Up Till Now (35 page)

Executive producer Rick Berman agreed. “Okay, that sounds dramatic. Let’s do it that way.”

The night before we actually did the scene I tried to imagine the feelings I would have. I began imagining my own death. This was the first time in my career I’d ever done anything like this. I tried to look at it technically rather than emotionally. I drew on my experiences; I remembered being knocked unconscious. I also remembered fainting from putting too much cold beer in an overheated body. As you lose consciousness there is a moment when everything slows down; that horse falling on top of me slowed down. You are completely aware of everything that’s happening around you: oh my God, that horse is falling on me. Oh my God, I’m tied into this kayak and I’m turning upside down and I can’t get free and I can’t breathe. Oh my God, I’m in a stunt plane and I’m supposed to land and I can’t line up the runway. As you lose consciousness you first lose your peripheral vision, you get tunnel vision. You’re aware of what’s happening until the very last instant, until that last bit of being aware that you are no longer going to be aware. And then.

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.”

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.”