19 Things You Might Not Have Known About Gene Roddenberry

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry (August 19, 1921–October 24, 1991) boldly went where no man had gone before, creating a sci-fi franchise that would have a seismic impact on the world of pop culture. Here are some fascinating facts about the man who launched the definitive sci-fi fandom.

Gene Roddenberry was a World War II pilot.

Roddenberry enlisted with the U.S. Army Air Corps on December 18, 1941—11 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He flew 89 missions during World War II. Following an accident that could have left him seriously injured, he was taken off active duty and served out the rest of his time in the U.S. military working as an aircraft accident investigator with the Office of Flying Safety.

He had a near-death experience.

Post-WWII, Roddenberry joined Pan American World Airlines as a junior pilot. During one flight, an off-duty Roddenberry was pressed into service by the captain when the passenger aircraft they were on lost an engine. The airplane crashed in the Syrian desert, killing 14 and sending 11 to the hospital; Roddenberry walked away with two broken ribs. “We can consider it as being very lucky,” he later wrote to his parents.

Roddenberry was a member of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Following his careers in the military and as a pilot—but before he became a TV writer—Roddenberry became a police officer, working as a traffic cop in the LAPD. Nearly a year and a half later, he was transferred to the education/newspaper unit of the Traffic Services Division, where, in the words of the biography Star Trek Creator, his job was “to write news releases, give lectures on traffic safety, and make contact with every newspaper editor in Los Angeles.” It was his first paid writing work.

Roddenberry worked for the LAPD while writing and pitching TV projects for several years. He served as a liaison between the LAPD and producers of the show Dragnet, and even wrote treatments of real cases for the show. He sold his first script—for the TV show Mr. District Attorney—in late 1953, writing under an assumed name (Robert Wesley) because he hadn’t gotten permission from the LAPD to embark on his side gig.

He wrote more episodes of a different show than he did of Star Trek.

After resigning from the LAPD in June 1956, Roddenberry dedicated himself full-time to a writing career, penning episodes of cop and western TV shows. He’s credited with writing two dozen episodes of Have Gun—Will Travel, meaning he actually wrote more episodes of that show than he did of Star Trek. (IMDb gives him writing or story credit on 12 episodes of the original series.)

His first TV series had a lot of future Star Trek actors.

Pre-Star Trek, Roddenberry created and produced The Lieutenant, which ran for one season in 1963–1964. Star Trek connections abound: The main character, played by Gary Lockwood, had the middle name Tiberius, same as Captain James T. Kirk. Future Trek actors Ricardo Montalbán, Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig, and Majel Barrett appeared in The Lieutenant in roles of various sizes.

One of Star Trek’s most famous species owes its name to Gene’s police days.

The Klingons, which would become one of the best-known Star Trek species, took their name from Wilbur Clingan, a probationary sergeant Roddenberry met while working in the LAPD’s Hollywood division. Clingan was fond of introducing himself as “the original Klingon.”

On Star Trek, he was a famous script meddler.

If you wrote a script for an episode of Star Trek while Roddenberry was in charge, no matter how brilliant the script was or how talented an author you were, chances were good Roddenberry would take his metaphorical red pen to it. A famous victim of Roddenberry’s yen for being overly hands-on on all things Trek was the great Harlan Ellison, who won a Hugo Award for writing season 1 episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” He dedicated his award to “the memory of the script they butchered, and in respect to those parts of it that had the vitality to shine through the evisceration.” At Roddenberry's direction, Ellison’s original script was reworked by several people, including Roddenberry himself. 

He had affairs with Majel Barrett and Nichelle Nichols.

Roddenberry dated future Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols while he was still married to his first wife, Eileen-Anita Rexroat—and while he was carrying on an affair with “First Lady of Star Trek” Majel Barrett, whom he married in 1969.

As Nichols recalled in her memoir, Beyond Uhura, Roddenberry brought her to Barrett’s house to reveal that he’d been seeing both of them while he was still married; little did he know that they knew each other after meeting during an audition for The Singing Nun. Nichols recounted that Roddenberry told her, “I couldn’t go on behind either one of your backs. I love you both too much. I didn’t know any other way to bring—to tell—the two women that I love that I’m in love with two women. I don’t know what to do about it.” Nichols ended their relationship, writing, “Out of deference to Majel, who I soon realized was dedicated to Gene above all else, and for my own salvation, I could not be the other woman to the other woman. And so I fled.”

His first post-Star Trek project was going to be a Tarzan movie …

Roddenberry grew up reading pulp fiction, so it made sense that, once the original series of Star Trek was canceled in 1969, he turned his eye towards adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan for the big screen. Roddenberry’s script incorporated a sexier-than-normal version of Tarzan, which proved a problem once the budget was slashed and the project was relegated to TV movie status. Roddenberry’s Tarzan was too sexy for TV, and the project was abandoned.

... But ended up being a sexploitation film.

Star Trek was (for the moment) dead, Roddenberry was divorced from his first wife, and the man needed some cash: Thus, his first complete post-Star Trek project became 1971’s Pretty Maids All in a Row, a sexploitation movie that Roddenberry produced and scripted. Directed by Roger Vadim (Barbarella), the movie centers on a high school counselor/football coach (Rock Hudson) who seduces (and sometimes kills) his female students. Star Trek actors James Doohan (Scotty) and Bill Campbell (Trelane in the episode “The Squire of Gothos”) had small roles.

He wanted to do a Trek movie that involved Kirk fighting an alien that looked like Jesus.

When talk of a Star Trek movie began in the mid-1970s, Roddenberry signed on to write it. Among the ideas he threw around were Kirk fighting an alien that had taken on Jesus’s identity (a treatment that has since come to be known as The God Thing) and Scotty traveling back in time to the late 1930s after the Enterprise is destroyed by a black hole. As associate producer Jon Povill explained to The Hollywood Reporter, he “triggers changes with a snowball effect”:

“His efforts to stop the snowball only make things worse for his original time period, though they do make things considerably better between 1937 and 1964. World War II is avoided, Kennedy is not assassinated, medical science advances substantially and a whole bunch of other boons make it impossible for world leaders to agree to help Kirk set things right for the future by plunging the 20th century back into the horrors stored in the Enterprise’s history records.”

Neither treatment made it past Paramount head Barry Diller, but Star Trek: The Motion Picture did eventually get made, hitting theaters in 1979. 

He thought Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan betrayed Star Trek’s values.

After the first Star Trek movie, Roddenberry was relegated to the role of executive consultant for future films—meaning that he could offer opinions on the movies as they were being made, but the creatives could (and often did) ignore him. Such was the case with 1982’s The Wrath of Khan. Roddenberry wrote a letter to a friend after the film’s release noting that “many of the problems you and I found in the script were hidden or quickly glossed over in the film, which has become quite successful.” He continued that he thought the creative team behind Khan “did a pretty good job. A brilliant job? In making ‘Star Trek’ work in a motion picture, possibly yes. In finding a way to stay true to ‘Star Trek’ values, definitely not.”

He was the first TV writer with a star on the Walk of Fame.

In September 1985, Roddenberry became the first television writer to be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His star is located at 6683 Hollywood Boulevard. Walk of Fame-wise, Roddenberry was beaten to the punch by Star Trek stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who received their stars in May 1983 and January 1985, respectively.

He’s directly responsible for Whoopi Goldberg being in The Next Generation.

Whoopi Goldberg grew up a big sci-fi (and Star Trek) fan, so when she found out Star Trek: The Next Generation was casting, she wanted in. By that point, Goldberg had already been nominated for an Oscar for her work in The Color Purple, and the Trek casting team was skeptical of her enthusiasm, thinking that (in Goldberg's words) she was a “movie person.” Goldberg took her case directly to Roddenberry, explaining that her love of Star Trek came from the show's pioneering role in depicting Black characters (specifically Lieutenant Uhura) in futuristic sci-fi settings. “No science fiction existed with us in any of the movies, in anything, we’re just not there,” she remembers telling Roddenberry. “This is the first time we appear[ed] in the future. And I said, ‘Not only do we appear in the future but this is a gorgeous woman and she’s the communications officer.’ ” Goldberg would appear in The Next Generation and in two subsequent Star Trek films.

Roddenberry was not a fan of Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard.

In a 2020 roundtable with The Hollywood Reporter, Patrick Stewart shared a story of his audition for the role of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation. “My meeting lasted about six minutes, and then it was perfectly clear I was not wanted in that room any time longer,” he recalls. “It was Gene who said, ‘What the hell? I don’t want a bald, middle-aged Englishman.’ ” Even once Stewart was cast, when Roddenberry visited the set he would routinely give Stewart a look that the actor interpreted as: “What the fuck is this guy doing in my show?”

He had a drug and alcohol problem.

Roddenberry wasn’t just a womanizer—he also had an issue with illicit substances. Trek alum David Gerrold said in a 2014 interview that Roddenberry “was a substance abuser. First it was alcohol, and then it was grass, and then it was Quaaludes and other drugs. He had this disease. If he had stayed off the booze and the pills, he would have been going strong until 90. He was just a big strong guy, but he fell into that trap of substance abuse and it killed him.”

He was planning litigation over Star Trek VI before he died.

Roddenberry passed away at the age of 70 shortly before the release of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Though the studio contended that Roddenberry had seen the film before his passing—and that he approved of what he saw—he reportedly came back from seeing Star Trek VI (48 hours before his death) and called his lawyer to start the process of getting scenes cut from the movie.

Roddenberry’s ashes were sent to space.

Roddenberry’s ashes were part of the October 22, 1992 mission of the space shuttle Columbia, which returned to Earth with Roddenberry's ashes intact. Years later, some of Roddenberry's ashes were sent into space on the Celestic Founders flight, which marked “the first public memorial spaceflight service ever conducted.”

You can find him (or his name, anyway) in outer space.

If you’re the creator of Star Trek, you’d better have something in space named after you. Roddenberry has multiple outer space namesakes: There's Mars’s Roddenberry crater, named in 1994 by the International Astronomical Union, and an asteroid, 4659 Roddenberry.

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