Up Till Now: The Autobiography

talking and eventually I suggested, “How about instead of buying a whole town, we fool a whole town!” And I knew exactly what town. The result was Invasion Iowa. We would bring a film crew into a small town on the pretext of making a movie, but in fact we would actually be doing a reality show, filming their reaction to a very bizarre Hollywood production. The whole production would be a hoax. It would be hysterical. What could possibly go wrong?
    Eventually Spike TV bought the concept. Then Priceline.com agreed to support it in return for some mention. Actually a lot of mention. I would co-produce and direct. It was actually a substantial financial risk for both companies—if one person found out that the whole production was a practical joke and exposed it, the showwould fall apart and their investment would be lost. In fact, when we pitched the show we didn’t reveal to anyone that we intended to shoot in Riverside, Iowa, population 928, which for several years had promoted itself as “The future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.” A plaque claiming that Kirk was “conceived at this point” used to hang under the pool table at Murphy’s Bar and tourists could buy “Kirk Dirt” from the site of his birth for ten dollars.
    Pulling off this massive joke required tremendous technical planning and on-the-scene improvisation. We had to somehow get a film crew into the town to shoot us shooting a movie, and make their presence believable. The story we finally came up with was that in addition to the film, we were shooting behind-the-scenes footage to be used on the DVD as bonus material, and our film crew was shooting that material. Our visible cast and crew, which consisted of about four actors, four or five technicians, and the promise that eventually Sean Connery was going to show up, plus our real technical crew, stayed in a motel about twenty minutes out of town. There was no script, just general situations and a lot of improvisation. We made it up as we went along, depending on the reactions of the real stars of our show—the citizens of Riverside. Our entire crew met early every morning to plan our day and then again at the end of the day to review our progress and discuss ideas for the following day.
    This was going to be amazing! Hollywood meets Iowa! The city slickers meet the country bumpkins. We were going to have such fun with these people. They were going to believe that we were making this nutty movie entitled Invasion Iowa and we’d tape them doing unbelievably crazy things. We fooled a lot of people outside the town too; we hired publicity people to create a buzz about this film. The Associated Press ran a nice feature story, quoting me as describing it as “my baby,” a baby “I’ve been dreaming of making for more than thirty years.” Unfortunately, almost immediately we confronted a problem we hadn’t anticipated. The citizens of Riverside were just too damn nice. The day we got there a large crowd turned out to welcome us to Riverside, and as a spokesman said warmly, “First of all, welcome home.”
    These people were so innocent. But perhaps the first wisp of a doubt that perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea to surprise these people occurred when the mayor told me earnestly, “I felt fine after the initial heart attack. Honestly, I felt fine.”
    How do you set up people who welcome you to their town with homemade apple pie? How do you have laughs at the expense of people who invite you into their homes and offer you their trust? How do you lie to people who leave with the good wishes, “See you in church on Sunday.”
    This simple concept very quickly became complex. I began to wonder, what have I done? Within a few days members of the crew were developing friendships with these people. It was impossible not to. I mean, how could I lie to a wonderfully sweet elderly man named Don Rath, who graciously shared with me one of his most prized possessions, his good-luck raccoon penis?
    We had to modify our original idea. We realized that we had to make ourselves the fools and focus on their good-natured reaction to our stupidity. Invasion Iowa became a spoof of Hollywood pomposity— a send-up of all the over-the-top foibles and eccentricities people read about in their newspapers. And guess who was the most eccentric? Here’s a hint: it wasn’t my “spiritual advisor” who accompanied me on the set. We hired half a dozen townspeople to work with us on the film and they