6 Quotes by Edward Gross

The gentleman who plays it in the new Star Trek movies is great, but he’s acting. Leonard was Spock. He was always the character.

I sympathize with the guys who went to go see The Phantom Menace and convinced themselves that it wasn’t as bad as it was. Phantom Menace is worse, I would argue, than Star Trek ever was, but we were kind of in denial. There were some beautiful shots of the Enterprise and we got to see some Klingons, so it wasn’t a total disaster, but in large part it was pretty boring.

I remember seeing an abstract of his rights once, and someone had actually thought of a clause that said the intensity of the musical fanfare, under Roddenberry’s on-screen credit, could be no less than that of the musical fanfare when Shatner’s name was on the screen.

Star Trek writers came in with supreme egos. I had worked with many of them before and found them, like most science-fiction writers, very unyielding to comment. Harlan [Ellison] was in a class by himself. He gave me an outline on The Mod Squad that would have cost twenty million dollars to produce.

The history of human endeavor has frequently [been] comprised of certain institutions which are based on two archetypes. There’s a guy who comes along and, with a certain kind of messianic fortitude and charisma, conjures up a universe out of nothing, hot air, if you’ll pardon the expression. He makes it happen. Usually, he never stays around to run it.

A lot of people said Star Trek II was such a terrific movie and had a lot of unkind things to say about Star Trek I, but I don’t think they realize that Star Trek II wouldn’t have been so good if someone hadn’t gone boldly where no one had gone before and showed us, in effect, what not to do when it was really important.