’t come up with a script for “City” that came in on budget—after putting all those other “better writers” like Carabatsos, Coon, Fontana and himself to the chore—then how could poor, miserable, inept, etcetera etcetera Ellison be expected to do it!

  I mentioned all this to Alan Brennert, the award-winning writer I’ve cited many times in this book (and to whom this volume is dedicated), and he told me:

  “As a sometime-producer myself, I can assure you: no matter who wrote ‘City,’ it would have cost more than an average episode of Star Trek, simply because of the period setting, New York City in the Great Depression. Sure, there was an old New York street on the Paramount lot, but you have to dress that street with vintage cars; you need to rent period clothes for your principals, your extras; to say nothing of the fact that you were making use of only one of the show’s usual standing sets (the Enterprise bridge), and all the rest—the planet’s surface, Edith’s soup kitchen, the tenement basement, in fact all the Old Earth interiors—had to be constructed. Roddenberry had to’ve known this from the very first treatment, as did the people responsible for budgeting the segment, it didn’t take them by surprise, and both they and NBC gave you the green light to go to teleplay first draft based on the treatment that contained everything I’ve mentioned. Hell, Roddenberry even boasted in his letter to you that he insisted on quality casting, sets, fx, and the like. Why would he commit to such inevitable budget overages if your script wasn’t as good as it was? I find it the rankest sort of cowardice that he then, for the next thirty years, makes this big deal about you not being able to write the story to budget when even he couldn’t! Or wouldn’t.”

  In his letter to me dated 20 June 1967, less than two months after the segment aired, Roddenberry wrote me:

  Dear Harlan: Despite the cuts in sets and cash the final budget figures on “City” were close to $257,000, or about $6,000 over our show budget of $191,000. We might have made it for around $20,000 less if I had not insisted on quality in casting, set constructions, special effects, and so on.

  I’ll tell you why I brought Alan Brennert into it at this point. In 1967—even allowing for what may or may not have been a typo—Roddenberry was saying I was $66,000 over budget. (In fact, what he was saying is that he was that much over budget because, don’t forget, by that time they had “saved” my expensive script, they had “modified” my extravagance, so all they were left to shoot was their own over-budget version.)

  By 1987, in an interview in Video Review (March 1987, page 46) that I cited earlier, but which bears refreshing in your mind, here’s what the great model of perfectibility of humanity was saying:

  VR: I remember a time travel episode with Joan Collins.

  RODDENBERRY: I sent Joan a note the other day. I said, “What has happened to our Salvation Army virgin?”

  VR: That was a great episode.

  RODDENBERRY: It was a fun episode to do.

  VR: Who wrote that one?

  RODDENBERRY: Well, it was a strange thing. Harlan Ellison wrote the first draft of it, but then he wouldn’t change it.

  VR: That’s Harlan Ellison.

  RODDENBERRY: Yeah. He had Scotty dealing drugs and it would have cost $200,000 more than I had to spend for an episode.

  And by 1990, he was telling the world I had been more than $350,000 over budget!

  From $66,000 to $200,000 in just twenty years.

  And by 1990, he was telling the world I had been more than $350,000 ove
r budget! Yeah, and I also had Scotty dealing drugs.

  A few loose ends, interesting digressions, a moment to catch our breath and depressurize so we don’t get “the bends” from all this intense self-justification and naked animosity. Not to mention speaking considerable ill of the dead. (But then, I have also spoken some ill of the living. I’m an Equal Opportunity Opprobriumist.)

  Not everybody ate from the poisoned mushroom of Roddenberry flack. The New York Times Book Review of 23 December 1993 carried a short review of Shatner’s MEMORIES. And in that little notice, the reviewer, Rosemary L. Bray (whose name I never encountered prior to seeing it on that Times page, but whose name raises hosannahs from me every time I now hear it), wrote this:

  “…bits of gossip and a record of happy accidents that led to some of the show’s signature moments. For example, the episode snidely considered the best of any Star Trek season, ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ starring Joan Collins, was a watered-down version of a script by the science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who so hated the entire experience and its result that he refused to associate with any of the staff again.”

  Well, almost right. I still associate with D.C. Fontana and occasionally talk to Johnny Black and even invited Herb Solow and Bobby Justman over to the house when they wanted information for their INSIDE STAR TREK. Leonard Nimoy and George Takei and De Kelley remain friends. We don’t see each other much these days, though Leonard and I, and our wives, went out and had some excellent Indian cuisine about three months before my heart attack, and that’s fairly recently. Walter Koenig and I see and talk to each other all the time.