The City on the Edge of Forever (7 page)

And then they shot it. And I hated it. And I wept for Trooper, who never got to exist, and for the really lovely way I wrote that ending in which Spock, for the first time in the series, called Kirk Jim and not “Captain.”

And then the original version—the one published in this book—the unabridged, unchanged, unscrewed version—won the Writers Guild Award as Most Outstanding Teleplay. Not the aired version; not the many-hands-in-the-soup version; but my own original story that John Black and Gene Roddenberry and director Joe Pevney and Solow and Justman and Shatner and
Trek
zombies who write dopey books like THE CAPTAIN’S LOGS have been telling people was too expensive, too lacking in drama, too inept to shoot as I wrote it.
My
story won the most prestigious award a Hollywood screenwriter can win from his peers, an award given only after blind voting based on hundreds of scripts submitted. Me, not Gene Coon or Roddenberry or any of the people who have said, as Roddenberry said in a 1987 interview in
Cinefantastique
, “I think Harlan’s a genius but he’s not exactly the most disciplined writer in the world. He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that!”

I gotcher Scotty right here, Gene.

Anybody who ever read that script
knows
there’s no Scotty selling drugs. Or any of the other horse puckey that has been spread for more than twenty-five years.

Do I still burn? Gee, gang, sorry about that. Am I less than slobberingly attentive to the myths and the upheld torches of historical revisionism that make me look like a jerk and mythologize Roddenberry as a high-flying interplanetary
rara avis
? Does my manner offend thee? Yeah, I’m always getting complaints about that.

But when it comes to the end of the day, it was I, no one but the guy who created and developed and wrote about “The City on the Edge of Forever” who dreamed that dream for the rest of you to call the best of the best. You should have gotten better, though. You should have gotten the original.

But, sadly, to quote one last time, from the 19th Century French essayist Jules Renard: “Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”

Think how interesting this screed would’ve been if I’d been permitted to tell you the
whole
truth.

Have a nice day. Have just a
real
nice day. And thank your mother for the chicken soup.

So now we come to that portion of the
TV Guide
source material I was unable to use in such a limited venue. Remember: the article I wrote was more than 4000 words in length—at least twice as long as the usual
TV Guide
causerie. And even though the magazine ran a sidebar they called
Trail of Evidence
that gave pretty good proof Roddenberry lied continually about “City,” they were reluctant to expend much more space on further “plaintiff’s exhibits.” But here we are at full length, and the Publisher wants you to see as much as we can reproduce.

Over the past thirty years, “The City on the Edge of Forever” has become not only the most famous
Trek
episode, it has also been a marketing and franchising bonanza for Paramount. From two hundred dollar acrylic light-boxes with three tiny celluloid frames of the show as illuminated insert, to two hundred dollar “crafted in fine pewter and Tesori
^®
porcelain” desktop sculptures, to two hundred dollar posters sold on the shopping channels, “City” has become something of a cultural touchstone. Hell, it was even the punchline of a comic strip.

And during those thirty years of fame and glory proceeding from the initial airing of the segment on 13 April 1967, Gene Roddenberry continued to represent me in interviews and from the lecture platform, as an undisciplined, talented-but-for-the-most-part-unhireable writer who had written the story of Edith Keeler all wrong. If you need any proof that I tell it just as it is, take a look at this page from
Cinefantastique
magazine, March 1987. Check out that large pullquote at the top.

To view the page from Cinefantastique, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge

Twenty years after being asked repeatedly
not
to spread these untruths, Roddenberry was
still
bumrapping me. Here is a salient excerpt from the 20th anniversary retrospective interview, as conducted by Ben Herndon:

One of the persisting mysteries surrounding this episode concerns the expanded original version of the teleplay Harlan Ellison wrote as compared to the version that was filmed and broadcast with script changes penned by Roddenberry. [10]

Roddenberry himself explained why certain alterations were made in the original script. “I think Harlan’s a genius, but he’s not exactly the most disciplined writer in the world,” said Roddenberry.

“He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that! Also, he wrote it so it would have cost $200,000 more than I had to spend. He just wrote huge crowd scenes and all sorts of things. I tried to get him to change it and he wouldn’t, so I rewrote it.”

Yeah, and now you
can
see the original. It’s right here, just as I wrote it. And I defy you to find anyplace in the teleplay that remotely resembles Roddenberry’s endless assertion, “He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that!”

 Also, kindly find me huge crowd scenes.

Are we talking the line of extras in the soup kitchen? Are we talking the chump-change it would cost to populate a street in New York City during the Depression? How about those vast space armadas I’m supposed to have cobbled up? Where the hell are
they
?

Maybe now is the moment to suggest you leap ahead and actually
read
“The City on the Edge of Forever,” as it was originally conceived. Perhaps you’ll still like that abortive aired version, and perhaps you’ll understand why I was so pissed at the way Roddenberry and his minions screwed over my script. And then, if you feel like it, you can go on past the first draft teleplay and read my revised second draft, in which I had even eliminated the Beckwith-LeBeque element, and gave Gene a
reasonable
way in which Dr. McCoy could have run amuck.

That was one of
five
rewrites, without pay, that I did to try and retain the integrity of the story. But no, Gene preferred having an accomplished ship’s surgeon act in such a boneheaded manner that he injects
himself
with a deadly drug!

Yeah, sure, you were a sensational plotter and writer, Gene; and you can
schvitz
roses with Lysol to make ’em grow!

Such bullshit. Such never-ceasing, unapologetic, unabashed crapola. And this 1987 version of El Supremo’s inability to tell the truth was hardly the first instance, nor was it the last.

“He had my Scotty selling drugs…”

Geezus bleeding Kee-rist on a crutch!
Scotty doesn’t even appear in the goddam script
!

But it was a very different matter less than two months before the episode aired. According to Roddenberry in later years, I was
persona non grata
, a misfit who had cost the show a fortune. But on February 27th, 1967—a mere forty-five days before broadcast—the man who would lie about my ability and my creation for almost three decades sent me this telegram:

For higher resolution version, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge

But Gene spread his goo so eloquently, and the stone righteous
Trek
zombies slipped and slid in it with so much élan, that in later years it was like a Greek Chorus from anyone who needed to explain why I hadn’t been writing anything for feature films or the series. Like, uh, here…a case in point. To be enjoyed after glomming the Paramount note attached to the cover sheet of the original story proposal for
Star Trek IV
, sent to me in December of 1984 by then Producer Harve Bennett, and Leonard Nimoy. (Please remember, as you read this anecdote, that you have seen me invited to talk about writing #IV, as the anecdote mentions #V)

For higher resolution version, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge

In the 4 June 1989 Arts & Leisure section of the
New York Times
, appeared an article written—but not headlined—by Robert F. Moss, itchily titled “To Sci-Fi Writers Hollywood is Mostly Alien.” It is a longish piece purporting to explain the reasons “recognized” sf writers have not been more often hired to script sf/fantasy films.

In this
NY Times
article, Mr. Moss interviews all sorts of people, including me, and he quotes the producer of
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
(Paramount). Said producer being one Harve Bennett, a guy I know. And Mr. Bennett said, among a number of things he said, as follows: “We brought in Ted Sturgeon to do a rewrite on
Star Trek II
, but he didn’t make much of a contribution,” and he described the late Grand Master as “too cerebral.” Then the article reads like this:

He [Bennett] claims to have had a disastrous experience with Harlan Ellison on a television series (a charge that Mr. Ellison denies) and characterizes him as an “extremely undisciplined writer,” whose work is prolix, self-indulgent and often unshootable.

But the evidence seems to exonerate Mr. Ellison. Though he wrote only one
Star Trek
segment, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” it went on to become the most popular of the 79 episodes and appears to have served as the basis of
Star Trek IV
, the film series’ biggest hit.

You will find the above-quoted sections on page 18 of the Arts & Leisure section of the
NY Times
for Sunday 4 June 1989, as I noted earlier.

It appears that Mr. Bennett, who solicited me—despite my lack of discipline, my prolixity, self-indulgence and generally disastrous character—to write
Star Trek II, Star Trek III
and
Star Trek IV
(and my agent, Martin Shapiro, phoned me a year or so ago asking me how I would respond to an invitation to write
Star Trek V
) long after our alleged “disastrous experience” on “a television series,” told Mr. Robert F. Moss that he, Mr. Bennett, had this hideous imbroglio when he was shepherding
The Mod Squad
.

When Mr. Moss called to interview me for the
Times
article, he asked me about what Mr. Bennett had said. I replied as follows:

“Harve Bennett is a bastion of truth in an otherwise nasty world, and the idea that he might be telling an untruth is inconceivable. There is only one small flaw in his remarks. And it is this. I never worked on
The Mod Squad
. Dated Peggy Lipton a few times right around the time she appeared on the cover of
Life
, but I was never solicited to write for
The Mod Squad
, never submitted anything to
The Mod Squad
, never met with anyone from
The Mod Squad
. Perhaps the disastrous experience Mr. Bennett remembers was one of the brief chats we had at one of Marty’s famous black tie New Year’s Eve parties.” [11]

The story of my “story conference” when Paramount and Roddenberry wanted me to write the first
Trek
feature has been told any number of times. Most recently in Shatner’s second “memoir.”

Gene completed his script in August 1975. As expected, Paramount president Barry Diller quickly and flatly passed, then asked him to take another crack. At the same time, unbeknownst to Gene, the studio began interviewing other respected science fiction writers, asking that they, too, submit outlines for the proposed
Star Trek
feature. Harlan Ellison was one of their first targets.