Up Till Now: The Autobiography

to work you’re also turning down an experience, maybe even an adventure, and a universe of possibilities. The Transformed Man led to Priceline.com. Saying yes to possibilities has been the core of my career.
    Let me give you a perfect example. In addition to acting and producing and directing and writing and doing commercials and appearing at conventions I also worked quite often as a host or narrator of some kind of special. I had become ...the voice of authority! I hosted Heroes and Sidekicks, which celebrated motion-picture heroes . The Love Boat Fall Preview Party celebrated love on a boat. On The Search for Houdini famous magicians attempted to re-create some of Houdini’s most famous illusions—and in a live séance at the end of the show we tried to contact him. Obviously he was out that night, as he didn’t call back. I hosted the Dick Clark Bloopers Show, DonRickles’s bloopers show Foul-Ups, Bleeps & Blunders, An Evening at the Improv, The Best of Us Awards Show, TV’s Funniest Game Show Moments, The Horror Film Awards, MTV Movie Awards. I had gotten quite good at standing in front of a camera and reading lines with great sincerity. So when producer Arnold Shapiro called and asked me to host a series of three specials he was doing about people calling 911 for help, I immediately agreed.
    Arnold Shapiro and I had first worked together for a couple of days more than a decade earlier, when he’d produced the Science-Fiction Awards on which I’d performed the classic “Rocket Man.” A few years after that he’d produced a tribute to the Air Force on its fortieth anniversary called Top Flight —and had hired me to host it because I was known for piloting a rather impressive spacecraft.
    We also worked on Rescue 911 which had started with a terrible crime. Late on December 14, 1988, in Arlington, Texas, an eighteen-year-old thief armed with a knife broke into an apartment. There was some speculation that he was on drugs, but obviously he intended to rob the place. A man and his two children, a fourteen-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl, were asleep inside the apartment. The man woke up and confronted the thief, who attacked him with the knife. The kids woke up and the nine-year-old had the presence of mind to dial 911 for help. She started screaming into the phone, “This man’s attacking my dad! He’s got a knife!” Suddenly there was an explosion—the fourteen-year-old had grabbed his father’s shotgun and fired once, killing the thief. The entire 911 call was recorded; the girl screaming, the shotgun being fired, and finally the police arriving. Journalist Charles Osgood got hold of the chilling tape and ran it on his radio show, The Osgood File .
    The president of CBS’s Entertainment Division, Kim LeMasters, heard Osgood’s show while driving to work. He wondered if similar tapes existed, maybe even enough of them to fill an hour of television. Norman Powell, then the head of CBS Productions, hired Shapiro to produce two or three specials based on 911 calls. Documentary specials needed a celebrity host to do promotion and attractan audience. Kim LeMasters had a great idea for that host, suggesting, “What about Leonard Nimoy?”
    “And as soon as he said that,” Shapiro once told me, “I thought, no, what about Bill Shatner? He’d played T.J. Hooker, a police officer, and police officers participate in rescues. It worked for me.”
    Coincidently, ABC was developing almost the exact same show, to be hosted by Pernell Roberts. So we were in a great race to get on the air first. We beat them by two weeks and got a very good rating— they broadcast their show against 60 Minutes and got a very bad number. No one could rescue the ABC show.
    Star Trek changed lives, Rescue 911 saved them. We know we saved at least 350 lives, but the true figure may well be thousands. After both of our specials had won their time period CBS decided to turn the show into a full series. Now, please pause here with me for a moment as I savor a delectable situation. I want you to pretend you’re a CBS executive, sitting in your office, leaning back in your comfortable chair with your feet up on your desk and looking out the window, feeling very good about the amazing ratings these two specials received and confident about the prospects for the new series. What’s this? A knock on the door. An assistant walks into your office with a troubled look on his face. “Guess what?” he says reluctantly.