For you live readers: I was planning to make this a Friday series, but this is the second week in a row I had to drop it on Tuesday. We’ll see what happens. In case you missed last week’s post, we’re looking at the sales pitch for a new television series called Star Trek. I don’t know if this was the pitch to NBC or to Desilu or a general pitch before shopping it around to anyone. I’m admittedly lite on the history here. I found it on an archival site for writer’s guides and story bibles, linked to in the previous post if you want to follow along. Once we’re done with these 16 or so pages we’ll get into the actual writer’s guide.

This is the first draft, with Gene Roddenberry as the sole credit. The first four pages asks the question in the article title, and that’s what we’ll be looking at in this first official article. Remember as we go through this that at the time there was no “Star Trek”. It was still just a concept, with names changed between here and the story bible, and concepts that were refined between the two pilots and the series we all know and love. The point is to see all the changes and speculate if the changes were a good idea or if there was some merit, and what aspects of the original ideas made their way to the end product, or were even homaged in later productions either out of a desire to see those changes or as easter eggs for fans who may know all the behind-the-scenes stuff that went on. Almost immediately there will also be ideas that did get made into actual episodes.

Roddenberry’s goal was to sell a television studio and network on his science fiction series. The earliest production credit I found on a quick IMDB search was a writing credit for an episode of Mr. District Attorney, where he was a consultant. Other credits prior to this include writing shows like Highway Patrol, The Detectives, Dr. Kildare, Have Gun–Will Travel, and The Virginian. These are all crime dramas and westerns (except for the one with the doctor, of course, and there are others on the list), not science fiction. His first creator credit is 1963’s The Lieutenant, about a rifle platoon leader stationed at Marine base Camp Pendleton in California.

And here he is pushing a science fiction show when sci-fi was on a TV downturn. It was still around, but a lot of it was considered children’s entertainment, your Flash Gordons, Buck Rogers, and Captain Videos. How do you push a family-friendly but clearly more mature and thought-provoking hour long primetime series in that culture? Let’s find out.

Continue reading →