I think I deciphered what went wrong with new Star Trek. Rushing it to be Ronald D. Moore-esque.

I think discovery is just fine, but if anything went wrong it was the chaos in management. Brian Fuller had a lot of pretty far-out ideas that didn't come entirely into play, but the ones that did, like lizard-Klingons didn't quite work. Season 2 was kind corrective surgery on parts of Season 1. I still enjoy Season 1 and am currently rewatching it, but I find myself skipping the Klingon bits.

 

Gene Roddenberry could come back from the dead along with William Shakespeare, Isaac Asimov, and C.S. Forester to write an epic Star Trek tale. They could get Stanley Kubrick to direct and co-produce with Roddenberry. Sigmund Freud, Frederick Nietzsche and Steven Hawking could also all be resurrected and be brought in as psychological and technological consultants respectively.

... and Midnight's Edge would still find a way to say it sucks if it were made in 2020. Just because it's new. No other reason. Somehow, with all that brain power and creative talent behind it, they'd still say it desecrates the Holy TOS and TNG they only pretend to be fans of.

 

Considering the things he likely did when alive, he'd be in the courtroom over from Harvey Weinstein. Best to stay dead, Gene!

 

Gene was lionized when he was alive and now he is trashed now that he is dead.

 

When one reads more and more about who he was, how he treated the people around him, especially his wives, it is easy to see the criticism he deserves.

 

In the context of his artistic and creative contributions he is trashed as a hack. I don't care for some of the personal things that I've heard about him(like the way he treated writers in the first season of TNG) but that doesn't affect my enjoyment of what he created.

 

One amusing story was, when I came in, I had my portfolio with me because I learned to do that when I was modeling, earlier. Anyway, I had a portfolio. Some good pictures and such. One of the key things about this character that Gene Roddenberry said was, "We want Yeoman Colt to have great-looking legs." He said, "You appear to have nice-looking legs." So I opened up this portfolio. There was an old magazine called Pageant. I had done a big spread, and one of the shots was with me in black leotards, with the little micro-glasses, and a skunk on a leash and a book of Freud in the other hand. And oh, boy, does it make me look great. So I opened the thing, and Gene said, "Well, yes, they do look good. But, you know, photos." So he said, "You do look like you do have good-looking legs. Would you mind lifting your skirt a little bit?" It didn't bother me any. I was a model as a teenager. You dressed in the back with a sheet around you.


So I pulled my skirt up. Not immodestly. He said, "Well, yes, I guess we all have to agree that she does have good-looking legs." So I’m thinking, "Hmm. Well, okay." So now, I get the job. We get into costuming and we go out, Majel and I, because that was the uniform. We started doing that. And, of course, they had to design these costumes. Well, by the time they got this costume together, against my better judgment, I could have been knock-kneed and bowlegged. They had me in baggy three-quarter trousers and ugly boots. I thought, "Well, I’m certainly glad that one of the key things was that you had good-looking legs."

-Laurel Goodwin, Yeoman Colt



I think Gene did it to himself. Guy was a creep. There's no getting around it. Maybe being a creep was flavor du jour then, but it doesn't change anything. Lucille Ball knew plenty about womanizers and she certainly wasn't comfortable with him though she did like he show concept. Lucille Ball was right: you can like the show but not the creator.

 

Gene as creator\producer\writer-He may have have been overrated but he wasn't without talent.
Gene as a human being-If there is a hell, he is there.

 

That's the thing, the only person that tainted Gene Roddenberry's legacy is Gene Roddenberry.

 

Forgive my confusion I didn't know whether we were talking about "Gene's legacy" in the context of him as a human being or in the context as a creative contributor to Star Trek.

 

I think they are hard to separate because some of the stuff affected Star Trek. Like his choosing of his mistress to play Number One. So when NBC balked, instead of recasting, he just ditched the character instead of recasting and then lying about the reasons.

 

If we're going to also talk about his work, then here it is. These are the episodes where Gene Roddenberry received writing credit, plus Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

"The Cage" (writer)
"Charlie X" (story)
"Mudd's Women" (story)
"The Menagerie" (writer)
"The Return of the Archons" (story)
"A Private Little War" (teleplay)
"The Omega Glory" (writer)
"Bread and Circuses" (co-writer)
"Assignment: Earth" (co-story)
"The Savage Curtain" (story, co-teleplay)
"Turnabout Intruder" (story)
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (story, un-credited)
"Encounter at Farpoint" (co-writer)
"Hide and Q" (co-teleplay)
"Datalore" (co-teleplay)

Gene Roddenberry was also the showrunner and the main re-writer of scripts for the first half of the first season of TOS, before Gene Coon came along to help lift some of the burden off his shoulders. And he was technically the showrunner for the first season of TNG until Maurice Hurley became showrunner starting with "Coming of Age". So he (and his lawyer in the case of TNG S1) had some involvement in all of those scripts -- to one degree or another -- as well, even if I didn't list them above.

 

Didn't Maurice Hurley use a pen name for "Hide and Q" because he was pissed off about the rewrite Roddenberry did?

 

Looks like Maurice Hurley didn't use a pen-name. He has story credit under his real name. At least according to Memory Alpha.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hide_and_Q

 

Gene had the beginnings of an idea, its true, but the degree that it was based on other sci fi, most importantly Forbidden Planet cannot be overlooked.
Jeffries, and Theiss get a due share of credit. Wah Ming Chang not enough, and of course DC Fontana, all the writers and producers that kept the show going. It was never one man's vision, and in many ways when he begin to believe in his own hype, Gene became detrimental to the thing he helped create.

 

Recently I was reading about some troubling inappropriate behavior from Isaac Asimov as well (one of the others cited by Lord Garth). Sometimes it's hard to "separate the art from the artist."

Kor

 

Without a doubt Maurice Hurley was pissed off. I believe that. I'm just saying he didn't use a pen-name in the final episode.

 

I'm not talking about "Datalore", I'm talking about "Hide and Q". Which was credited to C.J. Holland, Hurley's pen name.

 

Yup, so it is. Here I was, looking at the wrong thing...

We should put this into the TrekBBS Blooper Reel.