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Harlan Ellison Sues For "Star Trek" Episode
Miracle Jones writes "The ever-quotable speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison has launched a lawsuit against Paramount and the Writer's Guild West for rights to residuals surrounding his famous and award winning 'City on the Edge of Forever' episode for the original Star Trek series. Ellison, recently featured in the documentary 'Dreams with Sharp Teeth,' said that 'The Trek fans who know my City screenplay understand just exactly why I'm bare-fangs-of-Adamantium about this.' Regarding his lawsuit, he had this to say: 'The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who "have more important things to worry about," who'll have their assistant get back to you, who don't actually read or create, who merely "take" meetings, and shuffle papers — much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams — they refuse even to notice... until you jam a Federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you've made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars... from OUR labors... just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters.'"
On one hand, we have the tired old story of a writer/creative not receiving due credit for his work. On the other hand, said creative is possibly the most obnoxious asshole still living that I've known of.
Well, let me simplify things by giving you a bit more information. City on the Edge of Forever wasn't written by Harlan Ellison. Oh, Harlan Ellison did write a TOS episode called City on the Edge of Forever, which included a drug dealer, multiple humanoids guardians of forever, a pirate ship that replaces the Enterprise when the timeline gets changed, the bad guy being stuck in a supernova explosion, and a Captain Kirk who doesn't actually make the decision to let Edith Keeler die, thus forcing Spock to step up to that role.
I read the original script once. It was horrible. The adapted script took the Edith Keeler character and the overall general idea, then made the script good. Harlan Edison made a lot of noise about them spoiling his brilliant script, and then later published the original. Now he has the gall to say that, 'The Trek fans who know my City screenplay understand just exactly why I'm bare-fangs-of-Adamantium about this.' No. The Trek fans who know his original screenplay think he should thank the studio for paying him for his original script and for letting him keep the credit as writer. He doesn't deserve a penny of residuals for the actual episode. Forty years later, he really shouldn't get anything anyway, but if he is entitled to something, its royalties from his published original version.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
why this particular episode and why now?
Apparently a series of book have been released based on characters and situations from that episode. His contract specified that if such a thing were to happen, he would be paid. Paramount didn't pay him, even though he says he's been trying to get them to pay for a while. And the guild didn't defend him like they're supposed to. So after some months of going back and forth, he decided to sue them both (the guild for just $1 though).
So that's why.
"why is this coming up now?"
Because a recent novel trilogy—Crucible by David R. George, III—was based significantly on that episode (among others). The books came out in late 2006, and Harlan announced at that time that he was planning to sue Pocket Books/Paramount to either scrap the books or get gobs of money.
As for why it took two and a half years from "I'll sue!" to actually suing, I'd imagine that his lawyer(s) tried negotiating with Paramount/Pocket first.
davidh
Hate to explain a joke, but-
The line is from one of Harlans more famous books and goes " "REPENT Harlanquin!" Said the TICTOC man."