Free The City on the Edge of Forever by Harlan Ellison Page A

I tried to say something about mortality and the importance of courage when there is no hope and the nature of friendship and the basic crapshoot that is history.
    Read, and compare. The evidence is before you.
     
    I don’t have the space or the inclination to run all the letters from Roddenberry to me. Nor the space to place before you all of the times Roddenberry in print declared how much over-budget my show had gone…and each time it was thousands of dollars more than the last time, like the demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy holding aloft a sheet of paper and declaring, “I hold in my hand the names of 136 card-carrying Communists in the State Department!” and the next time, “The names of 258…” and the next time, “The names of 502….” But here’s a sample.
    Now, originally, I crowed like a madman at this ultimate admission by Roddenberry that, in fact, if I went over budget on “City” it was by a mere, piddling six thousand dollars! In the limited edition of this book, last year, I even went so far as to urge the reader to check out Roddenberry’s own math in his letter to me. I said, “It don’t parse, it don’t add up, it’s just simply incorrect !”
    But on closer examination—and with a determination to be as truthful as the evidence at hand compels—it is clear that Roddenberry’s budget letter presents a thorny ethical problem for me. As I pointed out, the Great Bird’s figures don’t add up. So I should caper and gibber and make hay out of this confession straight from his beak. But ethically, I’d be as bad as Roddenberry or the mooks who cobble up mythology about “City” and me. Because it’s obvious, I think, that it was essentially a typographical error.
    If you add another 6 to that 6000, you get $66,000. $191,000 + 66,000 = $257,000…which is what Roddenberry says the show finally cost. So I didn’t go over budget a stammeringly piddly six grand, but rather sixty-six grand. (And Solow & Justman’s INSIDE STAT TREK roughly confirms that budget.) But the investigative journalist Joel Angel, whose book about Roddenberry I’ve cited previously, sent me a fax after reading the limited edition of this book, and he made reference to his investigations of archives dealing with Star Trek , and he advised me as follows:
     
    “Though Roddenberry says in his letter to you of 6/20/67 that ‘City’ came in at $257,000, there is no documentation in the archives to substantiate it. In the first year, according to the documents that do exist, no episode cost much more than $192,000. As you will see in Herb Solow’s memo that follows, the approved budget was $185,000.
     
    “The only budget document I could find for the second year was Coon’s ‘Devil in the Dark,’ which ran a month before ‘City.’ Its projected cost, according to the documents, was $187,057; it came in at $192,863.
     
    “Some examples of third year budgets: ‘All Our Yesterdays,’ projected cost: $182,282; final cost: $183,532. ‘The Lights of Zetar,’ projected cost: $168,000; final cost: $ 173,369. ‘That Which Survives,’ projected cost: $175,000 and that’s exactly what it came in at.
     
    “You may also like to know that in the third year, when budgets were cut, Roddenberry approved a raise for himself on at least one script, from the standard $4500 everyone else was getting, to $5500.”
     
    I think it’s reasonable to assume that “City” ran $66,000 over budget…not $6000 as I trumpeted in the limited edition. But you wanna know something? Who gives a shit?! I was a freelance writer, like hundreds of others who worked Star Trek and every other television series, and it wasn’t our job to board and budget the show! That was a job for Solow and Justman and Bernie Widin and the other staff members whose job it was to oversee such things. It was the responsibility of these “experts” to advise freelancers what the budget was, and ways in which it could be met if we went over the line.