American writer who was story editor of the unmade series Star Trek: Phase II, associate producer of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and co-writer of The Child.
Jon Povill is an American writer who began as an assistant and researcher to Gene Roddenberry in the 1970s. When Paramount planned a new television series, Star Trek: Phase II, he became its story editor, helping to commission and revise the scripts.
Phase II was cancelled in favour of a feature, and Povill stayed on as associate producer of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979, working closely with Roddenberry and Robert Wise during its troubled production.
One of the Phase II scripts was The Child, which he wrote with Jaron Summers. During the writers' strike of 1988 it was reworked by Maurice Hurley as the opening episode of the second season of The Next Generation, and Povill and Summers share the writing credit.