If someone handed you a motion picture script about a young man
who becomes first a heroic airline pilot, then a high-ranking
policeman, then a television writer, and then creates the most
popular TV series in history ... you'd probably find it
difficult to believe that such a man could exist. And yet all
these things are part of the life of Gene Roddenberry.
Roddenberry believes in the potential of the human race to rise
above its aggressive, prejudicial tendencies. He believes that
some day all the people of the Earth will take constructive
delight in their differences. Because of this man and his
beliefs we have STAR TREK. If anyone else had created the
concept, it would bear little resemblance to the phenomenon that
we know and love so well.
When I arrived in Los Angeles to conduct my interviews for this
book, Gene was in the midst of the many intricate creative
challenges of the first week's production of STAR TREK -- THE
NEXT GENERATION. Thousands of details had to be attended to,
meetings held and rewrites done very quickly. Yet when I saw him
walking back to his office on the Paramount lot he stopped,
smiled, and confirmed that he would find the time to meet with
me.
I don't know how he did it, but Roddenberry did find the time. I
spoke with him in his office, a room decorated with memorabilia
including the framed original artwork of "The Cage" videotape
package, presented to him after the 100,000th sale of that
Paramount Home Video cassette.
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AA -- You created STAR TREK, and your name is known all over the world. How does it feel?
GR -- I feel, as I wake up every morning, "I hope today isn't the day they find me out." I have no feeling of having it "made." My life, I believe, is a life of education and growth, and I desperately hope I have not, and will not, reach a point and say, "Okay, I finally got it," because that will stop the education and growth. I'm still on reading programs, studying programs. I still take 16 or 17 publications a month, so I'm sorry if people think I've got it made. I know different.
AA -- When I was researching your background, I learned that you may actually have been offered the post of police chief of Los Angeles, but that you turned it down.
GR -- When I was a police officer, [William] Parker, who was then the Chief of Police, and whom I worked with very closely and personally, wanted me to stay on and become that, but I wasn't offered the job ... a lot of executives put their eye on certain young men and want to guide them to a position, but what I wanted to be was what I turned out to be...
AA -- STAR TREK is also a household word all over the world, and now it has even been shown in the Soviet Union.
GR -- Yes, I think that's fun.
AA -- Do you have any hopes of STAR TREK actually doing what it depicts for the future, of its being an instrument to draw mankind together?
GR -- First of all, I have no belief that STAR TREK depicts the actual future. It depicts us, now, things we need to understand about that. But I hope that STAR TREK will encourage other artists and other writers to work in this area. I think that drama is a powerful force we still do not use very well, especially in television. I understand, of course, that we're going to have programs that are frothy and fun. I liked THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES. I think the ancient American legends of the country boys who outsmart the city slickers are great fun. Mark Twain liked them, too. I don't ask that every program on the air be an exercise in reality, but I would like to see other shows do more, to talk about what we are, where we should be going, and what we lack. It troubles me that there are no programs on television, at least none I've seen, that point out that the world is opearting in a very primitive way on the basis of hate. Our own president hates the Commies, and he and his henchmen believe that therefore everything they do to defeat the Commies, whether it's illegal or not, is justified because of their hate. The Ayatollah feels the same way, and in Northern Ireland both sides feel the same way, and in India the same things are happening. If we are ever to turn the corner away from that, we need our artists and poets and entertainers pointing it out.
AA -- You wrote one of the first definitive studies on the narcotics problem in Los Angeles for Chief Parker. Do you think that any progress has been made, or are they even going along the right channels?
GR -- No, they're not going on the right channels. You cannot stop people from having something they need badly by declaring it illegal. We could not stop alcohol that way in the days of THE UNTOUCHABLES. No, they haven't approached drugs at all the right way. I'm upset, for example, that the MIAMI VICEs of the world look at drug offenders the same way we looked at insane people three hundred years ago. The thing to do is to put them in a cage, punish them. The truth is that drugs actually represent something that's very wrong in our society. I submit it is frightening that when a person reaches adulthood or adolescence they need some sort of help to make life happy. What emotional things are we doing to those people who need a substance to get by? We should be examining that, not the criminal aspect of drugs. It may be that unless our world becomes more perfect some people are always going to need mood changers. It is ... the nature of the beast in our society at present, but we go at it improperly. We go at it blind ... [In regard to] terrorists, many people accept that it was quite all right when the Jews bombed the King David Hotel when the British held it, and some 80-odd people were destroyed, but that's okay, because they were fighting for their rights. Yet when a Moslem bombs someone in Beirut he's a terrorist, a madman. I think we've got to accept that the Moslem has something he believes in, too. Right or wrong, he does it out of some strong belief.
AA -- But both parties are wrong in resorting to violence.
GR -- Yes, of course they are ... But there are just dozens of such things that artists, playwrights, poets, television writers and movie writers should be addressing through their particular type of communication. So my hope for STAR TREK is that it encourages that in television. I don't think STAR TREK itself is going to create great changes.
AA -- Can you recall the first thing you thought about when you conceived STAR TREK?
GR -- I guess it was the thought that under the terrible restrictions of television it might be a way I could infiltrate my ideas, and that's what it's been all the time. You see, it's difficult for people to understand that even in the barren vineyards of television you might do these things. Actually, you can do them better there because you reach more people with more impact. You don't do it by each of your episodes being a fine HALLMARK HALL OF FAME, or those great shows that are meaningful and deep and advertised as such. The power you have is in a show like STAR TREK, which is considered by many people to be a frothy little action-adventure -- unimportant, unbelievable, and yet watched by a lot of people. You just slip ideas into it. I've been very much heartened by the fact that some key people like the Smithsonian Institute take a look at STAR TREK, and they understand. They don't expect it to be more than it is, because what it is is a lot. Other shows can be the same thing. We do love America to be turning out things that are deep and meaningful and sending people staggering out of the theater and away from the television set, but those are special-occasion-type shows. What you need is for the small mills of television drama to do these things.
AA -- Samuel Peeples remembered that when you initially began to research science fiction literature, you were very curious about Olaf Stapledon's writings.
GR -- I still am. As a matter of fact, on my nightstand at this time there's some Olaf Stapledon material I'm rereading, although I think the type of thing he did, the traveler through space and imagination and so on, really doesn't work for mass-audience weekly shows. You've got to put the ideas he talks about into the heads of more ordinary characters, who merely fly a starship that goes places faster than the speed of light.
AA -- Mr. Peeples also remembers one stage of Mr. Spock's evolution, when all you were sure of was that he was an alien, and that he had a metal plate in his stomach through which he consumed energy to sustain himself. Do you recall this early formative time for Spock?
GR -- Vaguely, yes. Series are a process of refining ideas. I'd like to say that all the ideas that I get are bright and eternal and right for the time, but they're not. You do evolve things.
AA -- You once told me that you had an early thought about casting a black man as "Mr. Spock." Was your aim in creating Spock to make someone who was different to some extent, looking at the rest of the series' personnel as an outsider?
GR -- Yes, very difinitely. I was also considering Michael Dunn, a dwarf [best known for his appearances as "Dr. Lovelace" in THE WILD, WILD WEST]. I wanted Spock to look different and be different, and yes, to make a statement about being an outsider looking in. I did finally pick the way we went because I was dealing in weekly mass-audience television, and I needed Spock to be attractive even though he was different. I'm afraid Michael Dunn might not have been, and 22 years ago a black man might not have been. It was the right choice for the time.
AA -- TV Guide once ran a short blurb about Martin Landau's being considered for the role of Mr. Spock.
GR -- Yes, but he was unavailable for it; he was a fairly well-known actor who was getting plenty of jobs. Leonard Nimoy was my first choice. Landau, I know, was my second choice, but Leonard agreed and we stayed with him.
AA -- Were there any other second choices?
GR -- Well, as I said ... Michael Dunn, who was a marvelous actor, and there may have been others whose names I don't remember. Dunn was a serious second choice because of his being a dwarf. That seemed certainly to put the stamp of being from another place on it, but as I said I was also dealing in a mass audience, and Spock had to have an attractive look then.
AA -- How was Jeffrey Hunter chosen for the lead in the first pilot? Was there anyone else who was under consideration?
GR -- Oh, yes. I remember Lloyd Bridges was very much under consideration, except when I approached him with it he said, "Gene, I like you, I've worked with you before in the past, but I've seen science fiction and I don't want to be within a hundred miles of it..." I understood what he meant then. I tried to convince him that I could do it differently, but at the time I wasn't that sure that I would treat it differently. I wasn't sure I could manage it.
AA -- So this was before "The Cage" was written?
GR -- Uh, huh.
AA -- Was anyone else considered? You mentioned James Cobern during one conversation.
GR -- My wife suggested him for the Captain. I said to her something I've heard over and over for many years since, "No sex appeal." That was a monster of a goof, and I came to realize, though, that there just weren't a lot of actors who would do it. I was talking about what was in many people's eyes a silly show. Leonard, for example, when they were [first] trying ears on him for Spock, tried to get out of it.
AA -- You mean he tried to get out of doing the show, period?
GR -- Yes, or he just tried to get out of wearing ears, anyway. It was just very difficult to cast.
AA -- Did he make his fears known at the time? Was he afraid that people would not be able to take his character seriously?
GR -- As we tried them on and began doing camera tests, the crew began chuckling and calling him "jackrabbit," and so on, and he finally started to get a little upset, because he could see [the audience] laughing too, perhaps.
AA -- I've also seen surviving frames of a black and white test of Majel [Barrett]. Her eyebrows are pointed upward, and her complexion is dark.
GR -- I used Majel for a lot of tests, including the green skin we finally put on Susan Oliver. But she was a close friend and available; [it was] just a case of having a body to paint, and seeing what it would look like.
AA -- I think that framed painting on the wall of your office honoring the first 100,000 videocassettes of "The Cage" sold, proves how the film is thought of today. How did you feel when NBC rejected it?
GR -- I sort of understood. I wrote and produced what I thought was a highly imaginative idea, and I realized I had gone too far. I should actually have ended it with a fistfight between the hero and the villain if I wanted it on television, and so when we did the second pilot, as a matter of fact we did end with such a fistfight. But at least we slipped it by and it got on the air, and when once on the air we began to infiltrate, but it was a good pilot, anyway. It's just that we had to put these things into it because that's the way shows were being made at the time. The great mass audience would say, "Well, if you don't have a fistfight when it's ended, how do we know that's the finish?", and things like that.
AA -- I guess Oscar Katz [Desilu executive while both pilots were being made] liked them both.
GR -- Oscar Katz liked it.
AA -- Did he sell the show to the network?
GR -- He was the one who decided that Desilu would make it, and to get a network to cooperate.
AA -- I know that you had some disappointing negotiations with CBS. I once heard that there was a time when you were considering selling STAR TREK but not doing it as a line producer, and somebody had approached Irwin Allen to do it. Is that true?
GR -- I don't know that story. It may have been, because I don't necessarily know everything that heppens in these things. Generally, I was in favor of producing it ... at least giving it a shot.
AA -- Did Jeffrey Hunter want to continue as the Captain when "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was being prepared for production?
GR -- His wife of the time didn't want him to, and convinced him that science fiction was beneath him, and so I just had to pick someone else. Shatner was available, he needed a show, was open-minded about science fiction, and a marvelous choice because he did great things for our show.
AA -- After Jeffrey Hunter became unavailable, did you ever give any thought to anyone other than William Shatner?
GR -- No. I was happy to get him. I'd seen some work he did, and I thought he was an excellent choice, no question of it at all.
AA -- And the studio and the network went along with your feeling?
GR -- The studio was then Desilu, of course. Yes.
AA -- From the beginning, STAR TREK had excellent people -- film editors, composers, etc. How did you assemble your production staff?
GR -- I realize that we had an impossible production job, and a lot of the people we chose were assistant department heads who wanted a chance at the top. Matt Jefferies, for instance, was a draftsman, not an art director, and we had to cover for him until he got his ticket. We also did similar things in a lot of other areas: set decorators, editors. Our people turned out to be good because we looked for young, bright, malleable people, but they did not necessarily come to us with long shining reputations. I figured older people who were solid in their trade worked at a certain pace, and it might be difficult to change that pace. However, I knew that we would get more creativity and work and imagination out of assistants, because it would have been their only big chance, and indeed it turned out like that. It's easy to look back now and say, "Oh, well, of course you had a proven crew." No. We had some names and recommendations, but it was far from being a proven crew. It became a proven crew because of the way I think we operated. We gave credit to people when they did good work, and cheered, and we very quickly created a family feeling for STAR TREK.
AA -- When was the first time you realized that there were a lot of STAR TREK fans out there? How did you feel?
GR -- ...the first science fiction convention that I took our STAR TREK pilots to.
AA -- Tricon [the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention], in Cleveland? I was there.
GR -- Yes, Tricon. That was it. I was nervous, particularly when I saw them watching other films that were shown before, and booing, and stomping, and laughing at things. I walked out thinking, "They're finally going to show this one." There was a rather loud gentleman surrounded by other people, discussing something at the time my show was starting, and upset already, I turned on him: "For (Pete's) sake, could you be quite? My show is on now." And Isaac Asimov said, "Yes, you're pefectly right. We will tone it down." And someone said, "You're dead, you just insulted Issac Asimov." Well, it turned out that I had not, and over the years we became fast friends. He understood. Then I watched how they accepted this show. I said to myself, "Yes, there are people, if we go this way and try these things, who are going to appreciate them." I realized then that we would have fans of some sort and, of course, where that went is insanity. Who expects to have millions of fans? At that time I realized that we'd reached some people. I didn't think it would be anything like it was, but I did realize at that time if I did the show I would be approached by people now and then who would say, "I saw the thing you did years ago, and I liked it." That's enough.
AA -- I recall that "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was the first of your films shown, right after THE TIME TUNNEL pilot, which was the film that was being booed and hissed, except for Michael Rennie's performance.
GR -- Yes.
AA -- People were murmering throughout the showing, "did he say this was for television?" After it ended, I remember there was a moment of silence.
GR -- I didn't know how people were going to react. I think I finally got to my feet and said, "Is anybody going to say whether they liked it or not," and it was only afterward that the applause began. I remember calling up the studio and saying, "I really think we may have something here," and the studio's reaction was, "Well, so a thousand gods who go to a science fiction convention like it? That means nothing in television." And they were almost right, because we did get low ratings.
AA -- If you were doing the original STAR TREK series now, would you do anything differently from the way you originally did it?
GR -- Oh, of course there are literally hundreds of things I would have done differently with the luxury of hindsight, but I'm quite pleased, given the time, the place, the problems we faced, our own lack of knowledge at that time, because we've grown since then, that we did as well as you can reasonable expect. We made lots of mistakes, but obviously we did enough things right that it worked despite the mistakes.
AA -- Why didn't NBC see that?
GR -- Because network executives, who are hired on the basis of being businessmen, are not creative artists and they did not see those things then, nor do they today. With few exceptions, networks are more interested in the show that represents an established, familiar pattern, and what age group does it play to, and lots of things that are nonsense. If something seems too risky, they don't want it. They are by nature conservative, and I point out to you, as many people now know, that every show that'e ever been a hit came near to being canceled in its first season. "Archie Bunker." Oh, my God, they hated that because it was so different...
AA -- That series, ALL IN THE FAMILY, also had more than one pilot, I understand.
GR -- Yes. Going all the way back to GUNSMOKE. That was almost thrown out. Dick Van Dyke's first show was at one time canceled, and brought back. So, it's no wonder that STAR TREK, with spaceships and pointy-eared hobgoblins and so on, was close to cancellation.
AA -- Why did you step down as line producer halfway through the first season?
GR -- Because it is just impossible for one person to produce, write, and look over a show so extraordinarily complex as STAR TREK. Really, what I became during the first half of the first year was a full-time script rewriter, and you just cannot do that and in addition fulfill all producer functions. Becoming executive producer really meant becoming full-time story and script rewriter. Bob Justman was really in charge of the physical side of production. It is impossible to do a science fiction show like STAR TREK, but we managed to do it despite that fact.
AA -- Why do you think no other show has come close to duplicating what STAR TREK accomplished?
GR -- I think because caring that much about what you do, as most people realize, is an invitation to disaster or tragedy, and they're not willing to do it when you can make a very good living, and in fact you can get much richer, by just doing an ordinary show well. My own attorneys and advisers used to say to me, "Gene, why don't you write a detective, or a police show, or something like that. You are good at writing, you are good at putting in action, excitement, movement, pace, adventure, and forget about really changing the world and talking about things that upset people, because if you just do an ordinary show you can do it eight hours a week, you can make millions of dollars if you do it well, and forget this STAR TREK type stuff."
AA -- What did you answer?
GR -- I said, "I'd love to , but if I took on another show, I know my perverse nature. I would start writing extras into it, and whatever it started off as, it would eventually become a very difficult kind of show, and I'd be right back where I'd started, except I'd be doing it in modern day, or ancient day, rather than in the future."
AA -- Have you ever felt typecast because of STAR TREK?
GR -- Of course. When I finished doing STAR TREK, I had trouble getting a job. They said, "You're a science fiction type." I said, "Hey, wait a minute, I used to write westerns, I wrote police stories," and they said, "No, you're now science fiction." I don't feel bitter about that. That's the way Hollywood is, and that's the way mediocre people think. It's an easy way to think and television, like movies, like plays, like everything in the world, is staffed by mediocre people with, thank God, a few other extra people who do make things happen. They make the big changes. I never doubted that I wouldn't do reasonably well in television, because all I had to do was keep writing, and rewriting, and rewriting, and eventually I could at least turn out something a little better than average.
AA -- Why hasn't Paramount Home Video issued either POLICE STORY or THE LONG HUNT OF APRIL SAVAGE, the other pilots you did at about the same time as "Where No Man Has Gone Before"?
GR -- I don't know that they feel anything about those shows would be particularly attractive to the buying audience. STAR TREK is, of course, broadly known, and I think just because a show was written and produced by Gene Roddenberry it would not necessarily have enough audience attraction unless it was promoted. But I think without doubt that if Paramount acquired The Questor Tapes, which Universal owns, and promoted it for what it was, which many people call the definitive android show, that it might do pretty well.
AA -- Do you have anything you've always wanted to say to the fans of STAR TREK but have never said?
GR -- Just the same thing as always: "Thank you."