According to “Pioneers Of TV” Allen wanted to compete with the more campy “Batman”. One more example of money winning over substance IMHO.
Actually, this was Harlan Ellison, not Roddenberry, who was pitching his ideas, and I think you can find the story in HE’s collection Strange Wine.
ETA: 404 Error — Forgotten Trek
Actually, the story can be found in Stephen King’s Danse Macabre.
Harlan’s always good for an executive-meddling story!
Say, what ever happened to him, anyway?
He’s still writing and bitching. 
Thinking of Terry Pratchett reminded me of Neil Gaiman, and a story I’d heard about a proposed Sandman movie. Screenwriter Ted Elliot described pitching a script to Warner Brothers that he’d co-written with his usual writing partner Terry Rossio, a script that Neil Gaiman had told him personally that he liked, and later being told by the studio that the script was so bad it was “undeliverable” and that they would not be paid the usual fee for completing it. Elliot suspected the actual problem was that the producer was upset that his suggestion that Morpheus be imprisoned by kids holding a seance at a slumber party (not a serious, grown-up occultist as in the graphic novel) had been rejected.
I just pulled up Elliot’s account and was not-that-surprised to learn that the producer was Jon Peters, who’s already been mentioned in this thread. Anyone who wants to read this story can go to http://www.wordplayer.com/archives/SANDMAN.cover.html and click “INTRO” at the bottom of the screen, a direct link doesn’t seem to work for some reason. A draft of the unproduced screenplay is also available there.
Terry Rossio has also written about how bad things can happen to good scripts, see for instance this Wordplay column.
On his commentary track for Batman and Robin, Joel Schumacher (while not totally excusing himself) said one of the reasons the movie sucked balls was because the execs wanted it to be really “toyetic.”
Interesting overview of the commentary at the Onion AV Club.
The bay, however, does have many navigation hazards such as shoals and sandbars (as Clancy would be well aware) and the ending of the film, as patently Hollywood as it is, is still better than the ending Clancy wrote into the novel, which spends the penultimate chapter going down on the unnamed Prince of Wales in a fashion that would make Linda Lovelace look like a virgin.
There are other problems with Patriot Games, but a boat meeting an unhappy end to its high speed traverse of the bay isn’t really one of them.
Stranger
There’s a book called A Martian Wouldn’t Say That which collects some of the most peculiar memos from movie and television execs. My favorite was the executive who was worried that a gangster named Rocco Balboni might be an offensive Italian stereotype, so he sent a memo to the writer to change the character’s name – to Seth Balboni.
My recollection is from Harlan telling the story to Tom Snyder - this was during the '70s - and I am pretty sure that Roddenberry was with him, as you’d expect.
As for another example, there was his short lived series the Starlost, which Ben Bova was an adviser on. Bova turned the experience into a novel call “The Starcrossed.”
Roddenberry was likely in the group (I seem to recall that as well), but it was Ellison who flipped out.
How come I never see a new Ellison book in the SF section any more?
I remember hearing some story about a young director who was friends with Steven Spielberg (who was also attached to the film somehow). The director was getting really crazy and stupid suggetions from a studio exec, and Spielberg ended up senting a letter to the exec, thanking him for the “joke memos” he was sending out and telling him how funny they were. Naturally the exec was too embarresed to admit they weren’t jokes and the matter was dropped. Does that familiar sound to anybody?
PS Never mind. The movie was Back to the Future and the “young exec” was Sidney Sheinberg.
Yeah, I guess you’re right… looks like the last published thing of his was around 2001 and his website was last updated in 2007.
'cause in the latter stage of his career he seems to have focused a lot more on the bitching 
He’s still putting stuff out but apparently not at a volume that made it commercially viable to do print fiction collections for bookstore sale during the '00s (there was a spike of reissues and compendia in '10-'11).
Apparently literally.
Stephen King, in Danse Macabre, cites the Ellison incident, noting that Ellison flipped them the bird (presumably the Cordwainer Bird), and stormed out.
That’s really weird. I could have sworn there was a fancy newer website just a couple of years ago. He had another one of his personal memorabilia sales just about two years ago and I remember visiting the site for more information (I bought a recording of Jeffty is Five on vinyl and a limited edition Frank Miller poster from Ellison’s roast back in the 80s)
My son and I were surfing for something to see on Netflix or Hulu one night and came across this movie Age of Dragons. It was described as a retelling of Moby Dick but featuring a dragon vs. a whale.
On land. With a landboat traversing a forest. On wheels, but still a boat.
With Danny Glover as some sort of whacked-out Ahab.
Who has a totally hot daughter harpooner on the landboat.
And Ishmael as some shit-hot harpooner who romances the daughter and saves the day.
Could it reek of stoopid movie exec any harder??
I think we’ve stumbled on why SyFy movies suck so very badly.
They have no creative talent, only executives.
The site I went to was www.harlanellison.com
Some of them have turned the corner and they are SO bad they are actually pretty good entertainment. In a thread not too long ago, I predicted the movie Nazi Dinodragocrocosharktopus, and I am still waiting. I have more titles if they need them.