Oscar, Where Are You? Part I
So many figures in Star Trek history have been interviewed so many times that it’s easy to forget that there are key players most of us have heard little or nothing from.
One such person was Oscar Katz, Desilu's Executive Vice President in charge of Production from April 1, 1964 until March 11, 1966 and the man who brought Gene Roddenberry to the studio with a mandate to develop new shows. His tenure at the studio was brief, but without Katz, Star Trek might never have been more than a pitch.
But where is his story?
Oscar, where are you?
Oscar Katz (born April 12, 1913; died January 3, 1996) was interviewed a few times about his contributions to Star Trek, notably for the hagiography Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry (1994), but not at length.
As such, Katz’s involvement with Star Trek is often glossed over or minimized, in part because while Gene Roddenberry and Herb Solow have told and published their versions of events, Katz’s voice remained largely unheard.
Until now.
Thanks to FACT TREK friend Bill Kobylak, we have a 43 minute recoding of Oscar Katz’s story, as told at-length in his appearance at a Star Trek convention—the first major Trek con, held in New York City on January 21, 22, and 23, 1972, only two and a half years after the show’s final curtain on NBC.[2]
So, without further ado, here’s Oscar’s version of the Star Trek story—in his own words. (This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Flier for the convention where Katz appeared. [1]
STAR TREK LIVES! Convention
Statler-Hilton Hotel, New York City, Saturday, January 22, 1972, 11 a.m.
OSCAR KATZ — THE TWO PILOTS
Isaac Asimov: […]He became Vice President in charge of Productions for Desilu Productions. At Desilu, it was Mr. Katz who first saw the possibilities of a show such as Star Trek, even after it was turned down by CBS. He gave it total support and more important, total freedom of concept and production. He is probably one of the most important people involved with the successful commission of the Federation starship Enterprise. He is highly regarded by Gene Roddenberry, as well as those who have the privilege of being associated with him. Here now, to talk about Star Trek’s two pilots, is Mr. Oscar Katz.
[Audience applause]
Oscar Katz: Thank you. I may ramble a bit, but what I’d like to do is elaborate some of the points in the first two years before Star Trek got on the air. Normally, television being as complex as it is, it takes about a year-and-a-half [between] the time a project is started until it actually gets on the air.
In the case of Star Trek, this period was a two-and-a-half year period, a year longer than is normal. I’d like to tell you some of the things that happened in that two-and-a-half year period.
Some of those touched on in the book written by Steve Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry, The Making of Star Trek. I’d like to elaborate some of the points in the book, I may contradict one or two, and may fill in one or two that aren’t mentioned at all.
In April 1964 I became Executive Vice President in charge of Production at Desilu. That’s a fancy name for the program head. Desilu had a particular problem, which was why they employed me at the time. Desilu consisted of three lots in Hollywood: Desilu Gower, Desilu Cahuenga, and a lot in Culver City called Desilu Culver, which also had a so-called backlot.
At the time I joined Desilu, the basic problem was that they had become, primarily, a rental studio. By that I mean they rented office space, stages, camera crews, etcetera. at fixed rates to various production companies for the production of television series. They only had one show of their own on the air, that was The Lucy Show. Now, some years before—six or seven years before—when Desi was running the studio, they had five, six, or seven shows that were shot on the lot that they owned. Obviously, when you own a show, you make much more money out of it than when you use your studio facilities for rental. But from the time that Desi had left the studio, they’d gone downhill in the number of shows that they owned, they had tried a number of shows that had lasted for a season [or] sometimes just half of a season. They were very anxious to get back into the business not just of renting, but of owning their own shows, and that was the job that I was presented with.
I had several handicaps. The first of which was that I was starting [on], I think it was April 2, 1964, and this was fairly late in the television development season for a year from September of the... In other words, in April of ‘64, you were developing shows for September of 1965, and this was already late into that development season. One of the handicaps that I had was a late start.
Secondly, because Desilu had become primarily a rental studio, the creative community—the writers, producers, etcetera—did not come to Desilu. Desilu wasn’t high on their list of places that they came to first because it wasn’t that active a studio in producing its own shows. So I had to establish a relationship with the creative community in a hurry, because of the late start.
Desilu President Lucille Ball & Executive Vice President in Charge of Production, Oscar Katz at the August 18, 1964 Desilu Board Meeting. (Los Angeles Times Photographs Collection, UCLA)
In conjunction with the agent for the studio, we decided on a course of action, which, within two weeks of the time I started resulted in Gene Roddenberry coming to the studio. You can make many different kinds of deals with writers and producers. The usual kind of deal was you indicate interest in one of their ideas or one of their projects, and you make a deal for that specific project. So, the writer comes over, you may give him office space for a couple of weeks, but he’s free to deal with another studio. He may be dealing with another studio on another project. In other words, you have him on a non-exclusive basis. And he may stay at your studio for a month or three months or four months, but in the meantime, he’s sold another project to—let’s say Metro—and then he moves over there.
We felt that that course of action wouldn’t get us off the ground fast enough, so instead we decided that we would take at least one writer/producer in the dramatic field and a writer/producer or a team of writer/producers in the comedy field and make an overall deal. By that, I mean we made a deal tying, let’s say, Mr. Roddenberry up on an exclusive basis for a period of some years. This involved our putting forth much more money up front, which was essentially the way we attracted Gene to the studio, and it involved going with him without knowing all the projects he had in mind.
In other words, you’d say that Gene came into the office with Alden Schwimmer, who was his agent and also the agent of the studio, and Gene told me about Star Trek. I liked it. He also mentioned several other program projects, which were in their very early formative stage, and these easily could have changed. And on that basis, we made it a multiple project deal, so that Gene was tied to Desilu on an exclusive basis for a period of two to three years. So that Gene came really as one device to start the creative community coming to Desilu and a week or two later we made the same kind of arrangement with two writer/producers in the comedy field, who currently are writing on The Flip Wilson Show. That sort of broke the ice, and then we started to get a flow of writers and creators and writer/producers, and from that point on we more or less made deals on individual projects, rather than these overall exclusive deals.
Now, Gene and I took Star Trek around to try to sell it. We struck out at CBS—read the account of that in The Making of Star Trek—and then we went to NBC and NBC was interested. Now, when you make a deal for a project like that with a network, you usually make what they call a “step deal.” They don’t say, “Yes, we like it, you go ahead and pilot it.” They say, “We like it, we’ll finance a script.” If they like the script, then they have the option of going to pilot. If they like the pilot, of course, then they have the option of going on the air. That’s called a “step deal,” it really occurs in three steps: script, pilot, [and] on the air. From the network’s point-of-view, it has the advantage [that] they invest relatively small money up front and at each stage they are better able to evaluate the project. And we made such a deal with NBC.
Now, in a meeting with NBC—and this is how “The Cage” or “The Menagerie” got to be the pilot, or at least got to be the first pilot—Gene pitched the show, left with them a copy of the presentation, which I believe is printed in its entirety in the Whitfield book. And when they indicated interest, and indicated they wanted to make a deal, I gave them a choice of four kinds of stories.
Excerpt from a Star Trek pitch mentioning story types.
The first was a story that would take place on the Enterprise without the Enterprise landing on any planet. And this is where the expression “Wagon Train of the air kind of show” came from. Essentially, since the Enterprise had a crew of two, three, four, five hundred, we could introduce as many guest stars as we wanted, have them one week and never see them again. And it could be that a member of the crew had joined up because they were running away from some emotional problem—a boyfriend, or girlfriend, or parents, or whatnot—and the Captain of the ship eventually “solves” (in quotes) this emotional problem for this crewmember. This is essentially what used to happen on Wagon Train with Ward Bond and Robert Horton.
The second kind of show we offered them, second type, was one that involves landing on a planet where an Earth colony was in existence, perhaps they were mining, and the Enterprise was sent there to perform some function, perhaps a police action, if there was lawfulness.
The third type was where you could land on a planet, where because of atmospheric conditions, the inhabitants were very much like us. They were actually humans; looked like us, talked like us. But perhaps because the planet they were on had started to develop either before our’s or after our’s, they were two hundred years behind us or two hundred years ahead of us. And this gave rise to a great many interesting kinds of plots: they land on a planet where the Civil War is about to break out or they land on a planet where Al Capone is about to take over that planet’s Chicago.
And the fourth kind was where they land on a planet with alien creatures. [They] could be very wild creatures or perhaps huge plants that control the planet.
We gave them those four types as an indication of the range of stories that could be told on Star Trek, and to our horror they picked the fourth type.
[Audience laughter.]
Oscar Katz: Now, we didn’t want them to pick the fourth type for really three reasons. One, the fourth type wasn’t really typical of the way Gene conceived the series. As you know, his concept was much more on the science fiction rather than fantasy kind of show. Type four would be in the minority on the air. Another, very important reason was that the fourth type was extremely costly to do because it involved special effects, fantastic make-up costs, etcetera. But NBC’s thinking was they wanted to pick the most difficult one for us to do. And if we could do the most difficult, we would then obviously be capable of doing any one of the first three types. So we were essentially stuck with a request or a demand, actually, by the network to do the kind of show for the pilot that neither Gene or I wanted to do.
Out of that desire on NBC’s part emerged “The Cage,” later changed to “The Menagerie.” A couple of miscellaneous points on that first pilot. It was shot on the largest soundstage in the history of Hollywood: stages 15 and 16 at Desilu Culver, which have huge, rolling doors. Each stage is enormous and when you open the doors, they become one stage in effect, and it’s easily twice the size of any stage that’s ever existed in Hollywood. And on that stage, we of course built an unbelievable set. We had to construct the surface of the planet.
Secondly, let me tell you about how a pilot is financed, or at least was in those days when the networks were still doing hour pilots. The cost of that show was $645,000. It was financed in a method that’s commonly called deficit financing. The fact that NBC was ordering the pilot did not mean that they were paying us $645,000, and this is a common practice in television. The production company and the network agree on a fixed price and the production company absorbs any overage. Well, the fixed price in the case of the first pilot was $285,000. This is a frequent ratio, incidentally, in this kind of thing. The net cost to the studio was $360,000 of its own money. Now I hasten to add that the $360,000 is not all cash, because a good part of it is studio facilities, camera crews, etcetera—overhead that the studio has, anyway. And I would guess, I don’t remember the figures, [but] I would guess that at least $160,000 was those kind of charges. So, if you forget those kind of charges, which are called non-cash charges, the studio had $200,000 of its own money in the pilot, $160,000 in services and facilities it was providing that were really covered by its overhead, and $285,000, which was received from the network.
Herb Solow reporting to Katz on the status of the first draft of “the kind of neither Gene or I [Katz] wanted to do.”
As you know, the first pilot had Jeff Hunter in it. Let me tell you about how you make acting deals. When you do a pilot, you have to have a hold on the actor, because your pilot is shot usually in October, November, December, it comes into New York in January or February, and the network may not make the final decision about scheduling it until, let’s say, sometime in May. And then they’re scheduling it, of course, for the following fall. At the time you do a pilot, let’s say in October, you sign your actor, you have to have them available should the network pick up the pilot.
So as a fairly standard procedure, the actor is usually tied up for a minimum period of six months from the time the pilot is completed. He can go do other work, but he’s on call if the network picks up the pilot, you’d say Jeff Hunter got picked up and you have a deal with him and his weekly salary and all of that has been pre-agreed. In that way, you have the elements of what you’re selling, so that you’re able to deliver if you have to go on the air. In the case of Jeff Hunter, because pilot number one wasn’t picked up by NBC—they didn’t go on the air with it—we lost him. We lost our right to call upon his services. This is important. I will refer back to this later.
One other point about the first pilot. In the Whitfield book, he makes mention of the fact that the first pilot took twelve days to shoot. He says that this was quite a long period, because the norm is eight to ten days. This is one point where I disagree with Mr. Whitfield. Twelve days was actually a fairly short period for a pilot of that complexity. I believe that same season a show was done called [The] Wackiest Ship in the Army. I think it got on the air. And that pilot took twenty-two days to shoot. The fact that the Star Trek pilot was done in twelve days with all of its problems [and] complexities was really a tribute to Gene’s efficiency as a producer.
NBC turned down the pilot, and here again I’m going to disagree slightly with what’s in the The Making of Star Trek book. If you read the book, you’ll find that they turned it down because it was “too cerebral,” its storyline was too involved, it dealt with intangibles because it dealt with thought control, [and] there wasn’t enough action in it. If you also read the book, you’ll find that Roddenberry takes the blame for this. He says that his original concept was to really do an action-adventure science fiction show, but one that was really action-adventure, and he didn’t deliver that in the first pilot. Another reason he gives for taking the blame for the first pilot not getting picked up was the fact that NBC didn’t like Spock’s ears.
[Audience laughter.]
Oscar Katz: My version of what happened is somewhat different. Nobody blamed Gene, neither NBC or Desilu. The only one who blamed Gene, I guess, was Gene. What NBC said—I believe it was a conversation between myself and the Vice President of Programs at NBC in Hollywood, a fellow named Grant Tinker, Mary Tyler Moore’s husband—he said, “You delivered everything you promised us, but we can’t schedule it and we can’t sell it because we don’t think we can sell this show from this episode to advertisers.” And I said, “why not?” And he said, “It’s the wrong story. We see this as not typical of the series. We see it as the kind of show that you would schedule once every thirteen weeks to give the series a hypo or a shot in the arm. And we feel that if we go to market with this, go to advertisers, we have to have a pilot that’s more typical.” And I said, “Hey, fellas, you picked the story. Now you’re telling us that we delivered a perfect pilot and you can’t go to market with it because the story is wrong, and you’ve cost the studio $360,000. This is surely cavalier.” And Grant, who is quite a gentleman and a very honorable guy, said, “It’s our fault. We take the full blame. And we’d like to order another pilot for next season.” So, Star Trek became the first show in the history of television ever to be piloted twice.
Now because of the conversation with Tinker, the order of the second pilot, we got that very early in the season. It was ordered, I don’t know, February, March, or April. Now, what networks normally do—I’m now talking, of course, 1965—what networks normally do is they wait til all their scripts come in, and then they have a tendency to order all of their pilots at once. They’ll order their pilots, usually, in October, so that all the pilots in Hollywood are shooting October, November, December. There’s a terrible rush on facilities, a terrible rush on getting actors and directors, because everything is being compressed into a short two or three month period. There’s a reason that they do this. That’s because they like to see all their product, because they have a limited amount of money, so they [don’t] want to select something and then have something better come in. So, they wait till all of it comes in. We became, really, the first pilot that was ordered that 1965 year and that gave us tremendous advantage. We could shoot in July, when there was less pressure from facilities, it was easier to get actors, and so forth and so on. And that second pilot, of course, was shot in July.
Going back to the first pilot, when they turned it down, of course, it was a blow to Gene, but it was sort of a blow to me, too, because I was up at bat in trying to get Desilu back on the road, and I had four other pilots that season. And all five went unsold. Gene had a 0-1 batting average, and I had a 0-5 batting average. And the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” was shot in July.
The Jeff Hunter story is just touched upon in The Making of Star Trek, and they say there that he was making a motion picture and he was unavailable. Remember, we had lost our hold on him to do another pilot. Since we weren’t going on the air, we completely lost our hold on him. It was almost imperative that we get him for the second pilot, because we had $645,000 worth of film with this guy as the lead. If we didn’t get him for the second pilot, we would have visions of burning “The Menagerie.” You know, what were we going to do with “The Menagerie”?
So, we went out to get Hunter, who was available, and he had never seen the show, which is quite frequent with actors. And before he re-signed, he wanted to take a look at it—before he got into negotiation with us. A screening was set up where Gene and I—I think Herb Solow was there—in a very large screening room at Desilu, invited Hunter in to see “The Menagerie.” He came in with his wife and the five of us sat in the screening room and watched it. I knew from the whispering that was going on between his wife and Jeff Hunter that at least one of them hated it.
[Audience laughter.]
The invitation. Katz says Hunter attended. Solow says only Mrs. Hunter made an appearance.
Oscar Katz: He left, and I instructed our business affairs department to open negotiations with his agent, manager, or himself and word came back that he didn’t want to do it because he didn’t like the show. Now, I thought this was a negotiating stance. Actors are very capable of doing this. They know that they’ve got you over the barrel with this sort of unique situation. They know you’ve got $645,000 worth of film and they’re in quite a position in terms of negotiating a very favorable deal for themselves.
Weeks went on. It may have been true that he hated it, but our business affairs department and his agent were miles apart and finally we were running out of time, and worse than that, our tempers were getting short. One day I said, “Well, forget it, we’ll sign another lead. Forget the $645,000 worth of film.”
Now the second pilot, as you know, cost three hundred and thirty thousand. NBC paid another two eighty five. So we were in close to a million with a recovery of somewhere between five and six hundred thousand from the network. Now to jump a bit. Again, in the Whitfield book, the first pilot was converted into a two-parter—according to Whitfield—because it was the only way they could see to make their production schedule, [on] such a tight production schedule, when the show finally got ordered up. That’s only half the story. Actually, the other half, he said it was made into a two-parter as a way of re-capturing the six hundred and forty five.
And it was a very ingenious thing that Gene did when he wrote that two-parter, because had we had Jeff Hunter as the lead we just would have run that first pilot as an episode, and recouped X dollars, whatever an episode price was for that first pilot. But since you normally overshoot much more on pilots than on episodes, we had a lot of footage on the first one, and by shooting not too much additional footage, Gene was able to convert what looked like a terrible deficit, a liability, into a tremendous advantage because we used it as two episodes rather than one. And the economics were just as important as the production schedule.
Two other points about the second pilot. The networks, when the pilots start coming in, do audience reaction tests. And sometimes you live or die on the results of those. NBC was using, and I think still does, an outfit out in Hollywood called ASI. They have a theater—I think it’s called Viewer House—on the Sunset strip. They invite people to come in, tickets are free, and they screen pilots, and the procedures that they use are roughly this: they find that an audience that sees a show many vary from another audience that sees the same show, so they have to be able to equate different audiences.
Now some of the seats in the theater are wired so that the people sitting in those particular seats can react by turning a dial which indicates whether or not they like what they’re seeing. And all of this is composited up in the control room on polygraph-kind-of meters with pens that indicate the level of liking and disliking. There’s one meter there for the total group, but then men are separated from women, young, old, in between, etcetera. In other words they get reactions for the total group and for sub-groups.
And the way they operate these sessions is they show a ten-minute cartoon that they show at every session they’ve ever done and that’s their norm. And they can tell whether that audience is reacting better or worse than the average audience. Then they show the show, whichever show is being tested, and they make an adjustment based on what they found out about the reaction to the cartoon shown. And then they subsequently write a report to the network. The production company, producer, etcetera does not get a copy of that report, but quite frequently has tremendous influence on what the networks select.
Well, Star Trek was going to be tested. At the time of the year that all these pilots come in, ASI is very busy because they’ve got pilots coming in—they’ve got pilots coming out of their ears. Plus they also test commercials for advertisers. You can get into the control room, if you know somebody at ASI, even though you can’t get a copy of the report. I didn’t want to go when Star Trek was being tested, because I knew I was going to lose my temper. The idea of this show being subjected to this kind of thing annoyed me somewhat.
I sent Herb Solow as a spy, and I told Herb to phone me as to whether the results were favorable or unfavorable. Well, the show tested very poorly and it looked like it was doomsville based on the test. Herb told me that—remember ASI was very busy this time of the year—they showed the cartoon, they showed another show, then they handed out questionnaires about the other show, then they tested eleven commercials, and handed out questionnaires about each commercial, and then they showed Star Trek and handed out a questionnaire about Star Trek.
Now I had—and least the studio had—well over a half-million dollars riding on this procedure. And so what I did was I picked up the phone. I think I called Mort Werner in New York, [the] NBC overall program head, and indicated displeasure, which is sort of putting it mildly, and demanded that the show—or asked, really—that the show be retested and that on retesting it that it be in the first position, that it not be the second show of the two shows that they tested with the commercials in-between. And so Star Trek—I believe—became the first show to be tested twice, not only piloted twice. And it was tested in first position and the test was favorable. And I would hazard a guess that probably an 80 percent chance if the show wasn’t retested the series never would have gotten on the air. The network might have been influenced by that first report.
What other notes do I have…?
One final thought on the second pilot. Again if you read Making of Star Trek, you’ll find that the post-production period on the second pilot was a seven month period, and part of this was due to the fact that Gene was producing The Long Hunt of April Savage and a show called Police Story, which he created, and that he was upset that he couldn’t get to finish the post-production and that eventually the studio heads got restless; that would be me, I would assume. That’s not true.
Katz & Solow’s playful telegram to Roddenberry on the commencement of principle photography for the 2nd pilot.
Remember, our pilot was shot in July and all the other pilots were gonna be ordered by NBC, CBS, ABC in October, and be shot October, November. And I’d begun to [consider] the psychological point of should we deliver our show to NBC as soon as it is ready? And I came to the conclusion that, psychologically, that would be bad because let’s say we shot our pilot in July, delivered it to them in October, and let’s assume they were wildly enthusiastic about it. By the time the other pilots started coming in, in January and February, our pilot would’ve been old news, been around so long, reaction to it may have changed. And I decided it was psychologically wrong or bad to have a pilot come in to the network in September or October when all their other pilots were not going to come in until January. So Gene was instructed to stall. And that’s how that period got stretched. And he also did Police Story and April Savage. We told NBC that since he was involved in Police Story, which was a show for them, this was holding up completing Star Trek. But it was a deliberate stall, it wasn’t that we were restless. We felt psychologically it would be bad for product to come in to a network too early.
When the second pilot got picked up, of course it represented a vindication for Gene. I had finally come through for the studio in my second season. As a matter of fact, out of five pilots that we did that year, our batting average was pretty good. We sold three, one of which—by a fluke—got cancelled before the season got started. And we almost sold a fourth: Police Story, which was a very interesting show, almost was bought by NBC. The definite sale that we made was Mission: Impossible because by that time Bruce Geller had come to the studio.
Now a couple of words about my friend Gene. He’s… You have no idea how thorough this man is, what a workhorse he can be, and what a stickler for detail he is. As a matter of fact at the beginning I had difficulty developing a personal relationship with him, because he was the kind of guy, he’d be on the lot early, and on occasion I’d drive on [the lot] late at night to pick something up at my office or something like that. 11, 11:30 at night or 12, 12:30 and there’d only be one light on in the whole studio and that would be in Gene’s office and he’d be working. And my first impression of him was that he was an impersonal kind of machine. I changed by attitude toward him however, cause one night I stopped in at the studio and saw the light in his office and just barged in and he was there with a girl. I said, “Gee, this guy must be human,” and our relationship started from that point. The girl, I believe, is on the panel later this afternoon.[3]
Now, a studio head has, in a sense, really has creative control over the projects that are developed under him. Creative control can be exercised oppressively so it stifles creativity, or it can be exercised in a delicate, helpful kind of way, and the relationship between Roddenberry and myself was of the second type. Having agreed with him on the philosophy of the show, from then on I didn’t interfere with him very much. I approved major casting, possibly made some suggestions in the script, and assigned Herb Solow, who was at the time my assistant, to Gene to be more involved in the production, to help him as much as possible with the lesser casting with the studio and production problems that invariably come up.
So, Gene and I had developed a good, not only personal relationship, but I consider a very good professional relationship. He used to drag me out of my office and drag me over to the art department and there’d be hundreds of drawings of the costumes and the Enterprise and he’d say, “What do you think about this one? What do you think about that one?” And three days later, he dragged me over again and then the whole wall would be changed with different pictures. They must have done thousands of drawings of each little detail.
One last point. As you know, Star Trek was offered to several other studios before it got to Desilu, and Whitfield in his book says, in reference to the turndowns by the other studios that they said—this is a quote from Whitfield—“It's an interesting idea, but it's not only too different, it's physically and financially impossible to do as a weekly television series." And I want to tell you that that show was done on budget, and actually Desilu—and subsequently Paramount—had much more trouble with the other hour show that was bought that season. And the fact it was done on budget and with the quality that it was done, is nothing more than a tribute to Gene’s integrity and his ability as a producer.
Thank you.
[Audience applause]
0:56 Katz speaks! This short film contains a few brief comments by Katz, when he attended the 1973 Star Trek Lives! con.
—30—
Special Thanks!
To Bill Kobylak for making this invaluable and rare recording available for us to transcribe and publish here on FACT TREK. Listen to the original recording of Oscar Katz from 1972 here.
Revision History
2020-12-14
Original version
2020-12-14
Minor update to the introduction. We originally wrote that the 1972 Star Trek Lives! convention was Katz’s one and only con appearance, but we since learned that he was scheduled to appear in the 1973 Star Trek Lives! convention as well.[4]
2021-04-28
Minor formatting revisions.
2021-04-25
Added link to a film featuring Katz interviewed for his 1973 Star Trek Lives! con appearance.
End Notes & Sources
[1] Star Trek Lives! (convention)/1972 flier (link) found on Fanlore scanned by Jim Rondeau and Melody Rondeau.
[2] Star Trek Lives! (Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, First Printing, July 1975, p52-70). The book outlines the order of the speakers (On Saturday: Oscar Katz, Gene Roddenberry, and Dorothy Fontana/Majel Barrett; on Sunday, Isaac Asimov) and details other information about the planning and execution of the well-known Star Trek Lives! convention held in January of 1972.
[3] Katz is referring to Majel Barrett, who appeared on a panel with Dorothy Fontana that afternoon.
[4] Star Trek Lives! (convention)/1973 documents (link) found on Fanlore, from Fern Marder's zine collection.
