How progressive was Star Trek

[The Squire of Gothos]

In it's day, how forward thinking was the show in terms of the crew and scripts.

I picked up a copy of Inside Star Trek - The Real Story (Star Trek) by Robert H Justman and Herbert F Solow a little while ago. Flicking through it, I found a memo from the NBC encouraging Gene Roddenberry to follow the example of other TV shows in having actors and actresses from "minorities".

So how big a deal was it to have an Asia and African-American on the bridge given that that's what NBC wanted them to do?

Was there anything in the scripts that, in its day, would have made the average viewer think twice and say "Wait a minute!"

 

[Maurice]

Well, it was a big deal because so few shows represented minorities, and Trek at least paid lip service to that with a black and an asian and two guys with accents on the bridge.

On the other hand, it illustrates how sad Roddenberry was trying to lay claim to this, making up tall tales about having to fight for an interracial cast, etc.

 

[JNG]

On the other hand, it illustrates how sad Roddenberry was trying to lay claim to this, making up tall tales about having to fight for an interracial cast, etc.

...Those memos are out there too.

Some of the higher-ups resisted making the token characters they wanted to be present into officers, and in particular they had some kind of poorly-explained huge problem with a half-female crew. Stuff like that. It was indeed something of a fight.

 

[Maurice]

On the other hand, it illustrates how sad Roddenberry was trying to lay claim to this, making up tall tales about having to fight for an interracial cast, etc.

...Those memos are out there too.

Kindly point me to these memos.

 

[Dayton3]

On the other hand, it illustrates how sad Roddenberry was trying to lay claim to this, making up tall tales about having to fight for an interracial cast, etc.

...Those memos are out there too.

Some of the higher-ups resisted making the token characters they wanted to be present into officers, and in particular they had some kind of poorly-explained huge problem with a half-female crew. Stuff like that. It was indeed something of a fight.

A half female crew implied that the entire crew was paired off and having sex (no one considered the possibility of homosexual crew members back then).

So the official crew breakdown became "one third female".

Because anyone who has studied group dynamics knows that when males vastly outnumber females of a population, the amount of sexual conduct between men and women declines dramatically.

 

[Red Ranger]

On the other hand, it illustrates how sad Roddenberry was trying to lay claim to this, making up tall tales about having to fight for an interracial cast, etc.

...Those memos are out there too.

Some of the higher-ups resisted making the token characters they wanted to be present into officers, and in particular they had some kind of poorly-explained huge problem with a half-female crew. Stuff like that. It was indeed something of a fight.

A half female crew implied that the entire crew was paired off and having sex (no one considered the possibility of homosexual crew members back then).

So the official crew breakdown became "one third female".

Because anyone who has studied group dynamics knows that when males vastly outnumber females of a population, the amount of sexual conduct between men and women declines dramatically.

Oh.

 

[HIj'Qa]

Check out "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," Season 1, which is up on HULU.com, if you can watch that.

All white Anglo-Saxon male main cast.That's what action adventure TV was like. It is difficult nowadays to grasp how not-seen minorities were.

 

[Vance]

Some of the higher-ups resisted making the token characters they wanted to be present into officers, and in particular they had some kind of poorly-explained huge problem with a half-female crew. Stuff like that. It was indeed something of a fight.

Actually, I've never found anything, anywhere, of hard proof that Roddenberry's claims about 'women on the ship' and 'minorities' were his fight - Desilu and NBC were pushing these memes hard on other shows, so why would they be an issue on Star Trek?

Oh yeah, it's because Roddeberry was screwing the would-be co-star of the show, and was using the casting couch so wildly that the studio regretted ever hiring him (no one wanted to touch a Roddenberry project for YEARS after his was 'let go of his contract' after Trek season two).

Trek was decidedly progressive in many ways. Roddenberry, for as much as he is vaunted, was not.

 

[GodThingFormerly]

^ GR removed himself from TOS after Season 2 because he lost a pissing match with NBC suits over timeslots. It was a decision that he ultimately came to regret, at least according to the Inside Star Trek with Gene Roddenberry album released in 1976.

TGT

 

[Vance]

^ GR removed himself from TOS after Season 2 because he lost a pissing match with NBC suits over timeslots. It was a decision that he ultimately came to regret, at least according to the Inside Star Trek with Gene Roddenberry album released in 1976.

And, as we all know, Gene Roddenberry was always honest about the situation with NBC, too! It's not like he's ever been known to blatantly lie to cover his own ass, either! :P

 

[Basil]

The importance of Star Trek when it comes to racial diversity is overblown, and in the absence of so much of what was on TV at the time to reflect upon today (very few shows made it to syndication), seems much greater than it was.

Many shows contemporary with it had regular minority cast members, though like Star Trek, relegated to supporting roles. The Courtship of Eddie's Father featured Mrs. Livingston, who was Asian American, Mission: Impossible! had the great Barney Collier, who was African American, Room 222 had Pete Dixon, played by WNMHGB's Lloyd Haynes, Hawaii 5-0 featured Chinese American and Hawaiian characters, such as the incomparable Chin Ho Kelly, The Mod Squad, of course, had Link. Shorter-lived shows we've long since forgotten also attempted diversity, anthology shows like The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits scripted minority characters, and though minority characters might be played in "face," such as half-Polynesian Tom Lopaka (played by non-Polynesian but still likable Robert Conrad) on the 1950s' Hawaiian Eye, at least some attempt was made to recognize that the world had more colors in it than white.

Much more progressive was a show like Julia, which starred Diahann Carroll as a widowed African American raising her child. But then, and now, such shows were relatively scarce when target markets were white households, and the assumption is that whites only want to see whites in the starring role.

Star Trek would have been revolutionary if it had put minorities into primary roles and whites into the secondary roles, but that is something that is still pretty rare even 40 years later.

 

[Danoz]

^ GR removed himself from TOS after Season 2 because he lost a pissing match with NBC suits over timeslots. It was a decision that he ultimately came to regret, at least according to the Inside Star Trek with Gene Roddenberry album released in 1976.

And, as we all know, Gene Roddenberry was always honest about the situation with NBC, too! It's not like he's ever been known to blatantly lie to cover his own ass, either! :P

What are you guys talking about?

What's with all the Roddenberry bashing around here? As far as I understood, he was nothing but genuine and DID fight for multicultural cast. It was one of the dreams he had for a progressive show.

 

[Vance]

What's with all the Roddenberry bashing around here? As far as I understood, he was nothing but genuine and DID fight for multicultural cast. It was one of the dreams he had for a progressive show.

Roddenberry was full of shit on this matter, and liked to portray himself as some 'visionary crusader for equality', yet look at his pilot for his minority cast. Hell, the woman 'co-star' for the original pilot was the woman everyone knew he was screwing - which is one reason that NBC itself refused to allow Majel to be 'number one'. It's only Roddenberry's word against many produced documents which state the case - including Majel's OWN account of that period.

Roddenberry also lied heavily about Nichols, whom he was also shagging, about getting her on the show. Again, the network wasn't against having black cast members (far from it, as many produced memos illustrate), but were against HER because she was also known to be one of the producer's lovers.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

What's with all the Roddenberry bashing around here?

The thing is that Roddenberry tends to be deified, and while he did create a great, entertaining television series, he gets mystified and sanctified.

He was someone who gave contradictory information in regards to the production of Trek, perpetuating the myth of himself -- e.g. the suits not wanting Number One because they wondered "who they hell does she think she is," the first pilot being "too cerebral," Ellison's script using Scotty as a drug dealer, and so on. All of those countered by those who worked on the show.

Roddenberry had a good concept, got it off the ground, and others, despite his interference, made it work.

He was a man, taken for all and all, but still a man prone to vices, pity jealousy, and stealing credit where credit wasn't due. Does this make him any less of a visionary? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It does, however, make him a human being and that gets forgotten around these and other parts.

 

[Outpost4]

Vance, you make it sound as either you can be in favor of a racially and sexually mixed cast, or you can be all for screwing the cast members. I have no illusions about Roddenberry's personal morals. They were slim. But a person can also have a different set of public morals and not be a hypocrite. If GR had been screwing starlets and then saying they shouldn't be on the show because he wanted a male, white bread cast, then he would have been a two faced liar. At least he did come through, putting these women on screen.

"Sleeping your way to the top" was not unheard of back then. Hell, I'm sure it's still done now. It was just more expected in the 1960s. It was the tail end of the era of the casting couch. I'm not excusing it. It was just the way it was.

Roddenberry was a hedonist. He doesn't seem to have been a bigot. I give the two things different moral weight, and seemingly, so did he.

 

[Vance]

Roddenberry was a hedonist. He doesn't seem to have been a bigot. I give the two things different moral weight, and seemingly, so did he.

I didn't mean to imply that Roddenberry was a bigot. I meant to say that he was a self-aggrandizing liar. And the 'casting couch' was not that common in Hollywood (read Mel Brook's book on this subject), and the directors and producers who used it were well known and not respected. This included Roddenberry.

Star Trek was not cancelled because of bad ratings, shows were saved and carried over with much worse. Star Trek was cancelled because the ratings weren't high enough to put up with the crap that the show's staff kept piling out. If Roddenberry had tried to stay on for the third season, there would not have been a third season.

Simple as that.

The main problem I have with the 'pro-Roddenberry' threads and anecdotes is that they always villainize people who didn't deserve it. Grace Lee Whitney, for instance, was practically raped on set, and was fired for 'causing a stink' over it. Yet Roddenberry was quick to say 'the writing of the show wouldn't support the character' as well as demonize her as an actress for years.

Poor Fred was brought in at the last minute, with no prep time, to take over the show, and he did a decent enough job despite being saddled with no-draft scripts, terrible morale on the set, a gutted budget, and so forth. Yet, since he's not the 'Magic Roddenberry', he's demonized as the 'man who destroyed the original Trek'. Funny that.

All this to say nothing of Roddenberry's outright lies about getting the show on the air, his contributions to the scripts, and so on, and so forth... Hell, we even saw a letter recently where Nimoy had to threaten legal action against him for licensing materials out without his permission.

So, yeah, give me a break. I long for the moment that there's a much more honest treatment of Roddenberry and what he REALLY did for (and against) Trek over the years.

 

[MikeH92467]

If you can find a copy of Stephen Whitfield's "The Making of Star Trek" it's a very interesting read. It was one of the first, if not the first, books written about TOS.

While it was definitely an "approved" version of events, with Roddenberry in effect serving as co-author, it does have some good points. For one, it was written before the show become a phenomenon and it is mostly dispassionate in describing how and why the show came about.

To me, some of the key points that hold up pretty well are that Roddenberry didn't set out to make a ground breaking series. He wanted to move up the Hollywood food chain from a writer depending on piece work (with the ever present fear of writer's block forcing him to go back to a regular job) and owning his own franchise with a larger, more guaranteed income. I think it also is still fairly accurate in describing the kind of crap shoot that trying to get a television series made from concept to pilot to regular show is.

It's also quite clear that there was nothing overly idealistic involved with choosing the sci-fi genre: it was merely a way to tell stories about issues that wouldn't get past the censors in modern dress. More flexibility for writers=better stories=equal longer running show=more profits. That was pretty much the plan.

As far as the mixed crew in terms of race and sex, he reasoned that while some people weren't ready to have that happen right now, most people probably could accept the idea that we would have moved past such issues in a few hundred years. I think his stated rationale is plausible, although it certainly does look in retrospect like he chose to cast himself in a more visionary role and a battler against network "suits" who were less enlightened. Self-aggrandizement is not uncommon in the entertainment industry.

I certainly am not endorsing this book as the ultimate resource for what went on behind the scenes in terms of human relations (there's plenty of dirty laundry in other books), but in terms of the process of how and why the show was conceived and how it eventually made it on to weekly tv is fascinating and I would submit mostly valid as far as it goes. Self serving? Definitely. Biased, sure. But I think if you compare it and contrast it with other books on Roddenberry and the Star Trek franchise, it serves as a valuable piece of a colorful mosaic.

 

[KirksFlyingFist]

I don't think it REALLY matters that you measure it. Point is it meant a lot to people, and that's what really counts.

 

[omnirad]

Yeah, the LEGACY of being groundbreaking and progressive is the real measure of its influence. Wether it really was is irrelavent, that HISTORY has sanctified its vision is the point.

And GR could 'spin' with the best of 'em, even by todays standards. But the group effort put into producing ST is a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

 

[stoneagepunk]

I always thought it was remarkable to have a Russian on the Enterprise at the time of the Cold War.

But Checkov had to pay the price of having to be the one to go nuts and scream his head off.