(I’ve told you what really happened.

(That this is complete codswallop, the delusionary attempt to insert oneself into a game being played by others, that it bears absolutely no relation to the facts, is not startling. Mr. Shatner’s memory, and the accuracy of that implement, has been called into public question before. Take for instance, in the 4 December 1993 edition of TV Guide, in the “Grapevine” section, a pullquote insert box called “Sound Bite.” Shatner, during an interview, was asked about the U.S.S. Enterprise’s “five year mission” on Star Trek, one of the most familiar lines in the pantheon of American Pop Culture Babble, if I’m not mistaken. And, in the words of TV Guide, Shatner “drew a blank” and finally had to have the lines repeated to him, at which point this Paragon of Infallible Recollection responded…

(“Seek out new civilizations, oh, yeah, I remember.”

(Using this anecdote as trope, as metaphor, as touchstone, as anydamnthing you choose, kindly explain how it was that Shatner was sent to explain to me why my script was unusable, when actors and writers on tv series barely meet each other, much less get these Mission: Impossible assignments by the Executive Producer to intercede when all else has failed. In fact, Shatner was the first to see the script, as I’ve said, before anyone read it, Justman, Roddenberry, Coon, anyone! Shatner was at my home once. Only once. And I’ve described what happened. But here we go again, for thirty years, yet another minion of Star Trek Memories advising a quarter of a million strangers that I was—and likely still am—no-price, a bum, a dawdler, an incompetent.

(Do I seem to get angrier and angrier as I write this introductory essay? Yeah, well, as I said, thirty years is much too long to keep getting kicked in the ass before one does something about it.)

After all that time it had taken me to write it, Roddenberry now had been put on notice by his leading man that if the script wasn’t substantially altered, there would be, er, uh, some hesitation on Bill’s part when it came time to shoot the story.

Oh, hell, why belabor it…I rewrote the script, I rewrote it again, I worked on it at home and on a packing crate in Bill Theiss’s wardrobe room in Building “E” and when Gene kept insisting on more and more changes, and when I saw the script being dumbed up, I couldn’t take much more, and I went on to do a 90-minute script for Cimarron Strip.

And Gene gave it to a guy named Steve Carabatsos, who’d been brought on staff after Johnny Black had his falling out with Gene and righteously walked off the show; and Carabatsos took a chain-saw to it, and screwed it up so badly that Gene asked me to come back and do yet another rewrite (for no money, of course); and then it was rewritten by yet another hand (whose name I’ll not reveal here, but it wasn’t Roddenberry, who for years afterward told everyone that he had been the great talent who had “saved” poor inept Ellison’s script), and I hated it; and I tried to take my name off it, and put on my pseudonym Cordwainer Bird—which everyone in the industry knew was Ellison standing behind this crippled thing saying it ain’t my work and sort of giving the Bird to those who had mucked up the words—but Gene called me and made it clear he’d blackball me in the industry if I tried to humiliate him like that; and I went for the okeydoke. I let my name stay on it.