Up Till Now: The Autobiography

the jungles to get to the site. But when he finally reached it, there was nobody there. So he retraced his path and swam all the way back. “We know the MIAs are there, Bill,” he told me, adding that he’d written it all down.
    Wow. This is an unbelievable story, I thought. And as it turned out, I was right. I just didn’t know it at the time. Instead I told him, “Bo, I want to tell this story. It’s an important story.”
    He agreed with me, and told me he would be pleased if I told the story—as long as I paid him for it. I had a discretionary fund at Paramount that enabled me to buy the rights to stories I believed would make good movies. This was one of them. It had adventure and action and the most noble purpose imaginable—saving the lives of American POWs. We finally agreed on a $10,000 option. I gave him the check and asked for a copy of the manuscript. “I’ll get the manuscript to you next week,” he promised.
    Oh. The check was cashed and Gritz disappeared. I never saw or heard from him again. However, several months later the media descended on me. It turned out that Gritz apparently had used the money I’d paid him, as well as $30,000 Clint Eastwood had paid him for the same rights, to pay for a secret mission to Laos to try to rescueAmerican prisoners. It had been a total disaster: He’d been arrested almost immediately after sneaking into Laos, when the guerilla leader he was supposed to meet showed up drunk and unarmed. Somehow reporters became convinced Clint Eastwood and I were funding secret missions—although Clint was paying a lot more than I was.
    I never heard from Bo Gritz again. I was mortified by the entire situation. It certainly hadn’t been my intention to get involved in anything this controversial. I just wanted to tell a heroic story— which turned out to be untrue. It was an awful situation, so many families whose husbands and sons had disappeared in Vietnam were given hope by Bo Gritz. I had no idea what was true or fantasy and I didn’t want to raise the hopes of those families that the soldiers they loved were still alive somewhere. Eventually reporters pursued Clint Eastwood—did I mention he gave Gritz $30,000?— and left me alone. The last time I heard his name was in 1992, when he was running for president of the United States with the slogan “God, Guns, and Gritz.” And no, I did not contribute to his campaign.
    Like Star Trek, T.J. Hooker was a survivor. After four successful seasons on ABC and seventy-one episodes the show was canceled. At that time we still were getting a twenty-seven share, a number most shows running today never reach. Toward the end the producers did make a few minor changes. For example, they moved Hooker from Los Angeles to Chicago. They moved the entire show! And worse, they sent Hooker to Chicago without a winter coat. And rather than Adrian Zmed, they gave me a new partner, a black detective who dressed as a Rasta to go undercover. The concept was to exploit the then-popular 48 HRS. pairing of Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in which I did a reverse Beverly Hills Cop. Rather than Murphy’s Detroit detective in L.A., I was the L.A. cop in Chicago.
    In very cold Chicago. Beyond-cold Chicago. I am a Canadian, I have lived through Canadian winters. I’ve skiied in races at forty-below temperatures. Take your finger out of your glove, you lose yourfinger. But it was never as cold as it was while filming T.J. Hooker on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. You didn’t just see your breath; you could take it right out of the air and put it in your pocket until it thawed out. The whole time we were shooting there I lived in fear of the words, “Let’s try it one more time.”
    I mean, it was a completely different show, with a new cast. It would have been like moving the survivors of Lost to a resort on Fantasy Island . “Da plane! Da plane! Uh-oh, dere goes da plane!”
    Unfortunately, the seventy-one episodes we’d completed for NBC were not enough for the show to sell in syndication, so CBS bought the rights and scheduled it for late night. For that network I came back to Los Angeles and no one ever mentioned Chicago again. We did a stripped-down version of the show for CBS. Adrian had left the show, and we finished the series with a two-hour prime-time movie entitled Blood Sport or, as I refer to it, Hooker Goes Hawaiian .
    Apparently we’d cleaned up the streets of Los Angeles, because in this movie Hooker was sent to Hawaii to