Harlan Ellison Talks To Fandom

Edward Gross at Fandom has put up the first installment of a two-part interview with Harlan Ellison, who wrote the classic Original Series episode 'The City On The Edge Of Forever'. As is usual with Ellison, almost all of the interview deals with the mistreatment he felt he suffered over the episode:

A couple of years ago, Harlan Ellison was preparing to finally tell his side of the "City on the Edge of Forever" story, to set the record straight about his involvement with STAR TREK and his working "relationship" with series creator Gene Roddenberry. While his full story is told in the pages of his book on the making of the script, prior to its release we sat down to discuss the project. Needless to say, Harlan had plenty to offer....

HARLAN ELLISON: I wrote an 18,000 word introduction to the book where throughout I refer to Roddenberry as the Great Pretender, El Supremo, and an outright naked liar, and [say] that after 30 years I was sick and tired of this bullshit of him telling people how expensive this script was and how it couldn`t be shot, when in fact I had letters from him proving that that was not the case. Two weeks after the show aired, I have a letter from Gene Roddenberry that said the show went $6,000 over budget. Six thousand dollars. By 1988 when he was speaking at the Museum of Television in New York, he said that my script was $360,000 over. All of this in photographed evidence is in the introduction.

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