Did Roddenberry Really Write "The Cage"?

Yep, he stole credit for it.



Does that make the Roddenberry haters happy?

 

Oswald was a crack marksman and it was not that difficult a shot.

 

For me, the telling thing is that at least three entirely independent investigative groups -- the Warren Commission, a CBS News team led by Walter Cronkite, and an investigation done for PBS's Nova -- all separately reached the conclusion that Oswald acted alone. While in contrast, there are countless different conspiracy theories that don't uniformly agree on anything. There's only one right answer to a given question and an unlimited number of wrong answers, so if something is true, separate inquisitors will end up converging on it. If they go off in a dozen different directions, there's no reason to think any one of them is true.

Additionally, Cronkite started out with the assumption that the Warren Commission was hiding something and that Oswald hadn't acted alone -- and his investigation led him to conclude the exact opposite. He tried to disprove the Commission's findings and ended up verifying them. Now, if someone ends up concluding something that confirms their pre-existing bias, then it's likely their bias distorted their perception of the facts, and that calls their results into question. But the facts convinced Cronkite of the opposite of what he expected to find, and that's very telling. (Not to mention that Cronkite wasn't called "the most trusted man in America" for nothing. His integrity as a journalist was beyond reproach.)

And Stone's JFK was a joke. Its conspiracy theory was predicated on a belief in the authenticity of a report that had been confessed to be a hoax decades before the movie was made. That's a contemptible failure of research.

Anyway, we're getting off-topic. I wonder, how many conspiracy theories about Roddenberry will arise in the decades to come? Perhaps a better comparison here would be all the conspiracy theories about someone else writing Shakespeare's plays.

 

Edward de Vere created Star Trek.

 

Only in the Abramsverse.

 

I thought it was Benny Russell.


I wonder what would've happened if Gene Roddenberry and Bob Kane had collaborated on something. Which one would've been more successful at stealing credit for the whole thing?

 

Indeed, I think these kind of theories about Roddenberry and Star Trek will circulate a lot into fandom after everybody "who was there" would have been gone.

But, did Pike really go on Talos IV or it's only studio footage?

 

Roddenberry was a successful TV freelancer who'd sold a boatload of scripts, had won an award, and previously sold a series. Frankly, the writing in "The Cage" isn't that wonderful. The ideas are better than the dialog (which totally smacks of Gene). As such I have little trouble believing it's Roddenberry's work, even if he got a lot of notes.

 

^^
This.

 

Not to mention that he flew 89 combat missions in WW2 as a USAAF bomber pilot, for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal, flew commercial airliners for Pan-Am, and attained the rank of sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department. The guy had already lived one hell of a life long before he had ever dreamed of creating Star Trek, and he will always be one of my heroes, no matter how much of a "jerk" he may or may not have been. There is a good reason why the people of his time are known as the Greatest Generation.

 

I thought fandom was over the demonisation of Roddenberry!

I get that he was over-idolised in the first 25 years of Trek, but the way people speak of him nowadays...

Sorry, I have a real issue with all of these "friends" and "co-workers" who worshipped him when he was alive, and it was only till he was dead took the opportunity to tell tales, stab him in the back etc when he has no chance to defend himself or put forward his side of the story. As Majel Barrett once said in an interview (quoting Gene): "Consider the source".

Don't get me wrong, yes, a lot of the stories and things we've learned suggest he was a deeply flawed human being - but now we get to people accusing of him being talentless, or not even responsible for Star Trek etc etc...

I really hope for the 50th anniversary we can get a more objective, honest documentary and/or book about Roddenberry than has been written in the last 50 years.

 

You forgot being a hero when his Pan Am plane crashed in the desert.

 

Regardless as to whether or not Solow's assumptions are true, I take issue with people who consistently treat him like he was a saint. Take a listen to the Nichelle Nichols interview with the guys from Mission Log and tell me you don't want to vomit. My god, she acts like he wrote every episode of Star Trek all by himself, walked on water, and found the cure for cancer all in the same day.

He's somewhere in between the sinner Solow claims and the saint Nichols suggests.

 

I believe the word for that is "human."

 

^Now that's just crazy talk.

 

What he said.

 

Is it the objective warts&all bio where Tracy Torme tells the story about GR waxing (not whacking, though that probably figure into it a little earlier in the scene) poetic in the Hart Building about stream after stream of ejaculate shooting forth ... ?

 

^^^I remember the story as "wave after wave." But I'm sure I've said more than a few gross things in my life, so...

Sir Rhosis

 

I stand corrected, as soon as I saw that wave you wrote, it all came crashing back (fortunately, not onto me.)

 

There's a proper use of the word "objective," and then there's the sloppy colloquial one.