The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, Volume 1

by Edward Gross

  DAVID GERROLD

  I have to be real honest here: It feels great to have written “The Trouble with Tribbles.” I remember when I wrote it, I looked at it as an honor and responsibility, and I set out to write the very best episode of Star Trek ever made.

  DAVID P. HARMON (writer, “A Piece of the Action”)

  I felt that our Western civilization is based on a Judeo-Christian ethic, so what I did in “A Piece of the Action” was say that suppose a ship crashed, and the people on the planet salvaged a book called The Life of Al Capone, which they treated as their version of the Bible, and from which they built their own society.

  JAMES KOMACK (director, “A Piece of the Action”)

  The thing that always had to be kept in mind was that Kirk and Spock were from another time while we were trying to make a picture about the twenties. You constantly have to say that it’s got to be the twenties from everyone else’s point of view, but it’s got to be future-time for Leonard Nimoy and Bill Shatner, and that gets a little bizarre. The joke going on around them was that they had never seen a machine gun before, they never saw pool tables or cars. We’d have to work out the jokes right there and then. You’d say, “Wait a minute, you’ve never seen that before. I’ve got to shoot something that shows you’ve never seen this before.” Spock and Kirk came down with this great intellect and they were dealing with the equivalent of monkeys. These guys had an IQ of about room temperature, and it was funny to watch Kirk and Spock stare at them, because they were just ludicrous. They had a book, they were mobsters, they were taking over cities. Their brains just weren’t working that well. That was great fun.

  JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS (director/writer, “Patterns of Force”)

  The totalitarian, particularly the Nazi, society had always fascinated me. How could this come about? I know the history, but how in the minds of people could this come about? I started off with the premise that I would try to explain it and explore how an entire country could get swept up in it. It’s still difficult to comprehend. Thankfully there was very little problem in terms of covering such dramatic material. Gene Roddenberry tended to do no censorship on that basis. He would come in and, if anything, would encourage even wilder statements. He was a very adventurous guy, so there was no opposition in terms of, “My God, what are you writing about?”

  RALPH SENENSKY

  Gene Roddenberry is a very creative man. When we did “Bread and Circuses,” I remember having a meeting with him about it, and he was going to do some writing. I went there the next morning at six o’clock to get the new material, because there were things about that script which weren’t working. Both Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon were writing on that show as we were shooting. I don’t remember what the problem was, except that we were doing the Roman arena in modern times with television. I do remember that my concern was all of that talk about the “sun,” which they talked about from early on, might not be a mystery when we got to the end. We didn’t want to tip that we were doing a Christ story from the word go. That took some doing, because it wasn’t really in the script, but they did it. They were sealing up the loose ends, because originally when they were talking about the sun, you knew right away that they were talking about the son of God.

  DOROTHY FONTANA

  Certainly there was a nice philosophy going on there with the worshipping of the “sun,” and then the indication that it was the son of God, that Jesus or the concept had appeared on other planets. I thought that was a nice touch. There have been other stories written with the same theme as the main point, but just adding it at the end really seems quite nice.

  Fontana remained concerned for much of the second season that the show was repeating itself. In a memo she wrote on June 19, 1967, she emphasized, “Even our devoted viewers will not stay with us if we do not vary our backgrounds, themes, and adventures. We’ve touted this series as one with creative imagination and daring. Where is it?”

  One of the more controversial episodes in the second season, spearheaded by Roddenberry, was “A Private Little War,” in which the Klingons are providing weapons to a primitive planet, prompting Kirk to do the same to maintain the “balance of power” on both sides, an analogue for the ongoing conflict in Vietnam.

  WALTER KOENIG

  That was the one episode that I thought digressed from a rather liberal, political posture. I had a very strong feeling about it. I thought that in maintaining this balance of power we were justifying the building of armaments.

  In so many ways Star Trek was a standout compared to the rest of the shows being broadcast by the networks, but insofar as NBC was concerned, the show was more trouble than it was worth. Not only was there a continuing series of battles with Gene Roddenberry regarding content, but the series was not a ratings powerhouse. Indeed, it seemed that season two could very well be the show’s last. The only hope would be if the word could somehow get out to the fans, a challenge made more difficult by the fact that Harlan Ellison, who by this time had had a major falling-out with Roddenberry over his script for “The City on the Edge of Forever,” would not throw his support behind such a campaign. The show’s future was strictly in the hands of the fans.

  HARLAN ELLISON (author; writer, “The City on the Edge of Forever”)

  I was very optimistic about the show in the beginning, but within a couple of years that changed and everybody was laughing at me. When these people said, “Star Trek is going to be the new horizon for us; we’re going to sell more science fiction than ever before and it’s going to be the Golden Age,” I said, “No, it’s not, you fools. You’re not going to sell one more of your novels. What they’re going to sell are Star Trek books,” and this was before there ever was a Star Trek novel.

  Everybody looked at me and laughed and told me not to be ridiculous. Well, there it is. Star Trek books and that idiom, that space-opera crap, pushed everything off the bestseller list. I don’t like being right, but it was obvious to me that that’s the way things were going to go. This was a series that had the potential of being truly great. There are few series that really transcend the medium. All the rest of it was just television. That’s what, to me, Star Trek was mostly: just television.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE (authors, On the Good Ship Enterprise)

  By the middle of the second season Star Trek was once again in danger, and hints of possible cancellation kept disturbing the set. We were visiting the shooting of “The Deadly Years” when cancellation was certain at the end of the second season. This episode being shot was one of the last Star Trek episodes to be aired before cancellation. But there was something we could do. Fans could play the largest game of “uproar” in the world and if nothing else, make certain that NBC and everyone connected with Star Trek knew that fans were unhappy about the cancellation.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG (founder, Star Trek Welcommittee)

  The reaction to news about the cancellation among Trekkers was based on knowledge of the television business model: If we didn’t have a full three seasons of a show, there would be no syndication reruns. This was pre-video recorders in every home. Without a third season, we would lose it all forever. The reaction was panic. This was material to be passed down to grandchildren, not left to rot in some vault. This was historic breakthrough, not a trivial bit of failed entertainment. So the reaction went from “You just don’t understand!!!!” to “You and what army???” There was even a movement to try to buy enough Paramount stock to control the company.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  We wrote up a preliminary contact letter, ran it off on our ancient little mimeograph machine, and mailed it out to about a hundred and fifty science-fiction fans. These fans had been especially selected because they had some further contacts, either as fanzine editors, club members, or for some such reason. We even had addresses of some Star Trek fan mail that Gene helped us obtain from the fan-mail service that Paramount contracted with. We didn’t have enough money to have a letter printed, so we had to fly on the strength of th
e message and its urgency to get people’s attention. We used the Rule of Ten: ask ten people to write a letter and they ask ten people to write a letter, and each of those ten asks ten people to write a letter. And so on and so on.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  Bjo put out directions for how to write such letters, and the directions were mostly followed. The audience was educated adults more than gaga kids with no buying power.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  NBC was convinced that Star Trek was watched only by drooling idiot twelve-year-olds. They managed to ignore the fact that people such as Isaac Asimov, a multiple Ph.D., and a multitude of other intellectuals enjoyed the show. So, of course, the suits were always looking for reasons to cancel shows they didn’t trust to be a raging success.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  This was before Nielsen got demographic analysis down to where sponsors could use that data. The bulk of the Trek audience was college students, grad students, and recent grads. People with potential earning power that sponsors wanted, but the sponsors had no way to know that until that letter campaign produced a flood of original letters formatted as business letters.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  NBC began to get a wave of letters that rocked them off their fat complacency. Fans were not to know this for some time, so we just kept sending in letters on faith that something was happening. The first intimation our plan was working was a party where a computer systems analyst heard someone call Bjo’s name. “Are you Bjo Trimble?” he asked with a grin. Bjo asked how he knew her name. “Everyone at NBC knows your name,” he said. “You’ve cost NBC a lot of money. They had to hire extra help to keep opening that mail, sorting it, and trying to find out what the average Star Trek fan is like. Labels are everything in the TV biz. They keep running everything through our computers to see if they can come up with the definitive Star Trek fan. You know, how old, what income bracket, and so on. So far it cost them a lot of money to find out nothing at all. You guys can’t be nailed down to any one label, and it’s driving NBC crazy. Also, it rattled cages to find that someone managed to put Star Trek Lives! bumper stickers on all the limousines in the very private executive parking lot.”

  ELYSE ROSENSTEIN (organizer of early Star Trek conventions)

  Do you realize how many pieces of mail NBC eventually received on Star Trek? They usually got about fifty thousand for the year on everything, but the Star Trek campaign generated one million letters. They were handling the mail with shovels—they didn’t know what to do with it. Their policy was to answer everything, even if it was a form letter, and a million pieces of mail is a lot of money. So they made an unprecedented on-air announcement that they were not cancelling the show and that it would be back in the fall.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  Well into cancellation and/or pickup time for all the TV series, NBC had been so flooded with mail that they were ready to throw in the towel. Naturally they weren’t about to give GR and the Star Trek crew any relief from their worries, so everything still hung in the air until NBC made their momentous, unprecedented announcement at the end of the spring 1968 season.

  No one had ever come on during prime time, even with a voice-over announcement, and told the watching public that a TV show had been renewed. So a major triumph of the consumer public over the network and over the stupid Nielsen ratings was accomplished through advocacy letter-writing. At the end of the Save ST campaign, we were told unofficially that one million letters had crossed their desks. We have no way of knowing how true this statement really was.

  ANDE RICHARDSON

  A guy named Thom Beck had a radio show in Pasadena called The Credibility Gap. It was a really popular show and it was all about antiwar and things like that. When I told them we were having problems with getting the show renewed, they did a whole segment on Star Trek. It got a lot of comments and a lot of press, and it helped with the renewal. It’s something that’s never mentioned, but Star Trek had definitely gotten help from a local radio station.

  RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)

  I knew nothing about possible cancellation at the end of season one. I don’t think very many fans did know about it. But when the write-in campaign started during season two, I became very active, along with my friend Alan. We signed up as many people in my junior high school as we could, not knowing yet that a petition would only count as one letter, and wrote letters ourselves to the addresses that Bjo and John Trimble were supplying to fans everywhere.

  GENE RODDENBERRY

  The letter-writing campaign surprised me and, of course, it was personally gratifying. What particularly gratified me was not the fact that there was a large number of people who did that, but I got to meet and know Star Trek fans, and they range from children to presidents of universities. One of my greatest enjoyments from the show was meeting the people we attracted and some of the relationships we formed with them.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  Gene wanted very badly to be completely involved, but we said it would only make NBC say it was a put-up job. Gene did do things like send over platters of food and drink when we were doing a collating of a mailing. He also paid for postage when we’d run out of funds, but for the most part fans paid for the Save Star Trek campaign, or it came out of our own pocket.

  ROBERT H. JUSTMAN

  Gene absolutely encouraged the campaign. Without his encouragement, I don’t think those campaigns would have gotten as far as they did. They were successful campaigns and they kept the show on the air. There was just an enormous amount of pressure exerted on the network by people who wrote in and demonstrated. It was wonderful. It was no fluke, as proved in later years when this same three seasons’ worth of episodes just kept on playing and playing and playing. There was something there.

  JOHN MEREDYTH LUCAS

  It sounds like the usual publicity trick a company would pull, but the company had absolutely nothing to do with it. This was a spontaneous thing. Some of the most fanatic support came from Caltech, which was heaven. It was nice to know. Unfortunately, the numbers on the show were never really spectacular. They were much, much better in reruns. At the time, the people that loved it were mad about it, but there just wasn’t enough of them with Nielsen boxes.

  The letter-writing campaign, which was rumored to have inspired anywhere from twelve thousand to a million letters, depending on who you believe (more likely the two hundred thousand number that NBC’s Mort Werner asserted in TV Guide at the time), culminated in a massive march on the network’s Burbank headquarters, where protestors from Caltech and elsewhere picketed on January 8, 1968, in the hopes of forcing a renewal of the series.

  FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)

  I met Bjo and I knew about her march on NBC, so I got my friends together and we made signs, and went to the park in Burbank where we were all congregating, and we marched on NBC. Stan Robertson from programming was there and Hank Rieger from publicity, the irony being that two or three years later, I was in college and I got an internship at NBC and Hank became my boss. I worked for him for years.

  HANK RIEGER (publicist, NBC Television)

  Unfortunately, I was one of the people designated by Herb Schlosser to go out and talk to the big demonstration they had in front of the studio in Burbank. They weren’t really in the mood to be talked to, but they listened, and Stanley [Robertson] said his words and I said my words, and essentially it was that we appreciated them, we heard them, we would take a look at it, and they saved the show for another year.

  We had all the extra Burbank police around and a few county deputy sheriffs there in case anything happened, but it wasn’t that type of crowd where they were going to storm the place. I’m a Trekkie, too, so I was just as sorry as they were to see it go off the air. I thought that Star Trek would do better initially than it did. I was one of the many disappointed ones when NBC announced they were going to take it off the air.

  FRED BRONSON

  Hank and Stan came ou
t and, of course, they accepted our petitions. They said they would be taken seriously and, as you know, it was saved, and we felt like we did it ourselves. I remember them making the announcement on the air one night, over the closing credits basically, and said please stop writing and calling.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  The concession from NBC was grudging, and despite Roddenberry’s best efforts, the third season bombed. But thanks to that letter-writing campaign, Star Trek went to syndication and then … and only then … the audience exploded.

  GENE RODDENBERRY

  We won the fight when the show got picked up for a third season. NBC was certain I was behind every fan, paying them off. And there was a group from MIT picketing the building, and a group in New York. Bless MIT, bless Caltech, bless them all. The network had a coterie of junior executives down there buttonholing all of the people, saying, “Listen, did Gene Roddenberry send you?” And they finally called me up and said, “Listen, we know you’re behind it.” And I said, “That’s very flattering, because if I could start demonstrations around the country from this desk, I’d get the hell out of science fiction and into politics.”

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  “TO SURVIVE IS NOT ENOUGH … TO SIMPLY EXIST IS NOT ENOUGH.”

  Star Trek concluded its second season on an incredible, and unprecedented, high note, with NBC essentially acknowledging the success of the fans’ letter-writing campaign by announcing that the series would be returning for a third season. On the surface, it would have seemed that with season three, Star Trek could begin to soar, but nothing would be further from the truth as the struggles that plagued it for the first two years only intensified in year three, resulting in the Enterprise’s final year in space … on NBC in live action, at least.