Up Till Now: The Autobiography

But Leslie Stevens decided to screen Incubus at the Venice Film Festival, hoping that would create a buzz about the film. In preparation for the festival Italian subtitles were added. When the film was finished I was invited to a screening. More than six months had passed since we’d shot the film, during which I’d done numerous projects, so I’d forgotten every word I’d learned in Esperanto, and I understood no Italian. So I sat there watching this film in which I’d starred, having not the slightest idea what it was about. I didn’t understand one word of the dialogue and I couldn’t read the Italian subtitles.
    Only one other time in my career was I involved in a situation even remotely similar. In the animated film Over the Hedge I played Ozzie the Opossum, whose primary survival technique is playing dead, but truly dramatically playing dead. Shatnerian playing dead. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of DreamWorks, sent the cast, including Bruce Willis and myself, to the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of the film. As we were walking up the red carpet, surroundedby photographers, we were introduced to the French actors who had played our characters in the French version. Wait a second, I wondered, we’re the stars of this film, right? I knew we were stars, our names were in big letters on the lobby cards and in the credits. But as this is an animated film our faces weren’t on the screen, and now our voices were being replaced by French actors. So we were the stars of a film in which we didn’t even appear. What were we doing there?
    Incubus finally premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival. It received a lot of attention and very little distribution. There is a famous French director and film critic, Henri Chapier, who loved this film and arranged for it to be shown in Paris. The French were quite enthusiastic about it, apparently because they didn’t understand a word of it. As it was explained to me, true French film connoisseurs find great meaning in those things they don’t understand.
    This was certainly the most unusual film in which I’ve ever been involved. After its release a terrible mistake made in a lab destroyed the negative and all of the prints. Many years later one print was found in the permanent collection of Cinémathèque Française in Paris and digitally remastered for video. I’m very pleased to be able to announce that the DVD is currently available at the online store at WilliamShatner.com for the remarkable price of only $9.95 plus shipping—that’s two dollars less than Amazon! And not only that, my friends, if you act now, and you spend more than fifty dollars (not including shipping) it would be my pleasure to include a free—that’s right, absolutely free—”Trelane: The Squire of Gothos” nine-inch action figure while supplies last.
    When they were preparing the DVD they asked me to provide a narrative about the making of the film. Doing so brought back many memories, including a few words of this language, which unfortunately after the original release of the film seems to have lost its cachet. But as I finished the voice-over and looked at the film, I do remember wondering, as we used to say, ewhat ethe ehell eare ewe edoing ein ethis emeshugana efilm/o?
    When I made this film I had been working regularly for almost fif-teen years and still didn’t have more than eighteen hundred bucks inthe bank. I did have three—count ‘em—absolutely beautiful daughters, a small house in Los Angeles, and a marriage that was not going very well. It was terribly frustrating, several of the young actors with whom I’d started in television were becoming major movie stars, fine actors like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, while I was still doing one-shots on TV series and making primarily low-budget movies.
    For a time I may have been the hardest-working actor on television. For example, on The Outlaws I played a man on the run for a murder I had not committed. In Robert Herridge Theatre I was a gunfighter hired to kill the honest sheriff in a one-horse town. I did several Thriller s; in one I became obsessed with the reflection of a woman in a mirror found in an old house, which caused me to accidentally kill my wife. In another one I was a desperate man trying to kill my rich aunt and her husband to inherit their fortune. On Alfred Hitchcock Presents I pushed my wife off a cliff instead of my mother-in-law. In “The Defenders” on Studio One , I accidentally