Guest post: Lance Parkin on the problematic artist

The author of “The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek”, asks whether the impurity of the creator inevitably stain the creation.

Jonn here, to introduce what follows.

When I was a baby nerd, I read a lot of Doctor Who books, and also – I'm sure this was a coincidence – didn't know any girls. One of the writers whose books I most looked forward to was Lance Parkin, whose work was reliably clever and thoughtful and brilliant, and who has since, fandom being what it is, become an actual friend.

In 2016, Aurum Press published The Impossible Has Happened, Lance's biography of Gene Rodenberry, which explains how a bit of cheap network sci-fi that only ran for three seasons ended up becoming both movies and one of the world's biggest nerd franchises. I've been meaning to ask Lance if I can run an extract from that book for a while, as I think some of you will like it (honestly, check it out, it's great).

But in January, he published the following on Medium, which is one of the best things I've ever read on the thorny issue of separating the art from the artist – so with his permission I'm running that instead. If you enjoy it, please do consider buying the book, too.

Here's Lance:

I had something of a crisis of conscience about halfway through writing my biography of Gene Roddenberry, when I realised I just really did not like this guy. It made me think hard about the relationship between an artist, their work, and the response to that work.

You don’t need to get halfway through writing a biography about Gene Roddenberry before you learn he was a deeply flawed human being. In the seventies there were Star Trek fans who unironically treated him as a great visionary, and authority, almost as a spiritual guru. He could be charming, and had friends who remained ferociously loyal to him even after his death. He was vocally opposed to racial and sexual discrimination, and this seems to be a genuine reflection of his own thinking and, more importantly, his actions. But Star Trek was always the work of many hands, a fair number of the people involved in making Star Trek were deeply distrustful of Roddenberry, with a pretty low estimate of his talents and moral character. Rumbles of that had become open dissent by the time he died in 1991.

One of the two biographies published soon after his death, Joel Engel’s Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and the Man Behind “Star Trek” was essentially a catalogue of the gripes and protests of people he worked with. Just about everyone involved in the original Star Trek went on to write an autobiography, almost all of them had examples of Gene Roddenberry letting them down or misleading them. Usually, these are complaints about how he stiffed them out of some money, or how everything good about the show was actually Gene Coon’s idea anyway. The summary of this version of Gene Roddenberry is: “He created Star Trek, but this was the only notable thing he ever did, its success wasn’t down to him, and he was a serial adulterer, substance abuser, and generally dishonest person.”

So, I knew all of this going in, it was never a state secret. Even when he was ‘progressive’, it was often all a bit self-serving. He championed the sexual liberation of women, mainly, it seems, because it freed them up to sleep with Gene Roddenberry. He had a degree of power and wealth as someone in charge of a TV show, and young actresses were typically in a far more precarious state. It wouldn’t be hard to argue he abused his power, but it’s absolutely indisputable that he used it. Perhaps that wasn’t obvious in the 1960s, or even the 1990s, but we can see it now. It’s just not possible to take his side now when he tells us he went on set to demand an actress wore a shorter skirt, tugging at the one she was wearing, or (post-Star Trek) that an actress was reduced to tears because she refused to do an unscripted nude scene. Saying that Roddenberry wasn’t the worst offender, even on Star Trek, isn’t much of a defence.

The anecdote that broke me, though, was about how Gene Roddenberry was at a vacation resort with his wife, and hired a masseuse knowing she was a sex worker, and told her to give him the happy ending first, then go to his wife and give her the massage. We know about this because Roddenberry told his friends.

What broke me wasn’t some objection to the sexual morality of any of that, particularly, it was just that … oh my god, the guy just comes across as scuzzy, and a cheapskate. Even if it’s a tall tale, not something that really happened, it’s … I was writing a whole book about the guy in that story, and he was basically like that all the time. I realised that at some level, we need the subject of a biography to be larger than life. We want our artists to be larger than life. They’ve got to be … more … of a person, I think. Gene Roddenberry just kept coming across as so small.

I’ve always been very suspicious of attempts to link situations in authors’ work with snippets from their life stories. Yes, obviously, your personal history affects what tales you tell and informs how you tell them, but art is fundamentally transformative, it’s rarely a thinly-veiled confession of the writer’s sins, it’s not just an author working through their therapy notes. Finding something that happened to an artist in real life that’s a bit like something that happens in one of their stories is almost always reductive, and I tend to find it almost entirely pointless.

Chatting about this with people — they’re credited in my book, and know who they are — I started to see something actually quite interesting, a joining of dots I don’t think had been joined before.

Star Trek as we know it formed in the seventies, thanks to endless reruns. It found a new, younger audience. The original show generated a fandom, but “Star Trek fandom” blossomed after the show was cancelled.

The original Star Trek isn’t a lot of the things we think it is. It’s inclusive, but not notably more inclusive than, say, its sister show Mission: Impossible. The Star Trek future is more hopeful than one where humanity survives as post-atomic savages, or jumpsuited cogs in a totalitarian machine, or lotus eaters, but it’s not particularly “utopian”. The social structures seem… well, very old-fashioned now. The Federation colonises planets and uses violence or the threat of violence to achieve its aims. It has politicians, generals, and scientists all out for personal glory, intent on causing suffering. The crew of the Enterprise live a life of service and operate for the collective good, but… so do the crew of a modern Navy or Coastguard ship.

This isn’t what the early Star Trek fans saw. They saw a future where everyone might find a role, one where they would be accepted, where difference was celebrated, because there was a common goal of unity and exploration. And… then they created Star Trek conventions where everyone was welcome. People who had spent their childhoods being told they were weird were suddenly in a room with a thousand weirdoes, and it was amazing. It’s a cliché to note that many of these people went on to become scientists, educators, and artists, all directly inspired and encouraged by Star Trek. And it’s naïve to think that Star Trek conventions were entirely free of the pressures and perils of the outside world. It was a start, though: young people, united in their adoration of a bright future.

At first, this had nothing to do with Gene Roddenberry. He was busy trying to distance himself from Star Trek. His only interest in “Trekkies” was that their existence allowed him to proclaim he created something with a devoted following, so his instincts must be better than all those dumb executives who cancelled his last show, god, studio executives were idiots. He never seemed to understand that might not be the best thing to say to executives during pitch meetings. He was given chances. He wrote lots of things that never happened, like a Tarzan reboot. He wrote a Rock Hudson movie that was f*cking terrible, and a handful of dead-on-arrival pilot episodes, all of which sound quite fun when you read the description, but which turn out to be f*cking terrible when you watch them.

Roddenberry was a failure. He’d downsized considerably following his divorce (which was deeply acrimonious), he wasn’t getting any traction with his new projects, he was in early middle age and women were not falling for him as much. A couple of friends his age died, he was drinking and unhealthy. Gene Roddenberry absolutely came to understand he was washed up. He was seen as a science fiction guy, but old-fashioned science fiction. He tried selling the rights to Star Trek to his ex-wife as part of the settlement, but they were assessed as worse than worthless. And that was his one big hit. He swallowed his pride, started going to Star Trek conventions.

Here, Roddenberry found he was the subject of adoration. Star Trek fandom started out as predominantly female. The typical Star Trek fan was college age. Gene Roddenberry regularly found himself in a room with hundreds of young women who thought he was one of the wisest, most wonderful people on the planet. Eep.

But it seems that the primary appeal of Star Trek fandom for Roddenberry was financial — he and his wife literally set up a stall to sell off Star Trek memorabilia and trinkets, they ran a mail order business doing the same.

Then something odd happened: Gene Roddenberry started listening to fans, and couldn’t help but see that Star Trek was life changing for a lot of the people. Post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, with an oil crisis and a Cold War, Star Trek was one of the very few things suggesting that the future might be better than the past. When he’d made Star Trek, in between cheating on his mistress with another mistress, and grabbing a chunk of Nimoy’s appearance fees and writing unusable lyrics for the theme tune so he got half the money every time it was played, and popping pills and mixing them with alcohol… he’d accidentally created one of the great beacons of hope in the whole of fiction.

Roddenberry threw himself into promoting utopianism. When he drew up background documents for The Next Generation, it was explicitly the depiction of an inclusive, non-materialistic, non-violent civilization that fans talked about (and a stark contrast to the Hornblower-in-Space the movies had become). The people of the future are going to be better than the people now.

But here’s the thing: Gene Roddenberry didn’t come up with that. The fans came up with that. They found something beautiful in a network TV show, they worked to fill the gaps, they tried to figure out how to build the “Star Trek future”. When official histories of the show are written, they emphasise (over-emphasise) the fan writing campaign that contributed to the show getting a third season. They talk about how the vibrant fan scene proved to studio execs that there would be an audience for Star Trek movies (and that they could offset the budget with licencing deals). They talk about fans who ended up writing books and scripts. These aren’t stories about “fandom”, they’re just noting that Star Trek fans are great consumers of product.

The actual story of Star Trek fandom is the story of the young people who took the work and were inspired to become better people. Some might be inclined to make this a story of redemption for its creator, but I don’t think that quite works. Gene Roddenberry did not emerge from the success of Star Trek inspired to become a better person (or if he tried, he failed rather spectacularly). But I think he did understand that he’d laid the foundations for something immensely, surprisingly positive. He didn’t change all that much, but he’d done something that had changed many people’s lives for the better. He found great satisfaction in that.

Many inspiring works of art have been created by shitty people. Many of the things that have inspired transcendental aesthetic experiences for members of their audiences had creators in it for the money, working on a production line rather than when the muse spoke to them, not-so-secretly plotting to get close to attractive young people they want to have sex with. Obviously there are some actions so heinous that, if they come to light, overshadow any piece of art created by the perpetrator. We should, never ever blind ourselves, or say that liking a television show or a book or a comic or a song somehow negates any human suffering behind the scenes. And where we draw the line will be tremendously inconsistent, not just from person to person, but as individuals. We will forgive and overlook capriciously, or we’ll never be able to watch a movie or read a novel ever again.

Some of the shit from a shitty creator probably does cling to our boots, however much their work makes us soar. But if we want art to make things better, it has to be better than where we started from. We can do more than stare at our boots.

For fans, knowing stuff is important. Knowing the background of the artists, the context, the rivals, the connections almost always enriches the experience in some way. Being part of a community adds layers to the experience, creates and enhances friendships. Engaging with a work of art is one of the main spurs for the creation of your own art. The discussion of fans, fandom, fan culture, audiences generally, usually misses a key part: all of it, every single bit, of audience engagement happens after the creator – who statistically, best case scenario, was very probably a twat has completed their contribution.

The artist can craft all they want, but ultimately, the point of creating music for people to dance to is the dancing, not the music. The point of comedy is the laugh. The point of art is the audience.

The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Rodenberry, Creator of Star Trek, is published by Aurum Press. You can find some other things Lance Parkin has written via Wikipedia.