While it was masterfully written, full of passion and emotion, in Gene Roddenberry’s opinion, the script wasn’t Star Trek enough. It would have to be rewritten. At that time, the rumor had not yet emerged that the reason it had to be rewritten was because “Harlan had Scotty pushing drugs on the Enterprise.” That came later, and possibly it came because Roddenberry felt he had to justify the rewrite. I know the explanation has been heard at a number of Star Trek conventions over the years. Well, the addictive Jewels of Sound were interesting “drugs” all right; but as the reader can see, Scotty isn’t even in the script!
In the Star Trek offices, however, the immediate question was—who would rewrite “The City on the Edge of Forever”? Now the story can be told because Harlan has mellowed over the years. Used to be, his temper burned at such a low firing point and with such high explosivity that it devastated buildings for ten square miles around ground zero when it went off. (You’ve heard of the “H Bomb”?) There are still places on the Paramount lot where nothing will grow. Now, however, it’s maybe only three square miles around that are leveled—and I live at least six miles from Harlan.
So who did the rewrite? Gene Coon took the first crack at it. As I recall, primarily he came up with structural changes, eliminating LeBeque and Beckwith and substituting McCoy as the catalyst. The pirates disappeared. In fact, the entire ship vanished because of the tampering with history. Kirk met Edith sooner, and dialogue and some relationships were changed. I believe it was Gene Coon whose delightful sense of humor spawned Kirk’s explanation that Spock’s ears got that way when he had a childhood accident—he got his head caught in a mechanical rice picker. Harlan hated it. He thought Steve Carabatsos had written it. No one offered to change that idea in Harlan’s mind.
Then Gene Roddenberry and Gene Coon turned to me and said, “You’re it. You try a rewrite.” Talk about being tossed a live grenade! Harlan was a friend—and not only a friend. He was a writer I deeply admired, one who stood ten feet tall as a master of his art. The very notion of rewriting him scared me witless. On the other hand (said the coward in me), if I rewrote it, I’d do it with respect and love of the original work. I gave it my best shot.
The Jewels of Sound were gone, of course. I invented cordrazine to put McCoy into a temporary madness. I tried to build the relationship of love between Edith and Kirk gently and meaningfully so her death would be the most wrenching personal moment Kirk would ever know. And I inserted the running joke of Spock’s tricorder which grew larger and more complicated with mechanical additions each time it was seen. The tricorder was Spock’s instrument for discovering the focus of the history change—Edith—as well as the how and when of her death. Naturally, he was hampered by the fact that the tools he needed hadn’t been invented yet. Thus the octopuslike appearance of the contraption and its continual growth. Harlan liked this draft a little better, but not much. He thought the characterization and dialogue showed sensitivity, but it wasn’t his script. He thought Gene Coon wrote it. We kept our mouths shut. (Remember those places on the lot where grass still doesn’t grow?)
Gene Roddenberry decided to rewrite it himself, and it was his version which became the shooting script. Harlan’s general structure was there, as were his major characters and the main conflict of the story. What Roddenberry did was make it “more Star Trek.” You will notice that every writer who worked on the rewrite was trying very hard to please Harlan, allowing him to read each draft and comment on it. It was a sign of the respect Star Trek had for writers. That doesn’t happen now—on any show.
Casting was lucky as the charming and lovely Joan Collins took the role of Edith Keeler. The directing chore fell to Joe Pevney, who had exhibited a special sensitivity and understanding of Star Trek and its characters.
As the episode approached production, there was a glitch in the art direction. Star Trek’s art director, Matt Jefferies, fell ill with the flu just as “City” was going into preparation. The department head, Roland (Bud) Brooks, stepped in to avoid any delay. He read the script, came up with set sketches, and got the carpenters going on the planet set. When Matt returned, he went down to the stage to look at it, and his mouth dropped.
“What the hell is that?”
He was looking at a gray planet surface on which were scattered broken Grecian columns, tumbled walls and statues. Bud explained they were the ruins, as called for in the script. Matt couldn’t recall any ruins. Bud opened the script to the planet description and said, “Oops.”
As he tells the story, he’d had two drinks with dinner the night he read the script and was puzzled by a description of “rune stones” covering the landscape. He had flipped through his dictionary and come to ruins before he got to runes. Deciding it must have been a typo, he had proceeded to design the ruined stones of the planet. (We never did figure out why the Guardian of Forever looked like a lopsided donut.)
The episode, which aired April 6, 1967, almost a full year after its birth, was a good Star Trek. It had humor, danger, and a deeply poignant love story. It turned out to be one of the most popular episodes of all time with both original Trekkers and with the youngest of the breed. But it wasn’t Harlan’s. It was Harlan, filtered through Coon, Fontana and, most of all, Roddenberry. For myself, I missed Trooper—a beautifully drawn portrait of a worn and despairing veteran of the Great War; I missed the Jewels of Sound—and the marvelous idea that sound could be an addictive narcotic; I missed the glittering city that is the source of the title; I missed the magic of Harlan’s words.
Harlan had the last word. He always does. He submitted his draft of the script to the Writers’ Guild of America for its annual award consideration. For the television awards, contending scripts are read by a number of writer judges who do not know the author of the piece. The film is never seen. Scripts which are nominated in each category are then read by a blue ribbon panel of writer judges and voted upon. In 1968, Harlan won the Writers Guild of America award for “Best Episodic Drama.” Writers judging other writers declared his script the best of all contenders for that year. They read his words—and the spell of them captured them all.
Read the script again, and fall under the enchantment yourself.
David Gerrold
The Steamroller of Lies
This book is not about Harlan Ellison.
It should be about Harlan Ellison. It has his name on the cover and it has one hell of a television script by Harlan Ellison inside but, unfortunately, this book is really about Gene Roddenberry, because Gene Roddenberry was the one who made it necessary.
For years, Roddenberry stood up in front of audiences and said with bland composure that he had to rewrite Harlan Ellison’s script for the “The City on the Edge of Forever” episode of Star Trek because Harlan had Scotty dealing drugs. That’s not the truth, you can see that for yourself, but Gene continued the falsehood in numerous speeches and interviews. He said it again and again, even after Harlan called him on each embarrassing occasion and asked him not to.
I witnessed more than one of these conversations between Harlan and Gene. When confronted, Gene acknowledged that Harlan was correct and promised that he wouldn’t say it again. Yet, at the very next convention he attended, he repeated the lie. I saw him do it. Did he forget what he had promised?
That’s why this book is about Gene Roddenberry. It’s Harlan Ellison’s long overdue refutation of the falsehood.
I can understand why Harlan feels the need to set the record straight. Every time that Gene Roddenberry repeated the lie, he was implying that Harlan Ellison did not understand Star Trek or that he did not do his job properly. He was insulting Harlan’s professional credential. At the very least, it was an inappropriate thing for Gene Roddenberry to say. At worst, well—it was unkind and unprofessional.
If there’s one thing that I have learned from Harlan—and also from Gene, albeit in an entirely different way—it is this: You are your word. Harlan Ellison understands this; I’m not sure that Gene Roddenberry ever di
d; but the difference between speaking a commitment and living it is the difference between eating the menu and eating the meal.
Maybe telling the truth isn’t important if you’re only a television producer, or worse—a television producer’s lawyer; but if you’re a writer, it’s all you have. A writer is a servant of the truth. He’s a channel for enlightenment. If he’s anything less than that, he’s a fraud, a charlatan, a phony, a waster of trees and time. Anything less than a total commitment to accuracy as a way of life is the murder of integrity and trust.
What I’m talking about here—authenticity—is apparently an alien experience for too many people. As individuals, we’ve been blinded, conned, manipulated, trashed, beaten up, beaten down, and hammered into insensibility by the publicity mills, the hype, the grind, the weight of peer group pressure, and ultimately even our own belief systems. We end up believing what we want to believe instead of seeing what is really so. Goebbels had it right—if you tell a big enough lie and you tell it loud enough and long enough, people will accept it as truth. It all depends on how well you package it. This is the essence of American discourse in the ’90s: Say anything. He who can lie the most sincerely will win the affection of the public.
And when someone does stand up to object, “Hey, wait a minute—the clothes have no emperor,” he too becomes a target. The steamroller of lies will aim itself at him, too.
Everyone who has a vested interest in having you believe that there really is an emperor inside all that taffeta will do everything they can to discredit and destroy any person who still believes in accuracy enough to stand up and say, “Uh, excuse me—? That’s not the way I saw it and I was there.” Even goodhearted people will unknowingly add their voices to the chorus of falsehoods because it’s more fun to believe the glamorous lie than the dirty truth; but the cost of that easy acceptance is such a complete and total destruction of our respect for authenticity that, as a society, we now act as if we have the right to vote on reality.
The one place where we really do have a vote—where it really matters—is in our interactions with other human beings. Samuel R. Delany said it. Drama occurs in the space between two people. It goes beyond that. All of life occurs in the space between us. All we really have is each other—and it’s in our commitment to each other that we make the kind of difference that really can change the world. But when we lose our commitment to accuracy, honesty, and justice, we lose our ability to make a difference, because we also lose our vision of what is possible.
Harlan Ellison’s strength, the essential reason why he has dominated the conversation of this community for so many years, is that he is a man who refuses to let his vision be muddied by the convenient little lies of politeness and tact, because those little lies lead directly to the bigger lies of greed and venality. Harlan stands up against the steamroller of lies again and again and again. I think it is this singular commitment to honesty that makes him one of the most important voices in the literature of amazement.
A great deal of the most passionate and inventive and imaginative writing in the genre was done during the ’60s and early ’70s. Some of the best was done by Harlan. Much of the rest was done by people who were inspired or angered by Harlan’s furious calls to glory. Whether you agreed or disagreed, you could not ignore the fires that were burning. Old visions were being vaporized. New ones were being forged. There was a lot of heat and fury—but there was a lot of illumination as well. It was an exciting time to be a writer; it was a great time to be learning one’s craft—because there were so many options to explore.
Curiously, this was also the moment in time when Star Trek began to assert its influence on the genre. In one respect at least, that influence has been a pernicious one: the allure of catching some of Star Trek’s fame and glory and wealth has caused too many good writers to lower not only their standards, but their goals as well. Science fiction used to be a dangerous literature. Now, it is a very commercial genre, and whatever dangers might still lurk within seem to have been safely sanitized for the marketplace. The real crime is that the lobotomy has been self performed.
I suspect that only a small part of Harlan’s disdain for Star Trek is the result of his own experience with the steamroller of lies that follows in its wake; the larger part must surely come from realizing that Star Trek is also a series of broken promises and missed opportunities to expand the range of what is possible in the genre.
You see, Harlan Ellison is a writer.
I’m going to have to explain this.
I’m only a storyteller. Harlan Ellison is a writer.
I tell stories for a living. I write about people who have problems and what they do to solve those problems and what they learn in the process. I try to make the people and the situations interesting and understandable. I try to keep the language as clear as possible because I’m terrified of looking silly in print. Only occasionally do I succumb to temptation and try to get my prose airborne—usually, the next morning, my head hurts and I’m embarrassed by the stylistic excesses committed to paper.
But Harlan Ellison is a writer. And that’s a whole other kind of critter than a mere storyteller.
Language pours from his typewriter in a torrent of words. Visions explode like anger-filled hand grenades. Liquid images flow onto the pages, neon-streaked, high-voltage, screaming charges of emotion, vibrating with pain and horror and rage. Harlan writes with words as clean as surgical-grade stainless steel, as hard as lunar diamonds, as bright as a roaring solar flare, as precise as a neurosurgical laser, and as deadly as a monofilament wire tightening around your neck. At his very best—when his most exquisitely crafted work shatters through the bland oatmeal of your everyday existence into the pulsating wet heart of your conscious self—Harlan writes of emotions so rare and precious and altogether human that in the act of reading, the reader transcends his own limitations, and is expanded to a new level of receptivity to the universe around him.
Do you see what I mean about the difference between writers and storytellers?
Harlan Ellison is a passionate human being. He cares. He feels. He reacts. He acts. He writes. He demands the truth—from himself and from everybody who dares to enter his space. He’s not idealistic. He simply demands that the world live up to its own standards—or stop professing them. And he puts all of that passion into his work. Where better?
But even that is not sufficient for Harlan.
There is one area in Harlan’s life, in which he is so demanding that his behavior is punishingly brutal. It has destroyed four marriages and an uncountable number of friendships. There are people who cannot keep up with Harlan and who cannot tolerate his near-fanatical dedication for perfection in this single arena. In my entire life, I have never met any human being who has demanded so much of himself, who has challenged himself so consistently and with such persistence as Harlan Ellison. Whatever else Harlan Ellison may be—and the stories are legion—the one brutal drive that motivates this man is the need to do better.
He is self-educated on a scale that is nothing less than astonishing. His knowledge of music, literature, art, comics, science fiction, contemporary culture, history, and trivia is second to none. You may be surprised to read this, but his growth as a compassionate man is no less.
Look, I know that Harlan Ellison has a thermonuclear reputation, and yes, it’s fairly earned; but that’s merely the public perception of Harlan. The real Harlan is a little old Jewish man with the cutest little pot belly, who shlumps around the house in his bathrobe and slippers, muttering about finding a bottle of seltzer water. The real Harlan Ellison is a man who takes every death as a personal insult.
He can’t stand to see people suffering unnecessary pain. I am tempted to insert an artful tangent here, discussing Harlan’s perception of necessary pain—the art of revenge—but most of that is performance and perception. In practice, Harlan limits most of his revenge to simply telling his side of the story and letting you make up your own mind. This book, fo
r example. The point is that the real Harlan Ellison is a very human being, a combination of both the best and the worst that a human can be; but his best is beyond simple description—and even his worst is still terrific.
When you have a couple of spare centuries, read through Harlan’s body of work in the order in which it was written. You will be able to watch a man grow, expand, transcend, challenge, renew, rededicate, and recommit himself over and over and over again. Reading his work is hard, painful work sometimes. Disturbing, annoying, frustrating—the nightmares and fantasies that he puts in your head are inescapable. He shoves timebombs down your throat; 15-kiloton time bombs that go off days, weeks, months later. I don’t know how history is going to judge Harlan; it may be that he is a special phenomenon unique to the twentieth century, but I hope not. Some of these screams of rage deserve to echo for a long, long time.
Gene Roddenberry, on the other hand, was a TV producer. (A TV producer is an ordinary human being who has made the mistake of falling asleep next to a big green pod filled with money. When he awakes again, he has been transformed into an alien thing that feeds on power, talent, and the blood of the innocent. Now, some people I know have argued with me about this, saying that a TV producer is nowhere near as bad as a lawyer, but TV producers are one of the leading causes of lawyers in Los Angeles. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out.)
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