by Edward Gross
She was several million dollars shy of being able to hang on, and you couldn’t go out and get bank loans like you can today. And you can’t keep going on credit cards, so she had no choice but to sell. She actually took off and went to Miami. She ran away because it was so heartbreaking to sign the contract. They had to track her down to get her to do it. There’s a picture of her cutting the ribbon after they’ve torn down the wall between Paramount and Desilu, and she’s standing next to the CEO of Gulf and Western, which owns both studios now, and the frozen expression on her face is she’s trying to put on a brave face for the photographer, and trying to fake this smile for the camera, and you know it’s just killing her. But she was right. One hundred percent. The two most rerun shows in the history of TV are I Love Lucy and Star Trek.
The turmoil of the second season continued with the announcement that Gene L. Coon would be leaving the series in the middle of the production year, which, as it turned out, would deal the series a very serious and potentially crippling creative blow from which it never really recovered.
GLEN A. LARSON (creator, executive producer, Battlestar Galactica [1978])
In the second season, Gene Coon decided to leave Star Trek. He had two scripts on his desk in front of him which he had to rewrite. He suddenly put his pencil down and finally said, “This is it,” and he got up and walked out. It had been an around-the-clock, very draining experience.
WILLIAM CAMPBELL (actor, Trelene in “The Squire of Gothos,” Kor in “The Trouble with Tribbles”; friend of Gene L. Coon)
It was starting to become a tremendous chore for the show to come up with anything new. Don’t forget, they were using writers from the outside, and it was becoming more difficult to get them. You’ve got to remember that we’re talking about a period when the great writers no longer were doing anything. When television was making its first inroads, you had some of these great people doing television shows.
MARC CUSHMAN
Why did Gene Coon leave Star Trek? Roddenberry was off doing a Robin Hood script, a Robin Hood TV pilot, which never got made, but he was being paid to do it, so he took off at the halfway point of the second season to go do the script assignment for four weeks. He comes back, and a couple of scripts he’d assigned while he was still there are now being filmed, and he walks onto Stage 9 and he hears all this laughter, which was not unusual because Shatner was always making jokes and there was always laughter. But this is more so than usual, and the lights are on so he knows they’re filming, so why is everyone laughing while they’re filming? And he walks over and it’s the scene from “The Trouble with Tribbles” where Shatner is opening the storage compartments and all the Tribbles are falling on him and he’s buried in Tribbles.
Roddenberry is standing there watching this scene being filmed and he’s not laughing. This isn’t his Star Trek, this is Lost in Space stuff. And so he turned and walked away and he went to the screening room and he said, “Show me the last episode that’s now being edited,” and the previous episode was “I, Mudd.” Roddenberry had given that assignment, the story was his idea, he’s the one who did the story for “Mudd’s Women” the year before and it was supposed to be more serious, a flamboyant character but still serious, and he’s watching this thing that is total comedy.
Then he watches more footage from “Tribbles” and then he takes a look at the next episode to be filmed, and it’s “Bread and Circuses,” which was also his idea, and it’s been turned into a bit of a comedy. So he starts rewriting it and he starts taking a lot of the comedy out, and he and Gene Coon have a powwow. Gene Coon comes out of that meeting and types up his resignation. That day, the day after Roddenberry returned, Gene Coon turns in his resignation.
ANDE RICHARDSON
If Gene Roddenberry said anything to him about what he was doing with the humor and everything, then why stay there and take that? He was doing fine.
I will say that after Gene was brought in, the Great Bird would do a disappearing act, sneaking in and out of the back door. Everything fell on Gene Coon, and I don’t think that’s what he signed on for. I think he thought that Roddenberry was going to be there carrying his load as well. I can’t say he dumped everything on Gene, but I got the feeling that Gene was more burdened once there was no Bird around. He never complained about anything, but you can only do that many uppers for so long and then you’ve got to wear out. And Gene was wearing out.
HARVE BENNETT (executive producer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
The loss of Gene Coon was critical. Credit for the success of the show of course goes to Gene Roddenberry. There’s no disputing his genius. But it also goes to Gene Coon, the hardheaded rewriter who made a lot of things work. I think of myself as the Gene Coon of the feature movies. Fandom never understood the contribution that Coon made to that which they loved in the movies, notwithstanding Roddenberry’s genius. It’s my gut feeling, knowing all the players and the material, that whenever the name Gene Coon is on the episode as producer, they are generally the best shows.
MARC CUSHMAN
Coon wanted out so quickly at that point, he looked out his window and saw John Meredyth Lucas coming to his car, because John was working over at Mannix, and he said, “Can you get out of Mannix? I want you to take over for me.” And it was done that fast. Roddenberry had to approve Lucas so Roddenberry had him come to his house, talked, and he thought, “Okay, John is going to dial down the comedy, he’s going to make the show more like what I wanted, he’s going to make Kirk more driven.”
One of the first episodes John did was “Obsession.” It had more of the tone Gene Roddenberry wanted it to be, and so he approved him. Now, they still had all these scripts that Gene Coon had been rewriting, and even though Coon’s name doesn’t appear on the screen for the second half of the second season, almost all those scripts were started by him, he got memos from him on all the scripts, but then John Meredyth Lucas and Gene Roddenberry started rewriting them and taking the humor out, and making it more of the show Roddenberry wanted it to be. And it wasn’t quite as good as the first half of the second season. It lost a little steam there.
JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS (producer, writer, director, Star Trek)
I was on the lot shooting Mannix, and I wrote a script for Gene Coon. Gene was going to retire and suggested that I take over because I had produced Ben Casey. We talked for a while and that was it. At that time, Bob Justman was handling the production end of things. When I came in, I got into production, too, and was also directing. Gene had said, “When they hired me, they knew I was writing and that was it.” That was not the way that I produced.
DAVID GERROLD
The last six episodes were finished up by John Meredyth Lucas, who was something of a caretaker just to make sure that things moved in the right way. A very nice man, but probably someone very much under the thumb of Roddenberry. Grateful for the job, and Roddenberry said, “We’re going to do it my way,” and the last six episodes of the second season were … adequate.
ANDE RICHARDSON
When Gene left—and he didn’t tell me exactly why he did leave—he said, “I’m going to go, and when I find someplace, I’ll let you know and you can come and join me.” So I worked with John Meredyth Lucas. He was a nice guy, he did the job, but I don’t think he really sparked anything. For me, the whole situation became bleh. I just came in, did my job, collected my paycheck. The joy was gone. I had such freedom with Gene. I could read the scripts, I could tell him honestly what I thought about things, and we would talk about the scripts. In the sense of what was going on, I felt like I was contributing. That was gone after Gene left. I was glad to get the heck away from there after he was gone.
JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS
When I came on, I remember a great deal of tension between the actors. Not civil war, but a great deal of tension among the cast and the company. As a matter of fact, Gene took me out to location to introduce me as producer. We came up to the company. When they’d gotten a particular shot,
we walked over and Shatner walked away from us. He would not speak to Gene or to me. They were feuding over something, though I’ve no idea what the problem was.
There was also tension among Shatner and Nimoy and Gene that had built up. It happens on every show, but it was particularly noticeable on Star Trek when I first came on. I won’t say I solved it, but I simply ignored it, went on and was on the set a great deal. I tend to be hands-on with everything. It was just a different kind of approach. Whatever had caused the tension, I’m not quite sure. Actors tend to feel that if you’re not there all the time and petting them a little bit, or at least there to hear their screams of anguish, that they’re abandoned. Eventually we all became very friendly. That doesn’t mean there weren’t complaints about someone’s part not being meaningful, but we developed a mechanism to talk them out.
DORRIS HALSEY (manager of Gene L. Coon)
Gene was happy on Star Trek for quite a while. Then both personal and professional things started weighing on him. He was having personality problems with Shatner and Nimoy. He had a very low respect for actors, except his friends. Gene also had a low threshold for boredom.
WILLIAM CAMPBELL
I don’t know anything about the relationship between the two guys, but I can tell you this: What happens to actors when they’ve acquired a position on a television show after a short period of time—they can’t help it—they become precious. And recognize that in some ways they can tell producers off, can make their presence felt. They all have ideas.
JACKIE COON FERNANDEZ (widow of Gene L. Coon)
Gene wasn’t crazy about actors. They were just too needful and too egocentric. He wasn’t. He didn’t get along with Robert Wagner either when he went over to It Takes a Thief. I would take his feelings about these actors he didn’t get along with with a grain of salt, because he didn’t care for actors in general.
WILLIAM CAMPBELL
I don’t remember a situation where Gene Coon would tell either Shatner or Nimoy how to act, nor did he suggest that he was a director, but he did have an inner sense and he might have held the line on certain things that they would have changed. Or areas where they would have liked another direction be taken, and Gene Coon perhaps debated them on occasion and they didn’t like it. But I never heard him say one bad word against anybody.
JACKIE COON FERNANDEZ
I don’t think there was a personal falling-out between Gene and Gene Roddenberry. Roddenberry liked the glory more than Gene wanted in the show. He wanted more guts and less glory. Less razzmatazz. Less show business and more thought. Roddenberry wanted more flash into the quirky trappings of science fiction. Gene [Coon] was a philosopher in his feelings. There probably was a certain difference there, but not enough to disturb a friendship because they remained friends for as long as he lived.
ANDE RICHARDSON
When Gene Coon was there, we were in a groove. We were changing the world. When I would answer his phone “Coon’s Coon,” it was okay because we were going to where no one had gone before. We were making a difference. I felt that way with Malcolm [X], I felt that way with Martin [Luther King], and I had it with Gene Coon. We were making a difference. My friends were, like, “I want to be a film producer,” but I wanted to be a television producer because I wanted to do what Gene Coon had done. I wanted to put things out there for people so that they could see a different way of thinking and being. I wanted to do “The Devil in the Dark,” because we are made out of the same material; we can’t dismiss one life-form over another. We were doing something. We were doing something good. And Gene just did what he did. He didn’t do it for people to say, “Wow, that was great.” He just did his best and he did it with his heart.
JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS
If there was one element that I brought back to the show when I was producer, because it had been a little bit lost, it was Gene Roddenberry’s inspiration for the series Horatio Hornblower. That’s the thing that I kept trying to bring back. The constant warfare—frontier warfare—to make Kirk Captain Hornblower again. A lot of that stuff had gotten lost into the areas of fantasy, which is fine. But as the season progressed there’d been less and less of the Hornblower elements, which appealed to me as exemplified in “The Ultimate Computer” and things like that.
A creative problem on the show was that we loved doing pieces which had some kind of concept. That’s a terrible word to use when you’re talking to the network. You would think that high-concept would mean a lofty purpose, but to them it simply means something you can tell in one word. The network tended to want green space monsters that ate the ship each week, and we tended to want to do shows which had, what seemed to us, some kind of concept, saying something and being different. But God knows we did our share of the green monsters eating the ship.
Despite all of the behind-the-scenes turmoil and a notable change in quality once Gene Coon had departed, season two of the original Star Trek is considered perhaps the best season of the show produced. Among the now-classic episodes: “Amok Time,” in which Spock is internally driven to return to Vulcan to mate or die—and finds himself in a battle to the death with Kirk; “Mirror, Mirror,” which found Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura in a savage parallel universe aboard a very different Enterprise, where rank is achieved through assassination; “Metamorphosis,” a genuinely moving exploration of the nature of love; “Journey to Babel,” in which Enterprise serves as host for a number of aliens en route to a diplomatic conference, which also explored the estranged relationship between Spock and his father, Sarek; “The Trouble with Tribbles,” Star Trek’s first comedic episode, which pits Kirk and company against the Klingons and thousands of purring fur balls; and semisuccessful visits to a number of Earthlike planets with a society mirroring old-time Chicago (“A Piece of the Action”) and modern-day parallels to Nazi Germany (“Patterns of Force”) and the Roman Empire (“Bread and Circuses”).
JOSEPH PEVNEY
The fight in “Amok Time” was absolutely excellent and one of the best we ever did. What made it dramatically interesting is that it took place between Kirk and Spock. During this episode, Leonard Nimoy and I also worked out the Vulcan salute and the statement “live long and prosper” together.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Leonard Nimoy came in with the “live long and prosper” sign—the split fingered salute. He came into my office and said, “I feel the need for a Vulcan salutation, Gene,” and he showed it to me. Then he told me a story about when he was a kid in synagogue. The rabbis said, “Don’t look or you’ll be struck dead or blind,” but Leonard looked and, of course, the rabbis were making that Vulcan sign. The idea of my Southern kinfolk walking around giving each other a Jewish blessing so pleased me that I said, “Go!”
DOROTHY FONTANA
On “Amok Time” I don’t remember if it was Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon, or [writer] Ted Sturgeon who came up with the idea of the Vulcan seven-year mating cycle, but the way we have established it, Vulcans mate normally anytime they want to. However, every seven years you do the ritual, the ceremony, the whole thing. It’s a biological urge. This every-seven-years business was taken literally by too many people who aren’t stopping and understanding. I mean, every seven years would be a little bad, and it would not explain the Vulcans of many different ages, which are not seven years apart.
When Ted was writing the episode, there were some places where we, as I recall, said to him, “Well, you know McCoy has this role in relationship to Spock, and Kirk has this role,” and Ted just put them together in a really nice blend of relationships, which is, again, what Star Trek is about. Relationships. The stories that didn’t go well were stories that were against objects without human relationships involved somewhere in the story.
JEROME BIXBY (writer, “Mirror, Mirror”)
I had already done a fiction story called “One Way Street,” which was a parallel-universe story, and I thought that would make a good Star Trek. The universe I created was a very savage counterpart, virtual
ly a pirate ship, into which I could transpose a landing party. I submitted the outline, they loved it and I did the script.
DOROTHY FONTANA
“Metamorphosis” was a very delicate and touching love story. The idea that a man could accept a relationship with this alien, and the young woman, to save her life, accepted the alien into her body was a really lovely story and a very touching one. Gene Coon did it with great deftness and delicacy.
“Journey to Babel” came about because of the mention a couple of times of Spock’s parents. I said to Gene, “We’ve talked about them, let’s show them.” So I sat down and created two characters, especially the relationship with Sarek and the rift between him and Spock, and Amanda positioned in the middle. She was a thoroughly human woman with an all-Vulcan husband and a half-caste son, which is bound to create a lot of character problems.
JOSEPH PEVNEY
“The Trouble with Tribbles” was a delightful show from beginning to end. I had a lot of fun with it, went out and shopped for the tribbles. It was the first effort of a writer named David Gerrold and I thought he made a hell of a contribution to the show. My biggest contribution was getting the show produced, because there was a feeling amongst the people involved that we shouldn’t do it. It was a comedy and they felt we had no business doing an outright comedy. It turned out well, and Bill Shatner had the opportunity to do the little comic bits he loves to do. The premise was humorous as hell.
