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mhm. Hello, I'm Mike Cannon, and this is conversation. Gene Roddenberry was born in El Paso, Texas, studied engineering at UCLA during the U. S Army Air Corps in World War Two and flew 89 reconnaissance and combat missions out of Guadalcanal in the Pacific Theater, then became an airline pilot with Pan American Airways flying international routes, then became a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, rose through the ranks to become a narcotics expert and on the side, starting started to write television scripts and became quite adept at it and soon left to become a full time writer and creator of television programs.

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And one day or night, we'll find out it dawned on him that a wonderful concept was Star Trek. Star Trek was the first serious and successful science fiction television series. There were about 80 episodes, beginning in 1966 and today in the United States and all over the world, the reruns of Star Trek play to millions of people, it has become a cultural classic.

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A conversation with Gene Roddenberry When I return in a moment. Mhm conversation from the University of Florida, a discussion of social political scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Michael V. Gannon, professor of history and ethics and associate dean of the College of liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

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Yeah, Mhm Gene. Welcome to conversation. Thank you. Delighted to be here. Nice to have you here in your own medium television. And nice to have an opportunity to ask how one of the most celebrated television series of all times came to be. Now, I think you have said that some of your earlier life experiences left you somewhat afraid, even scared.

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And was there something about the adventure of your early career and you're near misses And one crash in the Syrian desert with pan am and so on. That gave you an image of dangers out of this, uh, planetary space and into space itself. Well, actually, most of those things happen when I was young, and when you're young, you're you're convinced you're immortal.

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If I were to do those things today, I wouldn't be able to talk. I'd be so scared. Well, what was it? If I might ask, that was the germ of Star Trek you mentioned in the introduction that I had been a narc, and it's kind of funny because when we were just just getting Star Trek on the air and it was getting popular, someone wrote and asked, How do you folks think of all those things?

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Are you on LSD? And we answered in a letter. Uh, well, we tried, but we couldn't keep it lit. And that's about my knowledge of narcotics. The thing that caused me to do it is, I suppose I was always a little bit of an artist. And, of course, artists want to comment.

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That's of course, what art is all about. And television was so censored when I began, you could really not talk about anything. And I remembered that Jonathan Swift, when he wanted to talk about the politics of his day and war and peace and Insane kings and queens and so on.

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I wrote Gulliver's Travels, and it occurred to me Wow, you've always wanted to do science fiction. And maybe if you had things happy now to polka dotted people out on far off planets, you can talk about sex, religion, war and all these things you want to talk about, and indeed, it happened that way.

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It went over the network's head, but the the kids that listen to it knew exactly what we were talking about. And and that was really the inception of Star Trek. It was a kind of scientific morality play or science fiction morality. Um, and it did combine elements of science.

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Where did you come by your acquaintanceship with interplanetary space travel and so on? I think it came mainly out of an affection for the audience, which the networks really do not have. And this has always bothered me. I thought if I was going to do science fiction, I would try to make the science as accurate as was possible within the limits of mass media television.

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And, uh which is, of course, what science fiction does, as opposed to science fantasy and so on. And I was afraid when I did the show that serious scientists are around the country. If the show stayed on, any time would say to me, Oh my God, the terrible things you people did and you didn't explain this completely.

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Are that properly? What I discovered, Although I'm liberal arts myself, what I discovered was scientists, particularly the good ones are a marvelous group. They are smart in other things besides science. And they immediately understood the limitations of mass media. And, uh, this never happened. Uh, wherever I go, Smithsonian Institution and so on.

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They understand the limits. And they're saying, Well, nice work trying to keep it there. And in the first year, when the Nielsen ratings were not quite as high as you would hope that they would be. And there was danger that NBC would pull Star Trek off the air.

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Scientists from all over the United States wrote letters to the network demanding that it be continued. We were fortunate was the first program that had come along that at least made an effort to do things like that. And, uh, well, what a joy that was. Now you said you were playing to the kids.

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I wonder. I mean, young people. Yes, young young minds, young man. All right, there you are. Young minds full of imagination, uh, eager for the kinds of adventures that you presented them. People of all ages, I'm sure. But I can tell you this, Gene, I was here on the campus of the university when star Trek was playing, and this campus fairly well closed down at the hour when the program was shown, the number of cars decreased on the streets, restaurants were deserted, everybody was home in the dorms, and the fraternities were already house.

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Whatever watching Star Trek, it was a phenomenon. To this day, I can't believe it. I had been invited out to Flagler, Arizona, to the big Astronomical unit high up there, and, uh, I was up there and they there was a guy using the huge telescope 200 inch or whatever it is.

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If someone came in and waved to him and he went off and my guy says, Do you know what just happened there? And I said No, he said he just signaled him. Star Trek is on. My God, it's a, uh, frightening and lovely. I think what it says is not that Star Trek was very, very good, but that people are hungry for drama that talks about people in an optimistic way for a drama that says, Uh, it's not all over.

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The human adventure may just be beginning drama that says, Hey, we are something. We are really something and I think this accounts for that, uh, that excitement for young minds. Whatever their age. You you really must love this human creature. Now, there were some 80 episodes from 1966 through about 1969.

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Exactly. Why did it go off the air in 69? If there is this continued interest in Star Trek? Yes. Television runs by numbers. We were never a success. Our first. I remember the night after the day after our first show came out, the first critical report we read was the worst thing that has ever happened on television was perpetrated last night on the American people.

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And this was typical of most of our reviews. Uh, we we were chatting earlier. I mentioned to you that the night Star Trek went on the air, my own father, uh, excused himself and went down, walked up and down the street and apologized for all the neighbors.

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I love it. They no one was ready for a man had not yet landed on the moon. In those days, spaceflight was considered, uh, perhaps even a dangerous eccentricity. And this was still in your father's estimation, I suppose. Another juvenile Buck Rogers film and he was hoping for greater things.

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Yes. He was hoping his son would do something really American, like a good Western. No. Some of the characters who was the first captain of the starship was a Jeffrey Hunter or William shot. It was Jeffrey Hunter. And that was in the, uh, in the first pilot episode, which NBC rejected on the basis of being too cerebral for the clouds and the television.

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Uh, too cerebral, I suppose, for their executives. But we're putting this out this year in a, uh, we can't put it on the air and has never been on the air in that form. We're gonna put it out in a video, and that would be kind of fun.

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What was the name of the pilot was the cage That was the very first. And then what was the other one? I heard where no man has gone where no man has gone before. Yes. Why did Jeffrey Hunter not continue as the captain? His wife of the time felt that science fiction was really beneath the legitimate actors, Uh, level I had tried.

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And when he left, I tried to get some other actors among them Lloyd Bridges, who was very popular in those days and and and still is lovely, man. But he said to me, Jean, we've worked together. I like you and all of that, But I've seen science fiction.

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I want no part of it. Fortunately, Bill Shatner was coming free from a obligation he had in New York, and Bill had done quite a bit of reading and read science fiction, and he understood where we were trying to go. And Leonard Nimoy. He had been in a number of films that one could describe as science fiction and kind before Star Trek.

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But how did you happen to recruit him for the role he played? Many things in this business has in Bures and any others just fortune. I was doing a show called The Lieutenant, which was a story of the peace time. Marine Corps, which really wasn't a military thing, was growing up, and I happened to pick that as a place to grow up your first tough boss, your first bad luck and a job and so on.

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And Leonard Nimoy was playing of all things, a Hollywood producer, and he had a gum chewing, wisecracking Eve Eve Arden type secretary. And, uh, I kept his high Slavic chief bones in mind if I ever did this thing I've been dreaming about with pointed ears. And it turned out that recruiting Mr Spark was just a phone call.

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Would you step over here? He had his action, was not going that well. He was. And the gum chewing secretary. I later married. So on one show, I achieved all of that. You love your son? Yes. In both ways. You decided even before you hired Mr Speaker that the person who played that role would wear pointed ears and arched eyebrows.

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Then you already had that had an image in mind because I knew I wanted this character to look like Satan. Uh, in fact, is the first the first test we took. He had even a reddish skin. And I had written he came from Mars. Unfortunately, I thought about it a bit, and I said, Wait a minute.

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We're liable to be up there before too long. And if I have any luck at all and reruns, they'll prove I'm wrong. So we invented Vulcan. We changed him to yellows, but we kept the Satan as I have a I had a theory. I like the idea of him being logical and good, and yet that evil image and without emotion without, well, I screwed up so many times from emotional.

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He did break down in one or a number of episodes and show a little emotion was half human and, like the great early days movie the pale face, the half Indian, half white. Those are great characters. The clash of How Did You Do the ears with great difficulty.

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We tested him for a while. Camera crews can be very cruel. They tested him and we see the film the next day and they started calling the Elf the Jackrabbit and he came into my office one day and he's a gene. I'm a serious actor, and I really don't want to pursue this any further.

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We had a terrible argument, and after a long time, I finally said to him, Leonard, I make you a promise. If by the 20th episode you don't like the ears, I will personally write you a show in which you get an ear job. He fell down on the floor, laughing.

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That's a great a great out. There's a story that at one time you were thinking of letting him go, and rather early on in the series, entitled to that Two things one. Before I actually hired him, I was thinking, Is that really science fiction? Enough. And I talked to the dwarf Michael Dunn with a marvelous actor.

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Little man played in super Fools and many things, and I went over to see his producer and he says, You're right He said, This is a marvelous actor and he is different But he said, Think about it. You're on television mass audience. Do you think the audience will really relate to a man this size?

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And I don't know if Dwarf as he was a miniature but a beautiful man? We, uh, had many talks on it, and I finally decided to swept back to Leonard Nimoy because I decided that television wasn't ready for it. I believe I was right. The only other time was when we started the movies.

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Star Trek was over, and seven years after that we started to do a Star Trek movie, and Leonard said, I don't want to do the Star Trek movie, and he really didn't And so I began. I looked for someone else, but then he changed his mind and special effects.

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Your series became known worldwide for its truly remarkable and credible special effects. I assume that this was before Stanley Kubrick's 2001. So yes, so you pioneered, uh, space effects. Cooper came along and had his own, and it's been brought to a new high. And then Star Wars, where it really?

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Spielberg and Lucas Lucas. As I sat there, just my mouth drops open at Lucas. Our stuff, the only thing we really pioneered was getting them out in a hurry. Uh, no one thought I had offered Star Trek to MGM. They said There's no way you can get these special effects done on a weekly basis.

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So we we pioneered a lot of some simple things are special effects, actually are not that good? Our star backgrounds was a big black cardboard thing in which we punch nail holes in and then did three runs at different speeds. So we we got the basic depth, and they're much better today.

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But what I think the continued, uh, reruns of Star Trek means that special effects are not that important if you've got stories going on and as you started off by saying Human adventure happening there, uh, I think most science fiction today and I won't talk about Star Wars because I think Star Wars is pure genius.

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Most science fiction today would be much better off if they take a couple of million out of special effects. Put it in actors and stories and direction and that sort of thing. Yes, you used a model of the Starship Enterprise. How large was that model we had to?

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We had a 3 ft model for ZIP buyers, and we had 11 ft one. Ah, the an exciting thing to me. A staggering thing to me is the fact that our 11 ft model sits in the Smithsonian Museum Air and Space Museum on the same floor with the Wright Brothers airplane and those things.

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The head of the museum. When he called me back about this, he said, I want you to understand that this is not going to be a tribute to your genius. I said, Well, you'll never get my mother to believe that, he says. He says What? This is a tribute to him we've selected your show is, is the fact that the poet, the artist always goes first and science follows.

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And that's what indeed is why it's hanging there, and that's properly, why it's hanging there. Jean has the Truckee generation that you created been responsible. Do you think for the strong support that the space program of NASA has received? Those things are so bound up with my artists, Eagle and so on.

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It's difficult for me to comment, although I can say and I've been thrilled by the fact that Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and Bob Heinlein and people like that Ray Bradbury have said yes, it's very important. Indeed, a number of astronauts and others have said, Uh, yeah, that's where I first began really thinking about some of the new astronauts, and I have had the good fortune.

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Ah, two meet some of the older people in space to that talked about 1926 when they saw Fritz Lang's Man in the Moon in Berlin. Runner von Braun was one. How that push them into it. It's This, I think, is just sort of an indication of the fact that television and film a new languages is a whole new part of history and society and so on.

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And God pray it gets better. It creates our values in many ways in many ways. In fact, this it I'm I'm I would feel terrible if Star Trek had had as his heroes people who said, Hey, man, get yours while you can And that sort of thing Thank thank heaven that, uh, they are old fashioned, honorable people who believe in honesty and so on.

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Uh huh. But I am frightened by other things that go on in T. V. I don't see how we can ever how we could ever have our cities cleaned up and and start reducing crime. And that thing is, as long as TV keeps painting, other picked the power of that.

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I was I was out on a police stakeout years and years after I left the department and they had broken into a place where they were selling heroin and they had these men with their handcuffs behind, sitting on the floor of the room where they picked them up and the T V was running on TV was a police show, and not a very good one.

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These arrests are watching the police show. The man in charge of the squad says, Okay, on your feet. We're gonna go. And they're saying, Hey, wait a minute. Wait a minute, man, this is almost over. That's an irony, isn't it? Well, it is a. It is a a few of what it is and what it's about.

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That's the real world. And what we're living in our bodies and minds is somehow artificial and unimportant. What really counts is what's on the screen. And what really counts is what they believe the screen is saying about morality and all of that, because believe people act on their beliefs, not on reality if they believe this is the cool way to live.

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And that's the way they're going to live. Getting back to the NASA space program and the terrible tragedy of the loss of the A challenger and all seven aboard. Within a week of that tragedy, The New York Times and CBS ran a national poll asking how Children responded to the explosion, and it was remarkable how positive the Children were about space travel and how they wanted to see the United States continue and not be discouraged by this loss.

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Does that say anything to you? After all, you've approached young minds. At one time, I had two kinds of tears that day. One was for the astronauts and their families, but the other We're just tears of gratitude for this marvelous human creature who's saying Don't stop.

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Don't quit. Press ahead. Uh, we, uh to my mind, uh, proof again that we are something. We are brave. We are Voyagers still. Mm Jean, many people have asked, What does Gene Roddenberry do now? Does he rest on his laurels and on his oars? Or is Gene Roddenberry still working at the fast pace that he did in the first part of his life?

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I still put in my six hours of writing every day at the present time. I'm working on a novel. I do an awful lot of lecturing because, uh, that's great fun. Particularly to come to a great school like this and know that you cannot be asked the students they'll nail you to the wall and it keeps you thinking, uh, every teacher knows that I worked at a as a consultant at JPL and so on, and, uh I said, That's a very busy.

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What do you do as a consultant to public public attitudes towards the space program and what will offend them and what will pull them closer to it? And what are the kinds of things that you say in your lectures when you go to campuses or other places?

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It began really as Star Trek lectures, because when Star Trek was over, I was, uh, shoe box into a He's a science fiction writer, although I've done other things. Hollywood always pigeon holds you. And so I did that to pay the mortgage, and then slowly it began to be more lectures about the human creature.

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Where are we going? What it's about, What is what is this incredible knowledge revolution that's going on and so on until, uh, today I love coming to places like this, But I also, uh, my last few lectures were, uh, at the, uh, Blockade Management Association. I'll be speaking next week at the Yeah yeah, International Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics and, uh, generally the same subject, though, because businessmen and scientists who want to hear something positive about what are we, what's happening?

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Yes, something out of the liberal arts tradition that would help them understand what it is they're doing and sort of liberal arts and science hooked together. Um, we we are an incredible thing. Yes. Were you pleased or disappointed by the popular reception given your Star Trek the movie?

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I could not stay that close to Star Trek, and I have to put in other people's hands. And artists are notoriously selfish. No one will ever do Star Trek the way I would do it, but I like it as much. But I think they've done a good job, and it's it's ruled by economics anyway, as long as the ticket office work.

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So keep making Citrix well for a time. You dropped out of the day by day producing of Star Trek, the original TV series, and handed it on to line producers who did the ordinary work that producer has to do to get the film in the can.

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But you were called back, weren't you? Because it just didn't work. Some of it didn't work. The reason I dropped out is, I think the I think too often not even in university television. Uh huh. Courses do they quite get over the enormous physical and emotional expenditure of putting a television show on every week.

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As a matter of fact, for students graduating now, it's not going to be that bad, because on a on a show they an hour show they maybe make 12 or 14 a year. In the days when I did Star Trek, you did 26 and that meant 12 to 14 hours a day, six days a week.

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I went. I went for over three years without ever hardly seeing my family and young men do that challenge. But I I could not do it again. There's they networks don't have enough money to pay me to give up my new family and thank God with the old one.

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We're all friends again, but it's too much. How far in advance did you shoot? If you had 26 weeks to cover? Were you already working at the start of the summer to come up with a certain number that would be in the can by the start of the season in September would start in May, sometimes April, writing the shows and laying them out.

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But you keep you keep losing time it takes you so long to write and produce them. And and when you're on like Friday night, it seems like Friday's coming up every third day. And there's just a If you care about what you're doing, there's a great expenditure.

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Now there there are producers and they do a good job. God bless them, who don't who are not that deeply involved in their shows. And okay, it's six o'clock stop shooting. We'll go with what we have. But Star Trek was a different experience. It was a need being rejected by the network and the studio.

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It was a need to prove surrounded by really great people. Uh huh. It's, uh, one of the techniques that you used was the matte effect. Do I pronounce it correctly? And could you just very briefly describe how that worked? Artist would color would paint in a background to a scene so that you didn't have to build a set?

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Is that correct? They would shoot, they would shoot like you and I here with a tie down camera, and then they would take and draw, cut out part of the film above, and that would all be black. Then they would shoot another piece of film on a cut out like this, where when they put the two together, you and I are sitting here with the fireplace in this but beyond our the sequoia trees of California.

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And we had a marvelous office, a fan blowing on us. Uh uh, that you can do all of that in the studio. You never had to leave the Paramount lot. Is that where you said that you made Star Trek? It was Daisy Lou and then Paramount, but, uh, it's, uh it's like for half child people like I think you are.

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And I certainly am. It's like being given a marvelous toy box and saying, Go out and have fun. And really, here's more money than you can spend while you do it. It's too much and too good. And in studios that were built in the 19 twenties, I think you said there are all studios.

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We'll have to eventually get rid of those because the underground cables just can't carry the electricity. And we don't have fiber optics in them now, and we're going to need that soon. Uh, television, we live in a time. The reason science fiction, I believe is so popular and growing more and more popular.

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Day is the fact that tomorrow now isn't 50 years away. It's a five or 10 years away. And, uh, the same thing is happening in the film and television industry. It's happening so fast that we'll have to We'll have to go to other studios. Jean, thank you very much for joining me for this conversation.

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Gene Roddenberry, creator and producer of Star Trek. One of the great television series of all times. It continues to be as popular today as it was when it first appeared. And not only in this country, but around the world. And you're fun to sit with. I enjoyed it.

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Thank you, Jane, for being with me. Thanks. Yeah. Mm. Thanks. Thanks. Mm. Go with them. Yeah, Yeah. Mm.