Which brings me to the last, most recent item. During the last few years, Herb Solow and Bobby Justman—whose positions as executives of Desilu and Star Trek back in the days “City” was being done—called on me to be interviewed for their recently-published tome, the Gigantic INSIDE STAR TREK: The Real Story. Though I was reluctant to spill most of what you’ve read in this book, I felt (and continue to feel) warmly toward both of them. We go a long way back, and they have always treated me decently, and we’ve had a bemusing sort of relationship in which they perceive me as some sort of barely housebroken creature. So I spoke to them. They both came over one day, and we sat and I talked and told them vast amounts of stuff, and they taped it, as I recall.

Then, as the year or so passed, Herb would call me once in a while to check on something…and I’d answer his Queries as best I could. I knew they would treat me square in the hook. They are decent guys. But then, a few months ago—as I write this—the book came out, and though they reported the “City” matter at length in a chapter all its own, and they gave credit where it was due, even to buttressing my main contention in this book that Roddenberry was an unregenerate credit-thief (see page 185 of IINSIDE STAR TREK), they ended the section with this anecdote:

writer-director Frank Pierson sitting several tables away. Some months earlier, Howard had decided to hate Frank Pierson (an Academy Award-winning writer and former President of the Writers Guild) because Frank rewrote Howard’s friend Carol Sobieski’s screenplay, “Neon Ceiling,” a drama that Howard felt needed no changes whatsoever. Obviously agitated by Harlan’s remarks, Howard, a powerfully built man, announced he was going to tackle Frank and shove him through the huge plateglass window to plunge eight floors to the street below. We managed to restrain him. It was that kind of evening!

The Writers Guild rule for award consideration was that the writer, not the producing company. submitted the script and could submit whatever version he or she chose. be it the writer’s first draft or the final shooting script, which usually had undergone many revisions and rewrites by others. Two different panels of judges then made the individual award decisions.