Edward Gross > Quotes

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“I think a franchise is definitely showing its fatigue when you do an evil twin story.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross

“Among the best elements of Star Trek since the original series have been characters that Gene Roddenberry believed held a mirror up to humanity.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“And Star Trek is not an action TV series. It’s about a lot more than that,”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“When Star Trek is hitting its stride and doing what it’s supposed to do, it can be very provocative, but because it’s reaching so high and trying to live up to its own expectations, it fails more than most shows.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“To some people, The Beatles are just Paul McCartney’s band before Wings.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“With Star Trek, Gene conceived a vision of the future that was unashamedly optimistic: effectively a blueprint for what humanity could become should it eventually succeed in evolving beyond its superstitious, xenophobic adolescence. The show celebrated and glorified the virtues of human ingenuity, scientific advancement, and moral progress. It’s a vision that, to me, is sorely lacking in today’s entertainment landscape. In our era of Hunger Games–flavored dystopian science fiction, there is a conspicuous absence of such worthy models for the future. This should be cause for some concern.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“That could be a nice bonus to our incredible integrity-filled decision to keep him alive at the end.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“A future where people worked together and utilized science and reason and logic to try and solve problems, instead of just blowing things up.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“There was one thing the Star Trek movies did well, and that’s the action sequences always had something going on and were character motivated.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam, and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by, and it did. It apparently went right over the censors’ heads, but all the fourteen-year-olds in our audience knew exactly what we were talking about. The power you have is in a show like Star Trek, which is considered by many people to be a frothy little action-adventure; unimportant, unbelievable, and yet watched by a lot of people. You just slip ideas into it.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“MICHAEL PILLER As soon as I started, I said, “I need to see every script, every abandoned story, and every submitted piece of material that’s sitting around, because I have to have something to shoot next week.” Somebody gave me a script called “The Bonding,” by a guy named Ron Moore who was about to go into the Marines, and it was a very interesting story about a kid whose mother goes down on an away mission and gets killed. The kid is obviously torn apart by the death of his mother, and seeing how much he’s suffering, aliens provide him with a mother substitute. The writing was rough and amateurish in some ways, but I thought it had real potential to tell an interesting story. I went to Gene and pitched him the story, and he said it didn’t work. I asked him why, and he said, “Because in the twenty-fourth century, death is accepted as a part of life, so this child would not be mourning the death of his mother. He would be perfectly accepting of the fact that she had lived a good life, and he would move on with his life.” I went back to the writing staff and told them what Gene had said, and they sort of smirked and said, “Ah-ha, you see? Now you know what we’ve been going through.” I said, “Wait a minute, let’s think about it. Is there any way we can satisfy Gene’s twenty-fourth-century rules and at the same time not lose the story that we have to shoot on Tuesday?” I finally said, “Look, what if this kid has in fact been taught all of his life not to mourn the death of his loved ones, because that’s what society expects of him? He’s taught that death is a part of life, so he loses his mother and doesn’t have any reaction at all. That’s what Gene is telling us has to happen. Well, that is freaky, that is weird, and that’s going to feel far more interesting on film than if he’s crying for two acts. What if the aliens who feel guilty about killing his mother provide him with a mother substitute and the kid bonds with this mother substitute, and it’s Troi who goes to Picard and says, “We have a problem? The kid is not going to give up this mother substitute until he really accepts and mourns the death of his real mother, and we’re going to have to penetrate centuries of civilization to get to the emotional core of this kid in order to wake up his emotional life.” So the show becomes a quest for emotional release and the privilege of mourning. Well, Gene loved the idea. It respected his universe and at the same time turned a fairly predictable story on its ear, and it became a far better story and episode than it would have if Gene had simply signed off on the original pitch. SANDRA”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“I used to call it “Roddenberry’s Box,” and I loved being in it, because the restrictions forced us to be more creative than going into the routine melodramas that we often see in SF television.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“And Uhura stopping an important mission to bitch at her boyfriend I thought was insulting to everyone and not just the women.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“Well, Gene Roddenberry was also a fan of drama, so I think he would have agreed with that up-front.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“The Star Trek conception is a bottle, and into that bottle you can pour different vintages, but you’re not allowed to change the shape of the bottle.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“I think you would have gotten tired of that after a while, because it was an external mystery and you can only appease the audience for so long and then you start building traps for yourself.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years

“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.”
― Edward Gross, Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Wars