Sorry to MAGolding this... but it's time for...
A MINI FACT TREK!
Conceived it. Pitched it. Sold it. Hired team members (e.g. Jeffries) and directed and oversaw them. Oversaw everything re. the making of a fine, short sf film (Cage). Did it again. Oversaw the production company creating a weekly, hard-to-produce sf series. Personally produced half the first season, rewriting many or most of the scripts. Oversaw and supervised S2.
Yes. It's in vogue to dis GR's contributions to
Star Trek but he did a huge amount of the heavy lifting. People have even gone so far as to claim that Coon invented the Prime Directive but he didn't. It's there in everything but name in GR's May 1965 2nd pilot version of "The Omega Glory". That's not to knock the contributions of others, but the adulation pendulum has swung to the opposite side from GR. Reality is probably more in the middle.
Because I think his importance is overblown [...]
See above.
[...]the moment that TOS was threatened with cancellation he was preparing for the next best thing (See: Assignment: Earth as a backdoor pilot).
Untrue and it misrepresents the circumstances.
GR had a pilot development deal at Desilu and he was expected to make show pitches and pilots. He did
the Police Story pilot (link) literally on the heels of "Where No Man Has Gone Before". He pitched other shows, produced (badly, apparently)
The Long Hunt for April Savage, etc.
Assignment: Earth was something he'd been developing there for years and—after no network went for it—he decided to throw a Hail Mary and get it done as a backdoor pilot.
He left in the third season in part because he got a two picture deal at National General to do a
Tarzan feature script, and when that deal all fell apart, Herb Solow brought him over to write Roger Vadim's tasteless
Pretty Maids All In A Row. When that bombed GR's nascent motion picture career went down with it, so he turned back to TV with his early 70s pilots.
Moving on...
It wasn't about the merchandise, so much as how it was done. Roddenberry had already pretty much quit on Star Trek, then made them write in the trinket so he could sell it via his Lincoln Enterprises mail-order company.
As above, he saw the ship was sinking. He had a career to think about. We don't like it but it's understandable why he chased the National General
Tarzan deal. He needed work when
Trek went belly up. Was IDIC a tacky ploy to make some silver on
tchotchkes? Sure. But it was in the spirit of the show which is why it's hung around more than just from Spock's neck.
60’s and 80’s Roddenberry were two very different people.
Not really. I think Gene's basic personality remained the same. But like a lot of people perhaps he became set in his ways and inflexible.
The damning even device that he was the man who raped Grace Lee Whitney probably has something to do with it.
You meant "evidence". And there isn't really any. It's Grace's account, and while I find it credible and it lines up with what we
do know for sure happened, it's still not evidence in the legal sense.
I've heard that was myth or perhaps "cerebral" was code for something else. Maybe
@Harvey or
@Maurice can enlighten me. (us?)
My understanding, from reading Nimoy an Shatner's books, was that "too cerebral" meant the audience would struggle with emotionally connecting with the characters as presented..
I can't remember where I heard it, but somebody somewhere once suggested that "cerebral" was a roundabout way of saying it dealt a little too much with sexuality.
Pretty sure it was Solow who said that about "cerebral" meaning erotic.
From my read of the documents I've seen I think the comment "cerebral" as per the first pilot was because it's all about mind games as opposed not necessarily that the story was too smart for us
plebs. As to why "cerebral" stuck with GR, well, Stanley Robertson at NBC liked to use that word in his letters during series production.
Exactly. And, I think it was Nimoy who related in "I Am Spock" that the execs were concerned people wouldn't care about the characters as presented and wouldn't tune in again and again.
Perhaps. According to Solow NBC was not taken by the first pilot's cast, which is a good segue to...
His treatment of Laurel Goodwin (Yeoman Colt) was sleazy. Then after giving him the leg show he wanted he ended up not bringing her back after the pilot anyway. No one even knew about what happened for decades, and she didn't think anyone would care.
Solow has indicated that NBC didn't like the casting of the first pilot other than Hunter and Nimoy...so it was a clean sweep of the rest of the cast and nothing to do with Goodwin particularly. Hence buh-bye to Boyce, Number One, Garrison, Tyler
and Colt. Ultimately Hunter flew the coop but NBC never seemed that hot on him to begin with.
@Harvey addressed the
accuracy of some of Goodwin's recollections here (link), but obviously not on whether GR asked to see her legs (likely).
I don’t recall the over-sexualized accusation for Cage (although I’m sure someone might have had a problem with it at some point), but I do remember that a lot of folks, mostly in the Bible Belt, felt that Spock looked too demonic with the ears and eyebrows and really wanted him booted from the cast.
It was NBC that worried about audience reaction to Spock (hence in the infamous airbrushed photo) and maybe the Bible Belt, but the actual reaction to Spock in general was overwhelmingly positive, and his "devilish" appearance didn't appear to cause any NBC affiliates to drop the show.
From what I've seen, putting aside the rumors about Grace Lee Whitney, David Gerrold and Ellison seem the only people he worked with who particularly disliked him, while on the other hand D.C. Fontana and Robert Justman had some disagreements and grudges against him but didn't particularly dislike him or consider him terrible.
Don't forget John D.F. Black walked as soon as he could due to Gene's rewriting.
Interestingly, if you look at
The Lieutenant, made just prior to GR's Desilu deal, it seems he may have been less involved it the making of it than
Star Trek. Something about
Trek made him incredibly hands-on.
Yes but unsuccessfully by himself. (And I am talking about the actual pitch not the pilot that was made after the pitch). If not for Herbert Solo It probably would never have been made.
That was Solow's job, after all.
Again if you really look at the history of the production of Star Trek, Herbert Solo was just as instrumental as Gene Roddenberry in getting Star Trek off the ground and getting the first two seasons made and completed successfully.
That might be overstating the case somewhat. Solow was key to getting the show on NBC, yes, but as he was overseeing all the Desilu productions, I seriously doubt he gave
Trek as much time as the production people did.
Gene Roddenberry seemed a bit more lecherous than most.
Harvey Weinstein and others demonstrate that this is not the case, and the "casting couch" and nepotism goes waaaaaay back in Hollywood.
[...]
20. Cushman & Osborn 2013, p. 513.
21. Ellison 1996, p. 8.
22. Shatner & Kreski 1993, p. 221.
23. Cushman & Osborn 2013, p. 514.
FTFY.
Yeah I fail to see how "The Cage" was any more or less cerebral then "Where No Man Has Gone Before".
Solow has written that NBC's difficulty with the first pilot was that NBC's Mort Werner admitted they had picked the wrong story of the ones pitched to them, hence Desilu had proven they could make the show. Because NBC admitted their culpability Solow got a deal for three scripts to be written for a second pilot and NBC put up considerably more $$$ for the production of the second ($209,000) than the first ($185,000). (
budgets mentioned here (link))
The pilot was very expensive and took a long time to produce, and I remember one of the things NBC thought was that it would not be possible to maintain this level of production and turn out one new episode a week for broadcast.
That was part of the goal of the second pilot, to prove that they could do an episode a week and deliver something to the network to broadcast.
I suspect NBC didn't care much how long the pilots took to shoot. It was Desilu that had to figure out if they could do it on a reasonable schedule and if they could afford the amount of deficit financing required to make it feasible. People frequently conflate the network and the studio. All the network cares about is that the stories are acceptable and the shows arrive in time to meet their airdates. The rest is the studio's problem.
—whew—
Yeah, never thought about it from that angle before, but I could totally see him doing something like that.
