Gene L. Coon

Eugene Lee Coon (January 7, 1924 – July 8, 1973) was an American screenwriter, television producer and novelist. He is best remembered for his work on the original Star Trek series, especially as its showrunner where he was responsible for both its idealistic tone and various key elements of the franchise.

The eldest son of U.S. Army Sgt. Merle Jack "Pug" Coon and decorator Erma Gay Noakes, Eugene Lee Coon was born in Beatrice, Nebraska, on January 7, 1924. At four years of age, he showed talent, singing on the radio at WOAW-AM in Omaha. He knew twenty-four songs, including one in French and one in German. As his boyhood went on, he was a member of the Gage County 4-H Club and the Boy Scouts of America. He later attended Omaha Technical High School and participated in Junior Reserve Officers' Training Corps (JROTC), also playing in the school band. During this time, he was also a teenage newscaster for KWBE-AM in Beatrice. He later moved, with his parents and younger brothers, Merle Jack Coon Jr. and Bloise Newell Coon, to Glendale, California. Another brother died at ten years old when they still lived in Beatrice. His father found employment there working with poultry, and Coon transferred to Glendale High School.

During World War II, Coon served stateside in the United States Marine Corps from 1942 to 1946. Thereafter, he remained in the Marines as a reservist while studying radio communications at Glendale Junior College, where he performed in a production of The Night of January 16th. Following additional studies at the University of Iowa, he returned to active duty during the Korean War in 1950. He received additional training as a war reporter as well as running a pharmacy and building houses. He wrote about many of his experiences in the novels Meanwhile Back At The Front and The Short End of the Stick.

Upon his demobilization in 1952, Coon found work first as a radio newscaster before turning to freelance writing under the mentorship of Los Angeles Times reporter Gene Sherman. From 1954 to 1959, he operated a pharmacy at the intersection of Beverly Boulevard and North Ardmore Avenue; during this period, Sherman covered his pharmacy exploits in Page 2 Cityside column for the newspaper. Sherman also allowed Coon to have a guest spot promoting Meanwhile Back at the Front in the column he (Sherman) wrote for The Farmer's Market, using the pen name "Dick Kidson."

Beginning in 1956, Coon was primarily involved in scripting teleplays for popular western and action television shows, including Dragnet (1951), Wagon Train (1957), Maverick (1957), and Bonanza (1959). At Universal in the early 1960s, he turned McHale's Navy (1962) from a one-hour drama into a successful 30-minute sitcom. Together with the writer Les Colodny, Coon floated the idea for The Munsters (1964), as a satirical take on The Donna Reed Show (1958), to MCA chairman Lew Wasserman. The result of this last, whose format was worked out by Allan Burns and Chris Hayward and whose characters and situations were developed by Norm Liebman and Ed Haas, was yet another hit show, under the creative auspices of Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher. MCA, then the parent company of Universal Studios, produced the show through its Revue TV and Kayro-Vue Productions banners.

Star Trek

His Wagon Train scripts contained strong moral lessons concerning personal redemption and opposing war, and he later repeated very similar themes in his Star Trek scripts. (The latter series, though it owed much to C. S. Forester's novels about Horatio Hornblower and Jonathan Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels, had had to be sold to the NBC television network using the unofficial nickname of "Wagon Train to the stars".) Coon joined Star Trek during the first season; David Gerrold credited him with being a skilled showrunner before Coon left in the middle of the second season. Coon was responsible for many rewrites of Star Trek scripts.

His credited creations for Star Trek include the Klingons and the Organian Peace Treaty (in "Errand of Mercy"), Khan Noonien Singh (in "Space Seed", where he adapted a Carey Wilber story), Zefram Cochrane (in "Metamorphosis"), the advancement and the definition of the Prime Directive in "The Return of the Archons" and "Bread and Circuses" respectively, the official naming of the United Federation of Planets itself in "Arena" (in which he inadvertently plagiarized a Frederic Brown story), and the official naming of Starfleet Command in "Court Martial". Since he also had the responsibility of revising scripts, he worked uncredited on many other episodes. He also mentored the young Gerrold and helped him polish the script for the episode "The Trouble with Tribbles".Other Star Trek episodes that he wrote included "The Devil in the Dark" and "A Taste of Armageddon". He is credited with much of the character development of Star Trek's characters, much of the humor of Star Trek, and the "bickersonesque" disagreements between Spock and McCoy.

Following arguments with Roddenberry over the tone of the installment "Bread and Circuses", partly a satire on the medium of television, Coon left the writing staff and designated John Meredyth Lucas as showrunner. Lucas, who had already written the installments "The Changeling" and "Patterns of Force" for the program, quoted Coon as saying, after announcing to him (Lucas) that he (Coon) was leaving, "Why the hell don't you take over? You produced The Fugitive and Ben Casey and that shit". Lucas suspected Coon may have been secretly diagnosed with cancer, but he never definitely learned whether this was the case.

Coon contributed to four scripts for the third season under the pseudonym of Lee Cronin, as he was by then under contract to Universal Studios.

Post–Star Trek

Following his period with Star Trek, Coon produced the Universal Studios series It Takes a Thief, starring Robert Wagner, during which time he mentored Glen A. Larson. He also continued to write for Kung Fu and The Streets of San Francisco. In 1973, he served as co-writer with Gene Roddenberry on the NBC-TV movie The Questor Tapes. The movie was to serve as a pilot for a new series, but Roddenberry balked at changes made by NBC (eliminating the character of Jerry Robinson, Questor's human companion/mentor). He died before the pilot aired in early 1974. Although he turned down the opportunity to work on Star Trek: The Animated Series, he continued to work with Roddenberry, co-writing Genesis II and the proposal for Spectre. He also founded UniTel Associates, one of the earliest production companies aimed at the home video market.

Coon was known as one of the fastest writers in Hollywood, and it was not unusual for him to rewrite a script for shooting overnight, or over a weekend. He had a dry sense of humor, as reflected in his two novels. After years of separation, Coon again found his first love, model Jackie Mitchell. In 1967 he divorced his wife Joy so that he could be with Jackie, with whom he spent the last five years of his life.

A chain smoker of cigarillos for most of his life, the man whom fellow writer / producer Glen A. Larson referred to as "the spirit and soul of Star Trek", died of lung and throat cancer—one week after being diagnosed—in July 1973 at the age of 49. Another possible cause of his cancer was radiation from Nevada bomb testing sites he attended with his mentor Gene Sherman and his first wife Joy in the 1950s.

D. C. Fontana dedicated her novelization of The Questor Tapes to him. William Shatner dedicated a chapter in his 1993 memoir Star Trek Memories to him, titled "The Unsung Hero", in which he attributed many aspects of Star Trek to him. Leonard Nimoy did likewise in his own memoir (I Am Spock), as did Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman with Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. In the closing credits of the 1999 Star Trek tribute film Free Enterprise, he is referred to as "The Forgotten Gene" (in comparison to the recognition received by his close friend and collaborator, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry).

During the weekend of March 2–4, 2018, there was a tribute in his hometown of Beatrice, Nebraska.

Television

He worked on Dragnet, Bonanza, Zorro, Peter Gunn, Mr Lucky, Have Gun – Will Travel, Wagon Train, The Wild Wild West, The Four Just Men, Combat!, and McHale's Navy. Later his role was producer for The Wild Wild West.

Films

• The Girl in the Kremlin (1957)
• Man in the Shadow (1957)
• No Name on the Bullet (1959)
• The Raiders (1963)
• The Killers (1964)
• First to Fight (1967)
• Journey to Shiloh (1968)
• The Questor Tapes (1974)

Books

By Gene L. Coon

• Meanwhile Back at the Front (New York: Crown, 1961. 309 pp.) A novel dealing with the improbable exploits of the Public Information Section of the 1st Marine Division during the Korean War.
• The Short End of the Stick (published 1964). A novel dealing with the lives and problems of American troops stationed along the DMZ in Korea after the war ended. It includes how they got along with and were treated by the native Koreans, focusing on sex and cultural clashes. It is also one of the earliest publications to discuss the drug problems of the bored occupation troops and how commanders dealt with them.

About Gene L. Coon

• Gene L. Coon: The Unsung Hero of Star Trek Written by Justin Murphy. Amazon Kindle, 2017. His life story covering his start singing on Omaha radio at four years old, and aspects of his early life and military career, to his postwar career beginnings as a pharmacist and his reporter apprenticeship under Gene Sherman. It continues through his early screenwriting career leading up to and after Star Trek and founding one of the first home video companies in the early 1970s.