Except that his resentment appears to predate and reach back further than the development of TNG.
Have you read the new Gross & Altman book?
- Thread starter CrazyMatt
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Gerrold got screwed by Roddenberry -- not his lawyer -- just like a lot of other people (both literally and figuratively). Both Gerrold and Fontana were victims of bad timing (if they'd been able to stick around a couple of years longer we'd probably be talking about them instead of Piller, Moore and Braga) and -- in the case of Gerrold -- his inability to play the Hollywood game (pretty much by his own admission really). Yes, it cost him a truckload of money.
It's been almost 30 years; although he claims to have put it behind him he sure does talk about it a lot.
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Both Gerrold and Bob Justman knew Roddenberry and his proclivities very well before signing on to TNG; they knew what they were getting into. When Justman recalled his experiences with Gene in the Inside Star Trek book, he pretty much gracefully and with a great deal of class accepted them as "Gene being Gene." Gerrold on the other hand, either unwilling to accept Gene's shortcomings or fearing fan backlash if he condemned Gene personally, engaged in a bizarre, decades-long public vendetta against Gene's attorney Leonard Maizlish, a man who's been dead almost as long as Gene himself. I don't doubt Maizlish was less than pleasant for the TNG staff to deal with, but his job was to represent Gene's business interests in an ongoing power struggle over the franchise, not win a popularity contest. Every time Gerrold rails on Maizlish he comes off as progressively more unhinged. Quite sad.
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You mean David "I Have No Dog In This Fight" Gerrold? Seems like his ability to be objective is just as bad as it ever was.
Wow. It really looks like JJ Abrams took Harve Bennett's academy years script to make ST09 and kept a lot of the elements. If so then ST09 was not the brainchild of JJ but rather Bennett's.
Bennett's Academy movie was written by David Loughery; Abram's Star Trek (2009) was written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman. Loughery's version is, shall we say, not good. I doubt Abrams or anyone else involved in the recent movies has even read it.
The Academy script was discussed in Shatner's book on he movies, and elsewhere. Orci & Kurtzman might have unconsciously or otherwise assimilated the gist of it.
Bennett's Academy movie was written by David Loughery; Abram's Star Trek (2009) was written by Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman. Loughery's version is, shall we say, not good. I doubt Abrams or anyone else involved in the recent movies has even read it.
The Academy script was discussed in Shatner's book on he movies, and elsewhere. Orci & Kurtzman might have unconsciously or otherwise assimilated the gist of it.
Finished today. I like the format, but the content was very familiar. It might work better for someone who hasn't been reading Trek behind the scenes material for 45 years.
Oh, come on. Maizlish called Gerrold a "cocksucker" and an "AIDS-infected faggot" to his face, intentionally sabotaged people, and forced out most of the creative staff of TNG due to his shenanigans. I don't blame Gerrold for still bearing a grudge.
Does Gerrold choose to talk about it a lot, or does he still get asked about it a lot? I'm suspecting it's more the latter than the former. Gerrold's had a great career, but Star Trek is still the best-known thing he's ever worked on. I'm sure the majority of the questions he gets are ST-related.
You've missed the point; Maizlish died in 1994. Sure, he can hold a public grudge against a dead man for 22 years (or almost 30 since they parted company), but is that healthy or even becoming? What's Gerrold going to do; stencil "F*** You Maizlish!" on his own headstone?
Leonard Maizlish is a pretty shadowy presence in Trek BTS lore (I never even knew what he looked like until the Chaos on the Bridge documentary), but that's to be expected since most of his communications with Gene were attorney-client privileged. At least one of his memos to Gene (from 1987, misidentified as a "Memo from Paramount Pictures to Gene Roddenberry" and a spot on critique of the script for TFF) slipped out on Roddenberry.com, indicating he was no stranger to the series on a creative level. Personally I'd like to know more about Maizlish's actual contributions (for better or worse, I suspect mostly the latter) to the franchise, but aside from Gerrold's admittedly consistent rantings (he clearly hates the man) there's very little in the way of documentation or first-hand testimony about his behavior. I was hoping Chaos on the Bridge would shed more light than it did, but my takeway there was that Fontana thought he was not a nice man (can't remember the exact quote, but she seemed to be holding back), one Paramount exec wished him dead (jesting I'm sure; Maizlish certainly couldn't have been more than a minor thorn in his side), and another exec who complimented him on being a hard-nosed, able negotiator who secured a sweet deal on TNG for his client Roddenberry. Another subject (Behr I think) mentioned the alleged desk snooping but he wasn't even there at the time. I don't think anyone's defending Maizlish; perhaps they just find it uncouth to disparage a man long dead and truly have moved on.
That's why we have the phrase "No comment." If you've truly moved on, nobody can force you to dredge up the past. But Gerrold clearly hasn't moved on, and while understandable in a way it's not doing his career (such as it is) or reputation any favors.
Again, Gerrold got shafted, but he was shafted by Roddenberry who was notorious for making professional promises he wouldn't or couldn't keep. Gerrold's contributions to TNG are many and obvious (again, some for the better and some for the worse, arguably mostly the former). I didn't even know Gerrold was ever on staff at TNG until after the show wrapped (I had let my Starlog subscription lapse somewhere around '84-'85). I do believe Gene promised Gerrold a producer credit if he took the interim "consultant" credit and Gene later reneged. Perhaps unwilling to hold his idol Gene accountable he went rogue, focusing his wrath on Maizlish. Reporting Maizlish to the WGA was probably technically valid, but it certainly wouldn't have endeared him to the Paramount brass; they had a hit show and there's this Gerrold guy rocking the boat out of spite? Gerrold gets forced out in the power struggle (along with Fontana and a multitude of others), and once Gene leaves the scene and takes Maizlish with him, others are there to fill the power void (Piller, Moore, Braga, et al.).
Unless they're a masochist nobody would say to Gerrold, "So tell me about Maizlish." I suspect he gets questions about his time on TNG and immediately launches into "Well there was Gene's scumbag lawyer..." I'd love to know more about the genesis of TNG, how Gerrold's The World of Star Trek informed the TNG writer's guide, and so forth. We never get that of course, just more and more 30-year old butthurt. I'm sure Gerrold sees other Trek alumni with successful Hollywood careers and wonders what might have been.
Gerrold's free to say or do anything he wants of course, but if he's truly in as good a place as he says he is -- with a family, thriving book career and no regrets about his Hollywood days -- perhaps he should also walk the walk.
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If he's still holding a grudge against Maizlish, that makes Gerrold immature in the extreme. There are countless people who have experienced far worse slurs than Gerrold, or suffered beatings, other forms of extended abuse, or had relatives killed and forgave the person or people responsible. That is one of the true tenets of this life--not boiling in hatred toward someone until he takes takes his last breath.
Even if he's asked about ST, he does not have to mention Maizlish at all, since Gerrold has more ST experiences than that. Its a choice.
While, yes, he can always go for "No comment" or "I don't want to talk about that" or just redirect the question some how, maybe he just wants to be honest about it. Whatever the case, multiple fans asking him specifically about Maizlish wouldn't surprise me in the least. Some fans like to hear the dirt or like to know about as much as they can or just don't realize that a certain question might be inappropriate or painful for someone to answer.
Point taken. Again, Maizlish died in 1994 and I don't believe was ever very well-known in fan circles (FWIW he doesn't even have his own Memory Alpha entry; he's a footnote under Chaos on the Bridge). There was really no reason for him to be. He wasn't even behind-the-scenes; he was behind-the-behind-the-scenes. I even doubt the vast majority of contemporary (Abrams-era) fans have heard his name. That said I suppose his name might come up in an interview question, but it would have to be a pretty specific, obscure line of questioning. Chaos probably covered the subject to most people's satisfaction, and Gerrold's participation in that could serve as his "mic drop" on the subject if he chooses to do so (he's literally on camera admitting he wanted to murder the man; can't go much further than that!). Even that was in 2014 though, 27 years from the events in question.
I respect candor, and I don't know if Gerrold's comments in the Gross and Altman book are new or recycled from past interviews, but between his Maizlish fixation and his commentary on the Axanar affair, he just comes off as unspooled.
Yeah, okay, so Maizlish died in 1994. That doesn't magically make him not an asshole or erase the horrible things he did, does it? I see no reason that Gerrold should try to protect the reputation of a man who did him dirt.
And you can be honest about a person being horrible to you without still being angry about it. From what I've seen, Gerrold is simply stating the facts of what Maizlish was like.
I'm sure if he just said "No comment," a lot of folks would still try to read stuff into it and assume that their personal half-baked theories must be facts. "Oooooohh... What's Gerrold hiding?"
Recently I've been interviewing a creator about a show he did a few decades ago. He feels (much like Gerrold, I suppose) that he didn't get all the credit he was due and that his role in developing the show has been largely forgotten by history. When I told him that he didn't have to dredge up a lot of old feuds for the sake of the interview, he said that he was too old to care much about burning bridges any more. Perhaps Gerrold feels the same way.
From what I understand, a lot of the quotes in the Altman/Gross book are from previous interviews. I know that in my initial flip through, I recognized some of the Leonard Nimoy quotes from an interview he gave to Altman's Sci-Fi Universe in the mid-90s.
Of course he's under no obligation to protect Maizlish's reputation, and he almost certainly was an asshole. My point is that by repeatedly attacking someone who is long gone and can no longer defend themselves (not that he would necessarily be inclined to if he could) Gerrold risks looking like an even bigger asshole.
I don't know about that; his choice of terms is a bit over the top for simple documentation. While Justman, Fontana, Sackett, et al. obviously didn't like him, their comments were nowhere near as invective-laced as Gerrold's. "Evil" and "scumbag" are pretty charged words; he still seems to be harboring a significant amount of anger.
Have you seen Chaos on the Bridge? I found Gerrold's comments actually disturbing; the man is giddily admitting that he wanted to murder Maizlish by pushing him out a window! With Shatner (whom I suspect had no use for Maizlish either) egging him on! For me this transcended lighthearted banter into (at best) rather dark humor, bordering on mania. I understand Chaos was a relatively light, gossipy, TMZ-style exposé, but I for one was just like, "Wow, dude has issues..."
I'm sure if he just said "No comment," a lot of folks would still try to read stuff into it and assume that their personal half-baked theories must be facts. "Oooooohh... What's Gerrold hiding?"
Again, I just don't think Maizlish is that hot a topic of conversation. If anything Gerrold is probably keeping his memory alive; it actually made me want to learn more about the guy and how he helped shape early TNG for better or worse. We know he had a hand in hiring John de Lancie for Q for instance -- generally considered a good thing. This is probably impossible, but if he was in fact issuing notes and rewriting scripts (and not just as Gene's proxy), I'd be interested in knowing what was his and what was Roddenberry's. One episode has always fascinated me (for all the wrong reasons) -- "Datalore". The dialogue and characterizations are unusually off-key and stilted, even for S1 TNG. According to Memory Alpha it was Gene's last credited script for TNG; I wonder how much of it might have been Maizlish. While I don't think he was an experienced screenwriter, as I've said before I also don't think he was a complete hack when it came to the Trek format and what made it successful. I don't believe he ruined everything he touched on Trek; on the contrary he may have helped bolster Gene's efforts in his faltering years on the show.
Otherwise, just as Berman was there to protect Paramount's interests in TNG, Maizlish was there to protect Gene's -- pure and simple -- and he seems to have done a pretty good job of that. He was probably less than subtle and perhaps overzealous about it -- a bit of a wrecking ball -- but make no mistake, he was doing his client's bidding. That's what lawyers do. I do not believe he was trying to co-opt the franchise for his own purposes. That is not what lawyers do (practicing ones anyway).
Now certainly Gerrold's free to do or say anything he wants and has no reason to care about my opinion, but I just don't understand the point of constantly rehashing his Maizlish experience. Is he blaming Maizlish for the direction his life and career took post-TNG? Is he blaming the uneven quality of the early seasons on Maizlish? Is he crusading on behalf of everyone else negatively impacted by Maizlish? Dishing gossip? Getting it off his chest -- for 30 years? Why?
Gerrold had likely burned all of his bridges anyway, and his advocacy of the Axanar project won't do him any favors these days. I agree Gerrold deserved more credit than he got (which was virtually nothing) for working on the TNG development team. Although he had a major hand in writing the "bible", TNG was always going to be "Created by Gene Roddenberry" (and I don't think Fontana, who co-wrote the premiere with Roddenberry, or Gerrold realistically expected otherwise), but a producer credit would not have been inappropriate. Like I said, when the question of his time on TNG comes up, rather than him railing on Maizlish (and bitching about "Blood and Fire" -- enough already) I would love to see him discuss his contributions to the format and specific stories that made it to air, the through lines from The World of Star Trek to Phase II to TNG, etc. Maybe he does and I'm just not reading or hearing it.
Which is the main reason I've not picked this up just yet; I'd have to wade through too much old info to get to the juicy new stuff like the Roddenberry memo to the leads. I felt the same way about Gross and Altman's Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, which not coincidentally was done up for the 30th anniversary back in 1995. That also seemed mostly recycled from Sci-Fi Universe as well as some of Gross' earlier unauthorized books.
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See, what you're reading as "attacking" Maizlish, I see as him simply stating the facts about the guy. I'm still not really sure why you care so much, though.
Yes, I've seen it, and I don't recall Gerrold saying anything that sounded more heinous than all the shit Maizlish supposedly did.
And I kind of doubt that Shatner had too much interaction with Maizlish. Shatner wasn't involved with TNG in any capacity, and Roddenberry wasn't involved with the production of the ST movies beyond TMP. I just don't see their paths crossing that much.
Have you read Gerrold's statements about Maizlish to the end? They usually wind up talking about how his life ended up being much better off because he left TNG. He was able to adopt his son because he wasn't a full-time staffer on TNG, He went on to write The Martian Child out of that experience, which won him a Nebula and a Hugo, and was made into a movie starring John Cusack. He's written lots of other novels besides. Almost none of that would have happened if he stayed with TNG. So in the long run, Maizlish did him a favor.
From what I understand, the people who write the pilot episode of a television series ARE credited as the creator of the show (On the first season DVD commentaries of Homicide: Life On The Street, Tom Fontana expresses irritation that Paul Attanasio is credited as the creator of the series because he was the one who wrote the pilot). From what I've read, both Fontana and Gerrold did work on TNG that could conceivably be worth a co-creator credit.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that IMO, Gerrold did get screwed over on TNG and certainly has a reason to be upset about it, even all these years later.
Fair question; I don't know. It's been a topic of discussion before -- including on TrekBBS -- and it became a tangent on this thread. I wouldn't say I care -- and maybe I need to get out more -- but such a heated, public, long-lived, one-sided and posthumous vendetta against one man seems... a little unprecedented, certainly in Trek. I follow the media and pop culture pretty closely, including nonfiction (memoirs, etc.) about politics, the entertainment industry, and Trek in particular, and I can't say I've seen anything quite like Gerrold vs. Maizlish. So perhaps it's just a strange fascination; I'm certainly not qualified to psychoanalyze Gerrold. Let's call it the curiosity of a layperson and leave it to the experts as to what motivates Gerrold these days.
All of that business about pushing Maizlish out the window didn't strike any unusual chords?
Quite the contrary, although I always thought it was a little odd for Shatner to produce a documentary about TNG in the first place. According to Memory Alpha, Maizlish was Gene's attorney since 1959, so his involvement with Trek went way beyond TNG, and Maizlish certainly would have at least been in the loop -- if not Gene's point man -- on dealings with the Trek cast from the very beginning, including Shatner. This would certainly include salary negotiations, creative differences, etc. Maizlish was probably BCC'd on every one of Gene's memos that turn up every now and then from the archives. Even though Gene was largely removed from creative control over the movies after TMP, Gene (via Maizlish) was a constant thorn in the side of those productions, actively trying to sabotage (at least) both TFF (incurring Shatner's wrath no doubt) and also TUC, related by Nicholas Meyer in comments excerpted on MA (by the way, contrast Meyer's diplomacy in those comments where he calls it "Not my finest hour" to Gerrold's usual invective). While Gene was certainly out of line in what he was doing, given his ouster from the films his paranoia (which Maizlish almost certainly amplified) was probably well founded.
Ahh whatever. Everyone says they quit rather than being fired (or "forced out"). And the person or company involved always "did them a favor." I remember reading Gerrold's last TNG update in Starlog where he claimed he was leaving to produce a CBS miniseries called Trackers. This was before shooting began on "The Naked Now" in July 1987, and Trackers obviously never happened at all. There was no mention of any animosity, not that his Starlog column would necessarily have been the time or place. Besides, many Hollywood producers are able to find time for families and to win awards.
Look, if Maizlish did Gerrold such a favor, and he actually has no regrets about the situation, why continue to lash out at Maizlish's memory as recently as two years ago? Why not thank the guy, or at least take the approach of Justman, Fontana and others who have just said they didn't like Maizlish, he was a pain in the ass, but that's the business and it's in the past?
Well obviously not necessarily, at least in the case of TNG. Others more knowledgeable than me in these matters have analyzed this situation (Christopher among them), and certainly there's the formula you describe. In the case of TNG, it may be relevant that "Farpoint" was not technically a "pilot" (produced to sell a show to a network), but rather a "premiere" (since TNG was already greenlit or "sold" when it went into production). And again, this WGA requirement can probably be overridden by contract (e.g. Gene's TNG contract could have specified he was to have "Created by" credit) and -- for sheer publicity considerations -- it would have been lunacy for TNG to have been anything but "Created by Gene Roddenberry." "Created by Gene Roddenberry, Dorothy Fontana, and David Gerrold"? Doesn't have the same ring. And in Hollywood credit = money, and it's well established Gene got a "very advantageous deal" on TNG.
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Not really. It was just an idle thought that popped through his head for half a second that he didn't act on. Hardly comparable to all the premeditated, hateful, heinous things that Maizlish actually did.
Ah. That I didn't know. I stand corrected.
Well, Meyer's a very thoughtful and pretty upstanding guy, from what I can tell. I highly recommend his memoir of his experiences in Hollywood (with a particular emphasis on Star Trek work), A View From The Bridge, if you haven't read it already.
Why should he mention it? No reason to burn bridges in Hollywood and get labeled as "difficult" if you're still actively trying to work there. And adopting a kid was quite a bit tougher for a gay man in 1987-8, I'm sure.
Because then it makes Maizlish sound like a good guy. Which he wasn't. Some stories can't be summed up in just a couple of sentences.
That's interesting. I hadn't considered that, but I bet you're right that that's the distinction.
I wouldn't surprise me in the least if GR had a rider like that in his contract. He was a fiend for getting all the credit he could for ST, even when he didn't deserve it. Hell, DC Comics wasn't able to credit Batman co-creator Bill Finger as such until this year, because of how Bob Kane's contract was written up in 1939.
