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The Screenwriters of Star Trek
The starship Enterprise is powered by the controlled interaction of matter and antimatter. But Star Trek, like all television programs, was fueled by screenwriting. Without high-quality teleplays, Trek might have flamed out like so many other quickly cancelled series. Luckily, at least during its first two seasons, the show’s writers supplied a steady stream of scripts that managed to present sometimes complex science fiction concepts in understandable ways, to flesh out the show’s diverse cast of characters, and to include all the action and dramatic tension necessary to hold viewers’ attention for sixty minutes. During Season One, the show’s writing staff worked Scotty-like last-minute miracles on many occasions, barely meeting deadlines to avoid missing airdates. Working under incredible pressure, these gifted men and women created on the fly a remarkably elaborate, cohesive mythology now cherished by generations of viewers.
Here’s a rundown of some of the series’ most important writers and their contributions to the Star Trek legacy.
Gene Roddenberry
During its first two seasons, Star Trek creator and producer Gene Roddenberry also served as the series’ most important writer. Although few teleplays bore his name (and some of those that did, like “The Omega Glory,” were unimpressive), Roddenberry personally rewrote or polished, usually without credit, virtually every episode that aired during the 1966–67 and ’67–68 seasons. Many writers complained bitterly about Roddenberry’s extensive reworking of their scripts, but the Great Bird of the Galaxy made certain every episode conformed to his vision for the show, taking special care to protect consistency of characterization and continuity of the tricky technical details that were the bane of many would-be Trek writers. As a former Writers Guild of America award winner and lifelong sci-fi fan, Roddenberry was uniquely positioned to ensure each episode hit all the beats necessary for television drama and also functioned credibly as science fiction. The importance of his rewrites is best demonstrated by the precipitous decline in quality Trek suffered during its final season, when Roddenberry abandoned his meticulous oversight of the scripts. The episodes broadcast during Season Three proved wildly uneven, offering some superb shows (“The Enterprise Incident,” “Spectre of the Gun”) and some dreadful ones (“Spock’s Brain,” “The Way to Eden”), with occasional jarring lapses in characterization and technical jargon.
Gene L. Coon
Aside from Roddenberry, the writer who most influenced Star Trek mythology was Gene L. Coon, who also served as line producer for Star Trek during most of its first two seasons. Like Roddenberry, Coon was a World War II veteran who saw action in the Pacific theater and also a respected television professional. Coon’s prior credits included scripts for dozens of series—including twenty-four episodes of Wagon Train, one of Roddenberry’s often-cited inspirations for Star Trek—and production work on The Wild, Wild West. Coon’s Trek scripts defined the Prime Directive (in episodes like “Bread and Circuses”) and introduced the Klingons (in “Errand of Mercy”), warp drive pioneer Zefram Cochrane (in “Metamorphosis”), and genetically engineered superman Khan Noonien Singh (in “Space Seed”). He received screen credit on ten Star Trek teleplays, and in his capacity as producer provided uncredited polishes to numerous other scripts.
Coon was a well-liked member of the Star Trek team whose sense of humor shined through in his episode “A Piece of the Action.” He also guided young screenwriter David Gerrold through the creation of “The Trouble with Tribbles.” When Coon left Star Trek in the middle of its second season due to personal issues, Roddenberry told associate producer Bob Justman, “We’ll have to find someone else to take his place, but no one will ever be able to fill his shoes,” according to Justman and Herb Solow’s book Inside Star Trek. After his departure, Coon contributed occasional scripts to the show under the pseudonym Lee Cronin. Later he produced the short-lived espionage series It Takes a Thief, starring Robert Wagner and Fred Astaire, and wrote for another dozen TV shows. He died of lung cancer in 1973. One of his last jobs was cowriting The Questor Tapes, one of Roddenberry’s failed post-Trek projects.
D. C. Fontana
Dorothy Catherine Fontana penned several landmark Star Trek scripts and also served as the series’ story editor. In her editorial capacity, Fontana was second only to Roddenberry as Defender of the Flame and Keeper of the Continuity. She wrote the show’s first “Bible,” which explained Trek’s characters, settings, and core concepts for prospective writers. Not only did Fontana serve as watchdog for the show’s rapidly growing mythology, but she created major elements of the Trek mythos herself in watershed teleplays such as “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” the show’s first time-travel story; “The Enterprise Incident,” which explored Romulan culture and involved “cloaking” technology; and “Journey to Babel,” which introduced Spock’s parents, Sarek (Mark Lenard) and Amanda (Jane Wyatt), along with the blue-skinned Andorian and porcine Tellarite species. In all, Fontana (sometimes working under the pseudonym Michael Richards) had a hand in writing thirty-six of the show’s seventy-nine episodes, including many uncredited polishes.
Later, Fontana served as associate producer on the Star Trek animated series and wrote the cartoon episode “Yesteryear” (the only animated installment with story elements considered “canonical”); contributed scripts to Star Trek: The Next Generation (including the series pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint”) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; and created scenarios for three Trek video games. Roddenberry employed Fontana as production secretary on his first series, The Lieutenant, and for many years counted her among his most trusted allies. The two eventually had a falling-out, precipitating Fontana’s mid–Season One departure from The Next Generation. Despite her close affiliation with Trek, Fontana has contributed stories or screenplays for dozens of other television series, both live-action and animated, across many genres, including The Waltons, Dallas, and Babylon 5. As of 2011, she was teaching screenwriting for the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The fictional science fiction writer K. C. Hunter, played by Nana Visitor in the Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars,” was created to honor Fontana.
Jerome Bixby
Roddenberry desperately wanted Star Trek to have credibility within the community of science fiction fandom. So he invited several respected sci-fi authors to write for the series. Some, such as A. E. van Vogt, were unable to adjust to the specialized demands of writing for television. Jerome Bixby, however, flourished, supplying three complete teleplays (“Requiem for Methuselah,” “Day of the Dove,” and “Mirror, Mirror”) and sharing credit for “By Any Other Name” with Fontana. With “Mirror, Mirror,” Bixby introduced the idea of a parallel “Mirror Universe” containing evil alter egos of the Enterprise crew (including a scar-faced Lieutenant Sulu, who tries to advance his career by assassinating Captain Kirk, and a malevolent, goateed Mr. Spock). The concept proved so popular it was revived by Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Enterprise. The Mirror Universe also has been explored by writers of numerous Trek novels and comic books.
While not as a big a name as Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison or other high-profile authors who wrote for Star Trek, Bixby’s credentials within the world of literary SF were impeccable. He had written scores of science fiction short stories and was a former editor of the pulp magazine Planet Stories, which published early work by genre legends such as Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. Unlike many authors Roddenberry engaged for Trek, Bixby had experience writing scripts, having penned three screenplays, including the cult classic It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). One of Bixby’s short stories served as the basis for the eerie Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life,” featuring a spoiled young boy with godlike mental powers, which was remade for the 1993 Twilight Zone feature film. Another Bixby story, cowritten with Otto Klement, provided the scenario for the 1966 movie The Fantastic Voyage, about a miniaturized submarine that travels through a human body. Bixby passed away in 1998.
Theodore Sturgeon
Ted Sturgeon, renowned for his gripping short stories and novellas, was one of the first authors Roddenberry contacted about working for Trek. Although only two of his scripts were produced (“Shore Leave” and “Amok Time”), both are fan favorites. “Amok Time” was the first episode to explore Vulcan culture, introducing the concept of Pon Farr (the Vulcan mating cycle) and the customary valediction “Live long and prosper.” Much of the franchise’s elaborate Vulcan mythology originates with or is extrapolated from this episode. Like Bixby, Sturgeon had limited screenwriting experience, having penned teleplays for the short-lived Tales of Tomorrow TV series (1950–51). In 1974, his novella “Killdozer” served as the basis for a well-remembered made-for-TV movie of the same title, and in 1986, two of his stories were adapted for episodes of the revived Twilight Zone. Sturgeon, who died in 1985, is also remembered for “Sturgeon’s Law” (“Ninety percent of SF is crud, but 90 percent of everything is crud”) and for the personal credo that guided his fiction: “Ask the next question.” The Theodore Sturgeon Award, a juried prize issued by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, has been awarded annually since 1987 for the year’s best science fiction short story.
Robert Bloch
In 1960, director Alfred Hitchcock and screenwriter Joseph Stefano turned Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho into one of the greatest box-office hits of the decade. Bloch, a prolific author of horror and horror-tinged science fiction short stories and novels, parlayed the phenomenal success of Psycho into new opportunities, penning dozens of screenplays and teleplays and optioning many of his short stories for use in film or television. The three Star Trek episodes written by Bloch (“Wolf in the Fold,” “Catspaw,” and “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”) are characteristically dark, even Halloweenish. “Wolf in the Fold,” which integrated ideas from Bloch’s short story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper,” pitted Captain Kirk and his crew against Jack the Ripper—or rather a fear-devouring, noncorporeal life force that had previously inhabited the human host known as Jack the Ripper. Bloch, who as a young man befriended and was greatly influenced by legendary horror author H. P. Lovecraft, received the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards during his sixty-year career. He died of cancer in 1994 at age seventy-seven.
Margaret Armen
Like Robert Bloch, Margaret Armen wrote three Star Trek episodes, all in a common style. But while Bloch penned Star Trek horror yarns, Armen wrote spacefaring romances. She was a workaday screenwriter whose other credits included dozens of Westerns (The Rifleman, The Big Valley), detective shows (The Mod Squad, Barnaby Jones) and other programs (The Bionic Woman, Marcus Welby M.D.). Her Star Trek scripts included “The Paradise Syndrome,” in which an amnesia-struck Captain Kirk (aka “Kirok”), left on a primitive planet, goes native and marries the beautiful young Miramanee (Sabrina Scharf); “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” in which the captured Kirk romances his green-haired, silver-bikinied guard Shahna (Angelique Pettyjohn), then later knocks her unconscious; and “The Cloud Minders,” which offered romantic entanglements for both Kirk and Spock. Armen also wrote two episodes of the Star Trek animated series, “The Ambergris Element” and “The Lorelei Signal,” as well as a teleplay for the scuttled Star Trek: Phase II series in the late 1970s. She passed away in 2003 at age eighty-two.
Stephen Kandel
Stephen Kandel was a remarkably productive screenwriter with more than seventy produced teleplays to his credit during a career that stretched from 1956 to 1990. His work included multiple episodes of highly rated programs including Batman, I Spy, Mission: Impossible, and MacGyver, for which he wrote a whopping seventeen episodes. But in the realm of Star Trek, the versatile Kandel served a specialized function: He was the unofficial biographer of scoundrel Harry Mudd, guest star in two well-remembered lighthearted episodes, “Mudd’s Women” and “I, Mudd.”
“Mudd’s Women,” the sixth episode broadcast, was among the clutch of stories considered for development as the second pilot episode for the series. Kandel’s teleplay, based on a story by Roddenberry, introduced the character of Harcourt Fenton Mudd (played by Roger C. Carmel), a notorious interstellar con man whose current business is supplying beautiful “wives” to residents of remote settlements. Subsequent investigation reveals that the women owe their good looks to an illegal drug, and although the miners elect to go through with the marriages as planned, Mudd is placed under arrest. Undaunted, Mudd returned for the Season Two sequel “I, Mudd,” which found him the master of a race of curvaceous female androids. Kandel authored a third appearance for the character in the animated series episode “Mudd’s Passion.” (Kandel also wrote the unrelated episode “Jihad” for the cartoon program.)
Kandel’s two Mudd teleplays were novelized by writer J. A. Lawrence and published under the title Mudd’s Angels in 1978. Yet another revival was planned for the character on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The concept was for Mudd to awaken from cryogenic sleep to fluster Captain Jean-Luc Picard as he had Captain Kirk a generation earlier, but the scenario was heavily revised (and Mudd written out) when Carmel died in 1986. However, the greedy, amoral, yet comically appealing Mudd may have served as a forerunner of the Ferengi, a species introduced on Next Gen and featured prominently on Deep Space Nine.
Harlan Ellison
Acclaimed author Harlan Ellison wrote only one Star Trek episode, but it was the one most fans consider the best of them all, “The City on the Edge of Forever.” The reason Ellison wrote only one Trek episode is because he was incensed over Roddenberry’s changes to his original teleplay. Ellison labored over the script for months, writing and rewriting at Roddenberry’s request, before turning in what he thought would be the final product. Nevertheless, Roddenberry oversaw major changes to the scenario. (For more about “The City on the Edge of Forever” and the Roddenberry-Ellison feud, see Chapter 16, “Private Little Wars.”)
The prickly Ellison, who once described himself as “the most contentious person on Earth,” remains renowned for his hard-hitting speculative fiction, for which he has received eleven Hugo Awards, six Bram Stoker Awards, four Nebula Awards, and two World Fantasy Awards, among other laurels. He edited the groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), which collected thirty-three stories considered too politically controversial or sexually explicit for publication in mainstream science fiction magazines. Ellison began writing for the screen in 1953 and has been honored by the Writers Guild four times. His other notable teleplays include two classic episodes of The Outer Limits—the Writers Guild Award–winning “Demon with a Glass Hand” and “Soldier,” which director James Cameron acknowledges as the inspiration for The Terminator.
David Gerrold
David Gerrold was a twenty-two-year-old aspiring screenwriter whose first produced teleplay became a classic. With guidance from Coon, he penned “The Trouble with Tribbles,” a seriocomic episode about rapidly multiplying, Klingon-averse, trilling alien fur balls that became one of the most beloved of all Star Trek episodes. Coon rejected the first four Trek scenarios Gerrold proposed, but kept encouraging the talented and ambitious young writer. Finally Coon accepted a story Gerrold originally titled “The Fuzzies.” Gerrold managed to sell just one more scenario to Trek, which was developed by Margaret Armen into the episode “The Cloud Minders.” Later, however, Gerrold penned two installments of the animated series, including the sequel “More Tribbles, More Troubles.” He submitted the outline for a Next Generation teleplay dealing with homosexuality among two Enterprise crewmen, which was so heavily rewritten by Roddenberry that Gerrold obtained a Writers Guild injunction to prevent it from being produced. Gerrold also wrote three episodes (none of them involving tribbles) of the fan-created Internet series Star Trek: The New Voyages. In 1973, Gerrold published two of the first books about the history and impact of the series, The World of Star Trek and The Trouble with Tribbles, an account of the making of the episode. He has also written two Star Trek novels. In 1977, “The Trouble with Tribbles” was also published as a “Fotonovel,” with the story told in frame enlargements. Gerrold went on to write for many other television programs, including Babylon 5 and the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone.
Richard Matheson
Richard Matheson has written scores of short stories, novels and screenplays, many of which are now revered as classics. He is perhaps best known for his horror novel I Am Legend, which has been filmed (sometimes without credit to the author) at least four times, and for the fourteen teleplays he wrote for the original Twilight Zone. Among many other movies, Matheson penned most of director Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and the teleplay for The Night Stalker (1972), which became the highest-rated made-for-TV movie of all time to that point. Although he wrote only one Star Trek episode, it was an important one. In Matheson’s “The Enemy Within,” a transporter malfunction accidentally creates two Captain Kirks, one pensive and compassionate, the other impulsive and violent. The fifth episode broadcast, “The Enemy Within” was the first Trek story to explore the inner life of Captain Kirk. It also defined the working rapport of the Kirk, Spock, and McCoy team. For this episode, Matheson created Dr. McCoy’s signature line, “He’s dead, Jim.” Future screenwriters would adhere to the framework Matheson established here. Matheson remains active, and his stories are still frequently adapted for the screen. The 2009 film The Box was based on Matheson’s tale “Button, Button.” In 2010, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.