One of the first times I met Gene Roddenberry was at a tiny Star Trek convention on the Big Island of Hawai’i, circa 1982. It was “Space Day,” held at the King Kamehameha Hotel, organized and sponsored by the late Maria Muhlmann. This was a few years before I started working at Paramount, but I had done a little bit of effects work for some local television commercials, so believe it or not, Gene and I were the convention guests!
Gene had brought a film to show his fans, as he often did during speaking engagements. A member of the audience volunteered to load the film into the hotel’s projector.
Back in those ancient days, long before YouTube, 16mm film projectors were commonly used in schools and businesses, so quite a few people knew how to operate them. The most common type of projector was made by a company called Bell and Howell. Unfortunately, the hotel’s projector was made by Eiki, which used an elegant, but very different mechanism that was unfamiliar to many. If you tried to thread an Eiki autoload projector the same way as a Bell & Howell, the device would instantly shred the film. I worked at an audio-visual equipment rental company at the time, so I was familiar with both projectors.
The volunteer predictably caused the projector to ruin several feet of Gene’s film before he managed to shut it off. A second person made another attempt, also chewing up a couple of feet of film. I stood up and volunteered to do it, but a third person confidently leaped forward, with predictable results. I looked at Gene (who I had only briefly met a couple of times before) and told him, “I really do know how to run those things.”
Gene stood up, and in a quiet - but commanding - voice, said: “Michael here works in the industry. Why don’t you let him do it?” And I did, saving Gene’s film from further damage. It was his personal copy of “The Cage.”
Later that day, at a Q&A session, I asked Gene a question about the original Star Trek, how he was able to assemble such an amazing team with such luminaries as Bob Justman, Gene Coon, Dorothy Fontana, Matt Jefferies, and more. Without hesitation, Gene answered, "the first job of a good producer is to hire good people and to let them do their job."
Today (Aug 19 2023) would have been the 102nd birthday of Star Trek’s creator.