Scotty isn't in Ellison's script. At all. How the heck could the network demand Scotty be written out of the script if he was never in it in the first place?
Irrelevant. Not what I said. REREAD my post.
And?
Star Trek Publicity Myths
- Thread starter ZapBrannigan
- Start date
Irrelevant. Not what I said. REREAD my post.
And?
Ellison got the Roddenberry quote from a 1987 article in Cinefantastique magazine (#63).
http://wherenobloghasgonebefore.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-look-at-some-vintage-magazines-part-2.html(scroll down for review)
Previously, in Gerrold's 1973 Tribbles book Roddenberry didn't mention Scotty dealing drugs, just "one of our crewmen engaged in dope smuggling."
Here's a big publicity myth: the pre-regular series shots of the Enterprise flying in the sky, as if that was to be an expected function of the ship.
See: The Making of Star Trek 1st printing cover for the most famous example:
http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Making_of_Star_Trek
The brief low orbit seen in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" would not count, as that was due to the accident / power issue, not a deliberate function of the ship.
See: The Making of Star Trek 1st printing cover for the most famous example:
http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Making_of_Star_Trek
The brief low orbit seen in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" would not count, as that was due to the accident / power issue, not a deliberate function of the ship.
Where on that page? There are a lot of page scans.
Irrelevant. Not what I said. REREAD my post.
Your post was nonsensical. Hence my confusion. And judging from the other responses it got, I was not alone in that assessment. REWRITE your post.
Irrelevant. Not what I said. REREAD my post.
It kind of is what you said. Specifically, ``studio and network types would have probably demanded that the one-time character be renamed to Scotty, and write James Doohan out of the show to cut the cast budget''. One can see where a reader might take you to mean there would be a demand to write James Doohan out of the show.
I took you to mean ``write James Doohan into the show to cut the cast budget'' (at least, the guest cast budget). And I think you're likely correct. Budget concerns especially for an episode this obviously expensive would mean any redshirt role that possibly could go to someone already under contract would. But the role of drug-dealer could not possibly go to Scotty without breaking the show.
Mind. If we stipulate that Roddenberry did somewhere claim to have said Ellison's script had Scotty dealing drugs (I would like to see a primary source citation for this), the most charitable explanation I can imagine is that Roddenberry probably was speaking or writing a couple years after the 1967, and had almost certainly forgot all the details of the making of the episode.
There are two universal truths about people who make TV shows: they don't watch much TV themselves (too busy), and they don't remember anything but the fuzziest, broadest picture of what went into the making of their own TV shows (too busy). To remember that the early scripts were unusable and they had someone from the ship dealing drugs would be an unusually clear recollection of something that was, at the time, just the struggle to get an episode made.
I grant it's possible, even likely, that Roddenberry was trying to play up how important he was and how everyone else doing Star Trek didn't quite get it; that's part of his myth making approach. But it seems sufficient to suppose that Roddenberry forgot everything about the making of the episode roughly two hours after the network accepted it for broadcast.
Lost in Space shot all of its spaceship fx "in camera," simply hanging the model in front of a painting, or for take-offs and landings, in a miniature set. No blue screen involved. No matte lines, no image bleed due to spill light.
I wonder how Star Trek would have looked using that technique. The blue sky backdrop could just as easily have been a painted star field, for the 3-footer or the 11.
As discussed above, the earliest verifiable source we have for Roddenberry making that claim is from 1987. Although the Wikipedia talk page I linked to earlier includes an anecdotal account of Roddenberry denying that he'd said it as early as 1982. In any case, it's a controversy that didn't seem to begin until quite a few years after the fact.
Given how good Space: 1999's effects looked using wirework and in-camera mattes, ST would probably have looked pretty good that way. Bluescreen FX had the advantage of greater versatility and the ability to superimpose one image directly over another, separately filmed image without translucency; the in-camera matte shots in 1999 (made by multiple-exposing different image passes onto the same negative) tended to have gaps in the starscape for the ships to pass through without appearing translucent against the stars, whereas ST was able to superimpose the ship over a full animated starscape, various planets, etc. without image bleedthrough. The technique also allowed the same stock shots of the ship to be composited against different backgrounds, reducing the need for new photography. But the tradeoff was that bluescreen composites required multiple film generations (photographing a photograph of a photograph), so that the image lost resolution and became grainier and blurrier. (That's why TOS-R had to redo the effects as CGI. The completed opticals were too low-resolution to look good in HD, and the original, separate film elements didn't survive to be recomposited in high quality like in the case of TNG-R.)
Sometimes I think they should've done a mix of both techniques, using in-camera effects for the basic stuff and saving the bluescreen work for the more complicated shots. But maybe the 11-foot miniature was just too heavy to allow that, and maybe the difference in quality between the in-camera and optical composites would've been too jarring.
I think the 11-foot was too large for that kind of wire work, which would rob the model of the steady movement necessary to sell the idea of it being massive. Even using the miniatures of Jupiter 2 (largest measuring 4 ft.) & Flying Sub (largest measuring 3 ft.), there was the occasional wobble, when one would think both offered greater control.
Imagine how that would have worked with the 11 ft. Enterprise.
Check out Ellison's book with his original script drafts for COTEOF. It contains scans of at least two Roddenberry interviews where he made the claim that HE had Scotty dealing drugs. Ellison would correct him on this, Roddenberry would apologize & say he misremembered, and then he would make the exact same claim a couple of years later.
Scroll down to the review of Cinfantastique #63 from 1987 (its way down the page after a lot of Starlogs)
It states: "The best section might well be a several-paragraphs-long bit devoted to "The City on the Edge of Forever," the Harlan Ellison-originated episode that is beloved by more or less everyone not named Harlan Ellison. Ellison hurls invective ("I despise the Star Trek "City on the Edge of Forever"); D.C. Fonatana speaks logically ("You have to read the two" screenplays [i.e., Ellison's original and the revised version used for filming] "and form your own opinions"); and Gene Roddenberry speaks passionately in defense of his ideals ("He had my Scotty dealing in interplanetary drugs and things like that!"). On that last point, Roddenberry is in error (as he would later admit); Scotty does not actually appear in the script. However, having read Ellison's draft, which is very good, I can say that in my opinion, Roddenberry was right to heavily revise it; it was good, but it wasn't exactly Star Trek. Roddenberry took it and turned it into Star Trek, and vintage Star Trek at that. We here at Where No Blog Has Gone Before love ya, Harlan . . . but you ain't always right, and this was one of those times when you were mostly not."
It's important to remember that it took Ellison most of the first season to write the script to COTEOF, so what Star Trek was was still in the process of being discovered, as not many episodes were in the can when Ellison started writing. So I think he can be forgiven for it not entirely jibing with the Star Trek that we know.
Yeah, it's weird to think of the Enterprise we know having a firing squad execute an officer for drug-dealing on the Enterprise, but if it's happened somewhere in the first few episodes, we wouldn't think it so strange. Heck, one of Roddenberry's early drafts of "The Cage" had April/Pike throwing a crewman off his ship for opening fire on a non-humanoid alien species.
(song continues)
I have a thick campy accent
Which makes it hard to act very well
They brought me in as a sex symbol
And that's a really tough sell!
Yous guys....
At this juncture, it's probably worthwhile to note that, in "Turnabout Intruder," Kirk/Lester threatened to execute a party on the hangar deck, presumably by firing squad, and security evidently would have actually done it, were those orders not countermanded. The story-by credit for that episode goes to none other than Gene Roddenberry.
It would be interesting to know whether Roddenberry himself can take credit for that.
It wouldn't have. The thing weighed 225 pounds. The model appears to have been suspended from a stationary wire for some of the early FX shots, but I don't think it could ever have been swooshed past the camera on a Lydecker rig.
It is also noteworthy that none of the officers shown would have supported it and the evidence of security carrying that out is very meager. There was incredible outrage by all shown characters at that "order" and a vague statement about security obeying him is not conclusive.
In fact, what Security does here is stall. Throwing people in the brig is a great way to do that, and this is the worst that ever happens to any of the characters involved.
The intent of the writer(s) may have been completely different, but then again, "Turnabout Intruder" is the one episode that benefits the most from throwing writer intent out of the airlock and concentrating on what is actually on screen.
Timo Saloniemi
The intent of the writer(s) may have been completely different, but then again, "Turnabout Intruder" is the one episode that benefits the most from throwing writer intent out of the airlock and concentrating on what is actually on screen.
Timo Saloniemi
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