A Brief Guide to Star Trek (4 page)

Thus, Roddenberry’s first television success came in selling storylines to cop shows, often based directly on his own experiences or tales he’d heard from other officers. He quickly discovered LA’s TV writer hangouts – the bars, the restaurants – and began to spend time there off duty, making friends and building contacts. This paid off and he wrote episodes for various shows through the mid-1950s, including six instalments of
Mr. District Attorney
and five of
Highway Patrol
.

In April 1956 he sold a script to
The West Point Story
, a TV show about US Army cadets, produced with the cooperation of the military. Roddenberry had accosted E. Jack Neuman, the show’s producer, on a cross-country flight. Over the next year he would write eight more episodes, and one other in collaboration with Neuman himself. Stories came easily to the
West Point
staff, drawn as they were from the actual files of the real-life New York US Military Academy. Actors who appeared on
the show and later became big names included Clint Eastwood, Barbara Eden (
I Dream of Jeannie
), Larry Hagman (
Dallas
), and Leonard Nimoy. Over two seasons on air,
West Point
clocked up forty episodes, and Roddenberry had written, co-written or rewritten a quarter of them. It was a baptism by fire and one he was keen to learn from.

In 1956 Roddenberry quit the LAPD to become a full-time TV writer, continuing to draw on his police experience for his first commissions. One script Roddenberry rewrote for
West Point
was by Sam Rolfe (rewriting often involved taking a writer’s original work and making it more suitable for the pro -duction realities of any given show: it’s something Roddenberry would do a lot during the early days of
Star Trek
). Rolfe would soon go on to create
Have Gun, Will Travel
, and Roddenberry would quickly move on to that show, writing twenty-four of the half-hour Western adventure episodes. The light-hearted show ran from 1957 to 1963 and starred Richard Boone as ‘gentleman gunslinger’ Paladin, a champion-for-hire who liked to right wrongs without violence, but was an excellent shot when required. Paladin had been an Army officer and graduate of West Point and used a knight chess piece as his calling card. Among the episodic guest cast were DeForest Kelley (a veteran of many film and TV Westerns), Whit Bissell and William Schallert (all seen in later
Star Trek
episodes). Another significant writer who graduated from this series to run his own show was Bruce Geller (
Mission: Impossible
,
Star Trek
’s stablemate at Desilu Studios).

Having won a Writers Guild Award for an episode of
Have Gun, Will Travel
in 1957, the early 1960s saw Roddenberry develop a career as a jobbing TV writer, moving from show to show, building experience and contacts in the business. He was reliable, but he’d often write no more than one or two episodes for each series and never secured a staff-writing job. In 1962 he wrote instalments of some of American TV’s top-rated shows, including
Dr Kildare
,
Naked City
and
The Virginian
.

Roddenberry tried several times to get his own programme
off the ground. He’d written a pilot script in 1959 called
Night Stick
about a Greenwich Village cop, while his 1960 episode of
Alcoa Goodyear Theatre
called ‘333 Montgomery Street’, about a criminal defence attorney, was intended as a possible series pilot. It at least aired (unlike
Night Stick
), but didn’t go to series. His third pilot script –
APO 923
, a drama about three Army servicemen stationed on an island – was made but not seen except by network executives and ad agencies. Finally,
Defiance County
was written but never made.

Now aged forty-two, Roddenberry was keen to make a break from run-of-the-mill episodic TV writing. Pitching a series to
Dr Kildare
producer Norman Felton, he fell back on his days in the service and came up with an idea about the work of a professional soldier during peacetime. Through Felton’s industry connections Roddenberry secured a pilot deal with funding from MGM and a commitment that allowed him to produce the series, if it was commissioned. The writer believed that becoming a producer was the vital next step in his TV career: that was where the power lay in the business and to achieve that he had to secure a show he’d created. Realising this new project through Felton’s independent Arena Productions meant that the resulting show could be pitched to all three broadcast networks. The downside of this freedom was that as none of the networks had a funding commitment to the pilot, it was much easier for them to reject the show.

The Lieutenant
was built around the leading character of William Tiberius Rice, a second lieutenant in the US Marine Corps. In his mid-twenties and a recent graduate of the Annapolis Naval Academy, Rice is sent to investigate an alleged assault by a private against a corporal. Fearing he’ll miss out on a plum posting in the meantime, Rice resists but falls in with an attractive young woman named Lane Bishop. Through her, Rice discovers the private had good reason for attacking the corporal – he was having an affair with the private’s wife – but refuses, due to the potential embarrassment, to reveal these mitigating circumstances. The script, ‘A Very Private Affair’,
was circulated within Arena Productions in January 1963 with a view to producing it that spring.

Roddenberry’s troubled private life may have informed his teleplay. Although still married to Rexroat, Roddenberry had begun an affair with a young aspiring actress named Majel Barrett, only the latest in a long series of extra-marital affairs he’d pursued. As his twenty-year marriage slowly disintegrated, Roddenberry found himself out of his depth on the set of
The Lieutenant
pilot, contributing to delays on the already complicated location shoot at Camp Pendleton, where the military were lending their cooperation. The episode was finished just in time to be presented to the network executives who’d decide which new shows they’d commission for the fall TV season.

Despite the problems, which included tensions between Roddenberry and the episode’s director, the very experienced Buzz Kulik, and between Roddenberry and executive producer Felton, the resulting show was good enough for NBC to commit to a full series. After almost a decade in the TV writing business, Gene Roddenberry had successfully made the switch from episodic writer to series producer.

His euphoria was short-lived, however. Almost immediately,
The Lieutenant
ran into trouble. In order to secure the continued involvement of the Marines and the Department of Defense – the show would not be half as effective without it – the producers had to abide by a lengthy list of prohibitions from the military. Given that the core of drama is conflict, the requirement that
The Lieutenant
should portray military life positively severely restricted the new series’ storytelling possibilities – oddly, an approach Roddenberry himself would later take in his vision of the future on
Star Trek
. Roddenberry also ran up against his own creative limitations. As ‘showrunner’ it was down to him to determine the tone and direction of the series, but beyond making a version of
Dr Kildare
set in the Army, he was at a loss for a way to distinctively define his series. He only knew the show had to focus on Rice (Gary Lockwood), while each episode had to introduce one-off characters and situations for him to learn from.

Screenings of the pilot were arranged for LA’s freelance TV writers in the hope they could generate fresh story ideas. Roddenberry picked pitches he liked and commissioned scripts, appointing Del Reisman (
The Twilight Zone
) as story editor. Unhappy with the quality of the scripts and story outlines coming in, but finding it difficult to articulate exactly what he wanted, Roddenberry began to rewrite each script until he was happy with it. Reisman found himself on the receiving end of many complaints from the nineteen different writers who contributed to the twenty-nine episodes of the series. Roddenberry only scripted the opening and closing episodes, but he rewrote just about every other instalment.

From September 1963
The Lieutenant
began airing on NBC, opposite the ratings giant
The Jackie Gleason Hour
on CBS. The show was quick to catch on, proving to be a ratings record-breaker. However, the behind-the-scenes troubles continued. By early 1964 the Pentagon had complained about
The Lieutenant
directly to NBC, who in turn raised the issue with MGM. The final straw was a script called ‘To Set It Right’, dealing with racism in the service. Always aware of the big issues of the day, Roddenberry had decided to spice up his show by including some ‘hot-button’ topics. The episode saw a black Marine and his wife (
Star Trek
’s Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, with whom Roddenberry also later had an affair) attacked by a racist Marine (Dennis Hopper). Although Rice is able to overcome the issue and the men agree to work together for the good of the platoon, it was not enough to mollify the military: official cooperation was finally withdrawn.

Thanks to the use of the MGM back lot, as well as materials left over from assorted war movies and a lot of stock footage,
The Lieutenant
was able to struggle through to completion of its one and only series. As the US involvement in Vietnam escalated and looked ever more questionable, a series extolling the virtues of the armed forces looked decidedly out of date: NBC decided not to renew the show. Roddenberry wrote the final episode himself, sending Rice to an unnamed south-east Asian
country where he has to cooperate with a representative of ‘the enemy’ in order for both to survive. The episode features a debate on the nature of war and warfare that prefigured several episodes of Gene Roddenberry’s much more successful second TV series as producer:
Star Trek
.

Gene Roddenberry was desperate to get another TV series up and running to prove he was not a one-hit wonder. This time it had to be entirely his idea and a production wholly under his control. He’d realised control by the producer was necessary, but also that such control was often hard won in battles with networks and financiers. He was equally realistic that both the broadcast networks and the financiers were necessary evils he’d have to contend with.
The Lieutenant
was only the beginning: after all, as a natural storyteller he had so many other tales to tell.

One he’d outlined previously concerned a Zeppelin-style dirigible crewed by a team of multi-racial explorers that crisscrossed the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, discovering ‘new civilizations’. The idea had not progressed far, until Roddenberry revived it after
The Lieutenant
. This time, it was to be set in the future, the hot air balloon replaced by a spaceship.

The suggestion to develop a science fiction series had come from Alden Schwimmer, Roddenberry’s agent and the West Coast head of the Ashley-Famous agency. In 1963 the space race between Russia and the US was starting to heat up. Two years previously President John F. Kennedy had made his speech committing the country to ‘landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth’ before the 1960s came to an end. Russia had been active in space since the launch of Sputnik, with Yuri Gagarin the first man in space in April 1961. Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr had become the first American in space in May 1961, followed by John Glenn circling the Earth in 1962. A TV series that could capture the excitement and optimism of the space programme would surely attract a huge American
television audience hungry for drama chronicling the conquest of this wild, new frontier.

The first few years of the 1960s had seen science fiction continue to feature in television and film. Movie audiences had visited
The Angry Red Planet
(1959), journeyed to the past and the future in
The Time Machine
(1960) and saw the world survive
The Day the Earth Caught Fire
(1961). Irwin Allen had begun his
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
(1961, developed into a TV series in 1964). Television had brought viewers such fantasy shows as
The Twilight Zone
(Rod Serling’s weird tales had begun in 1959 and would run until 1964), and
One Step Beyond
(1959–61).

Schwimmer felt sure he could sell a Roddenberry-devised serious science fiction drama. Discussing the idea with others, including Schwimmer and Norman Felton (his executive producer on
The Lieutenant
), Roddenberry soon took to calling his space exploration series ‘
Wagon Train
to the stars’ as a form of shorthand (after ABC’s Sunday night hit Western series
Wagon Train
).

Roddenberry’s March 1964 sixteen-page pitch outline sum -marised the show: ‘
Star Trek
is a “
Wagon Train
” concept – built around characters who travel to worlds “similar” to our own, and meet the action-adventure-drama which becomes our stories. Their transportation is the cruiser
USS Yorktown
, performing a well-defined and long-range Exploration-Science-Security mission which helps create our format. The time is “somewhere in the future”. It could be 1995 or maybe even 2995. In other words, close enough to our time for our continuing characters to be fully identifiable as people like us, but far enough into the future for galaxy travel to be thoroughly established.’

However, Roddenberry’s space-set
Wagon Train
looked to be an expensive proposition, requiring new planetary settings every episode: it was easy to create a new earthbound setting for each episode of
Wagon Train
(another town or desert oasis), but much harder to come up with convincing alien planets on a weekly television series budget and schedule.