A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Roddenberry had become interested in the relatively new medium of television and was keen to develop a career as a TV writer. This was a new business, with opportunities for the right people – and the ambitious Roddenberry felt he could find a role.
    In the meantime, to generate income, Roddenberry fell back on the family tradition and joined the LAPD at the start of 1949. He became an officer in 1951 and a sergeant in 1953, allthe while optimistically submitting story outlines to various TV shows. After six weeks of perfunctory training, Roddenberry began his police life as a traffic cop.
    In mid-1950 William H. Parker became the LAPD Chief with a mandate to clean up corruption in the force. By 1951 Roddenberry realised his ambition to begin writing professionally by securing a job in Parker’s PR division, writing speeches for the Chief. Roddenberry delivered talks to schoolchildren on road safety, but it was as publicist to Parker that he became invaluable. Later in 1951 he sought permission to accept outside work, intending not to take the usual security job, but to explore whether he could make some headway as a writer for television.
    For Roddenberry, television was the equivalent of the ‘pulps’ of the 1930s: a here-today, gone-tomorrow medium that provided a perfect training ground for would-be writers. He used his office at the LAPD to obtain old scripts from shows like
Dragnet
in order to learn the formal layout and techniques of teleplays, then by 1953 the hopeful TV writer began to send his own scripts to producers, believing his real-life police experience would give his writing authenticity.
    Thus, Roddenberry’s first television success came in selling storylines to cop shows, often based directly on his own experiences or tales he’d heard from other officers. He quickly discovered LA’s TV writer hangouts – the bars, the restaurants – and began to spend time there off duty, making friends and building contacts. This paid off and he wrote episodes for various shows through the mid-1950s, including six instalments of
Mr. District Attorney
and five of
Highway Patrol
.
    In April 1956 he sold a script to
The West Point Story
, a TV show about US Army cadets, produced with the cooperation of the military. Roddenberry had accosted E. Jack Neuman, the show’s producer, on a cross-country flight. Over the next year he would write eight more episodes, and one other in collaboration with Neuman himself. Stories came easily to the
West Point
staff, drawn as they were from the actual files of the real-life New York US Military Academy. Actors who appeared onthe show and later became big names included Clint Eastwood, Barbara Eden (
I Dream of Jeannie
), Larry Hagman (
Dallas
), and Leonard Nimoy. Over two seasons on air,
West Point
clocked up forty episodes, and Roddenberry had written, co-written or rewritten a quarter of them. It was a baptism by fire and one he was keen to learn from.
    In 1956 Roddenberry quit the LAPD to become a full-time TV writer, continuing to draw on his police experience for his first commissions. One script Roddenberry rewrote for
West Point
was by Sam Rolfe (rewriting often involved taking a writer’s original work and making it more suitable for the pro -duction realities of any given show: it’s something Roddenberry would do a lot during the early days of
Star Trek
). Rolfe would soon go on to create
Have Gun, Will Travel
, and Roddenberry would quickly move on to that show, writing twenty-four of the half-hour Western adventure episodes. The light-hearted show ran from 1957 to 1963 and starred Richard Boone as ‘gentleman gunslinger’ Paladin, a champion-for-hire who liked to right wrongs without violence, but was an excellent shot when required. Paladin had been an Army officer and graduate of West Point and used a knight chess piece as his calling card. Among the episodic guest cast were DeForest Kelley (a veteran of many film and TV Westerns), Whit Bissell and William Schallert (all seen in later
Star Trek
episodes). Another significant writer who graduated from this series to run his own show was Bruce Geller (
Mission: Impossible
,
Star Trek
’s stablemate at Desilu Studios).
    Having won a Writers Guild Award for an episode of
Have Gun, Will Travel
in 1957, the early 1960s saw Roddenberry develop a career as a jobbing TV writer, moving from show to show, building experience and contacts in the business. He was reliable, but he’d often write no more than