Shatner Rules
Page 14
I’m standing over him and I instantly know that this is the best place for me to be. I’ve got the superior position now. I’m the star of this show and I’m in control.
“Okay, what is it you want to know?” I snapped.
“Billabong,” he muttered.
“Speak clearly.”
He was soused, and his bloodshot eyes scanned the crowd. “Farkus? Farkus? What’s the question?” he yelled.
Farkus? I thought. Who was that? Did this guy bring a friend?
He obviously felt that clarity required a standing position, and he began to rise, grabbing my arm in the process. I could see the cop coming over now.
He was gripping my arm. This guy made contact with me. He crossed the line. It was time for . . .
The Thumb.
I don’t know where I got this self-defense technique from—it’s nothing Kirk ever employed—but I jabbed my thumb into his neck. Hard. Boom, he went down like a sack of swagmans.
“Stay down!” I ordered, keeping him—literally—under my thumb. He seemed surprised that I had detained him with only one digit, and sat there in his shock while the police officer came over and handcuffed him.
Handcuffs? Seems a little easy, don’t you think, copper?
RULE: Make Fun of Australian Police Officers Only after You’ve Left Australia
I did have some personal, intimate contact with locals during my trip that I did appreciate, however. It was during my stop in Auckland, New Zealand. The show was going to run just like the Australian shows—without the seven-minute-long standoff with a drunk and his buddy Farkus—but with the inclusion of a new song called “Welcome Home,” which I was to perform with Kiwi singer Dave Dobbyn and performer Whirimako Black.
Dobbyn is a very popular performer in his native New Zealand, and in 2002 he became an officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his talent and contributions to the music world there. Whirimako Black is Maori and a popular singer who often performs in the traditional language over traditional melodies. She too, is a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. The organizers of this show were clearly pulling out the heavy guns for my performance. It was a little intimidating.
Before the show, Dobbyn and Black came backstage to meet me and go over the song a bit. Ms. Black’s face was lined with the traditional ta moko Maori tattoo, an important and striking cultural symbol of the indigenous peoples. She had a request.
“Mr. Shatner. My mother loved you when she was alive. May I hug you for her? My mother would have loved to have held you.”
I was more than willing to oblige such a wonderful and meaningful request. Sure beats your average, run-of-the-mill “Can I have your autograph?”
And it was a long hug, a silent hug, and one that she was doing so that the spirit of her departed mother could experience it. People were in my dressing room, watching us, but they all receded far, far away into the background. The only thing I could hear was my breath, her breath, and perhaps the breath of her lost mother.
Soon, I began to cry, and so did she. By the end of our hug, I was sobbing.
“Welcome home,” indeed.
And if my drunken Australian friend is reading this—that’s how you handle a William Shatner meet and greet!
QUIZ
Which one of these is an Australian slang word, and which is a character once played on a TV show by William Shatner?
A. Bascom
B. Kovalik
C. Gronke
D. Manoshma
E. Bodosh
F. Rawhide MacGregor
Actually, they are all the names of characters I’ve played in such TV shows or TV movies as TekWar, The Horror at 37,000 Feet, Sole Survivor, and Route 66.
The answer for option F is “both.” I once played the character Rawhide MacGregor in the TV movie North Beach and Rawhide, and in Australia, a “Rawhide MacGregor” is a condition suffered by outback sheepherders when they’ve been sitting in the saddle for too long.
CHAPTER 23
RULE: Dying Is Easy. Dying on Stage While Doing Comedy Is Easy, Too.
For many years in Hollywood, when an agent got a comedy script tossed onto his or her desk, the first phone call they made usually wasn’t to William Shatner.
If they needed a crusading district attorney, a race-baiting zealot, noted Roman statesman Marc Antony, a honeymooner who becomes enslaved by a fortune-telling machine, a Swedish farmer squaring off with Lee Van Cleef, a brother named Karamazov, a young sailor named Billy Budd—you gave William Shatner a call. You didn’t call him if you needed a clown.
Heck, I was even hired to play a Burmese sailor named Maung Tun on an episode of the old police show Naked City. But I just couldn’t book comedy. (Although someone in the casting department at Naked City clearly had a sense of humor, booking a Canadian as a Burmese sailor.)
This is ironic because I spent most of my time in college and in repertory acting in comedies, like The Seven Year Itch. But once I landed on the New York stage, started doing television, and then films, I could not be taken seriously as a clown.
This is too bad, because I love comedy, and love performing comedy. And I’m glad that the second half of my career has allowed me more opportunities to make people laugh. And again that’s laugh with, not at.
Performing comedy is like performing a knife-throwing act at a sideshow: When done properly it can amaze and awe, but one mistake, and there’s blood on the stage. Comedy is like an orchid: When tended to properly, it is a thing of beauty, but when it’s not, it withers and dies. Comedy is like chocolate soufflé: With careful monitoring it can rise to great heights, but if you slam the door too hard—flat as an unfunny pancake.
RULE: Comedy Comes in Threes. So Do My Metaphors.
If you had asked me a few years ago, “What’s the purest form of acting?” I would have said “theater!” But after my experience on $#*! My Dad Says, I have to say that it’s sitcom acting. There’s a communication and concentration required that is unlike anything I have ever experienced as a performer.
On a sitcom, you need to communicate with your audience and concentrate on what you’re doing. In drama, so many different opinions matter: the director’s, the producers’, the writers’, and so on and so on. In comedy, ultimately, the most important opinion is the audience’s.
Doing comedy in front of an audience is like a juggling act (oops, sorry, I maxed out my metaphor limit). It’s all timing, and it becomes all rhythm. If somebody coughs in the audience, it screws up the laugh. If you have the slightest hesitation on a word—if you hesitate, if you can’t think of the perfect bon mot, the comedic moment is gone and the audience always knows it.
The people who came to see $#*! My Dad Says had a tremendous impact on the show and on my performance. We would run a scene in front of the crowd, and if I failed to connect, they wouldn’t laugh. When they didn’t laugh, our producers, Max Mutchnick and David Kohan, would round up the writers and we’d try the scene again—but with different punch lines. Each thirty-minute episode was a mutual collaboration between performer, writer, and audience—more so than in any other genre.
In doing comedy you have to listen, you have to adjust, but most important, you . . . have . . . to . . . take . . . your . . . time.
A favorite comedian of mine was Dick Shawn, and he really personified both the ecstasy and the agony of comedy for me. I once went to see him perform in the mid 1980s. My wife and I arrived early, sat down in the auditorium, and noticed a large pile of paper and debris on the stage. I couldn’t figure out if it was part of the set dressing, or some garbage they forgot to remove from a previous performance.
Either way, time passed, about twenty minutes or so, as people filled in to take their seats. Suddenly the lights went down, a voice came over the PA announcing, “Ladies and gentlemen—Dick Shawn!,”
and Shawn leapt up from the pile of garbage.
He had been waiting there, silent, for nearly half an hour, just for that big, crazy laugh of surprise.
Patience. What a virtue.
Shawn was a master of taking his time. He would do these long, rambling jokes—with laugh-free setups—that wouldn’t pay off until the very end. I so admired his courage—what if the joke tanked? As they say in comedy, “That’s a long way to go to find out that the store is closed.” Audiences hate it when they feel their time has been wasted. But Shawn was fearless.
In fact, his commitment was such that when he was performing at a show in San Diego in 1987, he was doing a joke about the end of the world when he did a face-plant on the stage. The audience roared. And Shawn did not get up. The audience kept laughing.
It had to be part of the joke, right? This was the guy who was known to hide under a pile of trash for thirty minutes just to get an opening laugh. And the audience was patient until the paramedics arrived.
Shawn had had a massive, fatal heart attack while performing.
Needless to say, I really admired Dick Shawn’s timing and patience and courage, but no comedian should ever die like that on stage.
And I was thinking about him in 2005, when I was invited by the American Film Institute to celebrate the bestowing of a very special lifetime achievement honor. And even when I discovered that I wasn’t the honoree, I consented to stick around.
Who was the man of the hour? George Lucas.
The highlight of Lucas’s career was probably when he was the cameraman on a religious anthology program I once acted on called The Psalms. But he’s done other stuff too, like American Graffiti and the Star Wars movies.
FUN FACTNER: You can purchase The Psalms at WilliamShatner.com. It’s the perfect gift for that family member who loves William Shatner, George Lucas, and the word of God.
Now, lifetime achievement awards are taken very seriously in Hollywood. In fact, most everything to do with awards in Hollywood is taken very seriously. If you want to suck the air out the room at any Oscars celebration, get on stage and make some barbed comments about the nominees. Do you remember who won the Golden Globes last year? Of course you don’t—but I’m sure you remember the furor Ricky Gervais caused after his caustic monologue full of showbiz attacks hit the air.
And now I was tasked to open this special event . . . this lifetime honor to one of the most successful and powerful men in film . . . with some comedy. But not just a series of one-liners. I had to go out there and take my time and do a character bit and lead the audience to the laugh. An audience perhaps not in the mood to laugh. After all, they were in the presence of a master. One who could put them in his movies! It was a very serious moment.
This was a black-tie, top-tier event. In addition to Lucas, the crowd was filled with such luminaries as Harrison Ford, Steven Spielberg, Warren Beatty, Robert Duvall, and Chewbacca!
Yes, Chewbacca was seated near the stage. I think he even had a better seat than his costars, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher.
(NOTE TO CHEWBACCA: Don’t wear your ammo belt to a black-tie event. The tabloids will put you in a “fashion don’ts” spread, and rightfully so.)
The banquet room was decorated with—needless to say—a Star Wars theme. There were massive posters, pictures, even an X-wing fighter hung from the ceiling. And the first person anyone was going to see on stage?
That dude from Star Trek.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome . . . William Shatner.”
Can you say “cognitive dissonance?”
I walked out, and the crowd was . . . puzzled. The response somewhat . . . muted. I felt like I had stepped into a rumble between Twilight and Harry Potter fans in the middle of ComicCon.
(NOTE: Referring to elements of recent popular culture will help gain hip young readers. Thanks again, grandkids!)
I could see George Lucas on his special dais, sandwiched between Spielberg and Ford, looking baffled. And I could see Mr. Han Solo himself mouth the words, “What? The? Fuck?” (Clearly I elicit that response. Perhaps that should have been the title of Shatner Rules?)
Even Chewbacca folded his arms, and roared, “Bring it, bitch!”
(NOTE: I am not fluent in Wookie. Star Wars is for nerds.)
I got to the middle of the stage and felt a tad nervous. When you’re nervous, the instinct is to rush. Get it done. Get off the stage, run back to your car, and go home.
But no. I had to be patient. My comedy needed its knife thrown, its orchid watered, its soufflé fluffed. I was going to take . . . my . . . time.
I smiled and said, “Ladies and gentlemen. Star Trek changed everything.”
Totally unexpected, out of left field, a tad disrespectful? It got a laugh, but not a giant laugh, and about half of it was nervous laughter. Lucas seemed confused. I was starting to sweat. Did I want to bomb in front of Steven Spielberg? Of course not. But I stuck with it.
Patience. Again, the key.
I looked around the room, admired all the sci-fi decoration, and declared “. . . and aren’t these conventions wonderful?”
Boom. There was the laugh. Lucas even laughed. Chewbacca nodded and gave a thumbs-up (I didn’t know Wookiees had thumbs). They were finally with me.
I pretended to be confused, and then slowly pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket and began to read it.
“Dear Mr. Shatner . . . we’d love to have you open the show . . . Star Wars?!?!”
I was milking it, and the audience was eating it up.
“Wait a minute, I can do Star Wars,” I corrected, as I stared into Mr. Lucas’s eyes. “George . . . it’s George, isn’t it? May I call you George? You can call me Mr. Shatner.”
Laughs and more laughs. Had I rushed it, had I bailed, the whole bit would have bombed and wound up on the cutting room floor, replaced with a montage of scenes from The Psalms and other Lucas masterpieces.
Eventually, my bit ended with me singing “My Way” and doing a kick line with a bunch of Storm Troopers. I even gave a shout-out to Chewbacca, who then stood up and fist pumped.
I was patient, took my time, read the crowd, and got the laughs. Comedy is a delicate, wonderful thing.
And now, I’m waiting—patiently—for the call from either Lucas or Spielberg. It’s been six years now since the show. Come on, guys. I can do comedy. I can even throw knives, if that’s what you really want.
CHAPTER 24
RULE: Settle for Second Billing Only If the Top-Billed Act Can Beat You Up
* * *
RESERVED FOR
METALLICA
WILLIAM SHATNER
* * *
That’s what a little sign read on the table in my tented VIP cabana at the Nokia Theater in downtown Los Angeles. There was no sign of this so-called Metallica, but if they were going to get higher billing than me, I was going to take their goody bags. (My grandkids love guitar picks, Linkin Park T-shirts, and studded leather wrist bracelets.)
I was at the Revolver Golden Gods Awards, where I was to receive the coveted Honorary Headbanger Award. A headbanger is a heavy metal or hard rock fan who rocks his or her head violently back and forth while listening to said music.
(NOTE: Please—don’t ask me to ever demonstrate. I am an honorary headbanger. I am not licensed to head bang, nor may I practice it, or advise others on its practice. At least not in the state of California. But if you ask me in Nevada—let’s rock!)
I settled down into my chair in the little “Metallica and Me” section, ordered a beer and some sliders, and gazed at the crowd. A parade of young—and not so young—metalheads, tattooed and bestudded, passed me by, occasionally stopping to do a double take at the sight of Mr. and Mrs. William Shatner. It was quite a bizarre crowd. The VIP room was a who’s who of “what the hell is that?”
I usually ask myself this a couple of times a week, and while sitting there drowning in the sonic assault of the speakers at this heavy metal melee, I pondered, How did I get here?
But I guess music has always been part of my life in a way. When I was a child, my father would come home from his clothing business on Saturdays and put the Metropolitan Opera broadcast from New York on the radio. I would often close my eyes and wonder what the singers looked like. (I doubt they looked anything like the singers on the black carpet at the Golden Gods Awards. Those fat ladies at the opera could sing, but none of them could wail like these metalheads.) In college, I directed some musicals, and even took some voice lessons as a young actor. And now, at the age of eighty, I have three full-length records under my belt.
Yes, three. The Transformed Man, Has Been, and . . . Searching for Major Tom. It’s in record stores now. You might want to purchase it and listen to it while reading this book. (Headbanging while reading keeps you from looking too nerdy. )
Searching for Major Tom started in 2010 when the head of Cleopatra Records, Brian Perera, visited my office. He sat on the very couch that once held the Foos Brothers when we began discussions of Has Been.
“We’d love for you to sing on an album for us,” he asked.
“I don’t sing,” I replied.
“Oh, I know. But sing—like you do—on an album of science fiction songs.”
I began to look for a way to wrap up the conversation quickly. I explained that I didn’t want to do an album of science fiction–themed tunes. Would I be holding a toy laser gun on the front cover? Would the songs be punctuated by sound effects? This had “novelty” written all over it, not worth my time.