by Edward Gross
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)
At that time I told NBC that if they would put us on the air as they were promising—on a weeknight at a decent time slot, seven-thirty or eight o’clock—I would commit myself to produce Star Trek for the third year. Personally produce the show as I had done at the beginning. This was my effort to use what muscle I had. In fighting a network, you must use what muscle you have. They are monolithic, multibillion-dollar corporations whose interests are not necessarily in the quality of the drama.
It is one of the unfortunate curses of television that you can have as high as eleven or twelve million devoted fans, more people than have seen Shakespeare since the beginning, and be a failure, because at a certain time on a certain night you have to pass the magic number of fourteen million. At any rate, the fans scared the hell out of the network and they decided to keep the show on.
About ten days or two weeks later I received a phone call at breakfast, and the network executive said, “Hello, Gene baby…” Well, I knew I was in trouble right then. He said, “We have had a group of statistical experts researching your audience, researching youth and youth-oriented people, and we don’t want you on a weeknight at an early time. We have picked the best youth spot that there is. All our research confirms this and it’s great for the kids and that time is ten o’clock on Friday nights.” I said, “No doubt this is why you had the great kiddie show The Bell Telephone Hour on there last year.” As a result, the only gun I then had was to stand by my original commitment, that I would not personally produce the show unless they returned us to the weeknight time they promised. I wasn’t particularly anxious to put in a third year of fourteen hours a day, six days a week, but Star Trek was my baby and I was willing to risk it if I could have a reasonable shot at a reasonable time. And we talked it over and held fast.
We almost swayed them and ultimately they said, “No, we will not do it.” And then I had no option. I could not then say, “Well, I’ll produce it anyway,” because from then on with the network any threat or promise or anything I made, once you back down you become the coward and your muscle from then on in any subsequent projects will never mean anything.
GEORGE TAKEI (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”)
Gene was aware that even if he had stayed with Star Trek, NBC intended to cancel the show after its third year. From another vantage point, maybe it should have been a matter of personal integrity on Roddenberry’s part. Star Trek was Gene’s creation, and the third season would be identified with him whether he liked it or not.
If the quality of the show was in some way to erode, it couldn’t help but reflect on Roddenberry. Inevitably, it would be Gene’s reputation that was at stake. Now, Gene Roddenberry’s a human being, so I can certainly understand his position. At the same time, giving myself distance and perspective, I can’t help but wish that Gene had looked at the entire picture and realized how Star Trek’s third season might finally affect his professionalism and artistic integrity.
DAVID GERROLD (writer, “The Cloud Minders”)
Roddenberry, rather than try and do the very best show possible, walked away and picked Fred Freiberger. If he was there, there would have been some of that stuff that was there in the beginning. When the show first started, there was a lot of really nice stuff there that you always wanted to see developed. I wish Roddenberry had been there in the third season to take care of his baby.
Roddenberry later addressed his departure and reflected, “I think there was a little rationalization in my decision. I think also what was affecting me at that time was enormous fatigue; I think maybe I was looking for an excuse to get out from under the fight that I had just been having for two years, but really for four. I think fatigue just caught up with me … I think I would come back and produce it the third year myself if I had it to do over. I’m not taking a backhanded slap at the people who did produce it the third year, line-produced it. Obviously when you bring a producer in and you’re going to let him produce it, you’ve got to let him do it his way. I think his way, or their way, was somewhat different than our way the first two, so it did look different. As long as the original creator stays with the show, it gives it a certain unity. When other minds become involved, it’s not that they’re lesser minds or not as clever writers, but you lose the unity of that one driving force.”
DAVID GERROLD
The fact of the matter is that you have to work with other people, and Gene’s pattern is that he doesn’t work well with anyone. If he can’t be the boss, he doesn’t want to work. Gene does not have a track record of working as a writer with other producers, so he doesn’t know how to bend. There’s no working with other people’s considerations on a story. He never learned that trick, because he’s always been the boss. He’s never, ever been an Indian; he’s always been a chief. You know what you get when you get people who have always been chiefs? You get spoiled brats.
DEVRA LANGSHAM (editor, Spockanalia)
We all felt very annoyed about Gene leaving. I mean, it’s his show and truly he loves it as much as we do. On the other hand, he’s saying, “I put myself on the line, I said if you do that I’m not going to work on the show, and if I don’t follow my word I will have no credibility.” So you can understand it … sort of. But people were definitely annoyed.
MARC CUSHMAN (author, These Are the Voyages)
NBC didn’t like Gene Roddenberry, and they didn’t like the type of shows that Star Trek was airing. It was too controversial and too sexy, and they couldn’t get Roddenberry to tone it down. He was disrespectful to them, and it got worse, so it was just a matter of “we don’t want to do business with this guy; we don’t quite like how the show is going, so let’s maybe not pick it up.” And there’s another factor, too, back then. They weren’t getting the top sponsors for the hour, so the feeling may have been that they weren’t making as much profit off of Star Trek as another show. So they move it to Friday night—and they didn’t even want to pick it up, but there was the letter-writing campaign that made them cry uncle on the air and announce that they were picking it up, but they put it in the death slot. And they knew when they picked it up that they were determined that season three would be the last year.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
Roddenberry abandoned the show, but it’s interesting that he still had a lot to do with it. A lot of people don’t realize that he was still sending memos and notes and watching screenings. But a lot of times he would watch the screening, and it would be too late to change any of the problems. You watch an episode like “Balance of Terror,” where Kirk hunches over the briefing room table and goes, “I hope we won’t need your services, Bones.” And McCoy goes, “Amen to that. You’re taking an awful gamble, Jim.” And he walks out, the doors close, and he and Sulu are just walking down the hall and all the people are running by, it’s a busy ship. Or you look at the “The Corbomite Maneuver,” when Kirk is going from the sick bay to his quarters and you hear “All decks alert, all decks alert.” That is a busy ship that looks like there’s 428 people on board. In the third season it looked like there were four people on the ship.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I found a producer, Fred Freiberger, who had produced Slattery’s People and Ben Casey, and has impeccable credits and an honest love of science fiction since boyhood. He was backed up by our regular staff of Bob Justman and the directors; the cameramen; Bill Theiss, costumer; Walter “Matt” Jeffries, art; so backed up by the regular staff. They were producing Star Trek while my function in it was judiciary, policy administration.
MARC CUSHMAN
Everyone says Fred Freiberger was a show killer, when, in fact, he had a wonderful track record in Hollywood. He was the guy who got Wild Wild West up and running. I’ve read in books and I’ve read in articles that Fred produced the last season of the show, but he actually produced the first season. He was the producer who got that whole show and somehow did the magic act of taking a western sh
ow, a spy show, elements of sci-fi, and blended it into a hit. He did very well with Ben Casey and a couple of different shows.
FRED FREIBERGER (producer, Star Trek)
I was familiar with Star Trek only in that I had seen the first pilot they had done. I had met Gene Roddenberry at the beginning to talk to him about producing the show at the start, but I was going to Europe on a vacation that I had planned. I mentioned to Gene that the pilot was terrific, and if the job was still available when I got back, I was interested. By the time I came back he had gotten Gene Coon and I was off doing other shows. Then, when third season came along, my agent brought me into Gene’s office and he said he would like me to produce the show. Gene Coon had done the first season, John Meredyth Lucas did the second, and I assumed he wanted to change producers every year.
My first meeting with him was uncomfortable. Something like thirty people from the network came in, and I was amazed at the contempt with which Roddenberry treated them, and I could see they didn’t like him at all. I’d thought to myself, “Holy shit, what have I gotten myself into?”
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, Star Trek)
Because of the budget cut in the third season, we were reduced to what I call a radio show. We couldn’t go on location any longer because we couldn’t afford it. We had to do shows that we could afford to do. It was quite difficult, and that did affect what the concept was. Certain concepts just couldn’t be handled. We didn’t have the money.
Forget about what the actual numbers are, but in those days, in the first season each show cost $193,500. That was good money in those days. The second season was $187,500. The third season was $178,500. So that was an enormous drop. The studio had deficit financing situations, and every time you shot a show you lost more money. In those days, they didn’t think they had a chance of syndication, especially since everybody knew the third season was it.
FRED FREIBERGER
Joining the show wasn’t a daunting situation, it was a question of going in on a show that was being successfully produced with a lot of people involved who were very loyal to the show. You can walk into another show and it can be daunting for you. You get into a situation where everybody knows each other and they’ve been together for some time. I was more concerned with improving ratings, because the show had about a twenty or twenty-four share. Today that would be a hit. In those days, even if you had a thirty share, you were very iffy. It was the loyalty of the fans that kept it on when NBC threatened to cancel it. And they did keep it on—it was impressive for NBC to succumb to that.
In all three years, the ratings remained the same no matter what went on. It kept the same fans. Our hope was to improve the ratings, and we tried different kinds of stories. But the ratings always stayed the same. Always. It’s always all about ratings. And the situation wasn’t helped by the cutting of the budget. That hurt us badly.
GENE RODDENBERRY
If demographics had come in a year earlier, we would have had a twelve-year-run.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN
They just cut it down to the bone to cut their losses. And we were on Friday nights at ten. If your audience is high-school kids and college-age people and young married people, they’re not home Friday nights. They’re out, and the old folks weren’t watching. So our audience was gone.
SCOTT MANTZ
You went from $193,500 per episode to $178,000, so you lose $15,000 dollars per episode, but you lost more than that because some of the stars got raises. And that came out of that budget. So if you think about it, the fact that they got maybe half of a good season is lucky.
FRED FREIBERGER
We had to do at least four of the shows completely on the Enterprise. There were a lot of restrictions, but that’s no excuse if the stories aren’t very good. It’s a question of judgment and you have to go with what you think. That’s the way television works. I think, on balance, we did some pretty nice stories and some that didn’t come out so good. Some shows you’re happy with, some you’re disappointed with, and others you’re ashamed of. That’s the way it goes, but you’re a pro, you accept those things, you understand them, and all you can do is make sure that everybody does their best.
MARC DANIELS (director, “Spock’s Brain”)
Fred Freiberger and I didn’t agree on what the director’s role was. There are many writer-producers who don’t consider the director a partner. They consider him, shall we say, an employee. This is particularly true in episodic TV. They just want you to do the work, get the shots, and forget the rest of it. I didn’t particularly care for that kind of thinking.
MARGARET ARMEN (writer, “The Paradise Syndrome”)
I wrote Star Trek for Gene Roddenberry and Fred Freiberger, and I suppose they were looking for two different types of stories. Working with Gene was marvelous, because he was Star Trek and he related to the writers. Fred came in and to him Star Trek was “tits in space.” And that’s a direct quote. Fred had been signed to produce and was being briefed. He watched an episode with me, smoking a big cigar, and said, “Oh, I get it. Tits in space.”
You can imagine how a real Star Trek buff like myself reacted to that. It didn’t sit well with me at all. But I got along well with Fred and with him I did “The Paradise Syndrome.” Of course, Gene was the executive producer in an advisory capacity and he really had the last say on okaying story ideas. So I think it was actually Gene that accepted that one, because I feel “The Paradise Syndrome” was one that Fred would have let gone by.
In “The Paradise Syndrome,” a lushly photographed episode shot primarily on location, Kirk loses his memory and is mistaken for a Native American deity by the planet’s indigenous population, while the Enterprise attempts to prevent an asteroid from colliding with the planet.
MARGARET ARMEN
It turned out well, and Gene insisted that it be done. Fred thought the sponsors wouldn’t like it at all, but it happened that it was the only one that they did like of the first group he presented. I didn’t really know if Fred ever realized that Star Trek was a series about people. Fred was looking for all action pieces. That’s why he wasn’t crazy about the script for “The Paradise Syndrome,” because there wasn’t enough violent and terrifying action in it. He didn’t realize that the suspense would come from the characters, their relationships and so forth. There was some action in it, but there were no monsters and that sort of thing. So Fred was looking primarily for action pieces, whereas Gene was looking for that subtlety that is Star Trek. Action, but with people carrying the story.
FRED FREIBERGER
Star Trek had to change just by the nature that there was a different producer in place. This is the nature of this business. If people come in to produce a show—Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon—that show has to be shaped in terms of what they think. Writers have fragile egos. They come in and submit something. You generally know your show better. You change that show. You rewrite that show. You make suggestions. The professional writer who has been in the business and knows what it is, changes it. Some of them will accept the fact that some good suggestions are made. They have to if they want to stay with the show.
That is the nature of television. That’s the nature of Broadway in spite of the Dramatists Guild contract which says they can’t change any words. They just say to you, “We can’t change a line, I think our backers will pull out of this,” and so they get their way. Who’s kidding who? With a novel, if you won’t do what the editor says, unless you have a fantastic, powerful name, you just will not get that thing published. That is the essence of the procedure between staff on a show and writers.
DAVID GERROLD
I understand Freddy Freiberger’s problems a lot better now than I did then. Oddly enough, I have a respect for the man that I don’t think he realizes. He’s able to do something that not a lot of people can do: He can bring in a show on time and under budget. He can do the job. There are people who crumble under that kind of pressure. As a producer, I’m sure his decision
s were correct for what he was doing. I think his biggest weakness is that he doesn’t have a sense of humor. He doesn’t allow the shows he’s working for to have fun.
FRED FREIBERGER
Our problem was to broaden the viewer base. To do a science-fiction show, but get enough additional viewers to keep the series on the air. I decided to do what I would hope was a broad canvas of shows, but I tried to make them more dramatic and to do stories that had a more conventional story line within the science-fiction frame. The first show was “Spock’s Brain,” the second one was a more conventional kind of show, almost a fairy tale, “Elaan of Troyius.” I tried to do something a little different there.
I also tried to do shows like the one I personally loved, “Spectre of the Gun.” I thought that came out pretty well. Those are the kind of things I tried to do: good stories with different kinds of elements, such as romance or surrealism. I did one in which Kirk fell in love with an android. I wanted to do good stories with interesting twists to them. When you come into a series, you try to do shows which won’t diminish a series, but will help a little. In some cases it doesn’t work out.
“Elaan of Troyius” was an example of the new approach. The crew seemed happy with the idea. You assume these things, though you never know who’s saying what behind your back. With that episode we were trying to do a variation of Taming of the Shrew, and added the element of her teardrops being an aphrodisiac.
It was fun, but part of the reason we did that one was because the network had told us that they had done a survey and discovered that although there were a lot of female science-fiction fans, women generally are terrified of space. They needed stability, they needed surroundings; they’d rather be in valleys than on tops of mountains. So we tried to get the women, which is why we did a romantic story. We tried to reach that audience we couldn’t reach otherwise, but we didn’t succeed.
MARC CUSHMAN
People would be surprised to know that Gene gave out the first sixteen script assignments for the third season, and he gave a lot of memos as they were being developed. He would come in for screenings and give Fred memos on the episodes, things to change and so forth. So he was definitely involved, but as the season progressed his involvement became less and less because he was off making the film Pretty Maids All in a Row for MGM.
