Harlan Ellison sues Star Trek (1 Viewer)

[Sam Favate]

Ellison's a great writer. He's done a lot of good work over the years, and contributed to a lot of long-lasting works, like Star Trek, the Outer Limits and Babylon 5. But if this lawsuit will get him to finally stop complaining about his experience on Star Trek, so be it. I feel like we have never heard a kind word from Ellison about Trek or the other writers, producers, etc. It seems to me that writers' contracts in the 60s weren't what they were in the 90s or the present.

I hope he and the studio can come to a settlement. Ellison's story introduced a number of elements that are worth keeping in the Trek canon (Peter David used the Guardian in at least one of his novels). But given the antagonistic nature of Ellison's complaint and his seeming lack of desire for an amicable settlement, it seems unlikely.

I hope Ellison is successful, not just to help all writers, past and present, who worked on any shows, but also because maybe if he wins he'll finally shut the fuck up about it.

 

[michael_ks]

It will never happen as Harlan just has too many inner demons that'll never be wrested from his body. As a youth he was mercilessly teased and beaten up so many times that he has enough truculence and vitriol in him to last for several lifetimes. But the man is oddly full of contridictions. Where "Star Trek" is concerned, back in the 1960s he actually embarked on a one man campaign to help legitimize and sell the show to execs and fellow authors.

His demeanor in many ways reminds me of Bernard Herrmann's--a man who also, unable to shape things according to his standards of perfection, resorted to "throwing darts" at anyone and everything that displeased him. I have to say though that when I met Mr. Ellison in 1976 (simultaneously with SF author Robert Silverberg) I found him unfailingly polite. But then, I didn't have a copy of a script from "The Price of Doom" (from "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea") for him to sign, but rather a copy of "Dangerous Visions" instead.

 

[Jack P]

I simply take the view that if Daryl Zanuck was a sleaze for using the casting couch to promote the careers of his mistresses (which can be charted in many a Fox movie), then Roddenberry deserves to be thought of no differently. I'm glad the first Mrs. Roddenberry, who suffered the most from his behavior (the Solow-Justman memoir showed more than enough examples of Roddenberry at his worst there), got a bundle of money from him eventually.

As for Ellison though, I'll reiterate an earlier point I made. His original "City" script is not good television writing. "City" has earned its long-standing appeal with Trek fans because of the grim poignance of Kirk having to let Edith Keeler get run over, but that wasn't Ellison that was the rewrite since Ellison wanted to have Kirk try to save her, but Spock has to hold him back. That's not the Kirk of Trek, that's more the insufferable Kirk of "Requiem For Methuselah" in S3 who is so lovesick obsessed he totally loses his sense of perspective which rang false to the character. Ellison's failure to understand that when writing for a series as opposed to an anthology series, he needed to conform to the general rules established by the show's creator and producer is what was getting him into trouble from the beginning, not just on that point but more importantly on the pointless matter of the crewman Beckwith engaging in drug-dealing aboard the Enterprise. I think the biggest surprise for me when I read the script was that Edith Keeler doesn't appear until Act 3 which makes the whole matter of her budding romance with Kirk too rushed and utterly implausible as far as the great trauma Kirk is setting himself up for. And on top of that in Ellison's script, Spock never comes up with direct proof she'll cause Hitler to win World War II, all he does is speculate aloud how she'll do it since he's just deduced that she is who the Guardians are referring to as the one who is the focal point for changing history.

Ellison's arrogance is bad enough, but the man is also IMO not as a great a writer as his exalted reputation would have us believe. At least when it comes to the television work of his I've seen over the years (I'll leave out the matter of non-TV writing which I can't judge not being a sci-fi reader in general)

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

Ellison is definitely the provocative science fiction writer and I still relish my "Dangerous Visions" collection, but he is also the anti-Ray Bradbury - meaning he has little room for any sentimentality in his work. So these comments about his version of his Star Trek episode lacking the full romantic arc ring true. If I had to choose, though, I'd go with the humanist sentimentality of Bradbury's work any day.

 

[michael_ks]

Interesting. I find his two "Outer Limits" scripts along with those he wrote for the 1985 "Twilight Zone" series to be among the best teleplays I've ever seen, particularly "Demon With a Glass Hand" and "Paladin of the Lost Hour".

 

[Ockeghem]

Michael,

In my opinion, Demon With a Glass Hand is exceptional, and a first-rate script. But I don't know if the script was represented close to what Ellison wanted in that episode. I don't believe I've ever read that he was displeased with it, however.

JackP,

Thanks for that background information on COTEOF. That is what I was alluding to when I mentioned that I wasn't convinced that Ellison would admit to writing it the way it was realized on the screen.

Radioman,

Ooops, my bad. I have you mixed up with another poster. Sorry about that!

 

[michael_ks]

Harlan could not be thoroughly satisfied unless he had control over every aspect of an episode's production, from the hiring of the director to the casting of actors. I do know he was extremely pleased with Robert Culp's performance and was impressed with his intelligence. As I recall his biggest beef was over the make-up used on the Kybens and their inconsistent appearance. Some of the dialog exchange between the aliens appears to have been re-written by someone else. At times, they take on 50s B-movie roles, something that seems very uncharacteristic for Ellison.

 

[Ockeghem]

I see, thanks.

Yeah, the make-up used for the Kyben did leave something to be desired. But their 'vanishing' act was quite a neat special effect for the time.

As for Culp, that's good to hear. He was in three episodes of TOL, and in my opinion did a wonderful job in each of the episodes. (My personal favorite is The Architects of Fear.)

BTW, Abraham Sofaer was wonderful in Demon With a Glass Hand, wasn't he?

 

[Jack P]

The funny thing is that if Ellison can't have respect for another person's creative vision, in this case Roddenberry as the man who got the show on the air, insisting that there should be no drug-dealing aboard the Enterprise, it kind of totally cuts the ground out from under him regarding his points about tampering or misusing another person's creation.

Also, what made that subplot further bad writing from a TV standpoint IMO is that if the name of the crewman Beckwith is pushing drugs on is pronounced Le-BECK (it's LeBecque in the script) then you're breaking what should be an elementary rule of not establishing two characters with names similar enough to confuse an audience (for instance I wouldn't write a script with two characters and call one Johnson and the other Johnston). (though if that's the wrong pronunciation, I'll be glad to apologize and admit error on that point).

"Demon With A Glass Hand" I will grant was well-written, but the other stuff I've seen of his just underwhelms me completely and reading the "City" script only confirmed those instincts for me.

 

[michael_ks]

You probably know that what upset Ellison so much was how Roddenberry mistakenly (and repeatedly, even after being corrected) told other parties how "he had my Scotty dealing in drugs!". So Ellison never really, to my knowledge, elaborated on why he actually molded a crewman as a drug dealer, except that as I suspect, becasue he truly wanted to rain on Roddenberry's parade where his vision of the future was concerned.

In his writings set in the future, Ellison is more apt to craft stories focusing on downtrodden individuals situated in despotic regimes. The idea that in the future people will no longer lust for wealth and instead unite to expand our knowledge and foster good will to other inhabited planets is completely foreign to Ellison's philosophy and expectations. As I stated earlier though, the man is very contridictory. He championed "Star Trek" when it was sagging in the ratings and yet in the 1970s on the Tom Snyder show and in front of several original cast members I recall how he blatently referred to the series as just another "cop show".

 

[Mark Talmadge]

He can't sue Star Trek. He's sueing the studio and the producers.

 

[michael_ks]

That's why he's been aptly named "Mr. Outer Limits", Scott. Agree with you about AOF, a very fine performance. And though he's gone on record as being a bit dismissive over his performance/role in "Corpus Earthling" I thought he did a splendid job there as well. I've always loved his frustration in the opening scene where he tries to convince Dr. Temple and his wife about the voices, especially the tension he exudes the moment he says "Now just wait one moment before you break out in unbridled laughter..."

And yes, Abraham Sofaer was wonderfully cast. It's chilling to see his eyes become large when he says "We want YOU, Mr. Trent!"

 

[JoshuaB.]

As gifted as Ellison is with prose fiction, I've often wondered why he wrote so many teleplays if he hated the medium so much. He's had so many scripts butchered or filmed in ways that displeased him, so why bother writing for the medium? I assume the pay for writing a filmed teleplay, no matter how much corrupted by producers, was (and still is) more lucrative than strictly a career in literary fiction (as opposed to the escapist, commercial fiction market). This thread just adds to the many "horror" stories associated with Ellison's behaviour!

 

[BobSchneider]

Why so much tv ? he had to pay for his bar tab and miss right nows

 

[phil*]

It's too bad Ellison doesn't have access to The Guardian time portal so that he can go back and correct these alleged wrongdoings.

 

[michael_ks]

Recall that Rod Serling himself had something of a love/hate relationship with the television medium. I think that Ellison felt he could still contribute something worthwhile and he must have realized early on that exposure on television is bound to boost sales of his short story collections.

I'm of the opinion that overall his good experiences in TV outweighed the bad. Sure there was "Star Trek", "The Starlost" and "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", but I believe they were more than counterbalanced by his less negative experiences with "Burke's Law", "Cimarron Strip", "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", "The Twilight Zone (1985)" and more recently, "Babylon 5".

 

[paste]

If you can find it, there's a book, Gene Roddenberry: the myth and the man behind Star Trek by Joel Engel, that came out a few years after Roddenberry passed away that had some former associates, including Trek writer David Gerrold and Leonard Nimoy, say some not so nice things about Roddenberry.

 

[Jack P]

And the Solow/Justman memoir doesn't paint a flattering picture of Roddenberry as a human being, either, especially the shabby way he was treating his first wife Eileen and pulling his weight as the boss to get both men to act as cover for him so he could go off and get laid with Majel or someone else.

 

[michael_ks]

I thought it very underhanded when Roddenberry decided to write lyrics to Alexander Courage's "Star Trek" theme for no other reason than to collect half of all royalties. Boy did Mr. Courage despise him for that.

 

[michael_ks]

Thanks for that. I just this moment purchased a copy on Amazon for 18 cents. I enjoyed Joel Engel's bio on Rod Serling a great deal and I'm sure I'll enjoy this as well. Mr. Engel got tagged with the dubious moniker of being named the "Salman Rushdie of Trekkies", but I'm sure the book will make for fascinating reading all the same.