D.C. Fontana(1939-2019)

American science fiction author and story editor who worked primarily for television. An aspiring novelist from the age of eleven, Fontana began as a writer of horror and adventure stories. After graduating with an associate arts degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey she got her first job as a junior secretary to Screen Gems president Ralph Cohn. From New York, she relocated to California to work in a typing pool at Revue Studios and then become a script reader and editor for producer Samuel A. Peeples who specialised in writing and creating TV westerns. As 'Dorothy C. Fontana' she contributed several scripts to The Tall Man (1960) and (under the pseudonym 'Michael Edwards') to The Wild Wild West (1965). By 1965, she worked as a production secretary for Gene Roddenberry who was producing a military-themed drama series at the time, entitled The Lieutenant (1963) (future Star Trek guest star Gary Lockwood had the lead role). The series was however cancelled after a single season because of public apathy (or, indeed, antipathy) resulting from the war in Vietnam. Roddenberry later introduced Fontana to science fiction when he went on to create Star Trek (1966). As "D.C. Fontana" (avoiding prevalent gender-based bias from studio executives) she eventually graduated to full script writer and became one of a select group of pioneering female authors associated with the science fiction genre. Fontana was at once engaged as script consultant/story editor and as writer or co-writer of several key episodes, including The Enterprise Incident, Tomorrow is Yesterday, Catspaw, The Ultimate Computer and Journey to Babel (which introduced Spock's parents). Remaining with the franchise, she later co-wrote the two-part pilot episode Encounter at Farpoint for Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and served as associate producer during much of the first season. Her other forays into sci-fi as writer included Logan's Run (1977) and Babylon 5 (1993). Perhaps ironically, a later interview revealed that she considered herself proudest of her contributions to The Streets of San Francisco (1972). Of her work, she said that she was primarily concerned with writing about people: "The best shows are always about people" and "Creating characters from scratch, I usually go to their strengths first and then their weaknesses. Every hero should have vulnerabilities and flaws. Perfect people may exist - somewhere - but I never met any. Every character has to have a need for something, and every character has to have some kind of conflict in his/her life".

In addition to her TV work, Fontana also wrote the Star Trek novelisation Vulcan's Glory (1989) and The Questor Tapes (1978), a novel based on a screenplay by Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon. She latterly held a position as a lecturer in the screenwriting department of the American Film Institute Conservatory. A member of the Writers Guild of America, she was twice inducted into the American Screenwriters Association Hall of Fame (in 1997 and in 2002).