In 1964, Roddenberry was 42 years old, an experienced television writer and producer whose career had been productive without producing anything that would outlast its original run. He had a vision for a science fiction series that he had been developing in his mind for some time, drawing on the pulp magazines he had read as a child, the C. S. Forester *Hornblower* novels that gave him a template for the burdened, capable captain, and his own experience of extreme situations and institutional authority. He called it *Star Trek*.
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## The Pitch and the First Deal
The sequence of events that brought *Star Trek* to Desilu began with a series of rejections.
Roddenberry’s initial approach to television development followed standard industry procedure: he wrote a treatment and pitched it to studios and networks. The story has it that after MGM passed, he connected with Oscar Katz at Desilu. Katz, who had come from CBS where he had been vice president of programs, had been hired by Desilu to develop new programming. His CBS experience gave him an understanding of what networks would and would not buy, and his initial assessment of Roddenberry’s pitch was that it was unusual enough to be worth pursuing.
The pitch Roddenberry was making in 1964 was for a science fiction series set in the future, following the crew of a starship exploring the galaxy. The description he used to sell it — “Wagon Train to the stars” — was a deliberate invocation of the Western genre that was then dominant on American television. He was asking network executives to think of his show as a space Western: episodic, action-driven, with a central ensemble of regular characters facing different challenges each week. The science fiction setting was the hook; the Western structure was the framework that made it accessible to buyers.