I'm very familiar with teleplays and screenplays and I some years ago gave Ellison's first draft the stink-eye and wrote a fairly detailed post covering the production requirements and concluded that Justman had inflated its reputed unfilmability.
Lots of writers for the show wrote scripts that were not entirely produceable, so it's unfair to single out Ellison for something which was commonplace. Furthermore, his first draft hews very closely to his approved treatment, and a lot of the issues the staff had with the script should have been addressed before it went to script. -1 point for the staff.
Yes, Harlan has a bad habit of overdirecting the camera, so I'm not about to defend him on that point. And he seemed to ignore basic TV drama structure, notably introducing characters too late. BUT, and I hasten to BUT, all we've ever seen is his first draft, and first drafts are almost always terrible. All I've even seen for his 2nd draft is the open, and I haven't a clear fix on how many drafts he actually did, and that open addresses many of the notes from the staff. It's therefore difficult to pinpoint at which point the staff starting stuff and who to credit for what.
But I will say that while the aired episode is more formula Star Trek it loses the bigger themes and some of the better moments from Ellison's work. I'm fairly convinced they overcorrected and threw out the baby with the bath water. The ideal COTEF as a TV shows would fall somewhere between what Harlan wrote and what ended up on the air.
And Harlan's right about the window. Watching a TV doesn't have the same weight. But instead of putting a porthole in Kirk's quarters he could have been in some port of the ship that has a window. EDIT: In fact, that's just what Dorothy Fontana did in her draft: she moved the scene to the Observation Deck.
Lots of writers for the show wrote scripts that were not entirely produceable, so it's unfair to single out Ellison for something which was commonplace. Furthermore, his first draft hews very closely to his approved treatment, and a lot of the issues the staff had with the script should have been addressed before it went to script. -1 point for the staff.
Yes, Harlan has a bad habit of overdirecting the camera, so I'm not about to defend him on that point. And he seemed to ignore basic TV drama structure, notably introducing characters too late. BUT, and I hasten to BUT, all we've ever seen is his first draft, and first drafts are almost always terrible. All I've even seen for his 2nd draft is the open, and I haven't a clear fix on how many drafts he actually did, and that open addresses many of the notes from the staff. It's therefore difficult to pinpoint at which point the staff starting stuff and who to credit for what.
But I will say that while the aired episode is more formula Star Trek it loses the bigger themes and some of the better moments from Ellison's work. I'm fairly convinced they overcorrected and threw out the baby with the bath water. The ideal COTEF as a TV shows would fall somewhere between what Harlan wrote and what ended up on the air.
And Harlan's right about the window. Watching a TV doesn't have the same weight. But instead of putting a porthole in Kirk's quarters he could have been in some port of the ship that has a window. EDIT: In fact, that's just what Dorothy Fontana did in her draft: she moved the scene to the Observation Deck.
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