Harlan Ellison: Writer On the Edge of Forever - Part Two

By: Edward Gross
Date: Monday, March 20, 2000

In part one of our interview with Harlan Ellison, the author described the frustration he encountered while writing 'City on the Edge of Forever' for the original STAR TREK series. In this second and final installment he describes the genesis of the story and relates an idea for a proposed follow-up, intended to be an episode of THE NEXT GENERATION, that never happened.

FANDOM: PUTTING ASIDE EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED WITH THAT SCRIPT, WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM INITIALLY?
Harlan Ellison: Very simple where it came from. I work in peculiar ways, and my mind works in peculiar ways. Very often a story will grow out of not even an idea; it will grow out of a color, a juxtaposition of surfaces. The idea of 'City' came from the image of the City on the Edge of Forever, and it was an image of two cities, which is what it says in the script. The city on the edge of forever is the city on this planet. It was not a big donut in my script; it was a city. That was a city that was on the edge of time, and it was where all of the winds of time met. That was my original idea. All the winds of time coalesce, and when you go through to the other side, here is this other city which is also on the edge of forever, which is New York City during the depression. It's the mirror image of each other. In that time, all I was concerned about was telling a love story, which I made the point that there are some loves that are so great that you would sacrifice your ship, your crew, your friends, your mother, all of time and everything in defense of this great love. That's what the story was all about. All of the additional crap that Gene kept trying to get me to put in, kept taking away from that. The script does not end the way the episode does. Kirk goes for her to save her. At the final moment, by his actions, he says, 'Fuck it, I don't care what happens to the ship, the future and everything else. I can't let her die, I love her,' and he starts for her. Spock, who is cold and logical, grabs him and holds him back and she's hit by the truck. The TV ending, where he closes his eyes and lets her get hit by the truck is absolutely bullshit. It destroys the core of what I tried to do. It destroyed the art; it destroyed the drama, it destroyed the extra human tragedy of it and it also dulls the meaning of the last scene in which Spock talks to him and calls him Jim for the first time.

Here's an anecdote that has never been published: I had been asked to write a NEXT GENERATION, so Jeri Taylor was a friend of Kathryn Drenna, who's married to Joe Straczynsky, and she was an intern at STAR TREK. She suggested me and I talked to Michael Piller. I called him up and Jeri had set this thing up. I wasn't really interested in going anywhere near STAR TREK, but if I could find something to do I would be interested. The idea was, BACK TO THE FUTURE II uses BACK TO THE FUTURE, except you see it from a different angle. Using the original 'City on the Edge of Forever', you have the people from NEXT GENERATION going back to the same time, because what was changed was okay for their time when they did it, but 200 years later during the Next Generation, or whenever it was, the changes have been disastrous and they have to set things back the way they were. Edith Keeler's got to be left alive. Everybody who was alive in that show is still alive, but you didn't have to have any of the original characters. All you had to use was pre-existing footage. Put it in the background and put your characters from the new show acting and doing what they have to do, so what looks like her being killed, for instance, isn't.

I said, 'What a great idea.' I did up a small treatment, a page or two, and here's what Piller said: 'Dear Harlan, it is a splendid script, you don't have to be told that. It is a rare pleasure to read writing like this, but I just can't get behind the notion of revisiting the story with TNG. Even though there are elements that never made it to the original show, the episode is held so dear to fans that I think it would be a mistake to tamper with it. It would seem like we were trying to do the original recipe one better. It could also be interpreted as a slap to Gene. I would be delighted to get you in here to do an original premise if you have something else you would like to do. Most cordially, Michael.' In fact, what he said to me over the phone was, 'We don't want to do this kind of thing, because we just had Leonard Nimoy do a guest shot; we don't want to do too many of them.' In fact, the telling line there is it would seem like a slap to Gene, who was still alive at the time.
If this had been the only thing I had ever done, I can understand what they're saying. Like if I had written maybe 10 episodes of THE DUKES OF HAZZARD or THE BRADY BUNCH and I was a fairly undistinguished TV hack or something like that, and here's this one outstanding thing, then you would say, 'Yeah, it really doesn't fit the pattern.' But in fact, I have written A BOY AND HIS DOG, DEMON WITH THE GLASS HAND, SOLDIER--all of this other stuff which performs at a level of art and expertise that is paralleled by 'City on the Edge of Forever', yet here are all of these people....Gene Coon is not distinguished for any great writing; Bobby Justman isn't distinguished by any writing at all; Roddenberry at his very best was only a hack and all of a sudden they are the ones that are capable of this great and lasting piece of art.

WHAT'S TRULY AMAZING IS THAT GIVEN YOUR INVOLVEMENT IN THE FIRST LETTER-WRITING CAMPAIGN TO SAVE THE SERIES, THERE WAS A TIME WHEN YOU WERE OPTIMISTIC ABOUT THE SHOW.

I was very optimistic. As I said in my introduction, I was vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and I was the one who set up the West Coast banquet. I showed the pilot, the first time it was shown to the science fiction community, and I said, 'This is our chance to get good science fiction on the tube. It's being run by people who seem to know what they're doing and they want us.' That was how Roddenberry came to hire Ted Sturgeon and the others, because of my intercession. Everybody else takes credit for it. All of these people were friends of mine, and I got them to go in on the show. Later when Gene said most of the people he wouldn't want in the same room with him, I said, 'You fucking ingrate.' I was very optimistic about it, but within a couple of years that changed and everybody was laughing at me. When these people said, 'STAR TREK is going to be the new horizon for us; we're going to sell more science fiction than ever before, and it's going to be the golden age,' I said, 'No it's not, you fools. You're not going to sell one more of your novels. What they're going to sell are STAR TREK books,' and this was before there was ever a STAR TREK novel. Everybody looked at me and laughed and told me not to be ridiculous. Well, there it is: STAR TREK books and that idiom, that space opera crap, has pushed everything off the best seller list. I don't like being right, but it was obvious to me that that's the way things were going to go.

I GUESS YOU SEE IT AS A SHOW THAT NEVER MET ITS POTENTIAL?

I have a fairly pragmatic view of these things. I hope I do. I look at a show in which Gene's idea of explaining racial prejudice is painting people half-black and half-white. That's real childish shit. Most of the shows were childish shit.
This was a series that had the potential of being truly great. Like, what are truly great series? THE PRISONER? MY WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT? HILL STREET BLUES? There are few series that really transcend the medium. All the rest of it was just television. That's what, to me, STAR TREK was mostly, just television. One week it might be good, next week might be bad, but they operated off the kind of philosophy that exists in the television industry, which is, 'Our character wouldn't act like that,' meaning that there is utter inflexibility. That's the death of drama. It's bad enough that you have the rigors of a weekly series where the characters have to reappear every week--you can't kill anyone--but people don't act that way; they don't act in a uniform way. They act bizarrely; that's why they're people for Christ's' sakes.

HAVE YOU CHECKED OUT THE SPIN-OFFS AT ALL?

For me, the experience was so saddening, I've never even watched 'City on the Edge of Forever', except when it first aired. I've never seen it again. I have a videocassette of it in my files. It was so painful I couldn't watch it. It was like after I had a fight with Frank Sinatra, I couldn't enjoy his music anymore, which is the saddest part of it. The same for STAR TREK, I just could not enjoy it anymore.

YOU HAVE THIS REPUTATION OF BEING THE ANGRY MAN, AND THIS BOOK DOESN'T REALLY HELP THAT IMPRESSION. HOW DO YOU SEE YOURSELF?

I will tell you one of the pivotal experience of my life that delineates me. This is how I see myself. When I was a little boy during World War II, my mother, who had an asthmatic condition--I was never really sure what it was--and I went on the train from Ohio to Miami Beach. She had to be where it was warm; this was winter. We're talking 1941, maybe 1942. I became friends with all of the airmen who were training down there. They would be training on the beach. They had their obstacle course on the beach, and they would run it. I was a little kid, just a very small kid, and I loved to run their course with them and they took me on as their mascot. One day they said, 'Listen, they're showing a movie to us in the park, if you can get your mother to let you out tonight, come and see the movie with us.' I said, 'Okay, I will.' Of course, my mother wouldn't let me out because I was maybe seven or eight years old and very small, but I pried loose the screen on the fourth or fifth floor window of the hotel we were staying in in Miami Beach...we were not wealthy or anything. These were the days when it didn't cost alot. Outside the window was a huge palm tree that was curved. I threw myself off the ledge of the window, grabbed the trunk of the tree and slid down the tree in my Dr. Denton's with the bomb bay door and went running off to the park where three or four hundred airmen were sitting on the ground. A huge sheet had been stretched between two palm trees and they were showing MARK OF ZORRO, with Tyrone Power.
It was such a magical setting. Here I was this little kid who just adored airplanes and adored flyers. It was a night of incredible magic for me, and I sat there and watched THE MARK OF ZORRO, and the point of THE MARK OF ZORRO is that the downtrodden and those who are defenseless need to be defended; need to be protected from those who would attack them and lie to them and make slaves of them. It made an enormous impression on me, and the image of Zorro, the righter of social wrongs, was imbedded in me at that age. When someone says why are you the way you are, why are you so angry, it's because I have a conscience. I don't like waking up angry every morning and going to bed angrier every night. I would much rather be like most of the fucking drones in the universe who just say, 'It's not my job; I don't want to get involved,' which makes me want to take an uzi and shoot them dead. Most people are like that. Most people won't stick out their neck. As a consequence, I have an enormous number of enemies, because whenever you take a stand for something, it means you're going to gore somebody's ox and they're going to come after you. That's the way I see myself. I once said to somebody that my icon was Jiminy Crickett, because Jiminy Crickett was the manifestation of conscience, he's friendship, he's steadfastness, he's fidelity, and these are the qualities I most honor and revere in people. I don't care if people fuck chickens, but I do respect courage, personal integrity and ethics. That's how I try to live my life. This means that if I see something that seems to be an injustice, I speak out against it. I realize that's a very pompous sounding attitude, but I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do about it. That's the way I feel.