The City on the Edge of Forever (32 page)

If “The City on the Edge of Forever” had been written for an anthology such as
Outer Limits
, undoubtedly it would have been shot almost without change. As written, it stands shoulder to shoulder with Harlan’s bleak study of future warfare, “Soldier,” and his twisting, turning, character-rich “Demon with a Glass Hand.”

Unfortunately, it was not best suited to a series format. As the reader readily can see, the plot problem (the change in history) is brought about by characters who are strangers to the audience, LeBeque and Beckwith. The result of Beckwith’s meddling with the past is that the
USS Enterprise
is now the
Condor
, a raider ship with a crew of renegades. Once this situation is established, it is seen again only once, in a flash cut, leaving the audience to wonder how the few defenders in the transporter room are doing while Kirk and Spock are in the past. It is almost the end of the second act before Kirk and Spock see Edith Keeler—and at that moment, Spock realizes Edith is the focal point of the time change because of clues the Guardian of Forever gave them. Kirk does not meet Edith face to face until Act Three, so their personal relationship is short (though no less deep). Kirk loves her despite the fact he knows she must die. He loves her despite the even more cruel fact that he knows he
cannot
lift a hand to save her. At the climax of the story, it is Beckwith who reaches out to save Edith and Spock who stops him while Kirk looks on in his grief.

While it was masterfully written, full of passion and emotion, in Gene Roddenberry’s opinion, the script wasn’t
Star Trek
enough. It would have to be rewritten. At that time, the rumor had not yet emerged that the reason it had to be rewritten was because “Harlan had Scotty pushing drugs on the
Enterprise
.” That came later, and possibly it came because Roddenberry felt he had to justify the rewrite. I know the explanation has been heard at a number of
Star Trek
conventions over the years. Well, the addictive Jewels of Sound were interesting “drugs” all right; but as the reader can see, Scotty isn’t even in the script!

In the
Star Trek
offices, however, the immediate question was—who would rewrite “The City on the Edge of Forever”? Now the story can be told because Harlan has mellowed over the years. Used to be, his temper burned at such a low firing point and with such high explosivity that it devastated buildings for ten square miles around ground zero when it went off. (You’ve heard of the “H Bomb”?) There are still places on the Paramount lot where nothing will grow. Now, however, it’s maybe only three square miles around that are leveled—and I live at least six miles from Harlan.

So who did the rewrite? Gene Coon took the first crack at it. As I recall, primarily he came up with structural changes, eliminating LeBeque and Beckwith and substituting McCoy as the catalyst. The pirates disappeared. In fact, the entire ship vanished because of the tampering with history. Kirk met Edith sooner, and dialogue and some relationships were changed. I believe it was Gene Coon whose delightful sense of humor spawned Kirk’s explanation that Spock’s ears got that way when he had a childhood accident—he got his head caught in a mechanical rice picker. Harlan hated it. He thought Steve Carabatsos had written it. No one offered to change that idea in Harlan’s mind.

Then Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon turned to me and said, “You’re it. You try a rewrite.” Talk about being tossed a live grenade! Harlan was a friend—and not only a friend. He was a writer I deeply admired, one who stood ten feet tall as a master of his art. The very notion of rewriting him scared me witless. On the other hand (said the coward in me), if I rewrote it, I’d do it with respect and love of the original work. I gave it my best shot.

The Jewels of Sound were gone, of course. I invented cordrazine to put McCoy into a temporary madness. I tried to build the relationship of love between Edith and Kirk gently and meaningfully so her death would be the most wrenching personal moment Kirk would ever know. And I inserted the running joke of Spock’s tricorder which grew larger and more complicated with mechanical additions each time it was seen. The tricorder was Spock’s instrument for discovering the focus of the history change—Edith—as well as the how and when of her death. Naturally, he was hampered by the fact that the tools he needed hadn’t been invented yet. Thus the octopuslike appearance of the contraption and its continual growth. Harlan liked this draft a little better, but not much. He thought the characterization and dialogue showed sensitivity, but it wasn’t his script. He thought Gene Coon wrote it. We kept our mouths shut. (Remember those places on the lot where grass still doesn’t grow?)

Gene Roddenberry decided to rewrite it himself, and it was his version which became the shooting script. Harlan’s general structure was there, as were his major characters and the main conflict of the story. What Roddenberry did was make it “more
Star Trek
.” You will notice that every writer who worked on the rewrite was trying very hard to please Harlan, allowing him to read each draft and comment on it. It was a sign of the respect
Star Trek
had for writers. That doesn’t happen now—on any show.

Casting was lucky as the charming and lovely Joan Collins took the role of Edith Keeler. The directing chore fell to Joe Pevney, who had exhibited a special sensitivity and understanding of
Star Trek
and its characters.

As the episode approached production, there was a glitch in the art direction.
Star Trek
’s art director, Matt Jefferies, fell ill with the flu just as “City” was going into preparation. The department head, Roland (Bud) Brooks, stepped in to avoid any delay. He read the script, came up with set sketches, and got the carpenters going on the planet set. When Matt returned, he went down to the stage to look at it, and his mouth dropped.

“What the hell is that?”

He was looking at a gray planet surface on which were scattered broken Grecian columns, tumbled walls and statues. Bud explained they were the ruins, as called for in the script. Matt couldn’t recall any ruins. Bud opened the script to the planet description and said, “Oops.”

As he tells the story, he’d had two drinks with dinner the night he read the script and was puzzled by a description of “rune stones” covering the landscape. He had flipped through his dictionary and come to ruins before he got to runes. Deciding it must have been a typo, he had proceeded to design the ruined stones of the planet. (We never did figure out why the Guardian of Forever looked like a lopsided donut.)

The episode, which aired April 6, 1967, almost a full year after its birth, was a good
Star Trek
. It had humor, danger, and a deeply poignant love story. It turned out to be one of the most popular episodes of all time with both original Trekkers and with the youngest of the breed. But it wasn’t Harlan’s. It was Harlan, filtered through Coon, Fontana and, most of all, Roddenberry. For myself, I missed Trooper—a beautifully drawn portrait of a worn and despairing veteran of the Great War; I missed the Jewels of Sound—and the marvelous idea that sound could be an addictive narcotic; I missed the glittering city that is the source of the title; I missed the magic of Harlan’s words.

Harlan had the last word. He always does. He submitted his draft of the script to the Writers’ Guild of America for its annual award consideration. For the television awards, contending scripts are read by a number of writer judges who do not know the author of the piece. The film is never seen. Scripts which are nominated in each category are then read by a blue ribbon panel of writer judges and voted upon. In 1968, Harlan won the Writers Guild of America award for “Best Episodic Drama.” Writers judging other writers declared his script the best of all contenders for that year. They read his words—and the spell of them captured them all.

Read the script again, and fall under the enchantment yourself.

David Gerrold

The Steamroller of Lies

This book is not about Harlan Ellison.

It
should
be about Harlan Ellison. It has his name on the cover and it has one hell of a television script by Harlan Ellison inside but, unfortunately, this book is really about Gene Roddenberry, because Gene Roddenberry was the one who made it necessary.

For years, Roddenberry stood up in front of audiences and said with bland composure that he had to rewrite Harlan Ellison’s script for the “The City on the Edge of Forever” episode of
Star Trek
because Harlan had Scotty dealing drugs. That’s not the truth, you can see that for yourself, but Gene continued the falsehood in numerous speeches and interviews. He said it again and again, even after Harlan called him on each embarrassing occasion and asked him not to.

I witnessed more than one of these conversations between Harlan and Gene. When confronted, Gene acknowledged that Harlan was correct and promised that he wouldn’t say it again. Yet, at the very next convention he attended, he repeated the lie. I saw him do it. Did he forget what he had promised?

That’s why this book is about Gene Roddenberry. It’s Harlan Ellison’s long overdue refutation of the falsehood.

I can understand why Harlan feels the need to set the record straight. Every time that Gene Roddenberry repeated the lie, he was implying that Harlan Ellison did not understand
Star Trek
or that he did not do his job properly. He was insulting Harlan’s professional credential. At the very least, it was an inappropriate thing for Gene Roddenberry to say. At worst, well—it was unkind and unprofessional.

If there’s one thing that I have learned from Harlan—and also from Gene, albeit in an entirely different way—it is this:
You are your word
. Harlan Ellison understands this; I’m not sure that Gene Roddenberry ever did; but the difference between speaking a commitment and
living
it is the difference between eating the menu and eating the meal.

Maybe telling the truth isn’t important if you’re only a television producer, or worse—a television producer’s lawyer; but if you’re a writer, it’s
all
you have. A writer is a servant of the truth. He’s a channel for enlightenment. If he’s anything less than that, he’s a fraud, a charlatan, a phony, a waster of trees and time. Anything less than a total commitment to accuracy as a way of life is the murder of integrity and trust.

What I’m talking about here—
authenticity
—is apparently an alien experience for too many people. As individuals, we’ve been blinded, conned, manipulated, trashed, beaten up, beaten down, and hammered into insensibility by the publicity mills, the hype, the grind, the weight of peer group pressure, and ultimately even our own belief systems. We end up believing what we want to believe instead of seeing what is really so. Goebbels had it right—if you tell a big enough lie and you tell it loud enough and long enough, people will accept it as truth. It all depends on how well you package it. This is the essence of American discourse in the ’90s: Say anything. He who can lie the most sincerely will win the affection of the public.

And when someone does stand up to object, “Hey, wait a minute—the clothes have no emperor,” he too becomes a target. The steamroller of lies will aim itself at him, too.

Everyone who has a vested interest in having you believe that there really is an emperor inside all that taffeta will do everything they can to discredit and destroy any person who still believes in accuracy enough to stand up and say, “Uh, excuse me—? That’s not the way I saw it and I was there.” Even goodhearted people will unknowingly add their voices to the chorus of falsehoods because it’s more fun to believe the glamorous lie than the dirty truth; but the cost of that easy acceptance is such a complete and total destruction of our respect for authenticity that, as a society, we now act as if we have the right to vote on reality.

The one place where we really do have a vote—
where it really matters
—is in our interactions with other human beings. Samuel R. Delany said it. Drama occurs in the space between two people. It goes beyond that. All of life occurs in the space between us. All we really have is each other—and it’s in our commitment to each other that we make the kind of difference that really
can
change the world. But when we lose our commitment to accuracy, honesty, and justice, we lose our ability to make a difference, because we also lose our vision of
what is possible
.

Harlan Ellison’s strength, the essential reason why he has dominated the conversation of this community for so many years, is that he is a man who refuses to let his vision be muddied by the convenient little lies of politeness and tact, because those little lies lead directly to the bigger lies of greed and venality. Harlan stands up against the steamroller of lies again and again and again. I think it is this singular commitment to honesty that makes him one of the most important voices in the literature of amazement.

A great deal of the most passionate and inventive and imaginative writing in the genre was done during the ’60s and early ’70s. Some of the best was done by Harlan. Much of the rest was done by people who were inspired or angered by Harlan’s furious calls to glory. Whether you agreed or disagreed, you could not ignore the fires that were burning. Old visions were being vaporized. New ones were being forged. There was a lot of heat and fury—but there was a lot of illumination as well. It was an exciting time to be a writer; it was a great time to be learning one’s craft—because there were so many options to explore.