Trek Writer David Gerrold Looks Back

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Trek Writer David Gerrold Looks Back
Interviewer:	StarTrek.com staff
Interviewee:	David Gerrold
Date(s):	January 24–25, 2011
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Star Trek
External Links:	part one, Archived version part two, Archived version
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Trek Writer David Gerrold Looks Back is a two-part interview posted at startrek.com.

In it, Gerrold talks about his work on several episodes, his working history and decision to leave Star Trek: TNG, fan films, his decision to write the book "The Martian Child," his decision to adopt a child, the script Blood and Fire (script), Gene Roddenberry's vision and discussion about gay characters on the show, and how Tribbles were originally called "Fuzzies."

Excerpt

If I hadn’t done Star Trek, I have no idea what I’d be doing these days. Star Trek kick-started my professional career. And on another level – if I ever write an autobiography, this would be something I’d touch on – it resolved all of my adolescent self-esteem issues overnight to have sold a script to Star Trek. At that time, Star Trek wasn’t this big, wonderful, magical thing. It was this second-rate TV show that only a few geeks and dorks and nerds knew about. Everyone else kind of made fun of it. We weren’t pulling great ratings. But, for me, it was like, “Guess what? I just sold a script to a primetime TV series!” I look back on it and, gosh, there was still a lot, an awful lot I had to learn about writing, but it was crossing a great big line between just being a wannabe and actually having some sense of how the system really works.

Excerpt

Part of the problem on TNG was Gene’s lawyer (Leonard Maizlish) was making it impossible for anybody to do any real work. He was rewriting scripts. He was committing Guild violations. People were very unhappy. It was one of the worst working environments I'd ever been in. So when my contract came up for renewal, I asked Gene not to (renew it). Later, I found out that Maizlish was telling people what a troublemaker I was, that I'd been fired because I was mentally ill, that I never did anything useful for the show -- real character assassination of the worst sort. So my lawyer called him up and said, “You keep talking and we’re going to own your car, your house, your dog, etc.,” and that shut him up real fast. Maizlish was a disgraceful man. Fortunately, my lawyer was a Hollywood heavyweight, and when he said, “Hmmm,” that was a very expensive “Hmmm,” especially to the target. Now I’d invested a lot of time and energy, 20 years, into being a part of something really very special, but after I left the show I walked myself around the block and decided that it was time for me to have my own life and my own career, separate from Trek. I already did, really. I’d written books and done other TV shows, but I wanted to just step out of that whole arena.... [much snipped] My feelings about TNG are mixed. Bob Justman once said that we owed everything to the dedication and enthusiasm of the fans. And I always felt that the fans deserved the best we could give them. That's what I wanted to do. This might offend a few people, but I never felt TNG was living up to that promise -- at least not at the beginning, and not consistently -- and I think it's because the writers were being held back. If you go to a convention and listen to the fans talk about the show, they're very clear about what they were unhappy with. They’d complain about Wesley the super-genius. They’d complain about the scientific double talk. They’d complain about solving problems with a lot of “tech, tech, tech” in the last five minutes of the episode. And to be honest, I think the fans were right -- mostly. So I was a lot happier working on my own stories where I could challenge myself. By 2000, I was feeling like I was beginning to hit my stride. The book I wrote about my son (The Martian Child) was one of the most passionate and joyous things I'd ever written and it wouldn't have happened if I'd stayed with Trek, because I wouldn't have had time to adopt him. The story won a Hugo and a Nebula and was eventually made into a movie starring John Cusack. I couldn't have predicted that was going to happen, I couldn't even have aimed for it, but in retrospect leaving Trek was a good thing for me for a lot of different reasons. And having a son has been the greatest adventure of all.

Excerpt

The long story with “Blood and Fire (script)” is that a month after Next Gen was announced Gene and I were at a convention in Boston. We’d both been invited before anyone knew there was going to be a new Trek series, so there was a lot of excitement at the convention because this would be the first time Gene would speak in public about the new series. There were 3,000 people in the room waiting to hear the news. They had a lot of questions. But there wasn't really anything to say yet. We were still getting moved into offices and had not really made any serious decisions about what the new show would be. So it was mostly just promises that we were going to do our best to catch lightning in a bottle again.

One fan asked, “Well, are you going to have gay crewmembers, because in the 60’s you had Black and Asian and Latino, etc.?” Gene said, “You know, you’re right. It’s time. We should.” I was sitting on the side, taking notes, of course. So there it was: Gene had said it in front of an audience of 3,000 people in November of 1986. I was a little bit surprised and delighted that Gene was willing to go there. We got back to L.A. and Gene said it again in a meeting, and somebody in that meeting – I won’t say who – said, “What, we’re going to have Lt. Tutti-Frutti?” Gene balled [sic] him out and said, “No, it’s time. And I promised the fans we’re going to have gay characters.”

Then, Rick Berman, who was not yet aboard the show but was still a studio exec, passed us a memo saying, “Here are some of the stories I think you can do.” It was a three-page memo listing, I guess, about 50 ideas, and the third one was an AIDS story. And I thought, “Well, I’ve got this from Gene and Rick, so the studio has no problem.” Now, my cause at the time was blood donorship, and I knew that people were so terrified of AIDS they had even stopped donating blood. So I wanted “Blood and Fire” to be about the fear of AIDS -- not the disease but the fear -- and one of the plot points involved having the crew donate blood to save the lives of the away team. I thought, “If we do this episode right, where blood donorship is part of solving the problem, we can put a card at the end telling viewers that they could donate blood to save lives, too.” I thought it was something Trek should be doing, raising social awareness on an issue, and if we did it right, we could probably generate a million new blood donors at a time when there was a critical shortage... There were two characters who were not very important to the story, but they were the kind of background characters you need. At one point Riker says to one of them, “How long have you two been together?” That was it. The guy replies, “Since the Academy.” That’s it. That’s all you need to know about their relationship. If you were a kid, you'd think they were just good buddies. If you were an adult, you'd get it. But I turned in the script and that's when the excrement hit the rotating blades of the electric air circulation device. There was a flurry of memos, pro and con. One memo said, “We’re going to be on at four in the afternoon in some places and we’re going to get angry letters from mommies.” My response was, “If we get people writing letters, it shows they’re involved in the show, and that’s exactly what we want. We want them engaged, and a little controversy will be great for us.” And I said, “Gene made a promise to the fans. If not here, where? If not now, when?” But the episode got shelved anyway and that’s when I knew I wasn't going to be allowed to write the very best stories we should be writing. The original show was about taking chances. If we weren't going to take chances, we weren't doing Star Trek. So I let my contract expire and I went off to do those other things I told you about. (Editor’s note: “Blood and Fire” later became the basis of Gerrold’s Star Wolf book series. Also, eventually, he revised the “Blood and Fire” teleplay and a directed it as a New Voyages fan film.)