Up Till Now

by William Shatner

  That was my plan. That was the way I was going to play it. I wanted Captain Kirk to look at death and have a moment and I knew what that moment would be: it would be everything he saw in the voyages of the Enterprise, every strange monster, every bit of human understanding in an instant—and at the end he would see this extraordinary thing that was nothing like he had ever seen before. But rather than being afraid of it, his reaction was: isn’t this the most marvelous experience. How do I deal with it? I wanted to give Jim Kirk that moment of seeing whatever it is you see at death while he was still alive and reacting to it as I knew he would: oh my... isn’t that interesting?

  It was all technical. As I prepared I had to remind myself that this was just another performance. I was determined not to get overly emotional about the death of this character. And I was able to do that right up until I got up the next morning and realized Paramount was going to kill Captain Kirk.

  Kill Kirk? What are they, out of their minds? How could they kill a franchise? Why did I agree to this?

  Gradually I managed to calm down. It’s science fiction, I reminded myself, they can bring me back when they want to. In the movies, I knew, a character is only as dead as his grosses. After the studio realized there was a demand for Kirk, they would find a way to resurrect him.

  Patrick Stewart, Malcolm McDowell, and I did Kirk’s death scene. Kirk’s last words, spoken with awe and humor as he saw something that was never shown to the viewer, were “Oh...my...”

  I went home that night with a great sense of satisfaction. I didn’t feel it was the end of an era, just the end of a character. I was satisfied. Kirk had been given the noble end he deserved. And then I sat down and wrote a forty-page treatment for a story in which Kirk comes back from the dead.

  I called it The Return, and a couple of days later presented it to the producer. As I explained, there was a very important reason to bring back Kirk. Eighty million dollars. “That’s very interesting,” he told me. “But I think we’re going to go on with the Next Generation.”

  Well. Kirk may have been dead in the movies, but there was no reason he had to be dead to the publishing industry. I sold my treatment to Simon & Schuster and Star Trek:The Return became a bestselling novel. Co-written with Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, in my story, “the Borg and the Romulan Empire have joined forces against the Federation and the ultimate weapon is James T. Kirk, resurrected by alien science to destroy the Borg’s most formidable weapon: Jean-Luc Picard.” Actually, they reanimated my dead tissue and gave me back my katra. But what they really did was implant false memories that turned me against the Federation.

  To my surprise, and admittedly my pleasure, when Paramount screened Star Trek: Generations test audiences hated the ending. They had too much invested in Kirk to see him die so simply. They wanted Kirk to have a spectacular death. So the writers created a new death for him. It cost Paramount $4 million to go back into the desert and film this new ending.

  In this version Kirk dies saving an entire universe. Now that’s an ending. In this ending Picard and Kirk are desperately trying to stop Soran from launching a missile into this universe’s sun. I’m forced to leap from one side of a collapsed bridge to the other to get the device that enables me to uncloak the invisible missile, and Picard destroys it. And then the bridge collapses and Kirk falls to his death—but not before getting that last line, “Oh...my...”

  Actually I had written some other lines for this scene. When I leaped onto the bridge I said to Picard, “Captain on the bridge,” which was the way I had always announced my presence on the bridge of the Enterprise. And when the bridge collapsed on me I managed to say, “Bridge on the captain.”

  Those lines were cut out of the scene.

  The only hesitation I had about making this film was the fact that once again I would be working with Walter Koenig and Jimmy Doohan, both of whom had taken every possible opportunity to say unpleasant things about me. I wasn’t sure how they would react to me. In fact, both men were very professional on the set and we had no problems. In fact, after a couple of weeks of working together I was able to talk both men into posing with me for a photograph. After everything that had been written about our relationship, I figured a picture of us holding hands would really shock the entire Trekkie nation. But truthfully, I was glad that they agreed to pose for the photo. I thought, maybe they’re mellowing a bit. And I continued to think that until Walter said to me as we posed, “Any picture of the three of us holding hands has got to be worth at least five hundred dollars at a convention. If we all sign it, fifteen hundred.”

  And so Kirk died, although since then he has continued to live long and has prospered in the series of Star Trek novels and, more recently, video games.

  I’d been playing James T. Kirk for almost thirty years. But Kirk was done. And naturally with that reality I began to wonder if the greatest days of my career were done too. There would always be small roles for me, I knew that, and that I could always earn a reasonable living, but there does come a time when the phone rings less often. I did wonder if this was the beginning of the end of my career.

  And after Nerine’s death I began wondering if I was condemned to spend the rest of my life alone too. Obviously I had my daughters and their families, which happily included a growing number of grandchildren, but they all had their own busy lives. My greatest fear was being back—emotionally—in that ribbed-bed, rat-infested room in Toronto. All alone.

  As it turned out, rather than this being an ending, it was simply another beginning.

  I went back to work about two months after Nerine’s death. There is no such thing as “enough time,” or “being ready” to work. I just couldn’t sit around the house anymore. I’m an actor. I needed to act. Fortunately, the perfect role was offered to me, a role truly befitting the status I had earned in the entertainment industry. John Lithgow offered me the role of the Big Giant Head in his sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun.

  When I started watching the show I realized what a master farceur John Lithgow is. 3rd Rock is about the adventures of four aliens who have come to Earth on a mission to investigate life here and have taken human bodies. I love farce—very broad, wide-open, full-throttle madcap comedy played absolutely straight—but I hadn’t had the opportunity to do much of it since working in the theater in Canada. Great farce has all the meaning and depth of a soap bubble, it shimmers for an instant and then disappears. It really was precisely what I needed at that moment. Great farce means giving wit a swift kick in the pants—and it was the best possible work for me.

  In this half hour the unit’s superior officer, the Big Giant Head, was making his first inspection of the mission. He had never been to Earth before. Well, what fun to play that. My part was written extremely broadly. In an early scene I discovered I had these things called legs and kicked Lithgow in the pants! And it was so much fun I kicked him again. And then I got slapped in the face by a woman when I commented how much I liked “the round part at the end of her legs!” Kicks in the pants, slaps in the face, plot misunderstandings, and slapstick—I had to dump a large bowl of red punch over a prom queen wearing a white gown. What actor wouldn’t want to dump a bowl of red punch over the head of a girl in a white prom gown? It was everything farce is supposed to be, even the lines were properly broadly absurd. For example, when the beautiful Kristen Johnston discovered the Big Giant Head had promoted her because of her sexy appearance, she complained, “When a woman with a body like this gets a promotion everybody questions it. But if it were a man with a body like this no one would ask a question!”

  As Lithgow told me, no one in the cast knew what to expect from me. None of them had ever seen me playing broad comedy— although John claimed he had seen me singing “Rocket Man.” He told me that a series of performers ranging from Dennis Rodman to Naomi Judd had guest-starred on the show. “Some people wanted to come in and join in the fun, some knew it was their job to be a foil, and there were some people who just didn’t have a clue.�
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  I know that when I showed up for rehearsals some members of the cast were a little dubious, wondering how serious I was going to be about protecting my image. At first we did have a bit of a problem— I was playing more broadly than they were. I was really into it, over-the-top into it, and my performance had to be modulated—so I only kicked Jane Curtin in the pants once!

  What was truly nice is that the writers included several inside Shatner gags in the script. For example, knowing that Lithgow and I had played the same Twilight Zone character—the man on the plane who sees the monster at twenty thousand feet, in my opening scene Lithgow asked me if I’d had a good flight. “It was horrible,” I said. “I looked out and saw something on the wing of the plane.”

  Lithgow’s mouth fell open and he exclaimed, “The same thing happened to me!”

  Later when I was trying to woo Jane Curtin I told her, “I’m a rocket man, you know.” And then I asked her if I could help her jettison her pants. And in one of the final scenes which took place at a high school junior prom—did I mention that I got to dump a whole... oh, sorry—during this scene the police asked me if I had seen any kids with Lucy in the sky with diamonds.

  I had a great time doing the show. And apparently it was so popular that they brought Big Giant Head back for several additional shows. To my great surprise and pleasure—and I’m not kidding here—I was nominated for an Emmy Award as the Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series. After working in television for forty years, even considering the great success of Star Trek and Hooker and 911, this was the first time I’d been nominated for an Emmy. Yes, I had been nominated for other awards; I’d won a science-fiction Saturn as Best Actor for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and I’d been nominated for several awards for TV’s first interracial kiss—I’d kissed Nichelle Nichols in a 1968 episode—as well as a Razzie. I’d even been honored as the subject of an entire art show—about seventy-five artists created original pieces about me for an exhibition and book called The Shatner Show—with a portion of all proceeds donated to the Hollywood Horse Show. It is an astonishing collection, with pieces made from an extraordinary variety of materials— including a bust made of LEGOs and another one of clay, limestone, artificial ferns, and plumbing pieces. So I’ve seen myself in plastic and plumbing, but I’d never even been nominated for an Emmy. And at that point in my life, considering the events of the past year, just to be nominated was quite an honor and I truly appreciated it.

  But I really wanted to win. I mean, I really wanted to win. I’m not going to pretend I was satisfied with the nomination. I wanted to take home that little sucker. So I very carefully looked over my competition. The other nominees for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series were... imagine a drumroll here, please, but hold your applause...John Ritter! Charles Nelson Reilly! Woody Harrelson! And Mel Brooks! Mel Brooks? I was nominated for a comedy award against Mel Brooks? What chance did I have? That’s sort of like being nominated for Best Appearance on Money against Abraham Lincoln. I attended the awards but I didn’t write an acceptance speech. Guess who won? Mel Brooks!

  Whether it was 3rd Rock or just my time, again, rather than my career coming to a gentle end as I feared, I began being offered better roles than I’d played in years. The Shatman was back! I was “hot.” I was in demand! For example, I was given a full hour to peddle my wares on The Home Shopping Network during which I set sales records that have yet to be broken.

  Okay, that I am kidding about. I have appeared on just about every television channel in history—I’ve even been an answer on Jeopardy—but I have never been invited to appear on the Home Shopping Network. It would seem to me that Bill Shatner and the Home Shatner Net... Shopping Network would be a perfect match. Perhaps I might appear on there selling...this book. I could appear on HSN selling my autobiography, which claims I’d never appeared on HSN! The tabloids would love that story! It would be great publicity for HSN—and me.

  But one of the roles I did accept was to play a beauty-pageant organizer in Sandra Bullock’s movie Miss Congeniality. This is a comedy in which the awkward FBI agent Bullock goes undercover as a Miss United States contestant. Obviously it was pure fiction, Sandra Bullock could never be awkward. And in addition to working with Sandra Bullock—and for her because she was the producer—this was the first time I’d worked with Candice Bergen. I’d always admired her work, among her other attributes I’d long admired. We had several scenes together. In a wonderfully dramatic moment, Candice looked up at me and stated so proudly, “I would much rather cancel the show than have my girls blown up.”

  To which I responded nobly, “Especially without their knowledge.” Supposedly some of the dialogue came from actual beauty-pageant contestants. It’s possible. For example, the script called for me to ask one beautiful young woman, “Please describe your idea of a perfect date.”

  She thought about this, then said, “That’s a tough one. I would say... April twenty-fifth, because it’s not too hot, not too cold, all you need is a light jacket.”

  For me, it was oddly disconcerting to be working for a female producer. I like to think I’m one of the least sexist men in our universe, not that I ever actually think about it. Because if I did have to think about it, that would indicate I was sexist by nature but trying to make myself aware of it. But I don’t, so it can’t be. Honestly, I love women. I’d never knowingly worked for a female producer before, especially a producer who looked like Sandra Bullock. It was actually kind of scary for me, to be in a situation in which a woman had absolute power. Not that I’m sexist. And while Sandra Bullock was not the director, the director deferred to her. She was in complete charge of everything that happened on the set. I watched her working and thought, wow, that’s an interesting person I’d like to get to know better. We have become nice acquaintances, even if we’ve never had the opportunity to become friends. But I have extended to her something I value very much—an invitation to come to my house and join a large group of friends to watch Monday Night Football.

  And then we’ll just see who’s sexist!

  Miss Congeniality was the first of the several large-budget major-movie-star films in which I appeared—but that didn’t stop me from also appearing in considerably lower-budget films, particularly those that I thought would be fun. In Shoot or Be Shot, for example, I played the role of escaped mental patient Harvey Wilkes, who kidnaps an entire film crew in the desert and forces them to make the movie Shoot or Be Shot.

  Several years later I did another project about making a movie— and this was arguably the greatest practical joke ever played on an entire town. It really is difficult to accurately describe what was happening in my career during this period. But, for no specific reason that I could determine, I had become a bigger star than ever before. I was appearing in movies and on television, I was Priceline.com’s spokesperson, and I made many other commercials, I was writing books, creating and producing projects, even making my first new record album since 1968. I was having a great time doing it all. And almost daily people were approaching me with the most unusual and occasionally intriguing ideas.

  One afternoon I was in the lobby at MTV waiting to start a pitch meeting. I had several good ideas I wanted to discuss with executives there. Two young men who had produced the successful reality show The Joe Schmo Show were also waiting there to pitch a project. With great enthusiasm they told me they had a concept for a wonderful show for which I would be perfect. Generally, when people have a project for which “Bill, I swear, this is perfect for you,” what they really mean is that they don’t have any money, Robin Williams’s agent has turned it down, and they would like to attach my name to it to get financing.

  But I always listen. You never know. Two days later they came to my office in Studio City and pitched their idea for the greatest practical joke in television history. It was a good old-fashioned hoax. I liked it, I liked it a lot. Remember, I’m the man who tried to convince my daughter Melanie that a giant pine tree had actually onc
e been a bonsai. This was the idea: I would pretend to buy an economically depressed small town and proceed to try to save it by making all kinds of bizarre changes. The first thing I would do, for example, was change the name of the town to... Billville!

  My initial reaction was, that’s genius. And seconds later I pictured a poor single mother with her crippled child crying as she thanked me for saving the lives of everyone in the town by buying it.

  And I would be playing a joke on them all. Ha ha ha, end of career. That would be beyond cruel. But we continued talking and eventually I suggested, “How about instead of buying a whole town, we fool a whole town!” And I knew exactly what town. The result was Invasion Iowa. We would bring a film crew into a small town on the pretext of making a movie, but in fact we would actually be doing a reality show, filming their reaction to a very bizarre Hollywood production. The whole production would be a hoax. It would be hysterical. What could possibly go wrong?

  Eventually Spike TV bought the concept. Then Priceline.com agreed to support it in return for some mention. Actually a lot of mention. I would co-produce and direct. It was actually a substantial financial risk for both companies—if one person found out that the whole production was a practical joke and exposed it, the show would fall apart and their investment would be lost. In fact, when we pitched the show we didn’t reveal to anyone that we intended to shoot in Riverside, Iowa, population 928, which for several years had promoted itself as “The future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.” A plaque claiming that Kirk was “conceived at this point” used to hang under the pool table at Murphy’s Bar and tourists could buy “Kirk Dirt” from the site of his birth for ten dollars.