The perfect future: Roddenberry or Ellison?

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.

 

Harlan Ellison was furious that Star Trek didn't film his first draft. Even considering his previous experience with Bob Justman and Demon With A Glass Hand, he thought that the overall script was what they should have filmed, adjusting bits and pieces like Justman did with the earlier work. Ellison has even stated that he resented that idea the GR presented, that humanity would be able to outgrow such behaviors as drug abuse and dealing, and that military and paramilitary personnel would be able to not fall prey to such things. Ellison believes humanity is incapable of evolution, social or otherwise.

Not to mention whatever Beckwith had done on the previous planet LeBeque mentioned, that he must have been banned from shore leave, or he wouldn't have needed LeBeque's help in securing a landfall pass.

 

On TOS, "perfect" societies usually involved alien spores or insane computers. And Kirk was seldom a fan.

 

With respect, given 50 years it's impossible to say who was "furious" at what point.

According to Harvey, Ellison did three drafts of the script.

Ellison
1st draft, June 3, 1966
“Final draft” July 66
Revised final draft, delivered August 15, 1966

Carabatsos
Rewrite October 66

This draft completely changes the ending, and while Trooper is still there he only shows up in act 2 and vanishes for the rest of the story. In my cursory read-through, this is where the story gets very concrete about Edith's peace movement delaying the US entry into the war, which in earlier drafts was alluded to as one possible way history might be changed. What's really terrifying about it is the dialog written for the men who heckle Edith, who say the kinds of racist anti-immigrant stuff that's right back with us today.
​

Ellison
December 1, 1966 (reportedly)

According to Ellison, he delivered another draft (his fourth, the episode’s fifth), apparently to undo what Carabatsos had wrought​

[reportedly] Fontana
January 23, 1967

Trooper is gone. The scene with the beat cop is there now, but it's played serious.​

Coon (I'd bet on it, it smells of his writing...and the "rice picking machine" shows up there) and likely Roddenberry
January 30, 1967
February 1, 1967

Followed by page revisions

What's interesting is that both the Carabatsos and Fontana drafts retain big chunks of Ellison's writing, notably the ending, some of the better Kirk/Edith dialogs, etc., whereas right after the Fontana draft someone (as above, likely Coon) just chops all of that away. It's right at that juncture that all the poetry and nuance goes out the window. That draft solves many of the problems the script had but at the costs of a big chunk of its soul.