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

And, in truth, shows go over budget all the time, even scripts written by staff writers. It was, and is, a commonplace problem in the Industry, and not one that difficult to overcome case by case. If they wanted to.
    And here’s the capper to Roddenberry’s bleats about the show going $66,000 over budget: it was the aired version , which The Great Bird of the Galaxy kept insisting was his , THAT WENT 66,000 FUCKING DOLLARS OVER BUDGET! Not my poor, miserable, inept, self-indulgent, extravagant first draft! If he couldn’t come up with a script for “City” that came in on budget—after putting all those other “better writers” like Carabatsos, Coon, Fontana and himself to the chore—then how could poor, miserable, inept, etcetera etcetera Ellison be expected to do it!
    I mentioned all this to Alan Brennert, the award-winning writer I’ve cited many times in this book (and to whom this volume is dedicated), and he told me:
    “As a sometime-producer myself, I can assure you: no matter who wrote ‘City,’ it would have cost more than an average episode of Star Trek , simply because of the period setting, New York City in the Great Depression. Sure, there was an old New York street on the Paramount lot, but you have to dress that street with vintage cars; you need to rent period clothes for your principals, your extras; to say nothing of the fact that you were making use of only one of the show’s usual standing sets (the Enterprise bridge), and all the rest—the planet’s surface, Edith’s soup kitchen, the tenement basement, in fact all the Old Earth interiors—had to be constructed. Roddenberry had to’ve known this from the very first treatment, as did the people responsible for budgeting the segment, it didn’t take them by surprise, and both they and NBC gave you the green light to go to teleplay first draft based on the treatment that contained everything I’ve mentioned. Hell, Roddenberry even boasted in his letter to you that he insisted on quality casting, sets, fx, and the like. Why would he commit to such inevitable budget overages if your script wasn’t as good as it was? I find it the rankest sort of cowardice that he then, for the next thirty years, makes this big deal about you not being able to write the story to budget when even he couldn’t! Or wouldn’t.”
    In his letter to me dated 20 June 1967, less than two months after the segment aired, Roddenberry wrote me:
     
    Dear Harlan: Despite the cuts in sets and cash the final budget figures on “City” were close to $257,000, or about $6,000 over our show budget of $191,000. We might have made it for around $20,000 less if I had not insisted on quality in casting, set constructions, special effects, and so on.
     
    I’ll tell you why I brought Alan Brennert into it at this point. In 1967—even allowing for what may or may not have been a typo—Roddenberry was saying I was $66,000 over budget. (In fact, what he was saying is that he was that much over budget because, don’t forget, by that time they had “saved” my expensive script, they had “modified” my extravagance, so all they were left to shoot was their own over-budget version.)
    By 1987, in an interview in Video Review (March 1987, page 46) that I cited earlier, but which bears refreshing in your mind, here’s what the great model of perfectibility of humanity was saying:
     
    VR : I remember a time travel episode with Joan Collins.
    RODDENBERRY : I sent Joan a note the other day. I said, “What has happened to our Salvation Army virgin?”
    VR : That was a great episode.
    RODDENBERRY : It was a fun episode to do.
    VR : Who wrote that one?
    RODDENBERRY : Well, it was a strange thing. Harlan Ellison wrote the first draft of it, but then he wouldn’t change it.
    VR : That’s Harlan Ellison.
    RODDENBERRY : Yeah. He had Scotty dealing drugs and it would have cost $200,000 more than I had to spend for an episode.
     
    And by 1990, he was telling the world I had been