Excerpt from Fade In by Michael Piller
RODDENBERRYʼS BOX
When I surf the net or read letters to the editor in some genre magazine, I often come across complaints from fans who say that Star Trek really needs to get “some new writing blood in there”.
Theyʼre absolutely right.
In fact, recruiting new talent was one of my priorities when I was producing the television shows. I scheduled pitches from free-lance writers every day and required my staff writers to do the same. Hearing new voices and fresh ideas, in my opinion, kept the franchise vital. The Star Trek series were the only television shows in town that encouraged amateur submissions of speculative teleplays (if they were accompanied by legal releases that protected the studio from lawsuits).
Thousands were submitted. Every one was read. I looked at every synopsis and analysis myself. Ninety-nine out a hundred were not what we were looking for. But that last one made the search worthwhile. We discovered several writers through the process.
A writing assignment for a Star Trek movie would certainly attract all sorts of good writers with credentials in feature films. Why then wouldnʼt the studio and Rick Berman seek out “new blood” to write the next Star Trek movie instead of giving it to another old television warhorse like me?
The answer can be found in Roddenberryʼs Box.
I happen to like the box. A lot of writers donʼt. In fact, I think itʼs fair to say, most writers who have worked on Star Trek over the years would like to throw the box away. It may surprise you to learn that when I took over as head writer, the entire writing staff of Star Trek: The Next Generation was so frustrated and angry with Gene Roddenberry they were counting the days before their contracts expired (and indeed every one of them left at seasonʼs end.) He wouldnʼt let them out of the box and they were suffocating...
My first time in Roddenberryʼs Box was during the very first episode I worked on as head writer. We were already in production of season three, four shows were finished, twenty-two still to do. There were no scripts and no stories to shoot the following week. Desperate, I bought a spec script that had been sent in from an amateur writer named Ron Moore who was about to enlist in the U.S. Navy. It was a rough teleplay called “The Bonding” and would require a lot of reworking but I liked the idea. A female Starfleet officer is killed in an accident and her child, overcome with grief, bonds with a holographic recreation of his mother rather than accept her death.
I sent a short description of the story to Rick and Gene. Minutes later, I was called to an urgent meeting in Geneʼs office. “This doesnʼt work” he said. “In the Twenty-Fourth Century, no one grieves. Death is accepted as part of life.”
As I shared the dilemma with the other staff writers, they took a bit of pleasure from my loss of virginity, all of them having already been badly bruised by rejections from Gene. Roddenberry was adamant that Twenty-Fourth Century man would evolve past the petty emotional turmoil that gets in the way of our happiness today. Well, as any writer will tell you, ʻemotional turmoilʼ, petty and otherwise, is at the core of any good drama. It creates conflict between characters. But Gene didnʼt want conflict between our characters. “All the problems of mankind have been solved,” he said. “Earth is a paradise.”
Now, go write drama.
His demands seemed impossible at first glance. Even self-destructive. And yet, I couldnʼt escape one huge reality. Star Trek worked. Or it had for thirty years. Gene must be doing something right.
I accepted it as a challenge. Okay, I told the writers, Iʼm here to execute Roddenberryʼs vision of the future, not mine. Letʼs stop fighting what we canʼt change. These are his rules. How do we do this story without breaking those rules?
A day later, I asked for another meeting with Gene and Rick. And hereʼs how I re-pitched the story:
“When the boyʼs mother dies, he doesnʼt grieve. He acts like heʼs been taught to act -- to accept death as a part of life. He buries whatever pain he may be feeling under this Twenty-Fourth Century layer of advanced civilization. The alien race responsible for the accidental death of his mother tries to correct their error by providing a replacement version of her. The boy wants to believe his mother isnʼt dead, but our Captain knows she isnʼt real and must convince the boy to reject the illusion. In order to do so, the boy must cut through everything heʼs been taught about death and get to his true emotions. He must learn to grieve.”
The new approach respected Roddenberryʼs rules and by doing so, became a more complex story. He gave his blessing. And I began to learn how Roddenberryʼs Box forced us as writers to come up with new and interesting ways to tell stories instead of falling back into easier, familiar devices.
The rules of behavior in Roddenberryʼs universe have filled books. There are more books dedicated to the personal histories of Star Trek characters as well as detailed cultural histories of the alien races of the Twenty-Fourth Century. And even more books written about Star Trek’s science and technology. Gene and his colleagues over the years have created a tapestry that is not easy for new writers to penetrate. My experience has been that our most successful new writers grew up as dedicated fans and already know the Star Trek world inside and out. With the notable exceptions of Ira Steven Behr, Jeri Taylor and Joe Menosky, three writers in a decade, I rarely had luck hiring experienced writers who could come in and understand the franchise.
