William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge Page #3

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and I thought, "Oh my God,

I don't know if this is something

that anybody should be doing because it was such an iconic

thing, Star Trek at this point. "You cannot revive an

iconic series, you cannot

replace those guys." This had the markings

of some little seedy... John De Lancie:

It was both really exciting

and also, there was this thing

in my mind of going, "Ooohhhh, are we trying

to create or recreate?" Ronald D. Moore:

In the 1970's people started

saying that Gene was a visionary,

he had this utopian vision

of the future. I think that he started

to believe that and then Next Generation

became a vehicle to demonstrate this utopia. I remember he used to tell me

that L. Ron Hubbard was a friend of his

and that he went and

started a religion. Gene always thought

that if he had wanted to, he probably could have done

the same thing. Gerrold:

He would go to conventions

and he loved being the great bird of the galaxy.

Who wouldn't? He gave college lectures

for years in the 70's and tens of thousands

of people would show up

at these lectures. He was starting to believe

his own publicity. Isaac Asimov sent Gene

a copy of his book called

Asimov's Guide to the Bible. Gene got very

interested in learning

more about humanism. Shatner:

The research prior

to The Next Generation lead him to have a thesis that,

if not perfection, man was evolving

in a humanist way. In The Next Generation

he tried to impart his humanistic philosophy. Most science fiction

that we experience today is a relatively dismal view of what the future's

going to be like. Gene was obsessed with

the idea that the future

was going to be better. There was tremendous

anticipation because it was the rebirth of this

phenomenally successful series. Barry Diller had this idea

of starting a fourth network. Pike:

And he wanted to take

Star Trek and use that as the corner stone

of a new network. We had the commitment

to do the new series and we assumed it would be

a twenty-six episode commitment. Well, at the eleventh hour

they cut that to thirteen. I can't make the numbers

work at thirteen,

I need twenty-six. I'm not sure what to do here, but let me go explore

the other three networks. It was a science fiction

show and at that point in the mid eighties there was no

science fiction on television. First, I went to NBC,

to Brandon Tartikoff,

it was dismissed out of hand. I then went to ABC

and Brandon Stoddard, and he thought it was

simply a bad idea. The third meeting was with Kim

Lemasters, President of CBS

Entertainment, and he said let's do it

as a mini series. Well, that clearly

doesn't work. It is then when we went back

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