by Edward Gross
MARC CUSHMAN (author, These Are the Voyages)
It was a bad relationship between NBC and Roddenberry. It’s like a bad marriage—two people who don’t belong together, who are just not going to make a go of it. Neither one of them is a bad guy, it’s just that Gene Roddenberry couldn’t live within the network system. His relationship with NBC went sour with The Lieutenant, before Star Trek ever went on the air. The only reason they did Star Trek was because of Herb Solow, who was a former NBC man. And the fact was that they wanted to do business with Lucille Ball, who was CBS’s golden girl. They needed a science-fiction show (they’d never had one) and ABC was doing well with Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. CBS was doing well with Lost in Space, both of which had debuted the year before.
So NBC took the show for three reasons: to change their look, to be in business with Lucille Ball, and because they liked Herb Solow. They just didn’t want to do business with Roddenberry, and then once the show came on, the relationship got worse and worse. The stories were making commentary on Vietnam, on racism, sex, hookers in space, guys that were half white and half black, and things like that. The network is saying, “We’re getting too many letters; we’re getting too many people who are offended.”
HERBERT F. SOLOW
For years, Gene had painted NBC as the diabolical, evil-spirited, evil rich people who were always fighting against him, and that just wasn’t so. NBC put up a lot of money, had a lot of patience, and put up with a lot of crap from Gene and a lot of other people, and were always there, ready to help us put it on the air. They did two pilots, and for all those years, no one ever mentioned NBC in any decent light.
MARC CUSHMAN
In the speeches he would make during the time Star Trek was on the air, Gene would get in front of audiences all the time, or give interviews to the press, and he was constantly rapping the network. You can’t do that unless you’re number one, but even the Smothers Brothers, which was a top-ten show, got canceled by CBS because they were constantly giving the network a hard time in the press. Back then you did not do that.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I remember once when I was a freelance writer and I was sent out to a place and they said, “We’ve got a show called Riverboat. Would you like to write it?” And the price was right and it was an adventure thing, so I went out and it was Mississippi 1850s and I talked a story and they said, “Fine. You’ve got an assignment. Oh, uh, just one thing: No Negroes.” Mississippi, 1860? We got into an argument and I lost the assignment on that one. That is patently false. That is lying to both children and adults, and I think things like that are immoral. It’s those immoralities that are my principal fight with the networks.
Within the limits of their commercial system, where television exists only to sell products, they probably do the best they can. I, for one, am waiting for the whole system to be changed so that when we make a show, that our appeal is directly to the audience. If the audience doesn’t watch it, then fine, I goofed and I’m willing to admit my blame; it is this present strange system when you never get an appeal to the audience, you go through so many committees and agencies and vice-presidents that make the decisions that most of us, most dramatists, object to so strongly.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
NBC wanted as many “planet” shows that they could get. Of course that was very difficult for us to achieve. They, as anybody does, wanted more for their buck. The more things you could cram in a show, the more action you could cram into a show, the happier they were. Their need was to achieve good numbers. In a way, I guess that was our need, too, but we were more concerned with the content of the shows. The network was concerned with content, too, but it was their kind of content and the kind that would, in their mind, attract viewers.
TRACY TORME (creative consultant, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Gene and I had many golf-cart rides across the Paramount lot. We would go from one end of the studio to the other, taking these long meandering drives. He would wave at people he knew, saying hi to the security guards, and he used these times to talk to me about a number of things; personal things, professional things, great stories about the old Trek, stories about Shatner, stories about Majel, stories about his ex-wife, his divorce, his relationships with women.
He told me he thought I would be running my own show one day and things I needed to know about how to work with the network executives, how sometimes they will give you the stupidest notes in the world and you would have to choose when to nod your head and say, “That’s kind of interesting”—and then hope that it never comes up again.
JERRY SOHL
Right from when the show got going in September 1966, it was obvious that Gene Roddenberry had done a good thing in having little moral lessons in most of the episodes, and it seemed to be that pointed kids in the right direction. Not only that, it made the show entertaining. I don’t think it was sugarcoated particularly, because some of those episodes had some pretty racy things in them. On a whole, I think it was, in its time, about the best thing that existed as far as science fiction on-screen was concerned. Just the idea of going where no man has gone before is very good.
JOHN D. F. BLACK
As far as the scripts for the show were concerned, Gene was working from the position that he had created the show so it was his. GR’s approach was that he was in control of the show and he approached the scripts in that way. My deal going in was that if I was going to get really good heavyweight writers, I know that they don’t want anybody to screw with their material. They want it to be their concept. The only reason they’re going to take television money, which is short and it was shorter than short-story money at that time, and the only way that I will talk to them about it, is if they can rewrite their own material without interference. We could give them all the input we want, but we can’t put pencil to paper on their material. Gene said okay, and the head of the studio said yes, and that’s the way I took the deal.
This is the reality. When stories came in on Thursday or Friday, I would read them, make my notes, copies would be made, and GR would take them home on the weekend. And instead of notes, he would come in on Monday with a rewrite. He would have rewritten everything. God knows how much. And it would never, in my judgment, have been that much for the better. In some cases he got closer to the pattern that the show was becoming, because it was evolving while I was there. But GR has never been the writer that Harlan Ellison, Jerry Sohl, or Teddy Sturgeon were. He isn’t it. That’s no knock. Very few people are up to that standing, but Gene couldn’t keep his hands off a script. God knows what he would have done with “to be or not to be, that is the question,” but there’s one thing that’s absolutely certain: what would have been in the script and what was shot would not have been “to be or not to be, that is the question.”
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
When we were doing the original show, the well-known science-fiction writers came up with all kinds of marvelous concepts, marvelous premises. But just because you have marvelous premises when you deliver a teleplay doesn’t mean that you’ve written a proper drama. They didn’t write anything that could actually be photographed or made. Whereas you might accept it in the world of prose, you’re not necessarily going to accept it in TV drama.
GENE RODDENBERRY
During the first year, I wrote or rewrote everybody, even my best friends, because I had this idea in my mind of something that hadn’t been done and I wanted to be really there. Once we had enough episodes, then the writers could see where we were going, but it was really building people to write the way I wanted them to write. I lost a lot of friends, writer friends, because writers don’t like to be rewritten, but the whole thing was in my head and I couldn’t say, “Mr. Spock, write him like you would write so-and-so,” because there’d never been anyone like that around. So I rewrote them and lost friendships.
JOHN D. F. BLACK
After Gene would do his rewriting, I’d get the script back, try to satisfy him and get
it back to as close a shape to the writer’s work as I possibly could. The writer would come in, we would have a story conference, we would discuss changes, the writer would go away, and, generally, I would get the writer to do the polish … if there was time. The dilemma with Star Trek was that what seemed to a writer to be something that could be done easily inside the context of the starship, became impossible. So alterations were made in a lot of things. They were slight, but necessary.
The writers, I think, deserve credit for everything good in everything they did … while I was there, anyway. Any faults you could find in any material can be blamed on me and GR. The stuff we got was, by and large, brilliant. I cannot remember one instance where I sat across a table from a writer and said, “Why is this happening?” and they couldn’t explain it to me. There was always a reason.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
A lot of the writers suffered from bruised egos, and I can’t say that I blame them. Nobody wants to be rewritten, because you put a lot of thought and emotion into what you’re writing. You believe it’s correct or you wouldn’t have written it that way. But Harry Truman used to say, “If you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” No use determining that you’re going to work in a certain medium if you’re not willing to accept the rules that go with it, the restrictions that apply. This may surprise you, but people don’t like to rewrite because it’s hard work. You’d much rather get in a script that you can put right to work, but that’s not necessarily the way things happen.
JOHN D. F. BLACK
When I wrote “The Naked Time,” I delivered my first draft and gave a copy to GR. I figured, “Here I am, I’m working on the show, and if anybody knows the show besides GR, it’s me.” And GR brought back a rewritten script. I couldn’t cope with it. That was not something I could suck up. The question in my mind, and I put it to GR, was what the hell am I doing here if I don’t know the show? And I asked him what his problem was with it. He told me and I said, “Okay, I will rewrite it.” And I rewrote it from my original—then he rewrote my second draft. So nobody got their show on the air.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
I guess I’m prejudiced. I think Gene Roddenberry is a genius. Not only in creating Star Trek. I know him and have known him for years when he has said and done some amazing things. He’s an original thinker. His background was very humble, but he’s a man who educated himself and he’s found that his mind is fertile ground. It’s an astonishing mind. You don’t jump into a pool and swim without making waves.
DIANA MULDAUR (actress, “Return to Tomorrow”)
A lot of people try to diminish his genius in order to put themselves up there, and I have said to them, don’t ever forget his genius, because none of us would be here without him, period. That’s just the way it is whether you like it or you don’t like it. He created this. There is no question in my mind that Roddenberry is a genius.
JOHN D. F. BLACK
GR had a view that nobody liked him. When Gene would come up with an idea, I would say there was an 80 percent chance he was right; he was right about the characters, the crossover between outer space and inner space, he was right about a lot of things. And I don’t like to say that. I was one of the ones who didn’t like him.
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
My father does get all the credit and others are often overlooked. Not Nimoy and Shatner, but the significance of others’ contributions sometimes are overlooked, and I think that hurts them. It was a collaborative effort. A lot of people make Star Trek what it is. Yes, my father brought it to the table, he built the team and made mistakes along the way. He deserves plenty of credit, but I do feel for all the ones that feel wronged or don’t feel like they’ve been listened to or recognized. I think they should be … but they should also stop bashing my fucking father.
JOHN D. F. BLACK
It’s always mattered to me that my word was good, and if I told somebody that they would be permitted to rewrite their own work, that nobody would touch it, and then I would get it back already diddled with, that was not going to move us into a very happy state of mind. I was there because I could talk to those writers. Those writers respected me and I respected them. Integrity mattered, and I couldn’t bear to see quality work changed to the point where the dialogue did not have the sharp edge that it had, and GR would use the word “fast” at least once a page as in, “We’ve got to get there … fast.” I was watching too much good material getting screwed up, and I couldn’t take it. I confronted an executive at the studio and I said, “I can’t really continue if my word does not remain good,” and he said, “It’s GR’s show.” So I said, “Would you like my resignation or would you like to fire me?” And he said it could be one or the other. There was no alternative, so I left the show.
STEVEN W. CARABATSOS (story consultant, Star Trek)
I came in as story consultant for about fifteen weeks after John Black left. The show hadn’t been on the air yet. By the time I came on, there were about six episodes in the can. I’m sure today it’s even more frantic, because the stakes are higher, but at the time, on the shakedown year of a show, everyone was trying new things and was concerned about it being a success, as well as being the kind of show they wanted it to be.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
While this was going on, Gene was very fatigued and so was I. We both nearly didn’t make it through the first season because of overwork. We were at our wits’ end. I was so tired that first season that I came unglued one night at home. My wife called Gene and said, “That’s it, I’m taking him away.” You try working for about six months, seven days a week, and averaging three or four hours of sleep a night, with enormous pressure. Eventually something’s going to give. It happened to be me that night, and Gene was next. We were both basket cases. As a result of that, that’s how Gene Coon came to be on the show. Gene Roddenberry just couldn’t do it by himself. He was excellent, Gene Roddenberry wrote wonderful scenes, but it took its toll.
As Gene Roddenberry left on a desperately needed shore leave of his own, he dashed off a memo along with his completed pages to “The Menagerie,” which repurposed the original “Cage” pilot as part of an inspired two-part episode. Wrote Roddenberry playfully to Bob Justman, “As indication of my vast and sincere regard for you, I leave behind while I am on vacation in the High Desert, some fifty or sixty pages of sheer genius. Read and weep as did Alexander when he beheld the glories of Egypt.”
On August 8, 1966, one month before the series would make its network debut, Star Trek underwent something of a seismic shift, when Gene L. Coon was brought on to the show as producer. To a large degree, it would be Coon who would ultimately define the show creatively in the coming months.
Born Eugene Lee Coon on January 7, 1924, in Beatrice, Nebraska, he was educated within the public school system in both Nebraska and California. In 1942 he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, where he spent four years. During that time he was stationed in the Pacific and the Far East. Taking part in the initial occupation of Japan, he was ultimately sent to China, ostensibly to help repatriate the Japanese, but he ended up editing and publishing a small newspaper. For eight months he remained in northern China, and then went stateside, where he became a radio newsman, member of the National Association of Radio News Editors, and a freelance writer.
He wrote the novels Meanwhile Back at the Front and The Short End, both of which dealt with the Korean War. Writing for film and television came next, beginning in 1957 when he wrote the screenplays for The Girl in the Kremlin and Man in the Shadow, and, then, in 1964 he wrote Don Siegel’s remake of The Killers, which starred Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan, in his last on-screen role. Meanwhile, on television he wrote scripts for shows such as Wagon Train, Bonanza, Have Gun—Will Travel, Rawhide, Alcoa Premiere, The Eleventh Hour, Hotel de Paree, Riverboat, Suspense, General Electric Theater, Mr. Lucky, Peter Gunn, and many others.
MORT ZARCOFF (producer, writer)
At Universal
we had a charge to come up with new projects. We would develop new concepts, new ideas, bring them on to script form, and hopefully we would create little units that would then produce the shows. The spark to it all in terms of sheer energy and ability to turn out work was Gene.
LESTER COLODNY (writer, producer)
They had a series on the boards called McHale’s Navy and Jennings Lang, who was the VP of television, loved the idea, but the script didn’t work. The original version was a one-hour drama and it was terrible. Jennings said, “How do we make this work?” I brought Gene in and made a deal for him to write two pilots. Gene took a dramatic series and made it into a half-hour comedy, and they started making the pilot.
MORT ZARCOFF
He was an incredible source of creative energy. We would all work and write scripts, but it was a question of degree. Most of us could turn out so many pages a day, but Gene would lock himself in the office and the pages would just pour out. We reworked a little bit of it, but he would get into that fourteen-cylinder typewriter of his and whip the pages out. They were, without a doubt, some of the cleverest, most craftsmanlike work that I’d seen in a long time.
LESTER COLODNY
Jennings Lang said to me, “We own all these Frankenstein movies. How do we make a series out of this?” Gene and I started watching the Frankenstein movies, and the more we watched them, the more we were falling on the floor screaming. We were laughing and I turned to him and said, “Wouldn’t this make the funniest series in the whole world?” We put our heads together and between the two of us we came up with the concept of The Munsters. We took the idea back to Jennings Lang and he said, “You’re out of your mind.” Later, the head of the studio, Lew Wasserman, said, “We sold your crazy, goddamned series. We don’t understand it, but we sold it.”
