Gene's ideas about the future and about man,
are wacky doodle.
Red alert, shields up!
David Gerrold: He was a flawed man.
He had great virtues, he had great flaws.
I thought Gene was going to come across the table at me.
I saw first hand Gene's battling with the studio.
Rick Berman: Gene was considered somewhat of a pain in the neck,
he was kind of a blustery guy.
D.C. Fontana: Gene wasn't the easiest person to get along with
but he stuck up for his beliefs and his concepts.
It was just a lot of in fighting-- it was all chaos.
Ira Steven Behr: There was really scary stuff going on.
There's a lawyer going around looking in people's desks
when they're not there.
Brannon Braga: I spent the first couple of years
just worried I was going to be fired.
Sir Patrick Stewart: My agent was the first person to talk to us.
There wasn't a hope in hell that this show would even make it through the first season.
William Shatner: This film is about the turbulent years
that marked the beginning of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
How it got off the ground
and survived the chaos of the first three years.
I became fascinated with the struggle,
not only the creative struggle,
but the struggle for power.
Those doors are opening up on Stage 6 where the bridge
for The Next Generation was first constructed.
Power is an ephemeral; it's what is perceived.
In order for power to exist it has to be acknowledged
by the people who are involved in the work.
What I began to see was Gene Roddenberry the creator
of Star Trek aging and in diminishing health
trying desperately to hold on to his creative vision,
his legacy, and ultimately his power.
Hurley: Roddenberry had an incredible loyalty,
he was very loyal to his friends.
No, Gene screwed over all his friends as well as his enemies.
You know, he had a lot of demons.
He was very perceptive, had a high IQ.
Gene was a historical revisionist.
Creative and contributive and collaborative.
- Very intimidating guy. - His good nature.
He could be a bully.
But he was a nice man and was a generous man.
Gene had a way of making you feel really good about yourself.
He could inspire people to do better than
they believed they were capable of.
I just found him a decent man.
And had a lot of worldly experience.
A bomber pilot in the Pacific, decorated Pan Am pilot world wide.
I had great arguments about philosophy and all sorts of things.
He was a really remarkable man, I thought.
Gene was fun...
but then later as things were not going as well
I think he got sour.
There's this twenty year in the desert for Gene.
He's the forgotten man.
Fontana: The things that didn't happen
were disappointing and very saddening.
His wife Majel would go to the conventions
and they would sell memorabilia and make some money that way and
that money helped sustain him.
When you're out of work as a writer in Hollywood
and you can't find it, it's a difficult life.
I guarantee you he had a difficult life
between Star Trek and the first movie.
We get back together for Next Gen and for him
it's like he's been called back out of the desert
and given a position of power again.
At the time Gene Roddenberry was considered
somewhat of a pain in the neck, he was kind of a blustery guy
who was not very agreeable.
Everybody else forgot him after Star Trek the motion picture,
this epic disaster.
Every aspect of it got out of hand,
this was a runaway train.
He wasn't trusted with anything.
He had been relegated to being the executive consultant on the movies.
They paid him very well.
I think that may have been enough.
He had a big corner office in the Hart building.
He pretty much spent his days in correspondence
with people from all over the world
who had become Star Trek fans.
So they gave him this emeritus status and he was a "has been."
Arnold: The Summer of 1986, a special summer,
Star Trek 4 about to come out, twentieth anniversary about to happen,
and everything seemed to be building towards this peak.
The studio had decided to start developing a new series.
- Without Gene. - Without Gene.
The president of the television group was a guy named Mel Harris.
He called me one day and he said,
"We're gonna do a new Star Trek."
The studio came to him and said we want to start a new series.
Gene wasn't all that excited about doing another
Star Trek for Paramount.
And so created this series and Gene went, "Whoa, wait, no."
He saw the studio as an adversary.
Gene and the studio, it was a war. It really was.
Gene says, "No you're not doing Star Trek without me,
it's my property." Gene had the power.
Arnold: They weren't going to proceed,
And he said, "Well, damn it I can do it."
Finally, after years of trying to convince him
to do a new Star Trek series, he agreed.
He didn't mean to go in there
and come out with a new series in development.
He was looking forward to retirement in just a couple of months.
Gene agreed and
we had a very, very contentious negotiation
with Gene's lawyer from Bullhead City
by the name of Leonard Maizlish.
Oh, Leonard.
Gene's wacky attorney.
Who, in himself, could be a movie of the week.
( chuckles )
He was not the nicest person in the world.
A lot of people hated Leonard.
I can recall one day when Leonard was almost
clutching his chest and I'm saying, "I hope you die."
I personally never had problems with Leonard.
Gene wanted to be the good guy
so the lawyer got to be the bad guy.
Leonard was carrying the wrath of Gene for all these years
because Gene felt he had gotten screwed on the original series.
Paramount owns the rights. There was never any dispute about that,
but Gene Roddenberry is the creator of Star Trek.
Gene had as much celebrity as the show itself.
I actually thought he was imperative to the DNA
of a successful reboot of Star Trek.
So, what happens?
I needed Gene Roddenberry and I needed to make a deal
and Leonard Maizlish knew exactly where he had me.
Pike: Look, his job was to represent Gene Roddenberry,
and as tough as he was, he did a hell of a job at doing that.
We made the deal giving Gene a compensation package
that was sufficient to Gene and to Leonard.
Paramount would still own the property Star Trek,
but Gene would take his fair share out.
And by the way...
it was a handsome share.
So, Gene said yes to doing a series,
and then suddenly he's startled by his own statement.
Yeah, I don't think he was prepared for what that meant.
And he wasn't a fit man.
Gerrold: Every weekend Majel would pour him onto the train
and send him to La Costa the facility where they'd dry him out.
Because of the drinking, because of the recreational drug use,
he needed to clean himself up.
Which he did, over the next couple of months.
As everything was being worked out,
the I's were being dotted, the T's were being crossed.
Now it was decided,
all right, Gene, you will assemble your team.
Does anybody have a concept at this point?
No, they had no cast, they had nothing.
Do you go back and conceptualize what this show is?
Gene brought in almost immediately, Eddie Milkis,
Bob Justman, me, Dorothy Fontana.
Arnold: People that he had trusted and relied on heavily
during the original series production.
We began to meet at lunch time
at the Paramount commissary, in the private room there.
Gerrold: Everybody in the commissary would watch us walk in
and walk into the executive dining room.
"There goes a hundred million dollar deal on the hoof."
And it was fun, it was really fun.
Arnold: The fans you would have thought would've been Gene's
biggest supporters, absolutely not.
I think that a lot of the fans were very verbal
about someone taking away Captain Kirk.
Gerrold: They were angry because he didn't have Kirk,
Spock, and McCoy in the new series and how dare he call it Star Trek.
I had done a show called Get Smart Again,
which was off of the Get Smart series, and I think
there's a big problem if you try to recreate, it's quicksand.
Crosby: When I got this script to come in and audition
for The Next Gen and I thought,
"Oh my God, I don't know
if this is something that anybody should be doing
because it was such an iconic thing, Star Trek at this point.
"You cannot revive an iconic series,
you cannot replace those guys."
This had the markings of some little seedy...
John De Lancie: It was both really exciting and also,
there was this thing in my mind of going,
"Ooohhhh, are we trying to create or recreate?"
Ronald D. Moore: In the 1970's people started saying that Gene
was a visionary, he had this utopian vision of the future.
I think that he started to believe that
and then Next Generation became a vehicle
to demonstrate this utopia.
I remember he used to tell me that L. Ron Hubbard
was a friend of his and that he went and started a religion.
Gene always thought that if he had wanted to,
he probably could have done the same thing.
Gerrold: He would go to conventions and he loved being
the great bird of the galaxy. Who wouldn't?
He gave college lectures for years in the 70's
and tens of thousands of people would show up at these lectures.
He was starting to believe his own publicity.
Isaac Asimov sent Gene a copy of his book called Asimov's Guide to the Bible.
Gene got very interested in learning more about humanism.
Shatner: The research prior to The Next Generation
lead him to have a thesis that, if not perfection,
man was evolving in a humanist way.
In The Next Generation he tried to impart
his humanistic philosophy.
Most science fiction that we experience today
is a relatively dismal view
of what the future's going to be like.
Gene was obsessed with the idea that the future was going to be better.
There was tremendous anticipation because
it was the rebirth of this phenomenally successful series.
Barry Diller had this idea of starting a fourth network.
Pike: And he wanted to take Star Trek and use that
as the corner stone of a new network.
We had the commitment to do the new series
and we assumed it would be a twenty-six episode commitment.
Well, at the eleventh hour they cut that to thirteen.
I can't make the numbers work at thirteen, I need twenty-six.
I'm not sure what to do here,
but let me go explore the other three networks.
It was a science fiction show and at that point
in the mid eighties there was no science fiction on television.
First, I went to NBC, to Brandon Tartikoff, it was dismissed out of hand.
I then went to ABC and Brandon Stoddard,
and he thought it was simply a bad idea.
The third meeting was with Kim Lemasters, President of CBS Entertainment,
and he said let's do it as a mini series.
Well, that clearly doesn't work.
It is then when we went back at Paramount.
Lucy Silany who was President of distribution
said, "Wait a minute, I can give you twenty-six episodes.
Why don't you produce the program
and we will take it out in first-run syndication."
Well, nobody had ever done a program like that in first-run syndication.
Tell me what first-run syndication is.
First-run syndication is programming that is basically
sold market by market, station by station,
on independent stations, wherever they wanted to place it or on network stations
outside of the so-called prime time which is eight to eleven.
So, all of a sudden we went from a corner stone for the Fox Network,
to this new hybrid for first-run syndication
and by the way, Gene Roddenberry believed we were going to do a network show.
The studio, I think it's in their manual,
tells you that the director, the producer and the studio
are always going to be loggerheads about something.
Because they have different needs?
Because they feel that that's how they can
control the cast, the budget.
This was a low-budget television show
and it had enormous expectations.
How did you know that?
Star Trek has always been a low budget production.
And Star Trek always has enormous expectations.
- Yes. - I see.
Berman: The first meeting that I went to in Roddenberry's office,
the big discussion was whether it would be a one-hour
or a two-hour pilot.
Roddenberry wanted it to be a one-hour pilot,
the studio wanted it to be a two-hour pilot,
and it was a big, blustery argument.
Pike: The premier episode, we have to make a splash with,
and that must be a two-hour episode.
Roddenberry didn't want to do a two-hour.
Pike: I thought Gene was going to come across the table at me,
"We're not doing a two-hour and I'm not writing a two-hour."
And I said, "Gene, quite frankly if you do not do this,
I will bar you from the lot. We are going forward with a two-hour.
I don't know who's going to write it, and now everybody is looking around the room
and nobody is saying nothing.
I'm looking to my left where my bosses are,
I'm looking to my right, where the syndication people are.
There's poker being played right here.
And nobody is backing me because when I said,
"I will lock you out of this lot, I'm not kidding you."
What were you thinking?
I'm thinking what if he gets up and walks out,
I'm screwed.
If this program were not blessed by Roddenberry,
we would've placed the franchise in serious jeopardy.
These millions of dollars are hanging on his,
yes, to a two-hour.
Pike: And it's more like tens of millions of dollars,
it's a lot of money.
All right, so you were bluffing.
I was bluffing.
Holy cats.
And he knew I was dead serious.
- But you were bluffing. - I was bluffing, he blinked.
- You play poker? - Occasionally.
I was asked to come in, by Gene, and he said,
"Would you write the pilot?"
And I brought in Encounter at Farpoint.
So I was writing introduction of the new Enterprise,
the new crew, the new captain, obviously.
David Gerrold: Then he says, "I have to add thirty minutes to
the script because the studio wants my name on the pilot."
which was a lie.
Gene wanted Dorothy to write the two-hour script.
She said she couldn't do it,
she said I can't in less than two weeks.
Gene on the other hand, could write very well under pressure
and he came back the next week with Encounter at Farpoint, the two-hour story,
which introduced the Q character
who was not in the original story that Dorothy wrote.
Fontana: Q was so totally different. It was like he was thrust
into that story and I like John De Lancie,
I thought he did a wonderful job.
And Q came back in other stories.
Right, it has nothing to do with John.
Nothing to do with that but, it was like
this is not what the story was supposed to be about.
It was supposed to be about the mystery of Farpoint
and putting this new crew together.
- He wrote the Q character. - Yes.
And fleshed it out another half hour.
Right.
And then said it was a script by Gene Roddenberry.
Well, that went to arbitration, of course,
it was a split credit.
Gerrold: What he had done was he had jumped her credit.
He was now getting half the residuals for that episode,
and that's in perpetuity.
Gene did this brilliant job of turning this one-hour story
into a two-hour story he wrote half of it,
she wrote half of it.
He came back with a script and, to this day,
I have no idea what that episode was about.
But there was no way in the world
I was going to give any notes whatsoever to Mr. Roddenberry.
Berman: One story that is one of my favorites about Gene
had to do with the casting of Captain Picard.
We looked at a whole bunch of people and Bob Justman
had seen Patrick Stewart give a class or a lecture.
Bob Justman went by a hallway where he was teaching at UCLA
and heard this voice reverberating down the hallway.
It was Patrick Stewart.
Arnold: Patrick Stewart who was not Gene's first choice.
In fact, he kind of fought even reading him first,
but Bob Justman insisted, so Gene did.
Bob Justman said, "You got to meet this guy,
this is the captain."
And Gene met me and I understood some time,
some time later, that Gene said, "Absolutely not.
This guy couldn't be more wrong."
Gene said I'm not going to have a bald English man
playing the new Captain Kirk.
And I don't think he quite understands
the nature of my background and where I'd come from and what I'd done,
except that I was this guy who had a lot of classical theatre experience.
But Gene respected that.
It's final casting and it's Gene and I,
Rick Berman was sitting there. I had my vision,
my vision was, I want Bill Shatner.
I want a good looking guy who's young and virile.
We were down to three actors: Mitch Ryan, was number two,
Roy Thinnes was number three,
and the one that I thought was interesting was Yaphet Kotto.
They were all but despairing of finding a captain.
This is silly. Patrick is by far the best person that we've talked about
and Roddenberry said I'll have him read to the studio and this was John Pike.
He said I'll have him read but he's got to wear a wig.
Patrick had a toupee that was in England.
It was FedExed across to Los Angeles, and it was sent to me in my office.
He went to read along with one other actor
because you never went with just one actor.
Patrick did a really good reading but he had a
British accent and he had a really, really bad toupee on,
and Gene says you know, that number two guy,
that Patrick Stewart guy, let's bring him back.
And they grabbed Patrick as he was on his way out
and he had already taken his rug off.
Bring him in and read him bald-headed.
Well, Patrick Stewart, one of the baldest heads in the world,
I mean, there's not a hair anywhere.
And he comes in and he reads it and he nailed it.
And Gene said, "We got him."
And I said, "Gene, he doesn't have any hair,
we can't make the Captain a bald guy."
And he looks at me and goes, "Hair doesn't mean anything in the twenty-fifth century."
( laughs )
And it was remarks like that that there was no way you could counter.
And the next thing you know Patrick Stewart got the job.
Stewart: About two weeks before we started filming,
I say, you know, "Come on, Gene, give me stuff.
I want background..." and all of this.
And he said, "No, there's just one thing I have for you."
And he fished down and brought up this pile of these Horatio Hornblower books,
and said, "There he is, that's your man and the rest he left up to me.
It was brilliant he didn't tie me down
to anything at all, except he said that,
"The nature of the man is in this character."
Gerrold: We were having great fun until December of '86.
And, about February, Leonard Maizlish moved in full time,
and things started to go to hell.
He came on the lot and got his own office.
When we went into production the first season.
Even though he was the executive producer's lawyer,
he would hand me scripts saying these were notes from Gene,
but I knew Gene's handwriting and they were not notes from Gene.
The writers got ahold of this knowledge
that Leonard Maizlish, who was not a Writers Guild member,
was working on scripts.
Here's a guy who'd never written a word in his life
and he was telling writers how to write Star Trek scripts.
And this is very much against the Writers Guild.
My agent took this stuff to the Guild,
and the Guild filed a grievance
and Leonard Maizlish got banned from the lot.
But then he kind of snuck back in again.
We'd gone to lunch, we'd come back,
Leonard Maizlish had snuck into people's computers.
I see that Maizlish hovering around my room,
opening the door, peeking through like to see if I was in there.
And I just said, "Is there something I can help you with, Leonard?"
And he leaped about a foot and a half.
I think he thought he was speaking with Gene's voice
but I don't think Gene ever heard the way he spoke to people.
Nobody liked him.
Gene had these wonderful relationships with people
who had worked on the original series like Dorothy Fontana,
and Leonard was horrible to Dorothy.
In particular, I didn't like him.
Leonard Mezlish was running around hiring people:
Maurice Hurley, Bob lewin, neither one of which knew anything about Star Trek,
but were immediately promoted above me and Dorothy.
Why are people being promoted above us?
We are the ones who should be the show runners, the producers here.
I found him to be an unsavory character.
He's standing right next to an open window,
no screen, no anything, and I'm thinking it would be so easy
to push that bastard out the window... it would be so easy.
Say it again.
"David, go do it. Go push that bastard out the window,
they'll give you a medal."
Pike: I remember there was this huge screening
in the executive conference room at Paramount Pictures,
and all the hitters, and everybody that was important,
and up we put on the big screen Encounter at Farpoint.
Everybody looked at it
and they were visually knocked out at how stunning
the two-hour looked.
As I had looked at it and wondered what is this about,
what in the world is that thing that looks like a big jellyfish?
It didn't even really have an ending and it was a smash.
Did you realize that The Next Generation
it was possible to characterize it
as Gene Roddenberry's dream of heaven?
I would never have thought that at the time,
but now that we're talking with his conception of the future
and human beings in the future, and Q, Q is God.
I mean, just look at the character, look at everything about the character.
Gene was a well known atheist, but he invents Q.
Typical, so typical.
Savage life forms never follow even their own rules.
As I sit here it's pretty startling,
God's a character, a literalized character,
On Star Trek The Next Generation.
- By an atheist. - By an atheist.
Very interesting.
Stewart: I had never filmed in Hollywood in my life before.
I had no ambitions to film in Hollywood.
I didn't know how to wear these costumes,
I didn't know how to speak or move or sit,
but I was going to work and work and work and work.
I would always be prepared, I would know my lines when I came on set.
Frakes: Sir Patrick took the work very seriously,
and if we fooled around, which we would do, we,
meaning the Americans of the cast,
and if he was not in the mood he would let us have it.
Stewart: I thought there was a lack of concentration
and focus on the set.
That people were taking this far too lightly.
We would sing and we would dance and we would wrestle.
Bill! You're acting like you didn't do this?
- No! - Oh, Bill!
Okay, so here's 6 of the 7 of you
are singing and dancing.
No. Maybe not at the same time.
Sackett: People did not realize the closeness that we had.
We did have a long lasting, personal, very intimate relationship
that developed over fifteen years.
This was his final chance and he knew it pretty much.
That this was his last gasp because it is hard to go back to do something
you had done twenty years before.
He was feeling the need for some support and
he wasn't getting it from anybody except Maizlish.
Once Leonard Maizlish was there,
I wasn't even invited to meetings anymore.
So, it was like, okay, I no longer have input on the show, why am I here?
We keep hearing Maizlish's name, what was the magic there?
There was none.
No, but why was he there?
- To help Gene. - In what way?
To keep him protected.
I wouldn't say that he was the puppet master of Gene,
but Gene was not just having his doubts about his
ability to write, but he was also having some health issues.
Gene started experiencing a series of mini strokes.
But it was one meeting when the other producers and I,
and Gene were in, Gene got up to turn
and he literally went in a circle and slammed into a wall.
Gene's energy level was so up and down
and Gene's direct activity with the show
was so mercurial it was all over the map.
By that time Gene was...
his condition was deteriorating worse and worse.
And people were being fired left and right,
and screaming matches in the hallway,
and all kinds of insanity was going on.
And so the leadership that you needed from
your executive producer was not there.
We were shutting down sometimes because there was
no captain of the ship at that point.
- There was a power vacuum. - Very much so.
Hurley: I get a call from Paramount
saying come and meet Roddenberry,
we want to consider you as a writer for Star Trek: The Next Generation;
I said that's a joke, that's a joke.
But I want to meet Roddenberry.
Who wouldn't wanna meet Roddenberry?
I was coming off two cop shows.
I was coming off Miami Vice, very good show.
Equalizer, very good show.
So he gives me the first episode to rewrite.
We pass each other in the hallway
four or five times a day, he won't look at me.
Apparently Gene didn't like what he wrote.
It was probably the first time we heard them battle.
And he raises up behind his desk,
this great bird-like creature
and he points his finger at me like this and he says,
"You don't know the difference between shields and deflectors."
And that went on for weeks.
What did that say to you about what you were confronting?
He didn't want me, Hurley the writer.
He didn't want me to write me,
he wanted me to write him.
Hurley: Gene's ideas about the future and about man
are wacky doodle.
He sees us now in our infancy where we just gather and accumulate
like a three-year-old in a crib, that's mine, that's mine,
give me this, you can't have that I need this, I need that.
He believed that mankind in the twenty-fourth century
had resolved all conflict between themselves.
That developed between the first Star Trek
and the second Star Trek.
Gerrold: Back in the 60's, Gene wanted to be the womanizer
and always gets the beautiful woman
and always punches out the bad guy and always wins.
And in 1986, Gene is not going to be down there on the front lines punching,
but he will be the all-seeing advisor, the wise man.
Gene's conception on Next Gen
is almost heavenly
in that everyone's at peace.
Hurley: It takes away everything you need for drama
in Gene's wacky doodle vision of the future.
Shatner: The real trouble in year one is the dictums,
how to get a good script out.
If you tell a writer that the characters can't have conflict between them,
you're just cutting his legs off.
Some writers chaffed against Gene's vision of a better future
where there was no conflict.
The essence of drama is conflict.
There was no evil.
There's no money anymore.
There was no jealousy.
There's no fighting anymore.
No separate individual goals or ideas.
We couldn't negotiate.
No tension, what?
I liked the dramatic constraints it put on me as a writer.
Really?
Well, I had to find new ways to tell stories.
When you look at the original series
there's a lot of conflict between those characters,
They argue a lot,
and crewmen on the Enterprise are yelling at each other.
If our people are perfect and have no conflicts or
problems between them, there is no story here.
We would walk around in each others' offices going,
"I don't know how to write about that,
I don't know how to write about perfect people."
That was Gene's vision of Star Trek: The Next Generation,
take it or leave it and work within it or don't.
The dictums gave the writers a lot of stress and struggle,
and then in most cases, Gene would just take the scripts and rewrite them.
And these writers were not used to that
and that was very frustrating and a lot of writers left.
And the turnover that first season
was thirty writers and staff members left the show.
The first season of a TV show with that kind of turnover?
There was a writer who wrote an episode,
he was a huge Star Trek fan, he was so excited.
Gene called him to say congratulations and Gene told him how great it was.
The next day Gene came to him and said,
"I'm sorry, friend, but we're going to have to part company
and he thought, "Oh my God, Gene is leaving the show."
And then found out the furniture in his office
had been moved into the hallway and that's how he found out
he was fired and he lasted about a week.
Crosby: I know that the fans were always surprised that
this wasn't some glamorous, red-carpeted,
money-thrown-at-us affair.
- On the first year. - On the first year.
Your trailer was so bad you didn't want to go back to it.
It had no air conditioning.
No bathroom, no wash basin, no telephone.
They were those little Jerry Lewis boxes,
remember on the steel wheels?
Things that they dug out of some back lot
that no one had probably been in since 1953.
You remember those?
I do, I used to look at them from afar.
Of course you did.
We were a syndicated science fiction series,
we were down the status ladder at Paramount.
I would go to Rick and say,
"This is how much money we've got to spend per episode."
They weren't throwing a lot our way in terms of any perks.
If I was in trouble financially, I could go to Rick and say,
"Rick, I need two million dollars this year. Can you find it?"
And he said, "I'll get it for you."
I used to go and steal food from the set of Cheers.
You mean there were no craft services table?
Not really.
Rick at the end of the year... on the numbers.
We would literally have sliced tomatoes and Cremora.
So this made you think what?
Well, you feel like the illegitimate bastard in the back lot.
Hurley: Gene at this time in his life didn't really
care about the management of television,
it's a sausage factory.
You got to turn out a sausage every day.
He would come up with a story, say this is the story we want to do,
then when that story was written out, he'd want to tear it up
and throw it away. "Oh, no. I got a better idea."
Gene would read a script three days before shooting
and decide he didn't like it.
If you throw this story away because this one
is different, but not better, the machine breaks down.
Because this has to go to the stage and we have to have something to shoot on Monday.
Meanwhile we had a production meeting and
everything had been set for this episode
and suddenly we were having to make changes.
So, I wanted to leave. He said, "I'm turning the show over to you."
And I said, "I'll do the show if you leave."
And he said Majel and I were thinking of going to Tahiti.
I said, "I'll buy your ticket and make your reservation."
And he left.
This trip that they took had an enormous effect on the show.
It couldn't have been at a worse time.
And that's where Berman and I took his idea and ran with it.
Rick Berman and Maury Hurley were trying very hard
to respect Gene's wishes and perhaps they were doing so
a little too literally.
If in one instance Gene said,
"No that should be blue." Suddenly everything had to be blue.
Gene had intended fully to step away and he found he couldn't.
I don't think he realized things would get so out of control
so quickly.
Maury got elevated to sort of the show runner position
I was a little surprised because he had never
written any science fiction in his life, he had done mostly cop shows.
People questioned Maury's ability to run a room.
Maury didn't like the way certain people took notes.
I don't really care what people think.
I mean, when I'm doing what I'm doing, I don't care.
I'm going to do what I'm going to do and that's the way it is.
First thing he did was he took Bob Lewin and he
moved him to a tiny little office on the ground floor and
took all of his power away, and I didn't like that at all.
I grew up in a show business family and I've seen all of the bull shit,
and I don't like it.
The power pull.
The politics and the back stabbing and all that stuff.
- All for? - For personal power.
Maury was really trying to stick with Gene's plan,
and I think was a lot of resentment about that too
because a lot of people would come in and they had their own ideas.
And you know Gene didn't want anybody to have their own ideas,
this was his world.
No writer could come in and give me an idea that I would accept--
no matter how great the idea was--
if it broke that concept.
I wrote this thing called Conspiracy
and I was intentionally trying to shake things up
and do a different kind of story.
I was the keeper of the grail
and nothing was going to change it.
Maury came back to me and said it's not Star Trek,
it's too dark, it's got a dark ending, it's unhappy,
it's this and that, and he turned it down.
Somebody overruled him and maybe it was Rick Berman,
but somebody loved the script and that it was exactly
what we should be doing,
but Maury and I had a very bad relationship from that point on.
Stewart: In that first season we'd had Denise go
half way through the season which was just such a screw up.
Episodes would go by and I'd maybe say, "Aye, aye, Captain."
She was such a popular character.
Now Denise Crosby clearly is not Katherine Hepburn
but you know the camera really loved her.
I used to ask them to do a mock up of my legs
and just put them up there on the bridge.
You'd have to come in for a shot.
I was always there, fifteen hour days just
standing on the horse shoe. The actor inside of me
was beginning to chew on my own arm.
And Denise quit after twenty some odd episodes to
become a "motion picture star."
When I think about the Israeli Palestinian negotiations,
I think about, you know, sometimes they seem to negotiate
the way the studio was negociating with Denise's people
and it ended up with her just going.
I don't think you can sustain a show
where the characters are not accessible to the audience.
Where you don't see somebody over coming a flaw,
if there's no conflict and no tension between people,
then there's no relationship between people and that show will wither.
And that's what was happening.
I tried to make it sustain,
I wanted to create this new adversary, The Borg,
I want the Federation to form allies against
this overwhelming, awesome adversary.
At the end of the first season there's an episode called The Neutral Zone,
which was the arc for the second season, and the arc for the
second season was going to be here come The Borg.
At the end of the second season they defeat The Borg.
Then what happened?
Writers strike.
End of the first season, writers strike begins.
Couldn't talk to the writers,
couldn't talk to Roddenberry.
And the hiatus dragged on and on and on,
it was five and a half months.
Stewart: I remember having lunch with a couple of
executives from Paramount and they were saying,
"It's really bad, and I think your show will be one of the first to be canceled
it's looking so bad."
And I had already adjusted to the idea that maybe we'd get
two or three years out of this show.
Suddenly, the strike was resolved and we
went back and we started the second season very late,
and we started it without Gates.
Shatner: The end of the first season, Paramount Studios
was more than happy that their gamble on the rebooted series
was paying dividends,
but on the inside, behind the scenes,
oh, the in fighting, the chaos, and the power shifts
was about to get worse. And in the center of it,
a man that I've worked with and deeply admire, Maury Hurley.
Shatner: Tell me the story of Gates McFadden.
She's let go at the end of the first season and then she's rehired.
Tell me how that happens.
At the end of the first season Hurley became the successor
to all of the other writers and was going to be
coming back as the head writer.
He felt very insistant about a new doctor.
Gates McFadden: Coming out of academia, having done a lot of
stage direction, and being in New York theatre,
I was used to
you can sort of say what you think about
something, and you're respected.
You fight your argument, and then you either win or lose.
He just didn't like the way the character of Doctor Crusher was working out.
There'd been a few issues over that first season
about Doctor Crusher's character, and I think they thought at times
that Gates was a little bit high handed and
you know, maybe being a little demanding.
I never experienced that.
I had heard that somebody said it's either her or me,
you know, one of us has to go.
She was adored and suddenly she was gone.
We ended up casting Diana Muldaur who was
a pretty well-known TV actress at the time.
That never quite worked.
Why?
Just didn't get on with the cast all that well and the character
of Doctor Pulaski never quite solidified.
It was awkward a lot of the time.
Muldaur: They were not that interested in renewing me,
and I was certainly not that interested.
When I worked with you we had scenes,
because it was all actors.
By the time you got to Star Trek: The Next Generation,
it was a vast technical world
that had some characters placed in it.
At the end of the second season
I remember feeling like Maury was getting very frustrated.
Gene would allow things to come into the show
that were against his own concept,
and I would go ballistic.
Maury had kind of gotten the show back to where it had fallen apart
because of the writers strike.
Hurley: He said, "This episode is good, I want to do this episode."
And then he'd say, "This episode is crap."
When I have to fight Roddenberry about maintaining
the integrity of his concept, I know I've lost the fight.
He didn't seem to want to be there anymore, I think he was tired.
I think he was tired of fighting whoever he was fighting.
And egos kicked in in the second year. Big time.
Mine as much or maybe more than anybody's.
I get a call from the set;
Patrick Stewart won't read this line.
There was an argument and it went on a little bit too long.
Patrick got a little angry.
So now it's this.
It's the producer and the actor.
And he sort of said if you guys don't get out of here
I'm getting out of here.
I say to Berman, "Fire them all.
I'll build the second season on the absolute tragedy
that the Enterprise exploded by unknown cause.
And lost everybody and now we must find the new Enterprise crew.
Systems are off line. Core breach is eminent.
All hands abandon ship. Repeat, all hands abandon--
( ringing )
Rick Berman called me one day and said,
"We've got a problem. Patrick's very unhappy.
He's creatively not being satisfied.
I said, "I'll fix that."
I said, "Have Patrick come over and meet me for lunch today,
I want to make sure that he is in costume, it'll be a one o'clock lunch."
I happened to have a table in the back of the executive Paramount dining room.
At one o'clock the commissary is packed,
so I intentionally said to my assistant at the time,
"Maris, let me know when it's one fifteen." She said you're meeting
Patrick at one o'clock.
I said let me know when it's one fifteen.
You're a game player.
Patrick walks in promptly at one o'clock,
goes back to the table in costume,
sits down by himself and now has to wait for fifteen minutes.
And I walk up and I'm out of breath
and I say, "Patrick let's just cut to it.
I do know that you are not creatively not being taxed.
You're going to have to bear with us for a couple more weeks
but we've already put the script in the works
and we will write your character out.
Now, I'm looking at an actor who isn't even blinking.
What are you talking about?
The one thing I don't want is my lead actor unhappy.
Let's just cut through this thing,
no harm, no foul, I'd like to thank you.
John, that's terrible.
Patrick Stewart and I never had another discussion after that.
I was interested in the comment that John made
because I don't recall that meeting very well.
I recall another meeting, which was very different.
We were advised by the studio
that Good Morning America would be coming into town,
they were going to film on the set of Cheers
and they were
going to film on the set of Star Trek.
I said, "No, screw you.
We are working 12,14,16 hours a day
to persuade people that we are living
in the twenty-fourth century and we're out in space.
They basically said, "There's nothing to be done,
you're just an actor."
I said, "Okay, can we lay down some ground rules?"
Taking this stuff very, very seriously for the sake of our fans.
No gags, no jokes, no Klingon jokes, no fooling around.
And they said, "No, no absolutely not.
There's going to be nothing like that."
And so I walk onto our set, the show is going out live,
just in time to hear them say, "And now we're going over
to today's weather forecast,
now here's your weather man... wearing my uniform.
He's wearing the captain's uniform.
I won't repeat what I said, but I walked off the set.
"We're live, we're live, you've been announced
we're coming here." I said, "-- you. I'm out of here."
I had hardly been home more than a few minutes before my phone rang.
( phone ringing )
John Pike wants to see you in his office at two o'clock this afternoon.
I stood in front of his desk and was basically read the riot act.
He said I'd let the studio down, I'd embarrassed the studio,
they were trying to keep it out of the press
and we finished the conversation and I was about to leave and he said,
"By the way, off the record, I totally understand
why you did what you did.
And I said, "Thank you, John."
The first best thing was when I took over
Roddenberry's idea. That was the first best thing that happened.
The second best that happened was when they didn't pick me up
for the third year. When I left the gate at Paramount I was
laughing I said, this is insanity, I have just left the
coo coo house. Just go down to Paramount you'll find a great
bird of the universe only no body knew he was a coo coo bird.
Moore: First and second seasons of Next Generation
are almost unwatchable in almost all honesty.
They're very plot driven and very alien of the week.
The shows are kind of creaky and don't work very well.
But there was some crucial concepts that were done
in the first couple years, some things that would
reverberate through the entire series. Like The Borg, the idea
of Q, the holodeck in my opinion was Gene's greatest invention in
the Next Generation it was very ahead of his time
Making a show is difficult under any circumstances,
especially early on, but the story telling got sharper.
As it went on.
As the show found itself.
It had the advantage of having a great brand behind it before it started.
People were giving it more of a chance to last longer
than a show that had no brand recognition whatsoever.
The fan base kept the show on the air for those first two rocky years.
And that's an amazing salute to the audience
that's out there for this material.
They were going to stick with it, they were going to stick with it
and believe it was going to be better.
The ship had tilted, you know, all the way over on its side
already and Rick was just at that point tearing his hair out.
The first day I walked into someone's office
and they said come into this bathroom.
I used to have a big board that was in my bathroom.
And there on the wall printed out was the name
of every writer who had gotten fired so far in the first two seasons.
How many names?
It was a lot of names on a show that was only around for two seasons.
I have the third season fixed in my head
as being a time when there was a change in style.
Berman: Michael Pillar was a writer who had written on a
number of network television shows and a very rigid producing
writer when it came to the process and he believed that
the process that existed prior to his arrival was a mess.
Shatner: In the context of the way Maury Hurley ran his room.
How was the room that Michael organized?
Ira Behr was sort of his number two and Ira was the guy
in the trenches with us.
Michael had never run a show, Michael wanted me
to deal with the writers. Michael stayed in his room as
often as he could to do re writes. When I finally got a
script of my own to write, I came up with this idea
of this pleasure planet.
Captain's Holiday, the visit to Risa
it's the only planet name I actually remember.
Patrick kept saying the trouble with the show
is there's not enough f-ing and f-ing. Fighting and fornicating.
And I said I have a feeling our audience
might like to see our captain
just getting blown away by meeting somebody new.
The writers were real excited. Well Rick says,
"You've got to go in to see Gene. So I go in and he's very
nice but he says, "I like the idea of pleasure planet and I want it
to be a place where you see women fondling and kissing other women,
and men hugging and holding hands and kissing
and we can imply that they're having sex in the background.
Huh, really? I'm going, "Oh, man, I'm in the freakin' twilight zone."
I go back to Rick, he goes, "Pft, pay no attention to that,
just get the captain laid."
I think Gene knew that there had been this
subtle erosion of his authority and power.
The equation moved from Gene, Rick, Michael to just Rick and
Michael, because Gene's health had started to fail and he was
less and less involved.
They knew there were workarounds
for things they wanted to have done.
And Michael along with Rick found a way to make
the show work better.
Michael refocused the show, he said this is all about our characters
this is a war story, this is a Picard story,
this is a Data story. How is this episode going to affect one of our people
and make it a character-oriented show in that sense?
And that fundamentally shifted the direction of everything.
Michael Pillar who's very adept at creating
conflict between characters that was so organic
that you didn't question it.
- Data. - And what Klingons do to their children.
Data, I am not talking about parenting,
I am talking about the extraordinary consequences
of creating a new life.
Does that not describe becoming a parent sir?
Moore: When I started in third season,
we were still the bastard step child of Star Trek.
All we were still getting was Picard isn't Kirk
and there's no Spock.
And we were the pretenders and we weren't Star Trek
and there's only one real Star Trek and that was the one
with Kirk, Spock and McCoy.
Even though Gene was running it.
How did you feel when you heard that there
was going to be a new Star Trek?
Did that piss you off? Seriously.
I had a twinge. Absolutely, it was a sense of loss.
When I heard Star Trek and my name isn't associated with it.
I had a twinge to saying, "You're now the captain to Patrick."
It wasn't until after The Best of Both Worlds
cliff hanger that you felt the whole thing shift and suddenly
we were Star Trek.
I am Locutus of Borg. Reistance is futile
Your life as it has been is over.
Mister Worf, fire.
But what was genius is that it took Picard
who compared to Kirk was an administrator more than an
adventurer and by cutting him off and turning him into a Borg
it kind of gave his humanity back to him
Making the man more human and vulnerable
and prone to error and mistake,
was a great decision.
When I came in, I sensed that there was a transition going on.
Gene was beginning to phase out
and Rick was ceasing power.
Rick was generous and allowed me into some of his thinking
and some of his long-term planning and to
just talk in a relaxed way about the future of the series which
I'd never really been able to do with Gene
Everybody that worked there could see the
deterioration of Gene is his walking, his talking and his
ability to kind of communicate had changed drastically
When a powerful figure like a king or an emperor
has their faculties erode and therefore their power erodes
that diffusion of power
Eventually I think Rick Berman solidified the power, he replaced Gene.
Gene was clinging to the world he had built trying
to make it the most beautiful thing it could be.
A vision of humanity and I think he became far more obsessed with his
legacy then he was with his history of a storyteller.
The guy who created Star Trek why in trains with the stars.
As his health failed, as his faculties were failing I got sense from a man
that things were simply slipping away from him
We had been sitting watching dailies after lunch
and Michael Pillar pulled every body into his office
and every body came from the set, I knew something was up
but I didn't know what it was and I had a really bad feeling and he announced
that Gene Roddenberry had died that morning.
Shatner: Gene's passing brought an end to an era,
but also gave a new group of talented writers and producers
an opportunity to take the franchise to new worlds
If we had not shifted from plot to character
in the third season the show would've continued but I don't
think it would've broken through the way it did. I think it
would've been that other series that they did of Star Trek and I
get the feeling that Star Trek would of kind of stopped there
would've been a Deep Space Nine there would not have been a
Voyager and so on and certainly not more movies.
If he had not come back and done The Next Generation,
I think there would be people that would say that
Gene Roddenberry was a very lucky man who was a failed
producer who had one show that did well for three years and
that's what they would limit his legacy to
I sort of discounted him in a way.
Everybody did. They all did, most people
get one shot, have one triumph. Gene had one, it was elusive
and so when this one came back again.
Hold tight.
Hold it, don't let it get away from me.
Stewart: I've enormous respect for his
achievements for many of his unique ideas and beliefs.
Berman: I think he really believed in this positive vision
of what man kind was capable of.
And you subscribed to that vision?
I subscribed to that idea all throughout all the
different shows that we did because I believed
that I owed that to Gene.
I think at his best I don't think Gene wanted
the franchise to fossilize into this, you know, there's no way out,
you've just got to recycle everything over and over again
it was too rich a franchise there was too many possibilities
I should have done this a long time ago
You were always welcome
So, 5 card stud, nothing wild and the sky's the limit
Shatner: The sky is the limit, in it's seventh and final season,
five shows were nominated for nine Emmys and the series as a whole,
was the first syndicated television series to be
nominated for outstanding drama series.
To this day The Next Generation is the only syndicated drama
series to be nominated in this category.
Not so wacky doodle after all.
( music playing )