Gerrold discusses his episodes The Trouble With Tribbles and The Cloud Minders, and what he did rewriting I, Mudd--and why he got no screen credit for it. He mentions that his two non-fiction books, The World of Star Trek and The Trouble With Tribbles: The Birth, Sale and Final Production of One Episode, were well-received. He tells how his cameo in Star Trek: The Motion Picture happened (he asked, Roddenberry said yes), as well as his cameo in Trials and Tribble-ations (he had to push a bit for that one).
He explains why he quit TNG:
Part of the problem on TNG was Gene's lawyer (Leonard Maizlish) was making it impossible for anybody to do any real work. He was rewriting scripts. He was committing Guild violations. People were very unhappy. It was one of the worst working environments I'd ever been in. So when my contract came up for renewal, I asked Gene not to (renew it). Later, I found out that Maizlish was telling people what a troublemaker I was, that I'd been fired because I was mentally ill, that I never did anything useful for the show -- real character assassination of the worst sort. So my lawyer called him up and said, "You keep talking and we're going to own your car, your house, your dog, etc.," and that shut him up real fast. Maizlish was a disgraceful man. Fortunately, my lawyer was a Hollywood heavyweight, and when he said, "Hmmm," that was a very expensive "Hmmm," especially to the target.
He also talks about his (unproduced) TNG script "Blood and Fire", which was about the fear of AIDS.
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