by Edward Gross
GENE RODDENBERRY
I can remember at the beginning of television when many of us were working as screenwriters on even the bad shows that we started with, like Mr. District Attorney, we would always insert in our scripts that to be of a different color or a different creed does not make you bad. Lessons of tolerance and things like that. You had to do it very carefully, the network didn’t want any preaching in it, but I think these things had an effect. I don’t think these things could play every night in Mississippi and places like that around the country and not have an effect on the society and on the people growing up. I think TV has done some good. I just think it’s a damn shame that we’ve had to do it as saboteurs and not with the support of the studios and the networks.
JOSEPH STEFANO (creator/producer, The Outer Limits)
Dealing with the television network is like dealing with a two-headed monster. On one hand, they want high ratings, and on the other, there are people who want to safeguard the hearts and minds of viewers, and they come from the same source. So one half of the network is telling you to cut this or that out, and the other half tells you to give them more. I don’t think it’s as big a problem as it was, because they’ve determined a time when sex and violence should be on TV. We had very little sex in The Outer Limits, and very little violence except in the scary sense, not violence as in shooting eight people.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, The Outer Limits, Star Trek)
In doing The Outer Limits, what the network wanted was not necessarily an intelligent science fiction show. What they wanted was a science fiction show that would return a lot of numbers. Their theory was that to do that you had to have a monster in every show. If you’re an intelligent person and you like monsters, no, it wasn’t a problem keeping science fiction on the air. But if you’re an intelligent person and you don’t think it should be monsters to do an intelligent show, yes, it was difficult.
Somewhat of the same attitude was found in the early days of Star Trek when the network suggested they wanted to open with an episode called “The Man Trap,” because it had a monster. We felt that it wasn’t a very good show compared to some of the others we had already made. We lost the battle, they won the battle, and “Man Trap” was aired first.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Our plan all along was to present drama. Due to postproduction difficulties, our opening show, including a “monster,” was the only one available for air. Our entire concept is and has always been to demonstrate that science fiction is a much broader and more dramatic field of literature than is generally recognized by the public.
JERRY SOHL
There was a lack of true science fiction on television at the time. Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, and myself got together and formed what we called The Green Hand. We were going to knock television dead by doing really responsible science fiction. Certainly the medium could stand better material. We wanted script and quality control. We wanted to breathe something new into the shows, bring the medium up to date and in step with what was happening in SF at the time. We thought at least half of prime time should be devoted to SF and fantasy. We offered a number of scenarios and met with the different networks who said they loved the concepts.
In the end, though, they didn’t buy any of the series we offered. It was too bad for the networks, too bad for The Green Hand, and too bad for the viewing public. The corporation was dissolved and the four of us went our separate ways. But the ironic thing is that all of our series premises eventually became TV shows in one form or another.
In 1963, Roddenberry had his first pilot produced by MGM for NBC, the short-lived series The Lieutenant. Many faces familiar to Star Trek fans would appear in The Lieutenant, ranging from lead actor Gary Lockwood, playing Marine Corps Second Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice; to Majel Barrett, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and, most memorably, Leonard Nimoy. All of them had been cast by Joe D’Agosta, who would rejoin Roddenberry for Star Trek. The character of Robert April (designated as the first captain of the Enterprise in Roddenberry’s original concept description of the series) would also once again make an appearance in the final episode of the Star Trek animated series.
The Lieutenant was a Marine Corps drama set and shot at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, thanks to the cooperation of the military. Until they pulled their support late in the run, when Roddenberry butted heads with both the military and the network, insisting on producing an episode about racial prejudice in the military, “To Set It Right,” which featured a young Dennis Hopper.
MARC CUSHMAN (author, These Are the Voyages)
NBC didn’t want to air it; the Marines, who had been cooperating with the show, didn’t want them to air it; and the Pentagon even said, “If you air this episode, we’re not going to let you film down on our bases anymore. We’re not going to give you free tanks and trucks and soldiers and uniforms,” and all of the things that made The Lieutenant work. Yet he was determined to put it through; he went to the NAACP and forced them to put the heat on the network to air that episode. The week after that episode aired, NBC canceled The Lieutenant. So his relationship with NBC was bad at the get-go.
JOHN D. F. BLACK (executive story consultant/associate producer, Star Trek)
The network didn’t like him, nobody liked him, and the writers, in particular, didn’t like him because when he had done The Lieutenant he had rewritten everyone on that show just like he had done with us on Star Trek. GR would sit in his chair and look through a writer. I don’t know if you’ve ever had anyone look through you. It’s very disconcerting and a great many of the writers had that feeling.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Writers for the television audience do the same thing as the great sculptors and painters and composers do. When you do say to the world, “Hey, these are things as I see it! These are my comments. This is how I see the world,” you do this with utter selfishness—which is what an artist should always do. All writers should be selfish and say, “This is the way I see it,” and under the voice should say, “Screw you! If you want yours, you can do it, too.”
After The Lieutenant’s cancellation at the conclusion of its first and only season, Roddenberry’s studio on that series, MGM, turned down his pitch for a new series called Star Trek. However, his agents at Ashley-Famous quickly set it up at Desilu Studios, which was looking to produce more provocative television dramas after years of unprecedented success in comedy. Headed up by former CBS executive Oscar Katz, Desilu signed Roddenberry to a three-year development deal. After being rebuffed by CBS, which already had Lost in Space in development, Roddenberry and the Desilu team set up their pilot at NBC, and “The Cage” (originally entitled “The Menagerie,” which would become the title of the two-part first season episode that would reuse footage from this first pilot) was born.
OSCAR KATZ (vice-president of programs, Desilu)
If I had to pick the three people who had the most to do with getting Star Trek into reality, they would be Gene Roddenberry, myself, and an agent at Ashley named Alden Schwimmer. I had problems signing creative people, getting them to pitch projects. Schwimmer said, “Let’s get a couple of guys and make overall deals with them. Let’s not say, ‘I like this property, I don’t like this property.’ Let’s approach them and say, ‘We’d like you to come to Desilu and would like you to make Desilu your home. The way we’d like to do it, don’t tell us your properties. We’ll make a deal for three properties to be determined.’” Roddenberry is the guy he recommended.
I started working for Desilu in April of ’64 and began to develop programs. The first year I did three or four pilots, which means that I might have had fifteen or twenty projects in earlier stages of development, from which the four were selected. They had to be sold to a network in order to get financing. I think all four sailed, but it was hard to attract creative people. Desilu had a reputation for heavy overhead charges, etc. The second year, I did five pilots and of the five, three got sold, w
hich is a pretty good batting average. Especially when you consider that two of them were Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Before Star Trek I had written pilots that were produced by other people, and none of them sold. I began to see that to create a program idea and write a script simply wasn’t enough. The story is not “told” until it’s on celluloid. Telling that final story involved sound, music, casting, costumes, sets, and all the things that a producer is responsible for. Therefore it became apparent to me that if you want the film to reflect accurately what you felt when you wrote the script, then you have to produce it, too. This is why television writers tend to become producers.
OSCAR KATZ
The studio [Desilu] made money two ways. One, by shows which they owned, such as I Love Lucy and The Untouchables. The second way was as a rental studio. For instance, Bing Crosby Productions shot all their stuff there, as did Danny Thomas and Sheldon Leonard. Desilu owned three lots, and the studio probably made money just by having real estate, which was going up in value while they were sitting there. But at the time, the number of shows they owned was declining. Desi Arnaz was a ballsy guy who at one time had seven or eight series on the air that Desilu owned. But now it had declined and they were down to practically Lucy’s show and fourteen or fifteen rentals.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Producing in television is like storytelling. The choice of the actor, picking the right costumes, getting the right flavor, the right pace—these are as much a part of storytelling as writing out that same description of a character in a novel. Although the director plays an important role in this, the director in television comes on a show to prepare for a week, shoots for a week, and then goes on to another show. Unlike the producer, he is neither there at the beginning of the script, nor rarely there for long after you end up with some twenty-five thousand feet of film, which now has to be cut and pasted into something unified. There are immense creative challenges and pleasure in taking all of these things and putting them together into something that works.
DOROTHY FONTANA (writer; Star Trek story editor)
One of the things about Star Trek is that so many of us came to it with no prior knowledge or experience with science fiction. Aside from some of the noted writers who did do scripts, most of us were virgin-fresh as far as science fiction went, and I believe it was one of the things that made Star Trek so good. We weren’t trying to do the hardware, we weren’t trying to do the science-fiction gimmicks, the flash. We were trying to do people stories.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Star Trek came about very slowly, as everyone who was with me at the time can testify. I was so tired of writing about what I considered nothing. I was tired of writing for shows where there was always a shoot-out in the last act and somebody was killed. I do not consider that the “ending” of anything. I would watch a whole show in those early days and, at the end, would feel like I had wasted time on nonsense. Star Trek was formulated to change that.
DOROTHY FONTANA
Most of the villains on Star Trek had personalities. They weren’t necessarily evil, they had goals of their own. Those goals were good for them. On many other shows, they were just villains and they were evil because they were evil. I think the audience responded to that, that you could feel that Kirk and Spock and the others had worthy opponents, people who thought, who had feelings and who had visions and goals in addition to our heroes. Now, we always knew our heroes would win, with the exception of a few red-shirted fellows who lost a lot of blood. But the villains were awfully unique and different persons.
GENE RODDENBERRY
At the time, I had said, “Gee, too much of science fiction is about gadgetry and not about people. And drama is people. If I ever get the chance to write science fiction, I’m going to try to make it scientifically accurate as possible and write them the way they wrote the old Playhouse 90s.” And it worked. I applied the rules of drama to science-fiction writing. There was a great deal of room for drama in science fiction in the time that Star Trek appeared. The stories are about people. And if they aren’t people, they must have some characteristic that is human. When you do a story, you imbue the characters with personality qualities with which you can identify.
CHRISTOPHER KNOPF
Sam Rolfe, who created Have Gun—Will Travel, Gene, and I and a few others had become very good friends in the early 1960s. One day Gene called me up and said, “I have a couple of tickets on first base for a Dodgers day game.” So we went out there, and during that game he told me he had an idea for a series about a blimp. A blimp that goes around the world in the late 1800s and stops in various exotic places, and that there would be a mixed crew. So that was the beginning of Star Trek. While we were talking, one of the Dodgers stole home and neither one of us saw it. Well, the next thing I knew, Gene was developing Star Trek, which was the same basic premise he had told me about, but he put it in the future.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)
Gene had been a big fan of 1961’s Master of the World. But less known is that five years earlier, in 1956, Gene had pitched an idea for a new series called Hawaii Passage, which followed the adventures of a cruise ship, her captain, and senior officers. What was different here was that Gene referred to the ship as one of the characters, unheard of at the time.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I had been a freelance writer for about a dozen years and was chafing increasingly at the commercial censorship on television, which was very strong in those days. You really couldn’t talk about anything you cared to talk about, and I decided I was going to leave TV unless I could find some way to write what I wanted to. I recalled that when Jonathan Swift was writing Gulliver’s Travels, he wanted to write satire on his time and went to Lilliput in his story to do just that, and then he could talk about insane prime ministers and crooked kings and all of that. It was sort of this wonderful thing.
Children could read it as a fairy tale, an adventure, and as they got older they’d recognize it for what it really is. It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam, and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by, and it did. It apparently went right over the censors’ heads, but all the fourteen-year-olds in our audience knew exactly what we were talking about. The power you have is in a show like Star Trek, which is considered by many people to be a frothy little action-adventure; unimportant, unbelievable, and yet watched by a lot of people. You just slip ideas into it.
JONATHAN LARSEN (executive producer, MSNBC)
Even without introducing us to a single crew member, Star Trek tells us everything we need to know about its core politics. If you accept the premise that Democrats are big government and Republicans are small government, you should also acknowledge that the United Federation of Planets is about as big a government as you can imagine. Where in Star Trek is the free market? Ask Harry Mudd. Ask Cyrano Jones whether he considers himself overregulated in the Tribbles trade.
DOROTHY FONTANA
Gene asked me to read the first bible for Star Trek in 1964. This was the very first proposal; the series presentation. I read it and said, “I have only one question: who’s going to play Mr. Spock?” He pushed a picture of Leonard Nimoy across the table, and I, of course, knew Leonard because he had appeared in my first [script sale], The Tall Man. I thought the proposal had a lot of possibilities and was certainly exciting. Of course you could never tell if it would sell and if somebody else would believe in it, but I certainly did. The captain at the time was Robert April [later James Winter], who eventually became Christopher Pike and the ship was the Yorktown. Mr. Spock was pretty much like the Mr. Spock that appeared in [the first pilot] “The Cage,” and the doctor was Dr. Boyce. The other characters weren’t as settled. Nobody was doing anything like it on television.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Leo
nard Nimoy was the one actor I definitely had in mind—we had worked together several years previously when I was producing The Lieutenant. Leonard had been a guest star and I was struck at the time with his high Slavic cheekbones and interesting face, and I said to myself, “If I ever do this science fiction thing I want to do, he would make a great alien. And with those cheekbones some sort of pointed ear might go well.” And then I forgot entirely about it until I was laying out the Star Trek characters, and then to cast Mr. Spock I simply made a phone call to Leonard and he came in. That was it.
SAMUEL A. PEEPLES (writer, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”)
In the beginning, Mr. Spock as we know him now didn’t exist. He was a red-tailed devil who didn’t eat. He absorbed energy through a red plate in his stomach. This is the way he was laid out in the original concept. I argued with Gene that it should be a humanized character, because I was adamant that it should be straight science fiction without fantasy.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Series are a process of refining ideas. I’d like to say that all the ideas that I get are bright and eternal and right for all time, but they’re not. You do evolve things.
With Spock, originally, I also thought that there were such few choices in doing someone who was of average height. You can do a little with the ears and fake eyes and so on, but actors tend to come in roughly the same size. So I was thinking of making Spock a “little person,” which would at least break some of those things, and make him stand out. Then, it also fit into the feelings I had that size should not be that important.
SAMUEL A. PEEPLES
I was one of the first people to see the Star Trek series proposal. Gene Roddenberry and I had known each other from writing Have Gun—Will Travel. He was trying to start a science-fiction series and he knew that I had one of the largest science-fiction collections in the world. At first, I remember he borrowed a copy of Odd John by Olaf Stapledon. Then, to research the show, he asked if he could go through my magazines and get some ideas for the Enterprise. Gene went through all the covers, and that’s really how the Enterprise was born.
