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FACT TREK's Back…& That's A Fact

Maurice

Maurice

Snagglepussed
Admiral
We're back!

Okay, albeit in a fairly limited capacity due to complicated real-life concerns.

For those who might not know what Fact Trek is, it's a project that began in 2020 as a spin-off from Michael Kmet's American Press Institute-twice-recommended Star Trek Fact Check Blog and moved from just fact-checking to doing primary source research (where possible) on the making of the original Star Trek up through the movies starring that cast and looking at them in context within the media landscape in which they were born. We posted a bunch of items to the board during the pandemic (like these).

Our primary channel shifted to Bluesky a while back and we've let X go fallow as it's an ever-stinkier cesspool. Before our board hiatus we took a break from writing articles to do a ton of research and some extensive interviews with some notable Trek figures for future pieces. Notable amongst these were:
  • Completing over eight hours of video interview with former Desilu casting director and raconteur Joseph F. "Joe" D'Agosta, discussing his entire career.
  • Multiple interviews with Richard Winn Taylor about his career at Robert Abel & Associates (RA&A and ASTRA) discussing the ST—TMP VFX debacle, as well as his post-Abel work on Looker, Tron, and an abandoned Terrence Malick film. (He invited me to a Robert Abel memorial event in Beverly Hills last fall, so I got to hang with him and other VFX industry vets, and I ran into my buddy Bill George. Pix below.)
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  • Helped Andreea "Ande" Kindryd (née Richardson)—Gene Coon's secretary at Desilu and Universal—in a small way with her memoir titled From Slavery to Star Trek (I located a photo of her with MLK that's in the book). Here's a pic of me as her dinner date last August.
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  • Helped Star Trek Lost Scenes co-author David Tilotta (@alchemist) get photos and video of the hologram made using the long-lost and recently resurfaced small Enterprise model, and putting his findings on our blog.
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  • We also located exactly where the 1968 Save Star Trek march of CalTech students was held at the former KNBC Studios in "Beautiful Downtown Burbank". This is us across the street from the location, which looks very different today.
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Hell, we even got photos of Gene L. Coon as a young man!

Got some fun stuff to share here and hope it's of interest, starting with the complicated history of "The Naked Time".
 
Good to see you back here!

Is Part One of Black's "From the First Day to the Last" extant anywhere? I've only seen the second part.
 
“The Naked Time”—Cliffhangers & Time Warps

“The Naked Time,” is the classic Star Trek episode memorable for characters going berserk and revealing their “naked” psyches. The episode ends with a “laws of physics”-defying bang as the starship restarts engines and is hurled into a time warp, ending—as Spock observes—in the recent past.
SPOCK
(bland)
We have regressed in time seventy-one hours ... It is now three days ago, Captain. We have three days to live over again.
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But a redo didn’t just happen on the screen. It happened in the pre-production and production of the episode.

What's been documented here and there—if not necessarily accurately—is that there were trials and tribulations (no tribbles) on its trek from script to screen, notably screenwriter Black being rewritten by Roddenberry, and that the story was for a time intended to be part one of a two-parter. So what happened?

We risked an implosion and time-warped back 57 years to try to find out why and how in…

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To set the record straight right out the gate, "The Naked Time" wasn’t conceived with a cliffhanger. Neither John D.F. Black’s story outline nor his June 14th dated “Preliminary Draft” leave any loose ends at the end.

This changed with what the script reports identify as the yellow-cover “First Draft” dated Thursday, June 23rd, 1966. Many particulars changed, notably the ending, wherein the malady affecting the crew remains uncured as the Enterprise is hurled from the planet and into a time warp and remains in said warp at the fadeout. And something else new has been added: “PART I” appears on the title page and “END OF PART ONE” on the final page.

The Roddenberry-rewritten June 28th, 1966 Final Draft script ends similarly, but not identically. Bones finds a cure but the ship is caught in a time warp and adds the wrinkle that the ship is heading towards Earth at the fadeout. But when will it be when it stops in Part Two?

That was the ending that was filmed. But, as we all know, it's not the ending that aired…because A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Airdate.

One week after the First Cut was screened—and a month after principal photography wrapped—a revised ending came out of mimeo. These pages were filmed at the end of shooting "Dagger of the Mind" and changed the denouement to what aired: a conclusive ending sans any whiff of a follow-up, and the concluding "END OF PART ONE" is absent.

That’s the Readers Digest Condensed Books version of our article The Naked Cliffhanger (here if you want all the details), published April 26, 2023. We planned to print the follow-up a month or so later, but A Funny Thing Happened On the Way To the Blog…

We naïvely thought we had just a few items to tidy up and a bit more research to conclude to clarify some points, but that research became a rabbit hole. Hydra-like, two new questions spawned for each one we addressed. Where did the idea of the cliffhanger come from? What was Part Two supposed to be? Who was supposed to write it? Was it ever actually what became "Tomorrow Is Yesterday"? Was there more to rewriting Black than Roddenberry being Roddenberry? What impact did all this have on the scrapped cliffhanger and the nominal Part 2? What was Black's actual job at the show, and how well did he do it? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum ad nauseam.

As a result, the publication date time warped 20+ months into the future.

More on that later.
 
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OK, thanks. I wonder why only Part Two is floating around. The UCLA collection has only a 34-page undated script.

Aside from what is here, could you provide a brief description of what happens in Part One?

From what I've read of Part Two, I tend to agree with Black that he should have received some credit along with Roddenberry for the televised "Menagerie".

Thanks again!
 
AFAIK there was only a single draft of both parts, which Black turned in pretty much on his way out the door when his contract ended.

The main difference was it was Pike who indicated he wanted to go back to Talos IV, not a decision by Spock, leading Kirk to fight the shore commander who'd designated the planet off-limits. Also, the video they watched was a computer-generated simulation of the events based on the ship's logs. I haven't read it in ages, and only once, so I'm hazy about the particulars.

Black getting that script assignment in the first place and the fallout of that is explored in Part II of the above: The Naked Time Warp, which I'll discuss next.
 
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Doing the Time Warp Again

NOTE: We'll use "TNT" in place of "the Naked Time" below.

One of the hardest parts of writing these histories can be what to leave out, especially when the stories get as complicated as this one. Our Part II — The Naked Time Warp — went through at least three different versions because there was so much information and so many potential tangents that it became necessary to boil it down to the question of "what story are we telling, and what's germane and superfluous to it?"

To explain why the episode happened as it did, we had to focus on the episode's writing and how the show's scripting worked. Central to that was the relationship between "TNT" scribe John D.F. Black and The Great Bird of the Galaxy's Gene Roddenberry. "Black v. Bird," as we call it, ended up complicating the narrative even as it clarified other parts.

Here's the high level version of…

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Black was early onto Star Trek following its series pickup in early 1966, having attended the first of a dozen or so screenings of the second pilot and quickly pitching the story for what would become "TNT." Just before that, he had been nominated for a WGA (Writers Guild of America) award for Episodic Drama for his script “With a Hammer in His Hand, Lord, Lord!” for the NBC series Mr. Novak. (1963–1965). Weeks later he won that award at the same ceremony where Harlan Ellison took home a trophy of his own in the Anthology category for his script "Demon With A Glass Hand" for The Outer Limits. As Black recounted much later:

Harlan and I were invited, with our guests, to his [Roddenberry's] house for a drink, to celebrate, to schmooze. And, I realized a few days later, to be scoped out.
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Ellison and Black's respective story pitches to Star Trek had been successful, leading to formal story assignments for both, but Bird also offered Black a job in the Star Trek office as Associate Producer and Story Editor on 13 of the 16 episodes of the show NBC had ordered, excluding his existing script assignment and the preexisting pilots.

Black accepted, with a caveat:

But, there was one condition — that was agreed on — which was put forth to Desilu and directly to Gene. The writers who were being hired were, in the greater part, giants or near-giants in science fiction and/or television writing. My conviction was that the original writer must be given every chance to take his or her concept through to the final shooting script. My condition was that I would not rewrite a piece of material — nor would anyone else — unless the original writer had been given every possible opportunity to bring the material into satisfactory form.
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Bird's choice was an odd one. Black had a single experience writing sci-fi, and was a self-described non-expert. He'd been a freelance writer and didn't have experience on a show's staff, let alone with the sort of "rewrite man" duties a story editor was expected to perform and his stated condition ran contrary to it. Furthermore, no one knew how speedy a writer Black was.

According to the 1996 book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, written by former Desilu V.P. Herb Solow and Star Trek 's other associate producer, Bob Justman, not fast at all:

HERB: Bob often waited impatiently for script pages from John D. F. Black, who, with his secretary, the estimable and highly likable Mary Stilwell, worked behind closed doors. DO NOT DISTURB! When they emerged hours later, Justman complained about the paltry number of script pages that were forthcoming. Like Oliver Twist, he wanted more.
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BOB: With John busy writing “The Naked Time,” his own first original script for the series, his Story Consultant responsibilities suffered accordingly and his rewriting output became less than prodigious.
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Indeed, Black had been on staff for almost two months before turning in any script draft of "TNT." Right out of the gate, the production had trouble getting scripts into acceptable form before production, and the first script Black shared with the Star Trek office was a "Preliminary Draft" dated only a hair over two weeks before what became the episode's start date. It was another nine days before his rewrite would be turned in on a Thursday and go to mimeo for distribution to department heads; seven days before the segment was to start shooting.

Black returned to work the following Monday morning, expecting to find notes from his colleagues. What he found was that Roddenberry had entirely rewritten his script over the weekend. That was—with a handful of page revisions—what went before the cameras that Thursday. This Final Draft came out of mimeo only two days before shooting started. Considering it took nine days for Black's Preliminary Draft to become a yellow cover, it’s doubtful he could have moved fast enough to meet the shooting schedule, and, with no other scripts ready to go, the production would have had to shut down for days.

Black was incensed at having been Roddenberry-ed. As Justman related decades later:

BOB: I knew we couldn’t afford to lose him. He was a talented man, and we couldn’t survive with only Roddenberry to do all the rewrites. But after Gene’s heavy-handed dealing with John Black’s script, the party was over and it was time to call it a day. John never again had the same positive disposition toward Star Trek. He came to the office every day, closed his door, and went to work. The door stayed closed most of the time. He kept precise hours, never staying late, never leaving early.
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When Black's contract expired, he left Star Trek's orbit, and it appears no attempt was made by Desilu to keep him on.

This fits what's become the bog-standard narrative of Roddenberry being an inveterate rewriter who trampled other writers. But what our research revealed was that it wasn't always as simple as it seemed.

The show was struggling to get scripts, and the sci-fi writers who'd been given assignments turned out to be, in Justman's words, "marvelous storytellers and lousy dramatists." Black's story editor duties required him to work with the freelance writers to whip their scripts into shape and, failing that, rewrite them himself, but it ended up being the Bird who did a lot of that rewriting.

Conspicuous in its absence is why Roddenberry did so much of what was nominally Black's job. Justman indicated that Black’s rewrite duties had suffered while writing "TNT". Black was reluctant to do rewrites unless absolutely necessary. Perhaps what qualified as “necessary” was what he and Roddenberry couldn’t agree on.

There's a lot more to this story, and it's all in the full The Naked Time Warp article (here), but much too much to put here.
 
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