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The City on the Edge of Forever

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2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For more than thirty years now, controversy has raged over the fan favorite Star Trek episode, "City on the Edge of Forever." Here, Ellison gives us the story of his script, how it was written, then rewritten numerous times, finally to the point where he disavowed it, trying to put his nom de plume, Cordwainer Bird as author.

The book, which starts as an interesting piece of, if not Trekker lore, television behind the scenes, quickly becomes a (likely justified) character assassination of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Plenty of evidence is presented to prove the claims of dishonesty by Roddenberry against not only Ellison, but other creators. "City" is not the first tome to assert Roddenberry's credit stealing or lack of writing ability (although it has never been put so succinctly as when Ellison says Roddenberry, "couldn't write worth sour owl poop.")

In three separate interviews printed here, Roddenberry claims that Ellison's script was unfilmable for two reasons. One, he had several crewmen acting out of character and two he was over budget. Taking these one at a time, Roddenberry was actually quoted as saying, "He [Ellison] had my Scotty dealing drugs!" Scotty does not appear on the script anywhere. Several times Roddenberry had apologized for his mistake, but he never seemed to stop making it.

Although Scotty was not dealing drugs, another character created just for this episode, Lt. Beckwith, is dealing in Jewels of Sound, a sonic narcotic. Roddenberry objected to having any of his perfect crew showing such poor character. Perhaps this was Roddenberry's complaint, and not defamation of Scotty, but Starfleet officers in general, whom Roddenberry never wanted to show with conflicts or flaws.

As for the second issue, budget reports reprinted here show Ellison did go over budget $66,000, which is a negotiable amount. Ellison proved he was willing to rewrite to accommodate expenses; he did so three times without pay, something that is against the rules for producers to ask writer's to do, according to the Writer's Guild of America. Roddenberry's claim of being $300,000 over budget is ludicrous and, I would hope, just a result of bad memory and not a willful lie.

No one else is safe from Ellison's legendary wrath, either. He recounts an incident with William Shatner, who had requested to be the absolute first to read Ellison's completed script for "City". Ellison invited Shatner into his home (after Shatner wipes out his motorcycle showboating in his driveway.) to examine the script. And examine it he does-for several hours. Thus we had the first request for a rewrite, because Shatner had counted the lines he had, and realized that Leonard Nimoy had a handful more. Such were the egos involved here.

What exasperates the point to almost unbearable levels is that the original script, unfilmed and owned exclusively by Ellison, won a Writer's Guild of America award, while the filmed version ("a thalidomide baby version of my script", according to Ellison) won a Hugo in 1967 for Best Dramatic Presentation, the only teleplay ever to do so. Ellison accepted the Hugo award in "memory of the script they butchered, and in respect to those parts of it that had the vitality to shine through the evisceration."

One is compelled to ask, then: Is the script really that great? In a word, yes. As a piece of writing, the original "City on the Edge of Forever" is a touching story. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of a legless World War I veteran named Trooper who becomes a tragic hero, so important and yet, unimportant. He is a very poignant character I would have liked to have seen added to Trek lore.

Ellison's original script has an officer, Beckwith, dealing in drugs and then escaping to a nearby planet. Beaming down after him, Kirk and crew discover the Guardians of Forever, who watch over a beautiful ancient city. As in the filmed version, a portal shows the crew events from Earth history, but Beck with is the one to jump through to escape, not McCoy. He is also the one who saves Edith Keeler and changes history.

The love story between Kirk and Keeler is played up, and becomes all the more tragic as Kirk honestly contemplates sacrificing for love the future, as it should be. In the end, Spock must grab and hold Beckwith as Keeler is killed, there by setting the time stream right again. Beckwith jumps back through the portal and lands in the heart of a sun and is forced to repeat that cycle forever.

This book is worth a read through, particularly just to have a copy of the original script. A good seventy pages is nothing but an angry rant by Ellison that true fans of his will enjoy, but others will think is just fussy and unnecessary. Because of this episode's status in the hearts and minds of fans everywhere, the battle to claim credit for it may never cease. Ellison, however, makes a fine case here.

This book is divided into three parts. The first part is an extremely long, bile-filled introductory essay from the pen of author Harlan Ellison. The second part, and the meat of the text, is the actual script treatments of CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER, with two additional revised scenes at the end written after Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek's creator and executive producer) insisted that certain elements of the story be removed or changed. The final part is a collection of afterwords written by various people to have worked with Ellison over the years, particularly those who were familiar with the conflict between himself and Gene Roddenberry - the Great Bird Of The Galaxy.

Harlan Ellison's introductory essay is a delightful, 72-page, no-holds-barred rant concerning the circumstances behind the Original Star Trek episode, CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER. The essay, filled with some of the most creative insults you'll see this side of a Don Rickles' act, is easily worth the price of admission by itself. In it, Ellison starts at the very beginning, painstakingly detailing the events behind the writing of the script, continues through the fights during the production and then screams about everything that took place after the show had ended. Ellison includes numerous photocopies of damning documents that build a very convincing case for his side of the argument.

It's laughable the number of things that Gene Roddenberry thought he could get away with saying at Star Trek conventions. My favourite is that Roddenberry would state during a speech that Harlan Ellison "had my Scotty dealing drugs!" When Ellison would contact Roddenberry to complain about the inaccuracy of that statement, as Scotty wasn't even in the original outline, the producer would admit his mistake and promise never to say that again. Yet the next time Roddenberry gave a speech or an interview, the "he had my Scotty dealing drugs!" line would be back. Also worthy of note, is the supposed cost of the script that kept getting more and more expensive the more that Roddenberry would talk about it.

It seems odd that Ellison claims to have been mostly silent on this topic over the years since the production. Judging by this introduction alone, it's hard to imagine him being silent on any topic at all. Still it's an amazingly entertaining rant, and a testament to what bottling up anger for about twenty-five years will do to a writer.

On to the actual script. Compared to the version that was actual transmitted as the Star Trek episode, the guts of the story are relatively the same. Kirk and Spock go back in time to the 1930s to prevent history from becoming perverted due to a rogue time traveler. There are a number of important elements that are different enough and change the light in which several powerful scenes are played out. Spock is much colder here, and more like the alien creature seen in the original character outline and in the second pilot episode. The opening is completely changed, as it isn't McCoy who goes back in time, but an officer on the Enterprise who is caught dealing psychedelic drugs (showing us a grittier, dirtier, less idealistically perfect, more realistic version of Starfleet than Gene Roddenberry wanted to portray). The relationship between Kirk and Edith Keeler is also slightly different and the ending (I won't spoil it), while sharing certain elements from the transmitted version, is turned completely around. Both the original ending and the alternative version are powerful, but it's interesting to see the differences in them from the standpoint of the men who created them. Ellison's version is starkly realistic, showing a human, flawed side to Kirk's character. Roddenberry's adaptation is much more idealistic, with characters who instinctively do "the right thing" no matter how difficult it should be for them.

However, some of the changes made make sense from the standpoint of the producer. Star Trek was, of course, a continuing series and several of the elements introduced in the script just wouldn't work inside the confines of the universe that Gene Roddenberry had created. As a standalone story, this original script is fantastic, but it doesn't make sense to see such gritty and flawed human beings when every other story has shown Starfleet officers to be perfect Supermen. Ellison's vision may have been more dramatic, but I can sympathize with a production team that was attempting to construct a coherent serial storyline. While Harlan Ellison's Star Trek may have ended up being better then what we got, it does make a certain sort of sense for many of his ideas to have been toned down when writing for Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. That said, however, I do think that a compromise situation (losing some of Roddenberry's idealness) could still have worked in this case.

The afterwords are a bit of a mixed bag. Several of them do little more than take up space and to give Harlan Ellison a good character reference. One or two of them make for interesting reading, as few of the Star Trek production team give their two cents as to what exactly was going on at their end of the debate.

The book is definitely worth getting, if only for the hilarious introductory remarks. Ellison's argument is quite argued coherently and the evidence he includes is extremely incriminating. The amazingly fun and witty way in which he carefully demolished practically everything that Gene Roddenberry has said about the subject makes for quite entertaining reading. The script itself is very enjoyable and very effective at tugging at the heartstrings without feeling manipulative or exploitative. Fans of Star Trek should definitely check this out, if only to see how different this is from the transmitted version. While much of the prototype shines through to the finished script, it's fascinating to see the original path taken with the concepts that Ellison created.

Harlan Ellison's bitter introductory essay is the absolute finest reason to buy this book. He handily deconstructs the myth that has been Gene Roddenberry in a literate, angry rant that makes the reader almost experience a vein-throbbing aneurysm as an act of pure empathy. I myself had to be hospitalized for several days after exposure to his acidic version of what went down. That having been said, I'm still a fan of the televised version of The City on the Edge of Forever and I think it was an improvement on Ellison's original draft. The number one reason is (as D.C. Fontana points out in her afterword) that Ellison's script just wasn't very series television friendly. The City and the Guardians as originally envisioned by Ellison could have never been delivered to his satisfaction given the special effects/makeup limitations of the time and would have been a legitimate budgetary concern. Personally, I think it was a stroke of genius to make the Guardian actually BE the gateway and substituting the original antagonist of the drug-dealing Beckwith (what's the street value on a Jewel of Sound, by the way?) with the accidentally doped-up but otherwise decent Dr. McCoy simply made more sense from a TV standpoint. Ellison's addition (okay, okay at Roddenberry's insistence) of space pirates came off as silly and the Enterprise simply ceasing to exist was certainly more profound than having them turn into a ship full of buccaneers. What I find incredibly interesting in the reading of Ellison's essay and the various afterwords are the unanimous suggestions that Roddenberry wanted HIS Starfleet people to be portrayed as perfect and uncorrupt while refusing to address the many episodes made under Roddenberry's supervision that depicted imperfect and corrupt Starfleet personnel. In Charlie X, the captain of the USS Antares passes Charlie off on the Enterprise even though he suspects the young man is a dangerous force and only tries to warn them when he figures his own vessel is a safe distance away. In Court-Martial, a Starfleet officer fakes his own death so as to incriminate Captain Kirk. Don't even get me started on John Gill and his little Nazi-experiment on the planet Ekos. Of all the people involved with this book, only Peter David took the trouble to write about this obvious double standard while not offering a theory to explain it. I have little doubt that Gene Roddenberry did have the most fond desire to have the universe he's credited with creating (he had a LOT of help) populated by the most brave and perfect human beings and I also have little doubt that he paid lip service to this concept throughout his life but it was obviously a desire he was able to put aside when the story demanded it. The simple truth is that The City on the Edge of Forever didn't need the arch-villain Beckwith to set in motion the events that resulted in the brief annihilation of the universe as James Kirk knew it. Point of fact: it was an act of mercy and kindness (the snatching away of Edith Keeler before she met her demise under the wheels of the beer truck) that caused this annihilation and was certainly much more in character for the kindly Dr. McCoy than some evil junior officer dealing space-crack. Ellison made much to-do of the changing of his original ending (which I won't reveal here) but I have to say that the one that was filmed has endured in my mind as more affecting than any thing I have seen on Star Trek to date with the possible exception of Spock's death in Star Trek II. Isn't it human that Kirk had the desire to give up his universe for the woman he loved but in the end sacrificed her and his happiness so that millions would live? Isn't it human that he had the desire but in the end did what was right? Isn't it more heroic? To Ellison's credit, the basic story is all there in his original script so City is his baby, albeit a bastard one with many vying to be the father. I doubt that the multiple fingerprints it endured on its way to the screen could have fashioned such a piece of TV history without Ellison's apt jump-start. For those of you who reviewed the book and wondered if Ellison had ever even seen an episode of Star Trek when he wrote his script, I would suggest that you read the book again and put yourself in the time and place. Ellison turned in his first treatment in March of 1966 and the second in May of that same year. Star Trek hadn't even premiered yet. The only episodes that were probably in the can at that time were the two pilots. It's quite possible Ellison was able to view those episodes in preparation for writing a Star Trek script but bear in mind that Spock was the only character in The Cage who appeared in the series and he wasn't really the Spock that we all know and love. Likewise, the characters as they appeared in Where No Man Has Gone Before were still characters in flux so Ellison had a lot of room to play around. I admit that reading Ellison's script gives one the initial reaction that he missed the characters by a country mile when it came to dialogue and mannerisms and I have no doubt the even the most casual Star Trek fan could summon exchanges between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy so authentic sounding that they would put Ellison's attempt to shame but just bear in mind that he did not have the benefit of experiencing Trek as a thirty-year old cultural icon. This was a guy who was in on the ground floor, folks. And in spite of my personal opinion on what he came up with, he is still the person who built The City on the Edge of Forever.

To quote Leonard Nimoy from his afterword in this volume: "if you don't know by now that Harlan Ellison and Gene Rodenberry were engaged in a blood battle over this project ever since its inception, then you have been living on some strange planet devoid of intelligence and communication."

Harlan Ellison's expanded introductory essay, "Perils of the City," is a 73 page detailed account of not only how his award winning original script for "The City on the Edge of Forever" was turned into the most popular "Star Trek" episode of all time, but how what happened was, um, misrepresented by the show's creator Gene Roddenberry (the proceeding is a gross understatement of epic proportions). The book contains several afterwords by names familiar to the Star Trek universe: Nimoy, DeForest Kelly, George Takei, Peter David, Walter Koenig, Dorothy C. Fontana, David Gerrold, and Melinda Snodgrass. I believe it is accurate to say that Ellison makes his case--with lots of illustrated textual evidence--several times over, and at great length, skewering more than Roddenberry's memory in the process (my personal favorite is the reference to "Bimbo Queen, Joan Collins).

All that being said, the reason to own this book is that it reprints not only Ellison's original script, out of print for several decades, but also two initial story treatments, providing a unique insight into the creation of a television script. Then you can watch "The Original and Uncut" episode (Star Trek Episode 28) and think about not only the alterations and deletions from Ellison's script (not just big things like Beckwith and the Jewels of Sound but also the character of Trooper), but the significance of the different endings. If after reading all this you do not appreciate that WHO stops WHOM from saving Edith Keeler makes a big difference on several important levels, then you are out there somewhere, lost on the aforementioned strange planet.

It is indeed difficult to reconcile the two parts of this book, the postmortem excoriation of Roddenberry with the original text of this exquisite story, but the point of origin for both is the creative little furnace of Harlan Ellison's mind. To be fair, Ellison has been on this particular diatribe pretty much since the day "The City on the Edge of Forever" first aired on April 6, 1967 and his side of the story was printed along with the script in the 1976 collection, "Six Science Fiction Plays." My best advice would be to either read the script first or read the two parts at different times. But you will really want to have a clean palate when you first read Ellison's original story. It is a treasure on the nature of love that richly deserves to be preserved in its original form and the reason to buy this book. The rest you can take or leave, but you ignore it at your peril.

I have read Harlan Ellison's books since I was 14, and I started watching Star Trek even before that. One of the things that I enjoyed about about the original Star Trek series that I think fell apart in the Next Generation was it's portrayal of a grittier Federation. You had smugglers like Harry Mudd, and "guru's" and many other representatives from the darker side of civilization portrayed.

Harlan Ellison's original script for City On The Edge Of Forever showed that darker side in a way that I personally would like to have seen filmed. In addition, this book also shows you the darker side of real society in his documentation of the way that his original script was handled. Given that Ellison is the darkest, yet most talented writer I've ever had the privilage to read, this book is a testament to the grim reality of everything he's written over the past 35+ years.

City On The Edge Of Forever has always been my favorite Star Trek episode, long before I ever knew that Harlan Ellison had written it. However, reading the history behind the making of this episode is truly fascinating, whether you like the original script or not. It's a great glimpse into the troubles that many writers, not just Harlan, have to face in a world where they aren't considered to be the stars of the show and others take credit for their hard work.

To hear Harlan Ellison tell it(as well as his butt-kissing entourage, which includes Peter David, David Gerrold and Melinda Snodgrass), his original script for City on the Edge of Forever is the greatest work of literature since Joyce's Ulysses. It isn't. It is, however, a very ambitious and well-written teleplay, but then so is Gene Roddenberry's version that was actually produced. Both scripts have their strong points and weak points. In Ellison's version, the strong points(in comparison to the Roddenberry script) include a drug-dealing officer who causes the temporal displacement, which is more convincing than a doped-up McCoy; a pair of ominous ancients who call themselves the Guardians of Forever, which is far cooler than a single Guardian that looks like a post-apocalyptic video screen; and the final, very moving conversation between Kirk and Spock. The weak points are the silly business with the space pirates(having the Enterprise simply cease to exist is more logical, and poetic), a dated drug trip scene, and the tacky retribution that eventually befalls the villainous time-distorter. Regarding Kirk's actions(or lack of action) at the story's climax, both versions are valid. I disagree with the all the folks(Ellison and his cronies included) who think the original ending makes Kirk more human, less heroic. I never thought of Kirk as especially heroic in the Roddenberry version, just pragmatic, he does what he has to do, what many of us "humans" would do in the same situation. He is still guided by passion, but his passion for the way of life he knew and the people in it, his passion for the millions who would have suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis, wins out. In fact, having Kirk be the one to prevent Edith from being saved is in many ways more powerful than Ellison's ending. They both work for their own reasons, however.

I can't agree with those who act as if even the bastardized version of City is light years beyond anything else Star Trek ever produced. For my money, Amok Time is the most brilliantly written and executed episode, and there are several other episodes in the same league. Even the highly flawed Requiem for Methuselah had the potential, if it had been done correctly, to be as powerful and meaningful a love story as City.

Frankly, Ellison's script, with its quality and its historic value, is the primary reason to read this book. Ellison's bileous introduction is certainly entertaining, but it is also overlong, repetitive and obscenely self-praising. Likewise, the afterword essays are a little too obsequious for my tastes. If Ellison is truly the man of integrity he claims to be, then he should have allowed some negative reactions to his work, just to balance things out. Instead, the author comes across as a man who needs his ego stoked as often as the warp engines on a starship.

It is almost never questioned that the best Star Trek episode of all time is Harlan Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever." Now, you can see how much better that episode could have been if Ellison's complete and unrevised script had been used. The bittersweet, doomed, romance of Kirk and Edith Keeler, the idea that love alone might be worth a universe, and the thought that a moment of courage could bring a lifetime of pain and destruction are all brought to the fore much more clearly than in the truncated TV version. Ellison is a master storyteller, and he has rarely been in finer form.

So why not a perfect ten? Well, the screenplay deserves a ten, but it's packaged with an introductory essay that is one of the bitterest things Ellison has ever written, which is no mean feat. The long, rambling essay exorciates pretty much everyone ever involved with Star Trek. Ellison refutes every word of criticism levelled against his teleplay by Roddenberry, Shatner, et al., and he does it without his trademark black humour. Granted, it's hard to be humourous about things when Roddenberry and the hard-core Trekkies have been spreading mistruths about why your screenplay got hacked to pieces for the last thirty years, especially Roddenberry's blatant lie that Ellison had "Scotty dealing drugs," a lie Roddenberry continued to spread despite being corrected on numerous occasions. Still, Ellison's bitter catharsis is hard going. The seventy-five page forward is in almost a stream of consciousness style, with Ellison leaping from topic to topic, going off on tangents in footnotes that cover three pages, and various letters, memos and other documentation thrown in at what appear to be random intervals. Ellison really could have used a good editor.

And White Wolf publishing really could use a good copy editor. The essay is hard enough to follow without the _dozens_ of misspellings and grammatical errors that slipped through.

Still, this is a must read for fans of Ellison and Star Trek, and a chance for both to think of what might have been

The Ellison strikes back! Underground icon Harlan Ellison makes his case that he was mistreated, lied to, and ripped off in the course of writing the most famous Star Trek episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever."
Anyone familiar with Ellison's work knows that he is most entertaining when angry, and most angry when rightiously indignant. His anger here spills out onto each page, calling his enemies names and mustering his evidence for the injustices done him thirty years ago.
A must-read for Star Trek fans, Ellison fans, and anyone interested in the process of TV production.

WARNING: I'm assuming that if you're reading this, you've seen the award-winning STAR TREK episode "City on the Edge of Forever." If I'm wrong, and you don't want anything given away, maybe you'd better come back when you have seen it.

As Harlan Ellison wants everyone in the world to know, his original screenplay for "City" differed significantly from the final product -- and he is REALLY BURNED UP over the whole affair. This book contains both the original script in its entirety, and a very angry introduction by Ellison, containing all the gory details.

The script is definitely a must-read for any serious trekker, or any serious science-fiction enthusiast. The STAR TREK COMPENDIUM calls it television writing at its finest, and even if you don't care much for STAR TREK, you might be interested in seeing what was in the script before it was turned into a committee effort and forced to conform to the STAR TREK format.

Regarding Ellison's anger and bitterness over the affair, I have mixed feelings.

On the one hand, I once had a similar experience, albeit on a much, much, much smaller scale*, so I know how infuriating it is to have your creative efforts messed with purely to serve someone's personal concerns -- especially when the people doing the messing treat your objections with contempt. Furthermore, Ellison is an established, respected, and acclaimed science fiction writer, who certainly deserved better. Among other things, Ellison was allegedly lied to and lied about by Gene Roddenberry, who kept claiming that Ellison's original script had Scotty dealing drugs, at the same time he kept promising Ellison that he was gonna quit saying that. And as Ellison points out, he had written for television before, so it was unfair to dismiss him as someone who didn't know how the business worked.

I also feel Ellison makes some good points regarding two major script alterations. Regarding the drug addict/dealer crewman Beckwith, Ellison maintains that there would have to be a few "bad apples" in a crew of 430 members. Regarding Kirk's freezing up because he JUST COULDN'T kill the woman he loved, Ellison claims this would have made Kirk a three-dimensional human being instead of a one-dimensional macho man.

On the other hand, if Ellison had written for television before, he should have expected at least part of what happened. He should have known that NO television script is purely the work of a single author. For better or worse, scripts get passed from hand to hand, and everyone makes changes to suit all sorts of different agendas. Furthermore, there's one additional, firm rule when writing for a series where all the episodes use the same characters and the same scenario. Each episode must present the characters and scenario in a manner consistent with every other episode, and no episode may permanently change either, unless it's part of a preconceived plan to change the series format. I confess that I wonder how familiar Ellison was with this rule, since his earlier television scripts were for THE OUTER LIMITS, an anthology series, where each episode contained its own characters and scenario.

So if the drug addict/dealer Beckwith was inconsistent with the STAR TREK universe, he had to go. Furthermore, Roddenberry had the network to answer to, and according to the STAR TREK COMPENDIUM, NBC wasn't wild about the whole drug thing either. And if Kirk's inability to kill the woman he loved changed him too much in the eyes of the viewers, that had to go as well.

Regarding those two points I mentioned earlier, I said they were GOOD points, but I didn't;t say I completely agreed with them. I concede the possibility that Beckwith might have slipped through and made it onto a star ship, but I also feel it's debatable. After all, Star Fleet is essentially a military outfit, and the military tends to have a zero-tolerance attitude to such things. Regarding Kirk being more believable and sympathetic if he's fallible, I think we;re walking a fine line here. Yes, someone who is too perfect and too impervious to pain will give you a cramp, nut someone who is too flawed and too sensitive to do what has to be done at a pivotal moment will fill you with contempt. Ellison's original ending might have made Kirk more human and more sympathetic, but it might have made him appear weak, as Roddenberry feared. And IS it really more believable that Kirk could;t do it. After all, to save the woman he loved meant destroying the entire universe as we know it, and perhaps a person in his shoes might feel that the whole universe as we know it is just a tad more important.

As far as Roddenberry's lying about and to Ellison, Ellison may have rubbed him the wrong way -- which brings me to my final point. The tone of this book very much rubbed me the wrong way. If you;re going to complain about how badly you've been treated, you must be careful how you do so, lest you lose the sympathy of the audience. One way to lose that sympathy is to take a confrontational attitude that says, "If you don't agree that I was treated badly, you're as rotten as the people who did it to me." In general, IF people want to hear you complain AT ALL, they want to be given all the facts and allowed to form their own opinion. Furthermore, in this case, the majority of the readers will probably be trekkers who want to sympathize with Roddenberry. Ellison would have gotten more of my sympathy if he had practiced a little more diplomacy.

*My situation involved a skit I wrote for a high school variety show, which got sabotaged and nearly canceled because someone didn't want to look bad. The concern may have been legitimate, but the person went behind my back to deal with it.

This is not only the original script and a few of the re-writes, it is an epic essay on why Harlan Ellison is so angry with Star Trek. Seems that all the twisted stories told by Gene Roddenberry because they got a laugh or promoted the Star Trek mystique tended to have victims. Harlan was one of them, and he isn't gonna take it anymore.

Although he is justifiably upset, he sort of comes out firing an uzi in each hand when maybe wagging a finger would have done. I get it Harlan. I don't need to have 50 pages of the same thing over and over to get it!

But it's a good look into the Hollywood TV production business. And maybe into the area of fragile Hollywood egos. I am not sure that truth, justice, and purity can explain why Harlan is doing this. Clearly some of his own stories are exaggerated and become rhetoric. His is guilty in his own book of what he seems so upset about in others.

Despite all this, Ellison is a great writer and this book is well worth the read. Be forewarned that Ellison spares no expletives or insults for the likes of Gene Roddenberry, Gene Coon, Bill Shatner and others. In fact, it seems as if he can not say enough about them.

By the way, this is the same man who picked up the Seaview model from Irwin Allen's desk and used it to break the pelvis of a network executive during a dispute about another of Harlan's scripts.