"David Gerrold - The Trouble with Tribbles - The birth, sale, and final production of one episode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

memories today: Venture and Beyond. I was in high school by
now, and my friends included Kurt Vonnegut and Brian Aldiss
and Harry Harrison and John W. Campbell and Robert Bloch
and H. L. Gold and Tony Boucher and L. Sprague DeCamp
and Zenna Henderson and James Gunn and Daniel F. Galouye
and Fritz Leiber and oh, yeah—a fellow named Harlan Ellison.
I knew them only as names on the bindings of battered library
books, or names on the covers of bright paperbacks, or names
in the tables of contents in the magazines—but I knew those
names. And they were magic. Those were people who were
dreaming—and they were allowing me to share their dreams.
How could I not help but think of them as my friends? They
were letting me into their heads.
If I had to pick out one factor which has had the most
influence in determining the shape of my life today, (with the
possible exception of sex) I would choose science fiction. Books,
novels, short stories, movies, comic books, what have you—if it
dealt with anything even slightly out of the ordinary, I had to see
it, do it or own it. (I have never quite forgiven Walt Disney for
not completing Tomorrowland before he opened up Disneyland
to the public in 1955—talk about disappointments….)
28 The Trouble With Tribbles

I can remember dragging my father to the worst possible B-
pictures on Tuesday evenings because that was the last night
they would be played and I just had to see Not of This Earth and
The Incredible Shrinking Man and When Worlds Collide and It
Conquered the World and Them and Tarantula and House of
Wax and (*sigh*) Forbidden Planet.
I remember the day we got our very first television set—and
it opened up not just Howdy Doody and I Love Lucy, but Tom
Corbett, Space Cadet and Space Patrol and Tales of Tomorrow
and the occasional Playhouse 90 or Studio One science fiction
drama.
And I collected. I filled one whole wall of my room with books,
then started on a second. Then I started packing them in boxes
and filled the garage.
I took over my mother’s 8mm movie camera and started
making my own animated monsters—jerkily moving puppets and
cartoons. I started drawing storyboards and reading voraciously
on film techniques—not just to know how they were done, but
so I could do them myself. I began to ache for the money and
resources to do the kind of science fiction movies that I wanted
to see, but no one else was making. (I still have a short piece
of film left over from that period—and to me, it represents a
triumph of will over technique. It’s an 8mm wide-screen color
shot of me standing next to my work desk and reacting to a
little animated monster about three inches high—which in turn
was looking up and reacting to me. Despite the crudeness of
the animation, I’m proud of this shot because there’s neither