The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay
But I don’t talk to Roddenberry no more.
I’ve mentioned David Alexander elsewhere in this essay. He’s a guy who was hired by Majel Roddenberry to write the “authorized”—that is, sanitized, prettified, heroificated—biography of Gene. It’s been brought to my attention that I seem to manifest some rancor at Mr. Alexander. If I do, it is because I think Mr. Alexander plays with the facts and has done a hired-gun job that maintains myths and untruths that no self-respecting biographer should have allowed to stand. What I guess I’m saying, is that I don’t think there is anything even remotely like evenhandedness in Mr. Alexander’s snow-job about the Great Bird.
I won’t even go into my feelings about Mr. Alexander actually trying, in a court of law, to be named “official biographer” so no one else—including Joel Engel, who wrote that other, warts-and-all Roddenberry biobook—would be able to contradict the Martinized version Majel had hired Alexander to write. (March 17, 1994; Case #SP 000 741; Superior Court of the State of California, in and for the County of Los Angeles.)
But what I would like to dwell on for a moment, because it is so goddam ludicrous and bogus that I can’t even get pissed at it, all I can do is shake my head in dumbfounded disbelief at the bodacious chutzpah of Roddenberry and those who spent their time sucking up to him, is a little number Mr. Alexander and El Supremo ran in an interview in The Humanist (March/April 1991; Volume 51, Number 2).
Now remember, folks, before we tumble down this weird little rabbit hole into Roddenberryland, that nothing of the story or characters in “City” existed before I wildly dreamed up the plot and presented it to Star Trek. It was all outta my head, y’ know what I’m saying here?
But in The Humanist Interview titled “Gene Roddenberry: Writer, Producer, Philosopher, Humanist” by David Alexander, we find the eye-opening exchange reproduced here.
To read the interview, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge
Alexander suggests to Roddenberry that Sister Edith Keeler, a character I created, and whom I based on the famous Aimee Semple McPherson, an historically-prominent evangelist of the 1920s and ’30s, was actually Roddenberry’s brainstorm, based on his father, whom he speaks of admiringly. (I won’t reprise what other books about Roddenberry have said in relation to the Great Bird and his father, and how Bird felt about the old man, and what their relationship was. I am sworn not to get into Roddenberry’s personal life here, for which pledge I am infinitely grateful.)
Above: Flamboyant Pentecostal preacher "Sister" Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944) was the first evangelist to recognize the potential of radio to reach a vast "congregation" (Library of Congress)
Now, doesn’t that absolutely fry the fish, folks! Don’t it just warm that illegitimate corner of all our hearts in which lies the most corrosive, mendacious beast of self-aggrandizement we can imagine?
Not only was the miserable, lying sonofabitch shameless in trying to grab credit for having written the script, he was not above tacitly acquiescing to the suggestion that it was all his own invention, right from the git-go.
Was I infuriated when one of my readers sent me that steaming Alexandrian turd? No, of course not. I am a sensible, rational person, ready to accept the fallaciousness of the existence of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the ability of my poor, stunted brain to create a character so fully-formed and coherent that even now when she goes out on the book-signing circuit, Joan Collins is asked repeatedly about Sister Edith Keeler.
Which brings me to a beauty.
And I don’t mean Collins.
If you’ve read the script, you will remember that Edith Keeler is an humanitarian whose philosophy is one of kindness and compassion. It is stated in the script that she develops, over the next few years, a coherent identifiable philosophy that many people in that post-World War I, semi-Isolationist society found appealing. It is set forth in the teleplay that her philosophy catches on—something like Scientology without the phony scams—and it is sufficiently appealing that it produces a tone in the body politic that briefly keeps America out of the war against Hitler. A brief period that permits the development of the first atomic bomb not by America, but by The Third Reich, and that leads to Germany winning World War II.
It is a “what if?” plot, and standard extrapolative play in the genre of speculative fiction. It is not a coarse, solve-the-problem-in-53 minutes oversimplification. But apart from the idiot bullshit dialogue that Roddenberry shoved into Sister Edith Keeler’s mouth—the kind of fuzzy-headed social thinking that could give you diabetes—she was a strong, decent woman. That’s why she remains appealing.
And how does the Bimbo Queen, Joan Collins, remember this glorious role, in this landmark show that still draws raves for her limited abilities? Well, read for yourself, from page 113 of Ms. Collins’s INSIDE JOAN COLLINS.
To read the page, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge
And if that journey “inside” Joan Collins doesn’t remind you of a visit to a forlorn, empty venue where the wind whistles forever across a sterile terrain, try this one from her own classic autobiography PAST IMPERFECT, page 248:
“So I worked…. and ‘Star Trek’—‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ became one of the most popular episodes. As Edith Cleaver [sic], a young mission worker for down-and-out men in New York in the Depression, I try to prove to the world that Hitler was a nice guy. Bill Shatner as Captain Kirk falls in love with Edith, and Dr. Spock [sic]—he of the ears—allows her to get run over by a truck lest her teachings lead the world to total destruction.”
I don’t know which one of them is the greater pinhead—Jay David who wrote the former book for Carroll & Graf in 1988, or the nameless editor at Simon & Schuster who apparently never fact-checked, much less read for sanity, the semiliterate blather of this latter—but there really ought to be a hell on Earth for literary dodgem-cars like that. The less said about Ms. Collins’s ratiocinative powers, the better off we’ll be but, amazingly, Collins seems to have taken the INSIDE JOAN COLLINS dementia version of my plot as gospel. She was interviewed last year on a British chat show, and she claimed that in “City” she was “in love with Adolph Hitler.”
I thought having Shatner getting it all mixed up was bad.
I didn’t know when I was well off.
Which brings me to the last, most recent item. During the last few years, Herb Solow and Bobby Justman—whose positions as executives of Desilu and Star Trek back in the days “City” was being done—called on me to be interviewed for their recently-published tome, the Gigantic INSIDE STAR TREK: The Real Story. Though I was reluctant to spill most of what you’ve read in this book, I felt (and continue to feel) warmly toward both of them. We go a long way back, and they have always treated me decently, and we’ve had a bemusing sort of relationship in which they perceive me as some sort of barely housebroken creature. So I spoke to them. They both came over one day, and we sat and I talked and told them vast amounts of stuff, and they taped it, as I recall.
Then, as the year or so passed, Herb would call me once in a while to check on something…and I’d answer his Queries as best I could. I knew they would treat me square in the hook. They are decent guys. But then, a few months ago—as I write this—the book came out, and though they reported the “City” matter at length in a chapter all its own, and they gave credit where it was due, even to buttressing my main contention in this book that Roddenberry was an unregenerate credit-thief (see page 185 of IINSIDE STAR TREK), they ended the section with this anecdote:
writer-director Frank Pierson sitting several tables away. Some months earlier, Howard had decided to hate Frank Pierson (an Academy Award-winning writer and former President of the Writers Guild) because Frank rewrote Howard’s friend Carol Sobieski’s screenplay, “Neon Ceiling,” a drama that Howard felt needed no changes whatsoever. Obviously agitated by Harlan’s remarks, Howard, a powerfully built man, announced he was going to tackle Frank and shove him through the huge plateglass window to plunge ei
ght floors to the street below. We managed to restrain him. It was that kind of evening!
The Writers Guild rule for award consideration was that the writer, not the producing company. submitted the script and could submit whatever version he or she chose. be it the writer’s first draft or the final shooting script, which usually had undergone many revisions and rewrites by others. Two different panels of judges then made the individual award decisions.
Some years after receiving the Writers Guild award, Ellison was in a bar when he ran into writer Don Ingalls. “Fandango,” a script Ingalls wrote for Gunsmoke, was one of the four other contenders that lost out to Ellison’s script. Ingalls had also written for Star Trek, and they discussed not only the series but Ellison’s award-winning script. After a few drinks Harlan boasted that, before submitting his own final draft for consideration, he had “polished it up a little bit to make it even better.” To this day, Ingalls remains amused by his friend Ellison’s award-winning stratagem.
HERB: So when I finally realized that Harlan was a sorcerer’s reincarnation, it answered that burning question: “Why did he do what he did at the Awards dinner?”
Easy. The Wizard made him do it.
On the Edge of Forever: Waiting for Harlan 289
I couldn’t believe what I saw there. I couldn’t believe that at no time in the preceding few years, of all the times we spoke, neither Herb nor Bobby thought to ask me about the validity of what Don Ingalls had told them. Not once.
Now, anyone who knows me at all…anyone who has read my books and followed my essays…anyone who is in my company for more than an hour…knows what’s wrong with that Ingalls anecdote.
What’s wrong is that I don’t drink.
I have never drunk.
Can’t stand the taste of alcohol, it makes me sick. As a consequence, I have no tolerance for alcohol of any kind. I do not drink beer, wine, hard liquor. I also don’t use drugs, but that’s another matter.
I’ve even written at length about this. Look up a piece I wrote about working in a carnival when I was thirteen years old. It’s in one of my books. It’s titled “Gopher in the Gilly.”
What I’m saying here, is that anyone who knows anything at all about me knows that I don’t drink.
Consequently, I don’t go into bars.
I don’t think I’ve been in a dozen bars in my whole life, even accompanying friends or buddies throughout my young adulthood.
And I sure as hell have never been drunk.
I barely knew Don Ingalls. He wrote some segments of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea when I was working at 20th Century Fox on the same series, and I guess I’ve run into him a few times over the years; but we are not close friends, just casual acquaintances; and I sure as hell never went drinking with him in a bar somewhere.
Additionally, I have in my files the exact copy of “City” that was submitted to the Writers Guild for consideration in judging that year’s awards, and it is exactly like the script in this book. There are no changes (with the exception of a few infelicities of grammar introduced into this edition) from the original version. It is a copy of my best draft of “City.” I never ever in any way “altered” or “polished up” my teleplay before submitting it. As I say, I have the very one that was entered, with the WGAw cover sheet still on it.
So why does Don Ingalls say this, a story that is patently bullshit, untrue, made up? Well, it’s been thirty years, and they just cannot let me have the credit for my own work. Even good guys like Bobby and Herb had to accept this unsubstantiated story from Ingalls—who was a very close buddy of Roddenberry’s, I’ve been told they were both cops together, but I don’t know Ingalls well enough to call him and ask him, and frankly, I ain’t gonna bother, he probably believes that crap by this time, he’s been dining out on it for three decades.
Don’t ask me why Ingalls has to make himself look as if I stole an award from him, this many years after the fact of his losing and my winning, but maybe Ingalls wasn’t happy that I copped the award (my second in as many years), and maybe he has altered memory to suit his saving face. I don’t know.
What I do know is that this anecdote never happened.
Not any part of it.
Not a bar, not me being drunk, not hoisting a few with a guy I barely knew, not doctoring up my teleplay so I could enrich my chances to win. It’s all bilge and rat-puke.
Ask anyone who knows anything about me.
So I called Herb, and I got very testy with him, particularly when I asked him why he verified so many other things in the book, but never sought to solicit any response from me, though he’d certainly had the opportunity in all the times we’d talked. And Herb got defensive and said well, we just heard it from Don, and we believed it, and blah blah blah.
So I told Herb that I don’t drink. That I never drank, not from the time I was born. I even told him that the one time someone had forced some alcohol on me had been maybe twenty years ago, at some dumb party somewhere, and some clown made a big thing about what a “party pooper” I was because I wasn’t bagged like everyone else, and he gave me maybe an inch of beer in a glass, and to shut him up I swigged it, and got instantly, totally falling-down sick to my stomach.
I told this to Herb, and I also told him that I had the very copy of “City” that the judges had looked at, way back in 1967, that it was in my files and I’d drive it over to him right then and there along with a copy of the limited edition of this book, containing the same damned script, so he could compare them if he had a mind to do so, but he got cranky with me, he didn’t like being told his book wasn’t as properly vetted and researched as he wanted to believe; and he told me that he would put in a footnote in later editions, and in the paperback, to the effect that “Harlan says he doesn’t drink and Ingalls’ story isn’t so.”
Big fucking deal.
Let’s end the section in this book, the section that once again posits my inability to write, and let’s try to be a good pair of guys with Harlan, and treat him not as quite the mountebank we could if we were meanspirited. But let’s end the section with a bogus anecdote that says, in pretty plain language, “Ellison wasn’t really good enough to win that Writers Guild award with his original version, my pal Gene’s version was much better, and Ellison had to cheat at the last minute even to get the judges fooled.”
So Herb will add a footnote that says, “Harlan says it ain’t so.” Yeah. Great. And the next day, I got the following fax from Herb:
For higher resolution version, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge
See what he did. He wants me to respect his “concern for accuracy” but he couldn’t even understand what I was saying about that one inch of beer twenty years ago. He heard it as my saying that I drank up till twenty years ago, but stopped, and so Ingalls had to be telling the truth because his anecdote took place earlier than twenty years ago. No, dummy, I never drank, have never ever drunk, not now, not twenty years ago, not sixty-two years ago.
I do not drink, period, no mitigation.
But there it is, thirty years, and still going strong. The Curse of Roddenberry.
The supreme, overwhelming egocentricity of Gene Roddenberry, that could not permit him to admit anyone else in his mad-god universe was capable of grandeur, of expertise, of rectitude. And his hordes of Trekkie believers, and his pig-snout associates who knew whence that river of gold flowed…they protected and buttressed him. For thirty years.
If you read all of this book, I have the faint and joyless hope that at last, after all this time, you will understand why I could not love that aired version, why I treasure the Writers Guild award for the original version as that year’s best episodic-dramatic teleplay, why I despise the mendacious fuckers who have twisted the story and retold it to the glory of someone who didn’t deserve it, at the expense of a writer who worked his ass off to create something original, and why it was necessary—after thirty years—to expend almost 30,000 words in self-serving justification of being the only
person on the face of the Earth who won’t let Gene Roddenberry rest in peace.
1 August 1995
Revised and expanded June 1996
Endnotes
Perils of the "City" Endnotes
[1] Before we get too far along, let me offer you a sample of the kind of bullshit I’ve had to put up with for three decades. This little gem comes out of a volume titled CAPTAIN’S LOGS: The Complete Trek Voyages by Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman (Image Publishing 1993).
On page 41, in a section dealing with “City,” here is what we find:
“City on the Edge of Forever” is generally considered the best episode of Star Trek ever produced. At the same time, it is perhaps the most controversial, due to the fact that Gene Roddenberry supposedly rewrote Harlan Ellison’s original teleplay and Ellison was not happy about the rewrite.
For over two decades fans have accepted the fact that Roddenberry did the rewrite of Ellison’s script, however [schlock tv producer] Glen Larson disputes this point, stating that it was actually Gene L. Coon who was responsible. This startling revelation came to Larson’s attention during a Writers Guild award ceremony in which the script was a nominated entry.
“That night,” Larson reflects, “I knew that something was troubling Gene and I asked him what was wrong. And he said, ‘There are two scripts up tonight for the Writers Guild award, and I wrote them both.’ One of them was by Harlan Ellison, and he said, ‘If Harlan wins, I’m going to die.’
“Coon had a great respect for writers…. Nevertheless, if you knew a guy was going to stand up and accept an award for what you did, that was more painful than the money. The mere fact that somebody was going to get credit for his thoughts and actual words, because they were so important to him, was almost too much to bear. He shared that with me.”