Happy Birthday, Gene Roddenberry

August 19, 1921 is the birth date of Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, the screenwriter and producer best known as the creator of Star Trek. Trained as a pilot during the Second World War, and after the war worked for Pan Am. In 1947, he was piloting a plane that crashed in the Syrian desert, and afterwards left flying to pursue his dream of being a writer. He moved to Los Angeles and got a job on the LAPD. He became a speechwriter for the Chief of Police, which led to him advising television productions, which led to him writing scripts for different shows. Roddenberry went onto create The Lieutenant, about Marines at Camp Pendleton, which lasted one season, running into problems because of a script involving racial prejudice. His next project was Star Trek, of which I was one of the millions of people obsessed by the show. Roddenberry tended to rewrite scripts, which led to problems with writers. Afterwards Roddenberry wrote a film for Roger Vadim (Pretty Maids All in a Row), wrote a number of pilots that didn’t go to series (Genesis II, Planet Earth, The Questor Tapes, Spectre) and worked on Star Trek: The Animated Series, attempted to revive Star Trek before launching the feature films and then The Next Generation. Admittedly Roddenberry managed to anger almost everyone working on TNG, and the show became significantly better once he stopped having much to do with the show. It’s hard to underestimate the influence of his optimistic humanist vision of the future and what was possible.