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Penthouse Interview's Gene Roddenberry 1976
Was just going through my old files and found
PENTHOUSE INTERVIEW
STAR TREK'S GENE RODDENBERRY
Exclusive interview by Linda Merinoff on assignment for Penthouse.
Published MARCH 1976
Call me crazy, but I transcribed it myself a long time ago.
Must have been really bored
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Penthouse: Why did you do a series like "Star Trek" ?
Roddenberry: I made Star Trek for two reasons. One was that I thought science fiction hadn't been done well on television and it seemed to me, from a purely selfish, career point of view, that if it did well I would be remembered. I suppose if a western or police story hadn't been done to my satisfaction I might have done that, too. The second reason is that I thought with science fiction I might do what Jonathan Swift did when he wrote Gulliver's Travels. He lived in a time when you could lose your head for making religious and political comments. I was working in a medium, television, which is heavily censored, and in contemporary show I found I couldn't talk about sex, politics, religion, and all the other thing I wanted to talk about. It seemed to me that if I had things happen to little polka dotted people on a far-off planet, I might get past the network censors, as Swift did in his day. And indeed that's what we did.
Penthouse: Do you think that censors purposely do a bad job ?
Roddenberry: I think the reason for censorship is what television is. The primary purpose for television is not to entertain people or amuse them or educate them. The primary purpose is to sell deodorants, beer, soap, automobiles, and so on. And as a result, the soul question behind what gets on the air is "will it attract a mass audience and hold them sufficiently long to get the commercial messages over to them?". Censorship then comes along because the people who want to sell products, feeling no obligation to uplift people, do not want to have anything in their programs that offends people. that makes them angry-because that anger may be transferred against the product. So they don't censor programs because networks are dull or stupid or evil. They censor because networks are products salesmen.
Penthouse: What have your relations with the networks been like ?
Roddenberry: It's not a case of network executives or studio executives being the bad guys, and we who write and produce and direct being the good guys. It's much more complex than that. Most people at the artistic level in these things are very much concerned with what they say and how they say it. There can be serious artists even in a thing as full of drivel as television. But the serious artist is as interested in what he portrays and what he has to say as in the money that he gets. That's one of the several differences between a hack and an artist. I get a huge charge out of doing a "Star Trek" episode that demonstrates that petty nationalism must go if we're to survive and so on. Although there are certainly many network executives who are moral men, who give to charities and raise their children decently, and who worry about these thing too, this is not the main thrust of their jobs. Since they belong to a corperation, the main thrust of their jobs is to produce so many viewers for each sponsor and to turn a profit to the stockholders every year. So many of the arguments and fights that we have with them come out of just two different viewpoints, two different goals. I suppose that if writer/producers could have their way totally, I would try to do lovely things that would maybe attract and audience of two million people instead of the necessary eighteen million, and the network, of course, would go broke.
Penthouse: Does this mean that the television show can't be art ?
Roddenberry It is often art in spite of this. But never because of it. You can't start from the necessity of selling beer and make art. But sometimes you can sell beer with artistry.
Penthouse: So knowing how difficult it would be, why did you turn to television ?
Roddenberry: Because you cannot ignore a medium which hits fifty million people in one evening. I think that the purpose of all writing is to reach people and say something you believe in and think is inportant. You may do it as a scientific or philosophical tract, but with fiction and drama and a certain amount of adventure you reach them easier and you reach more of them and you can infiltrate your messages into them. I think people forget too often that literature-usually fiction-is responsible for more changes in public opinion than news articles or sermons. An excellent example of this is Uncle Tom's Cabin-actually it's not a very good book-which probably did more to propel us into the Civil War than any other writing of the time. So historically this has been true of literature and whether we like it or not, television is literature. It may not be very good literature usually, but of course not everything that is printed is very good, either.
Penthouse: So you primarily consider yourself a writer ?
Roddenberry: Yes. A writer who produces. I'm a storyteller. And producing is merely and extension of the storytelling function. There's no difference between writing that "he spoke slowly, uncertainly, unsure of himself" and being a director who makes sure the actor does it that way or being the producer who hires an actor who is capable of doing it that way. When I first began writing, and think many beginning writers go through this, I felt that the director and the producer and the actors were the enemy. They took, it seemed to me, these priceless visions I had in my head, these lovely, lovely sonnets that I had written and put them on the screen and destoyed them. Or warped them. As I became a more and more professional writer I began to realize that actors and directors indeed were taking some fairly average things that I had done and were making them very much better. So the longer you're in business, the longer you're in television and film, the more you begin to respect all of the creative levels for what each of them brings to it. I had some strange ideas about Hollywood when I first came here. I had read these storys of the orgies and the pink Cadillacs and the flaming passions that erupt on set and all of that. But actually television and most independent motion picture production people are a group of very hardworking, dedicated, sensible people. This is not to say that we don't have our moods and arguments and disagreements, and often violent ones. But I think probably no more than take place at top echelon of U.S. Steel or Prudential Life Insurance Company. Naturally people that care have strong feelings. But i've done a lot of odd jobs and I can say that the nicest group of people I have ever worked with in my life are the people in the creative levels of this industry. They're great fun to be with and great fun to work with.
Penthouse: When television first began was there much censorship ?
Roddenberry: Oh yes, there was terrible censorship. I one wrote into the script that the newspapers on the corner were held down in the wind by a tire iron. I needed that because someone was going to grab a heavy object there as a weapon in a scene. I was called in and they said, "Please take the tire iron out and make it a brick." I said, "I sort of like the tire iron." And they said, "Yes, but it really conjures the failure of an advertised product, tires. And we'd rather not have that." It actually reached that far. In those days you couldn't, in a Western, have your people "ford" a river because you might be trying to get Chevrolet as a sponsor.
Penthouse: Do you feel that television censorship is decreasing ?
Roddenberry: No, in some ares it's gotten worse. If I wanted to write a show saying I believed organized religion was evil, I couldn't. No matter how entertaining a drama I wrote, I couldn't get it on television. I couldn't get a show on television questioning whether The United States was a mistake. I cannot write a television drama commenting seriously on unions or management, or on the armament sales that we're involved in. I couldn't write --assuming that I wanted to--a pro Arab, anti-Israeli drama. Now the answers that you get are that "Yes, but we do very brave things in news and public affairs programming." What they miss is the fact that fiction affects people more strongly than news and public affairs. The reason being that drama makes you identify with what's happening. If a good writer, or many good writers, during the Vietnamese conflict had been permitted to write fictional tales of what was happening in Vietnam, making you identify and become a Vietnamese peasant whose daughter has just been burned to death by napalm or had been able to write fiction so you could feel the horrible changing of a man that produced a Calley and made you become that man and wrench your guts as it happened, i'm absolutely certain that the war would have been over two years earlier.
Penthouse: But yoy could have also had writers doing stories that said we should have stayed in Vietnam.
Roddenberry: Good. Good! I'm a Jeffersonian. I believe that if we present every possible side, the public will make the correct choice.
Penthouse: Do you think that the fact you were a writer helped you to get what you wanted out of other writers for "Star Trek" ?
Roddenberry: Oh yes. That is very much the producers job. It's no accident that most producers of television series are writers. And the reason for that is the problem of getting a shootable script ready once a week. It's the primary problem of putting on a television show. But when your producer is also a writer, he can not only talk to writers on writing terms, but also when the writer's version doesn't quite fit the characters or doesn't quite work you have the producer there., with his writing staff, to rewrite the script, polish it, change it, and make it better. We had one writer, a fine science-fiction writer, who brought in a script that was really marvelous--except it wasn't "Star Trek." For one thing, the ship didn't work the way he wanted it.And he had our engineer, little Scotty, involved in an intergalactic dope smuggling ring and things like that. Finally, when I couldn't get it rewritten the way I wanted itfrom the writer, I rewrote it myself. For a long time that splendid writer refused to speak to me because I had rewritten his masterpiece. And it was very close to a masterpiece. Since then he's become involved in production himself and he understands why it becomes necessary. And i'm happy to say that we're now friends again. But you do lose a certain amount of friends.
Penthouse: You said that in this writer's script, "The ship didn't work the way he wanted it to." Is this why it was necessary to to write the Star Trek Guide ?
Roddenberry: Yes. We had such a unique format, such a special format, that we became tired of having to explain what the starship was, andall of that. So we wrote up a writers guide to answer all the questions we could think of. Interestingly, this has since become a best-seller--tens of thousands of copies have been sold.
Penthouse: How did you attract famous science-fiction wrters like Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, and others ?
Roddenberry: They say the to pilots that we'd done and the agreed that it was the first time that science fiction had been properly put on a television tube, so they were anxious to be part of the first. You know, science fiction is quite a lovely form of writing, and done well it can be very exciting. Of course there's been a lot of crap in science fiction. I always remember Ted Sturgeon's statement when he joined us here to write for "Star Trek." Some friend of his said, "Ted, how can you possibly write for television? Don't you know that 90 percent of television is crap?" Ted looked back at him and sai, "Ninety percent of everything is crap."
Penthouse: Did you ever get any script ideas from science-fiction writers which were too bizarre to use?
Roddenberry: Yes, yes. We had many ideas we thought that our audience really could not identify with. And sometimes they were impossible to do for other reasons, budget. One brilliant science-fiction writersuggested that the Enterprise land on a strange-looking planet, and every now and then a hole would open up and go "gulp" like like that and one of the crewmen would just disappear, be sucked out of sight. And what they finally discover, after they lose quite a few people, is that this planet is really one giant organism and what it's doing is eating these flies that are crawling around on it. And the writer said that at the end of the story Captain Kirk and Spock would have to devise a way to make the planet disgorge the people that it had eaten. And we said, "Well, what are you going to call this episode?' and the writer said, "Vomit" I think we told him that we couldn't do it because we just didn't have a sufficient budget to build the kind of landscape that would gobble people up!
Penthouse: Why do you think "Star Trek" appealed to so many intelligent young people?
Roddenberry: First of all, we lived in a time in which everyone, and particularly young minds, are aware that we face huge troubles ahead. There are many people saying, "I doubt it we'll make it through the next twenty or thirty years." And indeed, if you read the newspapers it seems so. "Star Trek" was a rare show that said, "Het, it's not all over. It hasn't all been invented. If we're wise, why the human adventure is just beginning." And this is a powerful statement to young-minded people, to think that the explorations and discoveries and challenges ahead of us are greater than anything in the past. I think also "Star Trek" was unusual in that it was about something. "Star Trek" took points of viwe on tolerance, points of view against the petty nationalism that's destroying our planet. It talked about meaningful things. And I think the audiences are a lot brighter than the networks believe. I think that the audience does like to have their mind challenged. I think that since "Star Trek" came along there have been shows that have done that. "All in the Family" has challenged people's minds, talking about bigotry and so on. Thirdly, I think the reason for the popularity of "Star Trek" is a really old-fashioned sort of reason. "Star Trek" came along at a time in which most television leads were anti-heros. On "Star Trek" we decided to go for real heroes in an old-fashioned sense, people whose word was their bond, who believed that there were things more important in life than personal security or comfort. That, indeed there are some things worth risking your life for, even dying for if necessary. As a result, our principal characters were ones about whom a person could say, "Hey, i'd like to be like that." Or, "I'd like my children to be like that." And it seems to me that possibly the greatest hunger there is in the world today is for heroes to admire and emulate. When I grew up it was much simpler, it was the president of The United States. But we don't even have that left. One reason I don't object to the "Star Trek" fan phenomenon is the fact that if there's got to be some show that people want to model their lives after, or point to for their children, i'd much rather they do it out of this show than some limited show that is saying that all doctors are Jesus Christ, or if we just let our police have more guns we could solve the crime problem.
Penthouse: In 'Star Trek" you seemed to have all your political ideals coming from the alien. Spock, who seemed to consider all human problems objectively.
Roddenberry: Well that wasn't the aim of Spock. The reason for the creation of the three main characters--Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Spock--was that one thing you don't have in film literature that you do have in novels is steam of consciousness. In a novel you can get inside the character's mind and you can read, "He thinks, 'Well should I do this or that, and there's this to say on this side and there's something else to say on the other side.' " So in "Star Trek" the Captain would say, "Which way shall we face up to this threat?" And Spock would say, "Well, from the logical point of view we'll do this." The doctor would say, "No, but that's not really humanitarian." And the Captain would say, "As a man of action I'm bound by orders." They could have the whole discussion right there that in the novel would have been-stream of consciousness.
Penthouse: Is it true that the networks wanted originally to get rid of Spock because they thought him too strange?
Roddenberry: Yes, but I thought people would identify more colsely with Spock than with the other characters because in a real sense we all feel like strangers on a strange planet, hoping that someday we're going to reach someone. If we're fortunate in our lives, we'll make contact with three or four of these strange beings we find ourselves plunked down among. And indeed the audience did identify with him, so I proved right. But the network people I was working with at the time would not accept this reasoning. We had a great fight and they said, "All right, you can keep the guy with the ears, but keep him well in the background." After we had about ten episodes on the air, I got a call from the new vice-president out here and went to his office. He said to me, "You knoe, Roddenberry, I really don't understand what you're doing on this show because you're supposed to be a good producer and here you've got a hit with this Spock character and you've always got him in the background." I told him what his predecessor had demanded and he said, "I don't believe that anyone could be so foolish." From then on, Spock became a primary character.
Penthouse: Do you ever watch reruns?
Roddenberry: I've just begun to again, for the motion picture, but for years and years and years I hadn't seen it. As a matter of fact, I was invited to a "Star Trek" convention in New York and one of the requirements to get in was to pass a multiple-choice test on "Star Trek" trivia. The name of Captain Kirk's brother, Spocks uncle who saved from death by what man, and all of that. I took the examination and only got four questions right out of 100.
Penthouse: Don't you feel by getting involved in such trivia you lose what the show is really all about?
Roddenberry: I think so, yes. When you make a show you usually have a research service that keep a certain continuity, so that Kirk's brother's name won't be different from the name you mentioned last year. They would even send us changes like, "Listen, to get where you say the ship is going from a planet around the star Polar-is at Warp 6, assuming you wind around the star Deneb, will take you seventeen days longer than you put in your script. So you have the choice of changing to Warp 9 or choosing another...." Our research people were remarkable people.
Penthouse: Do you ever look back at some of the shows and cringe?
Roddenberry: Oh my God, yes. I remember that night we were watching that week's episode and Mr. Spock said a line about something being one to the tenth power. Well, the tenth power of one is still one. And I thought, "How did we let that get by? There'll be a hundred letters." And indeed there were, you know.
Penthouse: You left "Star Trek" after two years. Why?
Roddenberry: The first year we were on at 8:30 P.M. on Thursdays. If we'd kept that time slot and evening I think our ratings would have slowly built because we built them all through that year. The second year, though they put us on Friday, what was it, at 9 o'clock, which was a bad time. Our ratings dropped again. We slowly, all year, fought to build them back up again. NBC was going to cancel us and then the fans protested, had marches all over the country, sent in over a million letters, and they put us on for a third year, but then they gave us Friday at ten o'clock, which is even worse. But it was the first time the fans had ever forced a network to keep a show on the air. But I went to the network and said, "If you'll give us a decent time slot, i'll come back and personally produce the show." I was at the time executive producer. "And not only that, I will guarantee to work as i've never worked before to really make the show a hit." And they said, "Fine, We'd like you to come back and oversee it. Become the producer again and we'll give you Monday at seven," I believe it was. A great time slot. And so I proceeded to prepare for the next season. But they began to line up their schedules, a show came along called "Laugh-In" that they felt they had a big bid on, and so they said, ""We're going to put 'Laugh-In' there and we're going to give you Friday night at ten." Well I knew this was death for the show. When you bargain with a network you have to use the only clout you have; the only single thing I had was agreeing to personally produce the show. And so on, in an attempt to force the to give us some time period that would work, I said, " I will not personally produce a show if you put it on Friday night at ten o'clock. There's just so much labor and effort and ultimate disappointment. If you do that I will stay executive producer. And, in fact, knowing it's going to die, i'll be spending part of my time lining up what i'm going to do in the following year." As it turned out, the network elected to keep us on at that time. And having made this threat, I felt that I had to stay true to my word, otherwise how could I, in the future, ever again make a bargain from any position of strength? It turned out it wasn't such a position of strength because they left it there.
Penthouse: What compromises did you have to make to get the show on the air?
Roddenberry: I would have like to have the crew 50 percent men, 50 percent woman. But you must go back to the fact that you must attract and hold a minimum of eighteen million people. There's no point in striking a great blow for women's lib, or for any other thing, and not getting the show on the airor not being able to keep it on the air. So what you do is you go as far as you can go, and then you try and infiltrate the rest. Now this doesn't mean that you give in on everything. There are certain principles that I have and that other writers have that they will not violate even to get a show on the air. I don't like too much violence. I refuse to have the future run by The United States of America because I don't think that's the way it will be. I refuse to have an all lily-white, Anglo-Saxon crew. And I think if they said, "This ship really has to be an instrument of the CIA of the future, of keeping the galaxies safe for democracy," I certainly would have said, "You can shelve the whole project."
Penthouse: Do you think you propagandized on your show?
Roddenberry: Well, yes. All writers propagandize. That's what writing, essentially, is about. We were constantly talking about moral issues. Don't forget that our monsters were never the monsters of bad sci-fi. They were always motivated beings who might be ugly, but had beauty inside of them. We were constantly saying, "Because something looks different doesn't mean that it's bad. Or because other people have a different lifestyle doesn't mean they're wrong." If there was one theme in all of "Star Trek" it was that the glory of our universe is its infinite combinations of diversity. That all beauty comes out of it's diversity. What a terrible, boring world it would be if everyone agreed with everyone else. And if there weren't different shapes and colors and ideas. When we are truly wise-and my test for a wise human is when they take a positive delight when someone says, "I disagree with you because......" My God, what an opportunity this opens for dialogue, discussion, learning.
Penthouse: You're currently working on a film version of "Star Trek." How will it be similar to the show?
Roddenberry: We'll be using the same characters and the same actors. Also, i'd like to keep a PG rating. There's no point in just arbitrarily doing a film that would cut out millions of ticket sales. I personally think that sex is an exciting and very, very humorous thing. I think that the possible variations of it throughout a galaxy have got to make a very exciting and very funny film. But I won't be doing it on this one.
Penthouse: You've said that you felt that "Star Trek" was a very optimistic show. Are you still that optimistic in the 70's about the future of mankind?
Roddenberry: Yes, but I think that if we have an earth of the "Star Trek" century, it will not be ab unbroken, steady rise to that kind of civilization. We're in some very tough times. Our twentieth-century technological civilization has no guarentees that it is going to stay around for a long time. But I think man is really an incredible creature. We've had civilizations fall before and we build a somewhat better one on the ashes every time. And i'd never consider the society we depicted in "Star Trek" necessarily a direct, uninterrupted out-growth of our present civilization, with its heavy emphasis on materialism. I think But my optimism is not for our society. It's for our essential ingredient in humankind. And I thinkwe humans will rebuild and, if necessary, we'll lose another civilization and rebuild again on top of that until slowly, bit by bit, we'll get there.
Penthouse: Do you think future space missions will be as eventful as they were on "Star Trek"?
Roddenberry: I think that absolutely true stories of missions in the future would probably be, from the dramatic point of view, much less exciting than "Star Trek" episodes. One of the reasons that the public became rather bored with the moon landings was because they were so scientifically well thought out, well executed, that there just seemed to be little chance of danger. The astronauts were such wonderful, intelligent, decent men, you knew you were never going to see any quarrels between them. But let's suppose you had a NASA mission to the moon and you had a crew of two men and one woman and you knew that both men are in love with this woman and they secretly would like to be the first people to fornicate in space. I guarantee you that you will have the highest-rated moon mission that ever was. You can have those things happen in a sci-fi story. You can't in reality, unhappily.
You know we never portrayed the "Star Trek" century as a century of perfection. We still had things to learn, we still were trying to solve things, and one of the things we were trying to solve was: is there any way we can reach hopeless maniac murder cases--the Charles Mansons of that time.
Penthouse: You were talking before about how you were against excessive violence on television.
Roddenberry: I'm not against violence. I think violence is a part of our life and our world. I'm against its being used for violence's sake, improperly motivated and improperly depicted. I am not against depicting a fight between two men in which one man gets hit in the mouth by the other man because that is part of the life we lead and that is a dramatic subject and can be part of a statement you're making. What I am against is the fact that in a typical Western a guy gets hit in the mouth and he reels back and he hits the other guy in the mouth and they go at it. I know from my own life, when a large man hits another man full in the mouth with his fist, teeth are going to break, lips are going to be cut open, and I think if this happened the ugliness of it would tend to eliminate violence.
Penthouse: Where do you think mankind is heading?
Roddenberry: There's a theory I have that i've been making notes on for a couple of years now and intend to write a book on it sometime in the future. You often hear the question, "I wonder what the next dominant species will be?" I think that completely unnoticed by practically all people is the fact that the next dominant species on earth has already arrived and has been with us for some time. And this is a species that I call socio-organism. It first began to make its appearance when men started to gather together in tribal groups, and then city-states, and more lately in nations, giant corperations, and so on. The socio-organism is a living organism that is made up of individual cells--which are human beings. In other words the United States of America is a socio-organism. It is made up of 200 million cells, many of them become increasingly specialized just as the cells in our body do. Furnish food, take away waste products, or the nerves--the sight, the thinking, the planning. Your local PTA is also a small socio-organism. General Motors and ITT are socio-organisms. The interesting thing about this new creature is that unlike all the past life forms, one cell in a socio-organism can be a member of several of these socio-organisms. Also, they do not have to live in physical proximity with each other as in our bodies. It sounds a rather foolish sci-fi thing to say that General Motors is a living organism. But if you take a few steps back and view it from this point of view, you begin to discover that the evolution of this socio-organism almost exactly parallels everything we know about Darwinian evolution.
Briefly, Darwinian evolution is fairly generally accepted, that the first life forms on earth were individual cells floating on the warm soup seas of the time. Finally, through chance and other factors, groups of these cells discovered that by being gathered togethere they could get their food more efficiently, protect themselves, and become dominant over the single-cell amoebas. With humans, exactly the same thing happened. More and more individual units began to get more and more specialized. As it became more complex, with more and more highly specialized units, the creature became more and more powerful, was capable of protecting itself, taking care of its individual cells. This is a process of accumulating interdependence. The frightening thing about viewing humankind now, this way, is that the socio-organisms are really becoming more dominant than the individual. In Red China they are teaching the very lessons that our bodies have, over the centuries, taught to its cells--that we can no longer exist for ourselves. We must exist for the whole. But you can see the same thing in the United States. People now live the corporate morality. If I join a corperation, my duty is to the corperation. If the corperation says lie, cheat, steal, move here, do that, I must do it because my duty is to the whole. So if indeed civilization is following the laws of Darwinian evolution, you can predict ahead a few centuries or a few dozen or hundred centuries, until a time in which the independent individual will have totally vanished and this planet will be inhabited by totally specialized cells who function as part of these giant, living things. The great battle and great decision we humans face is whether to let this continue until we become faceless, totally interdependent organisms. Whether this is goood or bad I don't know. You might, if it were possible, talk to a cell of my heart and say, "Look cell, are you happy?" It seems to have adapted well. Maybe this is the way it suppose to be. Maybe there is some form of mass mind, mass consciousness, when a socio-organism reaches its final form, and we will be part of it and perfectly happy to be part of it. There may be contentments and happiness in this that we presently can't visualize. I fear it because I can't visualize it being better than remaining a free individual. I also fear the fact that is I remain, and insist on remaining totally independent and free, that the way things are going I am to be treated as a cancer cell by the socio-organisms around me, which will find it necessary to eradicate me because I endanger the organism.
Penthouse: What is one's purpose in this socio-organism? Just to survive?
Roddenberry: No. My purpose... that's a hard question. I'll try to answer it. My purpose is to live out whatever my function may be as a part of the whole that is God. I am a piece of Him. I believe that all intelligence is a part of the whole and it may be a great cyclical thing in which we have to go on, evolving, perfecting, until we reach the point where we are God, so that we can create ourselves so that we know we existed in the first place.
Penthouse: Which socio-organism do you see as the most threatening?
Roddenberry: I think television is one of the most dangerous forces in our lives today. Because once most people, and certainly most literate people, learned about their word and formed their opinions and patterned their lives largely out of what they read that was published in books. The system of books was a fine system in its uncensored state. Any author could write about anything and you had a choice to buy it or not, depending upon whether you wanted to read it or agreed. But the insidious is not at all to convey ideas to people and to disseminate information--the purpose of television is to sell a product. It could also become very much opiate, a much stronger and more efficient opiate of the masses than religion ever was. I sat in a meeting many years ago where one of the heads of sydication was talking to some other sydicators. They were discussing the sales of programs in Africa. At that time Africa had newly emerging states in turmoil. And this gentleman said something that chilled me. He said, "Don't give me the armies of Africa; I don't need the control of the governments. You give me television in Africa for ten years I will own the continent."
Penthouse: What is happening to television as a piece of mechanical equipment?
Roddenberry: I think there is little doubt that we're probably on the threshhold of a whole new revolution in telecommunications. We are now experimenting with mating television sets with print-out devices, think of TV mated with a Xerox-type machine in which probably our newspapers will ultimately be delivered. It's a much more efficient system. The minute you put the newspaper to bed electronically, you can then push a button and any house that subscribes to the service can have the thing rolled right out of the TV set. We're also experimenting, in some cities already, with mating television with simple computers and the home will be run by a home-computing feature. You'll do your billing on it, your banking, probably a great part of your shopping. I think it is inescapable that we mate TV with reproducing devices, that it will become our postal system of the future, almost certainly our telephone or videophone. So I see television going in either of two directions. One is that it can become that opiate we fear. Or, used properly, it can be a way for all people, everywhere, to have access to all the recorded knowledge of all humanity.
END.
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PENTHOUSE INTERVIEW
STAR TREK'S GENE RODDENBERRY
Exclusive interview by Linda Merinoff on assignment for Penthouse.
Published MARCH 1976
Call me crazy, but I transcribed it myself a long time ago.
Must have been really bored
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Penthouse: Why did you do a series like "Star Trek" ?
Roddenberry: I made Star Trek for two reasons. One was that I thought science fiction hadn't been done well on television and it seemed to me, from a purely selfish, career point of view, that if it did well I would be remembered. I suppose if a western or police story hadn't been done to my satisfaction I might have done that, too. The second reason is that I thought with science fiction I might do what Jonathan Swift did when he wrote Gulliver's Travels. He lived in a time when you could lose your head for making religious and political comments. I was working in a medium, television, which is heavily censored, and in contemporary show I found I couldn't talk about sex, politics, religion, and all the other thing I wanted to talk about. It seemed to me that if I had things happen to little polka dotted people on a far-off planet, I might get past the network censors, as Swift did in his day. And indeed that's what we did.
Penthouse: Do you think that censors purposely do a bad job ?
Roddenberry: I think the reason for censorship is what television is. The primary purpose for television is not to entertain people or amuse them or educate them. The primary purpose is to sell deodorants, beer, soap, automobiles, and so on. And as a result, the soul question behind what gets on the air is "will it attract a mass audience and hold them sufficiently long to get the commercial messages over to them?". Censorship then comes along because the people who want to sell products, feeling no obligation to uplift people, do not want to have anything in their programs that offends people. that makes them angry-because that anger may be transferred against the product. So they don't censor programs because networks are dull or stupid or evil. They censor because networks are products salesmen.
Penthouse: What have your relations with the networks been like ?
Roddenberry: It's not a case of network executives or studio executives being the bad guys, and we who write and produce and direct being the good guys. It's much more complex than that. Most people at the artistic level in these things are very much concerned with what they say and how they say it. There can be serious artists even in a thing as full of drivel as television. But the serious artist is as interested in what he portrays and what he has to say as in the money that he gets. That's one of the several differences between a hack and an artist. I get a huge charge out of doing a "Star Trek" episode that demonstrates that petty nationalism must go if we're to survive and so on. Although there are certainly many network executives who are moral men, who give to charities and raise their children decently, and who worry about these thing too, this is not the main thrust of their jobs. Since they belong to a corperation, the main thrust of their jobs is to produce so many viewers for each sponsor and to turn a profit to the stockholders every year. So many of the arguments and fights that we have with them come out of just two different viewpoints, two different goals. I suppose that if writer/producers could have their way totally, I would try to do lovely things that would maybe attract and audience of two million people instead of the necessary eighteen million, and the network, of course, would go broke.
Penthouse: Does this mean that the television show can't be art ?
Roddenberry It is often art in spite of this. But never because of it. You can't start from the necessity of selling beer and make art. But sometimes you can sell beer with artistry.
Penthouse: So knowing how difficult it would be, why did you turn to television ?
Roddenberry: Because you cannot ignore a medium which hits fifty million people in one evening. I think that the purpose of all writing is to reach people and say something you believe in and think is inportant. You may do it as a scientific or philosophical tract, but with fiction and drama and a certain amount of adventure you reach them easier and you reach more of them and you can infiltrate your messages into them. I think people forget too often that literature-usually fiction-is responsible for more changes in public opinion than news articles or sermons. An excellent example of this is Uncle Tom's Cabin-actually it's not a very good book-which probably did more to propel us into the Civil War than any other writing of the time. So historically this has been true of literature and whether we like it or not, television is literature. It may not be very good literature usually, but of course not everything that is printed is very good, either.
Penthouse: So you primarily consider yourself a writer ?
Roddenberry: Yes. A writer who produces. I'm a storyteller. And producing is merely and extension of the storytelling function. There's no difference between writing that "he spoke slowly, uncertainly, unsure of himself" and being a director who makes sure the actor does it that way or being the producer who hires an actor who is capable of doing it that way. When I first began writing, and think many beginning writers go through this, I felt that the director and the producer and the actors were the enemy. They took, it seemed to me, these priceless visions I had in my head, these lovely, lovely sonnets that I had written and put them on the screen and destoyed them. Or warped them. As I became a more and more professional writer I began to realize that actors and directors indeed were taking some fairly average things that I had done and were making them very much better. So the longer you're in business, the longer you're in television and film, the more you begin to respect all of the creative levels for what each of them brings to it. I had some strange ideas about Hollywood when I first came here. I had read these storys of the orgies and the pink Cadillacs and the flaming passions that erupt on set and all of that. But actually television and most independent motion picture production people are a group of very hardworking, dedicated, sensible people. This is not to say that we don't have our moods and arguments and disagreements, and often violent ones. But I think probably no more than take place at top echelon of U.S. Steel or Prudential Life Insurance Company. Naturally people that care have strong feelings. But i've done a lot of odd jobs and I can say that the nicest group of people I have ever worked with in my life are the people in the creative levels of this industry. They're great fun to be with and great fun to work with.
Penthouse: When television first began was there much censorship ?
Roddenberry: Oh yes, there was terrible censorship. I one wrote into the script that the newspapers on the corner were held down in the wind by a tire iron. I needed that because someone was going to grab a heavy object there as a weapon in a scene. I was called in and they said, "Please take the tire iron out and make it a brick." I said, "I sort of like the tire iron." And they said, "Yes, but it really conjures the failure of an advertised product, tires. And we'd rather not have that." It actually reached that far. In those days you couldn't, in a Western, have your people "ford" a river because you might be trying to get Chevrolet as a sponsor.
Penthouse: Do you feel that television censorship is decreasing ?
Roddenberry: No, in some ares it's gotten worse. If I wanted to write a show saying I believed organized religion was evil, I couldn't. No matter how entertaining a drama I wrote, I couldn't get it on television. I couldn't get a show on television questioning whether The United States was a mistake. I cannot write a television drama commenting seriously on unions or management, or on the armament sales that we're involved in. I couldn't write --assuming that I wanted to--a pro Arab, anti-Israeli drama. Now the answers that you get are that "Yes, but we do very brave things in news and public affairs programming." What they miss is the fact that fiction affects people more strongly than news and public affairs. The reason being that drama makes you identify with what's happening. If a good writer, or many good writers, during the Vietnamese conflict had been permitted to write fictional tales of what was happening in Vietnam, making you identify and become a Vietnamese peasant whose daughter has just been burned to death by napalm or had been able to write fiction so you could feel the horrible changing of a man that produced a Calley and made you become that man and wrench your guts as it happened, i'm absolutely certain that the war would have been over two years earlier.
Penthouse: But yoy could have also had writers doing stories that said we should have stayed in Vietnam.
Roddenberry: Good. Good! I'm a Jeffersonian. I believe that if we present every possible side, the public will make the correct choice.
Penthouse: Do you think that the fact you were a writer helped you to get what you wanted out of other writers for "Star Trek" ?
Roddenberry: Oh yes. That is very much the producers job. It's no accident that most producers of television series are writers. And the reason for that is the problem of getting a shootable script ready once a week. It's the primary problem of putting on a television show. But when your producer is also a writer, he can not only talk to writers on writing terms, but also when the writer's version doesn't quite fit the characters or doesn't quite work you have the producer there., with his writing staff, to rewrite the script, polish it, change it, and make it better. We had one writer, a fine science-fiction writer, who brought in a script that was really marvelous--except it wasn't "Star Trek." For one thing, the ship didn't work the way he wanted it.And he had our engineer, little Scotty, involved in an intergalactic dope smuggling ring and things like that. Finally, when I couldn't get it rewritten the way I wanted itfrom the writer, I rewrote it myself. For a long time that splendid writer refused to speak to me because I had rewritten his masterpiece. And it was very close to a masterpiece. Since then he's become involved in production himself and he understands why it becomes necessary. And i'm happy to say that we're now friends again. But you do lose a certain amount of friends.
Penthouse: You said that in this writer's script, "The ship didn't work the way he wanted it to." Is this why it was necessary to to write the Star Trek Guide ?
Roddenberry: Yes. We had such a unique format, such a special format, that we became tired of having to explain what the starship was, andall of that. So we wrote up a writers guide to answer all the questions we could think of. Interestingly, this has since become a best-seller--tens of thousands of copies have been sold.
Penthouse: How did you attract famous science-fiction wrters like Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, and others ?
Roddenberry: They say the to pilots that we'd done and the agreed that it was the first time that science fiction had been properly put on a television tube, so they were anxious to be part of the first. You know, science fiction is quite a lovely form of writing, and done well it can be very exciting. Of course there's been a lot of crap in science fiction. I always remember Ted Sturgeon's statement when he joined us here to write for "Star Trek." Some friend of his said, "Ted, how can you possibly write for television? Don't you know that 90 percent of television is crap?" Ted looked back at him and sai, "Ninety percent of everything is crap."
Penthouse: Did you ever get any script ideas from science-fiction writers which were too bizarre to use?
Roddenberry: Yes, yes. We had many ideas we thought that our audience really could not identify with. And sometimes they were impossible to do for other reasons, budget. One brilliant science-fiction writersuggested that the Enterprise land on a strange-looking planet, and every now and then a hole would open up and go "gulp" like like that and one of the crewmen would just disappear, be sucked out of sight. And what they finally discover, after they lose quite a few people, is that this planet is really one giant organism and what it's doing is eating these flies that are crawling around on it. And the writer said that at the end of the story Captain Kirk and Spock would have to devise a way to make the planet disgorge the people that it had eaten. And we said, "Well, what are you going to call this episode?' and the writer said, "Vomit" I think we told him that we couldn't do it because we just didn't have a sufficient budget to build the kind of landscape that would gobble people up!
Penthouse: Why do you think "Star Trek" appealed to so many intelligent young people?
Roddenberry: First of all, we lived in a time in which everyone, and particularly young minds, are aware that we face huge troubles ahead. There are many people saying, "I doubt it we'll make it through the next twenty or thirty years." And indeed, if you read the newspapers it seems so. "Star Trek" was a rare show that said, "Het, it's not all over. It hasn't all been invented. If we're wise, why the human adventure is just beginning." And this is a powerful statement to young-minded people, to think that the explorations and discoveries and challenges ahead of us are greater than anything in the past. I think also "Star Trek" was unusual in that it was about something. "Star Trek" took points of viwe on tolerance, points of view against the petty nationalism that's destroying our planet. It talked about meaningful things. And I think the audiences are a lot brighter than the networks believe. I think that the audience does like to have their mind challenged. I think that since "Star Trek" came along there have been shows that have done that. "All in the Family" has challenged people's minds, talking about bigotry and so on. Thirdly, I think the reason for the popularity of "Star Trek" is a really old-fashioned sort of reason. "Star Trek" came along at a time in which most television leads were anti-heros. On "Star Trek" we decided to go for real heroes in an old-fashioned sense, people whose word was their bond, who believed that there were things more important in life than personal security or comfort. That, indeed there are some things worth risking your life for, even dying for if necessary. As a result, our principal characters were ones about whom a person could say, "Hey, i'd like to be like that." Or, "I'd like my children to be like that." And it seems to me that possibly the greatest hunger there is in the world today is for heroes to admire and emulate. When I grew up it was much simpler, it was the president of The United States. But we don't even have that left. One reason I don't object to the "Star Trek" fan phenomenon is the fact that if there's got to be some show that people want to model their lives after, or point to for their children, i'd much rather they do it out of this show than some limited show that is saying that all doctors are Jesus Christ, or if we just let our police have more guns we could solve the crime problem.
Penthouse: In 'Star Trek" you seemed to have all your political ideals coming from the alien. Spock, who seemed to consider all human problems objectively.
Roddenberry: Well that wasn't the aim of Spock. The reason for the creation of the three main characters--Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy, and Mr. Spock--was that one thing you don't have in film literature that you do have in novels is steam of consciousness. In a novel you can get inside the character's mind and you can read, "He thinks, 'Well should I do this or that, and there's this to say on this side and there's something else to say on the other side.' " So in "Star Trek" the Captain would say, "Which way shall we face up to this threat?" And Spock would say, "Well, from the logical point of view we'll do this." The doctor would say, "No, but that's not really humanitarian." And the Captain would say, "As a man of action I'm bound by orders." They could have the whole discussion right there that in the novel would have been-stream of consciousness.
Penthouse: Is it true that the networks wanted originally to get rid of Spock because they thought him too strange?
Roddenberry: Yes, but I thought people would identify more colsely with Spock than with the other characters because in a real sense we all feel like strangers on a strange planet, hoping that someday we're going to reach someone. If we're fortunate in our lives, we'll make contact with three or four of these strange beings we find ourselves plunked down among. And indeed the audience did identify with him, so I proved right. But the network people I was working with at the time would not accept this reasoning. We had a great fight and they said, "All right, you can keep the guy with the ears, but keep him well in the background." After we had about ten episodes on the air, I got a call from the new vice-president out here and went to his office. He said to me, "You knoe, Roddenberry, I really don't understand what you're doing on this show because you're supposed to be a good producer and here you've got a hit with this Spock character and you've always got him in the background." I told him what his predecessor had demanded and he said, "I don't believe that anyone could be so foolish." From then on, Spock became a primary character.
Penthouse: Do you ever watch reruns?
Roddenberry: I've just begun to again, for the motion picture, but for years and years and years I hadn't seen it. As a matter of fact, I was invited to a "Star Trek" convention in New York and one of the requirements to get in was to pass a multiple-choice test on "Star Trek" trivia. The name of Captain Kirk's brother, Spocks uncle who saved from death by what man, and all of that. I took the examination and only got four questions right out of 100.
Penthouse: Don't you feel by getting involved in such trivia you lose what the show is really all about?
Roddenberry: I think so, yes. When you make a show you usually have a research service that keep a certain continuity, so that Kirk's brother's name won't be different from the name you mentioned last year. They would even send us changes like, "Listen, to get where you say the ship is going from a planet around the star Polar-is at Warp 6, assuming you wind around the star Deneb, will take you seventeen days longer than you put in your script. So you have the choice of changing to Warp 9 or choosing another...." Our research people were remarkable people.
Penthouse: Do you ever look back at some of the shows and cringe?
Roddenberry: Oh my God, yes. I remember that night we were watching that week's episode and Mr. Spock said a line about something being one to the tenth power. Well, the tenth power of one is still one. And I thought, "How did we let that get by? There'll be a hundred letters." And indeed there were, you know.
Penthouse: You left "Star Trek" after two years. Why?
Roddenberry: The first year we were on at 8:30 P.M. on Thursdays. If we'd kept that time slot and evening I think our ratings would have slowly built because we built them all through that year. The second year, though they put us on Friday, what was it, at 9 o'clock, which was a bad time. Our ratings dropped again. We slowly, all year, fought to build them back up again. NBC was going to cancel us and then the fans protested, had marches all over the country, sent in over a million letters, and they put us on for a third year, but then they gave us Friday at ten o'clock, which is even worse. But it was the first time the fans had ever forced a network to keep a show on the air. But I went to the network and said, "If you'll give us a decent time slot, i'll come back and personally produce the show." I was at the time executive producer. "And not only that, I will guarantee to work as i've never worked before to really make the show a hit." And they said, "Fine, We'd like you to come back and oversee it. Become the producer again and we'll give you Monday at seven," I believe it was. A great time slot. And so I proceeded to prepare for the next season. But they began to line up their schedules, a show came along called "Laugh-In" that they felt they had a big bid on, and so they said, ""We're going to put 'Laugh-In' there and we're going to give you Friday night at ten." Well I knew this was death for the show. When you bargain with a network you have to use the only clout you have; the only single thing I had was agreeing to personally produce the show. And so on, in an attempt to force the to give us some time period that would work, I said, " I will not personally produce a show if you put it on Friday night at ten o'clock. There's just so much labor and effort and ultimate disappointment. If you do that I will stay executive producer. And, in fact, knowing it's going to die, i'll be spending part of my time lining up what i'm going to do in the following year." As it turned out, the network elected to keep us on at that time. And having made this threat, I felt that I had to stay true to my word, otherwise how could I, in the future, ever again make a bargain from any position of strength? It turned out it wasn't such a position of strength because they left it there.
Penthouse: What compromises did you have to make to get the show on the air?
Roddenberry: I would have like to have the crew 50 percent men, 50 percent woman. But you must go back to the fact that you must attract and hold a minimum of eighteen million people. There's no point in striking a great blow for women's lib, or for any other thing, and not getting the show on the airor not being able to keep it on the air. So what you do is you go as far as you can go, and then you try and infiltrate the rest. Now this doesn't mean that you give in on everything. There are certain principles that I have and that other writers have that they will not violate even to get a show on the air. I don't like too much violence. I refuse to have the future run by The United States of America because I don't think that's the way it will be. I refuse to have an all lily-white, Anglo-Saxon crew. And I think if they said, "This ship really has to be an instrument of the CIA of the future, of keeping the galaxies safe for democracy," I certainly would have said, "You can shelve the whole project."
Penthouse: Do you think you propagandized on your show?
Roddenberry: Well, yes. All writers propagandize. That's what writing, essentially, is about. We were constantly talking about moral issues. Don't forget that our monsters were never the monsters of bad sci-fi. They were always motivated beings who might be ugly, but had beauty inside of them. We were constantly saying, "Because something looks different doesn't mean that it's bad. Or because other people have a different lifestyle doesn't mean they're wrong." If there was one theme in all of "Star Trek" it was that the glory of our universe is its infinite combinations of diversity. That all beauty comes out of it's diversity. What a terrible, boring world it would be if everyone agreed with everyone else. And if there weren't different shapes and colors and ideas. When we are truly wise-and my test for a wise human is when they take a positive delight when someone says, "I disagree with you because......" My God, what an opportunity this opens for dialogue, discussion, learning.
Penthouse: You're currently working on a film version of "Star Trek." How will it be similar to the show?
Roddenberry: We'll be using the same characters and the same actors. Also, i'd like to keep a PG rating. There's no point in just arbitrarily doing a film that would cut out millions of ticket sales. I personally think that sex is an exciting and very, very humorous thing. I think that the possible variations of it throughout a galaxy have got to make a very exciting and very funny film. But I won't be doing it on this one.
Penthouse: You've said that you felt that "Star Trek" was a very optimistic show. Are you still that optimistic in the 70's about the future of mankind?
Roddenberry: Yes, but I think that if we have an earth of the "Star Trek" century, it will not be ab unbroken, steady rise to that kind of civilization. We're in some very tough times. Our twentieth-century technological civilization has no guarentees that it is going to stay around for a long time. But I think man is really an incredible creature. We've had civilizations fall before and we build a somewhat better one on the ashes every time. And i'd never consider the society we depicted in "Star Trek" necessarily a direct, uninterrupted out-growth of our present civilization, with its heavy emphasis on materialism. I think But my optimism is not for our society. It's for our essential ingredient in humankind. And I thinkwe humans will rebuild and, if necessary, we'll lose another civilization and rebuild again on top of that until slowly, bit by bit, we'll get there.
Penthouse: Do you think future space missions will be as eventful as they were on "Star Trek"?
Roddenberry: I think that absolutely true stories of missions in the future would probably be, from the dramatic point of view, much less exciting than "Star Trek" episodes. One of the reasons that the public became rather bored with the moon landings was because they were so scientifically well thought out, well executed, that there just seemed to be little chance of danger. The astronauts were such wonderful, intelligent, decent men, you knew you were never going to see any quarrels between them. But let's suppose you had a NASA mission to the moon and you had a crew of two men and one woman and you knew that both men are in love with this woman and they secretly would like to be the first people to fornicate in space. I guarantee you that you will have the highest-rated moon mission that ever was. You can have those things happen in a sci-fi story. You can't in reality, unhappily.
You know we never portrayed the "Star Trek" century as a century of perfection. We still had things to learn, we still were trying to solve things, and one of the things we were trying to solve was: is there any way we can reach hopeless maniac murder cases--the Charles Mansons of that time.
Penthouse: You were talking before about how you were against excessive violence on television.
Roddenberry: I'm not against violence. I think violence is a part of our life and our world. I'm against its being used for violence's sake, improperly motivated and improperly depicted. I am not against depicting a fight between two men in which one man gets hit in the mouth by the other man because that is part of the life we lead and that is a dramatic subject and can be part of a statement you're making. What I am against is the fact that in a typical Western a guy gets hit in the mouth and he reels back and he hits the other guy in the mouth and they go at it. I know from my own life, when a large man hits another man full in the mouth with his fist, teeth are going to break, lips are going to be cut open, and I think if this happened the ugliness of it would tend to eliminate violence.
Penthouse: Where do you think mankind is heading?
Roddenberry: There's a theory I have that i've been making notes on for a couple of years now and intend to write a book on it sometime in the future. You often hear the question, "I wonder what the next dominant species will be?" I think that completely unnoticed by practically all people is the fact that the next dominant species on earth has already arrived and has been with us for some time. And this is a species that I call socio-organism. It first began to make its appearance when men started to gather together in tribal groups, and then city-states, and more lately in nations, giant corperations, and so on. The socio-organism is a living organism that is made up of individual cells--which are human beings. In other words the United States of America is a socio-organism. It is made up of 200 million cells, many of them become increasingly specialized just as the cells in our body do. Furnish food, take away waste products, or the nerves--the sight, the thinking, the planning. Your local PTA is also a small socio-organism. General Motors and ITT are socio-organisms. The interesting thing about this new creature is that unlike all the past life forms, one cell in a socio-organism can be a member of several of these socio-organisms. Also, they do not have to live in physical proximity with each other as in our bodies. It sounds a rather foolish sci-fi thing to say that General Motors is a living organism. But if you take a few steps back and view it from this point of view, you begin to discover that the evolution of this socio-organism almost exactly parallels everything we know about Darwinian evolution.
Briefly, Darwinian evolution is fairly generally accepted, that the first life forms on earth were individual cells floating on the warm soup seas of the time. Finally, through chance and other factors, groups of these cells discovered that by being gathered togethere they could get their food more efficiently, protect themselves, and become dominant over the single-cell amoebas. With humans, exactly the same thing happened. More and more individual units began to get more and more specialized. As it became more complex, with more and more highly specialized units, the creature became more and more powerful, was capable of protecting itself, taking care of its individual cells. This is a process of accumulating interdependence. The frightening thing about viewing humankind now, this way, is that the socio-organisms are really becoming more dominant than the individual. In Red China they are teaching the very lessons that our bodies have, over the centuries, taught to its cells--that we can no longer exist for ourselves. We must exist for the whole. But you can see the same thing in the United States. People now live the corporate morality. If I join a corperation, my duty is to the corperation. If the corperation says lie, cheat, steal, move here, do that, I must do it because my duty is to the whole. So if indeed civilization is following the laws of Darwinian evolution, you can predict ahead a few centuries or a few dozen or hundred centuries, until a time in which the independent individual will have totally vanished and this planet will be inhabited by totally specialized cells who function as part of these giant, living things. The great battle and great decision we humans face is whether to let this continue until we become faceless, totally interdependent organisms. Whether this is goood or bad I don't know. You might, if it were possible, talk to a cell of my heart and say, "Look cell, are you happy?" It seems to have adapted well. Maybe this is the way it suppose to be. Maybe there is some form of mass mind, mass consciousness, when a socio-organism reaches its final form, and we will be part of it and perfectly happy to be part of it. There may be contentments and happiness in this that we presently can't visualize. I fear it because I can't visualize it being better than remaining a free individual. I also fear the fact that is I remain, and insist on remaining totally independent and free, that the way things are going I am to be treated as a cancer cell by the socio-organisms around me, which will find it necessary to eradicate me because I endanger the organism.
Penthouse: What is one's purpose in this socio-organism? Just to survive?
Roddenberry: No. My purpose... that's a hard question. I'll try to answer it. My purpose is to live out whatever my function may be as a part of the whole that is God. I am a piece of Him. I believe that all intelligence is a part of the whole and it may be a great cyclical thing in which we have to go on, evolving, perfecting, until we reach the point where we are God, so that we can create ourselves so that we know we existed in the first place.
Penthouse: Which socio-organism do you see as the most threatening?
Roddenberry: I think television is one of the most dangerous forces in our lives today. Because once most people, and certainly most literate people, learned about their word and formed their opinions and patterned their lives largely out of what they read that was published in books. The system of books was a fine system in its uncensored state. Any author could write about anything and you had a choice to buy it or not, depending upon whether you wanted to read it or agreed. But the insidious is not at all to convey ideas to people and to disseminate information--the purpose of television is to sell a product. It could also become very much opiate, a much stronger and more efficient opiate of the masses than religion ever was. I sat in a meeting many years ago where one of the heads of sydication was talking to some other sydicators. They were discussing the sales of programs in Africa. At that time Africa had newly emerging states in turmoil. And this gentleman said something that chilled me. He said, "Don't give me the armies of Africa; I don't need the control of the governments. You give me television in Africa for ten years I will own the continent."
Penthouse: What is happening to television as a piece of mechanical equipment?
Roddenberry: I think there is little doubt that we're probably on the threshhold of a whole new revolution in telecommunications. We are now experimenting with mating television sets with print-out devices, think of TV mated with a Xerox-type machine in which probably our newspapers will ultimately be delivered. It's a much more efficient system. The minute you put the newspaper to bed electronically, you can then push a button and any house that subscribes to the service can have the thing rolled right out of the TV set. We're also experimenting, in some cities already, with mating television with simple computers and the home will be run by a home-computing feature. You'll do your billing on it, your banking, probably a great part of your shopping. I think it is inescapable that we mate TV with reproducing devices, that it will become our postal system of the future, almost certainly our telephone or videophone. So I see television going in either of two directions. One is that it can become that opiate we fear. Or, used properly, it can be a way for all people, everywhere, to have access to all the recorded knowledge of all humanity.
END.
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