Harlan Ellison: Writer on the Edge of Forever

The author on wrestling with Gene Roddenberry over one of Star Trek's most-loved episodes.

By Edward Gross     March 13, 2000

A couple of years ago, Harlan Ellison was preparing to finally tell his side of the 'City on the Edge of Forever' story, to set the record straight about his involvement with STAR TREK and his working 'relationship' with series creator Gene Roddenberry. While his full story is told in the pages of his book on the making of the script, prior to its release we sat down to discuss the project. Needless to say, Harlan had plenty to offer....

HARLAN ELLISON: I wrote an 18,000 word introduction to the book where throughout I refer to Roddenberry as the Great Pretender, El Supremo, and an outright naked liar, and [say] that after 30 years I was sick and tired of this bullshit of him telling people how expensive this script was and how it couldn't be shot, when in fact I had letters from him proving that that was not the case. Two weeks after the show aired, I have a letter from Gene Roddenberry that said the show went $6,000 over budget. Six thousand dollars. By 1988 when he was speaking at the Museum of Television in New York, he said that my script was $360,000 over. All of this in photographed evidence is in the introduction.

In his book [STAR TREK MEMORIES], William Shatner said that Gene prevailed upon Bill to come up here. Actually, it was Bill Shatner who was the cause of all my problems to begin with. When he came up here, the most significant thing he did was manage to lay down his motorcycle on his leg and limp in like a cripple.

The book was announced four years ago, and I went at it very reluctantly and slowly. I was halfway through the introduction when Roddenberry croaked. Even in death he was fucking me up, and I had to go back and start all over again. The book just got finished, and it's an incredible book. There are all these wonderful afterwords by Leonard Nimoy, Walter Koenig, De Kelley, George Takei, Dorothy Fontana, Peter David, Melinda Snodgrass. My publisher said, 'Don't you think we should approach Shatner for an afterword?' and I said, 'Don't be fucking ridiculous. I hate Shatner; I wouldn't want his goddamn afterword in the book, besides which he wouldn't give it to us; besides he doesn't write.' But he went off on his own and got this astonishing quote. There's a big yellow banner on the back cover. Don't forget that I'm 61 years old. It says, 'Harlan Ellison is a surly young man who continues to say terrible things about me while I think he's absolutely wonderful, and 'The City on the Edge of Forever' is the best show we ever shot.' My wife said, 'See how gracious he can be?' I said, 'Jesus Christ, has he taken you in, too? This is called stealing the thunder.'

The book contains the long introduction, the original treatment, two complete treatments prior to the script, the complete first draft script, and it then has that section of the second draft in which I have Bones being the one who goes mad. He never told anybody that. The complaint at the time wasn't, 'Oh, gee, we don't want anybody selling drugs.' The complaint at the time was, 'Look we've got all these actors we're paying a lot of money to; can't we rework the plot so that it isn't Beckworth and LeBeck, these two guest stars, and we can use someone on the ship?' They said, 'How about if Bones injects himself with this medicine?' I said, 'What are you, crazy? The guy's supposed to be a proficient surgeon; he's going to inject himself with his own goddamned hypodermic? Why would you want to make him look like a schmuck?' They said, 'I guess that's right,' so I wrote a draft in which they are examining an alien creature, a little furry alien creature, little beast, and Gene said, 'This will cost money to do' and I said, 'For Christ's sake, you take a puppy dog and put a prosthetic on it and it'll cost you eleven fucking dollars.' That's what Gene meant when he said, 'Harlan said we should all do it with special effects.'

Ted Sturgeon said one of the smartest things to them about the series early on that they never used or made sense of. Ted said, 'No matter how alien you try and make an alien look, it's going to look like a human being in a suit. But if you take a chicken and put a prosthetic on a chicken, look at the way a chicken walksit's alien.' They were not smart enough to say, 'Oh, fuck, that's right.' That's what they meant when they said it was too cerebral. In other words, he was too clever. He was able to figure out ways of doing things that were so clever they couldn't even understand it. That's why Ted was badrapped in that respect, and it was the same thing for me. I gave them a way to do it in standing sets where the doctor would not be a schmuck: They're working over this little beast that they brought in from some planet; they're kind of looking it over and the thing bites him. It takes a little nip out of his hand. It goes through the glove and injects him with this poison, and then he goes nuts.
After that, there's the eight afterwards in which, for the very first time, I learned who rewrote me [NOTE: it was story editor Dorothy Fontana]. [Producer Gene L.] Coon never had a hand in it; he never touched it. There was one rewrite done by Steve Carabatsos, which was awful and I rejected it. I went through the roof and came in, and I did revisions thereafter. I rewrote on that thing for months. When they talk about locking me in a back room, I was not being paid. I came to the studio and set up my typewriter on wooden crates with a board across them in the back room of Bill Theiss' wardrobe room, and I worked all day and all night to the extent that, to get a little air I opened a windowwe were on the ground floorand a studio guard put a gun through the window and thought I was robbing the place. When they say that Harlan could still get outyeah, instead of going down this long hall to the exit, my window was closest to the stage; when I wanted to go to the stage, I would just step over the sill onto the walkway and go to the stage. Nobody locked me in. I was doing this on my own. And the story they tell about Bobby Justman coming into the office and I'm asleep on the flooryou bet your ass I was on the floor. I had been working for 36 hours straight in the back room with nothing to eat, no place to go and nothing to do, and I was exhausted.

QUESTION: THEN THERE WERE THE RUMORS THAT THE SCRIPT WAS LATE, THAT THEY WERE CONSTANTLY TRYING TO GET YOU TO HAND IN THE SCRIPT.

The only reason I didn't have the script done originally on time was that Gene came to me when I already had a bunch of assignments. He said, 'We've got to have this; we're going on the air,' and I loved the idea of the show so much that I took time out from what I was doing to do it. But I had to get back, and everybody was driving me crazy. I had three or four masters trying to monopolize my time. So, yeah, I was late with the script, no argument about it. That still does not validate all of the shit they have said about me over the years.

I wrote like five or six drafts of this script. It was not me who wanted the space pirates [that was in one of the drafts]. It was GeneGenewho demanded it. The network called and said, 'They've got to have the ship is jeopardy every show.' If you look at it, the ship is in jeopardy in almost every show. I said, 'Gene, that's of no interest to anyone. What's of interest is this love story; let me do this at full length.' 'Oh no, no, no,' says Gene. There's a lot of things they were right about. I introduced the love story midway through the second or third act; it should have come in earlier. Absolutely. But with three or four different people telling me what to do and one of them wanting this, one of them wanting that and the network wanting the other thing, and them calling me into meetings every fifteen minutes, I wind up with the space pirates thing. Which is the first thing I cut out. It was the first thing the network cut out, that Gene had suggested. All of this shit is common knowledge if anybody would bother to take a look at it or read any of the stuff that's been published over the last 30 years. But the same rotten myths keep getting repeated. Do you know how many jobs I've lost because of articles like that? When Rush Limbaugh says he's not responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing, that's bullshit. He didn't buy the chemicals and he didn't subvert Timothy McVey, but when you create an atmosphere or an ambiance that is free-floating, it becomes realistic. Urban myths take on a reality. You've probably heard stories about me that you know are true. Hundreds and hundreds of stories that aren't even remotely true, but they keep getting told over and over again until they assume the reality. Every time you reprint this material it just continues it.

The constant lies that Gene told endlessly over and over again, have been repeated so much that I can't get work. You've got to understand something: the kids who grew up to be in the space program were kids who grew up reading comics and science fiction. The kids who work in television are kids who grew up on television. They read all of these magazines; they think Gene Roddenberry was the fucking Great Bird of the Galaxy. They do not know that he was a duplicitous, lying...when you read my introduction, you'll find out he didn't even create the expression 'Wagon Train to the Stars'that was not his.

Majel [Barrett's] bread and butter and Paramount's bread and butter and the whole Trek community's bread and butter is tied up with keeping the myth of Roddenberry alive. So a little putz like David Alexander is really amusing. He went to court to be named the official biographer of Gene Roddenberry. He sued to be named the official biographer so no one else could write a biography. Majel went out of her way to send letters around to everybody saying, 'Do not talk to Joel Engel,' and Joel Engel [another Roddenberry biographer] is the guy who did the Rod Serling book. He was an investigative journalist. My God, every single step of Roddenberry's life was a lie. When Sam Rolfe heard that Roddenberry had said he had created Have Gun Will Travel, Sam went through the fucking roof. Roddenberry is an icon. Out here shadow is more important than reality. Two days ago, Larry Brodywho is the creator of the MIKE HAMMER show, the producer of BARETTAgot an Emmy for POLICE STORY. We did a pilot together called THE DARK FORCES, a pilot script. He took it to sell to somebody in town and the guy said, 'We love the pilot,' and the first question he asked was, 'Is Harlan going to be involved in this?' Larry said, 'No, I think Harlan just wants to sit back and take the money.' 'Good, because he's crazy, you know, and he never hands in his script.'
I'm in my sixties. There's already an age thing in this town, where if you're over the age of 20 they figure you don't know how to write a PORKY'S movie. It's very hard...I'm lucky. I've been around for 40 years, but I'm able to keep some kind of a presence in the field. But in an age when illiteracy and cultural ignorance is rampant, where for a kid nostalgia is what he had for breakfast, it is increasingly hard. You ask them about even Robert Heinlein, and most of them don't know who he is. I just had 31 of my books bought by White Wolf to be reissued. I'm in Chicago having dinner with them at the ABA. There's eight of them all of them in their 20s, and I'm talking to them about my comic book and talking about an idea I have for the cover of a comic. I said, 'Picture Ronald Coleman climbing back to Shangri-La; here's the wind blowing the snow from the left, and he looks off to the summit, and at the top he sees McDonald's arches.' I thought that was real funny, but when I looked up at them around the table they didn't have a clue as to who Ronald Coleman was, what Shangri-La was. I said, 'LOST HORIZON? The book? The movie?' Nothing. They have no knowledge of anything. Anybody who hasn't published anything in the last ten years is unknown to them.

I just keep on publishing; I just keep hanging on in there like a turtle, because you don't you wind up the way Roger Zelazny was, damn near broke and having to do share-cropper novels. It's really a tough gig, and when you can't get work because people believe this 30-year long ingrained myth that you are irresponsible and can't hand in a script, when in fact I've handed in fifty fucking scripts on time, almost all of which have won awards of one kind or another, it gets very difficult. You know, Richard Kimble may have had parking tickets and spat on the sidewalk, but he was in fact innocent of murdering his old lady.

One of the myths was Roddenberry telling people that my script had his Scotty selling drugs. When you read the script, not only is Scotty not dealing drugsScotty doesn't even appear in the script. Not even one scene. Not even a reference. Yet I supposedly had him dealing drugs, and it would have cost $200,000 more than Roddenberry would have had for an episode. Roddenberry said that stuff about Scotty for 20 years, and we spoke many times about it. Everytime he would do it, somebody would come back from a Star Trek convention and they would say that Roddenberry said it again, so I would call him and say, 'Gene, when the fuck are you going to stop doing this to me?' and he would say, 'Oh, I forgot.' 'No, Gene, you don't forget. Don't pretend that you don't remember; you remember very god damn well.' He did it on purpose. He continued to do it. I point out that one of his major flaws was that he was incapable of assuming blame. As Joel Engel has pointed out in his book, which I have totally forgotten, he continues to blame NBC for the show going off the air and how they were trying to undercut him all the time. In fact, NBC was a big booster of the showthey kept the fucking thing on the air for three years with shitty ratings.

I wind up babbling like a lunatic about this stuff.... He said I wouldn't do any of the rewrites; I am holding in my hand from the Gene Roddenberry collection at the UCLA inventor item 062, an inventory of the script material on 'City on the Edge of Forever' and it shows the first treatment 3/21/66, 5/1/6, 5/13/66; first draft teleplay 1/27/67, revised final draft teleplay 8/12/66, and all kinds of different drafts. You know how many times I rewrote this thing? Everytime I would rewrite it, he would have overspent on another show and the budget would vanish for subsequent shows. A personal and confidential letter dated 21st June 1967, Desilu Productions, says, 'Dear Harlan, despite the cuts in sets and cast, the final budget figures for 'City' were close to $267,000, or about $56,000 over our show budget of $191,000.' But in the previous thing he said he had $186,000. 'We might have made it for around $20,000 less if I had not insisted on quality in casting, set construction, special effects and so on. The point of this is that despite enormous criticism from studio businessmen, I would not have done it any differently.' But in a letter I have from him about two weeks after the show was aired, he said the show cost $267,000. There is no documentation in the archives to substantiate it. In the first year, according to the documents that do exist, no episode cost much more than $192,000. As you will see in Herb Solow's memo, the approved budget was $185,000. The only budget document that I could find was Coon's 'Devil in the Dark,' which ran a month before 'City' and its projected cost, according to the document, was $187,057. It came in at $192,863. You could see that as they were getting toward producing my show, they overspent on their budgets so much that they had to keep stealing from my show.