The City on the Edge of Forever (2 page)

CAN YOU SPOT THE DEMENTED LIES IN THE ABOVE TRANSCRIPT?

(
Clue
:
“The City on the Edge of Forever” never won a Nebula Award. It won a Hugo. In a letter to Harlan Ellison only two months after “City” aired, Gene Roddenberry stated the episode had only been $6,000 over budget. When Ellison accepted the Hugo Award—only one of the 8 1?2 he has won—he clearly noted to the vast audience that this honor was being bestowed on a crippled, eviscerated, fucked-up version of his original dream. David Gerrold never wrote an episode that Gene thought was shootable…then how do we account for something titled “The Trouble with Tribbles”?)

NOW READ “Perils of the ‘City’” AND LEARN THE TRUTH!

INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There was a 1000-copy limited edition of this book published in late October of last year. Due to arbitrary technical limits set on the size of the volume, two years before the book was actually written, the introductory essay that follows had to be truncated. Additional material already at hand could not be included, and a number of egregious errors were introduced into the introductory text. This edition includes all of that additional material, addresses the glitches and inconsistencies of the earlier essay, and speaks to subsequent assertions about “City” and the Author made in several books published since last year. I don’t expect
ever
to be free of the endless gossip, surmises, misstatements, uninformed theories and “Chinese Whispers” attendant on “City,” but as best I can tell it, and with truthfulness as best I can practice it (the poet Olin Miller has written “Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory”), this is the corrected, full story.

Perils of the “City”

Speak no ill of the dead?

Oh, really? Then let’s forget about writing a true introductory essay to this book. Let’s give a pass to setting the record straight. Let’s just shrug and say, ah, what the hell, it’s been more than thirty years and the bullshit has been slathered on with a trowel for so damned long, and so many greedy little pig-snouts have made so much money off those lies, and so many inimical forces
continue
to dip their pig-snouts in that
Star Trek
trough of bullshit that no one wants to hear your miserable bleats of “unfair! unfair!”…that it ain’t worth the price of admission, Ellison. So shine it on, and let the keepers of the holy flame of
Star Trek
and the preservers of the bullshit myth of Roddenberry have the field to themselves. The field,
and
the exchequer.

Oh, yeah, that’s what lies at the core of it. The money.

What is it Deep Throat said:
Follow the money
.

If it weren’t for the money, for that overflowing
Star Trek
trough in which the pig-snouts are dipped every day, no one would give a rat’s-ass if the truth about Roddenberry and the show got told. But if you follow the money, you see that river of gold flowing straight off the Paramount lot in boring sequel-series after clone-show, and you see the merchandisers and the franchisers and the publicists and the QVC hustlers and bought critics like
TV Guide
’s Jeff Jarvis, and you see the fanmagazine fanatics and the convention-throwers and the endless weary biographies and the huge pseudo-book franchise of useless
Star Trek
novels written by a great many writers who ought to take up flyspeck analysis instead of littering the bestseller lists with their poor excuses for creative effort (not to mention the few really excellent writers who ought to know better, but have gulled themselves into believing they’re writing those awful turd-tomes out of adolescent affection for nothing nobler than a goddamn
tv show
, when the truth is they’re doing it for the money, they follow the money, just like all the other
Star Trek
barnacles attached to that lumbering behemoth); and you see the venal liars and adulterers and con-artists and charlatans and deluded fan-fools who have a vested interest in keeping
Star Trek
sailing along, and all the innocent but naive tv absorbers, and you figure, Ah what the hell, Ellison, let it go! Just forget about it!

And, pretty much, except when my anger got too intense, or my gorge got too buoyant, or when one of the little piss-ants got within arm’s reach, I
have
let it slide for thirty years.

Thirty years. That is a piece of time.

Probably more years than are owned by most of the people who will buy this book. And with the historical soapbox
Star Trek
stands upon, to insure its posterity (not to mention its view of “how things happened”), the story those under-30 readers will have had to swallow by the time they
get
to this book…well, Ellison’s somewhat jaundiced and politically unkempt telling of that history has about as much chance as a snowball in a cyclotron.

So. Speak no ill of the dead. And let it go, pal. Give it a rest. As my wife says, belt up.

And I have. For thirty years, more or less. I won’t dissemble and pretend that I haven’t tried to refute some of the most widely-held canards-cum-mythology that have circulated through the
Star Trek
world, at conventions, or in private conversations. But in the main, for the most part, partially out of dismay and partially out of weariness, I’ve let most of it pass. To attempt to stem the tide of fannish folderol and gossip would mean I’d have to devote every waking hour to an essentially pointless task. And it would be as likely to do any good as trying to sweep the beach clean of sand.

As for that “speak no ill of the dead” admonition, I only wish the same Christian Charity was visited on the living. Yet I never said anything about Roddenberry in private or public that I didn’t (or wouldn’t have) said to his face.

But trying to present another viewpoint of Roddenberry—and we’re talking now about all those years prior to his death, before the tell-all books by virtually every member of the cast, before the scathing revelations in GENE RODDENBERRY:
The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek
(Hyperion, 1994) by investigative journalist Joel Engel, before even the whitewash biography by David Alexander—a man who was in Roddenberry’s hip pocket when Gene was alive, and managed to get to the task of grave-robbing Roddenberry’s life faster than the speed of blight—titled
The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry
: STAR TREK CREATOR (ROC, 1994)—trying to portray Roddenberry as anything approaching a fallible human being would bring down the tsunami of Trekkie wrath. To them, he was a bright and shining light, and they would eviscerate anyone who said otherwise. This is a degenerative process called “heroification.”

(As James W. Loewen writes in his 1995 book LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
, “Heroification…much like calcification…makes people over into heroes. The media turn flesh-and-blood individuals into pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest. …authors selectively omit blemishes in order to make certain historical figures sympathetic to as many people as possible. …A certain etiquette coerces us all into speaking in respectful tones about the past. …It perpetuates what might be called a Disney version of history.”

(As Washington Irving wrote in his heavily-heroificated biography of Christopher Columbus, “Care should be taken to vindicate great names from pernicious erudition.”)

By wildly extravagant heroification of Gene Roddenberry, all the untruths, all the false credit, all the betrayal and perfidious behavior he wallowed in, has been permitted to be flensed. …leaving only this glowing icon who wouldn’t tell a lie or hurt a fly. Yeah, and there are actually schmucks who think Adolf Hitler made the trains run on time.

So I tried to let it all pass, without comment most of the time. But thirty years is a piece of change. It is much longer to keep getting kicked in the ass than anyone should have to put up with.

So I let myself get talked into writing this book.

Yeah, yeah, I know: “You
let
yourself get talked into writing this book? Come on, Ellison! Who the hell’s supposed to believe
that
? Ain’t this the same world we went to bed in last night? Isn’t the reason for doing a
Star Trek
book of
any
kind—picayune biography, sharecropping derivative novel, moron quiz book, obsessional trivia book, adolescent episode guide—for the money? Follow the money? We’re not fools, Ellison! Yeah, we might swallow any crap the Paramount p.r. mill cares to throw out, and all preproduction inside-secrets desiderata, but we ain’t naive enough to believe you’re doing this book for any other reason than money.”

So okay, all right, all you little cynical television goobers, believe what the hell you choose.
I
say I was talked into doing this book, that left to my own devices I’d have spent my time on more worthwhile projects, and if I make money off this thing, well, since I’ve never seen more than a pittance from “The City on the Edge of Forever,” while every thug and studio putz and semiliterate bandwagon-jumper and merchandiser has grown fat as a maggot in a corpse off what
I
created, then you can chalk it up to achieving something not even close to balance in the Unjust Universe. But if you
want
the truth, here it is.

There is only one reason I’m doing this book:

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

“It is not at all to justify myself that I’ve been doing all this talking. …But no! That’s a lie! I precisely wanted to justify myself. I make this little note for myself, gentlemen. I don’t want to lie. I’ve given my word.”

—from
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

For thirty years I’ve had to listen to others shoot off their faces about how
they
saved “City.” How
they
rewrote this and trimmed that and suffered oh so awfully with the irresponsible Ellison.[1]
 
For thirty years I’ve slapped back only when they got me too angry to lay back…or when they got within arm’s reach. And now, with Shatner’s pinheaded memoir, and that laughable “biography” by David Alexander that tried to make Roddenberry look like fuckin’ Prometheus…well…I let myself get talked into doing the original, unexpurgated, you-read-it-and-judge-for-yourself teleplay, with additional material, and alternate versions and various treatments…and this is my final word on the matter. If it makes money, that’s terrific: I deserve it. (A lot more than the creeps who’ve fed off my work for three decades.) And if it doesn’t…yeah, well, what are the odds all the brain-damaged Trekkies wanted to hear the truth anyhow?

Here’s the way this Rosetta Stone will be revealed to you. The script you are about to read is the original version. It is
not
the teleplay as presented by NBC on April 6th, 1967. The episode of
Star Trek
broadcast on that evening was rewritten. Many times. Some of those times by me. Some of those times by others. For the first time in thirty years, right here in this book, you will discover—as I did only when
preparing
this manuscript—who it was that had a hand in the rewrites of my script besides Coon and Roddenberry and Carabatsos. You may be mildly startled to learn the name of that person, but I guarantee you will not be
nearly
as astonished as
I
was. Because I never had a suspicion for three decades that there had been anyone but the “usual suspects” involved. I knew it wasn’t Roddenberry, even though I was certain he had fiddled around with the final version. How did I know? Because as one well-known tv writer (an award-winner himself) has said, “There are chunks of dialogue speech Edith Keeler gives about how in the future everything will be wonderful because we’ll have spaceships to feed hungry people—which is precisely the kind of dopey Utopian bullshit Roddenberry loved.” So I knew Gene had screwed around, because that’s how he was able to lie to himself (and everyone else) that he was the Great Guiding Intelligence. But I also knew he hadn’t done the massive restructuring that was done to my story, although that expert liar told people from lecture platforms for the better part of a quarter century that it was
he
who rescued that brilliant script from the inept paws of the Slacker Ellison…when, in truth, Roddenberry had about as much writing ability as the lowest industry hack. A fact. Do with it what you will.

Oh, and when those I savage here decide they will punish me for my impetuous impertinence in muddying the great and golden icon
Star Trek
, let me advise you of something salient:

Though, indeed, I have a letter of permission from Paramount permitting me to publish this teleplay, I never needed it. (I sought out such a letter only because the publisher of the limited edition of this book, in the wholly premature announcements four years ago, sought to strike a deal with Paramount for some sort of commercial tie-in. By the time I learned of the letter, it was clear to me that I had better get Paramount “placed” before they decided to play lawyer with me. So I finessed a “release” that permitted me and White Wolf to do this book.) But in truth, I never needed such a letter. Because this is not the script that is the property of Desilu-Paramount.

It is the
original
version. The version they returned to me. It is also the version that was copyrighted by me in 1975. It is the version that was mine from the git-go by the “separation of rights” clause in the Writers Guild of America contract we lovingly call the Minimum Basic Agreement. And it is the version that was published in January of 1976 in the Washington Square Press paperback volume,
SIX SCIENCE FICTION PLAYS
. Had Paramount wished to do anything about my claims to this property, they should have (and certainly
would
have) done so more than twenty years ago. But since they didn’t, even the dullest attorney over at Paramount Legal would have to represent to anyone intent on “punishing” me, that you can’t make a case when you haven’t done shit about the matter in two decades. Statute of limitations, that sort of thing. It’s why the Pope exonerated the Jews for allegedly nailing up Christ. Statute of limitations. Only two thousand years. But, sadly, in the case of Paramount, it was twenty. So.