After Gene's years of service on the lot,
they finally dedicated a building in his name and in his honour.
The newest building was christened the Gene Roddenberry Building.
There was a very nice ceremony
to have Gene cut the ribbon in front of the plaque that bore his name.
The cast from The Next Generation and the original Star Trek
came out in force to be there.
Gates McFadden was there, very pregnant.
They opened the building up.
Gene just regretted that he couldn't move into it!
The legend is well known.
How Gene, a former airline pilot and police officer
turned screenwriter, struggled for years
to sell a science-fiction show to the network.
How it was almost cancelled
several times after it did get on the air.
It had its final broadcast
in June 1969. But the fans wouldn't let it die.
I was a freelance writer.
I got tired of writing about nothing. I began reading science fiction.
Among the science fiction I read was Swift's,
about the Lilliputians.
I saw from that that you could write about something in science fiction.
I dreamt up the Star Trek idea so I could comment on man and society.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
debuted in first-run syndication in September 1987,
now often outranking prime-time network shows.
I would hope there are bright young people drawing up all the time,
who will bring to it levels and areas that were beyond me.
And I don't feel jealous about that at all.
I think that, as I was saying,
Hollywood, the motion-picture industry, is a remarkable thing.
It'll go on without any of us, and get better and better and better.
That really is the human condition, to improve and improve.
In boldly going where no one has gone before,
the voyages of the Starship Enterprise
have given us a positive view of the human potential
that is both visionary and profound.
I see Star Trek
as part of the continuing education of Gene Roddenberry.
I learn new things every day about science, humanity and history.
They're paying me to go to college, paying me very richly,
and I thank them.
To you, Gene, and to all of you who have brought us this day,
I'll borrow some famous words from Mr Spock to express our gratitude
for Star Trek's first quarter century,
and that is to live long and prosper.
Gene had a relationship with all of us,
which, despite my great age,
was like a relationship of a father to his children.
I felt we were part of a brood with Gene.
Whenever I was with him, I could never be quite at ease
in the way that I could be with another producer.
To me, he was always the father figure.
I've been sitting here looking at this building,...
.. wondering, Gene,
what are the benefits and what are some of the drawbacks
of having a building named after you?
I assume you can park your car here?
Right in front of these steps whenever you like.
Right on the steps, if you like.
I sometimes feel that if Gene had been around,
there might have been more moments of outrageous fun.
- Naked Now. - Naked Now, yes.
Gene could be unexpected.
He would suddenly produce or would approve a script
that would be quite outlandish.
And not afraid to miss.
- He'd take a risk. - Take a chance.
But when you're the creator, the innovator,
when it has your name on it, it's a risk you feel more able to take.
Gene Roddenberry doesn't need a building to be remembered by.
He is remembered in the hearts and minds
of so many millions of people.
Out of those millions, I want to pluck one particular individual.
A man who first wrote to me in the second season.
He told me that he was a sergeant in the Las Vegas Police Department.
Since then, he's written to me several times
telling me about his life.
But in that first letter, Gene,
he said that at the end of certain days,
when he was saddened, disillusioned and desperate
by the mankind and womankind
that he had seen passing before his gaze in that city,
feeling that all his energies and the energies of the rest of the world
were to no avail because we were spiralling downhill,
he would go home in the evening,
take down tapes of Star Trek and The Next Generation,
he would put them in his video and he would have his faith restored.
One man's life you have affected, as you have affected all of ours.
Congratulations.
This edifice is rightly named the Gene Roddenberry Building.
Gene's soaring imagination and masterful organisation ability
brought forth a growing phenomenon.
My whole life has changed as a result of Gene.
I can't forget that.
That's an important part of my relationship with Gene.
Gene became a very close friend
in the subsequent five years before he passed away.
He taught me a lot. He taught me the language of Star Trek.
I can't forget the fact that every day,
we create television programming or movies
that are not based on my vision or anybody else's.
It's based upon Gene's vision.
Do you have any more words
for these fans, associates and long-time friends?
Well, just that I suggest they follow my example.
You get no end of credit for just going to an office every day
and writing your daydreams.
All I've done in Star Trek is have fun...
.. and daydream.
Paramount has graciously given me an office to do that in.
It was Gene's way of being humorous about serious things.
He dedicated this very nice postmodern structure
with his name on it,
and then said, "I don't have an office in this building. "
Paramount was unusual for me with studios.
I am not a big pro-studio man, being one of the workers.
But Paramount said, "We will back you in this. "
And by God, they did.
I've had nothing but good treatment out of them.
I do feel sometimes they were nervous
about giving the keys to the asylum to a writer,
but despite their nervousness, they stood true to their word.
I really respect them and thank them.
Gene Roddenberry's vision has endured for 25 years.
Longer than the Government's vision for it endured.
It's pretty amazing.
You look at Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig.
You look at all the diverse ethnic backgrounds of all these people.
It's phenomenal. You don't see it in movies or on television today.
There's not a lot of shows that involve an array.
Look at all the people up there. That's pretty bloody wonderful.
He's an amazing human being. He's made a lot of people happy.
He's given people an idea
that the future may be better than it appears that it will be.
We're very lucky.
I happen to like it. I don't need to do any of this stuff.
I do it for pleasure. I love it.
Did you see the people I get to play with? Come on, that's pretty neat.
I was very afraid, when I started Star Trek,
that scientists and NASA people would say,
"God, you're so inaccurate, and you're so wrong. "
I almost hated to deal with them,
until I discovered they're not like that.
They're intelligent. They understand the problems of show business.
They understand that I had to appeal to a mass audience
as well as a specialised audience.
It's been a love feast.
Someone asked me some years ago,
before I'd gotten a cheque for Star Trek reruns,
"What is your profit on this series?"
I said, "The greatest profit of all,
the people that I could not pay to meet and know. "
"Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke, and the NASA people
and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab where I'm welcome. "
You can't buy that.
First, I was somewhat in awe of him,
having grown up watching the original series
and realising that this was the man who created this.
This was really his vision.
As I got to know him,
and really feel the intense loyalty he has for his friends
and see the way he responded to people,
and the thoughtfulness that was behind what he did...
On one hand, he had to be an executive producer.
Sometimes, that's not a pretty job.
But Gene Roddenberry, the person,
was one of the kindest people I've ever met.
He's imposing. Not his personality, but his reputation.
He was the sweetest guy I met, ever.
Very down to earth.
One time, we had a meeting.
Gene didn't care about certain specifics.
He cared about the overall themes. You got those right.
But the colour of the beam, it wasn't as important to him.
I was in the edit bay one day.
It was a blue scene with a blue thing.
A blue beam would not cut it. It would be invisible.
I wanted to change it. You're changing Gene's law.
No one wanted to call him and ask him.
So I called him up. He said, "Is yellow better?"
I said, "Yeah. " He said, "Fine. "
Then I got calls from everyone else, going, "What did he say?"
I said, "Fine. " That's the kind of character he was.
One show I directed, his wife was in it.
He came to the set, which is terrifying.
He's the creator, his wife is in it and I'm shooting it.
He goes, "Looks like I'm in good hands. "
What a wonderful, reassuring thing for a guy of his stature
to be able to do to a young person. It was great.
So I always had warm recollections of him.
He was very sweet-natured
and always complimentary and appreciative.
I think he's an optimistic man.
I think hope is a necessary part of the play.
And, of course, if you ever begin to live without that, you're doomed.
And that's very important.
Because hope means you can take one step and another and another.
My first experience is that, when I left the room after my audition,
he came out and put his hand on my shoulder.
He said, "You made my words sound better than they are. "
I said, "Thank you. You must be the writer. "
And he said, "I'm Gene Roddenberry. "
I didn't know who that was.
Afterwards, when I started to do homework on what all this meant,
I realised, "God, it's Gene Roddenberry!"
When I was cast...
Actually, before I was cast, when I was auditioning,
six long auditions...
I always felt...
There was a room full of people. Gene was just one of the people.
But I always felt that he was on my side.
It was like I could look at him, and I looked at him most of the time,
because I just got this feeling that he wanted me.
I was the one, so he was kind of rooting for me.
The second time I had an experience with him
is that I was watching a setup.
I heard a voice behind me say,
"You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into. "
It was Gene. I said, "What are you talking about?"
He goes, "You'll see. "
I had always been a fan, speaking of Westerns, of Gunsmoke,
with their cast of Kitty and Doc and Chester and so on.
I noticed how well that worked over episode after episode.
I thought, "If I ever do a series, I want to do the same thing,
where the characters are like, Uncle Joe drops by,
and there's Dad, and there's brave brother. "
So I really cast my Star Trek people as a television family.
You knew what their secrets were.
You would laugh at the same joke every week, as you do in real life.
It was kind of in the second season that they adopted me.
Majel did more shows. We got to know each other.
We hit it off, which was very important.
Then I started to get the invites, you know...
The holidays, the parties, Oscar Night,
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Halloween.
Majel has a party for every holiday. She's the best.
I suppose I took it for granted at the time,
because he was there.
OK, he wasn't 100 percent fit, but he was there.
You know, he wasn't going anywhere.
Knowing that your husband is ill,
and knowing that he has so much to say and so much to do,
and knowing how frustrating that is for him
to not be able to do so,...
.. and to try to keep smiling,
and assure him and yourself and the audience
that everything's fine...
Tomorrow, he'll wake up and he's gonna feel a lot better.
You're trying to make yourself believe it.
When Gene passed it was like I had lost someone.
It was like I had lost a close relative.
And I've said this before, but the awful coincidence of it
was that he actually died on the exact date
that my father had died ten years earlier.
I very much remember that day.
We were shooting an episode that Patrick Stewart was directing.
It was called Hero Worship.
It was a very sombre thing.
Gene was our leader.
Even to this day, Rick Berman will say,
"This is the kind of thing that Gene would have done. "
I think all of us who were with Star Trek when Gene was there
felt a profound sense of loss.
When he passed away, it was such a shock.
I think he'd just gone to the doctor for a check-up.
He died while he was there.
It wasn't like he'd been ill for a long time
and we were expecting it.
It was just out of the blue.
The fact that it was on the same day my dad had died,...
.. years earlier,...
.. was ironic, being as I called him Dad.
I always felt like I had a special relationship with Gene.
What I remember most was that his office door was always open to me.
I would go over in the lunch hour just to say hi. I really liked him.
I really liked him a lot. He was really a neat person.
I would just go to say hi, not realising that maybe actors
shouldn't just go to the executive producer and creator of their show
just to hang out.
There was a lot of "The Emperor has new clothes" about me
when I was a kid.
I didn't understand how you're supposed to do things in Hollywood.
So I just did things my way.
One of the things that I wanted to do was just go see him.
I liked him. I wanted to go hang out with him.
More than once, he tossed people out for me to sit there.
He actually adored Wil.
I think if he had had a son at that time,
that's what he'd like him to be.
Gene always thought of himself as Wil.
He said, "This is where I would have loved to have been
if I could have been in space. "
That was Gene's desire in bringing Wil along with it.
He wanted to be that person.
He used to sit out in the back yard with a couple of soap boxes and...
.. pretend that he was in space.
So that was his desire.
He decided that somebody had to play that, so Wil got it.
Sometime during the third season, Picard promotes Wesley,
gives him a field promotion, to acting ensign.
It was a great moment.
I changed that ugly grey spacesuit for a real spacesuit.
I'm sure many actors complain about their spacesuits,
but I loved wearing my uniform.
The day that Picard gives his big speech and promotes Wesley,
for duty, valour and all that stuff,
Gene came to the set and he stopped production.
He asked me to come up to him on the bridge.
He said that when he was in the military, he had been promoted.
He pulls out of his pocket this little unassuming plain box.
He opens it up, and it's got his bars
that his CO gave him when he was promoted.
And he gave them to me.
He wanted me to have them because it was important to him.
I just didn't even know what to say. I just said, "Thank you. "
Apparently, Paramount wanted to make a big deal out of it,
and wanted Entertainment Tonight there.
Gene said, "That's not what this is about. "
"This is a private moment for my Star Trek family. "
And really just kept it between us.
I said, "It's too bad that, with all Gene has done
for the space programme, and looking at the space programme,
that he can't go up in one of those capsules. "
There was a girl that was there.
She said, "I'm going to look into that. "
I never expected to hear from her.
Shortly after, we get a call. It's from NASA.
They said, "We understand you might be interested in this. "
I said, "'Might' is hardly the word. "
So, we met.
They brought me into Washington.
I gave them the ashes.
And up they went. Of course, they came back down.
Then they had a ceremony, which we couldn't tell anybody about.
They brought me into Washington again
and gave me back the little phial of ashes.
It was a private ceremony that was down in a basement somewhere.
We waited for three or four months.
One day, we were having a thing in Orlando.
I forget how it came about. But they came over and said,
"Now's the time. Go ahead and tell them. "
Because they were going to let it out that night, too.
So I made the announcement at the dinner table
while they were all around dinner.
There must have been 400 or 500 people in the room.
After I had made the announcement,
there wasn't a clap, there wasn't a sound,
there was only tears coming out of people's eyes.
It seemed to be such a right thing to do.
Gene, if you and your two captains could do us the honour
of standing in the middle between the two casts...
Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Gene Roddenberry
with the original and Next Generation casts
on the occasion of Star Trek's 25th anniversary?
People often ask me, "What was he like?"
He was just this great guy that took me under his wing.
He was a big bear of a guy.
Good-humoured.
He was gracious, warm, endearing.
He came in. "Come on. Any time you want to talk, let's talk. "
I regret that I didn't know or work with him any better before he died.
Loved writers. Loved talking about the show.
He was just a very friendly big bear of a guy.
I always knew that the guy was intelligent.
He had a different outlook on things.
I saw he was a genius because I read his scripts.
I saw what he'd created.
There's not, like, a glow around him.
But you just can tell by the writing how intelligent he is about life.
The other things in life, not just what we see, but the future.
I really liked the man so much.
He had so much energy and so many ideas
about what the goodness of the future could be.
Gene Roddenberry's vision of the world is very positive.
It's not just science fiction.
It has a hopeful philosophy that the future will be a better place.
One of the things he first said as he fed me into this character
was that in the 24th century, there would be no hunger, no greed.
He thinks the judicial system has found a way to work.
He's got a very positive vision of the 24th century.
We should be so lucky.
His philosophy of the future is so different
to any other science-fiction approach to the future.
He's always said we're onward and upward.
That greed and poverty are a thing of the past
in our imagined future.
I think that's pretty powerful stuff.
I just really liked him. He understood human behaviour.
Really, all he wanted to do was give a little humanity back to man.
And woman!
So, he created a show where people were equal
and still have their foibles.
They weren't perfect, but they were trying.
I thought that was a great, wonderful thing.
He tried to break down a lot of barriers.
He envisioned a future
where there was very little conflict between humans.
He wanted the morals and texture of the stories to be uplifting.
In a world that was filled with movies
that had a rather grim quality to them,
he wanted science fiction to be hopeful.
Star Trek speaks to some basic human needs.
There is a tomorrow.
It won't all be over with a big flash and a bomb.
The human race is improving.
That we have things to be proud of as humans.
No, ancient astronauts did not build the pyramids.
Human beings built them because they're clever and work hard.
Star Trek is about those things.
Mr Crusher, set course for Starbase A...
Gene, you're adorable.
B, you're so beautiful.
C, you're a cutie full of charm
D, you're a darling
And E, you're exciting
And F, you're a feather in my arms
G, you look good to me
H, you're so heavenly
I, you're the one I idolise
J, we're like Jack and Jill
K, you're so kissable
L is the love light in your eyes
M, N, O, P
I could go on all day
Q
Q?!
R, S, T
Alphabetically speaking, you're OK
U make my life complete
V means you're very sweet
W, X, Y, Z
It's fun to wander through
The alphabet with you
To tell you what you mean to...
Engage.