Now…about my association with Harlan: I am not sure just when or where I first met this bundle of energy. Was it on The Tomorrow Show antagonizing Tom Snyder, our host, in brilliant verbal battle—or was it on a Star Trek convention stage, taking on the whole audience while projecting humor, charm, intelligence, and yes, always that in-dwelling anger that somehow manages to sneak past its security guard? I am sure when I first saw him. It was in the commissary of the old Desilu Studio during the first season of Star Trek while having lunch with a friend. My attention was drawn to a very animated, rather noisy conversation between a handsome young man and a lovely young girl. I asked my luncheon partner who they were. He glanced over to their table in the middle of the room and said, “Oh, that’s Harlan Ellison, the writer,” and went back to his lunch. I took another look—just in time to see him push a dish of ice cream in his date’s face. I said with disbelief, “Harlan Ellison just pushed a dish of ice cream in her face.” As my friend looked up, the lovely young woman very deliberately shoved her dish of ice cream into his face. My friend said: “That’s Ellison!”

I later learned that this was a carefully prearranged gag Harlan and the starlet—who was in that week’s episode, and whom Harlan had been dating—had set up to amuse the cast and crew during the lunch break.

That is Ellison—and this screenplay is Ellison at his best. All of these emotions are pounding throughout this script that he so desperately wanted produced…all of the fire and anger rage as he races through one exciting moment after another—and then, quite suddenly, when we take a deep breath, he delivers some of the most touching, heartbreaking scenes ever to grace the pages of a film script. Harlan’s wonderful, irreverent feel for a scene is rare among writers. This is the story behind the story of “City.”

It has been a choppy history and, like Harlan himself, a legendary topic of controversy. But at last, apparently, much of the story we did not know is before us. It makes one wonder.

Read it. You’ll love it!

Walter Koenig

Walter Koenig

At the time Star Trek IV was released, Harlan and I had yet another heated exchange in what has become a vast catalogue of heated exchanges. So indigenous to our mental set and so inevitable in our lives is this mutual contentiousness, that I am convinced the first stooped and knuckle-dragging primates to turn their backs on Tyrannosaurus Rex and start throwing rocks at each other were progenitors of the clans, Ellison and Koenig.