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Excerpts

By David Gerrold

I have now spent more years on this planet known as "the guy who created the tribbles" than I spent wondering what I would be when I grew up; if I had known I was going to be "the guy who created the tribbles" for the rest of my life, I might have thought twice about it. When I wrote it, I just wanted to write one good Star Trek episode, just to prove I could do it. And I was deliberate about two or three things in the script. In particular, I wanted each of the ancillary characters to have something important to do, not just open hailing frequencies or fix the doubletalk generators. One of the things that I had learned in Irwin R. Blacker's screenwriting course was that "every character gets his page." I loved these characters; not just Kirk and Spock, but McCoy, Uhura, Scotty, and Chekov, too. I wanted each and every one of them to have at least two or three good pages. And I think that's one of the reasons why they all enjoyed the script so much; it was a chance to show a different side of their characters, a chance to have some fun. For me, of course, the real fun was watching the actors say the lines I had written. I had been watching them for weeks, studying the way they talked; I spent hours on each scene, listening to their voices in my head, trying to match the way they spoke in the dialog I wrote. And, of course, there was other stuff to learn, too; one day, for instance, producer Gene L. Coon pointed out to me that there were no pockets in the uniforms. "But where do they keep their money?" I asked. "We don't use money. We use credits."
Okay.... When William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and the others finally brought the dialog to life, I was thrilled; they found things in the script, ways to say the lines, things to do with the action, that made the whole thing even funnier than I had imagined. The only real disappointment for me came as a result of having written in a single line for myself. The part of Ensign Freeman. And Gene L. Coon had told me I could play the part; but then at the last moment, it didn't happen. I was too young-looking. Too skinny. So Shatner's stand-in got my line of dialog. *sigh* "The Trouble with Tribbles" was first broadcast on December 29, 1967. I had just graduated from college, and I invited all my former classmates over to my house to watch the episode with me. They watched it as an episode and had a terrific time. I watched it as a terrifying collection of production values that mostly worked, sort of, but not quite the way I had imagined it, and, oh, dear, why did they use that take instead of the other one? That's the problem with being on the soundstage; later on, when it's all put together, you can't see the show; you can only see the production of it. But my family and friends enjoyed the episode, and they congratulated me on my first professional credential, and it was otherwise a wonderful night. But I remember, quite clearly, that at one point I said, "It's only a television show. Thirty years from now, who's going to remember it?" Duh. The answer was, everybody is going to remember it! Copyright © 1996 by Diane Carey