American writer and producer (1932–2018) who served as story editor and associate producer on the first episodes of Star Trek and wrote the early classic The Naked Time.
John D.F. Black was an American screenwriter, born in 1932, who joined Star Trek at the start of series production in 1966 as associate producer and executive story consultant.
In that post he dealt with the freelance science fiction writers commissioned for the first season and worked on their drafts. His own script, The Naked Time, in which a contagion strips away the crew's inhibitions, did much to define the regular characters. He left the series part-way through the first season.
Black returned twenty years later with story credits on two first-season episodes of The Next Generation: The Naked Now, which reworks his earlier script, and Justice, on which he used the pseudonym Ralph Wills. Outside Star Trek he co-wrote the film Shaft. He died in 2018.