A D.C. Fontana Primer
The onscreen ladies of Star Trek get a lot of love (and scrutiny). But what about the ones working behind the scenes? D.C. Fontana worked on several incarnations of ST, penned some of the most loved episodes of the original series and its spinoffs, and created several fascinating female characters, many of whom we're still writing and debating about today. Her career has spanned half a decade, and she's still coming up with new stories to tell.
D.C. Fontana
Dorothy Catherine Fontana is a writer and script editor who has the distinction of being one of the few people to have worked on Star Trek: The Original Series, as well as Star Trek: The Animated Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Deep Space Nine is her favorite Star Trek spinoff. She especially liked the show's strong characters. When rewritten, Fontana has used pseudonyms, including Michael Richards and J. Michael Bingham. 1
Fontana wrote several notable TOS episodes, including "Journey to Babel", and acted as script consultant in TOS's second season. She was the associate producer and story editor of Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which she also wrote the episode "Yesteryear". She later co-wrote the Next Generation's "Encounter at Farpoint", where she invented the "LCARS" concept and DS9's "Dax", her last involvement with Star Trek, where a great deal of Jadzia Dax's backstory was fleshed out. 2
SheKnows: I also thought you were a guy because we very rarely saw a woman's name in the credits in those days. You used your initials.
Fontana: Yeah and few women were writing under their own names. Pat Fielder wrote under her name, but Pat is kind of a nebulous name. Margaret Arman. She was a great friend. Leigh Bracket in films and there were others who were active then. Joyce Perry came along. Today, the women on the CSI's are very strong writers. So it's changed a little bit, but a lot hasn't changed. On the action adventure shows, you still see more male names than female names. But, it's a little better.
- sheknows.com
TOS:
(links go to episodes posted by CBS at YouTube)
Fontana is to thank for giving us this image, from "Charlie X"
UGO: Do you get a kick out of seeing people still dressed as Andorians?
D.C. Fontana: Yes, that's always fun, to know that these aliens I've invented are still around and kicking. And if you've ever read that "Journey to Babel" script, the makeup and costume instructions in the front is that "the Andorians are blue... just because." Because I wanted them to be blue!
- UGO Movie Blog
Fontana was clearly interested in characters' family lives. She introduced Sarek and Amanda in "Journey to Babel,"
and tried numerous times to introduce Dr. McCoy's daughter, Joanna.
Unproduced TOS episodes:
"There was sort of like the creature of the week, monster of the week [mentality], which they'd been doing over on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," remembers Fontana. "And I never thought that was a terribly successful thing for Star Trek to do. But also there were some complaints from the crew saying, 'Well, the story editor came down to the transporter room set and said, 'What does this thing do again?'' And when I was told that Doctor McCoy could not have a 22-year-old daughter because he was Kirk's contemporary, I said, 'O.K., they don't get the show.' I'm sorry, but they didn't. I honestly don't know. I can't answer for anybody else. I just know what they said to me, what the crew said to me, and I thought, 'I'm better off writing Westerns now.'"
- IGN: Star Trek 101
TAS:
"Yesteryear" features time-traveling Spock, a familiar-looking Vulcan bullies scene (we see what you did there, boys), and a grumpy Andorian.
TNG:
(links go to episodes posted at YouTube)
- Paley Center profile
Unproduced TNG:
DS9:
Star Trek: New Voyages:
(link goes to episode posted legally at YouTube)
SheKnows: Can you talk a bit more about New Voyages webisodes?
Fontana: These are one hour episodes as they would've been done on the show, like in the fourth season which never existed. It’s actors playing the original actors playing the roles. They rather resemble them and try to get the mannerisms. It's very well done and James Cawley spends his own money on it. He's an Elvis impersonator. He puts like a $100k into these episodes. There are a lot of donated and volunteer services and he has accurately recreated the sets. Before Bill Theiss died, he gave Jim a lot of the material that was used for the original costumes and some patterns.
SheKnows: Sounds like he and his team really care about the classic show.
Fontana: Yes. It's done with a lot of affection. They want me to do a story about Joanna McCoy who's Dr. McCoy's daughter which never got done on the real series, but people have heard about it for years. There are thirty two million downloads - not hits. So you can see how powerful it is.
SheKnows: And you've already written a webisode featuring the original Chekov, Walter Koenig, right?
Fontana: Yep. It's called To Serve All My Days.
- sheknows.com
Fiction:
Vulcan's Glory features Captain Pike and the wonderful, too-little-seen Number One. One of the things I liked about writing "Vulcan's Glory" was the fact that I could explore the character of Number One, the Enterprise's previous, mysterious, executive officer. I sat down for a couple of hours with Majel Barrett to discuss what she thought of the female officer she depicted in "The Cage." She gave me her ideas about what Number One felt and thought, and the fact that on Ilyria, her planet of origin, she would have been the best of her breed for the year she was born, the most genetically perfect being. Majel also thought Number One had an emotional thing for Pike--and he would be inclined to reciprocate, except for the restraining fact that he was her commanding officer.
- D.C. Fontana, from the afterword to Vulcan's Glory, typed up specifically for this primer by the wonderful taraljc
Comics: UGO: Ah. This is your first time in the world of comics. Are you a comics fan? Do you follow any series?
D.C.: Actually no. But I loved Watchmen. I love a lot of [Neil] Gaiman's work, etc, and [Frank] Miller.
- UGO Movie Blog
Other work:
Fontana has written scripts for other science fiction shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man in 1974, Logan's Run in 1978 (also serving as story editor for the short-lived television series based on the book by George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan), Babylon 5 in 1995 (the episodes "A Distant Star", "Legacies" and "The War Prayer"), and Earth: Final Conflict in 1997. 6
Her writing credits include children's shows such as the 1970s series Land of the Lost - which also featured other Star Trek veterans - He-Man and The Masters of the Universe in 1983 (episode "Battle Cat"), and the Beast Wars episode Crossing the Rubicon. She co-wrote "Where No Sprite Has Gone Before", a 1997 episode of the CGI television series ReBoot. 7
"Elsewhen" by D.C. Fontana (and directed by Dennis Steinmetz) has always been one of my favorite episodes of the 1970s kid-vid series, Land of the Lost. Even today, more than thirty years after it first aired, I feel it poignant, intelligent and endlessly fascinating.
- SATURDAY MORNING CULT TV BLOGGING: Land of the Lost: "Elsewhen"
Video footage of D.C. Fontana:
Archive of American Television - 7 part interview
MT&R Seminar: Writing the Fantastic for Television, 1996 - D. C. Fontana recalls advice from her mentor, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who preached writing not sci-fi stories, but “human stories” that happened to be set in the sci-fi world.
This page also includes a fantastic detailed profile here. I've pulled some of the most interesting bits: Fontana has come to be known as a science fiction writer, but she doesn’t think of herself that way: “I write about people. That it happens to occur in a science fiction environment is an accident. I truly like to write about people, and I try to find the stories that go to the heart. Those are the stories that interest me.”
...
In the midsixties she left Peeples to become executive secretary to producer Gene Roddenberry.
The next years were demoralizing for Fontana, as producers refused to give her work because of her gender. “I wanted to write for Combat,” she related, “and they wouldn’t read it. They said, ‘What would a woman know about combat?’ I read a lot of military history, I’m very familiar with World War II history. I wrote two full scripts out of speculation, and they wouldn’t even look at them.” Fontana knew she had to do something, so she began identifying herself as D. C. Fontana on the cover of her scripts. “I felt that if they don’t go in with any knowledge of who I am, they’ll at least read it and give me a chance.” The ploy worked, and Fontana started to get jobs immediately. Her first script sale since 1960 went to Irving Elman, a producer on the hospital drama Ben Casey. When it was revealed to Elman that Fontana was a woman, he said, “I don’t care-I like it.”
...
“Journey to Babel” is Fontana’s favorite episode. Exploring the relationship among Spock, his human mother, and his dying Vulcan father, it exhibits Fontana’s talent for writing stories that are, at their essence, about the human spirit. “It was really about the generation gap; how it can be either a wall or something warm and lovely,” Fontana explained. “In this case it was a wall, as far as between the father and son. Then I wrapped it up in a mystery and an adventure.”
Interviews:
What Th--? blog: part 1, part 2, part 3
IGN: Star Trek 101
She Knows
UGO Movie Blog
1. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
2. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
3. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
4. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
5. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
6. Source: Wikipedia. [ back]
7. Source: Wikipedia. [ back]
Updates: 7/09/2009 - Corrected Hugo Award nomination info. Added footnotes citing sources. Added a quote from the afterword to Vulcan's Glory by D.C. Fontana, typed up specifically for this primer by the wonderful taraljc.
D.C. Fontana
Dorothy Catherine Fontana is a writer and script editor who has the distinction of being one of the few people to have worked on Star Trek: The Original Series, as well as Star Trek: The Animated Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Deep Space Nine is her favorite Star Trek spinoff. She especially liked the show's strong characters. When rewritten, Fontana has used pseudonyms, including Michael Richards and J. Michael Bingham. 1
Fontana wrote several notable TOS episodes, including "Journey to Babel", and acted as script consultant in TOS's second season. She was the associate producer and story editor of Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which she also wrote the episode "Yesteryear". She later co-wrote the Next Generation's "Encounter at Farpoint", where she invented the "LCARS" concept and DS9's "Dax", her last involvement with Star Trek, where a great deal of Jadzia Dax's backstory was fleshed out. 2
SheKnows: I also thought you were a guy because we very rarely saw a woman's name in the credits in those days. You used your initials.
Fontana: Yeah and few women were writing under their own names. Pat Fielder wrote under her name, but Pat is kind of a nebulous name. Margaret Arman. She was a great friend. Leigh Bracket in films and there were others who were active then. Joyce Perry came along. Today, the women on the CSI's are very strong writers. So it's changed a little bit, but a lot hasn't changed. On the action adventure shows, you still see more male names than female names. But, it's a little better.
- sheknows.com
TOS:
(links go to episodes posted by CBS at YouTube)
- "Charlie X" (teleplay)
- "Tomorrow is Yesterday"
- "This Side of Paradise" (teleplay, story with Nathan Butler)
- "Friday's Child"
- "Journey to Babel"
- "By Any Other Name" (teleplay with Jerome Bixby)
- "The Ultimate Computer" (teleplay)
- "The Enterprise Incident"
- "That Which Survives" (as Michael Richards)
- "The Way to Eden" (story with Arthur Heinemann, as Michael Richards)
Fontana is to thank for giving us this image, from "Charlie X"
UGO: Do you get a kick out of seeing people still dressed as Andorians?
D.C. Fontana: Yes, that's always fun, to know that these aliens I've invented are still around and kicking. And if you've ever read that "Journey to Babel" script, the makeup and costume instructions in the front is that "the Andorians are blue... just because." Because I wanted them to be blue!
- UGO Movie Blog
Fontana was clearly interested in characters' family lives. She introduced Sarek and Amanda in "Journey to Babel,"
and tried numerous times to introduce Dr. McCoy's daughter, Joanna.
Unproduced TOS episodes:
- "Joanna" was written by Dorothy Fontana, as the first episode to feature Joanna McCoy, the daughter of Leonard McCoy. The outline was submitted 27 August 1968 and would later be heavily rewritten to become "The Way to Eden". 3
- "The Stars of Sargasso" was written by Dorothy Fontana. It had a draft date of 14 May 1969 and was intended for the undeveloped TOS Season 4. It was the second attempt to introduce Joanna. 4
"There was sort of like the creature of the week, monster of the week [mentality], which they'd been doing over on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," remembers Fontana. "And I never thought that was a terribly successful thing for Star Trek to do. But also there were some complaints from the crew saying, 'Well, the story editor came down to the transporter room set and said, 'What does this thing do again?'' And when I was told that Doctor McCoy could not have a 22-year-old daughter because he was Kirk's contemporary, I said, 'O.K., they don't get the show.' I'm sorry, but they didn't. I honestly don't know. I can't answer for anybody else. I just know what they said to me, what the crew said to me, and I thought, 'I'm better off writing Westerns now.'"
- IGN: Star Trek 101
TAS:
- "Yesteryear" (trailer) - Known as the only episode of the animated series to be included in canon.
"Yesteryear" features time-traveling Spock, a familiar-looking Vulcan bullies scene (we see what you did there, boys), and a grumpy Andorian.
TNG:
(links go to episodes posted at YouTube)
- "Encounter at Farpoint" (with Gene Roddenberry)
- "The Naked Now" (with John D.F. Black, as J. Michael Bingham)
- "Lonely Among Us" (teleplay)
- "Too Short a Season" (teleplay with Michael Michaelian)
- "Heart of Glory" (story with Maurice Hurley and Herbert Wright)
- Paley Center profile
Unproduced TNG:
- "Terminus" was a story written by Philip and Eugene Price, revised by Robert Lewin and Dorothy Fontana. It featured a character that was later re-conceived as Lore. 5
DS9:
- "Dax" (teleplay with Peter Allan Fields)
Star Trek: New Voyages:
(link goes to episode posted legally at YouTube)
SheKnows: Can you talk a bit more about New Voyages webisodes?
Fontana: These are one hour episodes as they would've been done on the show, like in the fourth season which never existed. It’s actors playing the original actors playing the roles. They rather resemble them and try to get the mannerisms. It's very well done and James Cawley spends his own money on it. He's an Elvis impersonator. He puts like a $100k into these episodes. There are a lot of donated and volunteer services and he has accurately recreated the sets. Before Bill Theiss died, he gave Jim a lot of the material that was used for the original costumes and some patterns.
SheKnows: Sounds like he and his team really care about the classic show.
Fontana: Yes. It's done with a lot of affection. They want me to do a story about Joanna McCoy who's Dr. McCoy's daughter which never got done on the real series, but people have heard about it for years. There are thirty two million downloads - not hits. So you can see how powerful it is.
SheKnows: And you've already written a webisode featuring the original Chekov, Walter Koenig, right?
Fontana: Yep. It's called To Serve All My Days.
- sheknows.com
Fiction:
- Vulcan's Glory (1989)
Vulcan's Glory features Captain Pike and the wonderful, too-little-seen Number One. One of the things I liked about writing "Vulcan's Glory" was the fact that I could explore the character of Number One, the Enterprise's previous, mysterious, executive officer. I sat down for a couple of hours with Majel Barrett to discuss what she thought of the female officer she depicted in "The Cage." She gave me her ideas about what Number One felt and thought, and the fact that on Ilyria, her planet of origin, she would have been the best of her breed for the year she was born, the most genetically perfect being. Majel also thought Number One had an emotional thing for Pike--and he would be inclined to reciprocate, except for the restraining fact that he was her commanding officer.
- D.C. Fontana, from the afterword to Vulcan's Glory, typed up specifically for this primer by the wonderful taraljc
Comics: UGO: Ah. This is your first time in the world of comics. Are you a comics fan? Do you follow any series?
D.C.: Actually no. But I loved Watchmen. I love a lot of [Neil] Gaiman's work, etc, and [Frank] Miller.
- UGO Movie Blog
Other work:
Fontana has written scripts for other science fiction shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man in 1974, Logan's Run in 1978 (also serving as story editor for the short-lived television series based on the book by George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan), Babylon 5 in 1995 (the episodes "A Distant Star", "Legacies" and "The War Prayer"), and Earth: Final Conflict in 1997. 6
Her writing credits include children's shows such as the 1970s series Land of the Lost - which also featured other Star Trek veterans - He-Man and The Masters of the Universe in 1983 (episode "Battle Cat"), and the Beast Wars episode Crossing the Rubicon. She co-wrote "Where No Sprite Has Gone Before", a 1997 episode of the CGI television series ReBoot. 7
"Elsewhen" by D.C. Fontana (and directed by Dennis Steinmetz) has always been one of my favorite episodes of the 1970s kid-vid series, Land of the Lost. Even today, more than thirty years after it first aired, I feel it poignant, intelligent and endlessly fascinating.
- SATURDAY MORNING CULT TV BLOGGING: Land of the Lost: "Elsewhen"
Video footage of D.C. Fontana:
Archive of American Television - 7 part interview
MT&R Seminar: Writing the Fantastic for Television, 1996 - D. C. Fontana recalls advice from her mentor, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who preached writing not sci-fi stories, but “human stories” that happened to be set in the sci-fi world.
This page also includes a fantastic detailed profile here. I've pulled some of the most interesting bits: Fontana has come to be known as a science fiction writer, but she doesn’t think of herself that way: “I write about people. That it happens to occur in a science fiction environment is an accident. I truly like to write about people, and I try to find the stories that go to the heart. Those are the stories that interest me.”
...
In the midsixties she left Peeples to become executive secretary to producer Gene Roddenberry.
The next years were demoralizing for Fontana, as producers refused to give her work because of her gender. “I wanted to write for Combat,” she related, “and they wouldn’t read it. They said, ‘What would a woman know about combat?’ I read a lot of military history, I’m very familiar with World War II history. I wrote two full scripts out of speculation, and they wouldn’t even look at them.” Fontana knew she had to do something, so she began identifying herself as D. C. Fontana on the cover of her scripts. “I felt that if they don’t go in with any knowledge of who I am, they’ll at least read it and give me a chance.” The ploy worked, and Fontana started to get jobs immediately. Her first script sale since 1960 went to Irving Elman, a producer on the hospital drama Ben Casey. When it was revealed to Elman that Fontana was a woman, he said, “I don’t care-I like it.”
...
“Journey to Babel” is Fontana’s favorite episode. Exploring the relationship among Spock, his human mother, and his dying Vulcan father, it exhibits Fontana’s talent for writing stories that are, at their essence, about the human spirit. “It was really about the generation gap; how it can be either a wall or something warm and lovely,” Fontana explained. “In this case it was a wall, as far as between the father and son. Then I wrapped it up in a mystery and an adventure.”
Interviews:
What Th--? blog: part 1, part 2, part 3
IGN: Star Trek 101
She Knows
UGO Movie Blog
1. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
2. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
3. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
4. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
5. Source: Memory Alpha. [ back]
6. Source: Wikipedia. [ back]
7. Source: Wikipedia. [ back]
Updates: 7/09/2009 - Corrected Hugo Award nomination info. Added footnotes citing sources. Added a quote from the afterword to Vulcan's Glory by D.C. Fontana, typed up specifically for this primer by the wonderful taraljc.