In this NY Times article, Mr. Moss interviews all sorts of people, including me, and he quotes the producer of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (Paramount). Said producer being one Harve Bennett, a guy I know. And Mr. Bennett said, among a number of things he said, as follows: “We brought in Ted Sturgeon to do a rewrite on Star Trek II, but he didn’t make much of a contribution,” and he described the late Grand Master as “too cerebral.” Then the article reads like this:

He [Bennett] claims to have had a disastrous experience with Harlan Ellison on a television series (a charge that Mr. Ellison denies) and characterizes him as an “extremely undisciplined writer,” whose work is prolix, self-indulgent and often unshootable.

But the evidence seems to exonerate Mr. Ellison. Though he wrote only one Star Trek segment, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” it went on to become the most popular of the 79 episodes and appears to have served as the basis of Star Trek IV, the film series’ biggest hit.

You will find the above-quoted sections on page 18 of the Arts & Leisure section of the NY Times for Sunday 4 June 1989, as I noted earlier.

It appears that Mr. Bennett, who solicited me—despite my lack of discipline, my prolixity, self-indulgence and generally disastrous character—to write Star Trek II, Star Trek III and Star Trek IV (and my agent, Martin Shapiro, phoned me a year or so ago asking me how I would respond to an invitation to write Star Trek V) long after our alleged “disastrous experience” on “a television series,” told Mr. Robert F. Moss that he, Mr. Bennett, had this hideous imbroglio when he was shepherding The Mod Squad.

When Mr. Moss called to interview me for the Times article, he asked me about what Mr. Bennett had said. I replied as follows:

“Harve Bennett is a bastion of truth in an otherwise nasty world, and the idea that he might be telling an untruth is inconceivable. There is only one small flaw in his remarks. And it is this. I never worked on The Mod Squad. Dated Peggy Lipton a few times right around the time she appeared on the cover of Life, but I was never solicited to write for The Mod Squad, never submitted anything to The Mod Squad, never met with anyone from The Mod Squad. Perhaps the disastrous experience Mr. Bennett remembers was one of the brief chats we had at one of Marty’s famous black tie New Year’s Eve parties.” [11]

The story of my “story conference” when Paramount and Roddenberry wanted me to write the first Trek feature has been told any number of times. Most recently in Shatner’s second “memoir.”

Gene completed his script in August 1975. As expected, Paramount president Barry Diller quickly and flatly passed, then asked him to take another crack. At the same time, unbeknownst to Gene, the studio began interviewing other respected science fiction writers, asking that they, too, submit outlines for the proposed Star Trek feature. Harlan Ellison was one of their first targets.