A Brief Guide to Star Trek

were.
    Talent agencies, independent agents and professional colleagues all got the call:
Star Trek
needed writers! Groups of aspiring episodic contributors were invited to a Desilu screening room, there to be shown the second pilot episode and to hear Roddenberry outline the premise of the series and the requirements the show had for scripts. The process was enough to turn off many established TV writers who just didn’t get the concept, didn’t think the show would last, or simply knew that ‘sci-fi’ was not for them. It was a disappointing process for Roddenberry, who realised he was going to have to put in muchmore one-on-one time with individually selected writers if he was going to succeed in generating the story ideas and finished scripts he urgently needed.
    Roddenberry drafted a memo (largely based on his original 1964 series proposal) for aspiring
Star Trek
writers that outlined the series and included a collection of ‘springboard’ storylines as examples of the kind of thing the series required. The new ‘writer’s guide’ outlined the main characters, the series situation, the world of the future the characters inhabited and the science and sociology of the show. It was hoped this document would provide enough information for writers more comfortable with Western towns, courtrooms or hospital emergency rooms to write for a space-traversing ship and her diverse crew.
    Roddenberry, however, had ambitions to reach beyond just TV writers: he wanted to appeal to successful science fiction novelists and short story writers. His thinking was that such people, even if they had no experience of writing for television, would be familiar with the ideas behind the futuristic drama of
Star Trek
and so would be able to contribute in a unique way to the development of this most singular of television series. While his instinct was right in reaching out to other accomplished science fiction storytellers, it was to be an approach that produced very mixed results.
    Of those consulted, the one who most readily grasped the concepts and characters of
Star Trek
was Richard Matheson. He had contributed episodes to Rod Serling’s groundbreaking SF, horror and fantasy anthology
The Twilight Zone
(which, like
Star Trek
, had initially begun life as a pilot at Desilu), and had written a series of fantasy novels, several of which would later become films (among them
What Dreams May Come
,
Somewhere in Time
and
I Am Legend
). He would contribute ‘The Enemy Within’, the fifth episode of the first season, that saw a transporter accident split Captain Kirk into his ‘good’ and ‘evil’ personalities.
    Others, such as novelist A. E. van Vogt, could not come to terms with the economic limitations of weekly television compared to the limitless canvas of the blank page. The ideasand characters he submitted to Roddenberry were either not well developed enough for television or unsuitable for the medium, being better suited to a 200-page novel than a one-hour TV episode.
    Throughout the original three-year run of
Star Trek
, several well-known science fiction writers did get episodes on air, not all of them without incident. Among those who succeeded were Ted Sturgeon (who did much to develop Spock and Vulcan culture in the second season opener ‘Amok Time’), Jerry Sohl, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison (the most problematic), Jerome Bixby, George Clayton Johnson (another
Twilight Zone
veteran) and Norman Spinrad.
    Roddenberry welcomed their inventiveness and ideas, but he had to put huge amounts of work into translating their concepts into shootable scripts for Justman to get on the stages at Desilu. Not all the authors understood or were comfortable with the process of weekly television, but most were content to bow to Roddenberry’s reworking of their originals (Harlan Ellison being the notable exception). After all, most reckoned, who knew
Star Trek
better than Gene Roddenberry?
    Many of the initial basics of the show were driven by the realities of television production. As well as the time-saving transporter that ‘beamed’ the crew up and down from planets, it was deemed that the crew should predominantly visit Earth-like worlds (labelled Class-M planets) as then the production could avoid the need to put the show’s stars into bulky space suits every week. Additionally, although the opening mantra of the show promised voyages ‘where no man has gone before’, in the old
Star Trek
joke there always had to be