INTRODUCTION
Jerome
Bixby: It Was a Good Life
By EMERSON BIXBY
(excerpted from the Introduction to the new Jerome Bixby collection, Mirror, Mirror: Classic SF by the Legendary Star Trek and Fantastic Voyage Writer)
After writing several thousand short stories —
science fiction, action, horror, western, comedy, etc. — and working for Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder, Galaxy
and other popular pulp magazines, Dad turned his attention to the screen. He continued writing short stories, often
adapting them later for television or film, as with “One-Way Street,” which was
part of his inspiration for Trek’s “Mirror, Mirror.” He took the theme from
"One-Way Street" and a
story titled "Mirror, Mirror,"
story, from which he also lifted the title.
Dad’s first screenplay was a Western titled
"The Body at Miller's Creek", which sadly never got filmed. Similar to "The Man From Earth", it
took place in one location and was mostly dialogue. A cowboy steps into a saloon during a fierce
blizzard, orders a bottle of whisky, and mentions in passing that there's a
body beneath the ice at Miller's Creek.
Others in the saloon, also trapped by the blizzard, begin to speculate
as to whose body it is, and some fear they are responsible for his death. The Sheriff who ran a drifter out of town,
the bar-girl who harshly rebuffed an advance, the bartender who threw out a
drunk, the rancher who argued with his son, and so on. These people spend most of the film baring
their souls, confessing their sins and regrets, while the cowboy just sits and
listens, drinking his whiskey. Then next
morning, he rides out of town, pausing to look at the body beneath the ice, and
realizes it's a scarecrow. A year or two
later, “Miller’s Creek” almost became an episode of “Have Gun Will Travel”,
with Paladin playing an almost silent role.
Dad felt the producers passed on the script because there was no
bloodshed, no conflict, and Paladin doesn’t kill anyone.
Dad always loved Westerns. He wrote a few more, none of which saw the
light of day. In retrospect, he assumed
he was trying too hard, almost attempting to re-write the genre. He never bothered with the familiar plots
like railroads coming through, so-and-so's out for revenge, and Indian
attacks. Instead, he kept attempting to
write a new Western, something other than the run-of-the-mill stories Hollywood
kept turning out. Don't get me wrong,
Dad loved the good ones. "Red River"
was his favorite, followed closely by "The Ox-Bow Incident."
In 1957, after the fourth or fifth rejected
Western, Dad decided to try writing science fiction films. The next year, "It! The Terror From
Beyond Space", "Curse of the Faceless Man", and "The Lost
Missile" hit theaters pretty much back-to-back.
"The Lost Missile" was Dad's first
film, which he scripted with John McPartland.
On the first day of filming, the director dropped dead of a heart
attack, and his son took over. The film
was well-received, but it suffered from an overuse of stock footage. There was easily fifteen minutes of it: jets
taking off, jets landing, soldiers running, jets taking off, jets landing.
Then came "It! The Terror from Beyond
Space", which was Dad's answer to "The Thing." Dad went to his grave praising Kenny Peach,
the film's cinematographer, and Paul Blasdel, who designed the creature. He was on the set for much of the filming,
and struck up friendships with both Marshal Thompson and Dabbs Grier, who
turned out to be an okay chess player.
“It!” was followed by "Curse of the
Faceless Man." Now, if anyone out
there ever wants to torture me for information, just play Rap music and force
me to drink Decaf, and I'll sing. For
Dad, just mention "Faceless Man" and he'd beg for mercy. His original script was a love story,
essentially "Titanic" with a volcano.
Set against the eruption of Vesuvius, a beautiful Princess falls for a
lowly Slave, but their undying love can never be. The first half of the script dealt with our
star-crossed love-birds hiding their passion in shadow. Then the Volcano erupts, and our hero spends
the rest of the script attempting to get his love out of harm's way. Jumping from one building to the next over
rivers of lava, outrunning landslides of molten rock, always one step ahead of
the villain who wanted the Princess's hand for himself and who now vows that
both shall die.
"The Faceless Man" was a good script,
but the producers were amused that Dad actually thought they had money to spend
on it. Someone, Robert Kent, I believe,
came up with the bright idea of losing the love story, and hey, let's make our
hero a mummy! Dad never visited the set,
and had no idea that his volcanic love story had become a third-rate mummy
rip-off. After the premiere, I
understand he shared some colorful expletives with Kent and put it all behind
him.
In the late '50's, Dad wrote for "Men Into
Space", a sci-fi adventure series that attempted to depict the coolness of
space travel, minus a budget. He wrote a
script titled "Eye in the Sky", about a military satellite that spots
the lone survivor of a shipwreck in a lifeboat.
"Men Into Space" refused to do the episode; something about
Department of Defense not wanting anyone to think we had satellites pointing
down at Russians, or, goodness knows, Americans. Dad left the show shortly after.
Dad met a girl in, I believe, late 1958; an
interesting precursor of the impending '60s drug-culture. After the divorce a few years later, Dad
raised me and my two brothers single-handedly.
In case I haven't already said this, my father wasn’t just a
multi-talented writer, he was an excellent parent.
When Dad's story "It's a Good Life"
was used as an episode of "The Twilight Zone," Dad had originally
wanted to do the script himself. It
turned out Rod Serling had written the script before purchasing the
rights. Dad was so impressed with
Serling's script that he didn't change one word.
In 1966, a new show about space travel caught
Dad's eye: "Star Trek." After
the third episode, Dad sat and wrote a script on spec, "Mother
Tiger." In it, the Enterprise
encounters
a derelict ship with an alien in suspended animation; an exiled
criminal from its home world and now the sole survivor of its race, which
begins laying hundreds of eggs.
Roddenberry loved the script, but it would have
been far too expensive to film, so Dad promptly wrote "Mirror,
Mirror," which was by far his best Trek.
I'm sure everyone has heard stories of a certain actor on Trek taking
lines from other characters. This almost
happened in "Mirror, Mirror," where so-and-so wanted this line, that
line, and Dad threw a fit. So the
director, Marc Daniels, suggests to so-and-so that they call the head of
Paramount, and have them call the head of Desilu Productions, and have them
call Daniels in the next "two minutes", at which point he'll be happy
to alter the script. Daniels then said
action and the scene was shot, with no changes to Dad's dialogue. Dad was forever grateful to Daniels for that.
Read more about the making of "Mirror Mirror" and Jerome Bixby's other celebrated Star Trek episodes "By any Other Name," "Requiem for Methuselah" and "Day of the Dove," as well as the saga of Fantastic Voyage, and more, in Emerson Bixby's fascinating account of his father's adventures in Hollywood - and beyond. Plus 9 more great novelettes and short stories for the new Jerome Bixby collection Mirror, Mirror: Classic SF by the Legendary Star Trek and Fantastic Voyage Writer $3.99 for Kindle.
Emerson Bixby is a screenwriter and director whose credits include Together in Heaven, On a Dark and Stormy Night (as by Bix Smithee), INRI, Deception,Last Dance, Bikini Island, and Disturbed.
