Up Till Now: The Autobiography

“Somehow we neglected to sign Shatner to a deal for a series.”
    The actor wins! The actor wins! Remember how ABC did not renegotiate my contract when T.J. Hooker was changed from an ensemble to the show in which I worked in almost every scene? Now it was my turn. This was one of the very few times in my career that I had the advantage over the producer—and we milked that advantage. As producer Arnold Shapiro describes it, “Needless to say the deal that we made was very favorable to him. In fact, to that time there probably never had been another deal like that in television.”
    Rescue 911 was on the air for seven and a half years. What set this show apart from the reality shows currently on the air was that our stories were real. We didn’t create reality. We made approximately 185 episodes. At one time it was on the air on CBS every Tuesday night—as well as in sixty countries. For almost three years we wereone of television’s top twelve shows. It was a series dedicated to the men and women who saved the lives of strangers, often at the risk of their own lives, ranging from emergency medical technicians to good samaritans. Each episode was an hour long, consisting of between three and five pretty amazing stories. We used existing footage and when necessary our own re-creations, and whenever possible when we did re-creations we used the actual people involved in the event. As host, I introduced the show—”True stories of dark despair and unexpected heroes on... Rescue 911 ”—and each segment—”On October 3, 1985, Michigan state trooper David Ayer was only an hour away from the end of his shift. But on this day David would not be able to serve out his time uneventfully. Instead he was forced to watch as a freak accident on a road outside Northville, Michigan, changed the lives it touched...forever.” “Children’s curiosity can drive them to the heights of achievement. But it can also push them beyond the boundaries of what is safe, as Rene Durschell discovered on June 23rd, 1995, at her home in Boynton Beach, Florida.”—and then I did the closing. We actually filmed my stand-ups on Sundays. Every other Sunday we’d set up at an EMT center—in Glendale, Manhattan Beach, everywhere—and shoot several shows. I did a lot of walking and talking with police cars, fire trucks, or ambulances in the background, depending on the type of story we were telling. With the number of different takes we did and the time it took to set up, we were there most of the day. And pretty much every Friday I’d be in a Hollywood sound studio doing voice-over narration. That was my job, show up and read my lines every Friday and every other Sunday. It took a full-time staff of about seventy-five people to do the show, yet somehow the audience perceived Rescue 911 to be my show.
    We told an extraordinary range of amazing stories on the show. An Idaho hunter mistakes a couple for a bear and shoots them. A police officer leaps onto runaway boxcars that are pushing an automobile down the tracks. Children lost in the mountains. Divers trapped underwater. A toddler falls into a hole. A teen touches a hot power line with a pool pole. People shot and stabbed by intruders. A truck’s brakes fail and he plummets forty feet into a swamp. A youngboy trapped under ice for forty-five minutes. A plane whose landing gear won’t deploy. A unconscious skydiver. A seven-year-old girl helps deliver her mother’s baby. A ten-year-old boy performs the Heimlich maneuver to save his choking brother. A duck gets its head stuck in the plastic rings from a six-pack of soda. A good samaritan dives into a river to try to save two women trapped in a submerged car. A woman is trapped in her smoke-filled home when her TV set explodes. A pregnant deer is hit by a car. A woman has to drop eight babies from the window of her burning apartment. Explosions, fires, floods, shootings, stabbings, runaway cars and trucks and trains, falls and accidents with tools, and heart attacks and difficult births—and almost always, nobody died. Perhaps most amazing was that almost all of the stories we told had a hap . . . satisfactory ending. Only when we told a cautionary tale did people die—the teenager who inhaled cleaning fluid to get high and couldn’t be saved. People who took absurd risks. A litany of dangerous acts that we wanted to warn our viewers not to do. In truth, a high percentage of the calls answered by these medical technicians do end