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RIP DC Fontana

@T'Elf Can you please consolidate the four different threads I see on this?

48129402702_0a1efb028b_b.jpg

Harvey and I with Dorothy in June​

Very sad news. I had the great privilege of having communicated with Dorothy over several years and she was always very helpful. I put her in touch with @Harvey and he was able to straighten out some incorrectly attributed credits of her for the Star Trek Fact Check Blog (link to piece about her first writing credit) (link to piece about her work on "The Enterprise Incident"). He and I were fortunate enough to get to sit down with her for a wonderful 2.5 hour lunch last June in No. Hollywood and talked about everything from the current WGA conflicts, teaching screenwriting, her experiences on Star Trek and TNG, and even who came up with the "mechanical rice picker" gag (Coon; I knew it).

Sadly did not get to meet her husband Dennis who unable to attend, but I will try to reach out to him and offer my humble condolences.
 
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Roddenberry, Coon, Justman, Jeffries, John D.F. Black and now Fontana... Any of Trek's 'parents' still with us?
 
JaxsBrokenHeart said:
...the world building in just Journey to Babel alone demonstrated how invaluable she was to Trek and beyond.
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Absolutely. In "This Side of Paradise," she gave us the first full focus on Mr. Spock (she realized that the story would be much more dramatic if it focused on Spock instead of Sulu, as originally conceived). She gave us some of the first hints of Spock's parentage in that same episode by saying that Spock's father was an ambassador and his mother a teacher. She later developed Sarek and Amanda into full-fledged characters in "Journey to Babel" and "Yesteryear," giving us almost the entirety of Mr. Spock's background.

In JTB, she created the Andorians and the Tellarites, further developed the Orions, and gave a us a peek into how the Federation operated. She further developed the Romulans in "The Enterprise Incident." She wrote "Charlie X," probably the best part that Yeoman Rand ever had on the show. She wrote "Tomorrow is Yesterday," Star Trek's first time travel story. She did substantial rewrites on "The City on the Edge of Forever." She tried to get McCoy's daughter Joanna on to the show. She was was the youngest story editor in Hollywood at the time (at 27!). She was a story editor on TAS. She even introduced Gene Roddenberry to costume designer William Ware Theiss!

She co-wrote "Encounter at Farpoint," the original pilot for TNG, and did a lot of work on the development of the series. She established the basics of Jadzia Dax's backstory in DS9'S "Dax." She wrote a Trek novel, Vulcan's Glory. She wrote for Trek video games. In the last decade, she'd written TOS comic books for IDW and an episode of the fan film series "New Voyages."

...And that's just the stuff that she did for Trek! She also did the novelization of The Questor Tapes and wrote scripts for Babylon 5, The Six Million Dollar Man, Earth: Final Conflict, Land of the Lost, the Logan's Run TV series... the list goes on.

Really, she was amazing. This is such a loss.
 
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:wah:

She was very important, not just for Star Trek, but she also contributed to Land of the Lost and Babylon 5. I'm sure there were others, but those are two of my favorites.
 
All comfort and warmth to those she leaves behind...

I always knew the story would be enthralling when I saw her name in the credits.

Thank you Dorothy.
 
A legend and pioneer has passed into the next dimension. Her stuff at the time was groundbreaking and bold, of which much remains as enthralling despite decades of time and advancements.

She had an affinity for Spock in particular, finding incredible ways to utilize the character, but for me - it's her stories and those teleplays she wrote or edited that have such a panache and flair for character and discussing the human condition. Even the stories where she opted out and to have a pseudonym used (and it's sometimes easy to see why!), I've found something to like and somehow knew that was part of her original vision or idea in there.

I'm lucky enough to have known people who actually met and had interviews with her. But those who were privileged to actually meet and interview her are far, far fewer. I'm just elated to have seen the results of her fantastic works as writer and editor.

An absolute and sincere thanks for a LOT of creative work.
 
So very sad to hear this. I never got to meet her and she was one that I would have liked to.
 
:(

A few years ago the Scy Fy channel was showing The Six Million Dollar Man episodes, and I happened to watch one. As I'm watching, I thought "this feels like a TOS episode." I saw the end credits: written by DC Fontana. She had her own distinctive style. Thanks for a lifetime of enjoyment, DC.

"Death is a primitive concept; I prefer to think of them as battling evil, in another dimension!"
--Grig, The Last Starfighter
 
This one is hard. I had the pleasure of exchanging a number of emails with Dorothy during the past few years of my research (she was extremely generous with her time) and got to meet her on a couple of occasions (including a very nice lunch that @Maurice already mentioned).

For the past few months, I've been sitting on a career-spanning interview with Fontana that I commissioned through work (Stephen Bowie did the interview, and did a great job). It's been a complete dog of a week there already, but I'm going to try and get it ready for publication before the weekend. If I meet that goal, I'll share the link here.
 
So long, D.C. Enjoy your next voyage.

Being a TOS fan almost from the start, I've always considered her one of those people so identified by her work on the show (and TAS) almost more than any other writer, that she was as much as fixture as the actors. No one can quite understand how her outreach during the convention explosion of the 1970s helped keep the series alive, how she convinced audiences that the animated series would not be kiddie junk, but live up to / respect the quality of TOS--and so much more. She will always be part of my fan and creative experiences from that era.

The following has been posted her before, but here's D.C. interviewed on a bridge set during a 1973 convention starting @ 3:45.
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Kirk Prime said:
Brilliant writer. Star Trek would not have been the same without her, and it's a shame her genius wasn't used in later years.
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Well said.
 
I heard about this on the Trek page on FB late yesterday! Such a sad thing to happen at this time of year as well! :confused:
She was also script editor for the short lived sci-fi shows The Fantastic journey and Logan's Run and even worked on The Six Million Dollar Man as well! But it is her contributions to Star Trek that we applaud her for! RIP
JB
 
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