BOOK REVIEW: “Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever, The Original Teleplay That Became The Classic Star Trek Episode

>>No writer likes being edited I know I hate it but need it. It's a big help to have a story critiqued because I can't always see where its gone off the rails.<<

MOATMAI, who used to do "Max Headroom" reviews for the site here, is one of my oldest and best friends in the world, and a professional journalist. He offered to edit "Ice Cream and Venom," and I jumped at the chance. The first story he did was "Dog Days," which I'll be the first to admit is kind of a sprawling, unfocused tale. He went over it, said it had a lot of potential, totally got the story, so there's no question of artistic/editorial confusion, and then proceeded to list changes, in detail.

I balked at this, because some of them seemed too specific, some of them were technically wrong (A debate about how sound would travel on Mars, for instance, where I was right) but basically the bottom line here is that he was right 90% of the time, and where he wasn't, it was pretty trivial (Should "earth" be capitalized or not?). More importantly, he showed me some SERIOUS pacing flaws that I hadn't noticed contained in certain scenes, and a few physical scenes that just didn't flow right.

The process was fairly agonizing, and because I am inherently a d!ck, I took the manuscript away from him, claiming it was because of time constraints. In actual fact, it was simply because it was too painful for me to have my nose rubbed in my shortcomings, *EVEN* by a close friend, even when it was meant for my own good, and even when said correction was pretty gentle, respectful, and undoubtedly was making for a better story. So, basically, I done MOATMAI wrong, b!tchslapped him when he was trying to help me, and basically was an evil, betraying jerk.

In the process, I really hurt his feelings, and we didn't talk for months. I still feel incredibly guilty about that.

Later on, I realized that he really *was* right about everything, and I ended up using his notes to fix the story, and I gave him co-credit for editing the book, and, yeah, he was right all along. I also basically outlined this whole sad affair in the forward, just so anyone who reads the book will know what I did. I feel it's important to own up to these things.

I don't know if he's noticed it or not. For obvious reasons, we don't talk about my fiction anymore. But basically, yeah, editing is rough. I very nearly lost one of my best friends over it. That said, I have learned that it is *VERY* important, and when people talk about 'censorship' and 'editors ripping the guts out of my story' they are generally just being b!tchy little pretentious undergaduate lit majors with no clue. Seriously: most of the (unedited) amateur books I've read in the last four years would have MASSIVELY improved with a bit of editing.

Also: Mad shoutout to GinRummy, who is my go-to editor, and does a frackin' great job!

>>$7k in 1965 would be the equivalent of $50k today, which would be over $65k/annum, and comfortably over $5k/month. Not an enormous sum, obviously, but not shabby by any means ... especially if toward the end of the 9 months, when he's just on set to verify proceedings, he could be thinking about and prepping for his next project.<<

During that same year, his only other sales was a "Man From U.N.C.L.E." episode, which was probably in the same range, price-wise. It was a good year for him. It's not really consistent work, though. Let's assume in today's standards he made the equivalent of $130 grand that year, that's fantastic! But it's not really consistent work. Prior to that, he hadn't sold a single TV script in 2 years, and his only screenwriting project - "The Oscar" - was a massive bomb that basically dashed the hopes of moving into movies. He had two sales in '68, one of which was a "Flying Nun" episode that I can gurantee didn't pay anywhere near $7 grand. Then from there he didn't sell another TV script for three years. Then two years without a sale. Then four years without a sale...

TV is a harsh biz. It devours content, it devours writers, it gives no promises, it gives no steady employment for most. It's a demon bitch goddess. The money ain't steady.

As Joe Straczynski said in his (Really good) book on screenwriting, "If you're getting into writing because you want to make money, forget it. Your average plumber in LA makes more money than your average writer, and with far less heartache."

(Figures courtesy of http://www.davemanuel.com/inflation-calculator.php)

Also, your calculation of $25/day (in 1960's dollars) assumes that he's working every single day for 9 months straight, including weekends, holidays, weddings, funerals, etc. Assuming an average of a 6 workdays/week, it's actually over $30/day. Assuming a 5-day workweek, it's close to $40/day.

But in fact, a daily amount is probably not really relevant. The more helpful figures are the monthly and/or yearly totals IMO.<<

"But did he cash the check?"

Why should that matter? Does getting paid for work he did somehow make his complaints less valid? If we extend that argument, doesn't that mean that getting paid for *anything* makes the work less valid? I think that's silly. People always say "Well, [insert name] complained a lot, but that didn't stop him cashing the check, so he must not have been *too* angry, he just wanted to put on an act of being pretentious and artsy." That's crap, particularly where writers are concerned. Writers are the low men on the totem pole, and always have been.

Harlan, and Bradbury, and Dick and the rest started out in an industry where you were getting ONE CENT per word, *IF* you could get a story published. A vignette like your Pecan Pie story might net you $20 bucks, assuming you could sell stuff at all, which was a tough business. Dick had something like 75 stories published over the course of 18 month, and he was losing money. Literally starving. Literally feeding himself and his wife by buying horsemeat from the pet store (It was low-grade dog food in those days). Harlan was cranking out a story a week for five years, which is prodigious by anyone's standards, and sales were a bit easier as he lived in NYC, where the big publishers were, but still: 250 stories or so in five years, working his ass off, and basically all he was able to afford was a one-room apartment, water, electricity, a hot plate, and groceries for the week. Forget luxuries like a car, or insurance, or medicine, or parties or whatever.

In a situation like that, who can afford to *not* take the check? Particularly when your *job* is a writer. What, you're going to do all that work and live in poverty and then just give it away for free? Give it away for free to a Jackass like Roddenberry, who's just going to take credit for it anyway, and slam your name? Why make it easy for the guy?

The actual script for "City on the Edge of Forever" netted Harlan about seven grand, which, even in those days, was not a lot of money. The script took him the better part of a year to write. Let's say nine months. That means that, per day, he was getting paid about $25, but of course he didn't get that until the end. Now, on top of *that,* writers also had to do as many unpaid rewrites as the show wanted. Harlan did six or so. Let's say six. These aren't spellcheck things, these are massive reworkings, in many cases complete rewrites, so, in essence, he had to write the same script seven times. That brings his per-day pay - if we factor it in - to about four bucks a day for nine months. Added to which, it's expected that the writer will be on hand at different stages in the production for meetings with the staff, and on hand for the actual filming - which would have been a week to ten days - in case there need to be any line changes or last minute fixes, or whatever. You don't get paid for that, though they let you eat free from Craft Services. During those periods, obviously, you can't be working on anything else.

Now, some shows paid more, some paid less, but Trek paid pretty good by the standards of the time. Some shows were better to work for, some were worse. Harlan's episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea went through *forty* rewrites, with the same basic thing: Write it, get paid, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, every time your actual *real* average drops. Some times you luck out, and it goes through without a problem, but that's really rare.

So how could he *not* take the check, and how could his taking the check be considered a sign that he was somehow a fake? He invested nine months of his life in that script! He had a mortgage, a career, union dues, an agent. How long do you think you'd survive in H'wood without an agent? How long do you think you'd KEEP an agent if you refused to cash checks from paying customers? C'mon!

Perhaps the fact that we're talking about "writing" makes it too artsy, to theoretical. Let's back it up, compare it to something mundane. Let's compare it to plumbing: Jim wants a new lawn sprinkler system put in, and he hires Jack to do it. Jack comes up with the system, and Jim says "Well, no, I want a flower bed here, and I don't care so much if the back yard goes brown because no one can see that, so make some changes. Oh, and I'm not going to pay you for these changes" Jack says "Well, that doesn't make much sense, but ok. You're the boss." So he does. Then Jack says "Well, what the hell is wrong with you, boy! My back yard is going to go all brown, and I wanted the flower bed on *this* side, and also put in a pond. And as ever, I'm not going to pay you for these changes." Jack says ok. This happens two or three more times, until finally Jim says "You know what, you suck, get out of here, and leave your plans, I'll just fix it myself." So Jack leaves, irritated.

Jim attempts to fix the system himself, but he's an idiot, and just makes it disastrously bad. He hands it over to his friend Bobby to fix (unpaid, mind you) and she does, despite admitting that the original plumbing plans were far better than what she came up with, and her job was basically damage control.

So Jim *FINALLY* gets his sprinkler system, and it works. People say "Jack did this, huh? He's pretty good." "Oh, no," says Jim, "Jack is a talentless jackass. You wouldn't believe the crap he tried to foist off on me. I had to re-do this entire thing myself," he lies, "and Jack's just got problems and is really hard to deal with. You should never hire him. In fact, I'm going to spend the next thirty years telling people that Jack is an incompetent boob, and since *I've* got a big house and a big name, what *I* say will carry a lot of weight!"

So can you see why Jack would be a bit pissed? Can you see why he'd take his lousy $7 grand?

Harlan - and many other writers - have been screwed, both by Roddenberry and other producers. It's the name of the game. (David Gerrold was unhappy with the way "The Cloud Minders" got treated) He's even been screwed *worse* than Roddenberry did on occasion. His registered pseudonym with the writers guild - "Cordwainer Bird" - was one he put on scripts that he wrote, but was unhappy with because of meddling from producers or whatever. In fifty years of writing for TV, he's only used it FIVE times (Well, more than that if you count "The Starlost," but I take that show as one thing), only when he's *Really* unhappy (As with the Voyage script). He *wanted* to use it on the finished version of "City," but Roddenberry wouldn't let him. Why? Because that would be a flag to other writers that Trek wasn't a great show to write for, and that it wasn't as smart as it pretended to be, and that it didn't respect name authors like Ellison. That would make 'em look bad. Roddenberry told Ellison that if he used the pseudonym, he'd burn him down. He'd see to it that he never worked for any NBC or Desilu show ever again.

Again, who can throw that kind of thing away? I mean, his only other sales that year had been to NBC!

So: Roddenberry wouldn't let Harlan wash his hands of the project, he threatened to blacklist him, *AND* he badmouthed him for decades.

Of course he cashed the check. It would have been wrong not to.

Man, I *WISH* there was no singing in Trek. Ugh.

I'm not speaking about you personally, but I often get the impression when I'm talking to apologists for TOS that their *only* exposure to 1960s SF was TOS, and it was likely their only exposure to 60s TV at large, excepting a few sitcoms. In fact, I know this is the case. Last con I went to, people were making outlandish claims about 60s TV that simply weren't true. These were the same people who were making outlandish claims about how awful the original Galactica was (It was never great, but it was FAR better than it had any right to be), and saying stuff about Space: 1999 that simply never happened on the show.

Obviously these people grew up in a world without UHF, and they're dealing with these things mostly by reputation. Conversely, in my youth, from about 1970 to about 1990, every city had at least one UHF station, and they were always cluttered with 10 to 40 year old crap, because it was all they could afford. And given the choice between watching Donahue or reruns of "The Mothers In Law," which am I gonna' choose? I mean, I'd've preferred to watch TOS or M:I something cool, but I'd *DEFINITELY* settle for "Here's Lucy" or Pink Panther cartoons if I had no choice.

As a result, I feel like my opinion of 60s TV tends to take in the overall context a bit more than does that of most modern geeks. Most modern geeks - pretty much anyone more than 10 years younger than me - have as little knowledge of the glory days of UHF as they have of the cold war, but it was pretty formative for me. They tend to go straight to the candy, but I'm happy to sample the buffet.

Trek really wasn't a product of fear. It was a product of early 60s Optimism. You want shows that were products of fear, check *any* spy show, or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Which I bring up a lot as it's the closest comparison to TOS) or The Invaders, where every week the world *almost* blows up because of the actions of one or more evil people, who are foiled, but only barely. Opposite this, you've got shows like pretty much any western, and the Rural Comedies, who's appeal was nostalgia (Despite the comedies being contemporary) Celebrate down-home wisdom, turn your back on the world's fears, ignore, ignore, ignore. That's a kind of fear, too.

TOS was optimistic, but it *wasn't* the only show that was, not by a longshot. I think it differed from the others in that it *wasn't* as serious (They swashbuckled. Everyone on the Seaview or in the IMF were always so grim), and that it was smarter than the competition. Not that it was all that smart, it really wasn't. (Frank Gorshin, the racist from a planet at the "Southern Edge of the Galaxy?" Yikes!) But it was generally smarter than LiS. And it was fairly preachy, but the morals were *entirely* populist, and since the show was fun, and smart-ish, and preaching a message that most people already believed, then obviously you're not going to come away from it angry.

Nor particularly challenged. I mean, give me a difficult issue TOS faced? Vietnam? They supported it. That's as contentious as they got.

The stories about conflict with the network were almost always created by Roddenberry, who seemed to like to maintain his control by repeatedly telling people that he was all that stood between them and endless attacks from stupid people outside. People conveniently only he could see. Yes, they had problems with censors, but EVERY show had trouble with censors. I really don't think TOS had any more trouble with them than The Wild Wild West did. In fact, I'm going to assume it had *less* trouble, since it came on later at night, and was considerably less popular (Censors tend to concentrate on popular shows more than ones they know no one's watching.) I doubt *EITHER* show had anywhere near as many censorsip problems as Batman did. And I've read some of the censor comments, and they're not out of line ("Please adjust her costume so we can't see her crotch" and "It has recently been shown that people can be hypnotized over TV, so rather than risk endangering our audience, or risk the appearance of endangering our audience, can we substitute some fictional method of hypnotism for the realistic one shown in the script.")

I mean, it wasn't like NBC *wanted* the show to bomb. They invested a ton of money and time in it, and in fact they renewed it *TWICE* despite utterly crap ratings. They wanted it to be a hit, they believed in it, it just wasn't. Really the only bad thing you can say about NBC was that they didn't really know how to market the show. Apart from that, they took a really big chance which didn't pay off for them at all, and had to face 50 years of everybody giving 'em grief for it.

I can't remember who did it, but I had a book of actual published sociological graduate papers on Trek about 15 years back, and one of them made a VERY strong (But probably disingenuous) argument that the Federation was a dictatorship citing those same examples.

Roddenberry hand-waved it aside. His stock reply was that the Fed was 'tighter than the UN, looser than the US' or something like that. I can forgive that. Despite B5 spending a LOT more time dealing with the EA than (Any) Trek ever did with the Federation government, there's still a lot of questions as to how it worked in some specific areas. (F'rinstance, are earth's colonies *states?* Do they have a voice in the Senate? It's never mentioned, though we know they're taxed: "Earth? What do I know about earth? I'm from Arisia Colony. Earth was just a name that sent us entertainment videos and took all our money in taxes")

Good morning!

>>Kirk expresses a lot of insecurity in Balance of Terror "Bones? What if I'm wrong...?"<<

Point taken. I thought you were saying they said he was insecure as a kid.

>>His whole speech in "Naked Time" is about how lonely he is, and how worried that he'll make a mistake and lose the ship.<<

Yeah, as I said, he had some flaws, mostly emotional.

>>But isn't ignoring the existance of character flaws in Star Trek a little like saying "The Wild Wild West is a show where no one is below average height?"<<

I've probably confused the issue here: Obviously interpersonal conflict wasn't really an issue in season 1 TOS (Spock is frequently annoyed by Kirk, and Spock and McCoy don't like each other at all, and are not shy about demonstrating it. They toned this back the next year, and I don't think it really hurt the show when it did.) Roddenberry *was* very much opposed to interpersonal conflicts in TNG, and he hated the movies, though why is arguable.

You simply couldn't have a 60s show with a normal-sized cast without the characters dickering with each other about something. Hogan's Heroes or Lost in Space or Trek or Bonanza: it was simply the style of the time. The real issue here is on the 'perfectability' of humanity, which is not a burden those other shows had to drag behind them. If any other show wanted to do an episode about a psycho killer or a drug pusher or war criminals, they just *did* 'em. If Trek wanted to do one they generally had to jump through hoops to say "Well, Jack the Ripper is an alien" and "These war criminals are from *before* we became perfect" or simply "We won't do this story because it has drugs, thereby implying humanity isn't perfect."

That's very limiting to a writer, *AND* it does, in fact, limit the nature of interpersonal conflicts. Not so much between the principle characters, but between them and the plot of the week. The threat *always* has to be external, which limits character development. You can't have - as per, the original Galactica - Adama getting mad at Starbuck and Apollo for not showing due respect to the council they've sworn to defend, or Starbuck being too hung over to launch during an alert. You can't have anything involving a black market because there wouldn't logically *be* a black market. Hence DS9 having to basically go outside the federation in order to find any non-utopian stories to tell.

So: interpersonal conflict, "Hey, you're a jerk" that was ok in the day. Interpersonal conflict on the level of "Hey, lets go mete out justice to bad people in our own society" was right out.

>>As for petty crime not existing in Season 1?
Well, here's something we both forgot: The Venus Drugs in "Mudd's Women". Yeah, they've got drugs, but Harry Mudd was seen to be a thorough scoundrel. Certainly not the sign of a perfected humanity.<<

Agreed. I've often wondered about that. I *suspect* Roddenberry just had it in for Harlan, and his continual "Scotty dealing drugs" thing was simply a slur, a slam, a way of making a more talented guy look like a jerk while making himself look better in the process. "City" won awards, so it wasn't one he could just ignore. and Roddenberry always claimed credit for "Saving" the script by rewriting it himself. (He didn't). It's an early episode. It may have been filmed before Bjo took on continuity cop duties. It may also have been one of those episodes that Roddenberry decided "Simply never happened."

>>Look: I'm not saying what Ellison said wasn't prescient about the way Star Trek went, but it wasn't accurate about the way Star Trek was at the time. At least the way it appeared on screen.<<

Fair enough. We agree the seeds were there, though, and I think Harlan was talking (As others from that era have likewise complained about) that Roddenberry's BTS dictates were needlessly limiting. As we've said, there were basically only 8 or 9 Trek stories, played out in endless variation.

>>In my opinion it's Because they got along so well. It would be reassuring to have friends like that, knowing they would stand by each other in the face of adversity.

Some folks say that lack of imperfections makes for lack of drama.

Not really, it just changes the focus of the drama.

When characters get along, the plot of an adventure must be externally driven. It's the attacking alien, or force of nature or moral issue that the characters must band together to work out.<<

Once someone asked me what my favorite color was. I said "Of what?" Doesn't matter, just what's your favorite color. "Yes it does matter. I like red cars, but I don't like it if my urine is read. I like green vegetables, but I don't like green stuff growing in my shower."

Point being there's not just one way of doing stuff. Everyone got along just ducky on "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," too. But only one of the characters there was any good, so it didn't work. There was a great deal of interpersonal conflict on Lost in Space, but the stories sucked, so it was pretty irritating. The interpersonal conflict on Lost was a needed, important part of the show. The interpersonal conflict on Caprica was basically stupid trendy crap there to pad out the nonexistent story. Secret Agent 86 repeatedly shot and killed people, which was ok because it was all in fun, but that would have been completely inappropriate in "The Flying Nun."

Trek had a good, affable cast, and good writers. I'm not dissing anybody. They had their way to do it, they did it, and it eventually worked out in the long run. *HOWEVER* might it have worked out for them in the short run if they'd had a less dogmatic sense of what is and isn't an appropriate story? Might they have held an audience, and managed to get their 5 seasons/110 episodes?

SF is about imagination, and when you start saying "We can't do this, and we can't do that, and we won't do that, and I don't believe in this, so it doesn't exist even as a story in my show" then you're *limiting* your imagination, reducing the number of bullets you can shoot. This is unavoidable to some extent, but I think TOS went a bit too far in the Ideological Purity department. And I doubt I'm the only one who thought so.

I mean, it wasn't like people were lining up to give Roddenberry another show. Heck, he was the FOURTH choice to run TNG!

I can not imagine how frustrating it must be for an author with some serious talent to be so completely hamstrung by people who are of such limited creativity and vision that they don't even *realize* they're hamstringing people.

You wanna' know what made Trek so great in TOS days? That they didn't give a damn about continuity and consistent messages. As long as it was generally 'up with people,' that was good enough. If A contradicts B, well, we'll leave that to DC to take care of. Got a compelling idea? Sure, run with it! We're making this up as we go along, anyway!

This is exactly what makes TNG and the rest so un-great: they're so amazingly dedicated to continuity (Though they screw it up anyway) and 'the message' that they simply can not write for sour apples. There's no science in their science fiction, and precious little 'fiction' as well.

It's like those terrible Prince Xixor books set between Empire and Jedi, where they're very cautious not to tell stories that take any chances or violate known canon, and hence fail entirely to be entertaining. TNG (And the rest) are like that without even the excuse of being interstitial.

If there are no chances taken, there is no drama, and if there is no drama, why bother telling the story?

I totally agree. Of all the Ellision-talking-about-the-industry books and stories I've read - up to and including the "Glass Teat" books - this one is far and away my favorite. Granted, I'm somewhat invested in my increasing dislike of Trek, and my longstanding loathing of Herr Roddenberry, so I'm unquestionably disposed to like a book that furthers my preconceptions.

Even still, the book is a hoot. By degrees exciting, sad, outraged, and introspective. I really did love it, and I'd strongly reccomend others to check it out. Particularly obsessive Trekies.

One of the early elements of the show, which quickly got dropped, was Anti-Vulcanism. Vulcans (Or "Vulcanians" as they were called in the early first season) were mistrusted and looked down on for no reasons ever explained. Functionally, Spock was like the indian guide that led the Wagon Train, someone the pioneers may not like or trust, but whom they need. This was intended as a way to show people getting over their biases in actual practce - "I don't trust you, but I'll work with you" - but Roddenberry quickly soured on the idea, and removed it. By the time of the Kirk/Finney trial, it's gone.

The only bit of it that remained was McCoy's continual sniping at Spock (And occasional vice-versa). Southerners are irretrievably Racist, after all, we're told that again and again and again by people from California. There are indications that Roddenberry didn't like this, but it worked and so he was kind of stuck with it, but it quickly shifted tones from racial dislike to merely a war between the head and the heart, with McCoy arguing that feeling is better than thinking. It was also repeatedly shown in the later years to be mostly bluster. McCoy actually *liked* Spock, but was too curmudgeonly to admit it.

Every politico and flag officer from starfleet was a useless ass. You're right. IF we follow Ellison's reasoning from this book through - and I think we have to - then it becomes a case of Kirk being a surrogate for Roddenberry himself, and only Gene knows what's right! Therefore, Kirk/Gene must always save the day despite interference from any knownothing layabout that outranks him, or those damn studio execs that tell me how to run my show.