The actors were transported back and forth from the ship on a small speedboat. One afternoon several of us were on this boat when its engine failed. We started drifting out to sea in a strong current— just as a thick fog rolled in. Within minutes we were lost in that fog. We couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of us—and frighteningly, we couldn’t be seen. We were just outside Los Angeles harbor and there were a lot of large ships moving through the area. I suspect all the actors onboard had a very similar thought: if we get killed which one of us is going to get top billing in the obituaries?
That picture was so awful it sat on a shelf somewhere for eight years before it was finally broadcast in 1976. No one knows what damage was done to that shelf.
I’ll tell you how bad it got. I starred in a horror film titled The Devil’s Rain, the story of a man being pursued through the centuries by Satanists. We filmed in Durango, Mexico, and the cast included Ernest Borgnine—who poked out my eyes and crucified me—Tom Skerritt, Eddie Albert, Keenan Wynn, Ida Lupino, and in his first film appearance, John Travolta.
The technical advisor on this film was Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. I don’t recall having any conversations with LaVey, although I suppose that is not surprising. What would I have asked him, is this the way Satan holds his fork? I was just so miserable making this film. Durango was such a hellhole, I was vaguely ill from the water, I was homesick, and anxious. But it did include perhaps the greatest chase scene of my career—even more memorable than my chase scene through a car wash in Impulse—although in this case it wasn’t actually in the movie.
In one scene I was tied to an altar as Ernest Borgnine performed a ritual ceremony over me, preparing me to be sacrificed. I was completely nude except for a piece of ribbon, sort of a breechcloth, covering my groin. Let me state here unequivocally that it is my firm belief that I am the only member of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival to have achieved this point in their career. Also in the cast was a nubile, barely clothed, beautiful young woman. A photographer from Playboy was on the set shooting pictures. Apparently this actress was to be featured in the magazine and the producers thought this would be good publicity for the film.
Why I objected to Leonard’s photographer in the dressing room as I put on my makeup and didn’t object to a photographer on the set while I was wearing a ribbon I don’t know. But I didn’t. In this scene my hands and my feet were bound to the altar. As the photographer started shooting, this actress softly laid her hand on my arm and then on my chest and then on my stomach and then on my . . .
Click. Wait a second! It suddenly occurred to me, Playboy! I realized exactly what they were doing. “Untie me!” I screamed. The photographer began quickly packing up his cameras. As soon as I got free, for the only time in my life, I went after a photographer. “Give me that roll of film!”
“No. It’s my film.” I grabbed his arm, trying to get hold of his camera. He was screaming, “Get your hands off me! Get your hands off me!” Give me that film. “Get your hands off me.” We struggled. It was an unusually absurd moment. I was grappling with a photographer who had taken partially nude pictures of me being groped by an almost-naked starlet while being sacrificed by Ernest Borgnine as the founder of the Church of Satan looked on dispassionately.
Ah, show business.
I finally managed to yank that roll of film out of his camera and expose it.
At the end of these films I often died in a unique way. In the big finale of The Devil’s Rain, for example, like the other members of the cast I melted in a rainstorm. In Sole Survivor, CBS’s first made-for-TV movie, and a truly haunting film, I played a ghost trapped in the Libyan desert with the crew of my World War II bomber. At the end of this one I get put in a flag-covered body bag and taken home to rest in peace. I played a psychotic lady-killer in Impulse who gets skewered on a sword by the daughter of the woman I’m romancing. In The Horror at 37,000 Feet I get sucked out of an airplane while carrying a lit torch into the plane’s baggage compartment to try to confront a druid ghost.
Now, there has been considerable discussion among the true Shatner aficionados about precisely which was the worst movie I ever made. And The Horror at 37,000 Feet does have its supporters. This was sort of The Poseidon Adventure meets The Exorcist plot: a small group of potential future Dancing with the Stars contestants, including Buddy Ebsen, Paul Winfield, Roy Thinnes, Chuck Connors, Tammy Grimes, and France Nuyen are flying to New York on a private plane that, unknown to us, is carrying in its baggage compartment a druid sacrificial stone—and it’s hungry! Or it’s thirsty. Or lonely or whatever happens to druid sacrificial stones to make them need another sacrifice. I played a drunken architect who eventually finds his nobility by fighting unseen ghosts. Ghosts are very popular in low-budget films, by the way, because they can’t be seen!
The most difficult problem I had to overcome while making this film was dealing with a young actress’s mother. I’ve worked many times with child actors, almost always without any problems. But in this picture the child was possessed by the druid ghosts and I had to choke her. There is a skill to convincingly choking someone on camera; you have to make it look real because the camera is close but obviously you can’t really choke them. I was very careful, but apparently not careful enough for her mother. No matter what I did, this woman complained. Too hard, too tight, too long. The child was very embarrassed—being possessed by the devil had turned Linda Blair into a star, so if necessary she was prepared to be choked for her art.
It was while I was busy working on these shows and movies, and pretty much unknown to me, that the entire Star Trek industry, an industry that would eventually cover the entire civilized world, was slowly coming into being. The original episodes were being syndicated...
Let me pause right here again. Did I happen to mention my favorite Italian restaurant? Now, I am aware it has been said about me that I am a man of many great passions and that I do tend to get overenthusiastic about things, that perhaps on occasion I might have even exaggerated. All right, it’s true that when I find something that is really special I feel a great desire to share it with everyone. But what’s wrong with that? For example, I would argue that among the very few common goals shared by most of civilized mankind is the eternal search for the perfect chicken parmigiana. So when I chanced upon it, should I not convey that discovery to others?
I certainly don’t get that enthusiastic about everything, only about things that I believe are the very best in the entire world and only those things that truly matter. For example, Café Firenze in Moorpark is simply the finest Italian restaurant in the world. That’s just the way it is. You have to trust me on this, but you have never had better chicken parmigiana in your life. You have to taste it, I mean, you won’t believe it. You’ve never tasted anything like it. What I do when I go there is, rather than ordering, I tell the chef, “Surprise me,” and I’m always surprised! Of course, if I wasn’t surprised, then I would have been surprised by that. That’s how good it is!
My daughters find it amusing when I get really enthusiastic about something. When I insist that they share it with me, or try it themselves. Oh, it’s just Dad being Dad again. But when they try it, they discover that maybe I did know something. Let me give you another example. When you leave Café Firenze, there’s a gas station several blocks away on the right. I mean, it looks like a normal service center, but in this place they have an air pump that contains the finest tire air I’ve ever encountered. It’s really amazing. Until finding this place I had always believed that all tire air was the same, but for some reason when you put this air in your tires the car rides more smoothly. I don’t understand it, what could it be? How could they have improved air? They can’t, can’t be done, it’s just air, but you have to try it. I mean, you must. It’s truly superior air.
As I was writing, the original episodes were being syndicated all over the world and wherever it was shown the program gained a dedicated following. There was no real expl
anation for it, just that people watched it and liked it. This growing popularity hadn’t affected my life, I’d already received all the checks to which I was entitled so I wasn’t making any money from it. And then in early 1973 Gene Roddenberry called and said he’d sold an animated version of Star Trek and wanted me to be the voice of Jim Kirk. And so it began.
This was my first experience doing a voice-over for animation. It’s the strangest form of acting I’ve ever done—although I did do all my own stunts. Since then I’ve done several major animated theatrical movies. I’ve always done it alone, without any other actors being present. When we were doing the animated Star Trek the director and the sound technicians would come to the set wherever I was working and between scenes we’d go into a bathroom and record my part. Apparently the acoustics in a bathroom are particularly good—and for obvious reasons bathrooms generally have thicker walls.
For movies like Over the Hedge and The Wild I did go into a soundproof booth to read my role. I don’t know why voice-over actors work alone, but that’s the way it’s done. At first, someone read the lines with me, but after a point I started hearing them in my head and simply responded out loud.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. There are as many as fifteen technicians working with me in the room, and all of them have an opinion about my reading. There is no right or wrong way to do a reading, just opinions. Endless opinions. In The Wild I played an egotistical wildebeest who wanted to become a predator—and who had a real passion for choreography. After one take I remember one of the techs telling me gently, “That just doesn’t sound like a power-crazed wildebeest to me.”
I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t sound like a wildebeest? I was tempted to tell him that I was playing it as a Canadian wildebeest, which has a much different accent than your normal wildebeest. Instead, I went back in the booth and did my best possible wildebeest.
Unlike film, which can be expensive, audio tape is very inexpensive. Normally on the first few takes I would be spontaneous, and then I would begin doing variations. Endless variations. Surprisingly, they record the audio first and then draw the animation to fit the voice.
In Over the Hedge I didn’t work with a wonderful cast that included Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Wanda Sykes, Steve Carell, Nick Nolte, and Avril Lavigne. Normally at the end of a picture the entire cast has a party, but when I finished doing my role in this film I popped open a soft drink.
Not working with your co-stars in a movie is actually quite common. In many of these pictures I appeared in only a few scenes, I’d come in for a few days and do my scenes and leave. If the other actors weren’t in my scenes there would be no reason or opportunity for us to meet. The one person in particular I remember not working with was Ava Gardner. Growing up, I had been in love with Ava Gardner, who was my fantasy of the perfect woman. I didn’t work with her for the first time in my career in The Kidnapping of the President.
So when we did the animated version of Star Trek I didn’t work with Leonard or any other members of the cast. In fact, they eliminated Chekov from the series because they couldn’t afford to pay Walter Koenig. The scripts were written by many of the same writers who’d done the original episodes and, in fact, some of them were based on those episodes. For example, we had more trouble with tribbles.
I enjoyed reprising Kirk, perhaps even a little more than I’d expected. He’d been locked away inside me for almost four years, but as soon as I opened my mouth to read his first line he was back. Slipping back into that character was like putting on a comfortable old sweatshirt; it fit. An actor does form a relationship with the characters he or she plays. When I was doing a low-budget movie or a guest-starring appearance on TV there rarely was time to actually get to know the character, it was just a mask I slipped on for a few days and I tried to invest as much humanity as possible into him. But when you’re working on a series for several years, on many levels your character actually does come alive, the character takes on its own emotional life, and you experience the emotions of the story through the prism of that character. You don’t even have to think about it, you just react. On occasion a character will surprise you, and react in an unexpected way. You also get the freedom within the protection of that character to take actions and behave in ways you never would normally. I liked Kirk. He was a heroic figure, he had a bit of Alexander’s nobility but with a nice sense of irony—and an appreciation of a lovely earthwoman.
Mr. Spock also became real on some level of my mind. Of course I know Spock is a fictional character, but I’ve known him so well for so long that... Actually, Kirk knew him so well and valued Spock’s friendship so greatly, that it was somewhat surprising that Leonard and I hadn’t become better friends. After the series ended we saw each other only when we were making an appearance and never spoke privately.
So I was very pleased that Kirk was back, even if it was only his voice. The animated series lasted two seasons, twenty-two episodes, and won our first Emmy, for Outstanding Entertainment in a Children’s Series.
Being Kirk was an island of tranquillity in an ocean of anxiety. It was like coming home. This was a very tough time in my career, I was having to run faster and faster just to stay in place. One of the few positive memories I have from this period, besides meeting Marcy, was that I began to work often with horses.
There is nothing in my background to explain my deep love for horses, whether I’m riding a horse, or communicating with a horse, or simply appreciating the beauty of this magnificent animal. For some reason I found myself enthralled by horses as a child. What could have caused that? I was a Jewish kid from the streets of Montreal. No one in my family knew anything about horses; it was a word that never entered my family’s lexicon. But I do remember loving Westerns and loving being in the woods and loving animals. There was a stable near our house and when I was ten years old I went riding there for the first time. I think I had earned this ride by working there. It was obviously a big deal because my parents came to the stable to watch me. I don’t think it made a lot of sense to my father, who was a very practical man. Jews didn’t ride horses. Name one great Jewish cowboy! My mother was terribly frightened I was going to get hurt. Oy, what does my little Billy know from horses? My sister Joy remembers sitting there with my parents as I climbed up on this horse, kicked it in the hindquarters, and galloped away.
The three of them sat there stunned, their mouths open. My first time on a horse and I was galloping. The only possible reason I might have had for doing that is because that’s the way cowboys rode. It never occurred to me not to; in the movies it looked like so much fun. For me it was just a matter of holding on. After that I rode every time I had the opportunity—which was not very often. And I ended up doing a lot of movies in which I got to ride a horse. For Alexander I had learned how to ride bareback, but I really learned to ride while doing a movie in Spain named White Comanche.
White Comanche was an Italian Western I made during a hiatus from Star Trek, in which I played twin half-breed brothers, or one breed, one good and the other evil, who eventually must fight to the death. Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti Westerns had become hugely popular and this was an attempt to make a less-expensive version. And when I was offered the part I realized that my childhood dream had come true: I was going to be in a Western! It turned out to be more of a macaroni and very cheesy Western. This was a truly awful experience. I was in the middle of my divorce from Gloria, I was one of the few people on the crew who spoke English, I didn’t get along with the director, and the script was dreadful.
How dreadful was it? I think I can probably sum it up by quoting one of my better lines from this picture. After my good character shoots a bad guy he says knowingly, “Next time, don’t eat the peyote.”
While Comanche Blanco, as it was released in Spain, is not available at my online store, WilliamShatner.com, you can get it at Amazon—for the incredible price, ladies and gentlemen, of...one cent. Literally, they are selling it for one cent. Truthfu
lly I don’t know how they can earn a profit that way, but I’ve never been strong in mathematics. One buyer, however, did write that he had actually purchased “the upgrade for forty-three cents.”
While making this movie I got to ride wonderfully high-spirited Spanish horses. Since each brother needed a horse, I had two horses with very similar markings. One of these horses, whom we called El Tranquillo, was to be used for close-ups. El Tranquillo had to remain calm when the clapboards snapped and the bright lights went on in his face. The horse that we used for long shots was called El Nervisio. El Nervisio was a difficult horse to ride; he’d broken the noses of several stuntmen by stopping short and as the rider’s momentum was carrying him forward sticking up his head. Bam, broken nose.
But after about a month El Tranquillo had become crazed by the snap of the clapboard—as soon as he heard it he knew he had to work and he didn’t like it. We stopped using the clapboard, instead the director shouted “Action.” But he quickly caught on to that. And he became difficult to ride. Meanwhile, El Nervisio got used to me and calmed down. So in the middle of the film we had to switch horses; El Tranquillo was used for long shots and El Nervisio was used for close-ups.
Honestly, I personally would pay a penny for this movie, if just to see the riding. After this I did several other films in which I rode— including one film in which I played perhaps the most celebrated rider in history.
No, I did not play Lady Godiva.
In John Jakes’s The Bastard I played Paul Revere, riding through village and town—in the mud as it turned out—to warn Americans. It was a small role in which... wait, let me do it for you. “To. Arms! To arms! The British. Are coming! The British are coming!” In my entire career, that was the easiest dialogue I ever had to memorize.
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