On James Van Hise

James Van Hise is a well-known journalist specializing in film, television, and comic history. A long-time fan turned media historian, Van Hise’s credentials as both writer and editor are extensive. He was the editor of the pivotal comix zine Rocket Blast Comic Collector (1974-8) and the pioneering Enterprise Incidents: The Magazine for Star Trek Fans (1976-85). In the comic field he has written stories for Dread of Night, Green Hornet, Ray Bradbury Comics, and Real Ghostbusters, among others. As a journalist Van Hise has authored books on Batman, Dune, Conan, Star Wars, The Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, Stephen King, and Star Trek.
  

 

 

Why Gene Roddenberry became a Cop and How It Helped Launch His TV Writing Career

From the forthcoming biography RODDENBERRY: The Man Who Created Star Trek by James Van Hise.

Throughout the late 1940s Gene continued to write for flying magazines. In 1949 the writing bug led him to quit his airline job and move to Los Angeles, "where I knew television eventually would be based. But I was a little early, and to make ends meet I joined the Los Angeles police department." He had come out from New York in 1949, "to see my dear and old friend, who was then Inspector William Parker in the Wilshire Division. He wasn't very enthusiastic about my plans. In fact, he did his best to talk me out of it." But Gene disregarded Parker's advice and joined the LAPD, following in his father's footsteps.

Looking back on that time, Gene stated that he didn't think he made a very good policeman himself because he hated writing tickets. He was probably the only policeman in Los Angeles who was a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Yet he never regretted the five and a half years he spent with the Los Angeles Police Department. "It gave me a good look at life and death. Policemen see things that you just don't ordinarily run into during your life. In a few years in police work you see life really stripped bare. It's awfully good experience for a writer."

Since he had come to Los Angeles to write for television, he knew he needed an agent and soon hatched a scheme to secure one. Gene also knew that a well-known writer's agent drove through his beat each day, so he just patiently waited until the man committed a traffic violation. Instead of writing a ticket, he got the agent to arrange an interview at Four Star Productions.

Gene dressed casually for the interview, and as he became more involved in disclosing his concepts and story ideas, he removed his sports coat. After that the executives were really hanging on his every word. It was only later that he realized that under his coat, he'd been wearing his shoulder holster and .38 police special.

He sold his first script to television in 1951. At the time he wrote under the name "Robert Wesley" (a combination of his brother's first name and his own middle name) because the Los Angeles Police Department frowned on its officers moonlighting.

Falling back on his ongoing experience as a police officer, Gene Roddenberry sold a script to Dragnet. He also applied his experience to scripts for such shows as Mr. District Attorney.

Gene said, "Then one day my wife, Eileen, said, 'Look, Gene, your job as a policeman brings you $435 a month but your writing hobby is earning $1100 a month. Why don't you stick to your hobby?' We went to dinner, to a Chinese restaurant, to talk it over. I opened a fortune cookie and it read: 'A change of name will bring you fame.'"

Gene had been selling his scripts under the name Robert Wesley. "I opened another one and it read, 'Tomorrow is an excellent time to change jobs.' Intrigued and amazed, I opened still another one and this message read, 'You may be sure of it.'

"That did it!" he recalled. "I quit as a policeman the next day. I still have those fortune cookies framed and on my desk."

Look for the forthcoming biography RODDENBERRY: The Man Who Created Star Trek by James Van Hise coming in April 2025.

First Look at Cover for James Van Hise Bio - Roddenberry: The Man who Created Star Trek

Cover design: Frankie Hill

First book in our new series reprinting James Van Hise's classic books on TOS. We call the series, The Unauthorized Guide to Trek. Due out April 15, 2015.

James Van Hise is a well-known journalist specializing in film, television, and comic history. A long-time fan turned media historian, Van Hise’s credentials as both writer and editor are extensive. He was the editor of the pivotal comix zine Rocket Blast Comic Collector (1974-8) and the pioneering Enterprise Incidents: The Magazine for Star Trek Fans (1976-85). In the comic field he has written stories for Dread of Night, Green Hornet, Ray Bradbury Comics, and Real Ghostbusters, among others. As a journalist Van Hise has authored books on Batman, Dune, Conan, Star Wars, The Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, Stephen King, and Star Trek.

Read Free How Star Trek Developed from Gene Roddenberry's Roots as a Young SciFi Fan - Excerpt from Unauthorized Roddenberry Bio Out in June 2015

From media journalist James Van Hise's forthcoming Gene Roddenberry: The Man who Created Star Trek, first book in his The Unauthorized Guide to Trek series. Due out June 2015.

Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, was born in El Paso, Texas on August 19,

1921. The young Roddenberry, who spent his formative years in Los Angeles, was a science fiction aficionado from the word go. It started with a battered copy of Astounding Stories magazine, and took off from there. Of course, he never considered writing in any genre or medium until much later in life, after college.

When he did, there would be no denying that he had a certain knack for it! Young Gene was a sickly boy whose parents often worried about his developmental problems. They failed to realize he had a vividly active imagination which made the trials of reality easier to bear. His discovery of science fiction, including Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars books, actually led him back to reality, demonstrating the possibilities of existence. Adolescence brought improvement in Gene's health, and he soon became a highly active youth. "I was somewhat handicapped as a child," Gene freely admitted. "I had the good fortune to lose most of it. I was a science fiction reader from the time I was about eleven years old. Since the age of four I've been reading everything in sight. I suspect if you gave me a telephone book I would read it. At the age of fourteen I read Days of Our Years by Pierre Van Paassen, which is a story that is sort of outmoded now, but it was the first statement I read about the evil of war and that wars are often manipulated for reasons other than the ones offered. I should say the whole range of reading through school, I could think of fifty-five writers, but not [only] one or two [that have influenced him.]"

As a child, Gene had radio (the home entertainment system of the day), but television didn't exist yet. He became a reader. He'd go to the library every week on the W-Line streetcar and then home again. "I remember getting some peanut butter and crackers and falling into the dream world of books." He noted, "If something comes out by Arthur C. Clarke, I grab it immediately."

[The book then identifies the surprising magazine that may have inspired basic elements of Star Trek TOS.]

George Clayton Johnson, who wrote the first episode of ST ever aired, "Man Trap." once said, "I remember having an argument with Gene Roddenberry, the great speckled bird of the universe himself, in which I said to him, 'I'm unhappy about this.' And he said to me, 'Look, George, it may well be, and I don't argue with you. You know one hell of a lot more about science fiction than I do. ...However, I know more about this show because I created this show.'
    "Whereupon I started to remind him that he created this show by reading Captain Future." Captain Future featured a handsome hero with three sidekicks, one of whom was an android, another a robot, and a third a brilliant emotionless scientist, Simon Wright, who existed only as a brain in a transparent floating case. George felt that elements of these characters were ancestral influences on Star Trek.

This may be true. Captain Future was very popular in the 1940s in a vein of science fiction very similar to E.E. Smith, another science fiction writer whom Gene named as a definite influence on his own work.

 

Read the press release. Click here.

DPS to Reprint Unauthorized, Behind-the-Scenes Books by Trek Chronicler James Van Hise

Digital Parchment Services and well-known media journalist James Van Hise have signed an open-ended agreement to bring his now classic journalistic examinations of the Star Trek phenomenon back into print. The first five books in the series will be published throughout 2015.
The entire series will appear under the title "The Unauthorized Guide to Trek".

The new edition of Mr. Van Hise's books will feature additional photographs taken by him personally during his three decades chronicling the shows, movies, and the cultural phenomenon Star Trek became.

Beginning in June, DPS will release the following books under the Unauthorized Guide to Trek series title:

Gene Roddenberry: The Man Who Created a Phenomenon

Leonard Nimoy: The Man Who Was Spock

The TOS Years (1966 - 1969)

The Movie Years (1979-1991)

The Complete TOS Crew Book: The Characters and the Actors

The first book issued, fittingly enough, features a look into the private life and public accomplishments of the man responsible for the vision that became Star Trek.
Readers will learn:

• the childhood circumstances that led to Roddenberry's passion for science fiction;
• how his early days as a police officer gained him entry, later in his life as a writer, into the newly burgeoning field of television;
• about the bitter behind-the-scenes battles to keep the Star Trek true to Roddenberry's vision of a diverse and pacifistic future where conflicts were solved more often with brains than weapons;
• the reasons for the constant scene and plot changes in the movies as they were being shot;
• which actors loved him—and which...not so much—and why;
• how Roddenberry trained the next generation of Star Trek television producers to realize his vision after his death, and how that training influenced Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and beyond;
• and much much more.

Look for more news about The Unauthorized Guide to Trek and Gene Roddenberry: The Man who Created a Phenomenon, coming soon from Digital Parchment Services.


James Van Hise is a well-known journalist specializing in film, television, and comic history. A long-time fan turned media historian, Van Hise’s credentials as both writer and editor are extensive. He was the editor of the pivotal comix zine Rocket Blast Comic Collector (1974-8) and the pioneering Enterprise Incidents: The Magazine for Star Trek Fans (1976-85). In the comic field he has written stories for Dread of Night, Green Hornet, Ray Bradbury Comics, and Real Ghostbusters, among others. As a journalist Van Hise has authored books on Batman, Dune, Conan, Star Wars, The Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, Stephen King, and Star Trek.