Was Gene Roddenberry an easy person to work with?

Gene, no. He was a silver-tongued devil. He would tell you exactly what you wanted to hear whether there were three thousand people in the audience or two people in the room. He was an absolute charmer but he wasn't a great manager, so if something had to be done that wasn't nice, like firing someone or whatever, he'd have his lawyer do it.

He just wasn't a good manager. He'd tell you, "I want it this way," and then you'd go out of the meeting and tell people, "This is what Gene said he wants." Then someone would go in and check, "Gene, David said you wanted this," and Gene would say, "No, no, David can't speak for me, this is the way."

I left because I recognised that we were not in a working situation where the quality of the show was most important. And I wanted to be on a show like the original Star Trek the year that Gene L Coon was running [it]. There was a guy there who loved story-telling so much he didn't care who brought in the story, how old you were, what you looked like if you could come up with an answer to the story problem.

Gene L Coon one time handed me a story problem and said, "We've got fifteen pages of script, how do we cut it?" The episode was I, Mudd. I said "You can't do this because Scottie didn't believe it in the first season, but you've got all these really strong robots, so they just beam up and grab everybody and beam them down. You don't even need to show it, you just have an android walk in and say, 'We've completed beaming down the crew of the Enterprise.'"

Gene L'Coon's jaw dropped and he said, "My god, you've just solved in one line of dialogue what we haven't been able to solve in fifteen pages of script." I realised then that I did have some kind of story-telling skill. That was the point at which I realised I was starting to think like a script writer. What can you put on the screen that doesn't cost you money?

Because I got away with that one I said, "Let's take identical twins and photograph them so that we can show six beautiful robots all identical, and we'll put all these numbers, five hundred of them. " He said, "That's a funny idea, let's go for it."

Without Gene L Coon there, without any moderating force, Rodenberry would forget from one moment to the next what he would decide. My frustration was that he was never willing to recognise anyone else's idea. He always had to make it up himself, so he'd throw out a good idea just so he could put something in. Sometimes what he put in wasn't better, sometimes it was pretty bad from a story-telling point of view and it was very depressing, [and] very distressing to all of us, for several reasons.

We loved Gene enormously, we would have thrown ourselves on hand grenades for him, but clearly somewhere along the line he'd forgotten how to write. Gene was a great visionary and a great figurehead, a great spokesman, a great leader, but not a good manager. The reason [the Original] Star Trek worked [was] because he had good managers working for him.

On the new one, he was afraid to have anyone else manage for him and the result was that that show was actually in chaos for the first two years, and that's why they promoted him to executive whatever and Rick Berman took over. Rick Berman's an excellent manager. Some people don't like his storytelling direction, but he's an excellent manager.