Harlan Ellison was a brilliant writer, but the number one rule of writing for someone else is that you have to expect it to be rewritten. That he could not comprehend that when that is the industry practice, especially for television, has always baffled me. His vemon at Roddenberry and Star Trek because of that was undeserved.
Ellison's venom wasn't so much over the fact that he was rewritten, but that he thought he was rewritten
badly. He thought that the space pirate stuff he had to add in was stupid, hated that McCoy accidentally injected himself with his own hypo, disliked the elimination of his original characters Beckwith and Trooper, and outright
despised that they changed his original ending. Ellison's P.O.V. was that Kirk loved Edith Keeler so much that he could never have sacrificed her life even to save the timestream, while the ever-logical Spock would've done what needed to be done. Obviously, Roddenberry felt differently.
And the fact that Roddenberry lied about Ellison's story for decades afterwards didn't help. If I were in Ellison's shoes, I'd be pissed off, too.
That being said, COTEOF may have been a mismanagement issue. Gene Roddenberry approved the initial outline that had all the elements (drug dealing, Kirk hesitating, etc.) he later objected to. If he didn't like those, why didn't he kill those ideas at the early stage.
Excellent point. If you don't like the story that your freelancer wants to tell, don't buy that story.
But to his credit, Ellison did address some of those issues with his rewrite, as seen in his COTEOF book. Hell he even added the ridiculous space pirate sequence in the first draft because Roddenberry insisted the ship be in danger. So he was willing to collaborate to a point.
When Ellison wrote "Demon With A Glass Hand" for
The Outer Limits, he originally conceived the story as a much more expensive cross-country chase with different locations. At the producer's suggestion, Ellison re-conceived the story as all happening in one location, the Bradbury Building in L.A., with a force field keeping all the characters confined inside the building and the immediate area.
So yeah, he was pretty flexible if you treated him well and were willing to collaborate with him instead of just rewriting him without any consultation.
even this is something Ellison complained about. He didn't care that his story had both Kirk and Spock acting out of character.
To be fair, Ellison originally pitched COTEOF early in the first season, when the characters and world of
Star Trek were much less established. By the time he turned in his story,
Trek had almost an entire season under its belt and things were more set. So the sands were shifting underneath him.
He didn't care just how easily a simple name change could have put Scotty in the role of the bad guy, not only dealing drugs but committing murder, and writing him out of the show, instead of his villain of the week.
My point was that forces beyond Ellison's control could have made the villain Scotty with a stroke of a pen, and there was nothing Ellison could do about it. He just didn't care. GR wasn't about to let those forces have the opportunity, and that's the main reason the drug-dealing was dropped.
Reread Ellison's first draft. Just that, no rewrites. Ignore mischaracterization and substitute Scotty for Beckwith every time. That's all a studio or network exec had to demand of the writers, and suddenly, Scotty is not only the drug-dealing murderer, but the bad end Beckwith got at the end is now Scotty's bad end, complete with his never being seen again.
...What? I mean, seriously...
WHAT?!?
"They changed the character because someone could've possibly rewritten him as Scotty" makes absolutely
no sense at all. I mean, they could've also rewritten the Kirk part to be Yeoman Rand or recruited Elizabeth Montgomery over from
Bewitched to play Spock that week. Either one of those theories makes about as much sense, and has as much evidence behind it.
Any who were these evil outside forces who could've rewritten Beckwith into Scotty, anyway? What would their motivation for this change be? With the period setting, COTEOF was an expensive episode to begin with. Why get the presumably more-expensive James Doohan to play Scotty when a non-name guest actor playing Beckwith would've been just as effective?
That's about the most nonsensical comment about "City" that I've ever seen, and that's saying something. And your clarification post... didn't.
Agreed.
In any overly long winded intro to some book or other Ellison had no problem letting YOU the reader know he spent time in a cell for marching for civil rights an was so good about it he shared food with a lesser soul also in the slammer that night. Sinatra, on the other hand, quietly used his influence to integrate entertainment in Vegas and open up the hotels and never said a word about it on his own.
Why is it automatically bad to mention good things that you've done in your life? Why
shouldn't Ellison talk about that stuff? Those are things to be proud of.
And Sinatra had mob ties throughout most of his career. He was hardly a paragon of virtue. Sinatra probably stayed quiet about integrating the Vegas scene because, in the 50s and 60s, that would've alienated at least half of his fanbase. At least Ellison put his money where his mouth was and took public stands on racial relations.
James Doohan was never a lead on Star Trek.
True. A lead would've been in every single episode and had his name in the opening credits the way that Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley did. Doohan was supporting cast.
Hey, the truth hurts.
Scotty was at the center of two stories - "Wolf in the Fold" and "The Lights of Zetar." Doohan was a contracted regular for the second and third seasons (in the first season, he had a commitment for multiple episodes, but contractually, was considered a recurring player, not a regular). He was a secondary character.
Uhura and Sulu were at the center of exactly zero stories. Nichols was only a regular for the first 13 episodes of season two; before and after that she did not have the contract and was paid by the day. Takei was a regular for the first two seasons; after that, he did not have a contract and was paid by the day. Neither Uhura nor Sulu received a first name, either on screen or in behind-the-scenes materials. They're secondary players at their most prominent; in most stories, they're tertiary ones.
Exactly.
