Blah blah blah. All righty, now. Here we are only a few pages into this little historical diatribe, and already we’ve got three literary birth-mothers for my script. (And don’t forget: you can read the script, in its entirety, right after this essay. In fact, just so you can make your own decisions about how “the dramatic moments missed badly,” why not skip right over to “City” itself and try on the original, so when you come back here, you’ll know whether guys like Pevney—who must have been talking to my astral projection on the set of “City” because I never went near the set, never thanked Pevney, never set foot back on Star Trek territory after they got done rewriting me—whether guys like Pevney and Larson and others you will soon meet in these pages, are stuffed full of wild blueberry muffins. Gee, folks, I wish I had a sense of theater. Just even a teensy sense of theatuh.)

[2] Make that four. I picked up another one in 1986 for my Twilight Zone script, “Paladin of the Lost Hour.” It should be noted that the superlative scenarist Christopher Knopf also won three times, after this was published. I’m the only writer in the now-nearly-50-year history of the WGAw awards, to win this prestigious honor four times for solo work. I make a big deal point of mentioning this, not so much to pound my chest, as to establish right at the outset that I have solid credentials for asserting that I know what the fuck I’m doing when I write a script.