Early career:
Roddenberry was promoted to head writer for The West Point Story, and wrote ten scripts for the first season, about a third of the total episodes.While working for Ziv, he pitched a series to CBS set on board a cruise ship, but they did not buy it as he wanted to become a producer and have full creative control. He wrote another script for Ziv’s series “Harbourmaster” titled “Coastal Security”, and signed a contract with the company to develop a show called Junior Executive with Quinn Martin. Nothing came of the series.
Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy (pictured) first worked together on The Lieutenant.
He wrote scripts for a number of other series in his early years as a professional writer including Bat Masterson and Jefferson Drum.Roddenberry’s episode of the series Have Gun – Will Travel, “Helen of Abajinan”, won the Writer’s Guild of America award for Best Teleplay in 1958.He also continued to create series of his own, including a series based on an agent for Lloyd’s of London called The Man from Lloyds. He pitched a police-based series called Footbeat to CBS, Hollis Productions and Screen Gems. It nearly made it into ABC’s Sunday-night line-up but they opted to show only western genre series that night.
Roddenberry was asked to write a series called Riverboat, set in 1860s Mississippi. When he discovered that the producers wanted no black people on the show, he argued so much with them that he lost the job.He was also considered moving to England around this time, as Sir Lew Grade of Associated Television wanted Roddenberry to develop series and set up his own production company.Though he did not move, he leveraged the deal to land a contract with Screen Gems that included a guaranteed $100,000, and became a producer for the first time on a summer replacement for the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show titled The Wrangler.
Screen Gems backed Roddenberry’s first attempt at creating a pilot. His series, The Wild Blue, went to pilot but was not picked up. The three main characters had names that would later appear in the Star Trek franchise: Philip Pike, Edward Jellicoe, and James T. Irvine.While working at Screen Gems an actress, new to Hollywood, wrote to him asking for a meeting. They quickly became friends and would meet every few months; the woman was Majel Leigh Hudec, later known as Majel Barrett.He created a second pilot called 333 Montgomery about a lawyer, played by DeForest Kelley.It was not picked up by the network, but was later re-written as a new series called Defiance County. His career with Screen Gems ended in late 1961 and shortly afterward he had issues with his old friend Erle Stanley Gardner. The Perry Mason creator claimed that Defiance County had infringed his character Doug Selby.The two writers fell out via correspondence and stopped contacting one another, even though Defiance County never proceeded past the pilot stage.
Gene Roddenberry appearing in an advertisement for MONY in 1961.
In 1961, he agreed to appear in an advertisement for MONY (Mutual of New York), as long as he had final approval.With the money from Screen Gems and other works, he and Eileen moved to 539 South Beverly Glen, near Beverly Hills.He discussed an idea about a multi-ethnic crew on an airship travelling the world, based on the 1961 film Master of the World, with fellow writer Christopher Knopf at MGM. As the time was not right for science fiction, he began work on The Lieutenant for Arena Productions. This made it to the NBC Saturday night line-up at 7:30 pm,and premiered on September 14, 1963. The show set a new ratings record for that time slot.Roddenberry worked with several cast and crew who would later join him on Star Trek, including: Gene L. Coon, star Gary Lockwood, Joe D’Agosta, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, and Majel Barrett.The Lieutenant was produced with the co-operation of the Pentagon, which allowed them to film at an actual Marine base. During the production of the series, Roddenberry clashed regularly with the Department of Defense over potential plots.The department withdrew its support after Roddenberry pressed ahead with a plot titled “To Set It Right” in which a white and a black man find a common cause in their roles as Marines.”To Set It Right” was the first time he worked with Nichols, and it was her first television role. The episode has been preserved at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City.The show was not renewed after its first season. Roddenberry was already working on a new series idea. This included his ship location from Hawaii Passage and added a Horatio Hornblower character, plus the multi-racial crew from his airship idea. He decided to write it as science fiction, and by March 11, 1964, he brought together a sixteen-page pitch. On April 24, he sent three copies and two dollars to the Writers Guild of America to register his series. He called it Star Trek.
Star Trek:
When Roddenberry pitched Star Trek to MGM, it was warmly received but no offer was made.He then went to Desilu Productions, but rather than being offered a one-script deal, he was hired as a producer and allowed to work on his own projects. His first was a half-hour pilot called Police Story (not to be confused with the anthology series created by Joseph Wambaugh), which was not picked up by the networks.Having not sold a pilot in five years, Desilu was having financial difficulties; its only success was I Love Lucy.Roddenberry took the Star Trek idea to Oscar Katz, head of programming, and the duo immediately started work on a plan to sell the series to the networks. They took it to CBS, which ultimately passed on it. The duo later learned that CBS had been eager to find out about Star Trek because it had a science fiction series in development—Lost in Space. Roddenberry and Katz next took the idea to Mort Werner at NBC,this time downplaying the science fiction elements and highlighting the links to Gunsmoke and Wagon Train.The network funded three story ideas, and selected “The Menagerie,” which was later known as “The Cage,” to be made into a pilot. (The other two later became episodes of the series.) While most of the money for the pilot came from NBC, the remaining costs were covered by Desilu.Roddenberry hired Dorothy Fontana, better known as D. C. Fontana, as his assistant. They had worked together previously on The Lieutenant, and she had eight script credits to her name.
William Shatner and Sally Kellerman, from “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the second pilot of Star Trek.
Roddenberry and Barrett had begun an affair by the early days of Star Trek,and he specifically wrote the part of the character Number One in the pilot with her in mind; no other actresses were considered for the role. Barrett suggested Nimoy for the part of Spock. He had worked with both Roddenberry and Barrett on The Lieutenant, and once Roddenberry remembered the thin features of the actor, he did not consider anyone else for the part.The remaining cast came together; filming began on November 27, 1964, and was completed on December 11.After post-production, the episode was shown to NBC executives and it was rumored that Star Trek would be broadcast at 8:00 p.m. on Friday nights. The episode failed to impress test audiences,and after the executives became hesitant, Katz offered to make a second pilot. On March 26, 1965, NBC ordered a new episode.
Roddenberry developed several possible scripts, including “Mudd’s Women”, “The Omega Glory”, and with the help of Samuel A. Peeples, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. NBC selected the last one, leading to later rumors that Peeples created Star Trek, something he has always denied.Roddenberry was determined to make the crew racially diverse, which impressed actor George Takei when he came for his audition.The episode went into production on July 15, 1965, and was completed at around half the cost of “The Cage” since the sets were already built.Roddenberry worked on several projects for the rest of the year. In December, he decided to write lyrics to the Star Trek theme; this angered the theme’s composer, Alexander Courage, as it meant that royalties would be split between them. In February 1966, NBC informed Desilu that they were buying Star Trek and that it would be included in the fall 1966 television schedule.On May 24, the first episode of the Star Trek series went into production;Desilu was contracted to deliver thirteen episodes.Five days before the first broadcast, Roddenberry appeared at the 24th World Science Fiction Convention and previewed “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. After the episode was shown, he received a standing ovation. The first episode to air on NBC was “The Man Trap”, on September 8, 1966, at 8:00 pm.Roddenberry was immediately concerned about the series’ low ratings and wrote to Harlan Ellison to ask if he could use his name in letters to the network to save the show. Not wanting to lose a potential source of income, Ellison agreed and also sought the help of other writers who also wanted to avoid losing potential income.Roddenberry corresponded with science fiction writer Isaac Asimov about how to address the issue of Spock’s growing popularity and the possibility that his character would overshadow Kirk.Asimov suggested having Kirk and Spock work together as a team “to get people to think of Kirk when they think of Spock.”The series was renewed by NBC, first for a full season’s order, and then for a second season. An article in the Chicago Tribune quoted studio executives as stating that the letter-writing campaign had been wasted because they had already been planning to renew Star Trek.
Some of the main cast of Star Trek during the third season.
Roddenberry often rewrote submitted scripts, although he did not always take credit for these.Roddenberry and Ellison fell out over “The City on the Edge of Forever” after Roddenberry rewrote Ellison’s script to make it both financially feasible to film and usable for the series context.Even his close friend Don Ingalls had his script for “A Private Little War” altered drastically,and, as a result, Ingalls declared that he would only be credited under the pseudonym “Jud Crucis” (a play on “Jesus Christ”), claiming he had been crucified by the process.Roddenberry’s work rewriting “The Menagerie”, based on footage originally shot for “The Cage”, resulted in a Writers’ Guild arbitration board hearing. The Guild ruled in his favor over John D. F. Black, the complainant.The script won a Hugo Award, but the awards board neglected to inform Roddenberry, who found out through correspondence with Asimov.As the second season was drawing to a close, Roddenberry once again faced the threat of cancellation. He enlisted the help of Asimov, and even encouraged a student-led protest march on NBC. On January 8, 1968, a thousand students from twenty different schools across the country marched on the studio. Roddenberry began to communicate with Star Trek fan Bjo Trimble, who led a fan writing campaign to save the series. Trimble later noted that this campaign of writing to fans who had written to Desilu about the show, urging them to write NBC, had created an organized Star Trek fandom.The network received around 6,000 letters a week from fans petitioning it to renew the series.On March 1, 1968, NBC announced on air, at the end of “The Omega Glory”, that Star Trek would return for a third season.
The network had initially planned to place Star Trek in the 7:30 pm Monday-night time slot freed up by The Man from U.N.C.L.E. completing its run. Instead, the enraged George Schlatter forced the network to insert Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In into the slot, and Roddenberry’s series was moved to 10:00 p.m. on Fridays. Realizing the show could not survive in that time slot and burned out from arguments with the network, Roddenberry resigned from the day-to-day running of Star Trek, although he continued to be credited as executive producer.Roddenberry cooperated with Stephen Edward Poe, writing as Stephen Whitfield, on the 1968 nonfiction book The Making of Star Trek for Ballantine Books, splitting the royalties evenly. Roddenberry explained to Whitfield: “I had to get some money somewhere. I’m sure not going to get it from the profits of Star Trek.” Herbert Solow and Robert H. Justman observed that Whitfield never regretted his fifty-fifty deal with Roddenberry since it gave him “the opportunity to become the first chronicler of television’s successful unsuccessful series.”.Whitfield had previously been the national advertising and promotion director for model makers Aluminum Model Toys, better known as “AMT”, which then held the Star Trek license, and moved to run Lincoln Enterprises, Roddenberry’s company set up to sell the series’ merchandise.
Having stepped aside from the majority of his Star Trek duties, Roddenberry sought instead to create a film based on Asimov’s “I, Robot” and also began work on a Tarzan script for National General Pictures.After initially requesting a budget of $2 million and being refused, Roddenberry made cuts to reduce costs to $1.2 million. When he learned they were being offered only $700,000 to shoot the film, which by now was being called a TV movie, he cancelled the deal.Meanwhile, NBC announced Star Trek’s cancellation in February 1969. A similar but much smaller letter-writing campaign followed news of the cancellation.Because of the manner in which the series was sold to NBC, it left the production company $4.7 million in debt.The last episode of Star Trek aired forty-seven days before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission,and Roddenberry declared that he would never write for television again.
1970s projects:
Following the cancellation of Star Trek, Roddenberry felt typecast as a producer of science fiction, despite his background in westerns and police stories.He later described the period, saying, “My dreams were going downhill because I could not get work after the original series was cancelled.”He felt that he was “perceived as the guy who made the show that was an expensive flop.”Roddenberry had sold his interest in Star Trek to Paramount Studios in return for a third of the ongoing profits. However, this did not result in any quick financial gain; the studio was still claiming that the series was $500,000 in the red in 1982.He wrote and produced Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), a sexploitation film directed by Roger Vadim, for MGM. The cast included Rock Hudson, Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, and Roddy McDowall alongside Star Trek regular James Doohan, and William J. Campbell, who had appeared as a guest in two Star Trek episodes, “The Squire Of Gothos” and “The Trouble With Tribbles.” Variety magazine was unimpressed: “Whatever substance was in the original [novel by Francis Pollini] or screen concept has been plowed under, leaving only superficial, one-joke results.” Herbert Solow had given Roddenberry the work as a favor, paying him $100,000 for the script.
Gene Roddenberry at a Star Trek convention in 1976.
Faced with a $2,000 per month alimony obligation as a result of his 1969 divorce, and a mortgage, he began to support himself largely by giving college lectures and appearances at science fiction conventions.These presentations included screenings of “The Cage” and blooper reels from the production of Star Trek.He was paid $25,000 to write a script called The Nine, which was meant to be about paranormal experiences, but ended up being based on his experiences attempting to earn a living attending science fiction conventions. At the time, he was close to losing his house because of the lack of income. These conventions began to build the fan support to bring back Star Trek, leading TV Guide to describe it, in 1972, as “the show that won’t die.”
In 1972 and 1973, Roddenberry made a comeback to science fiction, selling ideas for four new series to a variety of networks. Roddenberry’s Genesis II was set in a post-apocalyptic Earth. He had hoped to recreate the success of Star Trek without “doing another space-hopping show.” He created a 45-page writing guide, and proposed several story ideas based on the concept that pockets of civilisation had regressed to past eras or changed altogether.The pilot aired as a TV movie in March 1973, setting new records for the Thursday Night Movie of the Week. Roddenberry was asked to produce four more scripts for episodes, but before production could begin again, CBS aired the film Planet of the Apes. It was watched by an even greater audience than Genesis II. CBS scrapped Genesis II and replaced it with the Apes television series; the results were disastrous ratings-wise, and Planet Of The Apes was quickly canceled.
The Questor Tapes was a project that reunited him with his Star Trek collaborator, Gene L. Coon, who was in failing health at the time. NBC ordered sixteen episodes, and tentatively scheduled the series to follow The Rockford Files on Friday nights; the pilot launched on January 23, 1974,to positive critical response. But Roddenberry balked at the substantial changes requested by the network and left the project, leading to its immediate cancellation. During 1974, Roddenberry reworked the Genesis II concept as a second pilot, Planet Earth, for rival network ABC, with similar less-than-successful results. The pilot was aired on April 23, 1974. While Roddenberry wanted to create something that could feasibly exist in the future, the network wanted stereotypical science fiction women and were unhappy when that was not delivered. Roddenberry was not involved in a third reworking of the material by ABC that produced Strange New World.He began developing MAGNA I, an underwater science fiction series, for 20th Century Fox Television. But by the time the work on the script was complete, those who had approved the project had left Fox and their replacements were not interested in the project. A similar fate was faced by Tribunes, a science fiction police series, which Roddenberry attempted to get off the ground between 1973 and 1977. He gave up after four years;the series never even reached the pilot stage. The pilot for the series Spectre, Roddenberry’s 1977 attempt to create an occult detective duo similar to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, was released as a television movie within the United States and received a limited theatrical release in the United Kingdom.
Star Trek revival:
Gene Roddenberry (third from the right) in 1976 with most of the cast of Star Trek at the rollout of the Space Shuttle Enterprise at the Rockwell International plant at Palmdale, California.
Lacking funds in the early 1970s, Roddenberry was unable to buy the full rights to Star Trek for $150,000 from Paramount. Lou Scheimer approached Paramount in 1973 about creating an animated Star Trek series.Credited as “executive consultant,” and paid $2,500 per episode, Roddenberry was granted full creative control of Star Trek: The Animated Series. Although he read all the scripts and “sometimes [added] touches of his own”, he relinquished most of his authority to de facto showrunner/associate producer D. C. Fontana.
Roddenberry had some difficulties with the cast. To save money, he sought not to hire George Takei and Nichelle Nichols. He neglected to inform Leonard Nimoy of this and instead, in an effort to get him to sign on, told him that he was the only member of the main cast not returning. After Nimoy discovered the deception, he demanded that Takei and Nichols play Sulu and Uhura when their characters appeared on screen. Roddenberry acquiesced. He had been promised five full seasons of the new show, but ultimately, only one and a half were produced.
However, the groundswell of vociferous fan support (6,000 attended the second New York Star Trek convention in 1973 and 15,000 attended in 1974, much larger figures than at older events like the 4,500 at the 32nd World Science Fiction Convention in 1974) led Paramount to hire Roddenberry to create and produce a feature film based on the franchise in May 1975.The studio was unimpressed with the ideas being put forward; John D. F. Black’s opinion was that their ideas were never “big enough” for the studio, even when one scenario involved the end of the universe. At the time, several ideas were partly developed including Star Trek: The God Thing and Star Trek: Planet of the Titans. Following the commercial reception of Star Wars, in June 1977, Paramount instead green-lit a new series set in the franchise titled Star Trek: Phase II,with Roddenberry and most of the original cast, except Nimoy, set to reprise their respective roles. It was to be the anchor show of a proposed Paramount-owned “fourth network”,but plans for the network were scrapped and the project was reworked into a feature film. The result, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, troubled the studio because of budgetary concerns, but was a box office hit. Adjusted for inflation, it was the third highest grossing Star Trek movie, with the 2009 film coming in first and the 2013 film second.
In 1980, Roddenberry submitted a treatment for a proposed sequel about the crew preventing the alien Klingons from thwarting the John F. Kennedy assassination. Paramount rejected it and he was replaced on the project by television producer Harve Bennett. Roddenberry was named executive consultant for the project, and was compensated with a producer’s fee and a percentage of the net profits of any film projects in exchange for proffering non-binding story notes and corresponding with the fan community. Although Roddenberry’s memos were largely disregarded by Bennett and other producers, this arrangement persisted on future installments of the film series for the remainder of his life.An initial script for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was circulated to eight people; Bennett attributed the subsequent plot leak of the death of Spock to Roddenberry. Twenty percent of the plot was based on Roddenberry’s ideas.
Roddenberry was involved in creating the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered with “Encounter at Farpoint” on September 28, 1987.He was given a bonus of $1 million in addition to an ongoing salary to produce the series, and celebrated by purchasing a new Rolls-Royce for $100,000.This did not entitle him to be executive producer of the series. However, Paramount was already concerned about the original cast not returning, and fearing fan reaction if Roddenberry was not involved, agreed to his demand for control of the show.Roddenberry rewrote the series bible from an original version by David Gerrold, who had previously written The Original Series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”, and The Animated Series follow-up, “More Tribbles, More Troubles”
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Majel Barrett at a Star Trek convention in 2007.
According to producer Rick Berman, “Gene’s hands-on involvement in The Next Generation diminished greatly after the first season”,but the nature of his increasingly peripheral role was not disclosed because of the value of his name to fans.While Berman said that Roddenberry had “all but stopped writing and rewriting” by the end of the third season, his final writing credit on the show (a co-teleplay credit) was on “Datalore”, the thirteenth episode of the first season.
Although commercially successful from its inception, the series was initially marred by Writers Guild of America grievance claims from long time franchise writers Fontana and David Gerrold, both of whom left the series under acrimonious circumstances; frequent turnover among the writing staff (twenty-four staff writers left the show during its first three seasons, triple the average attrition rate for such series); and allegations that Roddenberry’s attorney Leonard Maizlish had become the former’s “point man and proxy”,ghostwriting memos, sitting in on meetings, and contributing to scripts despite not being on staff.Writer Tracy Tormé described the first few seasons of The Next Generation under Roddenberry as an “insane asylum”.
In 1990, Nicholas Meyer was brought in to direct the sixth film in the series: Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. He and Roddenberry clashed creatively, as Roddenberry felt that having the Enterprise crew hold prejudices against the Klingons did not fit with his view of the universe. Meyer described a meeting he later regretted with Roddenberry, saying:
His guys were lined up on one side of the room, and my guys were lined up on the other side of the room, and this was not a meeting in which I felt I’d behaved very well, very diplomatically, I came out of it feeling not very good, and I’ve not felt good about it ever since. He was not well, and maybe there were more tactful ways of dealing with it, because at the end of the day, I was going to go out and make the movie. I didn’t have to take him on. Not my finest hour.
Roddenberry watched The Undiscovered Country alongside the producers of the film, at a private screening two days before his death, and told them they had done a “good job”.
In addition to his film and television work, Roddenberry wrote the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, although it has been attributed to several other authors. It was the first in a series of hundreds of Star Trek-based novels to be published by the Pocket Books imprint of Simon & Schuster, whose parent company also owned Paramount Pictures Corporation.Previously, Roddenberry worked intermittently on a novel The God Thing that he had based upon his rejected 1975 screenplay for a proposed low-budget ($3 to $5 million) Star Trek film preceding the development of Phase II throughout 1976. Attempts to complete the project by Walter Koenig,Susan Sackett, Fred Bronson,and Michael Jan Friedman have proven to be unfeasible for a variety of legal and structural reasons.
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