D.C. Fontana is a pioneer and legend in genre television writing. Her incredible career spans nearly forty different series. She was not only one of the first writers on the original Star Trek TV series, but worked closely with Gene Roddenberry as a primary architect of the show. She has also scribed for such acclaimed programs as Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Six Million Dollar Man, Streets of San Francisco, and many more. Mrs. Fontana also co-wrote the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Encounter at Farpoint.”

JOSH: Leading up to Star Trek, talk about first getting into writing.

DC: I came out to Los Angeles in 1959 after I got my Associates in Arts Degree. I was a very good secretary and worked for Revue, which had just taken over Universal. I was in the typing pool, and I saw an ad up on the job board for a half-hour TV show that was going into production and they needed a production secretary, so I figured I’d try. I ended up working for Sam Peeples and Frank Price on the series Overland Trail. And that only lasted about thirteen episodes; and then Sam had created the series The Tall Man, which was a half-hour TV Western. We were in the middle of a writer’s strike when we started that series. Sam knew that I had been writing since I was eleven years old. Since grade school and high school, I had been writing these adventures and horror stories that featured all my friends as the heroes.

I thought of writing novels at first, but then I got interested in writing TV; and Sam knew this and he said, “When the strike is over, if you bring me a good story, I will buy it.” So I had about three months to think about it; and I knew the show since I was on the series, so when I brought in the story, he bought it. That was my first sale in TV, and that was in 1960.

JOSH: How old were you?

DC: Twenty one. A little later on, I sold another story. And then I came up with another one, my third.  And I said to Sam, “This time I want to write the teleplay.” And he said okay. Because by then I had read enough of the Tall Man scripts. I knew how they worked. I had my stories, so I just wrote the teleplay. I wrote two more of them for that series. So I sold two stories and two teleplays. In the meantime, Sam got me an assignment to rewrite an episode of Shotgun Slade, so I did that.

At that time, Sam went to MGM, and I went with him. He wrote a movie, and it never got produced; and he was going to move to another studio, but I stayed there. So he went his way and I went mine, and I was working in the typing pool again. And I saw an ad for a production secretary on a series called The Lieutenant. So I went in, and it was for the Associate Producer, but Gene Roddenberry was the creator and executive producer of the show.

In the meantime, I was being turned down to write for all kinds of shows.  People would say, “I don’t know if Dorothy can write this.” Up to that moment, I had put Dorothy C. Fontana on my scripts. So I said, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to write a script for Ben Casey, which was a series also on our lot, and I’m going to write D.C. Fontana on the front page.” So I submitted it, they bought and produced it. And that was my first script as D.C. Fontana.

JOSH: Did they have any idea that you were a woman?

DC: Not when I turned it in.

JOSH: So when they called you in to buy it, what was the look on their faces?

DC: It wasn’t that surprising. It was like, “Oh, you did a good script for us. Let’s go.”

JOSH: But there was a stigma against women at that time?

DC: I wouldn’t say that. I would say that some people didn’t want women writing for their shows. There were some women who were very good. Margaret Armen was very good. She wrote a million things. Leigh Brackett wrote movies. There were very few women writing action/adventures at that time. Usually, if you were a woman, you were writing a rom-com, or day-time TV, or comedy with your male partner. There were very few of us writing solo.

JOSH: Go deeper into your transition from The Lieutenant into Star Trek.

DC: Well, Gene was the producer and creator or The Lieutenant. But in late October / November, Gene’s secretary had a horrible appendicitis attack and was in the hospital recovering for two months. So I moved up, and somebody filled in for me. I became Gene’s secretary and got to know him better.

I didn’t write for The Lieutenant. But when that series was ending, Gene called me into his office, and he handed me about 15 pages.  He said “Read that, give me your opinion.” And it was Star Trek. That’s what it was called from the beginning. Star Trek. That I know of. I read it, and I came back the next day; and I said, “Who plays Spock?” And he pushed Leonard Nimoy’s picture across the desk at me. Leonard had done a guest star appearance on Gene’s previous series. And coincidentally, Leonard was the guest star on the very first episode of TV that I sold to The Tall Man.  I had known him since then, and I had chatted with him on set, and he was very nice to a newbie writer, so we kept in touch.

So when Roddenberry said that he was the guy who was going to play Spock, I said, “Hallelujah, we’re good!”

We didn’t know who would play the Captain then, but he knew who would play Spock. From there, he took it around town and finessed it a bit more. And we finally sold it, where we did, over at Desilu.

JOSH: What was Gene like? In the beginning and throughout your relationship?

DC: He was a very nice guy. He gave opportunities to new writers, he really did. He was willing to try new actors.

JOSH: At that time, science fiction television was very marginalized. It wasn’t until fairly recently that it emerged into mainstream entertainment. Did you feel that ghetto existed then?

DC: Yes. But, science fiction wasn’t nascent in my view. There was Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, hard science fiction series that were in existence back then. And that’s what we were trying to do. We were trying to do hard science fiction, in essence, real science fiction. Not the monster of the week, which we despised. We had very few monsters, as you know. The one story that was always fun, was when Gene Coon became Producer and Roddenberry moved up to Executive Producer. We had a wonderful stuntman “monster guy” who came into the office and said, “I’d like to show you something.” I went out, as did the two Genes, and here was this kind of lump of plastic, or whatever it was. We were looking at it; and a chicken, a dead chicken, was laid out. The guy climbed into the suit and goes humping along in it, over the chicken, which disappears; and out of it the back of the creature comes chicken bones. And Gene Coon said “I’ve got to do something with that!” Which led to the creature in the episode “The Devil in the Dark.”

The difference was that it wasn’t a creature meant to just kill people, it was a mother defending its young. That’s what makes Star Trek.

JOSH: Pathos...  So the show was coalescing from the beginning, and eventually Gene asked you to be a staff writer on the series? Was that your first staff position?

DC: Yes, but first I was Gene’s production secretary. And we had John D.F. Black, who recently passed away. He was the first story editor, but I was writing scripts for the show. I had written two of the first thirteen episodes. And Roddenberry was not pleased with the new guy who had taken over as story editor. He said, “I’m giving you this script,” which turned out to be This Side of Paradise, which was my title. And he said, “If you can rewrite this to my satisfaction and NBC’s – you will be my story editor.” I had written two scripts for Star Trek by then. Charlie X and Tomorrow is Yesterday. So I took the script home, and it was a love story for Sulu and the danger was from spores which were in a cave, which kind of bobbled up and down and infected you. The solution was simple, just don’t go in the cave! I went into Gene’s office and said, “As much as I love George Takei, he’s wonderful. This is a love story for Spock because the spores get into you and reveal your deeper emotions. This is a story for Spock.”

He said, “Go write it.” And I wrote it to his and NBC’s satisfaction, and I got the Story Editor position. This was approximately September or early October of 1966.

JOSH: Prior to that happening, you had already been writing. But there was a lot of world building that had to take place to make Star Trek work. That 15-page document–

DC: Gene expanded it to much more.

JOSH: You were in on those early creative days. Could you talk about some of the ideas that were rejected that Star Trek could’ve turned into. I’m sure there were iterations that your team did not go forward with.

DC: It was Gene Roddenberry all the way. John D.F. Black, he did some wonderful stuff, like The Naked Time. He added a few things that had to do with characters.

JOSH: But you had to make up rules, and technologies, and worlds, right?

DC: Sure. At the end of the season, I went down to the set and met with all the actors. I said, “You’ve been living in these characters’ skin for a year. Tell me what you know about them.”  They did, I made notes and took it back and put it in the bible. So that incoming writers knew.

In the first season, we were finding our way. If we found something that worked for Kirk, or Spock or McCoy, we used it. One of the things that grew was the kind of Spock / McCoy digs at one another – the way that they went at one another. The brinkmanship. That grew out of one or two things in the script. So we decided to use it and used it some more. Actors loved it. It gave them a chance to get away from the seriousness of the show. We knew we were in a good place because after the first week of being on the air, we got a sack of mail. Second week we were on the air, we got three sacks of mail. And the third episode we had on the air, we got a TON of mail.

We had so much mail, we couldn’t handle it. It had to go to a fan answering company. If it was general, or specific to an actor or Gene, it came back to us. But most of the time, someone else was handling it. Our fans were writing to us. Remember this was 1966; you didn’t have email, or any of this instant communication stuff. Sometimes people would call, and we’d talk to them. Mostly it was letters that said despite what your ratings are telling you, you have an audience out there and they love you.

And it was a lot of science fiction fans. In part because we brought in a lot of science fiction writers in on that first season.

JOSH:  The series, outside of the special effects, and the dynamic of the characters and the stories, the format itself, as an adventure show, was also quite innovative. Gene had cracked a lot. Of course, there were elements of other shows, but he and the writers had invented so much.  To sell a series like that, Gene must have been a very savvy businessman.

DC: Yes, and no. He knew the TV business in terms of being a writer-producer. But in terms of straight business, not so much. We had NBC to help us there. Fortunately, they were aware of the mail coming in on our doorstep.

JOSH: Were you versed in science fiction prior to the series, were you a fan?

DC: To an extent. Before we started, Gene had me read between seven and ten science fiction anthologies. A lot of them were from individual writers or a group of them. But the thing was, he asked me to look for stories we could use in Star Trek. I knew the show. There were a few that we pulled out and used elements of, but I don’t think we ever bought any of them actually. We did find writers that were telling the kind of stories that we wanted to see. Those were the ones we invited to come onto the show.

JOSH:   People like Theodore Sturgeon, George Clayton Johnson and Harlan Ellison ... Why do you think Star Trek, to this day, is such a hit? Why is it so hard to crack an optimistic science fiction series, so many are dystopic. Why haven’t we seen another series with as good an idea behind it?

DC: Well, for one thing it depends on who’s buying what. Maybe they don’t want that kind of show out there. Maybe people aren’t coming up with that kind of show. It was kind of funny that our Nielson rating was okay, not great, but those letters that came in were telling us, yes, you are doing it right. We’re fans, we love it, do more. The first New York convention, which I think was in 1970 – the show had gone off the air. Roddenberry was invited, as was I and the actors.  They expected 500 people at the hotel. The first day they got 1500. People were going to an SF convention like they hadn’t before. They wanted Star Trek.

Now, Roddenberry didn’t try to work on new a Star Trek until 1973 when we got the offer to do the animated series. Because people weren’t offering to do Star Trek again.  But we did the animated show the way we did Star Trek: The Original Series. Again we had a writer’s strike, but live-action writers could do animated scripts without breaking Guild rules and having to join the Animation Writers Guild. So we got regular Star Trek writers to write animation. The first thing we told them that this was Star Trek. The animated show was 22 episodes, and it was still well received.

JOSH: Talk about the writers who worked on the original series. What was it like working with Harlan Ellison? “City on the Edge of Forever” is widely considered the best episode of the series, and I know that Harlan was very cantankerous because he wanted it his way.

DC: He turned in the outline, which was approved. He told a story that Gene and I liked. And then it was — We need the script ... We need the script... WE. NEED. THE. SCRIPT. It was one of the last ones we filmed that year. We told him to come into the studio, we would give him an office, just come and write the script. Then we found out that he was taking trips to the set and talking to the actors and not writing the script.

JOSH: Which is why he has all those pictures with the actors!

DC: Yes. We finally had to literally lock him in a room. The first time, he was able to open the window and slide out. So we nailed the windows shut. I’m not kidding. Locked the door, trapping him, and said, “WRITE!” Finally, we got the script.

JOSH: How did he not get fired from that? Any other writer would’ve been fired for that kind of behavior. But he was good.

DC: Yes. We made some changes to his script.

JOSH: And he was pissed.

DC: Yes. Gene asked me to make some changes, so I did. Gene Coon did a rewrite on it and made some changes, and Roddenberry did the final polish. But the story is still Harlan’s story, it’s still his characters.  It ends the way he wanted it to. There’s a whole book about it. I wrote the intro to it. It was just a matter of ... sometimes, Harlan just got off track a little bit. It was the only time he wrote for Star Trek.

JOSH: Why?

DC: He didn’t like that experience. So he never came back

JOSH: But you wanted him back.

DC: We would’ve liked to have him back.  “City on the Edge” is still a really good, really good script. One of the key moments was the moment Kirk cannot save the woman, and he pulls McCoy back so he can’t save her either. And it’s just this moment where a woman who I really cared about died because I couldn’t do anything, and I couldn’t do anything because if I saved her, history would’ve changed.

Ted Sturgeon was good to work with. He delivered on time and what we asked of him. His script was refined, not because of his writing, but because the characters had changed a little bit, and we just adjusted accordingly. Not the story, but for character and the relationships, etc.

I stayed onto the third season. The reason was I didn’t want to be story editor any longer, but I wanted to continue to write scripts for Star Trek. I had a deal to write three of them, I believe. I wrote one; and I went in to talk to the producers, and I wanted to tell the story of McCoy’s daughter, Joanna. She was a nurse who just graduated from school and gotten her registration and was joining Starfleet. She was to be on the Enterprise. And what does this relationship work out as?

The first thing the producer said was, “McCoy can’t have a daughter that age, he’s Kirk’s contemporary.” And I thought, “They don’t know the show.” Because we had always played it as the actors played it. Spock and Kirk were always 35-36. And McCoy was about ten years older.  He could have a daughter who was 23-24, no problem. They didn’t understand the show, so I got out of there. I turned in the two stories I had and left. Because to me that is too big an ignorance of character. You don’t know this about three key characters. You’re wrong, you won’t be true to the show.

When NBC had shifted us to Friday night, we knew the show was dead. Because of the kind of audience we had, which we knew from those letters. They were college and high school students, they were going to games and dates on Friday nights. Young married couples, young professionals, they went out on Friday nights.  That’s where our ratings really failed. And you couldn’t record it then.  It was a death sentence. We never knew who was in charge of making that decision.

JOSH: Were you involved in any of the movies?

DC: No. I heard about the proposed series because he was happy with what I did on the original  and the animated series, and we were always in touch. It was in development, but it never came into fruition because here came the movies.

Since I wasn’t considered a movie person, I was never asked to write one. And Gene did most if it anyway. In fact, Harlan and I sat next to each other during a Writers Guild showing of the first Star Trek movie. The film ends, the music is playing, Harlan stands up and says, “Star Trek – The Motionless Picture!”

JOSH: Wow, that’s Harlan, all right. Y’know, I was reading a letter by Isaac Asimov about Star Trek. Essentially, he admitted to at first being a hater of the series, until he actually watched it, and found it to be lovely.

DC: Isaac was actually a touch point for Gene for the series. Not for science, but whether or not we were impinging on any existing stories out there. Because we didn’t want to do that. And Asimov was a good advisor. He had some really great people who got the science for us in there when we needed it, in the 60’s.

JOSH: You wrote the pilot for Star Trek: The Next Generation – “Encounter at Farpoint.”  Talk about what it was like when they rebooted the series.

DC: Gene called me and invited me to dinner with his wife, Majel – and told me, “We’re thinking of creating a new Star Trek.” Because some other shows had come back like Bonanza: The Next Generation, so he felt it was time. It wouldn’t be the same cast unless they made guest appearances because he was going to pitch it far enough into the future so they wouldn’t necessarily overlap, which meant recasting and rethinking, which we did. A lot went into the discussion of what it was going to be. And we talked a lot, and Roddenberry started to put stuff down as the bible. I came up with the idea for “Encounter at Farpoint” to introduce the characters. All new characters, a new ship, a new Enterprise. Everybody was finding a new home on a new vessel and their first stop was Farpoint Station, and there’s strange stuff going on there, and we need to find out why, because the people there are a little crazed.

Interestingly enough, the first name for Jean-Luc Picard almost became Julien Picard. And I told Gene, “What are we going to call him, Julie?” I said,” Noooo.” So I came up with Jean-Luc, which worked.

JOSH: Why did Gene bring you back then, but not for the other reiterations?

DC: I don’t know. I had always been in touch with Majel, and he remembered I had done good stuff before. By then, I had built up a lot of credits.  I came up with the story and teleplay for the pilot, Roddenberry rewrote it, and included Q. Who I never liked. I like the actor, but I never liked the character. And he rewrote it and took half credit.

JOSH: Did you already know the pilot would tie into the final episodes of the series? “All Good Things” Part I and II?  Did you know that arc would exist yet?

DC: No. I was hired to be a story editor. I worked with writers. Worked on the first 13 episodes. But Roddenberry had gotten weird. He was acting strangely. Got into quarrels with people. It caused a lot of unhappiness. So I decided that I would fulfill my contract for thirteen episodes and then was out of there. I never did any more Star Trek TV after that, except for DS9, which was a separate show.  There was some indication that Roddenberry had had some small strokes, that might’ve been affecting his behavior. I remember one meeting we were in. We were in a story meeting, Roddenberry stood up, spun around and smashed into a wall. Oh, shit, that wasn’t good. We all looked away and pretended it didn’t happen.  We didn’t want to embarrass him. Clearly, something was physically wrong. And probably mentally, too. The way he was behaving was poor. He treated David Gerrold poorly, and David had helped him create and develop the show.

He created a lot of what Star Trek: The Next Generation would become, and Roddenberry gave him no credit for it. We had a fight for payment, too. Both David and I had to take it to the WGA for services that were rendered before being officially contracted, but it was not pretty. It wasn’t the good time we had on The Original Series.

Roddenberry’s lawyer was hanging in the office all the time. We had come in, and he was at one point rewriting one of the scripts. He was a lawyer, not a writer.  But he was constantly on our butts about everything.

JOSH: Looking back, do you like the series and what it became?

DC: After the initial thirteen I worked on, I haven’t watched any of it to this day.  There were also people going out to conventions and apparently taking in writers, young amateurs who had good Trek ideas. One of them wrote to me, and asked how he could get more than $1,500 for a Star Trek script? The first thing I did was copy his letter, and send it to the WGA Legal Department with a note that said, “FIX THIS!”  They were going to conventions and looping in young writers and not paying them. At the time, the fee for a script was at least 20K; and of course their name wasn’t on it and that meant no residuals, etc. They were doing a lot of shady things. It was stopped.

JOSH: What other sci-fi shows have you worked on that you enjoyed?

DC: Babylon 5, which was developed prior to DS9. Let’s say they were a lot of similarities between both series. What J. Michael Straczinki pitched initially and what came on the air for DS9...

JOSH: Is that okay to go in this interview?

DC: It’s fact. The thing was that Joe still took his idea and made it his own. He did Babylon 5 very well. In the first two seasons, I did three episodes. After that, Joe started to write them all himself. Harlan was on it and was a contributor, as were many other writers I knew. It was a darn good show. I really enjoyed working with them. They were working it way in the Valley, and weren’t disturbed by the studio that much. Every day we had a community lunch provided by Joe; and when they had to, they had community dinners. I went down and looked at the sets. Everyone was nice, cordial and pleasant.

JOSH: You’ve worked on so many TV shows – tell me, what do you think makes a great story or script?

DC: That’s a hard one. For me, I always write about a problem the characters have that is maybe complicated by outside things. I want to know about the people. I want to care about them. That’s why I want to write for a show that has interesting characters. How do they react to problems and deal with them? What do they do, how do they solve the problem? That’s the story, it’s always it for me. And even if there is SF, I still want to know all those factors. Will I care if they win or lose?  That’s what I look for in stories on TV.

JOSH: You’ve worked in many writers’ rooms –

DC: Actually, I have not. I never have. All the shows I’ve worked on have been freelance. As a matter of fact, that’s why I often have to put my head together with Jane Espenson, and ask her how a writers’ room works, because I have no idea. In fact, if I did run a room, though, I would hire freelancers because I have found that an outsider can bring in a story you never thought of, because you are so close to the material. How about this? We never thought of that! That’s why I would hire freelance writers.

JOSH: It’s interesting, because live-action television, for the most part, is now all room driven, while animation still runs quite a bit on freelance writers. Staffing seems more prevalent these days. What are you doing now?

DC: Teaching, and writing a lot. I’m writing a novelization of a screenplay we wrote. Ridley Scott’s company suggested novelizing it. Since it would mean someone else put money behind it, which would make the script more commercially viable. It’s a sci-fi idea no one else has done. It’s two-thirds done, I have to complete the last third. I also have two pilot ideas, one is for a World War I Flying Corps story, and a sci-fi series. And some screenplays circulating out there.

JOSH: Are you still interested in writing Star Trek or other mediums?

DC:  I’ve written Trek novels. If someone approached me, I’d consider it.

JOSH: Looking back on your career, what do you think you’re trying to say with all the scripts you wrote?

DC: That’s a good question. I love people. The problems they get into, how they solve them. What kind of character are they? What kind of human being are you? That’s one of the main questions I try to always ask my characters.  What are your good points and bad points?  What do you do to not allow your flaws affect your life? To me it’s always about people. Yes, I care about characters and situations, but at the heart of it is people. People who win, lose and might die. It’s about the people.