And it happened again. And it happened again. And it happened again and again and again. He never stopped. And after a while I decided, fuckit, he’s screwed everyone I love on that show, and he’s lied about me for decades, and now the time has come to feed him a mealy diet of his own mendacity.

What’s that? You think I’m just a meanspirited guy? Well, how about someone else commenting on Gene’s way with other writers’ scripts? How about this excerpt from the latest ghost-written Shatner memoir, STAR TREK MOVIE MEMORIES, a remembrance by “creative producer” Harold Livingston of how well he was treated by Roddenberry when he, Livingston, saved Roddenberry’s ass by writing the screenplay for what turned out to be the first feature film. I quote from the HarperPrism paperback edition, pp. 74-76:

“In Thy Image,” having now been abandoned by William Norton and due to be finished in less than three months, was stuck in a no-win situation. A round of inquiries found that the best writers in town were all simply too busy to jump into the task at this late date, and those who were available were ultimately deemed unsuitable by Livingston and/or Roddenberry. Still, somebody had to write this thing…and fast.

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.”