Gene Roddenberry is the creator of Star Trek. A caption comes up at the start of every episode saying it is “created by Gene Roddenberry.” The back cover copy of Roddenberry’s novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture runs:
THE GREAT BIRD OF THE GALAXY WRITES A STAR TREK NOVEL!
The writer-producer who created Mr. Spock and all the other Star Trek characters—who invented the Starship Enterprise, who gave the show its look, its ideals—puts it all together again here in his first Star Trek novel!1
When some Star Trek aficionados talk about Roddenberry, we get an inkling of how religions must start. The following comes from the dustjacket of Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation:
As Gene receded from life, Yvonne’s increasingly solitary task was to convey the richness, the insight, the radiance they saw in each other and in humanity. This beautiful book, written as a philosophical dialogue, is a last confessional call upon centuries of earlier attempts to codify our understanding of human experience and what lies beyond . . . As we read and reread this stunning work, we are moved a little closer to the luminous future that Gene Roddenberry knew was already within us.2
“The Great Bird of the Galaxy” had been Roddenberry’s nickname on set. Coined by co-producer Robert Justman in a very early production memo, it was worked into the script of the first episode to be broadcast, “The Man Trap,” when Sulu thanks Rand with a lighthearted “May the Great Bird of the Galaxy bless your planet.” Roddenberry enjoyed the nickname and it gained currency within early Star Trek fandom.
It is ironic that Robert Justman should have come up with a name that so aggrandized Roddenberry, as he would go on to co-write with Herb Solow the book that makes the most compelling case for shifting credit for Star Trek’s success away from its creator. As the subtitle of Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, implies, Solow and Justman made the case that there was a “false story” out there that needed addressing. While on the publicity round for the book, Solow elaborated:
“Well one of the myths is that—and I can readily understand how this occurred in the first place and then grew and grew and was magnified—is that one man did the whole thing. One man had the idea, wrote the scripts, directed, produced, cast all the actors, designed the sets, did the costumes and the hair and everything else, and that just isn’t true. We had a complement of about a hundred and twenty-five enormously talented men and women who contributed greatly to the success of Star Trek.”3
There were definitely times where Gene Roddenberry would agree with this sentiment. As he said himself, on September 4, 1985, at the unveiling of his star on Hollywood Boulevard: “When they say on a show ‘Created by’ anyone, like ‘Created by Gene Roddenberry,’ that is not true. I laid out a pathway, and then the only thing I will take credit for is I surrounded myself by very bright people who came up with all those wonderful things. And then you can appear very smart.”
But on more numerous occasions he would say things like: “I am as near to an absolute monarch as is possible in this industry. I have complete control over what my show says and does. Much, much more freedom. And far more direct responsibility for what goes out there to the audience. I am Star Trek.”4
This is nonsense. Fern brought up the line in an interview a couple of years later:
“Yes, he did feel he was the center of the Star Trek universe. No question about it. He said to me over and over again, ‘I am Star Trek,’ which as Herb pointed out, if he had said that while they were making it, they probably would have stoned him to death. But, ‘I am Star Trek’ is something he said over and over again. Now I know from other people that he did appreciate the work that other people did, but he didn’t publicly acknowledge it, which is a mistake on his part and it leads to the conclusion that he tended to be the be all and end all of Star Trek, and he wasn’t.”
Roddenberry had made the “absolute monarch” claim at the end of his life, several years after his removal from the day-to-day running of Star Trek: The Next Generation. As for the movies, here’s what Nicholas Meyer, the writer/director of Star Trek VI, which was in production as Fern was in conversation with Roddenberry, had to say about the creator’s role:
“Roddenberry’s deal on the Star Trek movies called for him to receive a credit . . . and, I assume, a salary and profit participation, but it did not include actual involvement in making the movies after Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Nonetheless, there had evolved the tradition of kissing the ring . . . It was not, as I say, my finest hour. Roddenberry was old and in ill health, soon to die. The fact I was tired and unwilling to revisit the screenplay when it was almost time to start shooting was of less moment than my conviction that what was in the script was correct. I left the meeting and returned to work, leaving others to mop up the damage I had done.”5
There may be shows that are so successful and important to their studio or network that their executive producers are able, for a time, to operate as absolute monarchs. Even so, they won’t always get their first-choice actor for a particular role, there will always be circumstances beyond their control, they are always accountable to the people running the studio and the network. And, a lot of the time, the things that work are the happy accidents, the guest or bit-part player who steals the scene, the solution that the director and actors had to semi-improvise because of technical difficulties on the day.
It’s important to note that there is nothing inherently wrong with an executive producer taking the credit for using someone else’s idea. Deciding on the best of the available options among the many ideas pitched to him is an executive producer’s job and is itself a difficult, creative act. A writer might come up with a great script but he’s working within the framework the executive producer has established. Before the writer writes that script, the producer has chosen it over the other potential scripts and weighed up factors the writer might know very little about, like actor availability, other scripts in the works, technical challenges, and how much money remains from the season budget. Roddenberry assembled his team, picked the actors, writers, and production staff, and managed their conflicting demands.
No one would seek to deny Roddenberry his credit. The distinction is that, as Solow put it, “Gene had a blind spot about recognizing the contribution of others.”6 This wasn’t simply an abstract desire of his to be seen as the “creator” of the show. Roddenberry routinely rewrote every script early on. There was the legitimate practical problem that, with any new show, writers struggle to capture the right tone, or to write dialogue that sounds like the sort of things the regular characters would say. This was clearly more of a problem for Star Trek than it would be for a generic Western or cop show. There wasn’t much science fiction on television, so few people had experience writing scripts in the genre. Avid fans of SF had to understand they were writing for a specific show, and not producing short stories for magazines like Galaxy or Analog.
There was, though, a mercenary reason: Roddenberry’s contract paid him between $750 and $3000 for working on someone else’s script, depending on the level of rewrites. It incentivized him to work on every single script that came in. Solow likened it to “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse; it was Gene, himself, deciding what stories and scripts needed rewriting.”7
One of the constant accusations in the case against Roddenberry is that throughout Star Trek’s run, and afterwards, he sought to ensure he received a cut from any aspect of the show that was capable of generating money. Certainly he could be quite calculating about this. His attorney, Leonard Maizlish, a constant presence in Roddenberry’s life for the duration of his writing career—and particularly at the end—looked out for his client in ways that many found rather disreputable. In December 1966, when Maizlish tried to take a cut of Leonard Nimoy’s fee for the album Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space, it marked the start of a long-simmering feud between Nimoy and Roddenberry. Another notorious example was his insertion of a clause into the contract of the composer of the theme music, Alexander Courage, which allowed Roddenberry to write lyrics for the theme. Roddenberry did so, never intending to use them on the show. Why? Because a royalty was due every time the Star Trek theme was played, and if the song had lyrics, the lyricist split the money 50/50 with the composer.
In a similar vein, he was listed with Stephen E. Whitfield as co-author of The Making of Star Trek. Roddenberry was extensively interviewed, supplied a great deal of background material, and afforded Whitfield every access to the production, but he didn’t write a word of the book, or apparently read it before publication. He did, though, receive 50 percent of the advance and royalties.
Maizlish was also involved in the setting up of Lincoln Enterprises, a deliberately murky process. Roddenberry was trying to conceal this activity (and revenue) from his then wife, as he didn’t want to split the company’s assets in the event of their divorce. Lincoln Enterprises had initially been created by Roddenberry and Majel Barrett as a service paid for by the studio to answer fan mail for the series. Roddenberry enlisted the help of Star Trek fan Bjo Trimble, and she diligently did what she could both to send autographed photos of the cast and shield the actors from some of the more enthusiastic audience members. Someone at Lincoln Enterprises was canny enough to collate a list of names and addresses, and the company soon evolved into a mail order business which sold Star Trek memorabilia.8
The company issued catalogs offering a series of exclusive items, including “Flight Deck Certificates” signed by Gene Roddenberry and “Captain Kirk”—whose signature varies, but is usually identified by amateur internet graphologists as belonging to Majel Barrett. The two most popular lines were scripts and film trims. Roddenberry simply had the studio print up more copies of each script than he needed for the production, snuck the surplus copies home and sold them to fans for $5.50 plus postage a time—about $35 in today’s money. It was strictly against Writers Guild rules to sell scripts without compensating the writer. Many years down the line, Lincoln Enterprises reached arrangements with the studio and the writers involved and they continued to sell scripts on a more legitimate basis.
For $1, fans could buy a “film trim,” a strip of eight frames from footage that had been shot but not used in the series. The subject matter included characters, test shots, model work, and images of the sets. These could be projected onto a screen using a slide projector, and were hugely sought after in the early days—it was a chance to own an actual slice of Star Trek. There was only one possible place Lincoln Enterprises could have acquired the film. Solow and Justman relate that when it occurred to an editor working on the third season that he could save money by using old footage of the Enterprise flying through space, he went down to the studio vault and was surprised to discover it was completely empty. The security guard said that a while before, “Mr. Roddenberry and his friend, that girl from Star Trek, Mabel something” had backed a truck up to the door and told the guard the studio was throwing the film away.9
Film is fragile, and many of the frames sold by Lincoln Enterprises have inevitably been lost, or become scratched or faded in the last fifty years. Some fans collected huge numbers of them at the time, however, and these hoards have tended to survive. There are a number of internet projects dedicated to digitally scanning and sharing the frames, which often give valuable clues to the production process, filming dates, scenes that were shot but edited out, or angles on sets, props and costumes that we don’t see in the finished episodes.
While the show was in production, interviews and The Making of Star Trek pushed the idea of Roddenberry as the head of a large, vibrant creative team. It was after its cancelation that his reputation as a lone visionary took root. This part of the process was very public. In the words of a 1994 court case:
From 1970 to the mid-1980s, Gene criss-crossed the United States, giving lectures (sometimes as many as 40–50 a year) at college campuses and other places about Star Trek. He explained the Star Trek philosophy as one of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations” . . . Gene traveled throughout the country, very often with Majel, participating in hundreds of Star Trek conventions. They would give speeches, answer questions, mingle with fans, sign autographs and judge costume contests. He read and answered fan mail. He signed autographs. He gave hundreds of newspaper, radio and television interviews.10
After Star Trek was canceled, many of the people involved behind the scenes frankly ended up with better careers than Gene Roddenberry did. They had moved on, and were too busy making new television shows or movies to attend the conventions. The fans of the series were thoughtful and engaged, and many had committed The Making of Star Trek to memory (the book was in its nineteenth printing by 1977), but they naturally were more keen on getting the autographs of the stars of the show, the actors they recognized, than the script supervisors, co-executive producers, and so on.
Gene Roddenberry’s name appeared on the opening credits—and the title sequence for the original series didn’t include a full cast list as it did for Star Trek: The Next Generation and the later shows. For the first season, the names of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and Gene Roddenberry were the only ones to appear, in that order.
Later, there was a slight reorganization. The captions now ran “Star Trek created by Gene Roddenberry / Starring William Shatner / Also starring Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock / and DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy.” Every other regular was bunched up on “featuring” cards at the end, for the simple reason that not every member of the “regular” cast was there every week: Uhura is in sixty-six of the seventy-nine episodes, Scotty is in sixty-four, Sulu fifty-two. Chekov doesn’t join until the second season and is in thirty-six, Christine Chapel is in twenty-five, Janice Rand in eight. When fans list the “regular cast,” they rarely include John Winston’s Lieutenant Kyle, who appears in eleven episodes of the TV series and in The Wrath of Khan. The character was also in the animated series, voiced by James Doohan. Kyle’s was a small role, but he’s seen at the helm and operating the transporter, and he was significant enough to be given an evil twin in the episode “Mirror, Mirror.” His exclusion from the list of “regulars” is almost certainly because he was never part of the convention circuit in the Seventies—as The New York Times put it:
But despite all that, and a cameo in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the show means little to him. “I liked the cast and crew,” said Mr. Winston, 78, a London-born actor. “But there was nothing to build on with that character. What could you have done with three or four lines? I got paid for it, and I forgot about it.”11
Conventions lured fans to come to them by offering impressive guests. William Shatner has confessed:
“I turned down the first few invitations because I thought it wasn’t dignified. Actors don’t go to conventions. That’s for mobs! Actors act! Leonard felt differently; he didn’t take the whole thing quite so seriously. Even before the conventions began, he was making personal appearances at state fairs around the country.”12
Most of the other cast members, though, enjoyed the appreciation and interest fans showed in them. They were also paid appearance fees (albeit extremely modest ones at first). Writers like D.C. (Dorothy) Fontana and David Gerrold attended the cons, and were popular guests, but Roddenberry was the big draw, the behind-the-scenes guru. The Great Bird of the Galaxy. William Shatner says, “What I’ve never got used to, and what I’ve never come close to experiencing outside of a Star Trek convention, is the palpable wave of love that invariably roars forward from these audiences, crashing down and washing over whatever ‘featured speaker’ is lucky enough to drown under its wake.”13
Roddenberry loved the adulation, a huge hall packed with people listening intently to his every pronouncement. Meanwhile, in the dealers’ room, Majel Barrett could be found at the Lincoln Enterprises table, and many convention goers report being impressed by her ability to remember them from a previous convention, and her approachability. The Roddenberrys made for an impressive double act, and they spent a decade getting Star Trek fans firmly on their side.
Roddenberry continually pushed his name forward. The cover of Susan Sackett’s book Letters to Star Trek (1977) featured a prominent credit for its “Special Introduction by Gene Roddenberry,” but is most remarkable for a painted cover where Roddenberry (smiling and holding a pencil) is front and center, with Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise behind him. Whoever approved the cover had concluded that Roddenberry was the major draw for the sort of people who would buy a book of letters sent to the Star Trek production office.
In the Seventies and early Eighties, Star Trek remained a cult. Many of the people who’d made the show back in the day were aware that there were conventions but knew very little about what was said there, and they weren’t scouring the pages of Starlog or the fanzines. Star Trek routinely started receiving more mainstream coverage around its twentieth anniversary. Fans themselves started digging deeper into the history of the show. It became abundantly clear by the end of the Eighties that whatever role Gene Roddenberry had once played, and whatever the studio publicity was claiming, he was no longer in charge of the franchise. A reassessment of his role was long overdue.
A number of people have sought to identify those besides Roddenberry who deserve significant credit for Star Trek’s success. We can break that success down into four “eras”: the original series, the revival of the show’s fortunes, the movies, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. We will see how the success of the Star Trek movie franchise in the Eighties, for example, is almost entirely despite Gene Roddenberry, and that credit is due to Harve Bennett, Nicholas Meyer, and Leonard Nimoy.
Solow and Justman’s book is an attempt to redress the balance with respect to the original series. As Solow has said:
“if you reduce it down, it comes down to five basic people, and I talk about that in the book. The five people without whom Star Trek just would not have gone . . . I don’t think it would have gone past the early development stage. Those are the ones, I think, the public should, or the Star Trek fans should, know about and realize their great contributions.”14
In that joint interview, Fern identifies the “five people” as: Solow and Bob Justman themselves, for turning Roddenberry’s proposal into a show NBC bought and which Desilu could make on a weekly basis; Matt Jeffries, who designed the model of the Enterprise as well as the sets and props; William Ware Theiss, the costume designer; and Gene L. Coon. The book doesn’t claim that these are the only five people responsible for the success of Star Trek— for example, D.C. Fontana and Leonard Nimoy are praised effusively. But it does demonstrate just how large the team on Star Trek was.
Coon, the last name on that list, died in 1973 at the age of forty-nine. William Shatner’s Star Trek Memories dedicates a whole chapter to him, one called “The Unsung Hero.” Shatner describes him as “a man who was directly responsible for the lion’s share of the creative contributions that served towards making Roddenberry’s good science fiction show into a frequently great one.”15 In his 1973 survey of the series, The World of Star Trek, published just a few months before Coon’s death, David Gerrold couldn’t resist remarking that the show did so well because “it had good Genes.”16 In the twenty years between that book and Star Trek Memories, though, Gene L. Coon almost completely disappeared from accounts of the creation of Star Trek.
Coon was appointed producer in August 1966, and is first credited on the episode “Miri.” That was the tenth episode to be filmed as part of the regular series (not counting the two pilots).17 In practice there’s no one episode where Coon joined the show, as many different episodes were “in production” at any given time.
Coon came onboard just before the series started broadcasting. He took stock of the episodes made to that point, built on what was working and cut away what wasn’t. It’s notable that one of the first decisions made on his watch had been to lose Janice Rand, and to use McCoy more, particularly as a foil to Mr. Spock.
Coon quickly made his mark, writing or co-writing five episodes for the second half of the debut season: “Arena,” “A Taste of Armageddon” (with Robert Hamner), “Space Seed” (with Carey Wilber), “The Devil in the Dark,” and “Errand of Mercy.” Every one is a solid, memorable hour of television, with elements of suspense, and a strikingly good, very simple idea at the heart of it. “Arena” is the one in which Kirk has to defeat “the Gorn,” a giant lizard man, in unarmed single combat. In “The Devil in the Dark” a lava creature is killing miners, with the twist that it’s doing so to protect its young. Each story has a formidable, even monstrous villain, one with a code of honor but also a core of brutality. “Space Seed” introduces Ricardo Montalban as Khan, and “Errand of Mercy” is the first time we see the Klingons. It would be Coon’s scripts, not the series bible written by Roddenberry, that would introduce, name, or clarify some of the core concepts of Star Trek: he names Starfleet, tells us that Kirk and his crew are from the United Federation of Planets, introduces the Prime Directive that bans interference with the development of other cultures. Structurally, the first batch of stories tended to start small and gradually ratchet up the threat until there’s a massive showdown in the final act. Now, following Coon’s example, Star Trek would get to the action much faster.
One thing his own scripts don’t demonstrate very well is that Coon was keen to include a lot more humor in the series. Throughout his career, when a Gene Roddenberry script tries a joke, it can feel reminiscent of the scene in Star Trek IV where Spock intones the definition of the word as “a story with a humorous climax.” Roddenberry often crafts a line that’s an odd, forced deadpan. Something we’re clearly meant to laugh at, rather than something that’s actually funny. Left to his own devices, Roddenberry wants Star Trek to be serious and to be taken seriously, so he creates something that’s rather po-faced. Coon understood the concept of comic relief—that you often heighten the drama by introducing moments of comedy. More to the point, he understood that television audiences want a degree of warmth from their heroes and need to see them smile from time to time.
William Shatner reveled in the change, and instinctively understood that he wasn’t being asked to remove or to tone down the furrowed brows and earnest delivery of the early episodes, but to also to throw in smirks and playfulness. “Arena” is a great example. The second half of the episode concentrates on scenes involving Kirk by himself on an alien world, trying to dodge the Gorn while fashioning weapons and traps from the plants and rocks. With no one else in the scene, and little dialogue, Shatner essentially starts playing off himself, working in moments of triumph and tragedy, and when things go wrong, often playing it with “comic” reactions of the “oh . . . c’mon, give me a break” kind.
We’d expect any series to have made a few course corrections after half a season, and before Coon was on the show, it had already produced a few very strong episodes. But suddenly the show hit a winning streak.
Star Trek was broadcast for the first time on September 8, 1966. The production team had picked one of their least favorite episodes to launch with. “The Man Trap” was chosen because it was a straightforward monster story, with a large role for Dr. McCoy. For many years, the myth was that Star Trek was an underdog—that the network weren’t all that keen, that the ratings were low. It’s the version of events that Gene Roddenberry told fans in the Seventies and, if you’re inclined to believe it, it sounds convincing: the network needed two pilots before they were persuaded; the show was canceled after “only” three seasons; its immense success later proves that if only NBC had shown a little more faith, they’d have seen the quality of the show at the time and publicized it more. In this version of events, of course, Roddenberry is painting a picture of himself as the lone defender of the faith in the wilderness, not the absolute monarch of a magnificent kingdom. The fact is that he was neither of these things.
Star Trek did always exist in a precarious state. It was an expensive show to make, and its ratings never quite justified the price. To understand why it was nearly canceled during its second season, and why it was actually canceled at the end of the third, we need to understand who was paying for it.
There were four parties with a stake in the profits of Star Trek. Desilu, the Norway Corporation, and NBC each had a 26⅔ percent stake, with William Shatner owning the other 20 percent.18 While the original series was being produced, and for fifteen years afterwards, this was purely academic, as there were no profits. It does, though, identify the important players in the production.
When you watch the first and second seasons of Star Trek, the caption at the end declares it’s a “Desilu Production in association with Norway Corporation.” Very astute American viewers might recognize “Desilu” from the end of Mission: Impossible or Mannix, but they’re most likely to have seen it at the end of I Love Lucy or The Lucy Show. Desilu was comedian Lucille Ball’s production company, which she originally set up with her (on- and off-screen) husband, Desi Arnaz—it’s not hard to see how the studio got its name. By 1966, Desi and Lucy had divorced, and while she remained an extremely popular performer, and in firm control of Desilu (she did have a claim on being the absolute monarch there), the studio was in something of a decline. Mission: Impossible and Star Trek were conscious attempts to diversify its productions.
Desilu, then, was the “studio.” Physically, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible were filmed in Hollywood, at the company’s sound stages on Gower Avenue. It was a relatively small site, a rectangle boxed in by Gower Avenue, Melrose Avenue, the Beth Olam cemetery and the enormous Paramount Studios lot (an accident of geography that would have profound consequences for the destiny of Star Trek). It is located at the far end of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The Norway Corporation was not some formidable Scandinavian multinational with diverse global business interests that somehow happened to include making Star Trek but no other television show. It was a corporation set up by Gene Roddenberry once Star Trek was given the green light. Roddenberry was the sole owner and employee. A 1992 court established that “Norway was merely the vehicle in the alter ego of Roddenberry and that he ran it for his purposes and that basically no one else was interested in it, and that it was not a separate independent corporation.” It was set up for tax and legal reasons as a place for Roddenberry to bank the checks he got for Star Trek. When he died, the corporation passed into the control of his widow. The “Norway Corporation” was Gene Roddenberry.
The “network” in Star Trek’s case was NBC, the National Broadcasting Company, based in New York but with offices in Hollywood. Desilu sold Star Trek to NBC for an agreed fee per episode. For NBC, it was slightly more complicated. They made their money purely by selling advertising and sponsorship deals. They had a series of calculations to make: they had to arrange their shows on the schedules to maximize their audiences; they had to work out how much to spend marketing each show; and they had to decide if a brand new show would do better than a current one. They were in competition with the other two networks, ABC and CBS.
NBC was in a cut-throat world of dynamic scheduling and marketing decisions. They set their advertising rates in advance, based on projected ratings. They were under constant pressure to keep down costs, build audiences, and weed out underperforming shows.
When we hear Gene Roddenberry talk about “studio executives” and “network executives,” then, these are two different sets of overseers, from Desilu and NBC respectively. The “network” wanted to build a mass audience and for Star Trek to remain fresh and appealing. The “studio” wanted to keep the network happy so that they would continue to buy Star Trek, but they weren’t worried, directly, about ratings, advertisers, or scheduling. For the studio, there was one overriding imperative: they had to keep making Star Trek for less than NBC had agreed to pay for it. If not, they would effectively be paying NBC to show Star Trek.
Roddenberry would have understood the distinction between the studio and the network, of course. We can take it that when he talked to Star Trek fans about “television executives,” he was simplifying a little to make for a more pithy anecdote. That said, while Roddenberry worked in Hollywood for over thirty years, and seems to have socialized mainly with people in the industry, he never mastered the art of studio politics. He never seemed to understand that the organizations handing over millions of dollars to make his shows were made up of individuals with their own careers, needs, targets, agendas, and bosses. In times of trouble, Roddenberry’s instinct was always to defend his own position, rather than work with others. He would be “Crazy Gene,” as he’d concluded that digging his heels in was how he would get his way.
As executive in charge of production, Herb Solow worked for Desilu. The chain of command was simple: Solow was Roddenberry’s boss and reported to Lucille Ball, the head of the studio. Solow says of Roddenberry:
As he grew and grew in stature, what he would do is take out the frustrations of not being in total control by picking scapegoats, so he would treat NBC as someone who was against him, for instance, which just wasn’t the truth. NBC was trying to be supportive, but if there was a problem, Gene would turn it around and blame NBC, at times blame Desilu. That was the modus operandi for him in those later years while doing the first series.19
Star Trek had a specific problem, and it wasn’t that “the ratings were low”—it was that the show was expensive to make, and performed slightly under NBC’s target audience figures. The networks promised advertisers that a show would reach a particular number of viewers. If the show underperformed, the network had to pay back some of the money advertisers had given them (or give them free advertising of at least the same value, which amounted to the same thing).
The first episode won its ratings timeslot, against relatively weak opposition. Although in the following weeks it fell to second in its slot, it settled down to a point where it was doing better than most of the new shows. The network committed to a full season in November, but the ratings started to fall a little further. By January, it was third in its timeslot some weeks.
In March 1967, NBC signed up for a second season of Star Trek, ordering sixteen episodes, with the option of picking up another ten, which would add up to a full season of twenty-six. This was perfectly normal—established hits were picked up for a full season, but the networks reserved the right to pull the plug on most shows.
The second season started production only a few weeks after the first had been completed. It debuted on September 15, 1967 with the episode “Amok Time”—the one where Spock’s burning need to mate compels him to return to his home planet. It’s the first time we see the planet Vulcan, or any Vulcan character except Spock, and the first time we see the “Vulcan salute” or hear Spock say “Live long and prosper.” One of the most memorable episodes of Star Trek, featuring its breakout character, it’s extraordinarily important to the Star Trek mythology, and has always been a huge fan favorite. And it bombed in the ratings.20
You’ll find a number of sneering references to “Gomer Pyle” in early Star Trek fanzines and newsletters. Gomer Pyle was an extremely popular sitcom, a spinoff from The Andy Griffiths Show about a naive man who signs up to the Marine Corps. Like the lead character, it was vaguely moronic but good-natured. In Star Trek fan discourse, “Gomer Pyle” became shorthand for the very worst of lowest common denominator network television. Gene Roddenberry got in on the act in a speech he delivered in the seventies (it appears on the 1976 album Inside Star Trek):
“To get a prime time show—network show—on the air and to keep it there, you must attract and hold a minimum of eighteen million people every week. You have to do that in order to move people away from Gomer Pyle, Bonanza, Beverly Hillbillies and so on. And we tried to do this with entertainment, action, adventure, conflict and so on. But once we got on the air, and within the limits of those accident ratio limits, we did not accept the myth that the television audience has an infantile mind. We had an idea, and we had a premise, and we still believe that.”21
The reason for the ire is that Gomer Pyle was the show on opposite the second season of Star Trek, and more than twice as many people watched the sitcom. Star Trek’s second-season premiere was in the bottom twenty shows for the week. The following month, rumors started that the show would be moved—a sign that the network were not confident about its prospects.
There was already a major source of nervousness among the production team: Star Trek was under new management. On July 27, 1967, 22 Gulf+Western, who owned Paramount, bought Desilu from Lucille Ball for $17m. Rumor had it that the only reason for the acquisition was that Paramount wanted to expand their studio lot and Desilu’s property on Gower Avenue was right next door. So it was a mild inconvenience to Paramount’s expansion plans that Desilu had four network TV shows in production: Star Trek, Mission: Impossible, Mannix, and The Lucy Show.
Another blow was that, towards the end of the second season, and having produced about half the episodes of the original series. Gene L. Coon had decided to move on. He was in the midst of an expensive divorce—he’d reconnected with his childhood sweetheart when he learned she had moved to Hollywood and become an actress and model. Coon was in demand as a script writer, and working on Star Trek meant long days and an increasing number of disputes with Gene Roddenberry, who thought the show was becoming too comedic. Roddenberry particularly hated “The Trouble with Tribbles,” David Gerrold’s script about little furry aliens who bred at an exponential rate (he warmed to it eventually).
Coon stepped aside as producer in early September.23 There was no lasting rift, as there would be at other times when Roddenberry fell out with someone. Coon would continue to write for Star Trek under the pseudonym Lee Cronin, and before his early death, would work with Roddenberry again five years later on a new series, The Questor Tapes.
With ratings low, NBC were hesitating to commit to the future of the series. They wouldn’t even guarantee to pick up the last ten episodes of the second season. It was a very nervous time on the set, but the network finally committed to ordering the remaining episodes on the very last day specified in their contract: October 18, 1967. The decision on a third season would be made in the New Year.
Now the studio was having second thoughts about making more Star Trek. Herb Solow remained in place, but there were new layers of studio executives above him. They were not traditional television or movie men and they were looking at program-making purely as a business proposition. Star Trek’s balance sheet contained a harsh truth: thanks to cost overruns, NBC were buying each episode for less than it cost Desilu to make. If they made ten more episodes, the studio would lose money ten more times. If Star Trek came back for the third season, then as things stood, the studio would continue to lose money for another year.
It sounded like a compelling reason to pull the plug. There was, however, a counterargument: as it stood, there would be too few episodes for Star Trek to go into syndication. If the series was canceled now, the show would never make another cent. If Star Trek ran at least until the end of a third season, preferably a fourth, then the studio would eventually be able to sell it to new markets, and gain some income from that. Solow was able to persuade the new studio executives that the numbers said they needed to make at least another season of Star Trek.
To say Solow was proved right is, of course, something of an understatement. Exactly how much Star Trek has made for the studio is incalculable. The chairman of Paramount is on record as saying “if somebody had a figure, it would be made-up because there’s just no way of actually saying that this is how much it made.”24 But it runs into ten figures. To be fair to the executives, not one person was predicting that in 1967. All Solow was suggesting was that if the show went into syndication it might mitigate the losses.
Gene Roddenberry certainly wasn’t predicting a long and prosperous future for Star Trek. Back in April 1965, while waiting to hear whether NBC liked the first pilot, he had worked on a pitch for a different show, Assignment: Earth. In November 1967, sensing the writing was on the wall for Star Trek, he dusted off that script and rewrote it as a Star Trek script, one which sidelines the regular cast in a flagrant attempt to set up a spinoff series about an alien investigator and his kooky sidekick in modern-day America. The plan was doomed from the start—Robert Lansing, the ostensible leading man, had told Roddenberry he wasn’t going to commit to a regular TV role. Roddenberry then compounded the problem by becoming obsessed with the hemline of guest actress Teri Garr. His constant refrain that her skirt wasn’t short enough led to arguments with William Ware Theiss on set, and a walkout from Garr, who hated the experience so much that she continues to refuse to be involved with Star Trek in any capacity, including discussing it in interviews. This was not the most promising foundation for a successful series.
By now, a few loyal fans of the show were semi-regular guests on the Star Trek set. Two of the most prominent were Bjo and John Trimble, organizers of the Cleveland convention where episodes of Star Trek were first shown publicly. They’d met Gene Roddenberry then and accepted an invite to come and see the set. By the second season, they were regular visitors and the cast knew them by sight, while Bjo was helping Roddenberry run Lincoln Enterprises. “John and I were visiting the shooting of ‘The Deadly Years’ when The Word came down—cancelation was certain at the end of the second season. This episode being shot was, in fact, one of the last Star Trek episodes to be aired before cancelation!”25
The Trimbles sent out an urgent letter to various Star Trek fan club organizers dated December 1, 1967. The plan called for each person who received a letter to urge ten more to send in a letter of their own. Bjo Trimble’s experiences answering fan mail for the show had given her priceless insight into the sort of tone that worked and the sort that didn’t, and she urged people to be thoughtful and concise, rather than call the network idiots and issue threats. She explained that fans should send letters to NBC, rather than the studio, and they should be sent in anonymous-looking envelopes, ensuring that the letters were opened. NBC were inundated, and their standing policy of replying personally to each letter meant the diversion of considerable resources. The campaign peaked in February.
On March 1, 1968, the following announcement was made at the end of the episode “The Omega Glory” (and repeated the following week): “And now an announcement of interest to all viewers of Star Trek. We are pleased to tell you that Star Trek will continue to be seen on NBC Television. We know you will be looking forward to seeing the weekly adventures in space on Star Trek.”
As far as anyone knows, an on-air announcement that a show had been renewed was truly without precedent. It may well have been designed to stop the flood of letters to the network—if so, it backfired, because for the next month, NBC were swamped with “thank you” notes from grateful Star Trek fans. The fact the fans rallied, sent in letters and saved the show is the essential founding myth of Star Trek. The nasty television executives had been defeated by a massive grassroot activist movement, rallying under the slogan STAR TREK LIVES.
There are three highly contentious issues around the campaign. How many letters were actually received? Was this a grassroot movement, or was it an operation run by Gene Roddenberry? And would Star Trek have been canceled without the letter-writing campaign? Herb Solow is best placed to put on record the studio’s conclusions about the affair:
“The unfortunate part about it was it was blown out of proportion because of a letter that Gene Roddenberry wrote to Isaac Asimov, when he talked of the fact that a million letters were sent to NBC and that, of course, wasn’t the fact at all . . . I located the man at NBC back in 1967 who was responsible for answering all the fan mail. So what we learned was that ‘one million letters’ was really twelve thousand letters. But twelve thousand was huge. It was the largest outpouring of mail NBC had ever received. But again, it was an orchestrated event. The executives at NBC became aware that it was orchestrated and kind of resented the embarrassment. So it helped to get Star Trek renewed from year two to year three, but when year three came along, Star Trek found itself in a terrible time period with very little promotion behind it, so you have to say the letter writing campaign helped and hurt at the same time.”26
How many letters? A million, or twelve thousand? TV Guide at the time quoted an NBC vice president’s figure of “100,000,” although The World of Star Trek says TV Guide gave a figure of “200,000.”27 A newspaper report of March 17, 1968 stated a number of Spock-like precision, saying the network received 114,667 letters between December and March, with 52,151 in February.28 NBC said in a Mailcall pamphlet, an internal report on fanmail, that the figures were 115,893 and 52,358.29 Bjo Trimble says, “NBC admitted, unofficially, that over one million letters had crossed their desks. Within a year NBC was to announce during an interview on the mail campaign that only 500,000 had come in, and ten years later, NBC claimed that only 50,000 letters had been received!”30 She’s also noted that each item of correspondence counted as “one letter,” even if it contained a petition with dozens of names on it. The figure of “a million” took hold in Star Trek fan circles, being repeated in, for example, the book The World of Star Trek. As Solow says, it looks as if that number originally came from Gene Roddenberry. In the end, it doesn’t matter that much: a four-figure number would have been an impressive demonstration of audience loyalty.
Was Roddenberry involved? Oh, yes. John and Bjo Trimble mounted a Herculean effort, and ran a smart campaign. They corralled a group of avid Star Trek fans, they supplied a template letter that made its points passionately and was well-reasoned, and they told campaigners the best address to send their letter to. Bjo Trimble is a model for fan activism and inclusion. Very few people now could rally as many to click “Like” as she inspired to handwrite a letter, put it in an envelope, then pay for a stamp and post it. But by her own account, she checked with Roddenberry before proceeding.31 She says that when they sent out a call for action, one of the sources for addresses was the fan mail sent to the show which “Gene helped us obtain from the fan mail service that Paramount contracted with.” This, of course, was Lincoln Enterprises, which Trimble helped Roddenberry run.32 Roddenberry paid to print up the STAR TREK LIVES and I GROK SPOCK car stickers that ended up on the back of every limousine in the NBC executive parking lot in New York, after a fan, Wanda Kendall, smuggled herself past security.33 He supplied scripts and film trims to be auctioned off to raise money for the initial postage costs (it was when he saw them going for $20–$50 a time that he realized Lincoln Enterprises should be selling them).34
Would Star Trek have been canceled without the campaign? We know that it was possible the network wouldn’t renew the show, and that people working on Star Trek were pessimistic. Then again, we know that there was at least a possibility that the show would survive, because Gene Roddenberry thought a letter-writing campaign might help. We know that the campaign didn’t reverse a decision that had already been made to cancel the show—NBC hadn’t made up their minds. We know that by February, NBC had firmed up their plans for the fall schedule, and Star Trek was on it. It would be churlish to think that the campaign wasn’t a factor in the network’s decision. Boiling down nearly fifty years of debate, the answer would seem to be this: the network was debating whether to renew, and the campaign was a factor that helped lead them to decide they should order the third season. It wasn’t the only factor, but it might have been the decisive one.
It was a Pyrrhic victory. Herb Solow left Paramount soon after Star Trek was renewed, unhappy with the business culture there. NBC lowered their ratings estimates. The cost of buying a minute of commercials during the show fell from $36,000 to $30,000, and the price NBC were willing to pay Paramount fell accordingly. Star Trek would have to become a much cheaper show to survive, with the episode budget dropping from $200,000 in the first season to $180,000 in the third. However, the actors’ contracts guaranteed big pay rises if the show made it to a third season. Squeezed from both sides, the show’s location filming and elaborate effects would have to be cut back, and the guest cast limited.
With Herb Solow gone, Roddenberry had lost his key ally in the management team. Buoyed with the success of the letter-writing campaign, believing it gave him leverage, he issued an ultimatum: he would leave Star Trek unless it got a Monday 7:30 p.m. timeslot. NBC scheduled it for Fridays at 10:00 p.m. His bluff had been called. Roddenberry was moved aside to a position as executive producer, with Fred Freiberger brought in to his old role running the show. Roddenberry essentially sat in his new office on the other side of the Desilu lot and sulked throughout the third season. “I was really forced to break off from the show, and I could see it was going to die and I spent that year trying to develop new projects for the following season. Later, I also found out that there would be no fourth season, no matter what.”35
Leonard Nimoy utterly hated the season three debut, “Spock’s Brain,” and from this point started agitating with the studio to improve the quality of the scripts. His quiet, forceful campaign to maintain the integrity of his character left a lasting, positive impression on many at the studio. D.C. Fontana left her script consultant role, and was replaced by Arthur Singer, who Bjo Trimble characterized as being “famous for choosing senselessly violent scripts.”36 Fontana didn’t think Singer understood the series—she reports that on a set tour, she had to explain to him what the transporter did. She objected to rewrites on “The Enterprise Incident” that had Spock seducing a (female) Romulan commander in what she thought was a far too conventional way. The final straw that led to her cutting her ties with the show was when she was told that McCoy was the same age as Kirk, so wasn’t old enough to have a grownup daughter, the focus of the episode she was writing, “Joanna.” She felt the new team were ignoring key facts established in the series to that point.
Fans have usually seen the third season as a travesty. This overstates the problems. The budget cuts did lead to a lot of quite similar stories where a handful of aliens arrive on the Enterprise and disrupt the smooth running of the ship. But most shows start to repeat themselves sooner or later—the third seasons of Batman and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. were just as guilty of “seen it before” plot-lines, absurd gimmicks, and increasingly odd guest stars. There are some very well-regarded individual episodes in Star Trek’s third season, like “The Tholian Web,” “The Empath,” and “The Enterprise Incident.” As far as he could, Roddenberry washed his hands of the third season, but was happy to take credit for the “interracial kiss” between Kirk and Uhura in the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” Even some of the stinkers—“Spock’s Brain” and “The Way to Eden”—have their moments. The lack of money also forced the production team into some imaginative design work, like the stark black backdrops of “The Empath” and the surreal studio-bound Wild West of “Spectre of the Gun.” The third season is really not all that bad.
Gene Roddenberry was done with Star Trek. In 1970, Paramount offered him the option to buy their 26⅔ percent stake in the series for $100,000 (some reports say $150,000), which would have given him control of the property. He didn’t have the money, but wouldn’t have paid it if he had, believing it to be a preposterous amount. We have a legal record of the value he placed on Star Trek at the time: in 1969, he offered his share in the rights to the series as part of his divorce settlement with Eileen, valuing them at $1,000. He would make the same offer again in 1972. Thanks to inflation, that meant the value of the rights had fallen in real terms.37 She turned down the offer because she thought it overvalued Star Trek. To put this into perspective, the alimony agreement they reached was that Gene would pay Eileen $2,000 a month.
After seventy-nine episodes, Star Trek was finished.