Up Till Now: The Autobiography

Goulart.
    An acting career is extraordinarily difficult to sustain over a long period of time. In most professions the experience people gain enables them to become even more productive as they get older. Actors just get older. The audience slots actors into certain types determined by the roles that first brought them success, from leading man in action films to a character actor in serious dramas. But as they grow older and change physically they also have to change type. Nobody wanted to see John Wayne gather a posse to save the Old Actor’s Home. But often the audience won’t accept them in that new type. There is a word used to describe that: unemployment. So as I started getting older and began wondering how much longer my acting career would survive—let’s be honest, I could only survive as a heroic, handsome leading man for three or four decades—I started focusing on the off-camera areas of the movie and television business, including directing, producing, and more writing than I’d done in the past.
    All of which explains how I got into professional wrestling.
    TekWar was one of the first projects I developed. While I was directing Star Trek V the Teamsters Union went on strike, forcing us to shut down production for three months. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I get nervous when I don’t have something scheduled in the next half hour, so just imagine what I felt like facing three completely unscheduled months. There’s nothing more frightening to an actor than a future with nothing scheduled. So I began working on a novel: T.J. Hooker meets The Fugitive in the Star Trek future. I started by giving my character a past. He’s in the cooler, but the cooler is actually a deep-freeze in space. He had to have an objective, so he was wrongly convicted of a crime and his wife and child left him to be with the man who gave false evidence against him.
    I’d been living in the world of science fiction for more than two decades, and this was my first opportunity to create something entirely new. There were bits and pieces I’d been thinking about for years, with brand-new ideas tossed into the future. TekWar was set in the twenty-second century.
    My main character, Jake Cardigan, was released from his cryogenic state when the wealthy owner of a private detective agency needed his help. Cardigan became a private detective, not only pursuing the enemies of the future, but also intent on proving his innocence by finding his wife and child and the people who framed him. The most fun about writing science fiction is that anything is possible. You want to cure a disease: “The diseases of the twentieth century had been wiped out.” There, it’s done, there is no disease in your environment. Snow in Los Angeles? “An artificial snow was falling across Greater Los Angeles, part of the seasonal special effects.” The universe is your imagination.
    In my universe ex-cop Jake Cardigan had been convicted of murdering his partners while under the influence of an extraordinary drug, Tek. At night I often leave the television on as I fall into sleep, and in that state there is a diffusion between reality and whatever is on television. Tek had a similar effect; for the user it made fantasies seem real while reality seemed like a dream state. Tek users lived intheir fantasies and would do almost anything to stay in that pleasurable state and, most dangerously, when the drug wore off, return to it.
    So that was the basis of my stories, the adventures of a hardboiled private detective two hundred years in the future. The novels were very successful and created a lot of interest in the property. But I discovered that I’d made a mistake setting these stories so far in the future. I didn’t realize how expensive the future was going to be. Futuristic sets and props and costumes made it too expensive for TV. Fortunately, Marvel Comics approached me to turn TekWar into a comic-book series. We sold them the rights—but insisted that they set the stories only fifty years in the future. Marvel changed the name to Tek World and eventually published twenty-four Epic Comics.
    By setting the stories only fifty years in the future we could use existing buildings as our backgrounds. Suddenly several companies who wanted to buy the rights. Universal in particular had watched Paramount make a fortune with Star Trek and wanted to own part of the future. So eventually I made a deal with them for a series of movies to be