The City on the Edge of Forever Page 3

  Beyond those few technical details, I don’t think you’ll have any trouble deciphering the jabberwocky of the tv medium. Just sorta kinda picture what’s going on as if it were playing on a screen in your head. Get visual. That’s what we have to do when we write the stuff.

  Now. There are things in this script that were taken out entirely. The first is the character of Beckwith. I was advised by NBC network continuity, at the time of the turn-in of the first draft of this teleplay, that drugs—even something as clearly a fantasy construct as the Jewels of Sound—could not be permitted on a show that was airing so early in the evening. Further, there is a killing on board: one crew member kills another. I was told that was nixed because no one onboard the starship Enterprise could be a bad guy. I railed at that concept. It always struck me as nonsense that the network could try to pass off a space battlecruiser of that size, with a complement of many hundreds of people, without a few rotten apples in the barrel. Just the rigors of space exploration and tight confinement should have made somebody go bananas. But, no, they didn’t want to shatter that silly myth that all tv heroes are just that: heroes. I was going for some reality, but the network gets inordinately uptight about such stuff. In the televised version, the entire Jewels of Sound/ Beckwith/LeBeque situation was replaced by the ship’s doctor injecting himself with some drug that made him go loonie, and he became the Beckwith character, going back in time.

  The entire alternate universe thing with the space marauders was excised. [7] Much of the relationship between Kirk and Edith Keeler was watered down, to my way of thinking. But the two most significant changes, the ones I resented most bitterly, were these:

  The joy of writing television is small. Once having written a script, once having poured one’s hours and emotions into a story, the script is passed into the hands of others, who alter the dream to fit their own interpretations and their own need to put their mark on something someone else has created. They have to justify their own jobs, even their existences in some cases.

  To hear directors tell it—with that moronic “auteur theory” by which they bamboozle audiences into believing it is they who have the vision—nothing comes to life without them. If the truth be told, were it not for the writer, who has the idea, orders it sequentially and logically, builds the characters and gives them their words, the directors would be standing around with their fingers in their mouths waiting for divine guidance. Producers, network continuity people, production personnel, every advertising executive who has bought time on the show, and his or her spouse, and mother-in-law…all of them take credit for the script. But it is the writer who starts it all rolling. Without the writer you would turn on your television set tonight and be dazzled by uninterrupted hours of test patterns or, at best, recorded organ music.

  So the primacy of a writer’s investment in the work is frequently ignored. He or she is never consulted about the script, never invited to sit in on the shooting, seldom even asked to rewrite if such becomes necessary. Ham-handed assistants, all of whom know in their secret heart of hearts that they could write “if they only had the time la-de-dah,” these are the ones who dumb down a script. With working conditions like that, is it any wonder any writers who care move on to other mediums? Films, books, quiet evenings around the campfire. And for those of us who do care, who make nuisances of ourselves by sticking with a script despite the baleful stares of producers and studio personnel, it becomes a matter of inserting those small things in a script that enrich us as creators.

  For me, in this script, the personal, secret things I planted were the character of Trooper, and what happens to him, and the characterization of Kirk that said he was willing to sacrifice the ship, the crew, himself, Spock, all time itself if need be, for love. In the end, he would allow time to be warped and never returned to its original state, just to keep Edith alive. It was Spock, logical and rational, who held Kirk back from saving Edith’s life.

  I was told: “Our character wouldn’t act like that.”

  Bull. Who knows how someone will act when pressed to the final, ineluctable confrontation with himself? I felt it vastly deepened the one-dimensional character of Kirk-the-rock-jawed, and made a point about mortality and the necessity for love that television seldom considers. And it was to be topped off by the first (and perhaps only) time in the series when Spock spoke to Kirk calling him by his first name. It was supposed to be a pair of scenes filled with genuine emotion and some kernel of human anguish, not the counterfeit emotion which tv usually substitutes for genuine pain, thereby dulling and diminishing all of us who watch the little box.

  Trooper was removed entirely. I think he is the best character I’ve ever written into a script. I would have liked to’ve seen him come to life. His death in the show says, I think, something fearful and important about the passage of our lives on this tiny grain of dust we call the Earth.

  I am sad he never had the breath of life blown into him by the magicians of the coaxial cable.

  Perhaps some other time, in some other script.

  Well. That about logs it closed. Had I but world enough and time, I would go through the months and events of this script and what happened to it, in much greater detail. But that’s the past, and as has been said, past is merely prologue. Here is the script. I’ve just reread it, after almost ten years, just to see if it needed any touching up. I still like it. My hope is that you feel similarly. And it was nice visiting with you.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  NEW YORK CITY

  6 DECEMBER 1974

  So it didn’t end there. It should have, but Roddenberry’s character flaws included one that continued to get his ass in trouble year after year. And that flaw—oddly enough omitted from the “authorized” biography as written by David Alexander—was his need to subsume into his self-perpetuating mythos of being El Supremo, every witticism, cleverly-turned phrase, story-concept, deed of derring-do, noble thought or selfless action of anyone he met. [8] If something was clever, or successful, or artful, it was his. If it was shit, it was ours. If something went wrong, it wasn’t his fault, it was the Conspiracy Theory machinations of the invisible men in black who actually ran the Network; or it was evil, ungrateful, penny-pinching Paramount that was out to get him; or it was the fault of those unruly, temperamental writers who acted like cranky babies and who needed the stern—but Solomonically fair and kindly—hand of El Supremo to set them back on the path of righteousness: the path of fulfilling Gene’s dream and vision of himself as the incarnation of his wearyingly repetitive god-surrogates (Adonis, V’Ger, Charlie X, The Squire of Gothos, Nomad and Q, just to reprise a mere half-dozen of the Deity-as-Demento that Roddenberry either wrote himself or forced into the work of others); or it was the evil ineptitude of Lurkers Within, the Iago or Brutus or Judas figures inside his own studio or production unit, whose smiling faces masked their true intent to thwart his Great Plan to show the less-perfect human race that they could be Starswept and Galactic, if only they would pay heed to Gene Roddenberry’s immaculate view of human perfectibility. Flaws could not be permitted in the rest of the human monkeymass, but El Supremo was never to be confronted with his own teensy imperfections—such as plagiarizing John Meredyth Lucas’s “Nomad” and Alan Dean Foster’s teleplay, to create the script for the first feature film (Foster had to go to the Guild to get his credit, and to the end Roddenberry kept insisting the work was original) [9] …betraying his most loving colleague, David Gerrold, by hiring him to write the bible for The Next Generation, then merchandising it ruthlessly, and denying Gerrold had ever written a useable word (Gerrold won his suit against Roddenberry for back wages to the tune of something close to seventy thousand dollars)…and doesn’t that story have an interesting resonance with the “unuseable script” of yet another sweet young writer named Ellison?…exploiting Bjo and John Trimble, who had set up Roddenberry’s merchandising arm, Lincoln Enterprises, by having them work their asses off independently until the divorce was finalized with Eileen Ro
ddenberry, and thus avoiding the ex-Mrs. R’s claim to half those profits, and then freezing them out and giving it to his girlfriend Majel Barrett.

  As one disillusioned ex-Trek official recently said, “You know why they cremated Gene? They were afraid people would come to piss on the grave.”

  So it didn’t end there. Roddenberry continued to rewrite history in his head and spew out the revisions at conventions everywhere. And the vast monkeymass of Trekkie fans who have trouble differentiating between the fiction of television shows and the reality of those who created the shows, rewarded Gene with bouquets of gullible acceptance. Whatever Roddenberry said became canonical. And right up there in the forefront of his lies-made-history was that he had saved “City” from the drooling jaws and clubby hands of Spendthrift Ellison.

  He never stopped retelling that story.

  And I kept seeking the definitive rebuttal to that lie, for thirty years.

  Well, all else in this essay notwithstanding, I finally found that single definitive bit of evidentiary support.

  It came into my hands only as this book was going to press in its White Wolf edition. It can be found on page 31 of a large, coffee-table-style trade paperback titled WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE: A History in Pictures (Pocket Books, 1994, and updated 1996) by J.M. Dillard.

  The rebuttal comes from a source so unimpeachable, that standing alone it should consign to outer darkness the last echo of Roddenberry’s wretched untruths about the creation of “City.”

  The rebuttal comes from the man who truly first conceived Star Trek, who had his “Wagon train to the stars” line filched by Roddenberry, who wrote “Where No Man Has Gone Before” as the successful pilot when NBC rejected Roddenberry’s first pilot script, “The Cage.” The rebuttal comes from Samuel A. Peeples.

  Here is what appears on that page 31:

  However, Roddenberry massively rewrote the original script, much to Ellison’s consternation. In an interview with Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow program, Ellison commented, “…they had mucked it up badly. It took six or seven years before Gene Roddenberry and I even spoke to each other again.”

  Writer Sam Peeples concurred. “I thought Harlan’s version of his script that won the Writers Guild award was far better than the script that was shot…”

  And then J.M. Dillard proceeds to repeat Roddenberry’s bullshit assertions that he rewrote me, and that “City” won a Nebula, and that I “rushed up on stage” and took credit for his aborted, stunted, thalidomide-baby script-by-committee. But since it was a Hugo, and it was at a World SF Convention, and since Roddenberry wasn’t even there, he didn’t know if I rushed up and took credit or not.

  In truth, as you will find it reported in Locus, the newspaper of the science fiction world, I made it very clear to those at the ceremony—and anyone who cared to read of my remarks in their many published reincarnations—that it was a wretched, half-witted, abortive version of my lovely script that they had seen on television, and I accepted the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation “in memory of the script they butchered, and in respect to those parts of it that had the vitality to shine through the evisceration.” I never took credit for what they had done to my work, only to what they could not kill, though it took a gang-bang of them to do it!

  But now, back to the original time-line.

  Even after repeated phone conversations between us in which I reminded him that I was hardly the sort of guy who would take these endless canards with a smile and an aw-shucks. And every time Gene would figuratively slap his forehead and laugh and say something like, “Oh, gee whiz, Harlan, yes, now I remember that it wasn’t like that at all! It must be my memory! Gee whiz, Harlan, I must be getting old and senile! I promise it won’t happen again.”

  And it happened again. And it happened again. And it happened again and again and again. He never stopped. And after a while I decided, fuckit, he’s screwed everyone I love on that show, and he’s lied about me for decades, and now the time has come to feed him a mealy diet of his own mendacity.

  What’s that? You think I’m just a meanspirited guy? Well, how about someone else commenting on Gene’s way with other writers’ scripts? How about this excerpt from the latest ghost-written Shatner memoir, STAR TREK MOVIE MEMORIES, a remembrance by “creative producer” Harold Livingston of how well he was treated by Roddenberry when he, Livingston, saved Roddenberry’s ass by writing the screenplay for what turned out to be the first feature film. I quote from the HarperPrism paperback edition, pp. 74-76:

  “In Thy Image,” having now been abandoned by William Norton and due to be finished in less than three months, was stuck in a no-win situation. A round of inquiries found that the best writers in town were all simply too busy to jump into the task at this late date, and those who were available were ultimately deemed unsuitable by Livingston and/or Roddenberry. Still, somebody had to write this thing…and fast.

  With that in mind, Livingston, under enormous time pressure and lacking confidence in Roddenberry’s abilities, took the task upon himself. He turned the bulk of the series’ story editing duties over to Jon Povill, locked himself into his office, and spent the next month pounding “In Thy Image” into a complete first-draft screenplay….

  Livingston’s first-draft script was really quite close to the one that would ultimately become Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The only real difference was the ending….

  “I brought in my script on a Friday afternoon. I gave it to Gene and he said, ‘Okay, now you’ve done your job. Let me do mine.’ He then goes home, and rewrites the whole goddamn thing over the weekend. Monday morning, he hands out copies of his revised version to Goodwin, Bob Collins, Jon Povill and me, and at first glance, I immediately notice that the cover page now reads ‘In Thy Image by Gene Roddenberry and Harold Livingston.’ He’d put his name on top of mine.

  “So now we all go into our offices, we all start reading this thing and maybe an hour or so later, we’d all finished. At that point, everybody congregated in my office, saying ‘What are we gonna tell him? WHO’s gonna tell him?’

  “So I picked up his script, walked into his office, and while he was sitting there with this expectant grin on his face, I said ‘Gene, this is SHIT!’ Just like that. And the grin remained frozen on his face, so I got myself excited, and I asked him, ‘Why’d you do this? When something works, you don’t piss in it to make it better!’”

  That was Gene. Couldn’t write for sour owl poop, but strutted around for the benefit of the gullible Trekkie Nation, explaining how every failure was someone else’s fault, and every success was due to his fecund imagination, vast literary ability, and CEO-level organizational skills. Do I strike you as vicious in my presentation of these facts? Yeah, well, just so, gentle reader, just so. I put up with this crap for the better part of three decades, and now it’s my turn. Do not expect from me a nobility that was not possessed by the late, great Bird of the Galaxy, who spent more than a few hours of those years dropping bird-shit on me and my version of “City.”

  Now we come to the section of this Introductory essay that was excerpted in a recent TV Guide Special on the Trek phenomenon. I was asked to write the piece by Larry Closs, senior editor at TV Guide. He contacted me (if I recall accurately) late in December of 1994, and he asked me if I was now ready, after all those years of the Roddenberry version, to tell the Ellison version of how “City” came to be. I was extremely reluctant. Ask Closs, he’ll tell you. I said no a few times, capping the refusal with the phrase, “TV Guide hasn’t got enough money to get me to write this sordid little epic.” He asked how much money that would be. Now, since I know that TV Guide, for all its enormous circulation and ocean-swallowing advertising revenues, pays some of the worst rates in magazine writing, I named a figure about five times what their best pay-out had been in my experience. Closs called back later that day and said, “You got it.”

  Well, ’pon mah soul! What an epiphany, folks! There was actual rowrbazzle size money to be made from this kind
of thing. Not just everyone else with their pig-snouts in the trough, but li’l ole me, too! So I wrote it. And Closs even reproduced some of the photographic evidence that proves I’m not just makin’ this shit up as I go along. (And there’s all of that stuff, plus more, here in the full-length book version. We want you should get your money’s worth. Also, we want the winged monkeys who’ll come to carry me off should have a hard time saying I’m a big fat liar, when you can see the actual documents here reproduced.)

  So I wrote the article.

  And the first phone call on my answering machine after the issue hit the newsstands, was the hysterically tearful voice of a woman who—in properly Roddenberry perfect-humanity manner—left no name, but in heart-rendingly (albeit cowardly) fashion excoriated me. “You rotten person,” she screamed, “you should die and burn in hell forever! You aren’t fit to speak Gene Roddenberry’s name, you lying sonofabitch bastard!” And on and on, without much originality or innovative use of defamatory verbiage. (Don’t you just hate it when some plucky little pustule summons up the sneaky strength to give you an anonymous call, and the best they can come up with is fuck you? If you’re going to go at it, do try to heed H. L. Mencken’s admonitions about the pallid nature of American cursing.)