I know too much useless trivia. That thought occurred to me a Friday night over dinner at a nearby diner. I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation of the guys in the booth behind me. One was an actor, and he mentioned doing some workshop with Leonard Nimoy, and that segued into a discussion about Star Trek. He told his friend that every year some TV channel polled fans about their favorite original Star Trek episodes, and every year the same episode was ranked #1 — and did his friend know which episode it was? I knew which one it was. It was The City on the Edge of Forever, which you can watch on YouTube here (embedding disabled).
Pie eater on the edge of Forever
I also know the silly anecdote about the making of it, because I read Shatner’s book about the original series, Star Trek Memories. Here, I was about to relay as fact Shatner’s anecdote here about how Ellison wrote scenes that contained thousands of extras, even though Gene Roddenberry told him the show only had a budget for seven, and about how Roddenberry locked Ellison in his office to force him to finish the script on time, and how Ellison ate Roddenberry’s office plant in revenge.
But a quick Bing search brings up this article from 2000, “Harlan Ellison: Writer on the Edge of Forever”, in which Ellison is quoted disputing Shatner’s claims. Excerpt:
HARLAN ELLISON: I wrote an 18,000 word introduction to the book [apparently, a book about the writing of The City on the Edge of Forever] where throughout I refer to Roddenberry as the Great Pretender, El Supremo, and an outright naked liar, and [say] that after 30 years I was sick and tired of this bullshit of him telling people how expensive this script was and how it couldn’t be shot, when in fact I had letters from him proving that that was not the case. Two weeks after the show aired, I have a letter from Gene Roddenberry that said the show went $6,000 over budget. Six thousand dollars. By 1988 when he was speaking at the Museum of Television in New York, he said that my script was $360,000 over. All of this in photographed evidence is in the introduction.
In his book [STAR TREK MEMORIES], William Shatner said that Gene prevailed upon Bill to come up here. Actually, it was Bill Shatner who was the cause of all my problems to begin with. When he came up here, the most significant thing he did was manage to lay down his motorcycle on his leg and limp in like a cripple.
The book was announced four years ago, and I went at it very reluctantly and slowly. I was halfway through the introduction when Roddenberry croaked. Even in death he was fucking me up, and I had to go back and start all over again. The book just got finished, and it’s an incredible book. There are all these wonderful afterwords by Leonard Nimoy, Walter Koenig, De Kelley, George Takei, Dorothy Fontana, Peter David, Melinda Snodgrass. My publisher said, ‘Don’t you think we should approach Shatner for an afterword?’ and I said, ‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous. I hate Shatner; I wouldn’t want his goddamn afterword in the book, besides which he wouldn’t give it to us; besides he doesn’t write.’ But he went off on his own and got this astonishing quote. There’s a big yellow banner on the back cover. Don’t forget that I’m 61 years old. It says, ‘Harlan Ellison is a surly young man who continues to say terrible things about me while I think he’s absolutely wonderful, and ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’ is the best show we ever shot.’ My wife said, ‘See how gracious he can be?’ I said, ‘Jesus Christ, has he taken you in, too? This is called stealing the thunder.’
So maybe I don’t know too much. Just more than one of the two guys who were sitting behind me in that booth.
HT to Cheryl for the Nimoy Sunset Pie site, which she coincidentally read about today on one of the Gawker sites.
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