FACT TREK—The Off-Center Seat: 55 Years of Myth Making

Just tweeted this...

 

Of course when I scanned the article again I spotted a number of typos and formatting errors, mostly in the footnotes. <facepalm>
I’ll fix them over my morning coffee.

 

Fixed the errors, but whilst glancing at a spreadsheet of documents my eye landed on this, so I immediately had to tweet it.

 

Hmm that could be source of this from the intro of Star Trek Lives! (Bantam 1975)

"At the end of the first season, when Star Trek was first canceled by the network, people wrote to protest—to the staggering total of one million letters."

So have fans over the years just conflated a dubious number originally applied to that Committee campaign with the end of the second season Bjo Trimbel campaign?

Also, I'd be curious to see more of that top paragraph in the image, the one that ends with "Carrying the good word down into the boondocks."

 

The whole thing is a confused mess. It seems the two campaigns have been routinely conflated. That said, "The Committee" campaign seems less likely than the Trimble-faced/Roddenbacked season 2 campaign to have generated an enormous response.

We'll be tweeting the full piece on the 11th, which is the anniversary of the letter being printed, but here ya go.

 

During one of the episodes, Marc Cushman made a comment about former Paramount executive Barry Diller being Catholic. Close but not quite. Diller is Jewish.

 

Why? Wasn't The Committee associated with WorldCon and the existing SF community?

 

In the December '66 Yandro, one of the letter column submissions talks about having gotten his gang to produce 60+ letters. All of the extant zines are filled with second-hand exhortations. A million letters sounds high, though, because Harlan would have been leveraging the existing fan infrastructure, and over a comparatively short amount of time. Given that the average run of Ace Double sales might be 70,000, I think that's a decent tally of SF print fans. Thus, thousands of letters is the order I'd find more plausible than a million. The common viewer wouldn't have been engaged yet, I don't think.

And not all literary fans were hip to Trek. In the same issue of Yandro, none other than Alex Panshin (who has a piece on Galactic Journey!) poopooed the show.

Also, one of the things I'm noting in these contemporary reports of having sent letters is that they often describe the personalized responses they got. Who can answer a million letters?

I guess the real question is this:

Do we have conclusive proof that the letter campaign had anything to do with the decision to renew for a 2nd season? (obviously, it had nothing to do with the show getting a full first season)

 

I suppose that's possible, but most of the reporting about mass letter writing centers on the 2nd campaign, when the Trimbles had access to Rodderberry-provided info for outreach.

But as I look deeper at this it's even more confusing than I realized. Inside Star Trek (p.305) claims the on-air announcement and not to write more letters was during "Devil In the Dark", but a 1968-03-10 item 'Star Trek'--Cause of the Greatest Public Uprising, in The San Francisco Examiner, claims this happened on March 1, 1968 when "The Omega Glory" aired.

As to the "million" letters, Roddenberry likewise mentions it in 1968, which is at the end of the second campaign.

If one person could just count two letters per second with no lag for 8 hours a day, five days a week, to just count a million pieces of mail would take 34.7 person days (six work weeks) just to count the envelopes. To open them would take considerably longer. Solow and Justman address this in Inside Star Trek (p378–9), and the impossibility of dealing with such numbers as have been claimed.

Frankly, it all stinks of fannish invention.

 

@Maurice @Neopeius I already said the number was "dubious" so don't distract by pretending I was defending it. I'm not.

I was simply saying that, since the WSFS had been giving out Hugos since 1939, their existing network of fans and fanclubs might have worked better than any ad-hoc thing Bjo came up with. Also, I can't speak to the relevance, but i do find it interesting that the fan letter with the million letter number was from an attendee of Tricon—aka the 24th WorldCon—the convention where GR showed off the pilot(s). Maybe someone thought of a letter campaign as a contingency long before the cancellation announcement came.

 

I'm sorry if it seemed that way. I was just answering your question: ("Wasn't The Committee associated with WorldCon and the existing SF community?")

Right, which is why I brought up the Ace sales figures. Harlan did a good job of mobilizing the existing network. Problem is that that network would be hard tasked to generate 100,000 letters let alone 1,000,000. SF readership, not the folks who engaged in fanac (which numbered in the low thousands), but just read the stuff numbered no more than 100,000, and a lot of the community didn't care for Trek.

I haven't gotten to 1968 yet, but I suspect Bjo's campaign went beyond the SF community to the Trek community, which would have been a lot bigger.

Per Harlan's book, the campaign was Roddenberry's idea, broached in November -- after the series had secured a full season.

 

Sorry, don't buy those numbers. There were 800+ attendees at Tricon; your numbers would suggest that 1 in 121 readers attended that Con. What about Doubleday's sales figures? What about Bantam's? What about Ballantine's? Those are the names on the spines of the books I own that date from that era.

 

I'm not sure which numbers you're not buying. Is 1 in 121 too few or too many in your estimation?

I don't know the sales figures of the other companies, but Ace I think is representative of the SF crowd of the time.

 

I think your numbers for readership are too low. According to NASA, at its peak, the Apollo program employed ~400,000 Americans. That means there were four time more people working to make science fiction real than there were reading it according to you. Heck, your 100k isn't even one–tenth of one percent of the US population. Talk about rare.

Were they? And how do their sales represent those readers that never purchased from them? Or are you basing it on capacity, because Ballantine was able to run off 375,000 copies of Executive Suite, the very first book they ever published. In a year. And they were a definite major player in the SF business at the time (and still are AFAIK) .

 

Turning the argument back around, if those 400,000 Apollo folks were SF fans, why did Tricon only have 800 attendees?

I'll submit that most folks working at NASA were probably not plugged into the SF community Ellison had access to.

Ballantine was definitely big in the SF community, but that's not all they did. (I know ACE didn't just do SF either, but it was much more central to their line).

In any event, I'm just using the numbers I have to get a general sense of the fan network at the time. And I don't think Ellison could, logistically, have motivated a million letters in the space of a month, not using the machinery at his disposal.

Again, it would help if we had information from the network side of things -- like a memo saying "Gosh, we got inundated with hundreds of thousands of letters. We had to renew Trek!" That'd be a smoking gun.

 

Me? Distract? How?

 

What percentage of readers of a given publisher were on a mailing list that can be reached out to? A mailing list that fans can get at to beat the drum?

The simple fact of the matter is there are—to date—no smoking guns. What reporting there is on it seems very dependent on Roddenberry narrative or what the actors said. I have yet to see one piece of reporting cite a TV station, let alone NBC, about mail volume. The numbers that are reported are all over the place. The only place I ever see “million” is in fan circles. And how do even the fans know it was a million letters? Did they all write to each other just to say they had written to NBC? The whole idea doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. I find it incredibly unconvincing, and the more I read up on it, the more I suspect all these numbers are just invented.

 

FFS, that was for comparison purposes; I wasn't claiming those numbers as readers, I was just pointing out that it was rarer to be a SF reader than be an Apollo employee if 100k was a good figure.

I was curious about your reasoning on campaign 1 being less than campaign 2 and your post seemed to hare away from that...and into unrelated stuff about the second campaign before ending with the logistics of the million letter problem.

 

I think that's a true statement, actually. Certainly rarer to be a fan who engaged in fanac.

 

@Maurice And I keep expecting you to find something that has that million number as a motivational point. Something like "if we all do this then maybe..."