by Edward Gross
PETER GOULD (cocreator, executive producer, Better Call Saul)
Nothing will ever replace the original sixties Star Trek. There was just something a little bit special about that one in terms of the storytelling and the cast, even the way it looked, that I always found very fascinating. The later incarnations in a lot of ways are more sophisticated and you might even say deeper science fiction, but I have to say my heart belongs to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)
It’s been said time and again, but it’s worth repeating: Gene gave us a future where we survived our current immaturity and did so with dignity. We’re not out there empire-building, we’re out there exploring and learning. His vision has changed so many people’s lives, and will continue to do so for a long time.
NICHELLE NICHOLS (actress, “Nyota Uhura”)
The success of the show and the genius of Gene Roddenberry was in taking a message—as did Shakespeare so cleverly—and making it dramatically sound while adhering to the first law of show business—to entertain.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James Tiberius Kirk”)
I’m often asked why Star Trek has had such longevity and why people continue to be interested in the original series and who knows how many more manifestations of Star Trek. I think it has to do with mythology. Star Trek with its hearty band of followers, its heroes, its villains, and its tales of good and evil, provide modern culture with a mythology and also bespeaks of a future and the certainty that the future will exist.
ROXANN DAWSON (actress, “B’Elanna Torres,” Star Trek: Voyager)
I thought of Star Trek as more of a cartoon before I got involved, and then I realized, “My God, it’s almost like these are the myths of our times.” I realized there was all this depth here. It was really shocking to me.
IRA STEVEN BEHR
It was a quintessential sixties show, and the other thing that was great about it—which, unfortunately, has more or less disappeared off of the cultural landscape—is the fact that as far as we were concerned, it was our show, my sister and I. We found it, no one told us to watch it, no one said it was good, no one said it was must-see TV. There was no hype, there was no mass culture telling you that if you wanted to be a card-carrying member of the hip mass culture you have to watch it. So, that made it so special. It’s sad to have that kind of disappear. It’s much harder nowadays to own pop culture, because that ground has been covered by the hype machine.
JEROME BIXBY (writer, Star Trek)
Star Trek was a great vehicle for advancing social critique via paraphrase and allegory. You showed how the world sucks by showing another world so occupied. Also, for playing with serious scientific possibilities. No other show has come so close to the elbow room of literary science fiction. Those were the days.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I think that all serious writing is valuable. It is the duty of the writer to speculate on things of importance to us, and to give us new insights into ourselves, who we are, what our society is, what its pitfalls are—what its joys truly should be. In that sense I think Star Trek was valuable, and that all serious and entertaining writing is valuable.
HERBERT F. SOLOW (executive in charge of production, Star Trek)
I maintain all along that if it wasn’t for Gene being a genius at self-promotion and having a massive ego about his work and about Star Trek, it would have died. It would never have come back to life in syndication, it never would have made other series, other movies. It would have faded away.
DAVID WEDDLE (producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
It’s now the same amount of time talking to someone about the original Star Trek as it was somebody in the sixties talking to Buster Keaton about making silent movies and working with Fatty Arbuckle.
J. J. ABRAMS (producer, Star Trek Beyond)
I’m honored to have been the temporary captain of the show that Roddenberry built. I only hope that my involvement helped bring more people into this universe, so lovingly and wonderfully drawn by its creator.
DIANA MULDAUR (actress, Star Trek, “Return to Tomorrow”)
I just wish we could be around forever and ever, so we can see how long it lasts.
UNCAGED
“IT’S LIKE NOTHING WE’VE ENCOUNTERED BEFORE.”
The year is 1966. Fans at the World Science Fiction Convention, Tricon, in Cleveland, Ohio, are about to get their first glimpse of “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot for the new NBC science-fiction series Star Trek. Introduced by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, who had already given attendees a taste of the show via elaborate costumes modeled at the convention, the episode unspooled alongside the pilot for Irwin Allen’s The Time Tunnel. Whereas Allen’s was derided, Roddenberry’s was greeted by thunderous applause from the 850 assembled fans.
Much like rock fans demanding an encore at a concert, Roddenberry dutifully complied and screened the first pilot, “The Cage,” as well that weekend to an equally rapturous response. It would be a first look at the television series that would entrance, delight, and obsess fans for the next fifty years.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)
I was nervous, particularly when I saw the Tricon audience watching other films that were shown before, and booing, and stomping, and laughing at things. I walked out there thinking, “They’re finally going to show this one.” Then I watched how they accepted this show. I said to myself, “Yes, there are people, if we go this way and try these things, who are going to appreciate them.” I realized then that we would have fans of some sort, and of course, where that went is insanity.
JERRY SOHL (writer, “The Corbomite Maneuver”)
There was what felt like three thousand people watching a new Irwin Allen show, and as soon as they saw his name they started booing. They just booed his name. Then when Gene Roddenberry showed Star Trek, they really loved that. I was really surprised. When Gene and I sat up at the podium answering questions, I was introduced as the “head writer” of Star Trek, which I wasn’t. I just went along with it, because I thought it would be good politics. And it was. It was fun.
This would be the first, but far from the last, taste Gene Roddenberry would get of fan adulation for his groundbreaking series. Born Eugene Wesley Roddenberry on August 19, 1921, the tall but often shabbily dressed Texan had already lived a remarkable life by the time he arrived in Los Angeles with his then wife, Eileen Anita Rexroat, with whom he would have two daughters and on whom he would have an extramarital affair with Majel Barrett before they would eventually be married.
CHRISTOPHER KNOPF (writer, producer)
Eileen Roddenberry was a very quiet woman, totally different from Majel Barrett. She was very happy being a cop’s wife. Hollywood was very hard for her to handle; he had a lot of social commitments, and she wasn’t very comfortable with that at all. He had these two daughters, and when they broke up it was very bitter. She went after him financially and won big-time. The two daughters took their mother’s side, and I think Gene had virtually no relationship with them. Then Majel and Gene had a son, they called him Rod, who is a really nice guy.
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
I have very fond memories of Christmas and dinners with the whole family there. Both my grandfathers had passed before I was born, so both grandmothers, my father’s sister, my half sisters, and their two children all having Christmas dinners and stuff like that. None of the history was there, so I got introduced to it after my father passed away because the ex-wife came around. One of my father’s daughters sued the family alongside the ex-wife and I was very upset with that.
The other daughter didn’t, she sided with us and I was kind of confused and distraught. I have sympathy for them, because they were around during the original series. My father even said in one of his interviews that he was focused so much on the original series, he was never there, so I could see why they felt wronged by him. And he had an affair with my mother
for ten years before they got married. So, I can’t say I feel what they feel, but I can understand how they would feel betrayed.
ANDE RICHARDSON (Desilu secretary, assistant to Gene L. Coon)
I met Eileen. She wasn’t all that friendly. She wasn’t warm and open to other people. She was quite elitist. People were beneath her, especially after Gene was really doing well. So that was the impression. That wasn’t Gene Roddenberry. Gene was still a pretty cool guy. I remember I came back from Mexico with a whole bunch of joints ready-rolled and he was thrilled. [An assistant] used to sit there at the desk and empty all the tobacco out of the cigarettes and then stuff the pot into the empty cigarette.
A former pilot and second lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps and copilot of a B-17 Flying Fortress during World War II, Roddenberry had made the move from military to civilian aviator and narrowly survived the crash of Pan Am Flight 121 in the Syrian desert that he was flying from Calcutta. Joining the Los Angeles Police Department in February 1949, Roddenberry found himself writing speeches for Chief William H. Parker as well as articles for the LAPD newsletter, The Beat.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I was a policeman and learned to write as a speechwriter for Parker. I learned to write long before that, though, with the idea that if you write eight hundred words a day, soon you will be a writer. It took me eight years or so. Once I quit Pan American as a pilot, it seemed to me that, yes, I’m a writer, whether people believe that or not.
Although I suppose you could have called me a science-fiction fan, this certainly was not the alpha-omega of my reading. I think all writers are omnivorous in their reading. I know few writers that I respect that read only science fiction. As a result, when I decided to become a writer, I decided to become a writer, not just a science-fiction writer. But I’ve loved science fiction since I was a child, and I suppose most of the ideas were a combination of things I had read and heard about, although I have a smattering of knowledge in the scientific field. I had been an airline pilot, so I suppose that helped.
Not content to remain a policeman the rest of his life, Roddenberry began to contribute ideas to Dragnet producer and star Jack Webb, who became a fast friend as well as a rival for the affections of actress Majel Lee Hudec, later Majel Barrett Roddenberry.
FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)
Jack Webb, who was a great guy, dated Majel Barrett at the same time as Gene. Gene, who was friends with Webb since he had been a cop—and Webb played a cop—told me years later that Majel was on a date with Jack when Gene sent flowers to the table with a card.
YVONNE CRAIG (actress, “Whom Gods Destroy”)
Majel and I lived at The Studio Club because when I first came out to Hollywood I didn’t have a place to live. It was like the Y for show-business people. I hadn’t seen her for years, and when I saw her at a party for the twentieth anniversary of Star Trek, I said, “Majel Barrett, how are you?” And she said it was “Majel Roddenberry,” and I said, “Oh, I didn’t know that, I don’t keep up with Hollywood gossip.” I didn’t know that she was having an affair with him while he was still married to his wife. And she said, “It is not gossip!” And I thought, “God, what a crab she turned out to be.”
Hired as a consultant to Mr. District Attorney, Roddenberry sold his first script in 1954. Subsequently, he had scripts produced for such series as Goodyear Theatre, The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Four Star Playhouse, Highway Patrol, Dr. Kildare, and Naked City, among others.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I remember myself as an asthmatic child, having great difficulties at seven, eight, and nine years old, falling totally in love with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle and dreaming of being him and having his strength to leap into trees and throw mighty lions to the ground. It was a part of my growing up. It was a lovely dream. It carried me through many a hacking and coughing and sneezing attack.
Then there was a boy in my class who life had treated badly. He limped, he wheezed. I don’t know all the things that were wrong with him, but he was a charming, lovely, intelligent person. He, because of being unable to get on the athletic fields and do many of the things that others were able to do, had sort of gone into his own world of fantasy and science fiction. He had been collecting the wonderful old Amazing and Astounding magazines from those great old days, and he introduced me to science fiction. I started to read them and then discovered in our neighborhood, living above a garage, was an ex-con who had come into science fiction when he was in prison. He introduced me to John Carter and those wonderful Burroughs things. By the time I was twelve or thirteen I had been very much into the whole science-fiction field.
Resigning from the police force in 1956, Roddenberry continued to write for television and sold several pilots as well. Later, he provided a number of scripts to a man who would become a good friend, Sam Rolfe, for Have Gun—Will Travel, the brilliant and groundbreaking TV western starring Richard Boone. In that show several familiar Star Trek-ian tropes would be introduced, including a character named Robert April. Roddenberry also won a Writers Guild of America Award for his episode “Helen of Abajinian.” It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Have Gun—Will Travel in the formative, progressive thoughts of Gene Roddenberry.
CHRISTOPHER KNOPF
Sam Rolfe is really the one who gave him his big shot, on Have Gun—Will Travel. That’s what put him up and made people say “Whoa, this guy can do something.”
In the series, Boone plays Paladin, an erudite bon vivant in San Francisco who supports himself from bounty-hunter work, usually by Paladin discovering their plight through the daily newspaper with the help of his valet, Hey Boy, and sending them his iconic business card by mail or telegraph. Once on his way, the man in black is as skilled with a gun or in a brawl as he is at quoting Shakespeare or Dickens. More important, Have Gun was a morality play in which nothing was usually as it appeared (a rare western that depicted Native Americans sympathetically and not as outright villains), and Paladin often took the side of the underdog, even if it turned out they were not the ones paying his rather exorbitant fee. Paladin had the passion of Kirk, the intelligence of Spock, and the beating, bleeding heart of McCoy.
DOUG DREXLER (scenic artist, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
Paladin is Kirk, Spock, and McCoy fused into one. Gene split Paladin up to make those three guys. Look at Paladin, he’s got all the elements of Spock, he knows about everything. He’s a bon vivant, he’s a humanitarian, and he’s a man of action—he’s all that stuff.
Two of my all-time favorite Have Guns were Roddenberry episodes. One was called “The Great Mojave Chase.” Paladin is at the hotel and he’s sitting reading the newspaper with a friend of his who’s a cavalry colonel, and this guy is stinking drunk. He’s going on and on about how he just got off this awful assignment and he’s glad it’s over with. The army decided to try out camels instead of horses. Now, this is true. Roddenberry, I’m sure, looked at the books and said, “Ah, how can I get Paladin on a camel?” And while he’s going on and on about how bad they smell and they have a bad attitude and stuff, Paladin’s reading the newspaper and there’s the voice-over of him reading about the great Mojave chase. And he gets the idea right then and there to get into the race, but with a camel. He knows he can kick everybody’s butt. And just as he is making this realization, the cavalry colonel says, “Who the hell would want one of those stinking things anyway?” And he goes, “I don’t know. Could be your best friend.” And he goes out and he gets the camel. It is so unique and unusual. It has that gimmick that makes it so special.
And then there was another one that was Roddenberry exercising his love of men romancing women. It was called “Maggie O’Bannion.” He ends up getting robbed by some highwaymen. They take his clothes, they take his horse, they take everything. He comes across this house where there is a woman who has a farm. She’ll help him, but he has to do chores around the house like cook and clean. She falls in love with him because he knows how to make amazing di
shes and stuff like that. She is very smart, though. She takes his gun hand and goes, “How did you get a callus like this on your thumb?” There’s this wonderful scene where he brings her food and she wants to have nothing to do with him. And he gets into a conversation about Shelley and Shakespeare and he picks up a book and quotes from it. It’s so wonderful.
Later on, there’s a scene that’s right out of “The Cage.” Paladin goes out riding on the horse and she is following him. He stops and waits for her. They argue and she goes to smack him and he grabs her hand and before you know it, they’re not making out like Kirk would with someone, but they basically sit down under the tree together and she’s leaning against him. It’s the sweetest moment. It’s so Star Trek.
At the very end of the show two women are saying good-bye to him and it’s just like it was almost “I’ll watch the stars.” And instead of beaming out, he rides off as the two girls are looking at him and she says, “I’ll never find help like that again.” And the other one goes, “Never find help like that again. Cook, clean, fight. I get chills just thinking about it.” It’s perfect Roddenberry.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Paladin was as close to being SF as you could get. Richard Boone was a marvelous person as actors go.
DEBORAH ARAKELIAN (assistant to Harve Bennett and Robert Sallin)
I always suspected he had a thing about Armenian girls because when I met him he said, “When I was a cop and I was working in Hollywood, I got called out on a loud party call.” And so he and his partner show up and it’s a full-out kef. Big Armenian party; belly dancers, hookahs, the whole nine yards. These guys say, “Hey, come on in. Join us.” His partner says, “No.” Gene says, “I’m down.” Gene stayed and partied with them all night long. He went home and, according to Gene, he wrote the very first thing he’d ever written, “Helen of Abajinian,” which he later sold to Have Gun—Will Travel. I think he had a general like of little dark swarthy women. He would have loved the Kardashians.
