World’s longest aside.

Anyhow, I went in to work on Star Trek and devised a story I was anxious to tell. I called it “The City on the Edge of Forever.” I wrote it carefully, with considerable love, and with enthusiasm at being part of what looked to be the most faithful translation of pure science fiction to the television medium since the second year of The Outer Limits. (Not the first year: that was all bogeymen and monsters; but the second year was frequently identifiable science fiction that did not induce projectile vomiting, and some bloody fine shows they were. Now that was a series I dug working on; I’ll tell you about it some time.)

I handed in my script to rave comments by Gene, Dorothy Fontana—who was, herself, writing scripts for the show, even while she was serving as Roddenberry’s assistant—and the then-story editor, John D. F. Black.[4] They all said it was dynamite and that they’d be “putting it up on the boards” at once, for early shooting. But then, peculiar things began happening.

The script was put aside for several months and scripts I’d been told were “lesser in quality” began to slip into the progressively later slots “City” had been intended to fill. I kept checking back, to see what was going down—I was writing a segment for another series at that time, I don’t remember which one [5]—but kept getting the runaround.

Now, understand something: for many years after the period I’m talking about here, Gene Roddenberry and I didn’t speak to each other. Considerable bad vibes and poisoned blood between us. I felt I’d been badly used; Gene felt I was being unfair and unnecessarily condemnatory (not to mention loudmouthed) about my treatment on the series. Those days are past. Gene and I have reached rapprochement and he has done a number of very gentlemanly, wholly unsolicited good deeds in my behalf. I choose, and so does Gene, to forget the hassles of that period. So I won’t lay them out here like dismembered corpses. Suffice to say, Gene’s contention was that I had written a script that cost too much to film on the budget NBC had allowed (a budget that kept getting smaller as the season wore on and one segment after another ran over cost); I contended that unnamed parties had leached all the humanity from the story and had turned it into just another melodramatic, implausible action-adventure hour. Those who have read the original version of the script assure me my teleplay has greater depth, emotionalism and quality than that which finally was aired. But of course they would tell me that. They don’t want to go through life without a nose. Even so…the original version won the Writers Guild award as the best dramatic-episodic teleplay of the 1967-68 season. But Star Trek fans swear by the aired version, awarded it a Hugo at the World SF Convention and a George Méliès Fantasy award at the International Film Festival in Los Angeles in 1973. I like to think the latter awards were given because that which I bled into the script could not be totally drained off, even by several rewrites by other people. But, who’s to know? It could be that I was, and maybe still am, too close to the material to know when it’s been bettered by other hands.