Up Till Now (36 page)

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 once 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.

Pulling off this massive joke required tremendous technical planning and on-the-scene improvisation. We had to somehow get a film crew into the town to shoot us shooting a movie, and make their presence believable. The story we finally came up with was that in addition to the film, we were shooting behind-the-scenes footage to be used on the DVD as bonus material, and our film crew was shooting that material. Our visible cast and crew, which consisted of about four actors, four or five technicians, and the promise that eventually Sean Connery was going to show up, plus our real technical crew, stayed in a motel about twenty minutes out of town. There was no script, just general situations and a lot of improvisation. We made it up as we went along, depending on the reactions of the real stars of our show—the citizens of Riverside. Our entire crew met early every morning to plan our day and then again at the end of the day to review our progress and discuss ideas for the following day.

This was going to be amazing! Hollywood meets Iowa! The city slickers meet the country bumpkins. We were going to have such fun with these people. They were going to believe that we were making this nutty movie entitled
Invasion Iowa
and we’d tape them doing unbelievably crazy things. We fooled a lot of people outside the town too; we hired publicity people to create a buzz about this film. The Associated Press ran a nice feature story, quoting me as describing it as “my baby,” a baby “I’ve been dreaming of making for more than thirty years.” Unfortunately, almost immediately we confronted a problem we hadn’t anticipated. The citizens of Riverside were just too damn nice. The day we got there a large crowd turned out to welcome us to Riverside, and as a spokesman said warmly, “First of all, welcome home.”

These people were so innocent. But perhaps the first wisp of a doubt that perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea to surprise these people occurred when the mayor told me earnestly, “I felt fine after the initial heart attack. Honestly, I felt fine.”

How do you set up people who welcome you to their town with homemade apple pie? How do you have laughs at the expense of people who invite you into their homes and offer you their trust? How do you lie to people who leave with the good wishes, “See you in church on Sunday.”

This simple concept very quickly became complex. I began to wonder, what have I done? Within a few days members of the crew were developing friendships with these people. It was impossible not to. I mean, how could I lie to a wonderfully sweet elderly man named Don Rath, who graciously shared with me one of his most prized possessions, his good-luck raccoon penis?

We had to modify our original idea. We realized that we had to make ourselves the fools and focus on their good-natured reaction to our stupidity.
Invasion Iowa
became a spoof of Hollywood pomposity— a send-up of all the over-the-top foibles and eccentricities people read about in their newspapers. And guess who was the most eccentric? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t my “spiritual advisor” who accompanied me on the set. We hired half a dozen townspeople to work with us on the film and they became our subjects. We were watching them as they watched us make ever bigger fools of ourselves. These were the people the audience really got to know. One of them was our cue-card woman. In one scene, for example, I discovered the aliens had followed me to Earth and I had to scream a great echoing, “Nooooooooooooo!” That was the entire scene, one word. So naturally we wrote it on three cue cards. And we carefully instructed our cue-card woman that the first cue card had to have exactly five O’s. Then she had to hold up the second cue card, which contained precisely four O’s. And the final card had three O’s.

And this wonderful woman really counted my O’s to make certain she got it right. Of course I couldn’t get it right, I kept getting the length of my “no” confused. You actually could read her expression:
These people are crazy, but they’re probably harmless so I’ll go along with them.

The film we supposedly were making, also called
Invasion Iowa,
was the quite confusing story of an alien who comes to Earth to find... well, it doesn’t matter. There was no plot. But it did have some very funny lines. For example, I arrived on Earth buck naked. After first pretending to be from Nebraska, I told the young woman from Riverside we’d cast as our ingénue, “I know this sounds crazy, but I come from the future.”

To which she responded, “I thought you came from Nebraska.” We also gave her the classic science-fiction line, “I would much rather carry your seed than seed that would destroy the Earth.”

Most of the real action for the TV show took place off the movie set as we put our cast and the townspeople in bizarre situations. For example, when our leading lady, Desi Lydic, went shopping at the local Kwik ‘n E-Z, for example, we whispered to the store owner that “Gryffyn,” the character she was playing on the show but not in the movie, was a kleptomaniac. We’ll pay for everything she takes, we said, but please don’t say anything about it. So this woman watched with growing incredulity as Desi went through the shop putting items like Remington gun oil and Travis Tritt’s Bar-be-cue in a Jar in her purse.

Then we decided Desi was going to solicit advice from a group of women about a children’s book she was writing. A small group of them gathered to hear her read from this manuscript. It was the story of a female penguin who was very unhappy because she had small “wings.” Her wings were so small, in fact, that her sweater just drooped in front. Naturally, as she read this story we had a cast member dressed as a penguin making absurd remarks. Fortunately, in Desi’s story, the penguin was able to get wing-enhancement surgery so her sweaters would be really tight and people would love her and she lived happily ever after. Ta-ta!

These women finally gathered the courage to suggest that her moral—plastic, surgically enhanced “wings” are the key to happiness— was probably not the best message to send to children. So Desi went
right back to work and a few days later read from her newly rewritten children’s book in which her penguin doesn’t care that her wings are small and meets another female penguin with small wings who becomes her friend and they move in together and live happily ever after.

Naturally I was at the center of most of the absurdity. Right from the beginning I practically insisted that rather than wearing hats, the townspeople should wear Shats, sort of like berets. One night, we had decided that I should entertain these people with my stand-up comedy act, which consisted of jokes like, “One of my favorite places in town is the Kwik ‘n E-Z. They named it after my first girlfriend. It’s a good thing they didn’t name it after my first wife, because then it would be the Fat ‘n Ugly!”

I think the proper way to describe their response is dumbfounded, completely and absolutely dumbfounded. Those were the jokes, folks. They didn’t get any better than that.

Part of our continuing story was my growingly acrimonious relationship with my large and often loud nephew, Tiny. Eventually, though, I revealed to one of the townspeople that Tiny wasn’t really my nephew—he was my son! And when I revealed it to... dumb-founded townspeople, Tiny looked at me lovingly and said, “Dad, I want to have a catch!” And we proceeded to take out the baseball gloves and have a catch.

The citizens of Riverside were so unbelievably accommodating. When my aides suggested they change the name of the town to... Did you really think I was going to let loose of this idea?... Bill-ville, they actually printed petitions and handed them out, then helped us make and hang a large sign reading, WELCOME TO BILL-VILLE. They also went along with our producer, who whispered to them just before the townspeople vs. cast and crew softball game, “Bill doesn’t like to make an out. So whatever you do, it’s very important that you let him get on base. Otherwise he’s going to be in a real bad mood for the rest of the day.” So they did—and amazingly I then successfully stole second base and third base and then I stole home! Yeah, Shatner!

And no matter what we did, our new Priceline.com spokesperson was always somewhere in the background, wearing his Priceline.com shirt and hat, and occasionally I would point to him and he would immediately do a promo for Priceline, “Go to Priceline to save a lot of money.” And when we thought Priceline had enough mentions, we made him the spokesperson for Brylcreem.

When one of my assistants explained I’d always wanted to ride on a fire truck and fight a fire, a member of the Riverside Fire Department actually set fire to an old car. We raced to the fire and they let me man the hose! However, they were a little reluctant to go along with my suggestion that we tell everybody that I’d saved the lives of two people by pulling them out of the front seat.

Just about the only thing we suggested that they absolutely refused to do was smash the hundred-year-old extremely valuable stained-glass windows in the church. In fact, when we made that suggestion they were... dumbfounded. And even after we told them it was absolutely necessary to break just one window, a small one, when the aliens showed up, they refused.