The City on the Edge of Forever (8 page)

Ellison, as every decent Trekker knows, is the author of many of the finest pieces of science fiction ever written, as well as the man behind what’s generally considered
Star Trek’s
finest episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” He’s also a bit…eccentric. In fact, as legend has it, when he was asked by Paramount to write up his story outline in regard to a possible
Star Trek
movie, he balked, opting instead to commit his idea to memory. Once that was accomplished, he set up a meeting with a Paramount development executive, wherein he ran through a forty-five minute monologue and verbally unveiled a
Star Trek
adventure of truly epic proportions.

Pacing about the office, speaking loudly and gesturing broadly for dramatic emphasis, Ellison conjured up a tale involving time travel back to prehistoric times, complete with battles against an evil race of reptiles and Captain Kirk’s kidnapping of the entire
Enterprise
crew. Exhausted after his performance, Ellison supposedly turned to the executive and asked, “Well, whaddya think?” at which point he was told, “Hmmm, it’s okay, I guess, but I was just reading this book right here called
CHARIOTS OF THE GODS
and in this thing, it says that the ancient Mayans were visited by creatures from outer space. Think you could squeeze some of those Mayans in there?”

Ellison, being Ellison, quickly, loudly, bluntly and politically suicidally pointed out the inherent stupidity of the man’s idea, making clear the obvious fact that there were no Mayans in prehistory.

“Aw, so what,” the executive supposedly replied, “nobody’ll know the difference.”

Ellison chimed, “I’ll know the difference, you idiot.” He then punctuated his remarks with a stream of profanity, a hasty exit and a strident door slam. Needless to say, his idea was quickly rejected.

As this second ghostwritten “memoir” by Shatner is about as reliable as the first one—and that
TV Guide
piece that appears earlier in this introduction should be compared side-by-side, page-by-page, with Shatner’s self-serving fantasy about how
he
came up to my house to get me to finish the script—(Notice how everyfuckinbody in the world is responsible for the success of the “City” script…everybody and anybody…except me?) there are only a
few
hideous errors in the telling, apart from the anecdote being apparently lifted
in toto
from Edward Gross’ book
TREK: THE LOST YEARS
(1989). Since we all know the Shatner
TEKWAR
novels were written by the fine sf/fantasy author Ron Goulart (who has a poison pill implant in his right lower bicuspid in case he is ever tempted to repeat that auctorial reality in public or private), so we know that one Chris Kreski wrote
STAR TREK MOVIE MEMORIES
for Shatner, and it’s a shame proper credit wasn’t given to Gross, but then, freewheeling use of other people’s material seems to be only
de rigueur
for the
Trek
family and its associates.

(Oh, what’s that? You think I’m kidding that Kreski and Shatner have pilfered Gross’s material? Here take a look at what Gross wrote, and you tell me if you think this is “coincidental parallel development.”)

In his excellent nonfiction assessment of horror and science fiction,
DANSE MACABRE
, Stephen King reported that rumor had Harlan Ellison going to Paramount with the idea of the
Enterprise
breaking through the end of the universe and confronting God himself. And that wasn’t big enough, either.

Removing tongue from cheek, the author explained the real story to King, but before discussing that, it’s important to note what writer James Van Hise wrote in his fanzine,
Enterprise Incidents
.

“The story Harlan came up with,” Van Hise wrote in number eight of his magazine, “was never written down, but was presented verbally…the story did not begin with any of the
Enterprise
crew, but started on Earth where strange phenomena were inexplicably occurring. In India, a building where a family is having dinner, just vanishes into dust. In the United States, one of the Great Lakes suddenly vanishes, wreaking havoc. In a public square, a woman suddenly screams and falls to the pavement where she transforms into some sort of reptilian creature. The truth is suppressed, but the Federation realizes that someone or something is tampering with time and changing things on Earth in the far distant past. What is actually happening involves an alien race on the other end of the galaxy. Eons ago, Earth and this planet both developed races of humans and intelligent humanoid reptiles. On Earth, the humans destroyed the reptile men and flourished. In the time of the
Enterprise
when this race learns what happened on Earth in the remote past, they decide to change things in the past so that they will have a kindred planet. For whatever reason, the Federation decides that only the
Enterprise
and her crew are qualified for this mission, so a mysterious cloaked figure goes about kidnapping the old central crew. This figure is finally revealed to be Kirk. After they are reunited, they prepare for the mission into the past to save Earth. And that would have been just the first half hour of the film!”

Ellison gave Stephen King a little more information on his story meeting with Paramount.

“It involved going to the end of the known universe to slip back through time to the Pleistocene period when man first emerged,” he said. “I postulated an alien intelligence from a far galaxy where the snakes had become the dominant life form, and a snake-creature who had come to Earth in the
Star Trek
feature, had seen its ancestors wiped out, and who had gone back into the far past of Earth to set up distortions in the time-flow so the reptiles could beat the humans. The
Enterprise
goes back to set time right, finds the snake-alien, and the human crew is confronted with the moral dilemma of whether it had the right to wipe out an entire life form just to insure its own territorial imperative in our present and future. The story, in short, spanned all of time and all of space, with a moral and ethical problem.”

Paramount executive Barry Trabulus “listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes,” Ellison elaborated. “Then he said, ‘You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Mayan calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?’”

The writer pointed out that there were no Mayans at the dawn of time, but the executive brushed this off, pointing out that no one would know the difference.

“‘
I’d
know the difference,’” Ellison exploded.

“‘It’s a dumb suggestion.’ So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn’t I do it if I wanted to write this picture,” Ellison continued. “So I said ‘I’m a writer. I don’t know what the f-k you are!’ And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the
Star Trek
movie.”

Gross tells it even better. But they both omit one very important fact, and it is the omission of that fact in the Shatner-Kreski version that convinces me it was swiped from Gross: Roddenberry was
in
the room when I had this interchange with Trabulus. It was
Gene
who called me to come in for the meeting, in the very same office where we had done the series at Desilu, now Paramount.

Because neither Van Hise nor Gross ever mentioned it—he may not have known—Kreski-Shatner assumed this was a
sub rosa
meeting to do a back-door around Roddenberry’s rotten first script. No way. Gene was sitting right there at the little round table in the corner near the windows, and he took part in the conversation.

That I didn’t write it down before I told it, would only seem extraordinary to someone who didn’t know diddlyshit about how business is done in Hollywood. The Writers Guild won’t
allow
spec writing! You are not
allowed
to set down the plot before you have a deal. (There are, of course, hungry waifs who ignore this hard-won victory over Industry Greed by the excellent Writers Guild of America, who will write entire drafts of a screenplay on pure speculation. When they get it up the
tuchiss
, I have no pity for them.) So both Gross-Van Hise and Kreski-Shatner seeming to be startled that I “ran through a forty-five minute monologue and verbally…” is, in the case of the former, ignorance, but in the case of the latter, more than a revealing suspicion of monkey-see, monkey-do. (By the way, as a graciously offered writing note to Kreski-Shatner: the only way a
monologue
can be presented
is
“verbally”—that is, unless one is Hamlet delivering a soliloquy, or one is telepathic…out where I come from, pahdner, we call that “schoolgirl syntax.”) But that is
precisely
how one makes a story pitch. You put together in your head the basic storyline, and you then sell it on your feet, like a stand-up comedian, to idiots in suits who have no more idea of how a plot should be constructed than a piece of ravioli has about Euclidian geometry.

As for my being “exhausted” after doing a mere 45 minutes…sheeeet, just ask anyone who’s been to one of my 3-hour lectures!

And what end does this redundant exposure serve? If nothing else, it should show you, gentle reader, just how much malarkey you’ve accepted as True Word. Van Hise gets bits and snippets of half-remembered anecdotes, and publishes them without ever offering the finished copy to his sources for fact-checking. Then those mini-legends get circulated and distorted by fans who gossip and
never
get the specifics right (not to mention the inadvertent or purposeful warping of data on these idiot computer bulletin boards that run all night long disseminating half-baked bullshit no more valid than the
National Enquirer
edition of 12 November 1991 that blared the headline: STAR TREK CREATOR’S SECRET—HE DIED HATING CAPT. KIRK.) Then Edward Gross picks up the story and gets more specific, but
he
wasn’t there,
either
, so he makes the mistake of leaving Roddenberry out of the scene. And then a Shatner-puppet filches the story, attempts to rework the wording sufficiently so no one can shout, “Plagiarism!” (they needn’t have worried, neither Van Hise nor Gross has the money to sue) and sets down the anecdote with several major errors now concretized, drawing an utterly bogus conclusion that Paramount was working behind Gene Roddenberry’s back, thus reinforcing Gene’s long-since disproved claims that studio and network were out to scuttle him, a song he sang from the git-go. And it makes Roddenberry look like El Supremo, fighting off the hordes of duplicity, when in fact he was the single largest blockage in the
Star Trek
flow.

But here is what I ask you to consider, and I realize now that I grow weary writing this self-vindication, as weary as you must have grown reading it: I ask you to perform two acts of simple logic. No arcane thinking, no convoluted creation of conspiracies, no long leaps between facts. Just
two
acts of cold, logical thinking. And they are these:

• First, ask yourself if the depiction of the author of “City” as a writer who couldn’t handle the materials of his own story, as a mad jackanapes without professionalism, as a talent to be admired but not hired…rings true for a writer who was subsequently asked to write
Star Trek I, Star Trek II, Star Trek IV
and
Star Trek V
? And asked to write those larger,
more
expensive,
more
easily fucked-up productions by
the same people who had been telling everyone Ellison was a bum
!

If I was so goddam notoriously impossible to work with, if I had such a criminal disregard for budget, if I was a cannon on the loose…why the hell did they come back to me again and again and again?

• And second, just read the damned script. Read all the treatments, read the attempt I made to satisfy those subsequent demands for revision, read the actual words I wrote! Then rent the damned video, if you must, and compare. You may still go with what aired, but at least you’ll see that I wrote no Scotty selling drugs, I wrote no great crowd scenes, I wrote no space armadas! I wrote a simple and poignant love story, and I tried to say something about mortality and the importance of courage when there is no hope and the nature of friendship and the basic crapshoot that is history.

Read, and compare. The evidence is before you.

I don’t have the space or the inclination to run all the letters from Roddenberry to me. Nor the space to place before you all of the times Roddenberry
in print
declared how much over-budget my show had gone…and each time it was thousands of dollars
more
than the last time, like the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy holding aloft a sheet of paper and declaring, “I hold in my hand the names of 136 card-carrying Communists in the State Department!” and the next time, “The names of 258…” and the next time, “The names of 502….” But here’s a sample.

Now, originally, I crowed like a madman at this ultimate admission by Roddenberry that, in fact, if I went over budget on “City” it was by a mere, piddling six thousand dollars! In the limited edition of this book, last year, I even went so far as to urge the reader to check out Roddenberry’s own math in his letter to me. I said, “It don’t parse, it don’t add up, it’s just simply
incorrect
!”

But on closer examination—and with a determination to be as truthful as the evidence at hand compels—it is clear that Roddenberry’s budget letter presents a thorny ethical problem for me. As I pointed out, the Great Bird’s figures don’t add up. So I should caper and gibber and make hay out of this confession straight from his beak. But ethically, I’d be as bad as Roddenberry or the mooks who cobble up mythology about “City” and me. Because it’s obvious, I think, that it was essentially a typographical error.