Quote:
Originally Posted by Buddahaid
...As far as TOS not living up to the hype of the opening narration, you do have to take into account it was a very expensive series to make and all those alien worlds, spacecraft and interior shots had to be built life size on a sound stage. That limitation, and the expense of adding in the special opticals, made finding writers of SF that could create stories the studio could afford to make difficult and more than one top notch author was pissed off by the script rewrites needed.
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The most notable, and notorious, example of this is the TOS episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ci...er#Controversy
Ellison still fumes over the whole re-writing of his original story and I have heard him many times, in radio interviews, detail his dissatisfaction. He also tells the story of how he first presented the story to Shatner. Shatner was to go to Ellison's home in the hills above Los Angeles to get a first look at the script. Ellison says he was at home when he heard a roaring sound; looking out his window, he saw Shatner, on a Harley, coming up the steet. While making the turn into the driveway of the home, Shatner los control of the bike and laid it down. He picked himself up and walked the bike in the rest of the way. After the usual hellos, Ellison gave Shatner the script and left him alone in the living room to read it. Ellison would occasionally sneak a peek at Shatner reading to see if he could gauge Shatner's response to the story. Ellison was sneaking a peek when Shatner had just finished reading; Shatner closed the script, gazed off into the distance and sighed. Ellison thought "Oh, good, the story has moved him." Shatner then reopened the script and started to move his finger deliberately down the pages. It was then Ellison realized Shatner was counting the character lines to see if any other character had more lines than Kirk...
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