Basically, as I’m flying home with my wife I look out the window into a raging storm and see a hairy creature at play on the edge of the wing, tearing away at the metal. But when anyone else looks, the creature hides. I know the creature is not a figment of my imagination; I know it, do you hear me, I know it! “Gremlins!” I scream, “Gremlins! I’m not imagining it. He’s out there. Don’t look, he’s not out there now. He jumps away whenever anyone might see him. Except me.”
If I persist in screaming that there’s a creature playing on the wing at twenty thousand feet my wife will believe I’m having another nervous breakdown and send me back to the crazy house—yet if I don’t the plane will be destroyed and all aboard will die. Finally I grab a revolver from a sleeping police officer and kill the creature. The flight ends as I’m taken off the plane in a straitjacket—but as viewers can see I will soon be vindicated, because a portion of the wing has been ripped apart. Or, as Serling explains it so beautifully, “[T]angible manifestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even from so intangible a quarter as...the Twilight Zone.” Do-dodo-do, do-do-do-do, dooooooooooo—ba da da daaaa.
That half-hour has been parodied numerous times, including an episode of The Simpsons entitled “Terror at 51⁄2 Feet” in which Bart sees a gremlin tearing apart his school bus, and a music video made by the metal band Anthrax. And when a full-length Twilight Zone movie was made in 1983 this episode was one of the three chosen to be remade, with John Lithgow playing my role. They had actually asked me to appear in the film, but I was doing T.J. Hooker and couldn’t get a release.
Believe me, at the time nobody realized we were making a classic television episode. This was the fifth season of Twilight Zone and they were just churning them out. I met Rod Serling, but I certainly didn’t get to know him. He always seemed so busy to me, so removed from the actual production, but perhaps he didn’t consider working with an actor worth the time it would take.
This was a series in which they spared every expense. But the writing was so good, as was this script by the great Richard Matheson, that the story overwhelmed the cheap production values. The gremlin was portrayed by an acrobat named Nick Cravat in a ridiculous furry costume; it looked sort of like a distant relative of Chew-bacca, and by distant I mean several light-years away. This was such a cheap costume, it looked like the actor was molting. That animal would have been uncomfortable in a tree, much less on the wing of an airplane in flight. It was just unbelievable, everyone knows that a real creature playing on an airplane wing at twenty thousand feet would be considerably more aerodynamically shaped.
But viewers didn’t care what the creature looked like, that was the brilliance of the story. They could have put someone out there with a lamp shade on his head and people would have been scared. One reviewer commented that this show “Did for the fear of flying what Psycho did for showers.”
However, as tribute to this program, you can buy a twelve-inch action figure of the gremlin holding a piece of the wing—in fact, there are two different gremlin action figures, both of them dressed in that same cheesy costume. Not from my store at WilliamShatner
.com, of course, but elsewhere.
While I had been offered the lead role in several different TV series, I’d turned them all down. I had been trained in the old school, although that was in the formative years of television so it actually was the new school: a real actor did not sign to do a series because then he couldn’t accept the starring role in the Broadway play or Hollywood film that was going to make him a real star. Or, worse, you would become typecast, locked into a specific category of roles which could mean the end of a career. So I had turned down several offers to star in a series—and watched as Richard Chamberlain became a major TV star playing the role I’d turned down as Dr. Kildare and Robert Reed became a star playing the role I’d created in “The Defenders.” Maybe they had stardom and security and more than eighteen hundred dollars in the bank, but I still had my actor’s integrity!
Unfortunately, I was also starting to get typecast—as an actor who starred in meaningful movies that didn’t make a lot of money and every TV series from The Nurses to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. But truthfully, a guaranteed weekly paycheck was beginning to look very enticing. And I was practically a regular on The Defenders; I made five appearances on that show and six on Dr. Kildare. For someone who didn’t want to be tied to a series, I was tied to just about every series—without the publicity or the paycheck. Based on the success of his show featuring father-and-son defense attorneys, The Defenders producer Herb Brodkin created another show that told legal stories from the points of view of an older and a younger prosecutor. He asked me to co-star with a fine veteran actor named Howard Da Silva.
This is it, he told me, this is really truly cross-my-heart no kidding honest-to-goodness the show that is going to make you a star. It’s your turn, Bill.
Finally. Once again. Of course, this was long before we’d learned the hard reality of life that just before Charlie Brown kicks the football, Lucy is always going to pull it away from him. So I accepted the role of Assistant District Attorney David Koster in Herb Brodkin’s For the People. It wasn’t The Defenders, it was better than The Defenders. This wasn’t a repeat of something that had been done before, at that time this was a new and exciting idea. The trials of a passionate prosecutor, a dedicated man with a single-minded zeal to defend the criminal justice system of the United States of America. And it was perfect for me: I mean, maybe I’d never been inside a real courtroom in my life, but I’d often played a lawyer or a criminal on TV. So I knew the TV legal system inside and out.
Howard Da Silva, who played my understanding boss, had been blacklisted by McCarthy, but somehow managed to retain his idealism. He was a terrific actor and while making this series we became good friends. I loved him. Jessica Walter played my beautiful wife, a free-spirited musician who performed in a classical string quartet. While the scripts focused on my work, they also included plot lines about our family life, which was a very innovative concept at that time. That was as close to a real family life as I was living. We shot thirteen episodes in New York so I had to leave Gloria and our three girls in Los Angeles while I stayed in the city. Working.
For the People was a very good show about meaningful legal issues. TV Guide wrote that it was “more compelling” and “probing” than The Defenders, and that it put me in the “big leagues” of TV actors. The character I played, as I told a New York reporter, was the kind of dedicated prosecutor who did “a regular Spanish Flamenco heel dance on the toes of anybody who crosses my way.”
This was it, for real, this was the show that was going to make me a star. Herb Brodkin was producing it. Not only was Brodkin the most successful producer in live television—he also did the most meaningful programs. We had the finest New York actors and writers and directors. We were considered the companion show to The Defenders, a top-rated program. Critics loved the show. Many people were rooting for Howard Da Silva, whose career had been destroyed by the blacklist, and this was his comeback. Justice was going to triumph in real life as well as on the show. The show went on the air in January 1965.
Let me explain what happened this way: They will never be making a twelve-inch action figure of passionate Assistant District Attorney David Koster.
In its great wisdom, CBS decided the perfect time slot for our show was Sunday night at 9 P.M. Now, what other program would every man in America be watching at that time? How about the most popular television program in America? The number-one ranked western, Bonanza. Now, sometimes you really do wonder if all the top CBS executives happened to be sitting around after work one day and one of them said, I got a great idea, let’s play a big joke on Bill Shatner. We’ll spend all this money to make a TV series, we’ll make him think that this is reallllllllllly the show that’s going to make him a star, and then we’ll put it on the air opposite the top-rated show on television. And they all laughed. I never understood why CBS would bother
going through all the trouble and expense of hiring talented writers and actors and technicians and then dropping a very good program into the worst time slot in television. Lamp Unto My Feet had a better time slot—which I know for certain because I played a Roman soldier who picked up the cape worn by Christ, after which I converted to Christianity, while For the People was being run. Test patterns had better time slots.
But I was still optimistic. I figured, maybe people are tired of well-made westerns. Bonanza starred my old friend Lorne Greene, whose investment advice years earlier had cost me my five-hundred-dollar life savings. This was my chance to get even with him for uranium.
Got me again. As philosophers like to ask, if a TV show broadcast opposite the number-one program on the air is canceled, does anyone know it? For the People never had a chance. After thirteen weeks it was canceled.
Almost every actor goes through periods of great frustration, when you wonder seriously why you’re pursuing this often-impossible profession. Usually it happens when you know you’ve done very good work, when you’re proud of what you’ve accomplished, and no one sees it; it disappears. And when that has happened several times you begin to wonder, what am I doing this for? Am I wasting my life? I was born in 1931, right into the Great Depression. While I don’t remember details, I can remember the sense of desperation that seemed to pervade our lives. My father gladly accepted responsibility for many members of his family and it was the money he gladly shared that helped keep many of them alive. I had the same sense of responsibility, and there were many nights I lay thrashing in bed wondering how I was going to support my wife and our children, how I was going to make the mortgage payment. The reality of my situation was pretty cold: I was constantly struggling to support my family, I was living from job to job with no security, and talent didn’t seem to make any difference between success and failure. Believe me, there were times when I thought about giving it up, when I never dreamed that someday I might achieve the kind of success that would lead to Howard Stern inviting me to join him in his famous homo room.
Actually, For the People was not the first series in which I starred, just the first one that got on the air in America. In 1963 I had been hired by producer Selig J. Seligman to star in a weekly series as Alexander the Great. Seligman, who had actually been an attorney at the Nuremberg Trials, was then producing the successful World War II series Combat! And although I didn’t realize it, Alexander the Great was intended to be Combat! in drag. It was going to be a big costume drama in which the men wore little loincloths and the women carried trays of grapes and wine and wore as little as permissible.
We filmed the two-hour pilot in Utah—for six months. Adam West and John Cassavetes were also featured in the cast. I rarely do any research beyond reading the script, but in this case I saturated myself in the lore of Alexander the Great. And I was enthralled by him. What an extraordinary human being. What a truly inspiring life he led. How can this show miss, I thought? It’s got action and adventure and beautiful women and guys fighting on horseback—and it’s based on fact. Perhaps it wasn’t as exciting as a hillbilly family moving to Beverly Hills or a Martian sorting out life on Earth, premises for two of the most popular shows then on the air, but nothing like it had ever been done before on television.
I had yet to figure out that by this time when something hadn’t been done on television, there probably was a good reason it hadn’t been done on television.
Alexander was a soldier and a philosopher, taught by Aristotle, who marched his army over twenty thousand miles in eleven years, conquering most of the known world. He never lost a battle and introduced a common language—no, not Esperanto—and currency to a great part of that region, before dying at thirty-two years old. Coincidentally, I was precisely the same age he was when he died.
I spent more than a year preparing to play this role. This time I believed this role could make me a star. I worked out with weights and got myself in the best physical shape of my life. This is when I learned how to shoot a bow and arrow. I learned the elements of sword fighting and I learned how to ride a horse at a gallop bareback because Alexander had disdained a saddle as being too weak for his manliness! I learned how to do a flying mount, swinging up onto a horse from the side while it’s moving. And I worked with an expert horse trainer, for example, to learn how to mount a horse from the rear, which is very difficult and can be dangerous and unusually painful. Let me give you a little bit of advice here: horses do not like to be mounted from the rear. They do not come equipped with a rearview mirror and, like any animal, they don’t like to be surprised from behind where they are defenseless. But I learned how to do it.
Seligman wanted this show to be as historically accurate as possible. I had been outfitted in the hardened leather armor Alexander would have worn. During a pause on the second day of shooting, as I walked along holding the reins of a beautiful saddle-bred five-gaited champion, the director approached me with a worried look on his face and told me we had to reshoot a scene we’d done the day before. “We lost the sound when you were leaning over the dying soldier and saying kind words,” he explained. “All that leather you’re wearing is creaking and we can’t hear the dialogue.”
I looked out over all that I could survey of the hardened plains of Utah, dressed as Alexander had been dressed, holding a horse that could have been his legendary horse Bucephalus, and I thought, I’m talking about a problem that Alexander had to have dealt with because they rode at night. They would ride great distances at a great pace, binding their horses’ hooves in rags, and make silent forays into the camp of the enemy. In a flash I knew that Alexander had told his aides, “The noise we’re making with our leather armor is warning our enemy. We’ve got to do something about it.”
At that moment history came alive for me, it all sort of mystically came together.
Of course, Alexander didn’t have to deal with sensitive microphones and studio executives. There wasn’t too much we could do about the problem—they made some technical adjustments.
The pilot episode opened with a sonorous voice-over, proclaiming, “Persia, 2,297 years ago. A land of rock . . .” Unfortunately, Seligman couldn’t sell the pilot of a show taking place in a land of rock to the networks and eventually recut it to movie length. Released as a theatrical film in Europe, it was very successful. But by the time it was finally shown on American television, to be accurate the voice-over should have begun, “Persia, 3,001 years ago . . .” With so much wonderful historic material to work with, the scripts were just riddled with clichés. Now, perhaps if we had put Alexander in a time machine and had him transported to Beverly Hills where we could see his wacky adventures, that show might have worked, but this show did not.
I took a lot of pride in the fact that I did all of my own stunts. Except for those truly dangerous stunts that require a stuntman with experience, that’s something I’ve done throughout most of my career. Over the years I’ve done a lot of fighting, tumbling, running, jumping, car stunts, and unique tricks. I’ve always believed that doing the physical work, the stunts, is part of the actor’s job—but it has to be done safely. The safety of the star is always foremost in every-one’s mind. Not because they love you, but if you hurt your left pinky and can’t make the next shot, it’s going to cost the producers a lot of money. So generally they don’t let the star do anything unsafe.
The reality is that even the most basic stunts can be very dangerous. On Gunsmoke I played a bad guy involved in a shoot-out with a deputy sheriff. According to the script, just before the shooting started one of my fellow bad guys was supposed to grab me around the neck and use me as a shield. In the story I was shot and my life was saved by a Quaker family; I convinced the family that I was the good-guy victim—until their beautiful daughter fell in love with the deputy.
In this instance no one promised this story was going to make me a star.
The actor playing the other bad guy was a big man, who looked crazy. That’s why they hired hi
m, because he looked crazy. As it turned out, he looked that way because he was crazy. When we started shooting he grabbed me around the neck and actually started strangling me. I couldn’t breathe. This was truly the serious actor’s nightmare: I was going to die—on Gunsmoke. I grabbed him by the thumb and yanked him around. I was literally fighting for my life.
A similar thing happened many years later—when I saved Oddjob’s life. Harold Sakata, who had created the memorable James Bond villain Oddjob in Goldfinger, was working with me in a low-budget film entitled Impulse, a title that had been changed from Want a Ride, Little Girl? I played your basic homicidal maniac, who is forced to try to kill a young girl after she sees me killing an old prison buddy. Harold was a huge man with no neck, he was just shoulders and a head. In this particular scene he chased me through a car wash and I managed to escape by climbing up onto a roof; when he walked by below me I threw a lasso over him and yanked him up. As he’s being strangled I jump off the roof, hit him several times, then escape.
The stunt coordinator rigged Harold with a harness under his shirt which was connected to a steel cable. To the camera it appeared that I was pulling him up by the rope, but in fact he was being lifted by the cable. We practiced it several times, rope, pull, up, looks good. Then we rolled cameras.
I dropped the loop over his head and yanked him up. I jumped down to the ground and looked at him dangling three feet in the air, struggling to get loose. He was making terrible choking sounds. Boy, I thought, I hadn’t realized he was such a good actor. He sounds like he’s really choking. I punched him rat-tat-tat in the gut a few times and took off. And as I started running a thought struck me: Wait a second, he’s actually choking. In real life one would probably have screamed, “Help!” but as this was on a movie set I yelled, “Cut! Cut!” and ran back to help him. Harold weighed about three hundred pounds but somehow I managed to lift his body enough to reduce the pressure on his trachea, enabling him to breathe, and then held him up until they cut him loose. I don’t know where I got the strength, but I broke my finger holding him. Because we were filming on a tight schedule I didn’t want to stop to see a doctor, so my finger never healed correctly.
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