The City on the Edge of Forever

by Harlan Ellison

  At his best, Gene Roddenberry was an inspiring speaker. He knew how to say all of the right things. He knew how to speak to a crowd or an individual with equal grace. He knew what you wanted to hear and that was what he told you. He made you want to believe again.

  At his worst—well, he was a producer, the American version of a feudal lord. Despite whatever assertions for truth and justice a feudal lord might make, he’s still a lord. He might believe he’s acting justly, but the way the system is constituted encourages acts of abuse, if not by the lord himself, then certainly by those who act in his name. The lord doesn’t have to drive the steamroller; there are lots of peasants working in the fields who will happily do that job for him, without regard to whose home or livelihood they’re rumbling over.

  The real issue here is not “The City on the Edge of Forever.” That’s just a side battle in a much larger war. The real issue is the challenge of Star Trek and the underlying commitment of the storyteller. It is clear from reading this script that Harlan Ellison wanted to do more than just another hour of forgettable television. He wanted to do something powerful and unique.

  As science fiction, Star Trek ranges from pretty bland to pretty silly with occasional forays to pretty godawful. I do not say this as a blanket condemnation. Star Trek is a television show. It is a commercial enterprise (pun intended). When a camel flies, you don’t judge it by the same standards as an eagle. (The good news about Star Trek is that it has raised the standard of acceptable mediocrity. If this is the lowest common denominator, then maybe we’re not doing too badly. The bad news is that so many fans of the show never think to raise their sights any higher.)

  To put it simply, Star Trek is the McDonald’s of science fiction; it’s fastfood storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time and you don’t really have to get involved. It’s all plastic.

  This is why “The City on the Edge of Forever” is such an extraordinary episode. It is the one story in which the problem is never solved; the pain goes on forever. Whether you are reading Harlan’s script or watching the produced version, the impact of Edith Keeler’s death is a devastating blow. Kirk will never be the same. Neither will the audience. Kirk will age a century in a single moment; he can never again have the same adventurous innocence. The last scenes of “The City on the Edge of Forever” are a promise. “Don’t ever relax. Nothing is certain. Not in this universe—and not on this TV show.”

  Unfortunately, it’s a broken promise. Never again did Star Trek startle its audience so brilliantly. When we came back again next week, here was Kirk, no different than before. Edith Keeler was never mentioned. She might never have existed.

  This is the difference between Harlan Ellison’s view of writing and Gene Roddenberry’s. When Harlan tells a story, it’s about an important event in a person’s life; it assaults that person’s sensibilities, shatters him, forces him to reinvent himself, and ultimately leaves him forever transformed. A Harlan Ellison story is a challenge to festering complacency.

  Gene Roddenberry’s view of the job seemed to be much less ambitious: get the Captain laid and clean up the mess before the last commercial. Nobody gets permanently hurt. Our people are the best and the brightest; our people are perfect; they don’t have problems. Everything is wonderful. Everybody is loyal. Nobody ever argues with the Captain.

  The Captain is always right. Everybody stays in his place. And is happy. Forever.

  I guess so, but if our people don’t have any problems to solve, they’re really not very interesting, are they? They certainly aren’t human. They’re just…nice to look at.

  But that’s not storytelling. That’s cowardice. That’s a failure to use the tool. A television show like Star Trek is an opportunity to make a difference—to demonstrate that human beings can rise above adversity, that life as it is lived is not necessarily the way that life has to be, to evoke the best from ourselves and demonstrate that we as a species are committed to challenging ourselves against whatever horrors the universe can throw against us. A television show like Star Trek shouldn’t be polite. It should be unafraid and passionate. It should startle and disturb and leave your view of the universe shaken. It should expand your vision of what’s possible in the world.

  Most of all, a show like Star Trek should be a writer’s dream assignment—it should be a place where a writer can come in and tell that story that he’s always wanted to tell, a place where he can take that thing that sticks in his craw and lay it out for all the world to see. When a writer cares, when he is committed to truth, and passionate about life, then he is willing to wrestle with the devil himself if the result will be a story that makes a difference.

  It’s about keeping the promise.

  Anything less is like having your imagination gummed to death by tribbles.

  If there is only one reason to fault Gene Roddenberry, this is it—his failure to allow Star Trek’s writers to be the very best that they aspired to be.

  The loss is Star Trek’s. And ours.

  DeForest Kelley

  I am certain, I have no doubt: most of you are familiar with Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever.” You should also know that it was my favorite episode, as well as the runaway favorite of Star Trek viewers, as noted in a poll conducted prior to a recent Star Trek marathon.

  I had a feeling about that show. After you’ve done as many scripts as those of us who work steadily in film and tv have done, you can feel the electrical charge in the really top-notch ones. I knew it was going to be a winner, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. It’s one of the few times I wished that I had been playing Kirk’s role.

  In fact, during the filming, I became convinced that McCoy should also fall for the lovely Edith Keeler (played by Joan Collins). I felt it would add to the intrigue, should McCoy as well as Kirk come under the spell of her decency, humanity, and beauty—both inner and outer.

  I suggested it to Joe Pevney, our director. I thought a good spot to indicate the attraction would be when Edith comes to McCoy’s room where he’s recuperating. McCoy, at this point, is up and feeling better. She’s on her way out, just prior to meeting Kirk—moments before her death.

  As she goes to the door to leave, she turns and looks at McCoy and smiles. McCoy meets her look and returns her smile as he says, “You have the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen!” She pauses, looks at him, smiles, exits. Close on McCoy. He’s nuts for her. Pevney shot it. It was never seen.

  Now…about my association with Harlan: I am not sure just when or where I first met this bundle of energy. Was it on The Tomorrow Show antagonizing Tom Snyder, our host, in brilliant verbal battle—or was it on a Star Trek convention stage, taking on the whole audience while projecting humor, charm, intelligence, and yes, always that in-dwelling anger that somehow manages to sneak past its security guard? I am sure when I first saw him. It was in the commissary of the old Desilu Studio during the first season of Star Trek while having lunch with a friend. My attention was drawn to a very animated, rather noisy conversation between a handsome young man and a lovely young girl. I asked my luncheon partner who they were. He glanced over to their table in the middle of the room and said, “Oh, that’s Harlan Ellison, the writer,” and went back to his lunch. I took another look—just in time to see him push a dish of ice cream in his date’s face. I said with disbelief, “Harlan Ellison just pushed a dish of ice cream in her face.” As my friend looked up, the lovely young woman very deliberately shoved her dish of ice cream into his face. My friend said: “That’s Ellison!”

  I later learned that this was a carefully prearranged gag Harlan and the starlet—who was in that week’s episode, and whom Harlan had been dating—had set up to amuse the cast and crew during the lunch break.

  That is Ellison—and this screenplay is Ellison at his best. All of these emotions are pounding throughout this script that he so desperately wanted p
roduced…all of the fire and anger rage as he races through one exciting moment after another—and then, quite suddenly, when we take a deep breath, he delivers some of the most touching, heartbreaking scenes ever to grace the pages of a film script. Harlan’s wonderful, irreverent feel for a scene is rare among writers. This is the story behind the story of “City.”

  It has been a choppy history and, like Harlan himself, a legendary topic of controversy. But at last, apparently, much of the story we did not know is before us. It makes one wonder.

  Read it. You’ll love it!

  Walter Koenig

  At the time Star Trek IV was released, Harlan and I had yet another heated exchange in what has become a vast catalogue of heated exchanges. So indigenous to our mental set and so inevitable in our lives is this mutual contentiousness, that I am convinced the first stooped and knuckle-dragging primates to turn their backs on Tyrannosaurus Rex and start throwing rocks at each other were progenitors of the clans, Ellison and Koenig.

  The Jungian battle presently addressed occurred in 1986 and was fought out over the phone. Expletives of a most incendiary kind were followed by telephone carriage abuse that rivaled the impact suffered by crashed automobiles in traffic school films.

  Histrionics notwithstanding, to this point, the fight was still a thing easily forgotten and dispatched with time. But then Harlan committed the cardinal sin; he took it public, wrote about it—to be sure, not as the basis of a treatise, only in passing—and used my name making sure which of us looked like the good guy. (Well, I guess I can’t blame him for that.)

  It was then I swore I would never ever speak to him again. I swore it and I swore it with nostrils flaring and veins popping, with legs locked and fists raised to Heaven, with epic oaths and pledges made to the devil. I swore it and I swore it and, of course, here I am writing this afterword, my resolve as insubstantial as RediWhipTM, as cotton candy, as dandelion puffs. Why? Because in the end, no matter what the transgression (real or imagined) homage must be paid the artist.

  Harlan Ellison can really piss me off, but when he writes of Edith Keeler’s idealism, Captain Kirk’s pure love and the tragedy of being Trooper, I begin to suspect, against all reason, that I, alone, am ignoble and the sole cause of the endless disputes between us.

  There is in “The City on the Edge of Forever” a profound sensitivity that taps into what is good in man while never letting us forget that we are also by nature a callous, selfish, indifferent breed and that only through monumental struggle and much personal sacrifice can we achieve the best of which we are capable.

  It is a story that is both despairing and uplifting. It makes us ashamed and it makes us proud and because of that, time portals and Guardians and the twenty-third century notwithstanding, it is about life, our life, life in North Hollywood, California and Beacon, New York and Kaukauna, Wisconsin and Culpeper, Virginia.

  The test of any work of art is the uniqueness of its creator’s vision and the universality of his message. Harlan Ellison, the sonofabitch, is a master craftsman who marches to his own drummer but never fails to teach us the steps.

  How often have we read a story and said what a terrific film script could be made from it. The book you hold in your hands is a film script that reads like a terrific story. If you loved the TV episode, you have to love this tome even more. And if you didn’t like the TV episode, you still have to love this work.

  He’s done it again, the mother__!

  Leonard Nimoy

  In our business, that of producing movies and television shows, there is a commonly repeated saying that is, sadly, too often true:

  “Success has many fathers. Failure is an orphan.”

  Clearly “The City on the Edge of Forever” was a resounding success. I remember well the day I read the draft of the script submitted by Harlan Ellison. I found myself holding my breath and turning pages without knowing it, as this wonderful story unfolded. Some Star Trek scripts were actually unreadable. Harlan’s was unstoppable. You couldn’t put it down. No matter what happened later, the unalterable fact is: Harlan Ellison delivered a piece that had creative love pouring out of every page.

  And if you don’t know by now that Harlan Ellison and Gene Roddenberry were engaged in a blood battle over this project ever since its inception, then you have been living on some strange planet devoid of intelligence and communication.

  The fact is that “The City on the Edge of Forever” lives. And I have always been deeply grateful to Harlan for his energy, his passion, his talent and this gift to Star Trek.

  Melinda M. Snodgrass

  Star Trek is almost thirty years old, and there are going to be hundreds, nay thousands, of words devoted to its impact, its genius; words of wisdom from its actors, past and present; and of course hosannas sung to its creator. As I look over this list I notice the one glaring omission—where are the writers?

  Kirk would never have been so charming, nor Picard so turgid—excuse me, wise—without the writers. But writers do more than merely put words in the mouths of the attractive mynah birds. In the field of science fiction they create entire cultures (evidence D.C. Fontana’s remarkable work in creating Spock and Vulcan society), and if they’re any good at their craft they look at the collections of traits and quirks which define “character” on your average television show, and they try to find the guts of these people.

  Guts are messy, and writers root about in them because we’re trying to understand humanity, its condition, and ultimately ourselves. This is terrifying to the pablum of television that demands life be simple and comfortable, and problems which are solvable in 22 or 47 minutes.

  “The City on the Edge of Forever” is not a comfortable script. There is nobility and sacrifice, but there is also pain and imperfection on these pages. No wonder Gene Roddenberry wanted it rewritten.

  I came aboard Star Trek: The Next Generation, and within weeks discovered I was bound in a creative straitjacket. The directive had come down from on high—my people are perfect. Star Fleet is perfect. The Federation is perfect. Only the little fuzzy-wuzzies possess flaws, and our mission is to seek them out and set them straight.

  Most of my Wailing Wall generation (Richard Manning, Hans Beimler, Ira Behr) grew up on Classic Trek. We would look back, and fantasize about how wonderful it must have been on the old show. Imperfect people, passionate scripts…

  And then I read “City,” and realized it had all been a shuck. Gene was already protecting his place in history, although perhaps not as desperately as he would by 1988. Heaven forbid there should be immorality, and out and out dishonesty on the blessed Enterprise. Perish the thought that Spock and Kirk could fight, and yet still remain friends. In Gene’s universe, love is established by people standing around telling each other how much they love each other, and never doing a damn thing about it.

  Please note I am discussing love here, not sex. In addition to the mantras of “Picard is the Captain, keep him strong,” and “My people are perfect,” we often received the directive to “LET THEM FUCK!”

  Read “City” again. This is about love. Not fucking.

  Like Harlan, I came into the insane world of Hollywood through the emotionally sustaining but economically unsatisfying world of books. There, a writer’s words are his coin, and his spirit, and no one touches them. Editors can suggest, but a writer can refuse to accept their guidance; in publishing we’re permitted to starve on our principles. Not so in Hollywood. You’re a high-paid typist, your words are worthless, your vision unimportant. You take the high ground, and they come through with a bulldozer and remove it. If they don’t like a script, they’ll “polish” (piss on) it, and make it their own.

  Being invited to write this afterword meant a great deal to me. I, too, have a script in my closet which was destroyed. Unfortunately the filmed version of “Ensigns of Command” does not bear comparison with even the watered-down film version of “City.” I think that is a testament to the power and passion of Harlan Ellison’s wor
k.

  A final note. For those of you vid kids who bought this book because it was Trek, and TV, and so cool, and who have never read a word of Harlan Ellison’s prose—Go Buy Some and Read It!

  Because ultimately books are better.

  George Takei

  Before reading the manuscript of Harlan’s original “The City on the Edge of Forever,” I thought I would jump through the “time portal” of my own to refresh my memory of the version we had filmed back in 1966.

  I threw the cassette into the VCR and snuggled down with a hot cup of tea. It opened with the familiar soaring music and the good old Enterprise dependably whooshing by—it was all so comfy. Then, the jolt. It wasn’t, however, the action of the first scene where the bridge was being violently shaken by a time disturbance. I had expected that. The shock was in how bloomingly young we all looked back then. Oh, so very young.

  But the action quickly grabbed me away from the warm fuzzies of nostalgia. This was gripping drama. Yes, it was one of our best episodes. Sure, some of it was dated—Uhura’s whispering “Captain, I’m afraid”—a line that could hardly be written for a woman today, though perhaps it could be said by a man now—a measure of the times.

  Another time warp—Joan Collins as the personification of purest virtue. Time—that’s what this story was about—past, present and future deconstructed by Harlan’s fertile imagination into a mind-play fable. Intriguing concept, tight drama and stimulating science fiction.

  So, what was Harlan’s big beef about his script being debased? This was great television. With that, I began reading the original manuscript.