Leonard actually was editing the fourth movie when Frank Mancuso, then running Paramount, told him they intended to produce a new series and asked if he would be interested in producing it. It was a great show of respect for Leonard’s abilities, but he had no interest in doing that. At that point, he probably still believed he eventually would escape the tractor beam that held us so tightly to the franchise. Neither Leonard nor I had any great confidence that the new series, which they titled Star Trek: The Next Generation, would succeed. There was a bit of ego, of course; Kirk and Spock were the core of the stories, and we didn’t see how it could be successful without them. Especially because, as I heard, Roddenberry had decided the series would take place a century after our voyages ended. The crew would be flying the fifth Enterprise, and it would take place in a world in which people have grown out of conflict. When the writers wondered how they could dramatize a world without emotional problems, he supposedly told them, “That’s your problem.”
