The City on the Edge of Forever (12 page)

[5] It was “Knife in the Darkness” for the 90-minute CBS western series,
Cimarron Strip
, created by that same Christopher Knopf I mentioned a minute ago, starring Stuart Whitman. (Aired on Thursday 25 January 1968.)

[6] That was the state of the art in 1975. These days, with the new computer technology and the universal use of Steadicam
^TM
and its other refinements, the term HAND-HELD is used. I’ve made that change from the original script. But I’ve retained the name “Arriflex” in the body-copy of the stage directions, just for old times’ sake.

[7] Which was the ultimate irony. When Gene insisted that I “put the ship in jeopardy,” a perennial pain-in-the-plot that Roddenberry adored, and one he shoehorned into almost every script (and then blamed on NBC, which was bullshit), I resisted like a man in chains. But I did it, finally, because Roddenberry said if
I
didn’t do it,
he
would. So I wrote the space pirate element—and when you read the script, notice that Mr. Spendthrift Ellison, who wrote too expensive a script, did it in a way that cost
nothing
, shot as it would have been in one already-standing set—and it was the first thing NBC demanded be dropped.

[8] When I wrote those lines in August of 1995, INSIDE STAR TREK:
The Real Story
by Solow and Justman (studio executive on
Trek
and co-producer, respectively) had not yet been published by Pocket Books. But now it has, and my assertions are verified that Roddenberry was a pathological credit-grabber, a man who made up his past and his credits to aggrandize himself, a guy who could not bear to admit that no matter how he and others fiddled with it, that “City” was the best of the original series, and that it was I, not he, who conceived the story that made it so memorable.

Throughout the Solow-Justman book—filled with authentication that is irrefutable—those two men who worked closest with Gene during the years of the original pilot and then the series state again and again that Roddenberry was a glory-hog, taking credit for everyone else’s contributions to the show. Not once or twice, do they state that position, in clear and forceful language, but again and again.

And that is why the evidence of Roddenberry’s need to claim “City” credit is so blatant. As, for instance, the following:

In a letter to me from Roddenberry dated June 20, 1967, Gene wrote: “Next, never outside this office and particularly nowhere in S.F. or television circles have I ever mentioned that the script was anything but entirely yours.”

In the March 1987 issue of
Video Review
magazine, in a candid interview with Gene, we find the following, referring to “City”:

VR
: That was a great episode.

RODDENBERRY
: It was a fun episode to do.

VR
: Who wrote that one?

RODDENBERRY
: Well, it was a strange thing. Harlan Ellison wrote the first draft of it, but then he wouldn’t change it.

VR
: That’s Harlan Ellison.

RODDENBERRY
: Yeah. He had Scotty dealing drugs and it would have cost $200,000 more than I had to spend for an episode.

VR
: That’s like E.T. wearing a coke spoon.

RODDENBERRY
: When I called these things to Harlan’s attention, he said, “You’ve sold out, haven’t you?” I said, “No, I haven’t sold out. I only have $180,000 to spend on an episode.” So I rewrote the episode. And his original won a Writers Guild award, but my rewrite won the Nebula award for actually being filmed.

So much for Roddenberry never telling anyone outside the office that the script had been written by anyone but me.

(And though I deal with it elsewhere in this essay, let me point out that Gene didn’t
do
the rewrite, he only fiddled with it after it had been through three other hands. Let me also point out, yet again, for the nine millionth fucking time, that nowhere in my teleplay does Scotty even
appear
, much less deal drugs. Read the script, it’s here, in your hands; read it and see if Roddenberry wasn’t a glory-hog who had to invent idiot conversations about “selling out” so he could look like the Last Model of Rectitude in the Universe, who
had
to keep repeating the “Scotty sold drugs” delusion, who
had
to keep insisting how much over budget my show would have been…rather than admitting that the high-water mark of his claim to fame was conceived not by him, but by someone else.)

The evidence of Roddenberry’s duplicity and determination to convince the gullible that his giant brain had been capable of the originality and depth of passion that were the hallmarks of “City”—even those snatches of originality and passion that remained after everyone had a whack at it—exists in brief and clarity.

Elsewhere in this essay (if you’ve been paying attention) you read Roddenberry’s March 1987
Video Review
interview, with its assertions that mine was a deeply flawed script, and that one of my dumbest goofs was having Scotty sell drugs.

Well, in the May 1987
Video Review
—just two issues later—that same award-winning Alan Brennert I’ve mentioned before, wrote a letter. (See
Video Review
art.)

And on 25 March 1987 Brennert received a letter from Gene Roddenberry. (See Roddenberry letter.)

I urge you to riffle back through and up ahead in this long self-defense, and log in the number of times Roddenberry repeated these canards, though he admitted he was wrong in the Brennert letter. When it served his ego, he always conveniently “misremembered”—and most times he was called on it by someone in an audience or in print. But it didn’t stop the myth from continuing in fandom.

As for that miserable lie he told
Video Review
about how I “only wrote the first draft,” well, you’ll find several sections of later rewrites off my second and third drafts, published right here in these pages. As they say in Latin,
res ipsa loquitur
, “the matter speaks for itself,” which makes Roddenberry’s endless repetitions of the lie, as they say in Latin,
res judicata
, “a matter already settled.”

Yet…

I am driven, compelled, maddened, to bombard you with the evidence, so no smallest rat-hole is left through which a rabid apologist for the way Roddenberry dealt with me—as he did so many others—can scuttle, to cobble up some rationalization for his remarks. To that end, here is an inventory sheet from the previously-noted UCLA archive of Roddenberry’s papers.

Kindly note how many
different
versions of the script, as written by Harlan Ellison, appear in this log.

“Harlan Ellison wrote the first draft of it, but then he wouldn’t change it.”

Speak no ill of the dead. But it seems the dead, in this case, goes right on speaking, repeating the same lies enjoyed in his life.

[9] That Source of All Wisdom, the recently-married Alan Brennert, has apprised me—subsequent to my having written those lines about Roddenberry plagiarizing Lucas and Foster—that Roddenberry’s claim about the origin of “In Thy Image” is at least partially correct. Alan’s belief is that it originated as a story idea called “Robot’s Return” in the bible Gene did for the
Star Trek
II series. Alan Dean Foster picked that as the episode he wanted to write, which became “In Thy Image.” But Roddenberry
still
stole it from John Lucas’s Nomad. This attempt at being punctilious about the facts comes to you through the courtesy of the Auctorial Honesty Network. At the tone, the time will be ten forty-two, and thirty seconds.

[10] Hell, I’m tired of playing cutesy with you about who actually wrote the rewrite that aired. I’ve hinted at it, because
to me
it was a great revelation. But if you go to page 257 of the Afterwords section, you will find Dorothy C. Fontana’s comments, wherein for the first time in our more than thirty years of mutual respect and friendship, she cops to having worked on the teleplay after Gene Coon’s rewrite. Somehow, Dorothy didn’t know about the
first
rewrite, the gawdawful version written by the man who briefly replaced John D.F. Black…Steve Carabatsos. Dorothy makes no reference to it, but I had a copy of that version and it was the existence of that inept attempt to rewrite me that convinced me I should drag my ass back to Desilu, for no remuneration and damned little approbation, to do the three or four rewrites that you will find reprinted in this book.

But what of Roddenberry’s claim to have penned the aired version? Well if we are to believe Gene Coon—whose words come to us through the lips of Glen Larson and others—he wrote that version. But now we know that Dorothy Fontana whacked at it after
they
were done with it. I assert that Roddenberry may have fiddled, but that he did no substantive work. At least, nowhere in the UCLA
Star Trek
archive do we find even one page of a “City” script with Roddenberry’s handwriting on it, or his typewriter’s identifiable print, or anything that confirms either Dorothy’s or his own contention that he rewrote on “City.”

Peculiar, ain’t it? I was supposed to have written only a first draft, according to Gene, but the UCLA archive contains at least three complete drafts and any number of rewrites, all neatly dated and catalogued; but nary a whisper of a script on “City” that can be directly laid at the altar of the man who twisted the truth so many times he came to believe his own fanciful mythology.

Gee, I wish everyone would buy into my untruths as they so happily did Roddenberry’s, without ratiocination, without question. Hell, with that kind of blind adoration, even
I
could make the trains run on time.

[11] Subsequent to the publication of the limited edition of this book last year, one of my faithful readers called me on this bit of historical recollection. And impaled me on my own words. In one of my two books of television criticism (which White Wolf will be reissuing in the
Edgeworks
series, probably in 1997), THE GLASS TEAT, I mention in one of my columns from that period (circa 1968-70) that Bennett and Rita Lakin had solicited me to come in and pitch a story idea for
The Mod Squad
. Nothing more is said of this liaison, and though I’ve combed my own extensive (and orderly) files, and searched through Leslie Kay Swigart’s massive (but as yet unpublished) thousand-page-plus bibliography of all my writings, I find no
Mod Squad
treatment or teleplay or even story notes. So, to be precise, I was wrong when I asserted I had never been approached to work on that series. But as far as I can tell, my memory isn’t playing me too many tricks, because there’s no record of
The Mod Squad
request from Rita Lakin ever going any further.

TREATMENTS

21 March 1966

13 May 1966

March 21, 1966

STAR TREK

“The City on the Edge of Forever”
 

written by Cordwainer Bird

TEASER:

FADE IN aboard the
USS Enterprise
somewhere out near the Rim. CLOSE ON a small isometrically-shaped metal container, as it is opened by a hand. CAMERA HOLDS CLOSE as the lid opens with tambour doors, so that the interior rises, and a strange dull light floods the frame. As the container opens, the black velvet interior slides up to reveal possibly half a dozen strange and wondrous glowing jewels. Yet they are not jewels. They are the infamous and illegal Jillkan dream-narcotics, the Jewels of Sound. They are faceted solids, but not stone, more like a hardened jelly that burns pulsingly with an inner light: gold, blue, crimson, orange.

We HEAR a VOICE O.S., a voice that shakes slightly, trying to maintain a tenuous control. “Beckwith, give me one. Stop it, Beckwith!” and as the CAMERA PULLS BACK we see one of the
Enterprise
’s officers LT/JG LeBEQUE, a French-Canadian with a strong face; but a face that is now beaded with sweat. And holding the Jewels of Sound is RICHARD BECKWITH, another officer, a man whose face shows intelligence and…something else. Cunning, perhaps, or even subdued cruelty. Cruelty kept rigidly in check, channeled to specific uses. Beckwith smiles as he stares with fascination at the Jewels of Sound.

“How long have you been my man, Lieutenant?” Beckwith asks, softly. He isn’t taunting, merely interested. “How long have you been hooked on the Jewels?”

The Lieutenant’s face tightens. He isn’t a toady, neither is he a weak man. But the Jewels of Sound have been listed illegal throughout the Galaxy because only one exposure is needed to make a man a confirmed addict. Swallow one Jewel, experience the Circe call of the strange music and lights the Jewels offer, and you are lost forever. And so LeBeque will swallow his pride, and answer the man who holds the delight he needs so desperately, “You gave me my first taste on Karkow, that was a year ago. I need one, Beckwith, stop playing with me.”

Beckwith extends one, a golden Jewel. But as the Lieutenant reaches for it, he closes his fist over it, closing off the light, and LeBeque winces, as though the loss of it physically hurts him. “I want to know our next putdown planet, and what the security log says about valuable commodities. I’ll want a landfall pass and I’ll want you to cover for me while I trade with the natives.”