CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 3/07/08

New Frontiers & Old Enterprises:
The Martian Child's David Gerrold

By jason davis

The writer of the classic Star Trek episode, "The Trouble With Tribbles," David Gerrold won literary science fiction's highest accolades for the true story of how he adopted his son, The Martian Child, and recently returned to his roots to resurrect a long-shelved story for Star Trek.

Decades after they were originally written, two of David Gerrold's most personal stories have finally reached the screen, though neither is quite the same as they started out. The Martian Child chronicles Gerrold's (played by John Cusack in the film) real-life adoption of his son, Sean (known as Dennis and played by Bobby Coleman in the film), and won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards before vanishing into development limbo for a decade, only to emerge as a screenplay by Seth E. Bass and Jonathan Tollins. "Blood and Fire," an AIDS allegory originally written for Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, is finally seeing the light of day as part of the fan-produced Star Trek: New Voyages series with Gerrold helming the story from the director's chair. As the former hits DVD and the latter closes in on its internet release, CS Weekly caught up with Gerrold to learn the history of both projects.

Why did you start writing?
When you're a kid and you're not relating well with other people, you have a sense of being different, which is true for all kids, but some of us experience it very profoundly. Writing is an escape. But eventually, it becomes a lot more than that. It's a way to connect to your own self very profoundly. Writing is a way to take a step out of yourself and look not only at what you're thinking, but who you are and who's doing the thinking. For me, writing is one of the best ways to be human.

When I tap in to my own experience, my own passion, the writing goes way deeper. Writing is about passion. It's about creating an experience and sharing it so powerfully that other people experience it as their own. Writing is about how well I can evoke my own humanity into the words and then evoke the reader's humanity through the experience of reading and hearing the words.

There's a chapter near the end of your novel, The Martian Child, where you allude to a time when someone makes a movie out of it. Did you always imagine it would be a movie?
First, there was the novelette—and then Ed Elbert, a wonderful producer, wanted to do it as a movie and got a deal going with a company called Bonneville. Then, Bonneville fell apart and decided they weren't going to make movies. So, then I took my script and turned it into a book. So yeah, by that time, I had a sense of inevitability about it.

So you wrote your own script for it at one point?
My script was the source material for the book. But I deliberately left some things out of the story about Sean's background, because that wouldn't have been fair to him. He'll have to live with this book and enough people had abused him in so many different ways—I wasn't going to add to his baggage. It was my job to lighten his load. Putting the details of his backstory into the book would have been an abuse of his confidentiality and an abuse of my responsibility as his dad to give him a safe home.

But there was one story he said I could share. There's was one day where he was just screaming in pain about this Ghostbusters comforter that had been taken away from him when he was four. I wanted to share the depth of anguish that he still he felt—but that was only the tip of the iceberg; there were far worse things that simply did not belong in the book. The book wasn't about what he'd been through and it wasn't even about his healing and recovery. I didn't want to write a case study. There are already plenty of books on that. I wanted to deal with the more important thing—our relationship as a father and son, how we learned to love and trust each other. To me, that was the real adventure. I did get tagged for it by some of the reviewers—"David didn't go into detail about his son's problems." That's right. I didn't. I'm entitled to my privacy and my son's entitled to his. I had to ask Sean's permission just to write the book.

The story is only about one thing—he might be a Martian, but he's my Martian and I love him. That's all there is. It's simply about how much I love my kid. The scriptwriters for the movie didn't feel this was enough to support a two-hour film, so they added stuff like the sunglasses and the fear of sunlight and the gravity belt and the Polaroid camera. And that gave the characters a lot of stuff to do. But I wish they had gotten deeper into the real heart and soul of the relationship that Sean and I experienced.

I think the key sequence in the book is what I call the pickled mongoose sequence. Sean didn't understand jokes; he thought people were teasing him. I had to teach him that it meant that people loved him and wanted to play with him. I had to teach him how to tell jokes, he didn't know how. One day, he hit me back with one of my own jokes. That was the day I knew he was going to be all right. I thought that would have been a perfect sequence for showing the development of the relationship, but more than that, for Sean it was the moment where he learned he could play with other people and that he could connect. It was a perfect moment of connection, of completion. I wanted that sequence in the picture because I felt that was far more powerful than a kid going out looking at a lizard or sorting pictures on the floor. That's where you see a moment of real connection. That's what I felt was missing from the movie, and that's why I think some of the critics weren't warm to it. They didn't see the step-by-step construction of the relationship. They saw the places where the relationship didn't connect.

What interaction, if any, did you have with screenwriters Seth E. Bass and Jonathan Tollins?
One meeting. I talked at length on the adoption process and how it had to be portrayed with respect for the caseworkers, who bust their butts for these kids, burn out very quickly, and are underpaid and overworked. As good as they try to be, it's not enough. If you ask the kids, foster care is hell for a lot of them. I said we have to be really accurate to the process of adoption. The focus of the story is about the family building. Please don't get lost in all the Hollywood, Disney-style crap—wrinkle your nose and magic happens. If you go back to the original short story, there's just a little bit of magic. Martian wishes and M&Ms. And that's about it. It's the most subtle thing I've ever written.

Your next project is a fan-produced adaptation of your unfilmed Star Trek: The Next Generation script "Blood and Fire" from 1987. How did the original script come about?
When Paramount announced that Start Trek was coming back, I called [Trek creator] Gene Roddenberry to give him my congratulations. He said to come down to the studio and I started working for him on October 20, [1986]. Three weeks after that, Gene and I were at a Start Trek convention in Boston. There was this fan who asked Gene, will there be gay characters in Star Trek? Gene hit one out of the park. He said, "You're right. It's time. These are the issues Star Trek should be addressing."

This was a pretty serious time in the history of the AIDS plague—Rock Hudson had not yet come out, there was enormous stigma, and Reagan had never even said the word "AIDS" during his entire term in office. So, I started blocking out this story that was more about the fear of AIDS than the disease itself. We go to rescue a ship that's broadcasting a distress signal and it's infected with a disease so horrible we can't even risk a rescue. We have to destroy the ship just to stop the threat of infection.

So, where did it all go wrong?
In writing the script, you tweak things as you go. I had two extra guys on the mission team, just for story mechanics, and it bothered me. They needed to be real characters, not just red-shirts. So, I added a scene where Riker says to one of them, "How long have the two of you been together?" And the fellow responds, "Since the academy." And that was it. If you were under 13, you'd think they're just good friends, but if you can read subtext, you'll get it: they're gay lovers. And this way, we'll keep Gene's promise, we'll tell an issue story, and we'll do what Star Trek is supposed to do—make you think. I turned in the script on a Thursday and went off on a Star Trek cruise. Gene sent me a telegram—"Everybody loves your script, have a great time—signed, Gene."

I came back from the cruise to find that Rick Berman had written a memo saying that the show is going to be on at four o'clock in the afternoon in some places—and we're going to get letters from angry mommies if we have gay characters in the episode. Angry mommies? Because some guy says how long have you two been together? I wrote a memo reminding Gene of his promise, asking, "If not now, when? If not here, where?" Later that day, [co-producer Herb] Wright stuck his head in my office and said, "Great memo. You still have to change it." And I said okay. This wasn't a fight I could win, because I didn't have Gene's ear. But the fact that Star Trek wasn't willing to take on the fight says that this isn't Star Trek anymore.

When you left Trek, "Blood and Fire" became something of a lost episode. How did it find a home with the fan-produced Star Trek: New Voyages series?
James Cawley had this thing called New Voyages, which I'd been vaguely aware of. [Star Trek story editor] Dorothy Fontana did one for him. Then, Cawley started e-mailing me and said, "I want a script from you."

I said, "I only write for money."

He said, "No, I want a script you've already written—I want 'Blood and Fire.' I want to do it right."

Somewhere in there, we agreed that I would direct it. So, Carlos Pedraza—a very sharp guy—goes off with the script and translates it back into a story involving Kirk and Spock and all of the other characters from the original series. One of the gay crewmembers is now Kirk's nephew, Peter Kirk.

James called and asked, "What do you think?" I said, "It's fine, let's shoot it." He said, "But isn't there anything you want to change?" At first I said no, but then I thought about a couple of lines that were a little bit off and maybe a scene that could be tweaked…

So, I booted up Final Draft, thinking it would be an hour's worth of diddling. But over the next six weeks, I found myself going over every scene, every line, every moment, as carefully as I could. In gong back to the characters of the original series, Carlos had added so many interesting elements that I felt could be explored in much greater depth. James was calling me every day, sometimes several times, and we finally realized that the script was still stuck in 1987, very tentative. We could be a lot more candid now. Putting gay characters in Star Trek isn't a breakthrough anymore, not after every other show on television has had openly gay characters, so what can we do with this that pushes the boundaries of 2007? We finally realized that one of the first scenes with these two young men had to be a love scene.

Here's the sequence. Kirk has already taken Peter off the mission team. He's being protective. Peter is upset that the boyfriend, Alex, is on the mission team. So, as I'm trying to figure out where's the real emotion in this scene, how would I feel if I were one of these two men, suddenly it hits me. Peter has a line where he says, "My uncle thinks I'm on this ship because of him. I'm not. I'm here for you." And he turns to Alex and says, "Marry me." To me, effective storytelling is about doing the opposite of the expected. Instead of saying, "Yes," Alex says, "How many times are you going to ask? I already said yes." But then Peter says, "I'll ask my uncle to marry us." Now, this gets interesting because this brings the problem back to Kirk. Remember, all problems on the Enterprise have to come back to Kirk.

So Peter goes to Kirk, "If you don't put me on the mission team, it says you're protecting me and I won't be seen as a real member of this crew. I'll have to transfer to another ship…and so will my husband."

Kirk goes, "Husband?"

"Yes, if you'll marry us." And then you get this wonderful double take from James Cawley as Kirk. The whole story is now about the relationship between Kirk and his nephew. Which is the logical progression of what Carlos set up when he made one of the gay characters Kirk's nephew. It takes the character of Kirk into emotional places we've never seen before. And it takes the character of Peter into places where we've never seen any Star Trek character go. The story about the bloodworms on the diseased ship is still very important, but by the time we get to the end, we've also been through a very tense and emotional story about what it means to be a family. I was very pleased about that. I think this is the best iteration of this story yet.

After so many years of writing, how did it feel to finally direct your own work?
It was great. We had 12 days to shoot 90 pages. It was grueling and exciting and energizing and one of the best times of my life. Working at that pace, everybody got to be very inventive, so there's a lot of spontaneity and aliveness in the performances. We had to move fast. But the entire New Voyages team are workhorses. It was a fantastic experience. Writing and directing Star Trek? Working with people who love it as much as you do? Yeah, it was great! The best part is that this is the story I most wanted to tell, and it's told in the best way possible. I don't think anybody who hasn't directed can understand what a great experience it is to direct a story you care this passionately about.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

David Gerrold, The Martian Child courtesy Warner Bros.

From the Trenches
Working screenwriters discuss in their own words a particular aspect of screenwriting, from the mechanics of writing to the personal and professional impact that writing has had on their lives. > VIEW ARCHIVE

The Big Picture

Features that cover all aspects of screenwriting, from our "Seven Best" lists to analysis of old favorites and new classics. > VIEW ARCHIVE

Weekend Read
Film, book, web site and technology reviews from a writer’s perspective. How can these items help a writer on his or her journey, or make that journey more enjoyable? > VIEW ARCHIVE

DVD Review of the Day
DVD reviews from a writer’s point of view. What aspects of this script and features of this DVD illuminate the writing, development, and storytelling process? > VIEW ARCHIVE