Courting female fans has become a priority among entertainment companies. But long before that was the case, Dorothy Catherine “D.C.” Fontana, who died last week at age 80 after a “short illness,” wrote some of the most memorable episodes of Star Trek and established herself as a small-screen legend and a trailblazer for women in Hollywood.
Fontana was born in New Jersey and began her career writing novels and short stories, mostly to be read by friends. In the late 1950s and 1960s, science fiction was still largely a men’s genre, dominated by big names such as Ray Bradbury and L. Ron Hubbard, and being an author wasn’t considered a respectable path for a woman. Fontana earned her college degree in secretarial studies.
As luck would have it, she got a secretarial job at Screen Gems, based in New York City, where she learned the ropes of the entertainment industry. Armed with her knowledge, she moved to Los Angeles, working for Revue Studios writer Samuel Peeples, who eventually bought her first script, an episode of the television western The Tall Man.
She was hooked, though she had to change her name. “Dorothy Catherine” became “D.C.” to hide her gender in mid-century Hollywood, though she never explicitly considered herself a trailblazer. “At the time, I wasn’t especially aware there were so few female writers doing action adventure scripts. There were plenty doing soaps, comedies, or on variety shows,” she told StarTrek.com several years ago. “By choosing to do action adventure, I was in an elite, very talented and very different group of women writers.”
Eventually, Fontana came to work for a man named Gene Roddenberry, who became a mentor to her, coaching her as a writer and giving her the opportunity to edit and pen scripts for his own groundbreaking effort: a television series called Star Trek.
Fontana would go on to write some of the series’s most memorable episodes but is best known for the lush worlds and cultures she created that gave her favored characters depth and breadth. Her script Journey to Babel gave the U.S.S. Enterprise’s science officer, Spock, a rich and controversial background, a Vulcan father and an Earthling mother, that fleshed out the character and, ultimately, cemented him as a science fiction icon.
She was also well known for helping Star Trek become an important series for women characters. While other, contemporaneous shows cast women as helpers, wives, sidekicks, and staff, Star Trek cast its female characters as heads of communication, second-in-command medical officers, and trusted crew members, and that is largely because Fontana was pressing the Star Trek writing staff, which consisted of Roddenberry and a handful of trusted friends, to write complete, colorful, capable women.
When Roddenberry needed someone to help him write a pilot for Star Trek’s successor series, the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, he turned to Fontana. Their collaboration, Encounter at Farpoint, earned the pair a Hugo Award nomination.
A statement from her family announcing her death also lists her as a writer for such beloved TV shows as Bonanza, Babylon 5, and The Waltons. She was a senior lecturer with the American Film Institute in the years before her death.
Fontana was remembered fondly by Star Trek fans and alumni, but her legacy is more than just as a member of the Star Trek family. Although Fontana was only one of a handful of women screenwriters when she moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s, today more than a third of television writers are women, and the number is steadily growing.
Emily Zanotti is the senior editor of the Daily Wire.
