A Brief Guide to Star Trek (11 page)

A shimmering time vortex, an angry woolly mammoth, too many locations and too many speaking parts all caused Roddenberry to request a revision of the story. Additionally, concerned by how long it had taken Ellison to draft just the outline, he suggested the writer should be based in the studio offices for the writing of the first draft teleplay. That way, Roddenberry, Coon and Justman could keep a close eye on the maverick writer. ‘Harlan arrived with his own typewriter, his own portable radio, and his own original approach to creativity’, recalled Justman in
Inside Star Trek
.

Located in the studio’s wardrobe storage room, Ellison felt the need to escape his limited confines at regular intervals and was often to be seen wandering the back lot checking out whatever happened to be shooting. Even when he was locked in the ‘office’, he’d escape out through the window. He complained of being forced to work under ‘inhuman and inhumane conditions’, with constant interruptions from people using the wardrobe store forcing him to work at night. In response,
Justman moved Ellison into his own office and supervised him directly as he finished the teleplay (the pair had previously worked together on
The Outer Limits
). Important meetings conducted with Justman would continue around Ellison as he pecked away at his typewriter over a three-week period and gradually completed a first draft of what became ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’.

Justman described the finished script as ‘without a doubt . . . the best and most beautifully written screenplay we’ve gotten to date’. However, he also knew ‘we cannot afford to make this show as it presently stands [due to] set construction costs, location shooting, crowds of extras, crowds of stunts, special effects onstage, special photographic effects, wardrobe costs, period props and set dressing rentals, and other costs too numerous to mention . . . We have to find a way to retain all the basic qualities contained within this screenplay and make it economically feasible to photograph it.’

What Ellison’s script revealed about
Star Trek
was that it was a strictly budgeted production – that’s why so many of the planets visited resembled Earth-type settings (allowing easy use of the back-lot standing sets), why alien races often consisted of a handful of representatives, and why special effects shots (such as the
Enterprise
orbiting a planet) were repeatedly reused.

The decision to redraft the screenplay to make it producible within a television budget saw the beginning of a long-running feud between Ellison and Roddenberry that was to run for decades, even beyond the latter’s death. Roddenberry faced rewriting what Justman had estimated to be an eight-day shooting schedule for the episode down to
Star Trek
’s standard seven days per episode, over Ellison’s loud objections. Roddenberry also felt that some of the ‘guest characters’ featured in the episode did not represent the ‘best of humanity’ that he saw in Starfleet’s officers. The blame, or credit, for the rewrite was spread around, however. Gene Coon had the first try at rewriting the show, following Ellison’s own changes under Justman’s direction. Then story editor D. C. Fontana found the script on
her desk for another redrafting, which although now shootable resulted in Justman expressing his view that the revised teleplay lacked ‘the beauty and mystery that was inherent in this screenplay as Harlan originally wrote it. It is very good
Star Trek
material, but has none of Harlan’s special magic.’ In response, Roddenberry had no choice but to take on the task himself, attempting to fuse the drafts from his staff with the original from Ellison, picking out the best from each while still resulting in a practical screenplay that the production could shoot.

‘It budgeted out at nearly $100,000 over what we had to spend on an episode’, wrote Roddenberry of Ellison’s first draft. ‘His use of our characters was not according to format. When he couldn’t do an acceptable rewrite job, I rewrote the script to bring it within budget and within line of our
Star Trek
format.’

Even during filming of the episode in February 1967, Roddenberry continued to revise pages of the script. Ellison complained to the production, on the day shooting began, that he was not happy about the rewriting process. He requested that his traditional alias of dissatisfaction, ‘Cordwainer Bird’, be credited on screen. Roddenberry, however, saw great value in the Ellison name and fought to keep him attached. According to Justman, ‘After a lot of fussing and, according to Harlan, an “absolute threat” from Gene to keep him from ever working in Hollywood again, Cordwainer Bird was convinced to revert to being Harlan Ellison again, and his screen credit reflected the fact. Nevertheless, the uneasy truce that ensued between Harlan and Gene was never again remotely approaching comfortable.’

The resulting episode saw Kirk and Spock pursue a drug-crazed McCoy through a newly discovered time portal known as The Guardian of Forever, to 1930s Earth. There Kirk falls in love with social campaigner Edith Keeler (Joan Collins), only for Spock to reveal that she must die to protect the timeline . . . Fantastic ideas, a great emotional dilemma and high stakes, as well as superb production design, all combined to make this one of
Star Trek
’s best-loved episodes. The original script (before the
Star Trek
staff rewrote it) went on to win Ellison the Writers Guild
Award for most outstanding script for a dramatic television series, and he took the opportunity of his acceptance speech to berate studio ‘suits’ for ‘interfering with the writing process’. Ellison would go on to chronicle his side of the creation of the episode in a book-length study that included a lengthy essay and reprinted his original, award-winning screenplay.

Towards the end of the episode, the dialogue from Edith Keeler does much to highlight the then-growing iconic status of the characters of Kirk and Spock. Noting how out of place Kirk and Spock are in 1930s America, Spock asks her where she thinks they belong. ‘You?’ she says to Spock. ‘At his side, as if you’ve always been there and always will.’ To Kirk, she says, ‘And you? You belong in another place, I don’t know where or how, but I’ll figure it out eventually.’ She notes Spock’s relationship with Kirk by completing his statement with the word ‘Captain. Even when he doesn’t say it, he does.’ With these few lines, this episode encapsulated the relationship between Spock and Kirk and did much to define their iconic natures.

The first season of
Star Trek
ended on a creative high in April 1967 – ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ was followed by the final episode, ‘Operation: Annihilate!’ The show had come a long way from the two pilots, but Roddenberry and his team knew there were even more new worlds and new civilisations to be encountered.

Season two of
Star Trek
was all about honing Gene Roddenberry’s vision, as well as providing enough action-adventure content to please the network (and younger viewers) and so hopefully win the series another year on air.

The second year saw the introduction of a new character to the regular
Enterprise
crew. While Roddenberry had tried to balance ethnic and gender representations on the
Enterprise
, he’d given little thought to other nations. This was redressed with the addition of Russian Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), a mop-topped youth designed to appeal to young fans of The Monkees and The Beatles. The inclusion of a Russian character
was meant to indicate that sources of then-current tension, such as the Cold War of the 1960s, would be long resolved by the time of
Star Trek
’s utopian future.

Continuing mediocre ratings meant that
Star Trek
scraped through to a third year on air, but only after another vociferous fan campaign which this time included student demonstrations outside NBC’s headquarters in Los Angeles. A letter-writing campaign resulted in a steady flow of
Star Trek
mail to NBC. According to Roddenberry his show had actually been cancelled by the end of its second season in 1967, only for it to be renewed thanks to the volume of mail the broadcaster received.

Like the previous campaign, Roddenberry himself had been heavily involved in coordinating things from behind the scenes, but NBC were never to know that. They actually investigated the legitimacy of the letter-writing campaign and established to their satisfaction that the more than one million letters that arrived at NBC were representative of a genuine outpouring from real
Star Trek
fans.

By the end of the second season
Star Trek
had produced fifty-five episodes, not enough for NBC to run the show in syndication and thus maximise its returns on the series through daily reruns. With a third season of episodes, the series total would rise to enough for a decent syndication package (even though the usually preferred number of episodes was around 100) and a chance at generating a profit. The decision to renew may have been more of a sensible business move on the part of NBC than a response to any fan campaign (and in later years NBC claimed the number of letters received was actually less than 150,000). The decision to grant the series a third year would give
Star Trek
the chance to achieve serious longevity.

The show was back on, but despite his role in rescuing
Star Trek
from oblivion after its second year, Gene Roddenberry was to be even less involved in the production than ever before. Writing to author Isaac Asimov, Roddenberry addressed the changes behind the scenes of the third season and his hopes for
Star Trek
’s future. ‘This year I am pulling back from . . . the show
and will try to operate now as a real executive producer. I had offered to NBC to line produce it myself if they gave us a good hour on a good weeknight, but you know what happened there. I decided it was simply not worth the crippling expenditure of time and energy if I could not have a night and an hour which gave us at least a fair chance of reaching a mass audience and staying on the air. It is always at least possible that Friday night at 10 p.m. may work, or we might get a mid-season shift to a good time slot. I hope it works. I hope I can supervise the new team in keeping the quality of the show up, I hope
Star Trek
stays on for five or ten years. I’ve done my damnedest for the show.’

Like any successful TV producer, Roddenberry was always on the lookout for a way to advance to the next project, to a higher earning bracket or even into motion pictures. A third year of
Star Trek
was just another way for him to further that goal of advancing his own career. The new time slot helped Roddenberry to step back from the show he’d created: he’d promised hands-on involvement if NBC would return
Star Trek
to its previous successful early-evening slot early in the week, when younger viewers and students could watch. The Friday late-night slot was a blow, but it did help Roddenberry detach himself from his creation more easily. As far as he was concerned, cancellation after the third year was all but inevitable now, fan campaign or no fan campaign.

For its third year, producing duties on
Star Trek
fell to Fred Freiberger, an experienced TV producer hired by Roddenberry (he’d written for many of the same shows as Roddenberry, including
Highway Patrol
and
West Point
). In fact, Freiberger had initially been interviewed in 1966 for the producer role taken by Gene Coon. However, in the eyes of
Star Trek
’s fans, he would carry the responsibility for the reduction in quality of the episodes in the series’ third season. This had as much to do with a huge reduction in budget as it had with a lack of creative ideas. Even so, a number of the later episodes of the third year continued to prove that when
Star Trek
’s producers applied their minds, their stories could still challenge audiences.

Halfway through transmission of the third season in January 1969, Roddenberry confided in a letter to a friend his fears about cancellation. ‘I have grave doubts that we will be picked up for a fourth season. The Friday night at 10 p.m. slot is an almost impossible one for a show like this and it hurts us badly.’

Around the same time, Roddenberry outlined his frustrations with the final year of
Star Trek
in a letter to his mentor and inspir -ation John W. Campbell. ‘[
Star Trek
] is being made by someone else [Freiberger] and comes out quite different in important ways from the way I envisioned the show. The kind of creativity and imagination you saw in the first year of
Star Trek
is hard to find. Time, I think, to wash
Star Trek
out of my hair.’

January 1969 saw the shooting of ‘Turnabout Intruder’ – the final episode of the initial run of
Star Trek
, and the last live-action
Star Trek
adventure for a decade. The series had begun airing the previous September with ‘Spock’s Brain’. Those two bookend episodes are widely regarded by fans as two of the worst
Star Trek
instalments ever made. Ratings continued to be low and NBC did not help the situation by ‘pre-empting’ (replacing scheduled episodes with other programmes) the show three times and leaving a three-month gap between the airing of ‘All Our Yesterdays’ in March 1969 and burying the final new episode at the start of reruns in June 1969. NBC had issued a press release that February listing the shows that would be picked up for the following year –
Star Trek
was not among them. The network pulled the plug on the show before the final few episodes of the third series could even be shot.

Not only was
Star Trek
over but the show had been branded a failure by both its network, NBC, and its producer, Paramount (who had bought Desilu). NBC had cancelled the show – as they stated in a form letter sent to complaining fans – because it had failed to achieve the 30 per cent audience share the network required, even though the network’s poor scheduling of the series had contributed heavily to this failure. It was also true that the show had never cracked the Nielsen Top 20 listing of TV shows for any of its three difficult years on air.