Up Till Now: The Autobiography

“William Shatner!”
    The audience cheered. Literally cheered. I received a loud ovation. It was obvious the people in that room were genuinely happy for me. I was so moved because I’ve always felt like an outsider in this business. I’ve never felt like I belonged. This was a vote from my peers and it was so incredibly meaningful to me. As I walked onto the stage I had absolutely no concept of what I was going to say. I wanted to express my gratitude, I wanted to tell these beautiful people who hadso honored me how deeply I was indebted to them for their love and support. So I opened my mouth and said honestly, “What took you so long?”
    Denny Crane. Denny Crane!
    After the successful introduction of Denny Crane on The Practice, ABC bought David E. Kelley’s spin-off, Boston Legal . My reluctance to commit to the series had changed so drastically that rather than being reticent, I was very upset when I was offered a 7/13 contract, meaning they would only guarantee that I would appear in a minimum of seven of the first thirteen episodes rather than an all-shows-produced deal. That didn’t seem right. I was Denn...William Shatner. Emmy Award–winning William Shatner.
    Denny Crane is a brilliant, outrageous, unpredictable, funny, sexist—”A hundred women there and you didn’t invite me? That’s two hundred breasts and you kept them all to yourself”—courageous, occasionally looney character. Creating Denny Crane was a collaboration between the producers, the writers, and me. He is an extraordinarily complex character, capable of moving almost instantly from serious drama to the comedy of the absurd, without ever acknowledging to the audience which aspect of that is real. When he confides to Alan Shore, “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of...I think I have mad penis,” it has to be said with such honesty, such fear, that the audience will wonder how much he believes that and how much he is playing with Shore. Is he truly crazy, with moments of laserlike insight or is he absolutely brilliant, using absurdity to control his terrain? It took us several shows to clearly define the character as indefinable.
    Denny Crane was described as a man whose great financial success as a litigator is visible. He wears only expensive suits, he’s always perfectly dressed, smokes the best cigars, and drinks the best scotch—and knows the difference. Apparently in early meetings
    F. Lee Bailey’s name was mentioned. The sets were designed before the first script was written, which was somewhat unusual. Basically, it takes place in the plush offices of a respected Boston law firm, one of those places where the carpet is so thick the only sound you hearis the perfect-tone chime of an arriving elevator. In one show, for example, Denny Crane admits, “I’m so far up the ass of big business that I view the world as one great colon.”
    The most difficult aspect for Kelley was finding just the right balance between drama and humor in the scripts. So after we shot the pilot David E. Kelley decided it wasn’t substantial enough and rewrote it. He asked one of the producers, “What if we made it One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest set in a law firm?” The second version of the pilot was much funnier than the initial script. Then he wrote another version which was extremely serious and tended to minimize the relationship between Denny Crane and Alan Shore. The draft was, it was finally agreed, a very good episode of The Practice and would disappoint those people expecting it to be a truly new show. Then he rewrote it again and that was the version we finally shot.
    That balance between drama and comedy was extremely difficult to find and it took some poking around to get there. We struggled with it for several shows. As brilliantly as the shows were written, there was a lot about Denny Crane that wasn’t on the page. In one of our very first scenes, for example, Alan Shore asks Denny Crane, “What are you, homosexual?” The way it was written I didn’t respond. I had to say something. Why are you asking? Nice of you to care. So’s your old man. Anything, but I had to respond. Yet there was nothing written to indicate Denny Crane’s reaction. And I had to stop and think about it. How would this character react? He’s a tough guy, a former military officer, always calling people “soldier” and fixing their ties, and sexual harassment be damned—he’s never afraid to tell a woman how sexy she looks. And what he