Up Till Now: The Autobiography

though, I wanted to get some sense of how Leonard and I were going to work together. Leonard told me, “What’s good for you, Bill, is good for Star Trek . My intention is to make a damn good Star Trek movie, and to do that I need you to come off well.”
    Oh, I get it. Clearly we were on the same 120 script pages. But it turned out that everybody was somewhat concerned about how Leonard and I would get along. Early in production I had a scene in which I received the devastating news that my son had been killed by a Klingon raiding party. It was a tremendously emotional scene, and initially I didn’t quite know what I was going to do. To help me focus Leonard asked everyone not essential to the filming to leave the set. And as soon as they were gone I shouted at him, “I’m not going to do it your way.”
    “The hell you’re not,” he shouted right back at me. “You’re god-damn well going to do it the way I tell you. So go stand over thereand shut up. Come on, you’re just the actor and I am the director of this motion picture.”
    I suspect the phrase “just the actor” gave it away. Everybody started laughing at that remark—no actor is “just the actor”—and any lingering tension that existed on the production disappeared. Once again the picture did very well, extremely very well, so Paramount immediately began planning the fourth movie. Originally, this was the film that I was supposed to...
    Hold it, do you hear that? Shhhh, just listen. Hear it? No, you probably don’t, not unless you have tinnitus, which I do. And which Leonard also has. This was something else that both of us got from Star Trek. During one of the episodes Leonard and I were standing too close to a large explosion. It is the kind of thing that happens often on sets, most of the time with no problem. But afterward my ears started ringing, as did Leonard’s, and both of us years later developed a medical condition called tinnitus, a constant sound that you hear that never goes away. For some people it can be a ringing tone. For others, like me, it’s more like the hiss of a TV set that’s not tuned to any channel. Millions of people suffer from it; it can be caused by anything from an explosion, continued exposure to a loud sound—many World War II airmen and rock musicians have it, for example—it can be a reaction to a medicine or caused by one of many illnesses or it simply can be a function of age. Millions of people live with it without much problem, but for more than seven million people it’s debilitating. It makes it impossible to lead a normal life. There is no simple cure. And in extreme cases it can even lead to suicide. I developed one of those extreme cases.
    There are parts of the world in which tinnitus is said to be the voice of God. In remote parts of China it is considered a sign of great wisdom. In rural Turkey it is considered good luck. But not in the San Fernando Valley. There it’s considered a real problem. And it was driving me crazy.
    I had a loud sound in my ear and it would never go away. I consulted several doctors, I had all kinds of tests. I kept thinking, thishas got to stop, but it didn’t. I’ve gone through several different programs; the one that worked for me is called habitation. This is a machine that produces what is called white noise, a sound you can’t hear normally. For some reason if they can reproduce the sound you’re hearing in your head on this device the sound waves are canceled out. I remember the moment they reached my level: imagine being trapped in a mine and rescuers break through and you can see the sunlight! That’s what it felt like to me. I was given my life back. I wore a device similar to a hearing aid which continually piped white noise into both ears. After several months my brain got accustomed to the sound and I was able to wean myself off it.
    There are doctors who tell patients they can cure them with an operation. I suppose on occasion an operation can work, but generally it doesn’t. The majority of people eventually simply get accustomed to the sound and are no longer consciously aware of it—unless they think about it or some guy writes about it in his autobiography.
    I know how devastating it can be waiting to get used to it. It can take months. I’ve done volunteer work with the American Tinnitus Association, which does research and is a very good resource. At one point they gave me a list of potential contributors and asked me to call