Paramount executive Barry Trabulus “listened to all this and sat silently for a few minutes,” Ellison elaborated. “Then he said, ‘You know, I was reading this book by a guy named Von Daniken and he proved that the Mayan calendar was exactly like ours, so it must have come from aliens. Could you put in some Mayans?’”

The writer pointed out that there were no Mayans at the dawn of time, but the executive brushed this off, pointing out that no one would know the difference.

“‘I’d know the difference,’” Ellison exploded.

“‘It’s a dumb suggestion.’ So Trabulus got very uptight and said he liked Mayans a lot and why didn’t I do it if I wanted to write this picture,” Ellison continued. “So I said ‘I’m a writer. I don’t know what the f-k you are!’ And I got up and walked out. And that was the end of my association with the Star Trek movie.”

Gross tells it even better. But they both omit one very important fact, and it is the omission of that fact in the Shatner-Kreski version that convinces me it was swiped from Gross: Roddenberry was in the room when I had this interchange with Trabulus. It was Gene who called me to come in for the meeting, in the very same office where we had done the series at Desilu, now Paramount.

Because neither Van Hise nor Gross ever mentioned it—he may not have known—Kreski-Shatner assumed this was a sub rosa meeting to do a back-door around Roddenberry’s rotten first script. No way. Gene was sitting right there at the little round table in the corner near the windows, and he took part in the conversation.

That I didn’t write it down before I told it, would only seem extraordinary to someone who didn’t know diddlyshit about how business is done in Hollywood. The Writers Guild won’t allow spec writing! You are not allowed to set down the plot before you have a deal. (There are, of course, hungry waifs who ignore this hard-won victory over Industry Greed by the excellent Writers Guild of America, who will write entire drafts of a screenplay on pure speculation. When they get it up the tuchiss, I have no pity for them.) So both Gross-Van Hise and Kreski-Shatner seeming to be startled that I “ran through a forty-five minute monologue and verbally…” is, in the case of the former, ignorance, but in the case of the latter, more than a revealing suspicion of monkey-see, monkey-do. (By the way, as a graciously offered writing note to Kreski-Shatner: the only way a monologue can be presented is “verbally”—that is, unless one is Hamlet delivering a soliloquy, or one is telepathic…out where I come from, pahdner, we call that “schoolgirl syntax.”) But that is precisely how one makes a story pitch. You put together in your head the basic storyline, and you then sell it on your feet, like a stand-up comedian, to idiots in suits who have no more idea of how a plot should be constructed than a piece of ravioli has about Euclidian geometry.