Exclusive: David Gerrold Talks Frankly About TNG Conflicts With Roddenberry & Berman + JJ-Trek & more

Today TrekMovie finishes up our exclusive interview with writer David Gerrold – this time Gerrold talks frankly about his troubled time working on Star Trek: The Next Generation and coming into conflict with Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman, being ‘blackballed’ in Hollywood and he even gives his thoughts on JJ Abrams Star Trek.   Gerrold Interview Part 2 In part 1 of our interview with Star Trek writer David Gerrold we focused on his time with the original series and animated series, in part 2 we talk about his tumultuous time in the early years of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Warning: interview includes adult language) TrekMovie: Gene’s sensibilities changed a great deal from the 1960’s to the 1980’s. He became more of a pacifist, and he… David Gerrold: Well this is something we don’t like to talk about. Gene gave us Star Trek and he was a great visionary in that regard. But he didn’t know how to share the credit with everyone else and he was self-centered. And that led to some serious mistakes, and one of them – and I have no idea why – but he was a substance abuser. First it was alcohol, and then it was grass, and then it was Quaaludes and other drugs. He had this disease. If he had stayed off the booze and the pills, he would have been going strong until ninety. He was just a big strong guy, but he fell into that trap of substance abuse and it killed him. We could see that breakdown in his thinking processes very early. Maybe the stress of producing was tough on him. I didn’t know him that well personally, I only knew that professionally that there was stuff going on with him. According to Gerrold – Gene Roddenberry (pictured above on the set of Star Trek: TNG) was a changed man by the time the second Trek series went into development TrekMovie: From a philosophical perspective, it would be fair to say that by the time The Next Generation came around, Gene was more about the notion that conflict would no longer occur among the crew of the Enterprise, and that lack of dramatic tension boxed in the writers… David Gerrold: Well that came from Gene’s lawyer [Leonard Maizlish], a scumbag of a human being. I cannot say enough things – he was a truly evil human being. He was going to be Gene’s helper on the show. He appointed himself Chief of Staff and he would go around and say we can’t do this and we can’t do that and “on Star Trek everybody loves each other.” For those of us who had written for the show knew that wasn’t true! We knew our people got into arguments. But what happened was he would go to Gene and say “you can’t let David do this and can’t let Dorothy do that.” Everybody has to be good friends. It is that whole ‘band of brothers’ thing we established in the first. Well, no. What we established in the original series was that there was a lot of tension between Kirk, Spock and McCoy. It is normal and appropriate. Yes, there should be tension between these people who have different jobs. But you get Leonard Maizlish wandering the halls telling writers “you can’t do this” and everybody is terrified because you could argue with Leonard and explain to him and the next thing you know you get a memo from Gene that was dictated by Leonard. I had it happen to me several times where I would talk to Gene and explain that I thought “Data” was a bad name for the android and Gene would say “you are probably right, come up with another name.” And we would come up with another name and the next thing – later that afternoon – Gene would say “no, I’ve talked it over with my lawyer, we will keep the name Data.” Another time I would say we should do so and so and he would agree and then later in the day Gene would say “I’ve talked to the lawyer and we have to do it this way instead.” And I was “why does a starship need a lawyer, Gene?!”  That was the control that the lawyer had.  Gene was terrified that the studio would try and take the show away from him, so we ended up with this bizarre circumstance that Gene was so afraid of losing his show that he gave control away to his lawyer and he didn’t trust me or Dorothy Fontana after.  That was the part that hurt Dorothy and I the most is that Gene stopped trusting us and started treating us as the enemy.  The result of that is that I am not going to fall into the “Gene was the Great Bird of the Galaxy” bullshit that everybody loves to share, because I saw Gene being something other than the Great Bird of the Galaxy. TrekMovie: Let’s talk about “Blood and Fire” – the AIDS allegory that you wrote and the obstacles you ran into trying to get it produced. David Gerrold: I don’t blame Gene as much as I blame Rick Berman for that clusterfuck. Others have confirmed it. They have said that in their experience Rick Berman was a raging homophobe, which makes the whole thing even more bizarre. Because, before Rick Berman came on the show, he had written a three-page memo on ‘here are some of the stories we could tell, some of the issues we could address’. And number three on his three-page memo was AIDS and how we should do something about AIDS. So now Gene and I appeared at a Star Trek convention in November of 1986 and somebody asked “will there be gay people aboard the Enterprise?” And Gene – to give him credit for knowing the right thing to say at the right time – said “yes, it is time, we should show gay...