Life and Career
Gene Coon served in the United States Marine Corps for four years during and after World War II, seeing combat in the Pacific theater and serving in China and in occupied Japan.
Coon wrote mainly for television. His writing credits included Dragnet(for which Gene Roddenberry, using the pen name "Robert Wesley," also wrote in addition to providing technical advice), Bonanza, Zorro, Have Gun--Will Travel, Wagon Train, and The Wild Wild West, as well as the premiere episodes of The Four Just Men and McHale's Navy. He also became a producer for The Wild Wild West and later became a producer and writer for Star Trek: The Original Series. 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. Forrester's novels about Horatio Hornblower and the Reverend Dean Jonathan Swift Jr.'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 in the middle of the first season; David Gerrold credited him with being a skilled showrunner before Coon left in the middle of the second season. He continued to contribute scripts for the third season, but he had to do so using the pseudonym “Lee Cronin,” as he was under contract to Universal Studios at the time and was likely not, by the terms of his contract, supposed to be working for Paramount as well.
His credited creations for Star Trek include the Klingons (in "Errand of Mercy"), the Organian Peace Treaty (in "The Trouble With Tribbles"), Khan Noonien Singh (in "Space Seed"), Zefram Cochrane (in "Metamorphosis"), and the Prime Directive. Since he also had the position of doing rewrites for scripts, his work touches many more episodes. He also mentored the young Gerrold and helped him polish the script for the episode "The Trouble With Tribbles."
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).
Following his period with Star Trek, Coon produced the Universal Studios series It Takes a Thief, starring Robert Wagner, and he also continued to write for Kung Fu and The Streets of San Francisco. 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, Meanwhile Back At The Front and The Short End (published in 1964 about the Korean War). Coon was also fortunate enough to be reunited with the love of his life in time for them to spend his last years together.
Read more about this topic: Gene L. Coon
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or career:
“Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography.... For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)