by Jayden Leggett, Editor

“Good evening everybody, I’m so glad you’re here. I’m glad to be in Melbourne. Somebody gave me a boomerang. I asked this old guy that I knew ‘How do you throw a boomerang?’ And he says ‘How do you throw a boomerang?’ and he picked up a boomerang. And he flicked it with a twist of his wrist, and it was beautiful. Then he sat back down. And he lit a cigarette, and took a swallow of his drink. And just then his dog came in with the boomerang, and he said ‘Good dog!’ Have you heard that before? It really happened! I’ve just told an Australian story that actually happened, an indigenous Australian story. It doesn’t belong in New Zealand, it doesn’t belong in California, it belongs in Australia. The secret of how you throw a boomerang is a good dog.

So I’m in Perth, and I have to be in Adelaide shortly afterward. I’m thinking ‘I could drive that road.’ I have crossed the United States, I’ve hitchhiked across the United States, I have motorcycled, I have driven a truck, I have driven a convertible, I have driven a car with two dogs, two children and a wife – that was the worst! I’ve driven a lot of cars, I have crossed a lot of miles on a road. The road from Perth to Adelaide was nothing! I was going to rent a car in Perth, and drive to the Adelaide airport, turn the car in, and then do what I had to. I had five days between Sunday night and Friday night. I could spend it in Australia any way I want, I was determined to make that drive.

They told me about the golf course. There’s a golf course! There’s a hole every five hundred miles. You get out of the car and you play your round of golf, then you get back in the car and you drive for another day. I don’t know who adds up the total, but it’s better than the US Open!

The other choice I had was going north of Perth, and snorkeling with whale sharks. Whale sharks come as large as sixty feet long. It’s a shark, but it doesn’t eat people, it eats little… things. It eats krill essentially, and my last name isn’t ‘Krill’ so I knew they weren’t going to eat me. And I did dive with some whale sharks in the sea of Cortez, which is between Mexico and the United States where the whale sharks travel thousands of miles and they either mate or eat there. Anyway I did dive there, sixty feet long. You’re not supposed to do this, so don’t tell anybody, but I was able to grab on to the top fin as it’s slithering along. When it passed me, it kind of rolled it’s eye and looked at me. Shark eye, you know that cold, loveless shark eye? I looked at it, and then I grabbed its fin, and it went along for a while, and then it slowly descended. And when the water filled up in my snorkel tube I knew it was time to let go. I wanted to repeat that extraordinary experience.

There’s a place north of Perth that does that. So I thought I could go there. Five days to see Australia and I had nothing to do. I had my wife with me, I had a great companion, I could do anything. But that road from Perth to Adelaide… My wife said ‘You know there’s this thing called Kangaroo Island.’ It’s like Australia was in time immemorial. So I had to please my wife, so just like ‘How do you throw a boomerang?’, ‘How do you see Australia?’ You go with your wife to a beautiful lodge and sit on the porch and look at Kangaroos. So that’s what I did when I was here at last from Perth to Adelaide. But I wanna go along that road, I don’t play golf, but there’s a golf course there that I would love to do. Anyway, how do you throw a boomerang? You get a good dog.

Do you think this stage is temporary?” [Stomps feet as the stage makes creaking sounds.] “It lacks a certain permanence.

So anyway, a question, and then I’ll ramble on and it probably won’t make any sense to me or to you.”

One of my favorite things about the Star Trek series and movies was the camaraderie and comedy that you and Deforest Kelley and Leonard Nimoy shared, and I was just wondering if that was worked on by the writers or if it was developed by the actors?

“Shooting the series, when we were shooting Star Trek we took seven days to shoot an episode. That would be five working days and then it would bleed over to the next week. So it was rushed a lot, we had to rush through ten pages of dialogue a day, and memorize tomorrow’s work, and it just went on, and there was no cease, in our twenty-two or twenty-four shows. Ron Perlman who is doing Sons of Anarchy was saying ‘Yeah we do thirteen shows, it’s a full season’ and I replied ‘Thirteen? We do twenty-six, that’s a season! Thirteen is half a season!’

To relieve the tension of learning all of that dialogue, you do stupid things. I used to try and walk in to that door. I knew that there was a stage hand, now I don’t want to destroy the mystery of Star Trek for you, but it was all pretend! People are saying ‘Oh no! – Yes! People made it up!’

So I knew that there was a stage hand who had to pull the door open. We would rehearse, and I’d come up to the door, and I knew that George (the stage hand) would pull this door open with a bar. If the scene went on a bit, George used to place his bottle (single malt) on a ledge, and as the day wore on, George, sitting there, opening the door and closing the door, would every so often take a nip. And then you could just notice that his eyes would close, and that’s when I would walk in to the door.

I’ve trained dogs, I have four Dobermans at home, and I had a lot of training to do. So you have to train all the time. Repetition, repetition, repetition. I had to train George by repetition! ‘I’m coming George!’ and the door would open. When I didn’t call George because the microphones weren’t picked up, and George had a nip or two late in the day, the chances of my walking in to the door were 50-50. ‘Captain’s leaving the bridge.’ ‘Oh George, please open the door’ and fifty percent of the time, SPLAT! I’d hit the door.

On Christmas, the editors on our show would put all of these pieces of the film together, and we would have one laugh after another as we played the fool. Mostly I played the fool. Mostly people make me play the fool. ‘Play jokes on Shatner as much as you can to relieve the tension’. Then the editor would put all that film together, and we made bloopers. Every Christmas the editors would gather all of the funny things we had done during the year, put them together, and they would play them for us at our Christmas party. The cast and the crew and people from the studio would come down and laugh and laugh. Then when we were cancelled, we had two years of bloopers.

Six years later after we were cancelled, after the show was over and I moved on to other things, a guy comes up to me in California and he says ‘Have you seen this funny film that’s at our local bar? It’s you as Captain Kirk.’ And I’m thinking ‘But that’s been cancelled for six years?’ So I go down to the bar and on the television in the bar they’re playing the bloopers, like a resurrection from the dead. And it was shortly after that when I began to get calls about doing more Star Trek, doing movies and stuff like that, but it all started with my perception that they were playing the bloopers.

We never planned anything, it was always just having fun on the set, trying to do ten pages a day.”

If you could redo Kirk’s death, how would you go about it?

“I think the best thing would have been ‘Oh, oh my…’ and then ‘…Fooled you!’ The truth of the matter is, I planned that whole thing, what would it be like to die, but what had really happened was I did what the producer wanted about dying, and then they shot the scene, and we all commiserated the death of Captain Kirk. Then I turned to the producer and I said ‘You know, I’ve got a book that I just wrote, where Kirk comes back to life. Kirk comes back, and he lives! In my book! The return! It would be a great movie!’ and the producer said ‘Oh really? Because we’ve killed you, so we can get The Next Generation to make more money. Because your films make eighty million to a hundred million dollars and it costs thirty million dollars to make, and we spend another thirty million in advertising, so the studio only makes thirty million dollars on your movies. Whereas we know that The Next Generation is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s why we killed you!’

So I never came back to life… but they never made more than a hundred million dollars anyway! That was the reason they killed the character, but why I went along so meekly with it, I don’t know. I’m a trained actor, so when the director says ‘Move seven feet to your left’ I go ‘Oh, OK.’ Actors are supposed to do what they’re told, that’s part of what is ingrained in us. Last night I had a long conversation with Ron Perlman about Marlon Brando, who never did what he was told. Between the two, I don’t know, I guess it’s better to do what you’re told, because time is money when making a film. But how neat it would be to do what Marlon Brando would have done and say ‘No, I’m not going to die’, and Rick Berman says ‘Well you’ve gotta die’ and I’d say ‘No, I’m not dying’.

What would have happened if we’re in the middle of the desert, we’re shooting a scene, Malcolm McDowell shoots me, and Patrick cuddles me ‘Jim, are you all right?’ and Marlon Brando would say ‘Yeah I feel fine’.

Patrick Stewart couldn’t do a convention with the other members of his cast because he was busy, so they asked me to come on stage at a convention to be the moderator between the six other cast members. I got into a conversation with LeVar Burton, there apparently was a segment of The Next Generation, one episode that was essentially racist, and when he read it as a black man, he didn’t want to do it. So I said ‘What do you do as an actor if you don’t want to do something? Like in this episode, you knew it was racist. Apparently the people who wrote it and the people who were responsible for putting it out didn’t really understand from your point of view that it was racist. Did you do anything about saying ‘Hey, I’m not going to say these words’.’ He said ‘No, I didn’t do anything, because I’m an actor, I just had to go along with it.

It’s an interesting question isn’t it? If you want the part and you want the money and you want the prestige of being in whatever it is you’re doing, and yet you’re doing something you don’t feel comfortable with, like being in a racist play, what do you do? So there’s no answer, it’s an individual choice, but an actor is saying somebody else’s words, it’s not his own words, so he’s removed from the negative thing that he’s doing. But still, people are listening to him say it. LeVar said ‘If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it. But I just went along’.”

Star Trek is obviously one of your most well-known performance, but I find your spoken word songs to be quite entertaining.

[Audience all laughs]. “Wait a minute, why did everybody laugh? ‘Spoken word,’ and then everybody laughed, only three people applauded, what the hell is that?”

How did you get in to the spoken word scene?

“What you need to know is that I did an album that I was very proud of called Has Been. You should get it. Borrow it from somebody if you don’t want to buy it. I wrote most of it with Ben Folds, who wrote the music, and it’s a work of art for me.

I’ve just finished a new album, which is called Ponder the Mystery. I did it with Billy Sherwood. He wrote the music, I wrote the lyrics. When the guy who was the head of the label said ‘We’d like you to do another record, what would you do?’ I waited a second to feel what it was that I would do, and I said ‘I’ll write lyrics about a period of time an hour before sunset. There’s a guy in despair on the beach, and then that hour goes by into sunset, into the twilight, into the darkness and the beauty of the night. Through seeing the beauty of this period of time, he comes back to some kind of joy. I’ll write songs with that in mind, but when you hear the record you won’t think about that, you’ll just hear thirteen songs.’ So that’s what I did. I wrote songs, between the period of an hour before sunset, into sunset (there’s a song called Sunset, Sounds of the Night, I’m a Little Bit Afraid, Where Does Time Go?) The sequence gave me the inspiration to write the songs.

Ponder the Mystery is a work that’s very close to my heart, I’m responsible for half of it, the word half. The melodic line that Billy Sherwood wrote takes my spoken word and he weaves melody (including song, the sound of singing voices) through it, so that he supports, like it’s never been before, my inability to sing but my love of good words. He supports it musically. We have a phenomenal record. It is like a newborn thing, because it only has reality when I bring it to you, the audience, and ask you what you think. So I am in this limbo where the record is finished and ready to be released, with some of the greatest musicians in the world as part of every song, and I’m about to deliver it to you, waiting for your approval or lack of. It’s a tremulous time for me as this record now starts to emerge. So look for it at the end of the summer, I think you’ll really enjoy it.

And by the way, I’m also writing a book which is called Hire Yourself. The one-line explanation for it is people who are over fifty-five who are out of work take longer to get a job because they look for more in a job, and the advice I’m suggesting is use your skills and hire yourself, and how to do that. Between this new book and this new album and a lot of other stuff that I’m doing, stay acquainted with my website because all kinds of fascinating things are happening.”

What did you think of the irony of the two womanizers (Alan and Denny) marrying each other at the end of Boston Legal?

“I think the two characters were very male-oriented, there was no sexuality implied, but what I thought David E. Kelley did brilliantly was, because we knew the show was going to be cancelled in its fifth year, he devised a way in which the two characters could live their lives after the show was over. My character urged James Spader’s character to marry him for tax purposes. It was brilliantly done and it was all a ‘bromance’ if you will. But David Kelley has a genius for doing that kind of thing.

One day I’m saying my lines and I’m talking to another character, and the line reads ‘Cue the music’, like there’s an orchestra somewhere around. So I said to the director ‘Well what do you think? Do I say it to camera? Or do I say it to the person I’m talking to? Do you have any ideas?’ and he says ‘No, I have no idea’. So I tried it a few ways, and I think I said it like I’m talking to the person, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. Along the last part where David got the idea to marry the two characters, somewhere there towards the end of the whole series, he has my character say ‘You know, I live my life like I’m in a television show’, and I thought ‘Of course, that’s what cue the music meant’. He’s living like he’s in a drama all the time, so when something interesting happens, like the woman says ‘I love you’ and he says ‘Cue the music’, something crazy like that. So now I understood what the line meant, but that was six months too late!”

What was it like filming your various documentaries about pop-culture fans and conventions?

“I have been making documentaries of late, I made a film called The Captains. It’s all about the Captains of Star Trek, and everybody who played them. I made a documentary and I flew to every place where the actors were, like Patrick was in England. I had to fly to England and I had to fly to New York, I had to fly to all these people and I had to get there by airplane. The airplane fare alone, let alone all the time and trouble of getting in and out of airports, I didn’t have the energy to do that. But I thought ‘There’s a Canadian airplane manufacturer, Bombardier, I gotta call them.’ I called them, who’s headquarters is in Montreal, which is my home town.

‘Is this the CEO? Hi Steve, I’m Bill Shatner. I’m making a documentary and I need an airplane. I need an airplane to get to England, to get to New York, I’ll need it for about a week’. Apparently the rental of this large private plane would have been about $250,000, which is about three times more than the whole documentary costs. He calls me back and says ‘You can have the plane’. I said ‘That’s incredible, how come?’ and he said ‘When I was a kid I watched Star Trek. When I went to university I became an aeronautical engineer because of Star Trek. As an aeronautical engineer for Bombardier, I became head of the company. I owe you, here’s the airplane’. Then I made The Captains.

Right now there is an additional documentary, we’re calling it The Captains Close-Up. Five half-hours of the five captains, see if you can get it because it’s out there right now. It’s an insight into each of those actors. Patrick Stewart said he had never spoken like that on camera before. I interviewed them all, even Chris Pine is in it. All because of Bombarier’s Steve Ridolfi.

So I got into this way of making documentaries, and I had a concept, the first one was called Get A Life, about coming to conventions. What the ‘F’ are you guys doing here? First of all I wrote a book called Get A Life, in which I thought I had done my due diligence and found all the people who had come to see Shatner. I thought you were all coming to see me! Then as I made the documentary, it evolved into this discovery that what we’re all doing here has a mythological basis. We’re here, partially, because of mythology, and I won’t go in to the lengthy explanation, but right now we are in a ritual of listening to a hero of the mythology talking about the future of what might be, and what could be, and what has to be.

Out of that, came a concept ‘Why not a series about who goes to conventions, not just sci-fi conventions, but all kinds of conventions. Who goes, why are they there, what are they doing?’ and I called it Fan Addicts. A convention of people involved with Xena. Twelve years after it’s been cancelled, Xena has a convention every year in Los Angeles, and thousands of people attend. I shot the Xena convention and shot the people who went there. I filmed them… you didn’t think I meant ‘shot’ them, did you? It was fascinating, the people twelve years later, the passion they had for each other, for Lucy Lawless, and her sidekick, and all the people who made that series, it was fascinating. Right now, there is a company who is running with the concept of Fan Addicts, we’re trying to sell it to a network, and Xena, presumably, will be one of those hours in which we ask ‘Who goes to this convention?’