Star Trek and the City on the Edge of Forever controversy

"The City on the Edge of Forever" is arguably Star Trek's most popular episode, an hour of drama that contemplated the great questions and forced its Captain to make a terrible sacrifice, but it is also one of the most controversial. Unlike "Turnabout Intruder", "Spock's Brain", "A Private Little War" or "Plato's Stepchildren" the controversy did not involve the political content of the episode, its quality, sexism or interracial lip locks, some of the more common controversies that bedeviled the series. The home viewer could easily watch the episode a hundred times and then a hundred times again without having the faintest clue that there was a controversy. This is because the controversy was a purely behind the scenes one.

The credits on "The City on the Edge of Forever" credit it as having been written by Harlan Ellison and D.C. Fontana. Harlan Ellison is not a name known too well outside of Science Fiction literary circles, but Harlan Ellison has become famous or infamous for possessing a one man controversy creation field. Ellison has been involved in more lawsuits, than most lawyers and more controversies than most politicians. Critics charge him with obnoxious behavior, vindictive tactics and vicious rhetoric. Defenders say Harlan Ellison is a brilliant writer who has been repeatedly and routinely victimized by editors, producers, directors and publishers. Nevertheless the presence of Harlan Ellison's name on anything gives even odds that there will be a controversy involved, sooner or later.

The original Star Trek series, unlike its later incarnations, had benefited from the scripts of some talented Science Fiction writers of the time. Theodore Sturgeon had penned "Amok Time", another of the original Star Trek's most memorable and standout episodes. Norman Spinrad had penned "The Doomsday Machine", an episode still well remembered by fans today. Then there was Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Jerome Bixby, David Gerrold who got his start there and many others. Additionally the episodes themselves were written up later by the Science Fiction writer James Blish (working purely from scripts, without seeing a single episode) and the animated series episodes recieved a similar treatment from Larry Niven.

Science Fiction was on the upswing and "Star Trek" proudly associated itself with many of the Science Fiction writers of the day. Most writers understood that being edited and rewirtten was part of the process. It was certainly part of the process in short story markets where John W. Campbell and Horace Gold had set a tradition for shredding and rewriting authors. In a television series where an episode is part of a larger continuing framework of a story and must fit within that story, rewrites are inevitable. The professional Science Fiction writers who wrote episodes for Star Trek expressed various degrees of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with how they had been treated. It was however the relationship with Harlan Ellison that would become most explosive.

From the beginning "The City on the Edge of Forever" script had undergone multiple revisions, initially by Ellison himself. The script however was unfeasible within the bounds of television production. The scale demanded was too expensive and the focus of the script was less on the main characters, than on the world around them. It had elements incompatible with the back story of the time, including Kirk working on a rocket ship, a far more primitive form of space travel than the warp drive. It had a crew member on the Enterprise dealing drugs, which was no doubt a trendy 70's touch but not compatible with the back story either. Additionally the script depicts a downright hostile relationship between Kirk and Spock and Ellison saw Kirk as being willing to save Edith's life and destroy billions of lives, unless prevented by Spock.

The result was numerous revisions by Gene L. Coon, D.C. Fontana and Gene Roddenberry himself. David Gerrold's popular "The Trouble with Tribbles" episode was the result of similar extensive and uncredited editing by Gene L. Coon, something which Gerrold had thanks Coon for. Harlan Ellison was anything but happy though. When the script won a Writers Guild award, Ellison treated it as a vindication, though of course his original script had been praised by the Star Trek producers all along.

When Harlan Ellison's script was reprinted a decade later in the collection "Six Science Fiction Plays" edited by Rogert Elwood, Harlan Ellison wrote his own introduction to it. In it he stated;

"-for many years after the period I am talking about here, Gene Roddenberry and I didn't speak to each other. Considerable bad vibes and poisoned blood between us. I felt I'd been badly used. Gene felt I was being unfair and unnecessarily condemnatory (not to mention loudmouthed) about my treatment in the series. Those days are past. Gene and I have reached reapproachment and he has done a number of very gentlemanly, wholly unsolicited good deeds on my behalf."

Harlan Ellison then goes on to say.

"Suffice to say, Gene's contention was that I had written a script that cost too much to film on the budget that NBC had allowed... I contended that unnamed parties had leeched all the humanity from the story and had turned it into just another melodramatic implausible action adventure hour."

Even with all the cuts, "The City on the Edge of Forever" cost over 250,000 dollars to shoot. 65,000 dollars over budget. Harlan Ellison's script with its nine foot tall guardians, two additional guest stars to play Beckwith and Trooper, still more to portray the Guardians themselves, a massively detailed city and landscape would have cost twice as much. And all this is without going into the additional scene featuring the Enterprise crew fighting off pirates, that existed in a later revision.

While Harlan Ellison had insisted to Gene Roddenberry and Robert Justman that it could be shot for much more cheaply than that, the reality is Harlan Ellison had never actually directed anything and would never direct anything. Ellison had a pronounced distaste for directors and producers as a class, emphasizing the importance of the writer in crafting a story above all else. And while it is the writer who crafts the story, it's the producers and director and crew who have to actually make it feasible. Ellison's script for "The City on the Edge of Forever" was not financially feasible. Justman and Roddenberry understood that, having to actually deal with the day to day tasks of producing the series. Ellison had never done anything comparable and refused to understand that.

Over the years Harlan Ellison's bitterness grew reversing the harmonious accommodation that seemed to have been reached when "Six Science Fiction Plays" was first issued, motivated apparently in part by some business related favors Gene Roddenberry had done for him then. The supposed flashpoint was Gene Roddenberry stating that Harlan Ellison's script had Scotty dealing drugs. While this was certainly not true, Ellison's script did indeed have an Enterprise crew member dealing drugs. What Gene Roddenberry had done was confused one crew member dealing drugs with another. The principle itself was clearly unworkable at the time, though the later "Star Trek Enterprise" would portray T'Pol as a drug addict.

Harlan Ellison would go back to his assault "Star Trek" and Gene Roddenberry, alternately citing the popularity of "The City on the Edge of Forever" as proof of his script's greatness, even while denigrating the version that aired and laying the blame at Gene Roddenberry's feet. Eventually Harlan Ellison would separately publish a copy of his script, along with extensive background on what he believed had been done to his script in a book entitled weightily "Harlan Ellison's the City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay That Became the Classic Star Trek Episode."

In it Harlan Ellison would repeat the thesis that "The City on the Edge of Forever" was the greatest Star Trek episode, something for which he took credit for, and that its butchery was a crime against literature. Bolstering his claim with cartoons and pop culture references and letters to TV Guide, Harlan Ellison shifts from argument to tirade and back in the blink of an eye, the vast bulk of it directed at Roddenberry until he finally lambastes Gene Roddenberry for dying before the book could be published.

Time has not healed Harlan Ellison's wounds and even today the controversy continues with Ellison filing suit against a Star Trek novelization that incorporated the character of Edith Keeler without Ellison's permission. This is somewhat ironic since the character of Edith Keeler was herself based on real life evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. It is also ironic because among Harlan Ellison's tirades against the Edith Keeler of the aired episode, he particularly despised Joan Collins performance, as well as Gene Roddenberry's revisions that turned her into a hopefull prophet of the future. But as with the bulk of his role in "The City on the Edge of Forever" controversy, it consists of Harlan Ellison vigorously and furiously trying to claim ownership over an episode whose finished version he rejects and of a series he loudly despises.

Why Gene Roddenberry and D.C. Fontana's Script Remains Superior to Harlan Ellison's Script

The essential flaw in Harlan Ellison's argument remains his attempt to use the aired version to prove the superiority of an unaired script. The popularity of the aired version would more reasonably prove that the changes which were made, needed to be made. Ellison's nine foot tall Guardians were replaced with the single impersonal Guardian of Forever. Massive aliens and mysterious guardians or alien technologies were nothing new to Star Trek, but the Guardian of Forever, in the shape which Ellison had mocked as the product of misreading his script, is an iconic emblem burned into the minds of those who have seen the episode. By contrast Ellison's Guardians were mainly vehicles for endless philosophical exposition.

The drug dealer Beckwith irrationally trying to destroy human history, if not prevented by Kirk and Spock, was replaced with McCoy, lost and a little maddened, wandering through time and attempting to do a good deed, which Kirk cannot allow him to do. This eliminates the need for Kirk and Spock to chase a villain or for the Guardian to punish one. Instead the story is devoid of heroes and villains, but focuses squarely on the terrible decisions that have to be made for time to roll on as it does.

The disappearance of the Enterprise and all the Federation is far more shattering, than the renegade pirates of the Condor in Ellison's script. Ellison has blamed their inclusion on Roddenberry, but they remain in both published versions of his script and he could certainly have excised them.

The Kirk and Spock of Ellison's version are not the Kirk and Spock of "Star Trek". Burdened with a brooding hostility toward each other, Kirk appears self-destructive and Spock, inhumanly ruthless. The two do not act as a partnership and a team as they do in the episode, but are at odds. We are also shown Spock emitting a howl, for no great reason. Never having bothered to gain an appreciation for the characters, Harlan Ellison gets Kirk and Spock wrong.

Due to the dissatisfaction of some people associated with the series with Gene Roddenberry, which is unsurprising as Star Trek was a troubled production constantly facing budget shortages, network interference, jostling egos and other difficulties, Harlan Ellison has found no shortage of people involved with the production willing to take his side. But the reality is that what Harlan Ellison viewed as an epic conflict, was never that for Gene Roddenberry. It was merely another bump in the road in the process that allowed him to bring Star Trek to the air in the first place, keep it there and then revive it yet again years later. Unable to appreciate the difficulties of actually producing and airing a series, Harlan Ellison refused to yield on any point that troubled his ego. Long after Gene Roddenberry moved on and even died, Harlan Ellison did not. Perhaps that is because Gene Roddenberry could be satisfied with what he had created and Harlan Ellison could not.