… if you want to make people mad, ask them a question they can’t answer.
Category Archives: Blog
Historic First Drafts: Star Trek’s Intro
Gene Roddenberry’s first try, dated 8’1’1966:
This is the story of the United Space Ship Enterprise. Assigned a five-year patrol of our galaxy, the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce, and explores strange new worlds and civilizations. These are its voyages … and its adventures.
I think that’s terrible and, trust me, his next draft was worse. The intro emerged thru collaboration. For 10 days Roddenberry traded drafts with producer Robert D. F. Black and associate producer Robert Justman. Then he wrote out the final and Justman ran it over for Bill Shatner to record. All this was very last minute.
From the memos reproduced by Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, we can see that Black brought in “the final frontier” and the use of “starship,” whereas Justman introduced the idea of a “to do this, to do that” itemized list of what the Enterprise was up to in space. The phrase “where no man has gone before” is claimed by Sam Peeples, who wrote the series’ second pilot and used the phrase for its title.
The full story may be available in the Gene Roddenberry special collection at, I believe, UCLA. Going by the few pages devoted to the subject by Inside, I would guess that Roddenberry got off to a lousy start, collected phrases and ideas like a magpie, then pulled them together into the magnificent final product we now know. At least, if more credit could go to Black or Justman, Inside would definitely send it their way. Justman is the book’s co-author, and in regard to Roddenberry it has a pronounced “bad stuff ’bout” tendency.
A final point is that Roddenberry wrote some of Star Trek’s feebler episodes but is said to have done very good rewrites of other people’s scripts. The same bent can be seen here.
Obama and Biden Sitting In a Tree
A month or so ago I learned about the existence of Obama slash; fan fiction stories devoted to the apocryphal gay sex life of our current President. There’s apparently a fair bit of it, with numerous pairings — Obama/Biden and Obama/Rahm Emanuel being two of the most popular.
I was intrigued because…well, it’s so wrong, isn’t it? It seemed like the sort of thing that *somebody* should want to pay me to write about. Sure enough, the good folks at Bitch magazine expressed interest. So I hunkered down to read me some Obama slash.
There was only one problem. What was that problem you ask? Well, here’s the semi-contrite, semi-agonized email I wrote to my esteemed Bitch editor Andi Zeisler:
Hey Andi. So I started reading some Obama slash…and I think I’m going to have to bow out. I kind of can’t take it. It’s really viscerally upsetting. Obama/Rahm is horrible enough, but there’s Barack/Michelle which I actually can’t even bear to look at, and god, Obama/Hillary Clinton. Argh.
Sorry; I didn’t quite realize I was going to find it quite so unpleasant. I’ve read other slash before, and found it entertaining, but there’s something about the real people…it’s just not worth the psychic trauma, I’m afraid.
So there you go. I’m just not enough of a man for Obama slash, basically.
Did I mention that I think Hillary Clinton is the person in the world that I *least* want to imagine having sex? *shudder*
Anyway, if you’re made of sterner stuff, below are some links to Obama slash communities:
You Know Who Says “Shut Your Mouth” in “Theme from Shaft”?
Telma Hopkins. She also did time as part of Tony Orlando and Dawn. Then she went into tv acting and had a supporting role in Bosom Buddies. Did a lot of tv acting, actually, decades of it. And she just had a movie role, but it was in The Love Guru.
You Know Who’s a Bigger Jerk Than Michael Medved?
UPDATE: In Comments, Uland caught a suspicious resemblance between the photo that used to be here and Prof. Kevin MacDonald of California State University. In fact, the photo was indeed of Prof. MacDonald; I picture-googled Jamie Kelso and didn’t read the text that came along with the picture.
I’ve changed the link and now the picture is Jamie Kelso’s official Stormfront thumbnail.
**************
I know about him because I’m writing a novel set in 1960s LA. My research included What Really Happened to the Class of ’65, a best-seller in the ’70s, forgotten now. The book is nonfiction and follows a dozen or so kids during the first 10 years after they graduated a fancy high school in LA. A lot happened to them, ’60s and ‘7os stuff, transcendental meditation and drug smuggling and massage certification and God knows what else.
Michael Medved, one of the grads, cowrote the book with David Wallechinsky, another of the grads. The book did fine by them both, and Medved has stuck around to become a wingnut scold who makes a fuss about sexy, unpatriotic movies coming out of Hollywood. Kind of a pain, really. But you know who really dislikes Michael Medved? That guy up in the first paragraph.
His name is Jamie Kelso and he thinks Michael Medved is a dirty Jew out to manipulate the white race. Kelso is another of the ’65 grads profiled in What Happened. Even then he was a dreadful pill, a twitch hung up on the idea of his superior intelligence. By book’s end he had become an Ayn Rand-ite. Now he is “a senior moderator of the American White Nationalist website Stormfront.” Fee-uck.
Here he rants about Medved by podcast. In What Happened he sounded like a fool but not stupid; he could turn a phrase. Now he just comes across as a whiny dope. In a way I’m happy to see life knock the shit out of his pretensions: all that talk about his intellect, all that testing and rejecting of mental systems, and he’s fallen for the dumbest of the dumb, retailed in the most flatfooted and unoriginal fashion. On the other hand, it’s depressing to follow a life, any life, and see it turn out this way.
In other What Happened news, Gary Wasserman is now vice president for merchandising at Bobbie Jones, a maker of quality men’s golf wear.
As long as we’ve been talking about sex….
Here’s a review of a romance menage novel, of all things.
_______
More of the Same
Be With Me is an erotic romance, which means hot semi-nude bodies on the front, lots of graphic thrusting in the interior, and splurting gobs of exploitation plastered across the back-cover blurb . Heroine Reggie Fallon is in love with not one, not two, but three manly hunks — and since she refuses to choose among them, they’ve decided to share her. In other words, this should really be titled Be With Us.
That, though, would be just a little too outré. Author Maya Banks is determined to shoehorn her protagonists’ thoroughly unconventional ménage into a thoroughly conventional romance narrative. She manages this with brilliant obliviousness. Her simple strategem is to treat the three “boys” — Hutch, Cam, and Sawyer — as if they were a single six-armed, thirty-toed, three-dicked heartthrob. Oh, sure, each guy has distinguishing characteristics: Hutch can cook, Cam has glasses, Sawyer likes anal sex. But they were all brought up together with the same foster mother, they’re all business partners in the same architectural firm, and they all live together in the same enormous dream home. When Reggie needs help, they all come running; when it’s time for a romantic misunderstanding to spin out the plot, then by God they all misunderstand her in the same way. They even sleep together, but only when Reggie’s there, because, as they are careful to tell us, they aren’t gay, no, no, no.
Reggie is, of course, herself a thoroughly familiar spunky romance heroine. Her main distinguishing features are (1) she’s a cop, and (2) she’s beaten senseless by a perp in the first three pages. Convalescence fortuitously allows her to be needy and feminine without compromising her independence. Nor does it compromise her libido; once she’s out of the hospital, she cheerfully fucks her way through a series of efficient and crowded sex scenes. If you love generic romance novels, but wish they featured a tad more triple penetration, then this book may just be heaven.
Fact
The same guy directed the pilots for Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes, and Batman. He also did the pilots for Hill Street Blues and Moonlighting. And the pilot for Remington Steele. And he directed a Disney film I saw years ago, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, that starred Kurt Russell at age 17 or 18.
Hard-working guy!