Up Till Now

by William Shatner

  One advantage we did have was that because I was involved we were given permission to shoot inside the biosphere just north of Tucson, Arizona. Outside it was a weird and strange-looking building— perfect for my needs—and inside it was even more bizarre. We had permission to use it so we rewrote the script around it.

  I didn’t know how I was going to make this film for only half a million dollars. But rather than being discouraged, I looked at it as a challenge. I was going to get this film done and it was going to be good. The beautiful story and the extraordinary performances I would get from my actors would cover up what we lacked in production values. But what I didn’t know when we started was that Charlie Band was telling the executive producer he actually intended to get it made for $250,000. The producer was caught between Band telling him not to spend any money and me trying to make a decent movie. He pulled all kinds of shenanigans to try to stop us from wasting money on things like film stock and actors. When we were scheduled to shoot at night, for example, the cable from the generator had to be laid in the daylight. No cables, no lights, so you can’t shoot. It turned out he’d forgotten to order the cable. Whatever we wanted to do, he was prepared with a reason we couldn’t do it: there’s no film stock. We can’t get actors. There’s no money. There was no food for the company. Finally I ended up using my own credit card. We ended up paying the extras in pizza.

  It was insane. It made Roger Corman look like a spendthrift. Several key scenes had to be shot from the air. After a lot of screaming the producer finally agreed to rent a small two-person helicopter for four hours. We couldn’t even afford a camera mount for the helicopter, a basic piece of equipment. The cameraman was going to rope himself in and hold the camera in his hands. We had to shoot every scene we needed in those four hours. That was okay, we could do it if I planned every minute. In preparation I lined up a series of shots on local roads several miles apart. We’d use two units: while the cameraman was shooting with the first unit the second unit would move into place. When he was working with the second unit the first unit would race to the next setup. If everything went perfectly, we could get all the shots we needed. It required a tremendous amount of organization but it could be done.

  Do you think there was any chance at all of everything going perfectly? The first shot was scheduled for 4:30 A.M.—an hour before sunrise. At 4:30 we were standing on the road, waiting for the helicopter. And waiting. It was coming from about fifty miles away and it was late. And I began to wonder if we were waiting in the right place. And as people do in that situation I began to doubt myself: I think I’m the right place? But maybe it was around the bend? What did I tell him? The first glow of the sunrise appeared over the horizon. Shit, where’s that helicopter? I saw a bright light hovering in the distance. It was the helicopter and he was in the wrong place. Or we were in the wrong place. It didn’t matter who was right, the only thing that mattered was getting the shot. I shouted to my assistant, get him on the radio right now!

  She smiled. Radio? He doesn’t have a radio with him.

  I was thinking very quickly. How am I going to save the shot? Okay, I shouted to everyone, pack up and roll. Right now! We got into our cars and drove like maniacs on this unlit back road—only later did we learn that these were the roads used by drug smugglers and we were under constant observation—driving toward the helicopter. But as fast as we drove we didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

  I’m not quite certain when I realized we were chasing the North Star. That spot of light that I thought was the helicopter’s running lights was actually a very bright star. We could have driven forever and never gotten there—it was a thousand light-years away. I guess I wasn’t surprised that no one in the crew told the director that he was pursuing a star. Believe me, if I was acting in this film rather than paying for a lot of it, I would have been laughing at me. Turn around, I screamed, and we went racing back to our original site.

  Somehow we managed to get most of the shots we needed. This was the most memorable—and expensive—shoot of my career. We shot in Bisbee, Arizona, and stayed in a haunted hotel. It was while making this movie that Elizabeth and I went night riding with the Border Patrol and an illegal immigrant recognized Captain Kirk. From the beginning to the end of the production we had nothing but problems, many of which Elizabeth was able to solve. When Groom Lake was finished it had some nice moments, including several fine performances by some very good actors. But, honestly, it didn’t tie together smoothly. Again, it was my fault; I was just so blinded by my desire to make this film that I agreed to conditions that really made it impossible. No, we don’t need film, we’ll just take a lot of still pictures and string them together. It made a little money in rentals and plays occasionally on the Sci-Fi Channel, so with the tax write-offs I probably broke even on my investment.

  Actually, as a result of that film the Sci-Fi Channel asked me to come up with an original idea and direct a film for them. “Come up with an alien-of-the-week that we haven’t done,” an executive suggested. They had done three pterodactyls, four dinosaurs, and seven Frankensteins. I presented several ideas to them but the one they sparked to was a great ball of intelligent fire from another solar system that survived by consuming planets. This Alien Fire had consumed Venus, it had consumed Mars, and it was on its way toward Earth!

  I was going to direct it during a hiatus period from Boston Legal. We had a budget of about $1.5 million. Unfortunately, the producers cut short the hiatus and I didn’t have the time to direct it. Actually, maybe it was good fortune. The making of Alien Fire did not go well. It rained. It rained all the time—and this is a story about fire. Alien Smoke just doesn’t sound as threatening as Alien Fire. Once again this film depended on the quality of the special effects, and with all the other problems during the production they had only two hundred thousand dollars left to produce all the special effects. Not enough, not nearly enough. How about Alien Embers?

  It was during this period that I suddenly, and certainly unexpectedly to me, became more popular than ever before in my career. I became... ready for this... Shatman. After becoming Captain Kirk I received a lot of attention, particularly from Trekkies, but this was different. In public, people began expressing real affection toward me. They would often tell me how much they enjoyed my work and even thank me for entertaining them. I can’t begin to explain how gratifying that has been, nor can I explain why it’s happened. At first I would go into the denial mode, figuring they can’t possibly mean me! What had I done to deserve it? Say a few words on film? I didn’t believe I’d done enough to warrant the affection that I felt—and still feel—when I go out.

  It’s funny how it happened. Seriously. There have been a lot of articles written that claim the public embraced me because I finally learned how to laugh at myself, that I finally showed my sense of humor to the audience. If it’s true, it wasn’t a career decision, it’s because I was offered a job. My career in comedy began when I appeared in Airplane II: The Sequel, playing the role created in the original movie by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The kind of commander who orders a profile on anyone who watched The Sound of Music more than four times. It was in that film that I first began poking fun at my serious image. But here’s the truth about that: I was acting funny. I’m an actor, this was a comedy, my lines were funny, and the audience responded to it. John Lithgow, who like me almost exclusively played serious roles before finding success in comedy, explained accurately, “Once you’re funny people no longer think of you as quite the serious actor they’re used to seeing.”

  A few years later I appeared on Saturday Night Live and, once again, I think the audience was surprised I could be funny at my own expense. I parodied Kirk and Hooker. Well, if I hadn’t been funny it would have been a tragedy—and SNL is a comedy show. When I agreed to host the show I knew I would be poking fun at my somewhat somber image, that’s the foundation of that show. But rather than resisting, I embraced the opportunity to be funny. For me, it is our sense of humor, our
ability to laugh even when life can be so bleak, that separates us from all other living things. Have you ever seen a flower laugh? There are no great turtle comedians. Laughing hyenas do not get the joke. But humans laugh at all types of humor: bathroom humor, ironic humor, witty humor, slapstick, silliness, and knock-knock jokes. Name the different types of laughter that are available to us and that’s what life is all about. Looking back on my life and all the things that have happpened, success and failure, marriages and divorces, broke and less broke, it finally had become clear to me that it was all funny.

  Except perhaps The Transformed Man, although there are people who claim my comic career began with that album. So none of this was new to me. I’d learned that the audiences at Star Trek conventions most enjoyed the funny stories we’d tell about working on that series.

  After that SNL appearance I began to get offered more humorous parts. Bill Cosby saw me act, thought I was funny, and asked me to appear on The Cosby Show. And when John Lithgow needed someone to create the role of his boss, the heroic Big Giant Head, on 3rd Rock from the Sun, he immediately thought of me. I mean, let’s be honest, who better to portray the Big Giant Head than myself? And the audience embraced me as the Head man.

  Once I started doing more comedy my career—and my life— seemed to move in a very different direction. And ironically, some of it wasn’t at all funny.

  NINE

  The door of the dining room snapped open. A lovely blond android, clad in just about nothing, came stumbling out. There was blood splashed across her face and breasts. She bumped into Jake, caught hold of his arm, crying out, ‘They killed him! They murdered poor Zacky!’

  Shoving the mechanical woman aside, Jake carefully crossed the threshold.

  The large dining room’s interior offered a simulated moonlit terrace with a long formal dining table set up on the mosaic tiles. A large rectangle had been seared out of the far wall with a disintegrator cannon and the real night showed through. A chill wind was blowing into the room, carrying rain with it.

  Another nearly naked female android was still seated at the table. Most of her left side had been sliced away with a lazgun and her inner works were spilled out and dangling.

  A third android, this one in the image of a naked young boy of...

  Let me introduce you to Jake Cardigan, the futuristic detective hero of the TekWar series that I created, which eventually became nine books, twenty-four comic books, four movies, a TV series, sets of trading cards, and a computer game. These few paragraphs are from the third book in the series, TekLab, written with the very talented Ron Goulart.

  An acting career is extraordinarily difficult to sustain over a long period of time. In most professions the experience people gain enables them to become even more productive as they get older. Actors just get older. The audience slots actors into certain types determined by the roles that first brought them success, from leading man in action films to a character actor in serious dramas. But as they grow older and change physically they also have to change type. Nobody wanted to see John Wayne gather a posse to save the Old Actor’s Home. But often the audience won’t accept them in that new type. There is a word used to describe that: unemployment. So as I started getting older and began wondering how much longer my acting career would survive—let’s be honest, I could only survive as a heroic, handsome leading man for three or four decades—I started focusing on the off-camera areas of the movie and television business, including directing, producing, and more writing than I’d done in the past.

  All of which explains how I got into professional wrestling.

  TekWar was one of the first projects I developed. While I was directing Star Trek V the Teamsters Union went on strike, forcing us to shut down production for three months. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I get nervous when I don’t have something scheduled in the next half hour, so just imagine what I felt like facing three completely unscheduled months. There’s nothing more frightening to an actor than a future with nothing scheduled. So I began working on a novel: T.J. Hooker meets The Fugitive in the Star Trek future. I started by giving my character a past. He’s in the cooler, but the cooler is actually a deep-freeze in space. He had to have an objective, so he was wrongly convicted of a crime and his wife and child left him to be with the man who gave false evidence against him.

  I’d been living in the world of science fiction for more than two decades, and this was my first opportunity to create something entirely new. There were bits and pieces I’d been thinking about for years, with brand-new ideas tossed into the future. TekWar was set in the twenty-second century.

  My main character, Jake Cardigan, was released from his cryogenic state when the wealthy owner of a private detective agency needed his help. Cardigan became a private detective, not only pursuing the enemies of the future, but also intent on proving his innocence by finding his wife and child and the people who framed him. The most fun about writing science fiction is that anything is possible. You want to cure a disease: “The diseases of the twentieth century had been wiped out.” There, it’s done, there is no disease in your environment. Snow in Los Angeles? “An artificial snow was falling across Greater Los Angeles, part of the seasonal special effects.” The universe is your imagination.

  In my universe ex-cop Jake Cardigan had been convicted of murdering his partners while under the influence of an extraordinary drug, Tek. At night I often leave the television on as I fall into sleep, and in that state there is a diffusion between reality and whatever is on television. Tek had a similar effect; for the user it made fantasies seem real while reality seemed like a dream state. Tek users lived in their fantasies and would do almost anything to stay in that pleasurable state and, most dangerously, when the drug wore off, return to it.

  So that was the basis of my stories, the adventures of a hardboiled private detective two hundred years in the future. The novels were very successful and created a lot of interest in the property. But I discovered that I’d made a mistake setting these stories so far in the future. I didn’t realize how expensive the future was going to be. Futuristic sets and props and costumes made it too expensive for TV. Fortunately, Marvel Comics approached me to turn TekWar into a comic-book series. We sold them the rights—but insisted that they set the stories only fifty years in the future. Marvel changed the name to Tek World and eventually published twenty-four Epic Comics.

  By setting the stories only fifty years in the future we could use existing buildings as our backgrounds. Suddenly several companies who wanted to buy the rights. Universal in particular had watched Paramount make a fortune with Star Trek and wanted to own part of the future. So eventually I made a deal with them for a series of movies to be broadcast on the USA network. I directed the pilot.

  I’ll bet you’re beginning to wonder how this leads to my career in professional wrestling. Here’s a hint: Regis Philbin.

  Our budget for three movies was less than the budget for a Movie of the Week shot in Los Angeles. So we had to do everything possible to save money. I did, for example, create the most inexpensive elaborate computer in history. The computer was central to our plots. We needed a computer that actually could exist a half-century from now that we could use throughout the series. It was a central reference point so it had to look spectacular—and it had to cost about the same as a laptop. What I imagined was a highly complex three-dimensional computer that would project its own image 360 degrees around the operator—a holographic computer. It would be there, it would produce images, but the audience wouldn’t see it. The computer operator would reach behind him and manipulate an invisible switch, then turn and reach over there, just as if he was surrounded by a huge console. This was a truly amazing computer. Unlike games, it has a real computer keybo...Well, actually that was the Commodore Vic-20, this computer didn’t have a real computer keyboard. But to make the operator’s gestures look plausible, I brought in a dance choreographer and a sign language expert to work with him on his movements. />
  We had to figure out some way to demonstrate the extraordinary power of Tek. What would people look like in the middle of a fantasy they believed to be true? In one scene Cardigan’s son was supposed to be drugged. I was working with an inexperienced child actor and I needed him to show complete euphoria. Finally I suggested, “I want you to look as if you’re seeing the sunrise for the first time.” Go ahead, try it yourself—and you’re Tekked!

  Greg Evigan, who had starred in B.J. and the Bear, played Cardigan. Greg was terrific in it. I played his boss. We shot wherever we found a viable location. Viable meaning free. For one scene, in fact, we needed a location where homeless people would sleep—and our location manager discovered the worst place I’ve been in my life. It was an enormous abandoned warehouse complex, a huge open room with cement walls and a cement floor. All the windows were smashed, enabling sunlight to stream in. Almost every foot of floor space was covered with cardboard pallets, large cardboard boxes that had been broken apart and spread open so the homeless could use them as bunks. Every disgusting thing you can imagine littered the floor. The stench was suffocating. As I walked through the place I could feel the filth right through the soles of my running shoes, I could almost feel the bacteria eating through them. When I left that place we just had to throw them away.

  “This is fabulous,” I said excitedly when I saw it. It was so awful I couldn’t wait to shoot there. The decay was so visual. The light was perfect. It was a perfect location. We shot all over Toronto. That city has a large number of abandoned sugar silos—we built sets inside one of them and it became our prison. We found an abandoned fivefloor oil-cracking plant. Our character was supposed to be larger than life, a man with magical powers, so I put him on the fifth-floor balcony, then suddenly he appeared on the third-floor balcony, then he was standing on the ground. It was definitely movie magic. We completed the first film on time and only slightly over budget.