No distractions: He doesn’t follow sports on TV, never opens social media and, when he’s really flowing, sends even the important calls to voicemail. Morgan Gendel’s best work requires silence.
“All I do,” he said, “is walk around thinking of stuff.”
He’s a professional — a career “idea man” — who’s made his money by making things up.
Gendel, paid to provide plots and new twists to blocked and bogged down TV writers in his 30s, became a Hollywood showrunner in his 40s. In his 60s, he thought up and patented a way to build low-cost, low-weight structures that could be used on NASA missions to the moon or Mars.
And that latest idea is garnering attention.
Now a 72-year-old adjunct professor of screenwriting at Old Dominion University, Gendel is building prototypes of his patented design for aerospace shelters on campus, with help from the engineering department and money from the Air Force.
The government is betting Gendel’s invention has uses beyond aerospace, and here on Earth, the military is curious about its defense capabilities.
An early NASA concept drawing of a Habolith garage for the Lunar Rover. (Image courtesy of Planetary Shelter, Morgan Gendel and Old Dominion University)
He calls them Haboliths. Multiple layers of Kevlar are packed with soil to create a dome-like shape that can act as a transportable shelter, or blast bunker.
Air is pumped into Kevlar bladders to compress the already packed dirt. The granular compressions turn the soil as hard as concrete but more pliant so that an explosive shock wave won’t cause it to shatter. High flexibility also allows its walls to absorb exterior energy, such as from a bomb or other explosive, and protect its inhabitants from traumatic brain injuries — potentially better than other shelters, built with more rigid and conventional materials.
“On the very outside, as a blast comes in, it’s going to hit this sand layer,” Michael Seek, an ODU associate professor of civil engineering technology, explained while holding a piece of a prototype wall.
“And then with the air layer,” he continued, pointing toward an interior cross-section of the layered design, “it’s going to give it some movement.”
Michael Seek, associate professor of civil engineering technology at Old Dominion University, explains the use of an outer shock layer during testing to develop a blast bunker in the structural engineering laboratory. (Bill Tiernan/For The Virginian-Pilot)
Seek has been working with Gendel’s company, Planetary Shelter, in the development of Haboliths and contributing to the requirements of a $1.8 million Air Force Small Business Technology Transfer grant, which connects businesses and entrepreneurs to research institutions.
“The hope is that it’s going to absorb a lot of the energy of a blast,” Seek said, “as opposed to a lot of the structures the Air Force might have that are really rigid and just transfer energy.”
He and undergraduates have been testing the strength of shelters in the ODU engineering laboratory. Gendel, who primarily lives in Washington, D.C., often drives to Norfolk to observe their progress or teach a screenwriting class or two.
A series of dome-shaped Haboliths created from sand-filled membranes are linked to create an “instant village” for displaced refugees. (Image courtesy of Planetary Shelter, Morgan Gendel and Old Dominion University)
Gendel said he could never have invented his Habolith design without his previous work in Hollywood where for years his livelihood was dependent on his imagination.
Pitching ideas
As a young man, he knew he wanted to be a screenwriter and moved after college to California, where he found a day job as a newspaper reporter with the Daily Democrat.
By his mid-30s, he’d moved to Los Angeles and was working for the LA Times covering the entertainment beat by day and trying to break into showbiz — “trying to write the great American screenplay,” he said — by night.
By the time he did it, he was approaching 40. Gendel was hired as a full-time writer by TV producer Stephen J. Cannell.
“There was never a job like that before or since,” Gendel recalled, and later added, “I would just go room to room, office to office and see these guys. And when they got bleary eyed and were out of ideas, I would go in and pitch them — pitch ideas. And that’s how I got to write.”
He rose to the level of producer before leaving Cannell’s independent studio and becoming a creative force for notable series such as “Law and Order” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
One of “The Next Generation” episodes he penned, “The Inner Light,” has become a Trekkie fan favorite. In the episode, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard is struck unconscious by an alien probe that causes him to experience a simulation living as an inhabitant from a doomed planet before waking up with one memento: a flute. This year, the “Ressikan flute” prop, along with a flute box and a costume continuity script of “The Inner Light,” sold at auction for $403,200, according to the Journal of Antiques and Collectibles.
Because of the episode’s popularity, Gendel has been getting invites to Star Trek conventions for decades, many of them with the theme: science meets sci-fi. Apparently, Gendel said, a lot of people who work at NASA like “Star Trek,” and he “met a lot of top scientists.”
And then about 10 years ago, he saw something on TV that caught his eye: The program said that plans were in the works to one day travel to Mars and use Martian soil to make buildings, but it was going to be difficult to bring a large mass of machinery all that way.
“I thought, ‘Man, what if you just brought a bouncy house to Mars and filled it up with this same stuff, the same stuff they’re going to make the buildings out of, the Martian dirt?’”
He started talking up his idea to scientists at Star Trek conventions and received enough positive feedback that he decided to make it happen.
“Now, you think this has nothing to do with screenwriting,” he said in an interview. “But, I’ll tell you, it does have to do with being a showrunner.”
A Hollywood showrunner is a writer, a producer and a hiring manager all in one. They have to take an idea from the page to the screen by finding funding and picking the correct people to help complete the project.
In a similar way, Gendel had an idea for his Haboliths, started a company and found engineers and other experts who helped guide him toward a patent.
“I got a small investment a couple of years ago that I used to build some initial prototypes and do some testing, and then,” he said, “we got this grant.”
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com
