The City on the Edge of Forever

by Harlan Ellison

  As far as Roddenberry’s taking credit for the rewrite, Larson offers, “Gene Coon was there…”

  Yeah, and pandas will fly out of Glen Larson’s ass! Every sentence of that crap is laughable, and Larson knows it. Even if the late Gene Coon said all that—and I doubt that it ever happened—then he was also full of shit. Because, as everyone in Hollywood knows (but apparently the gullible Messrs. Gross and Altman don’t), the writer has the option which version of the script to submit. The work is blind-judged by many levels of unidentified (but color-coded) writers, and the aired version of the show is not only never seen, it’s never considered. I submitted the version of “City” that you will read in this book. Exactly as you find it here. Even if Roddenberry, or Coon, or any one of the half dozen or so others who’ve claimed credit for my work, had “saved my ass” as they were so fond of saying, it wouldn’t have meant didly-squat in terms of winning a WGAw award, because the one and only script that was ever submitted, the one and only script that made it through all those levels of judges, the one and only script that beat out every other script in the Dramatic Category…was mine. All mine. The one this idiot Larson doesn’t seem to understand was the one that was judged. Not some half-assed rewrite by Coon or some quarter-assed re-rewrite by Roddenberry, or anyone else. So here’s the guy we fondly refer to in Hollywood as “Glen Larceny” playing his violin and breaking our hearts with this tragic tale of the goodhearted producer who bought karma points by not stealing script credit the way Larson did regularly on his shows. So here is just the first of many such bullshit stories you will encounter in this introductory essay, in which poor dumb Ellison can’t find his own ass in a windstorm, but every other cosmically talented tv hack who never won an award on his own, bleats about how he “saved” my wretched script from the clutches of my Olympian ineptitude.

  In fact, there’s yet another claimant, in that same section of Gross and Altman’s unsubstantiated fantasy. Listen to this flight of overweening ego, that makes my hubris seem like virginal innocence.

  Director Joseph Pevney is someone who doesn’t agree with Ellison’s view of his own script. “This was the end of the first season,” he says. Harlan was very happy to get his story on Star Trek. He was down on the set thanking me. It’s great that Gene rewrote it, though, because Harlan had no sense of theater…It was a well conceived and written show. But in the original script’s dramatic moments, it missed badly. “It was a motion picture,” he continues. “I treated it as a movie…”

  Blah blah blah. All righty, now. Here we are only a few pages into this little historical diatribe, and already we’ve got three literary birth-mothers for my script. (And don’t forget: you can read the script, in its entirety, right after this essay. In fact, just so you can make your own decisions about how “the dramatic moments missed badly,” why not skip right over to “City” itself and try on the original, so when you come back here, you’ll know whether guys like Pevney—who must have been talking to my astral projection on the set of “City” because I never went near the set, never thanked Pevney, never set foot back on Star Trek territory after they got done rewriting me—whether guys like Pevney and Larson and others you will soon meet in these pages, are stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. Gee, folks, I wish I had a sense of theater. Just even a teensy sense of theatuh.)

  [2] Make that four. I picked up another one in 1986 for my Twilight Zone script, “Paladin of the Lost Hour.” It should be noted that the superlative scenarist Christopher Knopf also won three times, after this was published. I’m the only writer in the now-nearly-50-year history of the WGAw awards, to win this prestigious honor four times for solo work. I make a big deal point of mentioning this, not so much to pound my chest, as to establish right at the outset that I have solid credentials for asserting that I know what the fuck I’m doing when I write a script.

  [3] In fact, though Roddenberry claimed that phrase as original with him—as the shorthand log-line he had dreamed up to penetrate the regimented thinking of network executives who ideate only in clone images of previous tv “successes”—I learned some years later that the phrase had been spoken off-the-top-of-the-head by Samuel Anthony Peeples at a dinner party where Roddenberry announced he was going in to see the NBC programmers. Sam, who also came up with the phrase “to boldly go” (and, yes, I cringe every time I hear that split infinitive), was brought in to save Star Trek the first time, when Roddenberry’s windy script of “The Cage” was rejected by the network. Sam then wrote “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the teleplay that made NBC smile and got Roddenberry on the air. I have no idea if this particular nugget of truth has ever been published in the miles-high stack of books, pamphlets, fanzines, magazines, and assorted incunabula of the Trek industry. I’d tend to doubt it. Anything that casts shadow on the papal infallibility of the Great Bird of the Galaxy tends to get lost very fast. I’ll talk more about that a little later, but for the nonce, let it suffice that Peeple’s authorship of the phrase was conveyed to me not once, or twice, but on three separate occasions by three different people who were also seated at that dinner table on that evening. For his part, Sam Peeples is a fine and honorable gentlemen, and his loyalty to those who have employed him is legendary. Sam remains, if not precisely silent on the point, sedulously circumspect. I mention it, more than a trifle grimly, as a side-note to contentions I will assert later as to Gene’s need to abscond with others’ ideas and words, and to convince himself in very short order that they sprang fullblown from his own well of genius.

  [4] Writers, no less than sculptors, ballerinas, workers in origami, have a way of deluding themselves as to the value of their work. To quote John Steinbeck: “The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.”

  Writers, no less than professional race car drivers, scientists experimenting at the furthest edges of their specialty, strippers, all believe what they’re doing is sensational. When it doesn’t go down as sweetly as they think it should, they delude themselves that the work was great, just great, absolutely great; and the boneheaded masses (or critics) (or fans) are simply not noble enough to appreciate the grandeur of their creation.

  I wrote, back in 1976, “I handed in my script to rave comments by Gene, Dorothy Fontana…and the then-story editor, John D.F. Black.” I wrote that in 1976, but all through this essay you will find examples of statements from Roddenberry, Coon, Pevney, and any passerby who cared to dump a load of rat-puke on my abilities, attesting to how impossible the script was.

  But I wrote that my submission was greeted by raves. Am I deluding myself? Am I trying to save face by saying everyone else is misremembering, lying, altering the past to protect the memory of Roddenberry? Am I simply a writer who wrote a bad script and can’t admit it?

  Well, in 1976 I never contemplated writing this book. In 1976 none of the Star Trek memorabilia books had come out. In 1976 none of the cast members or the Paramount staff, or those who worked on Star Trek had spoken out. And in 1976 I had no access to the Star Trek archive of papers—letters, memos, schedules, and on and on—housed at UCLA’s Theatre Arts/Media Library (University Reference Library, 2nd floor).

  But it is 1996 as I write this, and all of those sources have been revealed. I wrote in 1976 that I got rave reviews. At that time I was just saying it. Now I have the proof.

  Here are some examples:

  Robert H. Justman was the Co-Producer of Star Trek. He is co-author with Desilu-Paramount’s Executive in Charge of Production for Star Trek, Herbert F. Solow, of the large recently-published volume INSIDE STAR TREK: The Real Story (Pocket Books, 1976). When I handed in the script he wrote a memo that said:

  “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.” (INSIDE STAR TREK, page 278)

  William Shatner: “‘City’ i
s my favorite of the original Star Trek series because of the fact that it is a beautiful love story, well told.” (Direct quote, 9/28/91)

  Oh, screw it! I don’t have to justify the quality of the goddam script in footnotes! Go read the damned thing and make up your own mind. But remember, we go in very short order from “this is a brilliant script” to “we can’t shoot this damned thing.”

  But Justman—with whom I worked on The Outer Limits prior to Star Trek—on page 277 of the same book describes how we had a similar problem of budgeting a script I had written for The Outer Limits, and how easily we solved it, how amenable I was to suggestions from the very same Justman who later wrote so many memos saying “we can’t shoot this, it’s too expensive.”

  I had written “Demon with a Glass Hand” as a cross-country chase. The Outer Limits had the stingiest budget ABC could come up with. Bobby Justman took me one lunchtime to a magnificent building in downtown L.A. called the Bradbury Building. He asked if there was any way I could rewrite the script to be shot there, permitting the production company a way of producing the show within the budget.

  Were I the intractable, primadonna pinhead Roddenberry and these other clowns have tried to paint me, I doubt seriously that I would have had the acumen to rethink “Demon” on the spot, and say to Justman, “A chase can be linear…horizontally…or vertically! If I postulate a force bubble around the building, invisible but impenetrable, then when the protagonist is lured to the building, and trapped inside, the chase becomes vertical!” And we shot it, and it won a Writers Guild award, and no one claimed they’d rewritten me, to save my ass.

  Same Justman. Same situation.

  If I had written it too expensive, if I had written it over budget, why were all these wise heads, all these sage intellects incapable of doing what Justman had done: treat me like a professional, stop running around like hysterical loonies throwing their hands in the air screaming “it’s too expensive!” and just tell me where it needed to be brought back into budget.

  I did it with the use of McCoy (Dorothy Fontana’s suggestion) when it was considered by Roddenberry to be imprudent that there could be a corrupt officer on board the Enterprise. Oh, yeah, it was D.C. who suggested McCoy replace Beckwith. Not Coon. Not Roddenberry. Not Justman. Not Solow. It was the woman whose Afterword on page 257 of this book told me thirty-year-old secrets that astonished me. (But it was not she who altered the interesting, sensible way in which McCoy is infected—see one of the revisions that follows the script—and had him make an asshole of himself by injecting himself with his own hypodermic. Caramba!)

  I wrote to order. If I’d written it too expensive, just sit down with me and explain why. There were set and cast and budget considerations of which I (as well as most other writers) was unaware. One would have had to be on staff to know such things.

  But if Justman, on page 277 of his book relates how professionally I behaved, turning my own script inside out without a murmur, then why could not such a situation have reprised itself on Star Trek? Or is it possible the show was a maelstrom of petty politics, with Roddenberry constantly having to create a “boogieman” threatening us—Paramount or NBC or censors or some Nameless Menace—with petty bickering and egos even larger than mine having to be succored? Is it possible the real reason that script “needed” to be overhauled has yet to be revealed in this essay? Yeah, fer sure, it’s possible.

  [5] It was “Knife in the Darkness” for the 90-minute CBS western series, Cimarron Strip, created by that same Christopher Knopf I mentioned a minute ago, starring Stuart Whitman. (Aired on Thursday 25 January 1968.)

  [6] That was the state of the art in 1975. These days, with the new computer technology and the universal use of SteadicamTM and its other refinements, the term HAND-HELD is used. I’ve made that change from the original script. But I’ve retained the name “Arriflex” in the body-copy of the stage directions, just for old times’ sake.

  [7] Which was the ultimate irony. When Gene insisted that I “put the ship in jeopardy,” a perennial pain-in-the-plot that Roddenberry adored, and one he shoehorned into almost every script (and then blamed on NBC, which was bullshit), I resisted like a man in chains. But I did it, finally, because Roddenberry said if I didn’t do it, he would. So I wrote the space pirate element—and when you read the script, notice that Mr. Spendthrift Ellison, who wrote too expensive a script, did it in a way that cost nothing, shot as it would have been in one already-standing set—and it was the first thing NBC demanded be dropped.

  [8] When I wrote those lines in August of 1995, INSIDE STAR TREK: The Real Story by Solow and Justman (studio executive on Trek and co-producer, respectively) had not yet been published by Pocket Books. But now it has, and my assertions are verified that Roddenberry was a pathological credit-grabber, a man who made up his past and his credits to aggrandize himself, a guy who could not bear to admit that no matter how he and others fiddled with it, that “City” was the best of the original series, and that it was I, not he, who conceived the story that made it so memorable.

  Throughout the Solow-Justman book—filled with authentication that is irrefutable—those two men who worked closest with Gene during the years of the original pilot and then the series state again and again that Roddenberry was a glory-hog, taking credit for everyone else’s contributions to the show. Not once or twice, do they state that position, in clear and forceful language, but again and again.

  And that is why the evidence of Roddenberry’s need to claim “City” credit is so blatant. As, for instance, the following:

  In a letter to me from Roddenberry dated June 20, 1967, Gene wrote: “Next, never outside this office and particularly nowhere in S.F. or television circles have I ever mentioned that the script was anything but entirely yours.”

  In the March 1987 issue of Video Review magazine, in a candid interview with Gene, we find the following, referring to “City”:

  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.

  VR: That’s like E.T. wearing a coke spoon.

  RODDENBERRY: When I called these things to Harlan’s attention, he said, “You’ve sold out, haven’t you?” I said, “No, I haven’t sold out. I only have $180,000 to spend on an episode.” So I rewrote the episode. And his original won a Writers Guild award, but my rewrite won the Nebula award for actually being filmed.

  So much for Roddenberry never telling anyone outside the office that the script had been written by anyone but me.

  (And though I deal with it elsewhere in this essay, let me point out that Gene didn’t do the rewrite, he only fiddled with it after it had been through three other hands. Let me also point out, yet again, for the nine millionth fucking time, that nowhere in my teleplay does Scotty even appear, much less deal drugs. Read the script, it’s here, in your hands; read it and see if Roddenberry wasn’t a glory-hog who had to invent idiot conversations about “selling out” so he could look like the Last Model of Rectitude in the Universe, who had to keep repeating the “Scotty sold drugs” delusion, who had to keep insisting how much over budget my show would have been…rather than admitting that the high-water mark of his claim to fame was conceived not by him, but by someone else.)

  The evidence of Roddenberry’s duplicity and determination to convince the gullible that his giant brain had been capable of the originality and depth of passion that were the hallmarks of “City”—even those snatches of originality and passion that remained after everyone had a whack at it—exists in brief and clarity.

  Elsewhere in this essay (if you’ve been paying attention) you read Roddenberry’s March 1987 Video Review interview, with its assertio
ns that mine was a deeply flawed script, and that one of my dumbest goofs was having Scotty sell drugs.

  Well, in the May 1987 Video Review—just two issues later—that same award-winning Alan Brennert I’ve mentioned before, wrote a letter. (See Video Review art.)

  And on 25 March 1987 Brennert received a letter from Gene Roddenberry. (See Roddenberry letter.)

  I urge you to riffle back through and up ahead in this long self-defense, and log in the number of times Roddenberry repeated these canards, though he admitted he was wrong in the Brennert letter. When it served his ego, he always conveniently “misremembered”—and most times he was called on it by someone in an audience or in print. But it didn’t stop the myth from continuing in fandom.

  As for that miserable lie he told Video Review about how I “only wrote the first draft,” well, you’ll find several sections of later rewrites off my second and third drafts, published right here in these pages. As they say in Latin, res ipsa loquitur, “the matter speaks for itself,” which makes Roddenberry’s endless repetitions of the lie, as they say in Latin, res judicata, “a matter already settled.”

  Yet…

  I am driven, compelled, maddened, to bombard you with the evidence, so no smallest rat-hole is left through which a rabid apologist for the way Roddenberry dealt with me—as he did so many others—can scuttle, to cobble up some rationalization for his remarks. To that end, here is an inventory sheet from the previously-noted UCLA archive of Roddenberry’s papers.

  Kindly note how many different versions of the script, as written by Harlan Ellison, appear in this log.

  “Harlan Ellison wrote the first draft of it, but then he wouldn’t change it.”

  Speak no ill of the dead. But it seems the dead, in this case, goes right on speaking, repeating the same lies enjoyed in his life.