These are the Voyages — TOS: Season One by Marc Cushman gives an extraordinary amount of detail about Star Trek, starting with a biography of Gene Roddenberry and moving though the production of “Operation: Annihilate”, the last Season 1 episode filmed. I want to recommend it, but with a caveat. The first few chapters are so dense and detailed, I found them hard to read. I had to read one chapter, then set the book aside for a while. After finishing five chapters, I set it aside, not sure if I would pick it up again.
Don’t get me wrong — I enjoyed reading about how Star Trek was conceived and evolved. What dragged me down were things like Lucille’s biography and how Desilu was formed, along with long bios of most of the production staff for the second pilot Where No Man Has Gone Before.
But one day I found myself out of reading material and went back to These are the Voyages. Chapter 6 was about the making of the first pilot, which I found very interesting. Chapter 7 had more bios of staff, but also discussed the selection of the cast (aside from William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, already cast). From there on, almost every chapter dealt with the production of one episode, and I found myself reading two or three chapters at a sitting, instead of just one.
There were several things I found interesting in this book. One was script development, how the scripts were assigned, then written and rewritten, taking into account not only the characters in the series but also how much the episode would cost to produce. Also, production was almost always behind schedule and over budget, and the air order of the episodes was different from production order due to the amount of special effects needed in certain episodes.
Another point of interest for me was the development of a specific character, namely Yeoman Rand. According to the book, Rand was supposed to have a sexual tension with Kirk. Me, I never got that. The only thing bordering on that that I remember was in the episode “Miri”, when Rand confessed that she had wanted the captain to look at her legs while on the bridge. Of course, there was also her attempted rape by him in “The Enemy Within”, but that could have been just random. Frankly, I always found her very distant and was glad when the character was deleted from the series. (Or maybe it was just the hair.)
There were other things I found intriguing, but in the interest of brevity, I want to jump to a discussion on Harlan Ellison and “The City on the Edge of Forever”. Most Star Trek fans know that he was very upset about the rewrite of his script to the point that he wanted to use a pseudonym in the credits. As implied in an earlier paragraph, most writers were heavily rewritten, sometimes by Roddenberry, sometimes by Gene Coon (producer of the show starting mid-first season), and sometimes by a story editor on staff. Sometimes all of the above.
Cushman included a summary of Ellison’s original script, which was excellent and quite different from the script that aired. It was exciting and contained a lot more action than the aired episode. But it also seemed to me that there was enough in there to make a movie, not just a tv show. Many of the changes were for economy, others for Roddenberry’s vision. For instance, he would never have allowed a drug dealer on board the Enterprise. Still, Ellison unfortunately never got over his anger, despite the success of the aired episode. (As of this writing, I have discovered a book that tells the story of Ellison’s original script. It is entitled Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever: The Original Teleplay and is available on Amazon.)
In conclusion, I would suggest that if you like Star Trek and want to learn more about the little tidbits of how it got on the air, pick up These are the Voyages — TOS: Season One by Marc Cushman. Just realize that you may have to struggle through the first few chapters, and you’ll be fine.