The City on the Edge of Forever (5 page)

With that in mind, Livingston, under enormous time pressure and lacking confidence in Roddenberry’s abilities, took the task upon himself. He turned the bulk of the series’ story editing duties over to Jon Povill, locked himself into his office, and spent the next month pounding “In Thy Image” into a complete first-draft screenplay….

Livingston’s first-draft script was really quite close to the one that would ultimately become
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
. The only real difference was the ending….

“I brought in my script on a Friday afternoon. I gave it to Gene and he said, ‘Okay, now you’ve done your job. Let me do mine.’ He then goes home, and rewrites the whole goddamn thing over the weekend. Monday morning, he hands out copies of his revised version to Goodwin, Bob Collins, Jon Povill and me, and at first glance, I immediately notice that the cover page now reads ‘
In Thy Image
by Gene Roddenberry and Harold Livingston.’ He’d put his name on top of mine.

“So now we all go into our offices, we all start reading this thing and maybe an hour or so later, we’d all finished. At that point, everybody congregated in my office, saying ‘What are we gonna tell him? WHO’s gonna tell him?’

“So I picked up his script, walked into his office, and while he was sitting there with this expectant grin on his face, I said ‘Gene, this is SHIT!’ Just like that. And the grin remained frozen on his face, so I got myself excited, and I asked him, ‘Why’d you do this? When something works, you don’t piss in it to make it better!’”

That was Gene. Couldn’t write for sour owl poop, but strutted around for the benefit of the gullible Trekkie Nation, explaining how every failure was someone else’s fault, and every success was due to his fecund imagination, vast literary ability, and CEO-level organizational skills. Do I strike you as vicious in my presentation of these facts? Yeah, well, just so, gentle reader, just so. I put up with this crap for the better part of three decades, and now it’s my turn. Do not expect from me a nobility that was not possessed by the late, great Bird of the Galaxy, who spent more than a few hours of those years dropping bird-shit on me and my version of “City.”

Now we come to the section of this Introductory essay that was excerpted in a recent
TV Guide
Special on the
Trek
phenomenon. I was asked to write the piece by Larry Closs, senior editor at
TV Guide
. He contacted me (if I recall accurately) late in December of 1994, and he asked me if I was now ready, after all those years of the Roddenberry version, to tell the Ellison version of how “City” came to be. I was extremely reluctant. Ask Closs, he’ll tell you. I said no a few times, capping the refusal with the phrase, “
TV Guide
hasn’t got enough money to get me to write this sordid little epic.” He asked how much money that would be. Now, since I know that
TV Guide
, for all its enormous circulation and ocean-swallowing advertising revenues, pays some of the worst rates in magazine writing, I named a figure about five times what their best pay-out had been in my experience. Closs called back later that day and said, “You got it.”

Well, ’pon mah soul! What an epiphany, folks! There was actual rowrbazzle size money to be made from this kind of thing. Not just everyone else with their pig-snouts in the trough, but li’l ole me, too! So I wrote it. And Closs even reproduced some of the photographic evidence that proves I’m not just makin’ this shit up as I go along. (And there’s all of that stuff, plus more, here in the full-length book version. We want you should get your money’s worth. Also, we want the winged monkeys who’ll come to carry me off should have a hard time saying I’m a big fat liar, when you can see the actual documents here reproduced.)

So I wrote the article.

And the first phone call on my answering machine after the issue hit the newsstands, was the hysterically tearful voice of a woman who—in properly Roddenberry perfect-humanity manner—left no name, but in heart-rendingly (albeit cowardly) fashion excoriated me. “You rotten person,” she screamed, “you should die and burn in hell forever! You aren’t fit to speak Gene Roddenberry’s name, you lying sonofabitch bastard!” And on and on, without much originality or innovative use of defamatory verbiage. (Don’t you just hate it when some plucky little pustule summons up the sneaky strength to give you an anonymous call, and the best they can come up with is
fuck you
? If you’re going to go at it, do try to heed H. L. Mencken’s admonitions about the pallid nature of American cursing.)

But, astonishingly, thereafter, every single letter or phone call or InterNet message passed along to me (I have no computer or modem or interest in wasting my life on these electronic
yenta
boards) congratulated me for having the (what one reader called) “ethical muscle” to tell it “like it was.” Well, gee whillikers, folks, how swell that you thought I was an icon of rectitude and justified moral indignation. I just have one question to ask:

Where the fuck were you for thirty years while Roddenberry and his running-dogs dissed me and smeared my rep
?

But, then, I shouldn’t be rude to you. After all, didn’t you pay good money to buy my book? So let me just get on with it, and reprint my article from
TV Guide
. And when I return, New Horrors! New Horrors!

Last fall,
Entertainment Weekly
did one of these special
Star Trek
issues and they ranked all 79 episodes of the original series. Number one, all-time best, most popular episode was “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Undisputedly the best episode of
Star Trek
.

I wrote that episode. The words didn’t spring unbidden from Spock and Kirk’s mouths, they were written. By me. The tragic love story in which the principal protagonists of the
Enterprise
went back in time to New York City during the Great Depression of 1930, and Kirk watched as the woman he loved—Sister Edith Keeler—was killed…I spent most of 1966 writing and rewriting and re-rewriting.

I watched it once, only once—when it originally aired over NBC on April 6, 1967—and have been unable to bring myself to look at it again since that evening. One would think the anger and the punch in the heart would abate after more than thirty years. But
Star Trek
has become as anally retentive a cult as the most obsessive True Believer could wish, and the urban myths that have been cobbled up about “City,” and my script, march on tirelessly. They are horse puckey, but on they trudge.

In the film
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
, there is a line that has become famous. It is this: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

That is to say, why bother with the truth when horse puckey allows the True Believers to enjoy their obsession in a state of blissful ignorance?

I cannot tell you the truth. You would not want it, or believe it, or honor me in any way for having told it to you. Crybabies whine for the truth.

What you want is myth and half-truth. Okay, I can do that. But what follows is only that part of the truth that will not curdle your milk. The snail on the rose remains hidden.

Roddenberry and I sat in a booth at Oblath’s. The restaurant was nearly empty, only a few gaffers and extras sipping coffee or dumping down a late breakfast. It was sometime between ten in the morning and noon. I was working on a meat loaf sandwich, and Gene had a drink in front of him. He looked at me and said, “They’re conspiring to cancel the show.”

Gene had called me at home and asked me to come down for “a private talk.” He didn’t want to meet at the
Star Trek
offices in the “E” building of Desilu Studios, which adjoined Paramount. He asked me to meet him at Oblath’s, the now-vanished luncheon joint that stood just across the narrow street from the Marathon gate of Paramount. It was always crammed with people from the studios, but not till coffee break or lunchtime. Now, we were alone, and Gene was telling me that dark and inimical forces inside NBC were plotting the demise of this new space adventure series to which I’d been devoted since Gene had invited me to be a writer for the series in late 1965.

It was November of 1966, and they were getting ready to shoot “City” after ten months of my slow writing of the script, and after much duplicity and aggravation, and after Gene had given my work to others to rewrite—betraying the promise to me that if changes were needed, I’d be the one to make them. It was November, “City” was in preproduction, Gene and I hadn’t spoken in many weeks, and he had asked me to come to a meeting so he could confide that the network was out to kill the show.

“I need your help,” he said.

I wasn’t a kid. I was 32 years old, I’d already won the first of four Writers Guild awards for Most Outstanding Teleplay for my
Outer Limits
script, “Demon with a Glass Hand” starring Robert Culp. I’d been a professional for a decade and had already published 11 of my 62 books; I’d been on my own since I’d run away from Ohio at age thirteen. I wasn’t a kid. But I went for it. What they used to call in the carny, the
okeydoke
. The hustle. The con.

Gene had an astonishing ability to tell people what they wanted to hear, to charm them into doing his bidding, all the time thinking the chores had been self-generated. I went for the okeydoke and believed (what is generally acknowledged now to be utterly untrue) that there were idiot monsters at NBC who were trying to scuttle
Star Trek
.

Despite my lingering animosity at what Gene had done, and had allowed to be done, to my script, I volunteered to help save the show. And I came back to the Studio and Gene set me up in one of the vacant offices, and I created The Committee.

I got hold of all the membership lists of the World Science Fiction Conventions from recent years, fan clubs across the country, mailing lists from antiquarian sf booksellers, a huge Rolodex of names. Then I enlisted eight of the biggest names in the world of speculative fiction—from the author of
Dune
, Frank Herbert, to the legendary author of
Slan
, A. E. van Vogt—and under a letterhead declaring us The Committee, I sent out thousands of letters asking for the help of fans and viewers, help in persuading NBC to keep the show on the air.

To see a copy of Harlan's letter, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge

I worked night and day in that little office. I cut the stencil, and took it to the mimeograph room at Desilu where scripts were run off on an old Gestetner mimeograph, and I actually cranked that handle for hours to create the letters of S.O.S. on the reams of light green paper Gene had provided for the purpose.

When I hear all the toots and bleats from those who came later, that
they
saved
Star Trek
, my jaw muscles get tense.

But I did it, nonetheless. I went for the okeydoke because I had no idea what was about to happen to me and “City.”

I was no kid. I should have heard the sounds of lies in the night.

Yeah, it took me an impossible ten months to get that script written. I don’t cop out on that. But I’ve written scripts as quickly as over a three-day weekend. I’ve got 50 scripts to my credit; it doesn’t take all that much time. So I have no excuse. But I
do
have an explanation.

In a dopey book called
CAPTAIN’S LOGS: The Complete Trek Voyages
(1993), in a section devoted to “City,” the authors quote my old pal John D. F. Black, who was the story editor on
Star Trek
during my writing months. He wrote, “Harlan always had 40 things going. He was doing a book and he had this short story he had to get in, or whatever…”

Johnny doesn’t seem to remember what the working situation for freelance writers was like in the ’60s. How it went, was this: the new season began in September; every show got an order for 28 to 32 segments from the networks; but they got those purchase orders earlier, in May or June. And then they would start showing the pilot episode to every writer in town. They had “cattle calls” in which you’d be sitting with twenty or thirty other scenarists, in a screening room at the studio. And after you’d seen the pilot episode they’d shot the year before, everyone would trample his gramma to get to the producer or story editor, to pitch an idea.

And it all happened during a couple of weeks in the spring. What you would have to live on for the rest of the year was predicated on how fast, and how many, gigs you could smash’n’grab during the cattle-call fortnight. (And in them thar days, kids, the pay was a lot less. For a half hour script, it was something like fifteen hundred bucks, and for an hour-long segment, like
Trek
, it was maybe three grand.) So if you wanted to live above the poverty line in expensive L.A., you glommed onto three or four assignments all at the same time.

No excuse, just the way it was.

And I had a couple of assignments on
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
as well as completing the last of a feature film assignment (coincidentally, also at Paramount). Gene came on the scene after I was committed to those jobs, but he wanted me on
Trek
so much, and I was so enamored of the idea of working on the first really big-time sf space adventure show…I accepted the contract.

So it is true. I was slow. I was riding three horses at the same time. But early on, I fell in love with my story of Kirk and Spock trying to set time right, of Kirk’s great, tragic love affair, of the immutability of time and the human spirit. I threw myself into writing “City” as I had done with no other story save “Demon with a Glass Hand.” And I wrote treatment after treatment to keep up with Roddenberry’s ever-changing “script direction” and “input”—most of which came as a result of either Desilu or NBC suggesting this nitwit idea or that bonehead concept, I wrote and wrote and wrote. More than the Writers Guild regs permitted, more than I was ever paid for, more than was required. What sort of imbecile demands?