Up Till Now: The Autobiography

in one of the first nationwide broadcasts on PBS, The Night of the Auk . This was a play that had flopped on Broadway several years earlier, starring, naturally, Chris Plummer and Claude Rains. It took place on a spaceship returning to Earth from the first successful manned landing on the moon. I played the wealthy young man who had financed the entire expedition. This was my first voyage on a television spaceship and it established one of the enduring truths of drama: if Shatner is aboard a spaceship, it is guaranteed that something is going to go wrong. In this story it’s atomic war on Earth and a lack of oxygen in the ship. There are five passengers, but only enough oxygen left to enable two of them to survive long enough to get back to Earth in time to die in the war. I don’t want to ruin the ending for you, so let us just say I don’t die in the atomic war.
    I’ve never had great fortune planning my career. That is a luxury enjoyed by very few actors. Insecurity is part of the job description. I would describe my career plan pretty much as answering the telephone. My problem was that I never had anyone I felt comfortable soliciting advice from; no one whom I trusted to direct my career. So I made my own decisions based almost entirely on my gut feeling. Acting is one of the few professions in which you feel good about turning down work. Later in my career, after my three children were born, I found myself accepting jobs only for the money and feeling bad about it—and conversely feeling very good when I felt secure enough to turn down a job I knew I shouldn’t accept. I’ve subscribed to the notion that work makes more work—the more producers and directors see you work the more chance there is they will offer you more work. There were many times in my career that I’d taken roles I shouldn’t have in terms of creating a long-term career—but it was a paying job and hanging over me always was my father’s plea that I not become a hanger-on.
    When do you accept a role, you never, ever have any concept of what the end result will be. Did I know when John Lithgow offeredme the prestigious role of the Big Giant Head on his sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun that I would be nominated for my first Emmy Award? Did it occur to me that people might recognize the subtle skills it took to properly convey the emotional life of Head? What I knew was that I was going to show up and say all my lines and they would pay me. That’s acting.
    Sometimes, though, it is about the role. About the opportunity to use the talent I had been given to make an important statement. Obviously actors have to survive, but occasionally you do get offered a role that you just savor, that you really want to do.
    The great C-movie producer-director Roger Corman offered me such a role. Seriously. That Roger Corman, who was already becoming well-known for films like Attack of the Crab Monsters, Creature from the Haunted Sea , and Little Shop of Horrors, cheap, get-em-made exploitation horror, T&A, and shoot-em-ups with low budgets and lower production values. But for some reason he wanted to do this film. By this time he had made seventeen films, all of them profitable, but every studio he approached with this script turned him down. Apparently making this film meant so much to him that he and his brother Gene mortgaged their homes to pay for it. Now, it’s possible I made that up, but I remember Roger and Gene did something very courageous to raise the money they needed to make this movie. Roger had seen me in Tamburlaine the Great and sent me the script. As soon as I read it I knew I wanted to play this role. This film changed my life.
    The movie was called The Intruder. It was from a novel by a very respected writer named Charles Beaumont. The Intruder took place in the Deep South just after the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ordered schools to integrate. It was based on the true story of a white supremacist from New York, a neo-Nazi who traveled throughout the South organizing Ku Klux Klan–type citizen groups and fomenting riots. This was easily the most despicable character I’d ever played. But it was a wonderfully written portrait of the worst kind of bigot. I had grown up in Canada, I didn’t know this kind of institutionalized racism existed in the United States. I was stunned when I found out it was all true.
    We shot it in black-and-white in three weeks, and the entire budget was about eighty thousand dollars; that was