20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About Star Trek

4. Roddenberry Was Sort Of A Drunken Lech

Along with facing constant push back from the suits upstairs at NBC, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry appeared to be at war with...well, everybody involved in the creation of the original series. From the sounds of it he was almost constantly doing battle with the first, showrunner John DF Black, along with the show's producers, cast and crew. He was especially unpopular with the various big-name guest writers drafted in to work on the early seasons. Roddenberry was a big sci-fi fan, and so he would routinely comission scripts from masters of the form like Richard Matheson (I Am Legend) and Harlan Ellison (I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream), only to completely rewrite them, much to the authors' dismay €“ and, in Ellison's case, some fairly typical outrage and slander. Not only that, but he apparently did much of this re-writing whilst drunk, which then necessitated further rewrites from other people involved in the production to have the scripts make any sense. Roddenberry usually took these opportunities to try and put more explicit sexuality in the show, which the network almost always censored.