The City on the Edge of Forever

by Harlan Ellison

  (I’ve told you what really happened.

  (That this is complete codswallop, the delusionary attempt to insert oneself into a game being played by others, that it bears absolutely no relation to the facts, is not startling. Mr. Shatner’s memory, and the accuracy of that implement, has been called into public question before. Take for instance, in the 4 December 1993 edition of TV Guide, in the “Grapevine” section, a pullquote insert box called “Sound Bite.” Shatner, during an interview, was asked about the U.S.S. Enterprise’s “five year mission” on Star Trek, one of the most familiar lines in the pantheon of American Pop Culture Babble, if I’m not mistaken. And, in the words of TV Guide, Shatner “drew a blank” and finally had to have the lines repeated to him, at which point this Paragon of Infallible Recollection responded…

  (“Seek out new civilizations, oh, yeah, I remember.”

  (Using this anecdote as trope, as metaphor, as touchstone, as anydamnthing you choose, kindly explain how it was that Shatner was sent to explain to me why my script was unusable, when actors and writers on tv series barely meet each other, much less get these Mission: Impossible assignments by the Executive Producer to intercede when all else has failed. In fact, Shatner was the first to see the script, as I’ve said, before anyone read it, Justman, Roddenberry, Coon, anyone! Shatner was at my home once. Only once. And I’ve described what happened. But here we go again, for thirty years, yet another minion of Star Trek Memories advising a quarter of a million strangers that I was—and likely still am—no-price, a bum, a dawdler, an incompetent.

  (Do I seem to get angrier and angrier as I write this introductory essay? Yeah, well, as I said, thirty years is much too long to keep getting kicked in the ass before one does something about it.)

  After all that time it had taken me to write it, Roddenberry now had been put on notice by his leading man that if the script wasn’t substantially altered, there would be, er, uh, some hesitation on Bill’s part when it came time to shoot the story.

  Oh, hell, why belabor it…I rewrote the script, I rewrote it again, I worked on it at home and on a packing crate in Bill Theiss’s wardrobe room in Building “E” and when Gene kept insisting on more and more changes, and when I saw the script being dumbed up, I couldn’t take much more, and I went on to do a 90-minute script for Cimarron Strip.

  And Gene gave it to a guy named Steve Carabatsos, who’d been brought on staff after Johnny Black had his falling out with Gene and righteously walked off the show; and Carabatsos took a chain-saw to it, and screwed it up so badly that Gene asked me to come back and do yet another rewrite (for no money, of course); and then it was rewritten by yet another hand (whose name I’ll not reveal here, but it wasn’t Roddenberry, who for years afterward told everyone that he had been the great talent who had “saved” poor inept Ellison’s script), and I hated it; and I tried to take my name off it, and put on my pseudonym Cordwainer Bird—which everyone in the industry knew was Ellison standing behind this crippled thing saying it ain’t my work and sort of giving the Bird to those who had mucked up the words—but Gene called me and made it clear he’d blackball me in the industry if I tried to humiliate him like that; and I went for the okeydoke. I let my name stay on it.

  And then he called me in to save his damned show.

  In Shatner’s STAR TREK MEMORIES, on page 220, he writes, “Believe it or not, Harlan Ellison, who had become so thoroughly disenchanted with Gene Roddenberry and his Star Trek creation, can actually be held directly responsible for saving the show when it appeared headed for cancellation at the end of our first season,” and then he goes on to get the story I’ve told you here all wrong in his charmingly Shatnerian way. But he verifies what I’ve written here, and concludes with this:

  “It is truly one of the show’s greatest ironies that Star Trek may have owed its continued existence in large part to Harlan Ellison, a man who would shortly become one of the show’s greatest detractors.”

  And then they shot it. And I hated it. And I wept for Trooper, who never got to exist, and for the really lovely way I wrote that ending in which Spock, for the first time in the series, called Kirk Jim and not “Captain.”

  And then the original version—the one published in this book—the unabridged, unchanged, unscrewed version—won the Writers Guild Award as Most Outstanding Teleplay. Not the aired version; not the many-hands-in-the-soup version; but my own original story that John Black and Gene Roddenberry and director Joe Pevney and Solow and Justman and Shatner and Trek zombies who write dopey books like THE CAPTAIN’S LOGS have been telling people was too expensive, too lacking in drama, too inept to shoot as I wrote it. My story won the most prestigious award a Hollywood screenwriter can win from his peers, an award given only after blind voting based on hundreds of scripts submitted. Me, not Gene Coon or Roddenberry or any of the people who have said, as Roddenberry said in a 1987 interview in Cinefantastique, “I think Harlan’s a genius but he’s not exactly the most disciplined writer in the world. He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that!”

  I gotcher Scotty right here, Gene.

  Anybody who ever read that script knows there’s no Scotty selling drugs. Or any of the other horse puckey that has been spread for more than twenty-five years.

  Do I still burn? Gee, gang, sorry about that. Am I less than slobberingly attentive to the myths and the upheld torches of historical revisionism that make me look like a jerk and mythologize Roddenberry as a high-flying interplanetary rara avis? Does my manner offend thee? Yeah, I’m always getting complaints about that.

  But when it comes to the end of the day, it was I, no one but the guy who created and developed and wrote about “The City on the Edge of Forever” who dreamed that dream for the rest of you to call the best of the best. You should have gotten better, though. You should have gotten the original.

  But, sadly, to quote one last time, from the 19th Century French essayist Jules Renard: “Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”

  Think how interesting this screed would’ve been if I’d been permitted to tell you the whole truth.

  Have a nice day. Have just a real nice day. And thank your mother for the chicken soup.

  So now we come to that portion of the TV Guide source material I was unable to use in such a limited venue. Remember: the article I wrote was more than 4000 words in length—at least twice as long as the usual TV Guide causerie. And even though the magazine ran a sidebar they called Trail of Evidence that gave pretty good proof Roddenberry lied continually about “City,” they were reluctant to expend much more space on further “plaintiff’s exhibits.” But here we are at full length, and the Publisher wants you to see as much as we can reproduce.

  Over the past thirty years, “The City on the Edge of Forever” has become not only the most famous Trek episode, it has also been a marketing and franchising bonanza for Paramount. From two hundred dollar acrylic light-boxes with three tiny celluloid frames of the show as illuminated insert, to two hundred dollar “crafted in fine pewter and Tesori® porcelain” desktop sculptures, to two hundred dollar posters sold on the shopping channels, “City” has become something of a cultural touchstone. Hell, it was even the punchline of a comic strip.

  And during those thirty years of fame and glory proceeding from the initial airing of the segment on 13 April 1967, Gene Roddenberry continued to represent me in interviews and from the lecture platform, as an undisciplined, talented-but-for-the-most-part-unhireable writer who had written the story of Edith Keeler all wrong. If you need any proof that I tell it just as it is, take a look at this page from Cinefantastique magazine, March 1987. Check out that large pullquote at the top.

  To view the page from Cinefantastique, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge

  Twenty years after being asked repeatedly not to spread these untruths, Roddenberry was still bumrapping me. Here is a salient excerpt from the 20th anniversary retrospective interview, as
conducted by Ben Herndon:

  One of the persisting mysteries surrounding this episode concerns the expanded original version of the teleplay Harlan Ellison wrote as compared to the version that was filmed and broadcast with script changes penned by Roddenberry. [10]

  Roddenberry himself explained why certain alterations were made in the original script. “I think Harlan’s a genius, but he’s not exactly the most disciplined writer in the world,” said Roddenberry.

  “He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that! Also, he wrote it so it would have cost $200,000 more than I had to spend. He just wrote huge crowd scenes and all sorts of things. I tried to get him to change it and he wouldn’t, so I rewrote it.”

  Yeah, and now you can see the original. It’s right here, just as I wrote it. And I defy you to find anyplace in the teleplay that remotely resembles Roddenberry’s endless assertion, “He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that!”

  Also, kindly find me huge crowd scenes.

  Are we talking the line of extras in the soup kitchen? Are we talking the chump-change it would cost to populate a street in New York City during the Depression? How about those vast space armadas I’m supposed to have cobbled up? Where the hell are they?

  Maybe now is the moment to suggest you leap ahead and actually read “The City on the Edge of Forever,” as it was originally conceived. Perhaps you’ll still like that abortive aired version, and perhaps you’ll understand why I was so pissed at the way Roddenberry and his minions screwed over my script. And then, if you feel like it, you can go on past the first draft teleplay and read my revised second draft, in which I had even eliminated the Beckwith-LeBeque element, and gave Gene a reasonable way in which Dr. McCoy could have run amuck.

  That was one of five rewrites, without pay, that I did to try and retain the integrity of the story. But no, Gene preferred having an accomplished ship’s surgeon act in such a boneheaded manner that he injects himself with a deadly drug!

  Yeah, sure, you were a sensational plotter and writer, Gene; and you can schvitz roses with Lysol to make ’em grow!

  Such bullshit. Such never-ceasing, unapologetic, unabashed crapola. And this 1987 version of El Supremo’s inability to tell the truth was hardly the first instance, nor was it the last.

  “He had my Scotty selling drugs…”

  Geezus bleeding Kee-rist on a crutch! Scotty doesn’t even appear in the goddam script!

  But it was a very different matter less than two months before the episode aired. According to Roddenberry in later years, I was persona non grata, a misfit who had cost the show a fortune. But on February 27th, 1967—a mere forty-five days before broadcast—the man who would lie about my ability and my creation for almost three decades sent me this telegram:

  For higher resolution version, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge

  But Gene spread his goo so eloquently, and the stone righteous Trek zombies slipped and slid in it with so much élan, that in later years it was like a Greek Chorus from anyone who needed to explain why I hadn’t been writing anything for feature films or the series. Like, uh, here…a case in point. To be enjoyed after glomming the Paramount note attached to the cover sheet of the original story proposal for Star Trek IV, sent to me in December of 1984 by then Producer Harve Bennett, and Leonard Nimoy. (Please remember, as you read this anecdote, that you have seen me invited to talk about writing #IV, as the anecdote mentions #V)

  For higher resolution version, visit http://www.ereads.com/cityontheedge

  In the 4 June 1989 Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times, appeared an article written—but not headlined—by Robert F. Moss, itchily titled “To Sci-Fi Writers Hollywood is Mostly Alien.” It is a longish piece purporting to explain the reasons “recognized” sf writers have not been more often hired to script sf/fantasy films.

  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.

  Ellison, as every decent Trekker knows, is the author of many of the finest pieces of science fiction ever written, as well as the man behind what’s generally considered Star Trek’s finest episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” He’s also a bit…eccentric. In fact, as legend has it, when he was asked by Paramount to write up his story outline in regard to a possible Star Trek movie, he balked, opting instead to commit his idea to memory. Once that was accomplished, he set up a meeting with a Paramount development executive, wherein he ran through a forty-five minute monologue and verbally unveiled a Star Trek adventure of truly epic proportions.

  Pacing about the office, speaking loudly and gesturing broadly for dramatic emphasis, Ellison conjured up a tale involving time travel back to prehistoric times, complete with battles against an evil race of reptiles and Captain Kirk’s kidnapping of the entire Enterprise crew. Exhausted after his performance, Ellison supposedly turned to the executive and asked, “Well, whaddya think?” at which point he was told, “Hmmm, it’s okay, I guess, but I was just reading this book right here called CHARIOTS OF THE GODS and in this thing, it says that the ancient Mayans were visited by creatures from outer space. Think you could squeeze some of those Mayans in there?”

  Ellison, being Ellison, quickly, loudly, bluntly and political
ly suicidally pointed out the inherent stupidity of the man’s idea, making clear the obvious fact that there were no Mayans in prehistory.

  “Aw, so what,” the executive supposedly replied, “nobody’ll know the difference.”

  Ellison chimed, “I’ll know the difference, you idiot.” He then punctuated his remarks with a stream of profanity, a hasty exit and a strident door slam. Needless to say, his idea was quickly rejected.

  As this second ghostwritten “memoir” by Shatner is about as reliable as the first one—and that TV Guide piece that appears earlier in this introduction should be compared side-by-side, page-by-page, with Shatner’s self-serving fantasy about how he came up to my house to get me to finish the script—(Notice how everyfuckinbody in the world is responsible for the success of the “City” script…everybody and anybody…except me?) there are only a few hideous errors in the telling, apart from the anecdote being apparently lifted in toto from Edward Gross’ book TREK: THE LOST YEARS (1989). Since we all know the Shatner TEKWAR novels were written by the fine sf/fantasy author Ron Goulart (who has a poison pill implant in his right lower bicuspid in case he is ever tempted to repeat that auctorial reality in public or private), so we know that one Chris Kreski wrote STAR TREK MOVIE MEMORIES for Shatner, and it’s a shame proper credit wasn’t given to Gross, but then, freewheeling use of other people’s material seems to be only de rigueur for the Trek family and its associates.

  (Oh, what’s that? You think I’m kidding that Kreski and Shatner have pilfered Gross’s material? Here take a look at what Gross wrote, and you tell me if you think this is “coincidental parallel development.”)