Yeah, and pandas will fly out of Glen Larson’s ass! Every sentence of that crap is laughable, and Larson knows it. Even if the late Gene Coon said all that—and I doubt that it ever happened—then he was also full of shit. Because, as everyone in Hollywood knows (but apparently the gullible Messrs. Gross and Altman don’t), the writer has the option which version of the script to submit. The work is blind-judged by many levels of unidentified (but color-coded) writers, and the aired version of the show is not only never seen, it’s never considered. I submitted the version of “City” that you will read in this book. Exactly as you find it here. Even if Roddenberry, or Coon, or any one of the half dozen or so others who’ve claimed credit for my work, had “saved my ass” as they were so fond of saying, it wouldn’t have meant didly-squat in terms of winning a WGAw award, because the one and only script that was ever submitted, the one and only script that made it through all those levels of judges, the one and only script that beat out every other script in the Dramatic Category…was mine. All mine. The one this idiot Larson doesn’t seem to understand was the one that was judged. Not some half-assed rewrite by Coon or some quarter-assed re-rewrite by Roddenberry, or anyone else. So here’s the guy we fondly refer to in Hollywood as “Glen Larceny” playing his violin and breaking our hearts with this tragic tale of the goodhearted producer who bought karma points by not stealing script credit the way Larson did regularly on his shows. So here is just the first of many such bullshit stories you will encounter in this introductory essay, in which poor dumb Ellison can’t find his own ass in a windstorm, but every other cosmically talented tv hack who never won an award on his own, bleats about how he “saved” my wretched script from the clutches of my Olympian ineptitude.

In fact, there’s yet another claimant, in that same section of Gross and Altman’s unsubstantiated fantasy. Listen to this flight of overweening ego, that makes my hubris seem like virginal innocence.

Director Joseph Pevney is someone who doesn’t agree with Ellison’s view of his own script. “This was the end of the first season,” he says. Harlan was very happy to get his story on Star Trek. He was down on the set thanking me. It’s great that Gene rewrote it, though, because Harlan had no sense of theater…It was a well conceived and written show. But in the original script’s dramatic moments, it missed badly. “It was a motion picture,” he continues. “I treated it as a movie…”