Encyclopedia
Eugene Wesley Roddenberry was an American scriptwriter and producer. He is best known as the creator of the
science fiction television series
Star Trek, and was one of the first people to be
buried in space.
Personal life
Born in
El Paso, Texas to Eugene Edward Roddenberry and Caroline Glen, Roddenberry spent his boyhood in
Los Angeles, California, where his family had moved so his father could pursue a career with the
Los Angeles Police Department . Following in his father's footsteps after high school, Roddenberry took classes in police studies at Los Angeles City College, and headed that school's Police Club.
In that role, he was a liason with the
FBI, thanking them for sending speakers and securing copies of the FBI Code and publications for club use, and attempted to take fingerprint records of the college community for the FBI's Civil Identification Division.
He later transferred his academic interest to aeronautical engineering and qualified for a pilot's license. Roddenberry joined the
U.S. Army Air Corps in 1941 and became an aviator. He flew many combat
B-17 missions in the
Pacific Theatre and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the
Air Medal.
After leaving the service, he was a commercial pilot for
Pan American World Airways . He received a Civil Aeronautics commendation for his efforts following a crash in the Syrian desert, while on a flight to
Calcutta.
Roddenberry left Pan Am to pursue writing for television in Los Angeles. He fell back on his early training as a policeman and joined the LAPD. He served the LAPD from 1949 – 1956.
Roddenberry was married twice. He had two children by his first wife, Eileen Rexroat — Dawn, and the late Darleen. His second marriage was to
Majel Barrett, who played Nurse Christine Chapel in the original
Star Trek series, Lwaxana Troi, and the voice of the computer in all of the
Star Trek series and several of the feature films. They were married in Japan in a traditional
Buddhist-
Shinto ceremony on August 6, 1969. He had one child, Rod Roddenberry, with Barrett.
Although raised as a Southern Baptist, Roddenberry did not embrace his parents' faith and instead became a secular humanist. After his death, a lipstick-sized capsule of his ashes was sent into space to orbit the earth for six years .
Television career
Before
Star Trek, Roddenberry wrote scripts for many of the popular television series of the 1950s, such as
Have Gun, Will Travel was a popular American Western [i] television series [i] ...
. He produced
The Lieutenant, a 1963-1964 ABC series about the
United States Marines. He was also trying to get other science fiction series off the ground, mostly without success.
Roddenberry developed his idea for
Star Trek in 1964 after looking for material to rival Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The series was finally picked up by
Desilu Studios by Gene selling the idea as a "Wagon Train to the Stars". The original $500,000 pilot received minor support from NBC, but the network commissioned an unprecedented second pilot. The series premiered on September 8, 1966 and ran for three seasons. Although it was cancelled due to low ratings, the series gained wide popularity in
syndication. In the third and final season of
Star Trek Roddenberry--who had offered to demote himself to the position of line producer in a final attempt to ensure the show's success if the program was given his desired timeslot--lessened his workload when these demands were not met and accepted a staff producer position with
MGM.
His first project with the studio,
Pretty Maids All In A Row, was a sexploitation film adapted from the Francis Pollini novel by Roddenberry and directed by
Roger Vadim. With a cast including established stars alongside
Star Trek regulars and beautiful unknowns , the film was expected to be one of the biggest blockbusters of 1971. Even with the support of a
Playboy pictorial featuring Burrell, the film only managed to break even at the box office. Roddenberry's relationship with MGM was all but terminated because of this, although he did continue to pursue ideas into 1972.
Following the cancellation of
Star Trek and the relative failure of his first feature film, Roddenberry pitched four sci-fi TV series concepts that all had pilot movies produced but were not picked up;
The Questor Tapes,
Genesis II was a 1973 TV movie [i] created and produced by Gene Roddenberry [i] and starring Alex Cord [i] ...
,
Planet Earth, and
Strange New World was a TV pilot [i] based on concepts envisioned by Gene Roddenberry [i]...
. He also co-wrote and was executive producer on the made for TV movie,
Spectre .
Unable to find work in the television and film industry and fearful that he would be unable to support his family, Roddenberry heeded the advice of good friend
Arthur C. Clarke and began to find steady employment on the college lecture circuit, where contemporaries in a similar predicament had also found success. He amused the fandom attendees with anecdotes from the
Star Trek set, spoke of his visions of the future and showed the
Star Trek Blooper Reel, a collection of outtakes from the original series. He also exhibited a black and white print of unaired first series pilot
The Cage. The screenings of the Blooper Reel drew criticism and ire from
Leonard Nimoy , who felt that Roddenberry was exploiting his mistakes for money and eventually sued the writer-producer and Paramount for the Blooper Reel screenings and uncompensated use of his image in a
Heineken promotional campaign. The matter would be resolved shortly before production of
.
Beginning in 1975, go-ahead was given by Paramount for Roddenberry to develop a sequel "Star Trek" television series based around as many of the original cast as could be recruited. This series was to be the anchor show of a new network , but plans by Paramount for this network were scrapped and plans were changed to do a Star Trek feature film.
The resulting
received a lukewarm critical response, but performed well at the box office. As a result, several feature films and a new television series,
, were created in the 1980s. Roddenberry was deeply involved with creating and producing
Star Trek: The Next Generation, although he ultimately only had full control over the show's first season. The WGA strike of 1988 prevented him from taking an active role in production of the second season, forcing him to hand control of the series to producer Maurice Hurley. While Roddenberry was free to resume work on the third season of the show, his health was in serious decline by this point, and over the course of the season he gradually ceded control to
Rick Berman and
Michael Piller.
Star Trek also spawned the television series
,
and
.
Roddenberry only produced the first Star Trek film,
. Screenwriter Harold Livingston found his work constantly rewritten by Roddenberry and quit three times--only to be rehired by a fearful Paramount on each occasion. Actors regularly complained of the garish period costumes, cut so tight in the crotch that male performers often found it uncomfortable to sit. Visual effects produced by industry titans John Dykstra and Douglas Trumbull took nearly a year to film, while director
Robert Wise was clearly out of his element.
When it came time to produce the obligatory sequel, Roddenberry was ousted and replaced by Harve Bennett. He continued as executive consultant on the next four films -
,
,
and
. In this position Rodenberry was allowed to view and comment upon all scripts and dailies emanating from the production, although the creative team was free to disregard Roddenberry's advice as Bennett almost always elected to do.
The last film based on the original
Star Trek series,
was dedicated to Roddenberry's memory; he reportedly viewed a version of the film a few days before his death, aged 70.
In addition to his film and TV work, Roddenberry also wrote the novelization for
Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was published in 1979 and was the first of hundreds of
Star Trek based novels to be published by
Pocket Books. It has been claimed by some that Alan Dean Foster was the ghostwriter of the book, but this has been debunked by Foster on his personal website and is a classic instance of the broken telephone game, as Foster
did ghostwrite the novelization of
Star Wars is a science fantasy [i] [i] and fictional galaxy [i] cr ...
and contribute to the original treatment of the
Star Trek film. Roddenberry talked of writing a second
Trek novel based upon his original rejected 1975 script for the film but died before he was able to do so.
Controversy
Writers on
Star Trek have charged that ideas they developed were later passed off by Roddenberry as his own, or that he lied about their contributions to the show at
Star Trek conventions. Roddenberry was confronted by these writers, and apologized to them, but according to his critics, he continued to repeat the false claims.
In her autobiography, actress
Nichelle Nichols, who played
Uhura in the first
Star Trek series, reported having had a love affair with Roddenberry. She felt that his strong and controversial inclination to get her on the show had a lot to do with their relationship.
Roddenberry's life and work has been chronicled in several works.
Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry, authored by friend David Alexander, is a flattering portrayal of Roddenberry's life that was received favorably by most readers, obscuring many of the troubles Roddenberry encountered in his later years. Far more controversial was
Inside Trek: My Secret Life with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry by
Susan Sackett, his close associate for 17 years. While she displays unwavering affection, respect, and admiration for her employer and lover, Sackett's account is hardly an hagiographic account. Recounted in brutal detail are his elongated dry spells throughout the 1970s, addiction to
cocaine, impotence, inability to finish creative projects, and mental and physical decline from roughly 1989 on. The book received a barrage of negative reactions from certain
Star Trek fans and solicited the threat of a defamation lawsuit from Roddenberry's widow.
Despite his reduced management of
Star Trek near the end of his life, Roddenberry was still respected enough that
Paramount Pictures, owners of the various
Star Trek series, agreed to his request that the
not be considered canon by the studio. According to the reference work
The Star Trek Chronology, Roddenberry reportedly considered elements of the fifth and sixth
Trek films to be apocryphal, though there is no indication that he wanted them removed from
Trek canon.
Legacy
After his death in 1991 in
Santa Monica, California, Roddenberry's estate allowed the creation of two long-running television series based upon some of his previously unfilmed story ideas and concepts.
and
Andromeda were produced under the guidance of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. A third Roddenberry storyline was adapted in 1995 as the short-lived comic book
Gene Roddenberry's Lost Universe.
There is an asteroid called 4659 Roddenberry and a
crater on
Mars that were named in his honor.
On October 4, 2002, the El Paso Independent School District Planetarium was renamed The Gene Roddenberry Planetarium. Eugene W. Roddenberry Jr. cut the ribbon at the dedication ceremony.
Roddenberry was born at 1907 E. Yandell Street in El Paso and lived there for nearly two years. The site is now a flower shop within a
strip mall, but there is a wooden plaque marking the historical site.
Notes
References
- Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry, by David Alexander
- Gene Roddenberry: The Last Conversation, by Yvonne Fern
- Inside Trek: My Secret Life with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry, by Susan Sackett
- Great Birds of the Galaxy: Gene Roddenberry and the Creators of Star Trek, by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman
- The Wit and Wisdom of Gene Roddenberry, by Majel Barrett
- The Man Who Created Star Trek: Gene Roddenberry, by James Van Hise
- Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, by Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman
- Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind Star Trek, by Joel Engel
External links
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- by Robert Bowman, Christian Research Journal, Fall 1991, pp. 20 ff.
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- on Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes.
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