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

by Edward Gross

  RONALD D. MOORE (coexecutive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

  As a fan, whenever I watched the third-season episodes in syndication, I was always like, “Here we go. I’ve got to watch ‘Way to Eden’ and ‘Spock’s Brain’ and ‘And the Children Shall Lead,’” which was my least favorite of the entire run. Worse than “Spock’s Brain.” “Spock’s Brain” is goofy and it’s almost absurdist. I just hated those kids and wanted them all to die. It’s too bad, too, because the third season is the best-looking of the show. The lighting is really good, the special effects were as good as they were ever going to be. It was a much more handsome show. It really found its footing. There was much more texture in the photography. Everything looked good but the stories were just crap. They weren’t quite on the Lost in Space level, but they had definitely fallen from where they were.

  FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)

  Back when the original series was in production, you could call a number and they’d arrange a set visit. So I called the office. You didn’t have to be anyone special, they just did it, and I got an appointment to visit the set. My appointment was four p.m. on December 31, 1968, and I was told I could bring a guest. I had a fourteen-year-old friend named Marc Zicree who was a huge fan, so I made it his Christmas present. I drive us over to Paramount, we go to the office, and they walk us over to the set. The guy says, “Stay about a half an hour and then go,” and he leaves! Would never happen today. Unchaperoned, we were basically two kids watching. They were filming a scene in sick bay, the only regulars were Shatner and DeForest Kelley.

  I couldn’t tell from the little bit we saw what the story was, but it turned out to be “Turnabout Intruder.” We stayed longer than a half hour because no one was chasing us out. It was also the stage where the bridge was, and all the corridors, so we walked around, and the two things that I remember distinctly were the assistant director saying, “Come on, people, it’s New Year’s Eve, last episode of the season. Let’s get this done.” And Majel Barrett, who I did not know yet, walked by me and said under her breath, “Last episode, period.” Inside I said, “No!” because they hadn’t announced it even though we all knew it was on the brink. That was how I found out the show was officially canceled.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  Unfortunately the very last third-season episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” was very good and it might have won an Emmy for William Shatner, but all TV shows got rescheduled for President Eisenhower’s funeral coverage. So the episode missed the Emmy-nomination deadline, because “Turnabout Intruder” was shown in the first rerun season, which made it ineligible for an Emmy.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  That’s how production ended. You’ve got to think about what Shatner went through during the original run of the series; his father passed away, which was something that really affected him. And then after the second season he and his wife separated. You can easily forgive Shatner if he chose to not have fond memories of Star Trek, because he went through two traumatic moments during the making of that show. One of them was sudden, the other one was probably caused by his workload and the fact that he was never around.

  But as bad as “Turnabout Intruder” was, there is something somewhat apropos about the last words of the episode, “If only. She could have had anything she wanted. If only.” And then he walks off. If only … If only Paramount and NBC realized what they had.… If only Roddenberry had got his wish to have a better time slot in the third season.… Can you imagine how great those third-season episodes would have turned out with him being the day-to-day line producer like he was for the first half of the first season? If only. If only indeed.

  RICHARD ARNOLD

  When I was putting together the guest list for the Hollywood Walk of Fame party at the studio for Gene, I was going over the list of who was invited with Gene in his office. I asked him if there was anyone missing from my list, and he gave me a couple of names of behind-the-scenes people I had omitted. I remember [original Star Trek editor] Fabien Tordjmann being one of them. As I was about to leave, I asked him, half in jest, if there was anyone who should not be on the list. He responded, “If Herb Solow or Fred Freiberger are there, I will not be!” It was the one and only time that I ever heard him mention either of their names, and I was somewhat surprised by his response, as he was quite adamant.

  FRED FREIBERGER

  I have read that the fans didn’t like any of the episodes of the third season. If true, that hurts me, but there is another truth. In my travels throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, I have run into many Star Trek fans and not one of them has ever treated me with anything less than courtesy and respect. For that I thank them.

  But I have to be honest. I thought the worst experience of my life was when I was shot down over Nazi Germany. A Jewish boy from the Bronx parachuted into the middle of eighty million Nazis. Then I joined Star Trek. I was only in a prison camp for two years, but my travail with Star Trek lasted decades.

  LIFE AFTER DEATH

  “WE’VE BEEN THROUGH DEATH … AND LIFE TOGETHER.”

  The seeds of Star Trek’s rebirth were actually planted while the original series was still in production, fighting for its very existence. NBC may not have recognized it right away, but the show had most definitely struck a chord with viewers, who developed a passionate interest in Star Trek very early in its run.

  It was that early fervor that would ultimately spawn the first fanzines devoted to a television series—mimeographed amateur fan-created magazines filled with illustrations, short stories, analysis, and interviews. Later, the record-breaking success of the show in syndication would inspire a plethora of merchandise and full-fledged Star Trek conventions, as well as the hope that the Enterprise would someday fly again, a dream that would eventually be realized with the release of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

  Without the fans keeping Star Trek alive in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, it’s very unlikely it would have ever survived into the twenty-first century.

  DAVID GERROLD (author, The World of Star Trek)

  In retrospect, I would have to say that Star Trek was overrated; that its survival, the phenomenon, is based more on what we imagine than what’s really there. This is true about all television. Television is imitation movies, so what we do in television is hint at and suggest what we really can’t show, because people don’t want it in their living room. So you go back and look at the original Star Trek, and there’s about a dozen episodes that are quite good as either television or science fiction. Not much more than that.

  ALAN DEAN FOSTER (author, the Star Trek Log series)

  It’s fairly obvious that Star Trek represented, more than anything else, a sensible future. A future where people worked together and utilized science and reason and logic to try and solve problems, instead of just blowing things up. It was the idea we go out into space and even if we meet hostile aliens, we can manage to get along; and everyone on the Enterprise gets along. The whole tribal issue of humanity has disappeared, and we have a sensible world. Just that we go forward and the world isn’t destroyed by climate change or some other environmental disaster, and we’re not fighting each other. That’s the message of all hopeful science fiction. I believe that’s what the fans latched on to.

  DAVID GERROLD

  The strength of the show is the format and the characters, not the episodes. Because the characters and the format suggest a possibility, and it is the possibilities that Star Trek suggests that I think are responsible for the phenomenon of the TV series. We would go to Star Trek conventions—and this would be about 1972—and people would say, “Why is Star Trek so popular?” I’d say, “I think it’s because Star Trek represents a world that works for everyone; that we could solve problems. It represented an opportunity to say that the human race is going to outlive its troubles and survive and succeed, and truly will learn to live together.” This was in the middle of the Vietnam War, race riots, famine, and Watergate, and
here’s Star Trek saying, “No sweat, we’ll be okay.” That’s real valuable. When I started saying that to other people, and I said it in my book The World of Star Trek, which was published in 1973, other people started picking up on it and repeating it.

  I did an analysis in The World of Star Trek that said that there are really three worlds of Star Trek. There’s the show itself, what gets transmitted; behind the scenes; and the fans.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG (author, Star Trek Lives!)

  Fanfic has been the main artistic outlet for writer-type people since the dawn of time. However, the fanzine was invented by science-fiction fandom circa the commercialization of the spirit duplicator … purple ink on a gel. Science-fiction fanzines did not usually publish fan-written fiction. One simply did not infringe copyright by writing in another person’s professionally published universe except for short humor. And fan-written original fiction was just too awful and nobody wanted it. So fanzines were discussions and reviews, personal life events, news of forthcoming books, etc.

  DEVRA LANGSHAM (editor, Spockanalia)

  A lot of the time they were letterzines—you wrote to someone about something and they wrote back—or there were con reports. You know, “I went to this con and I saw Isaac Asimov and it was neat.” Or there were book reviews, but there wasn’t fiction. There were three or four professional magazines that were buying fiction at the time. If your story is good enough to be published, why haven’t you submitted it to one of them? So nobody had thought of publishing fiction. I don’t know if people wrote stories related to other shows and other books. It didn’t occur to me that I should look for a fanzine with fiction in it, not that I think there were any. And if there were, there was no Internet, so it was a question of people finding each other.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  Devra Langsham in New York did the first fanzine, Spockanalia, as a one-shot with the attitude, “Let’s just publish these Star Trek stories in a fanzine.” There were only a few stories, but there were too many people who wanted them to distribute this by carbon copy (the usual method was carbon paper before Xerox). Meanwhile, Ruth Berman called for stories for a fanzine she named T-Negative. I’m not sure, but I think the first ones were mimeo and only later when circulation broke five hundred or a thousand did they go offset press. It’s all circulation size versus production cost and storage space in someone’s basement.

  DEVRA LANGSHAM

  My friend Sherna Comerford and I talked about Star Trek stories a lot. Then we met someone at a science-fiction convention in Newark and she said, “Here, you should talk to this lady; she’s got a magazine she’s published with book reviews and letters, and she’s written a couple of articles on Star Trek saying things like, ‘Hey, isn’t this neat: you can tell the service these people are in by the color of their shirts.’” Which, of course, we didn’t know, because we didn’t have a color TV. She put us in touch with Ruth Berman, a longtime science-fiction fan who had written a story and may have printed up a few copies for her friends. Then we met [writer] Eleanor Arnason and Kathy Bushman, who was an artist, and it just kind of went from there.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  Note the Vulcan connection of each fanzine title. It was Spock that woke up female science-fiction fans and produced a torrent of stories. Then the Kirk fans and everybody else wrote stories about their favorite characters. Zines proliferated and differentiated, re-creating genres from scratch.

  One such “re-creation” of fan fiction was so-called Kirk/Spock (or K/S fiction, also known as slash fiction), which brought the relationship between the two characters from close friends to something far more … intimate.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  Gene Roddenberry explained it this way. When he created the bridge crew, he created the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate from fragments of his own mind. He could identify with each character, they were components of his own creative view of the world. So when Trekkers studied the TV series, they saw Kirk and Spock as a unit. As one entity, as needing to “get together,” as two poles of a magnet, because GR created them to be two halves of a whole.

  DEVRA LANGSHAM

  Spockanalia was introduced in 1967 while the show was in its infancy. We were really careful and didn’t want to look like fools, so we said, “Don’t introduce things that aren’t on the show—if it’s in an episode, that’s great, but don’t suddenly decide that Kirk has golden nipples or anything like that.” We were writing and publishing this zine as though Star Trek is the real world, so we’re not going to publish articles on “I got to go on the set and I saw the actors,” because that was already being published by other people.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  Human nature being what it is, sexuality is the expression of that “get together” and “irresistible attraction.” The soul mate hypothesis runs deep in romance literature. Many of the women drawn to Star Trek fandom, who wrote fanfic, were not science-fiction readers or fans nearly as much as they were romance readers and fans. The other factions of Star Trek’s female fandom were scientists, often working in science labs. Many others were librarians and teachers whose education and professions include sociology as a science. Given that Kirk and Spock belong together—“well, then … maybe … uh, no, but…”—one fan wrote a story where that hypothesis was brought to the fore, played with, and suggested. That story circulated on carbon copies, then got printed—today we’d say it “went viral”—and all of a sudden people everywhere were arguing the hypothesis by writing stories.

  Simultaneously, the gay community was in the process of coming out of the closet, so while many Trek stories were fem-lib based, others were gay-lib based. My thesis is that popular fiction follows and reflects social trends but does not cause them. Popular fiction can and does help people who are not part of a particular social trend to understand the people who are part of that social trend.

  DEVRA LANGSHAM

  When Spockanalia was published, that was the year that the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Manhattan. We printed up our magazine and walked around the convention holding a picture of the front cover so people would see it was Star Trek. And either they said, “Blech, that stupid show” or they said, “Whoooooooa!” We developed what is commonly known as “unsold fanzine shoulder,” which is the way you get after you’ve been carrying ten magazines around. After that, we got a table, but this was the very first time and we just walked around and held it out to people.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  As far as fans connected to established science-fiction fandom were concerned, character distortions as the show went on were no problem. That’s what fanfic is for. You just fix it yourself. People generally liked the show because it was real science fiction or hated it because it was television and pretty much distorted or ignored the real-science ingredients. But they watched every episode, memorized them or recorded the soundtrack on sound recorders before video recorders, and discussed every error and development with vast differences of opinion.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE (authors, Star Trek Concordance)

  By the time Star Trek fandom emerged as a force to be reckoned with, the quick-print shops were common and offset prices were down so everyone could afford them. One of the first things science-fiction fans noticed was that Star Trek fans began turning out beautifully reproduced fanzines all over the place. This rubbed some of the science-fiction old-timers the wrong way, as they remembered all too well the frustration of trying to produce a letter-perfect fanzine using outdated methods of reproduction.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  There are two types of science-fiction fans: “fandom is a way of life” folks and “fandom is just a goddamned hobby” folks. Star Trek added another division: those who follow canon and those who embroider it with their own original material, and thus write “alternate universe” stories. My Star Trek fanfic series Kraith is “alternate universe” and was published first in T-Negative. I wrote a nonfiction article for Spockanalia
, the fanzine that held strictly to canon.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  Star Trek fans also thought they should make a profit off their endeavors. As one of the all-hallowed and totally illogical early ideas of science-fiction fandom, the unspoken “rule” that it was immoral to make a profit off fellow fans is probably one of the most stupid. Star Trek fans, without any of this “tradition” behind them, hit fandom broadside with expensive fanzines and conventions that were openly designed to make money for someone.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  Fandom was composed of readers—other media just didn’t connect. Thus at conventions, “Trekkies” were socially shunned, and eventually Trek items were prohibited from being on the program schedule. The year Kraith was nominated for a Hugo, the anti-Trek movement in fandom reached vitriolic levels.

  BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE

  Science-fiction fandom, established since the 1940s, viewed the sudden invasion of Star Trek fans with alarm. Until the popularity of the show, most fans discovered SF via books and magazines. This was long before Internet communication, so fans joined fandom as individuals or small groups. This made it easier to absorb the “WOWEE! More people like me!” enthusiasm of newcomers, as SF fandom seldom got rocked by the gentle intrusion. SF fans had muddled along nicely until Star Trek burst on the scene. Then everyone got a rude awakening to modern times.

  JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG

  We coined a new vocabulary. Trekkies were gaga media fans, celebrity groupies who couldn’t tell the difference between an actor and a character; people who didn’t read books—maybe a Trek novel, but not real books—and didn’t even know who Hal Clement was. We, however, were Trekkers, not Trekkies. We understood actor and character difference, and knew all the differences between real science and Trek science, the gap of which has closed recently, and criticized Trek for literary flaws while admiring it for incorporating Shakespeare and many classics just as science-fiction novels do.