Quotes from Edward Gross

To some people, The Beatles are just Paul McCartney's band before Wings.

And Star Trek is not an action TV series. It's about a lot more than that

Among the best elements of Star Trek since the original series have been characters that Gene Roddenberry believed held a mirror up to humanity.

A future where people worked together and utilized science and reason and logic to try and solve problems, instead of just blowing things up.

Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—

Star Trek writers came in with supreme egos. I had worked with many of them before and found them, like most science-fiction writers, very unyielding to comment. Harlan [Ellison] was in a class by himself. He gave me an outline on The Mod Squad that would have cost twenty million dollars to produce.

I think a franchise is definitely showing its fatigue when you do an evil twin story.

The gentleman who plays it in the new Star Trek movies is great, but he's acting. Leonard was Spock. He was always the character.

I sympathize with the guys who went to go see The Phantom Menace and convinced themselves that it wasn't as bad as it was. Phantom Menace is worse, I would argue, than Star Trek ever was, but we were kind of in denial. There were some beautiful shots of the Enterprise and we got to see some Klingons, so it wasn't a total disaster, but in large part it was pretty boring.

I remember seeing an abstract of his rights once, and someone had actually thought of a clause that said the intensity of the musical fanfare, under Roddenberry's on-screen credit, could be no less than that of the musical fanfare when Shatner's name was on the screen.

The history of human endeavor has frequently [been] comprised of certain institutions which are based on two archetypes. There's a guy who comes along and, with a certain kind of messianic fortitude and charisma, conjures up a universe out of nothing, hot air, if you'll pardon the expression. He makes it happen. Usually, he never stays around to run it.

A lot of people said Star Trek II was such a terrific movie and had a lot of unkind things to say about Star Trek I, but I don't think they realize that Star Trek II wouldn't have been so good if someone hadn't gone boldly where no one had gone before and showed us, in effect, what not to do when it was really important.

ROD RODDENBERRY There was a great quote that D. C. Fontana said about Nichelle Nichols and having a black officer on the bridge and what my father said to that. Apparently, he would get letters from the TV stations in the South saying they won't show Star Trek because there is a black officer, and he'd say, "Fuck off, then.

We did politics awfully well. The problem with that is there may have been something to the fact that people would rather watch space monsters, enigmas, and anomalies than politics.

But one of the things I was proudest of with Deep Space Nine is that I began to realize that it takes a great deal more courage to stay and deal with problems that don't get solved than it is to go in, meet somebody, change their lives or have them teach us something, and then zoom out to the next person.

We had learned from him and from experience that stories that combine science fiction with philosophy with optimism, with a comment on social issues and an exploration of human values, are the stories that work for Star Trek.

That could be a nice bonus to our incredible integrity-filled decision to keep him alive at the end.

So when you see Captain Picard or Commander Sisko decide that logic, reason, and communication are the way to solve problems and not turn to violence, then we were telling something to our audience that needs to be said on a regular basis.

From that experience, I learned that Roddenberry's "box" forced us to be more creative and to tell stories in more interesting and different ways than we would have in any other typical universe, so I loved that box.

The reason that that episode is a bore, in my opinion, is that there is no allegory. It is on the nose. It is a fastball down the middle, and it feels preachy. Suddenly, you're not deriving the meaning from the episode, the meaning is clobbering you over the head.

The producers broke one of their own rules: Star Trek has become pop culture, but there is never pop culture within Star Trek, because it punctures the reality.

Gene would be the first to tell you it doesn't matter what alien race you're talking about, how hideous they seem to be. There are no bad aliens; each of them has a culture that must be defined, recognized, and appreciated for what it is.

A writer is thinking about what he's supposed to be doing, whether he's actually doing it or not, every waking hour. He's constantly pondering problems.

Our series was designed to have the same uplifting messages—and would deal with the same metaphorical way of approaching the future that both of Gene Roddenberry's series did previously.