If you’re a fan ofStar Trek: The Next GenerationorStar Trek: Deep Space Nineand want to hear some really cool stories about the making of both series and the wild wayStar Trekled toRonald D. Mooregetting his break in Hollywood, you’re in the right place. That’s because last week I did an extended interview withRonald D. Mooreas part of ourCollider Connectedinterview series and he shared somegreatbehind-the-scenes stories about being part ofStar Trekincluding many I didn’t know. If you’re not aware, Moore wrote over twenty-five episodes ofTNG, fifteen episodes ofDS9, and was one of the writers onStar Trek: GenerationsandStar Trek: First Contact, so he has a lot of firsthand knowledge.
Anyway, back whenTNGwas filming on the Paramount lot in the late 80s, they offered weekly tours so fans could see the sets up close. It ends up Moore was dating a girl at the time who had a contact atStar Trekand she got him on a tour scheduled for about six weeks from when she asked. Moore decided he’d write an episode ofThe Next Generationwhile he waited for the tour and bring it to set to try and land a job. Here’s how Moore described it:
“I just decided I was going to give it a shot, and I sat down and wrote an episode and I tucked it under my arm and I brought it with me on the set tour. I convinced the guy that was giving the set tour, his name was Richard Arnold to read the script. He liked it and gave it to my first agent. Richard was one of Gene Roddenberry’s assistants. So the agent submitted it to the show formally. It sat in the slush pile for about seven months. Then Michael Piller, the late Michael Piller came aboard at the beginning of the third season, looking for materials, started going through the slush pile, found the script, bought it, produced it, asked me to write a second one. I did a second one. Then after that he brought me on staff and I was there for 10 years. It was a very lucky, amazing break that I got. I was very young. I was like 25.”
In this day and age something like this would probably never happen due to all the rules in place about unsolicited submissions, but it’s incredible to hear how Moore got started.
Besides sharing how he got started, Moore talked about the incredible production challenges trying to make twenty-six episodes a season onTNG, why they weren’t allowed to tell season-long storylines, how the writers were essentially working all year long, co-writing theTNGseries finale “All Good Things"and how they came up with the idea of Picard playing poker with the crew at the end of the episode, and so much more.
After we discussed TNG, we dove intoDS9where Moore talked about why he landed on that series and notVoyager, howDS9was able to push boundaries like featuring the first same-sex kiss onStar Trek, how the writers room was different fromTNG, why they didn’t map out a season-long arc, the newfound respect for the series that it didn’t have as it aired, and more. Finally, at the end of the interview, Moore shared what props he took home from set and how he saved something very cool from the dumpster when the sets were being destroyed.
Like I said previously, if you’re a fan ofTNGorDS9, you’re going to love hearing Moore share some behind-the-scenes stories that I’m sure you don’t know.
Due to how much these series mean to me, I’m doing something a bit unusual for this interview: you can either watch what Moore had to say in the player below, or you can read the full transcript further down the page. I know some of you prefer watching videos while others would rather just read the text. As usual, below the video is a listing of what we talked about.
Finally, if you missed what Moore had to say aboutFor All Mankind, the unproducedlive-actionStar WarsseriesUnderground,Outlander,or theBattlestar Galacticaseries finale, just click the links.
Ronald D. Moore:
Here’s the text of the interview:
Collider: I absolutely loveStar Trek: The Next Generation. It might be my favorite show. I heard a story about how you got involved on that show and it’s so crazy, and I just can’t imagine that it would ever happen again in today’s world. So how did you get involved? I want to make sure what I heard is actually accurate.
RONALD D. MOORE: I was living in Los Angeles trying to be a writer and basically I started dating a girl who had a connection toStar Trek: The Next Generation. She found out I was aStar Trekfan because I had Captain Kirk posters in my apartment and she said, “Oh, you know, I still know people over there. I could get you a tour of the sets.” They used to have a regular set tour. Like once a week they would take people on theStar Treksets, because so many people wanted to do it. So she made a call and they said, “Sure, you can get on the tour, and it’ll be in about six weeks.” So I just decided I was going to give it a shot, and I sat down and wrote an episode and I tucked it under my arm and I brought it with me on the set tour. I convinced the guy that was giving the set tour, his name was Richard Arnold to read the script. He liked it and gave it to my first agent. Richard was one of Gene Roddenberry’s assistants. So the agent submitted it to the show formally. It sat in the slush pile for about seven months. Then Michael Piller, the late Michael Piller came aboard at the beginning of the third season, looking for materials, started going through the slush pile, found the script, bought it, produced it, asked me to write a second one. I did a second one. Then after that he brought me on staff and I was there for 10 years. It was a very lucky, amazing break that I got. I was very young. I was like 25.
It’s crazy that happened because it’s so, I mean,Star Trek: The Next Generationhad a very unusual, they had a different policy where people could submit scripts or … that was the case, right?
Yeah. After, well, I’m kind of responsible for that. Because after Michael found my script, Michael decided, “Oh, this is a great resource. We should open the gates up to the fan community and people that want to write for the show.” So he negotiated a deal with the Paramount lawyers where if you filled out this release form, anybody could submit a script to the show. So we started getting like 3000 scripts a year. And we had at least five full time script readers who did nothing but readNext Generationscripts and then wrote up coverage on every script. Then every week the writers, of which I was one at that point, would get this stack of spec scripts with coverage. And we would have to read the coverage and then people would be invited. Some very, there was maybe one or two scripts that were bought, purchased outright, after me. I think Tin Man was a script that was purchased. Then there were a couple of stories that were purchased. But there were a lot of writers that came in and pitched for the first time because of that. Some of them sold stories. Bryan Fuller, I believe, got his start that way. And Jane Espenson I believe also.
It’s amazing. You worked on 27 scripts onNext Generation. What was it like back then? Because nowadays, the modern technology, the way we’re talking to each other, modern computers, the way people can work, is so different than it was back in the eighties and early nineties. What was it like writing for a show when the technology was just so different?
It was amazing. You have to remember, it sounds antiquated now, but at the time we were all working on what was state-of-the-art equipment or at least we thought it was. I worked on a Mac at home, but they didn’t have Macs at the studio. So we had to use these IBM PCs. And they were black screens with amber lettering at the beginning, and the big five and a half inch floppy disks. Then graduated to color monitors and the three and a half inch discs. Still didn’t have them networked together. There was no internet. You had to, if you want something printed out, you had to take the disc down four flights of stairs, give it to the script coordinator. They would do the print outs for you and take it back up.
Changes were done on the margins, handwritten in the script. Then you gave it to the script coordinator to actually type in the changes. But it was a point of transition. There was still a secretarial pool, a typing pool at Paramount, which meant there were women that were in that pool who had been typing scripts for literally decades. If you wrote your script in longhand, you could send it to the secretarial pool and they would type it up in the right format and send it back to you the same day. It was literally a survivor of the era going back to I Love Lucy when they would do stuff like that. So it was really something. The internet came in while I was atStar Trek, and working onStar Trek, we were always very interested in technology. So there were first adopters among all of us. Different people were buying new computers and Macs and upgrades. People started talking about the internet and it was feeding our sort of technocentric kind of view of the universe or view of the future. So we always were sort of trying to get the latest and greatest stuff. AOL was a big deal, and all the stuff at the primeval era of the internet happened while I was atStar Trek. Message boards, and fan communication changed pretty profoundly once the internet came through. It was a fascinating time.
One of the things aboutStar Trek, the show did I think 20 something episodes a year, which is a massive beast of a production for a sci-fi show. What was it like in terms of each season, trying to figure out the ultimate arc? How much was it changing on the fly? I’m just curious about the way you guys developed the seasons back then.
Well, inNext Gen, you have to remember it was very episodic. This was before the era of television embraced story arcs and character arcs. There was a mandate. The studio was very adamant that it did not want continuity between the episodes because we were a first run syndication show. It went out to straight to the local syndicated stations, and those stations wanted the ability to show them in whatever order they wanted to. They didn’t want to have to get locked into a certain pattern of showing. The studio was frankly afraid that viewers tuned into episode four of a five episode arc and they went, “Oh, I missed the first three. Well, screw it. I’m not going to watch any of this.” So it was a very different mindset. So when we were developing the show, you weren’t doing arcs. At the beginning of the season, we were doing 26 a year, which it sounds crazy now, but we were doing 26 episodes and you would just start keeping, putting up one line things of concepts for an episode on a big board.
You were mostly looking for a variety of storytelling. You were trying not to do two mysteries in a row. You were trying not to do two Picard stories in a row. You were saying, “Okay, we’ll do this Picard. Then we’re going to do a Beverly story. Then we’ll do a Worf story. Then we’ll do another Picard story.” You were mixing it up in terms of the characters and the style of storytelling. “It’s too many time travel episodes this season. Let’s not do that one here. Let’s do that one next year. We’re going to do one Q episode. Okay, we’re going to do one Borg episode.” It was really about diversity of storytelling and the rhythm, but so that you weren’t doing the same kind of show right in a row.
With that many episodes, we never mapped out the whole season ahead of time. You barely, you were always trying desperately to keep ahead of production. And there would always come a point in the filming of each season where you were pretty much hand to mouth. Where you were writing them and they were shooting them and you’re writing and shooting. You were just barely keeping ahead of the camera at certain times. Then you’d have episodes that were disasters or got thrown out for whatever reason. It had to be completely reconceptualized, and they’re on the stage. It was a tremendous pressure cooker in the staff room. As a result, you never got that far ahead. At the beginning of the season, you might map out the first five or six episodes, and then you have to start writing them and then time is clicking.
So you get a chance to start breaking the next couple episodes, and then next one, and maybe getting some freelance writer to pump out stuff. But again, you’re just trying desperately to get a script out in time to prep next week and shoot the following week. And it’s just going like this. Because they were also short shooting schedules. We shot an episode in seven days. Seven days is really tight. So that means you only had seven days of prep before you had to start shooting. So it was like, boom, boom. It was very, it was a relentless kind of schedule. Because it was my first gig, it was my first time working in television, I didn’t know any better. I just thought this was normal. It was like, “Okay, I just got to get with the program. Because everyone else is doing it,” and that’s how I learned. I just learned by like, okay, this is normal TV. And we just have to really work really hard as writers all the time. BecauseStar Treknever really worried about the ratings. I mean, the ratings were always great and there was no network because it was first round syndication. We never really worried about getting picked up. So we always kind of rolled into next season. Once we finished shooting season four, writers would get two weeks' break and then we’d be back in the writers room working on season five while doing post-production on four.
Did you have a favorite character to write for onNext Gen?
No. I mean, you learn to write for all of them. And I enjoyed writing for all of them. They all had different graces and they had different reasons to write for them. It was fun to write Data because of Data’s humor. It was fun to write the big sort of Klingon stories for Worf, and Picard had the moral ethical dilemmas. There was always some something you could grab onto as a writer. So no, I genuinely, there weren’t really any favorites that I had. It was just fun to write for the whole cast.
I thinkAll Good Things, the series finale ofNext Generationis a straight up masterpiece.
Oh, thanks.
It’s incredibly difficult to end anything. To give resolution to characters and make people happy. I love that episode. Can you talk about, because you were one of the people responsible for that one. Can you sort of talk about what it was like writing the series finale, and did it ever almost end up being something else?
Well, you know, it’s interesting. Brannon Braga and I co-wrote it, and we were writingStar Trek: Generationsat that point. We’d been working onGenerationsfor almost a year and there was an assumption among all of us on the writing staff that Michael Piller was going to want to write the finale of the show himself. Ultimately Michael was busy withDeep Space Nine. I think he was even working onVoyagerat that point, and decided that he was going to have Brannon and I write it. We were thrilled and excited, but it was also right in the middle of working onGenerations.
So suddenly it was this double load that we had to do. We were doing two two hour pieces about the exact same characters on the exact same ship. There were times when we were working on a script, an engineering problem with Geordi and Data talking about how to tech the tech for the work drive and we would get lost in which story this was. “Wait, is this the movie or is this the TV show?” The great irony of it all is that we spent four weeks working onAll Good Things. We spent a year working onGenerations. AndAll Good Thingsturned out so much better. It’s just one of those crazy lessons that you learn as a writer. But to answer your question, no, it wasn’t really ever going to be something else.
It was always pretty much about the three stages of a man’s life, which was Michael’s idea. I think Brannon and I pitched, there were various pitches on what it could have been, but it never came close. Michael pretty much locked into this notion of visiting all three periods of the captain’s life, of getting the Enterprise at the beginning, of what it was today, and his life in the distant future. So once that core concept kind of locked in, it never really changed radically after that.
Do you remember who came up with the idea of Picard joining the crew to play poker?
I don’t. I think that was, that might’ve been even earlier. I think the notion that we were going to end the show with the poker game was something I think we talked about in the writer’s room for quite a while. So I think that was always like, “Yeah. And somehow whatever it is, it’s going to end in the poker game.”
Jumping off ofNext Generation, I want to go intoDS9. I loveDS9. It was one of those fully formed shows right at the beginning. I thought it had its own mission, its own everything. Do you feel likeDS9has gained so much more respect now than when it was on the air? Or am I just mistaking this?
No, I think that’s accurate. That’s certainly my observation. When we were on the air, we definitely felt like we were the forgotten stepchild of theStar Trekfranchise.Next Genwas, had become this iconic thing andVoyagerwas going to be the big new show. Then we were like the middle child and we were the weird child and we were the one that, the show that didn’t go anywhere. The space station stayed in one place and had these long political and religious overtones to it. It wasn’t realStar Trek, to a lot of people and the studio kind of shrugged at us too. We were like, “Yeah, I know. It’s fine.” They were sort of wanting it to be a bigger deal, closer to whatNext Genwas. But those of us who worked on the show, we just had faith in what we were doing and we told ourselves at the time, “They’ll love us one day. One day it’s going to be special, and it’ll do really … it’ll go down well in memory.”
It’s nice to see that that’s true. I think the show has aged well. We were doing long character stories and character arcs onDeep Space Nine, and it was kind of the first time of us doing that and we had to force our way into doing that and really kind of overcome a lot of opposition to it, because again, people just didn’t do that kind of storytelling in the one hour drama format unless you were a soap opera in those days. Now all of one hour drama kind of moves in that direction. So people that do discoverDeep Space Ninenow start to pick up, “Oh, and there’s these long character arcs, and there’s these ongoing plots and stories.” It feels a little bit ahead of its time.
I think that’s one of the reasons why it stands up so well, is those long character arcs. You joined, I want to say, in season three or four. I could be wrong about that.
Season three.
So what was it like? Because obviously you leaveNext Generation, you’re working on the movie. Did you immediately want to jump intoDS9? Or was it one of these things where it’s like, they’re offering you a job, stable employment. Because it seems daunting to jump from all of thatStar Trekinto even moreStar Trek.
Well, you’ve got to remember, I was aStar Trekfan. So I was a big fan. This was a godsend to be on the show at all. So asNext Genwas winding down, I did, I wanted to remain in theStar Trekuniverse, and the question was, where would I go? Would I go toDeep Space Nine, or would I go to Voyager? Which was just coming together at that point. Michael Piller brought me down to his office to talk about it and it was his idea that I should take a look atDeep Space. Because he thought it would play more to my strengths, I liked darker stories and more ambiguous characters. He could tell, there were things I struggled against onNext Genabout making the characters more ambiguous and less morally clear on some areas, and more continuing storylines.
He said, “I think you should take a look atDeep Space.” And also, Ira Behr, who I’d worked with on the third season ofNext Gen, was now running the writer’s room atDeep Space. I loved Ira and really wanted to work with him again. So the combination of those factors became, “Maybe I should giveDeep Spacea chance,” and I sat down and watched a lot of the episodes. I mean, when I was working onNext Gen, I didn’t really watch a lot ofDeep Space. I had seen the pilot, and maybe I’d seen an episode here and there. ButStar Trekis so, the show was so all-consuming, when I got home and I was going to relax and watch something else, I didn’t want to watch moreStar Trek. It was like doing something else.
So I really hadn’t seen the first two seasons in any great detail. But when I started watching it I was really interested in the characters and in the setting, and the space station, the geopolitics that were going on with Bajor and the Federation. Yeah, it really appealed to me. I decided to go toDeep Space.
One of the things aboutDeep Space Nine, it pushed more boundaries thanNext Generationdid. I believe it wasStar Trek’sfirst same sex kiss.
It dealt with a lot of stuff. Did you, at the time, was there less resistance from the studio in terms of putting this material out there? Did you have resistance in terms of trying to do things that had never been done before?
Yeah. I mean, we were pushing the envelope. There were definitely, you had to sort of overcome fear. It was all about fear. There were fearful executives at Paramount that weren’t sure we should do that. But we fought the good fight on it, and we won, and we were always trying to push the boundaries of whatStar Trekwas. I think that was something that the writers on staff saw as our core mission. Let’s pushStar Trek. Let’s see how farStar Trekcan go. Let’s see what the boundaries of it are. And then let’s push them further. So we were always looking for ways to sort of try to do something new.
Did you experience the same kind of, in the writer’s room,DS9also had to churn out a lot of content. Was it the same experience where you were just rushing through it? Or was it, at that point, any easier?
It was easier in that it was a more stable writing staff. When I started atNext Gen, the writing staff in the first two years ofNext Genhad been very chaotic. There had been a tremendous amount of turnover. Writers had been fired or quit and kept churning for well into the fourth season. Then at the end of the fourth season and into the fifth ofNext Gen, it started to be more cohesive, and it settled down. Then onDeep Space, it was much more stable.
Some writers came and went, but it was a much more stable group. We all had worked together for quite some time. So it was easier in that sense, but we were still plotting this giant thing. So it always felt like we could never plot out all 26 at the beginning of the year. You could get maybe 10 of them, and you have an idea of where things like the Dominion War was going to go or what Worf, his first season arc might be. So you had a sense of confidence and experience that allowed you to do it. But still by the end of the season, it was still very hand to mouth. You were sweating the production dates and you were desperately trying to get rewrites out the door, and it was difficult. It was a treadmill at a certain point.
Well, one of the things that you mentioned aboutDS9is that you had these season-long arcs. And so did you ever have at the beginning of, say, season five, the end of season five in mind? Or was it sort of like, did you ever have those long ranging arcs figured out? Or was it always like, “We’ll see where it goes.”
It was pretty much we’ll see where it goes. I thinkDeep Space Nine, in the last two, three seasons, yeah, we might’ve said “Here’s where we want to be at the end of the year.” And then just stake that out as a target that we were going to get to. But didn’t really have the fundamental arc along the way. So we would have sort of a long range idea of what the season five and six endings were. And then obviously what the finale was generally going to be. But it wasn’t, we just didn’t have the time to really map out that kind of stuff in detail because so much would change.
So it was also, if you spent the time to map out a 26 episode arc and then started writing it, chances are, the first couple episodes would go through so much change and so much tumult. For production reasons, for story reasons, for notes, for all kinds of stuff, that there would be a huge domino effect through all 26. So it was almost like wasted effort to really do a great amount of detailed work like that when we knew the first episodes would, by their nature, go through a lot of change.
Did you take home any props or souvenirs from eitherNext GenorDS9?
Yeah. I have a bottle of Saurian brandy name from Quark’s Bar. I’ve got some props from Dr. Bashir’s office. I have, if you remember inNext Generationthere used to be the big gold ships on the wall in the conference, in the observation room of all the Enterprises. I have all the Enterprises.
I did, I saved them. I saved them literally from the dumpster.
I’ve heard stories about what they threw out and it’s amazing to me that it was thrown out. There are so many fans that would have been like, “I’ll take it, please give it to me.”
Well, that’s what happened. I mean, I got this call, Michael Okuda, who was working in the art department and was one of the great graphic artists and did all kinds of stuff, just called me up and said, “Ron, they’re throwing out the gold ships. If you want them, come get them.” I was like, “I’ll be right down,” and I pulled my car in and took every single one of them.
Are they in your house? Do you have them on display?
I have them in my office. I had them mounted up on the wall in my office in the same pattern that they used to be in the observation lounge.
Please, I know you don’t use social media, but can you please tweet a photo?
Just so some of us can see them.
I might’ve tweeted a photo of it at some point. I thought I did. Maybe I didn’t, I’ll find one.
If you did, I’m not on Twitter all the time. I’m sure people have missed it. I would be more than happy to look at it now.
I have to ask, this is my lastStar Trekthing, but have you watchedDiscovery,Picard? Have you watched theStar Trekshows that have come on since your time? Or do you sort of, “I can’t look at these.”
I’ve seen them. I enjoyedPicardvery much. I was invited to the premiere, that was a very lovely gesture that they made. And it was great. It was really, I was surprised how emotionally satisfying it was to see Patrick in that role again. It really made me like, “Wow. This is really kind of cool, watching him be Jean-Luc again.” The same with Brent and Jonathan. It was like, “Wow.” It meant a lot to see them up doing those roles. It was very cool.
