Gene Roddenberry

Gene Roddenberry: The Cop Who Wrote the Future

Before he invented the twenty-third century, Gene Roddenberry flew 89 combat missions in B-17 bombers, survived three aircraft crashes, and wrote speeches for the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. Star Trek's optimism was not the product of an innocent. It was written by a man who had helped evacuate a burning airliner in the Syrian Desert while fourteen people died.

El Paso, Los Angeles, and the Pulps

Eugene Wesley Roddenberry Sr. was born on 19 August 1921 in El Paso, Texas, and moved to Los Angeles with his family at two. His father was a police officer. As a boy he read pulp magazines and the science fiction that shaped him — John Carter of Mars, Tarzan. He graduated from Franklin High School in Highland Park in 1939 and went to Los Angeles City College, majoring in police science while developing an interest in aeronautical engineering: the two halves of his working life already visible.

Eighty-Nine Missions and Three Crashes

He enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on 18 December 1941, was commissioned second lieutenant on 5 August 1942, and flew 89 combat missions in B-17s with the 394th Bomb Squadron of the Thirteenth Air Force, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal. On 2 August 1943 his aircraft, *Yankee Doodle*, overran a runway on takeoff and crashed, killing two of the crew. After the war he flew commercially for Pan American World Airways from 1945 to 1948, and on 18 June 1947 the Clipper Eclipse went down in the Syrian Desert; as the ranking flight officer he helped get passengers out.

Badge, Then Typewriter

Roddenberry joined the Los Angeles Police Department on 10 January 1949, working traffic and then the newspaper unit that became the Public Information Division, where he ended up writing speeches for the Chief and acting as the department's liaison to *Dragnet*. That connection became his way out. He resigned on 7 June 1956 to write full time, sold scripts to *Highway Patrol* and other Ziv productions, used the pseudonym "Robert Wesley" on *Mr. District Attorney*, and won the Writers Guild of America award for Best Teleplay in 1958 for "Helen of Abajinian," an episode of *Have Gun – Will Travel*. On *The Lieutenant* he fought the Department of Defense over "To Set It Right," an episode about solidarity between a black and a white Marine — a preview of everything that followed.

Selling a Western in Space

He registered the Star Trek concept with the Writers Guild on 24 April 1964. MGM liked it but made no offer; Desilu took it; NBC ordered a pilot. "The Cage," shot in November and December 1964, failed with test audiences, and a second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," was made in July and August 1965. The series premiered on 8 September 1966 with "The Man Trap." Roddenberry built the show around a deliberately multiracial crew and recruited science fiction writers including Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison. Ratings were mixed across three seasons; he organised mass fan letter-writing campaigns to keep it alive, and when NBC exiled it to Friday at ten for the third season he stepped back from daily running while remaining executive producer. The last episode aired on 3 June 1969, leaving the production $4.7 million in debt.

Cancellation, Conventions, Resurrection

The years after were bleak. "My dreams were going downhill because I could not get work after the original series was cancelled," he said. He wrote and produced *Pretty Maids All in a Row* for MGM in 1971 and lived off appearances at colleges and science fiction conventions — which, unexpectedly, rebuilt the audience. He was executive consultant on the animated series from 1973 at $2,500 an episode, with D.C. Fontana effectively running it. Paramount hired him in May 1975 to develop a feature; after *Star Wars* the studio pivoted to a *Phase II* series in 1977, then abandoned it, and the material became *Star Trek: The Motion Picture* (1979), a box-office hit and, adjusted for inflation, the third-highest-grossing Star Trek film. Harve Bennett replaced him on *The Wrath of Khan* — roughly twenty per cent of its plot came from his ideas — and thereafter his memos as "executive consultant" were largely ignored. In 1987 he returned properly with *Star Trek: The Next Generation*, for a $1 million bonus plus salary, rewriting the series bible David Gerrold had drafted. Producer Rick Berman noted that his involvement "diminished greatly" after the first season; his last writing credit was "Datalore."

The Man Behind the Vision

The humanist future had a difficult author. Roddenberry rewrote other people's scripts constantly, often without credit: he fell out permanently with Harlan Ellison over "The City on the Edge of Forever," and Don Ingalls took the pseudonym "Jud Crucis" after what was done to "A Private Little War." He used amphetamines, cocaine and methaqualone through much of his career, cocaine beginning during the *Motion Picture* production; combined with diabetes, hypertension and antidepressants, this contributed to the cerebrovascular disease and encephalopathy that killed him. He married Eileen-Anita Rexroat in 1942 and divorced in 1969 after 27 years, conducting affairs with both Nichelle Nichols and Majel Barrett before Star Trek aired; he married Barrett in a Shinto ceremony in Japan in 1969, calling a Western religious ceremony "sacrilegious," and kept a relationship with his assistant Susan Sackett from 1975 until his death. Leonard Nimoy said flatly, "Gene was antisemitic, clearly," citing among other things Roddenberry's remark that "You Jews have a lamentable habit of identifying those characteristics in a society that you deem positive and then taking credit for inventing them."

Why Gene Is Called a Genius

The creative act was one of framing, not craft. Roddenberry did not write the best Star Trek episodes; other people did, and he frequently rewrote them into worse ones. What he did was construct a premise elastic enough to hold almost any moral argument — a starship, a mixed crew, a rule against interference, a future in which humanity had already solved poverty and war — and then insist, in 1966, on putting a black woman, a Japanese American and a Russian on the bridge at the height of the Cold War. That single design decision has probably changed more lives than the scripts did: the NAACP gave him its Brotherhood Award, and the American Humanist Association its Humanist Arts Award in 1991. He was raised Southern Baptist and rejected organised religion, saying "I believe in a kind of God. It's just not other people's God. I reject religion. I accept the notion of God"; Nicholas Meyer observed that Star Trek became "sort of a secular parallel to the Catholic Mass."

The counter-case is substantial. His post-Star Trek record is thin, his best collaborators found him a credit-taker, his memos on the films were disregarded by professionals who made better films without him, and the sharpest hours of the franchise — *The Wrath of Khan*, the later Next Generation — were made as his influence receded. He was also, by Nimoy's testimony, capable of real bigotry while authoring television's most famous argument against it. Call him a visionary of premise rather than of execution: the man who built the container, not everything poured into it.

Legacy

Roddenberry suffered a stroke in September 1989 and another in early October 1991, and died of cardiopulmonary arrest in Santa Monica on 24 October 1991, aged 70. At the secular memorial at Forest Lawn, Ray Bradbury, Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Stewart spoke, Nichelle Nichols sang, and four aircraft flew the missing man formation overhead. He was the first television writer to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in 1985, won a Hugo for "The Menagerie," entered the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2007 and the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2010, and received a posthumous NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal. A crater on Mars, the asteroid 4659 Roddenberry and a genus of spiders carry his name. Portions of his ashes flew on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1992 and again, with Majel Barrett's and Nichelle Nichols's, toward deep space in January 2024. In August 2021, on his hundredth birthday, NASA beamed a 1976 recording of his voice toward 40 Eridani — Vulcan's fictional star. It arrives in early 2038.