Up Till Now: The Autobiography

the Caspian Sea, “Captain Kirk!”
    Star Trek was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. I look back upon it as the miracle that changed my life. In fact, it has changed your life, too. All the extraordinary opportunities I’ve been given since that time can be traced directly to that series. So if I hadn’t done Star Trek none of the things that followed would have happened, therefore you wouldn’t be reading this book. To fill the time you’re spending reading it, you would have had to find other things to do. And your life would be different.
    It continues to astonish me how many people know it so well. And know me. In 2001 I was producing and directing a low-budgetfilm named Groom Lake . We were shooting in the small town of Bisbee, Arizona, which is about twenty miles from the Mexican border and a popular crossing point for illegal immigrants. One night while I was working, my now-wife, Elizabeth Shatner, was invited by a border patrolman to ride along the border on horseback with him.
    It was a very unusual experience, she told me. So several nights later Liz and I went on patrol along the Mexican border. We began by driving deep into the Sonoran Desert until we reached a campfire where horses were waiting for us. Even though we were in the desert it was very cold and we were wearing heavy jackets and Western hats. There was no moon that night and we could barely see twenty feet in front of us. The agents gave us their night goggles; when we put them on everything appeared in a greenish tint. Then we rode into the night. The agents stayed on foot; we trailed about fifty yards behind them.
    In a sense this was like a sad game in which everyone was playing a role. The agents knew from experience where the Mexicans were going to try to cross the border. Suddenly the agents started running and our horses started galloping behind them. Within minutes the agents had rounded up about twenty-five Mexicans who had just crossed the border. By the time we got there the Mexicans were squatting on the ground, listening to the agent. “Look,” he told them. “You’re going back across the border. Don’t come back this way.”
    Liz and I were sitting up on our horses, bundled into jackets, hats on our heads, wearing these goggles that covered most of our faces. And suddenly, one of these illegal immigrants looked at me, first with curiosity, then with recognition, and said finally in a heavily accented English, “That is Captain Kirk?” Then he smiled and asked, “We have autograph?”
    Obviously I never dreamed that any of this would happen when I did the pilot. If I had I would have done it much sooner. Star Trek was created by an experienced television writer named Gene Rodden-berry. In his proposal to NBC he described his show as Wagon Train — a very successful Western series about the adventures of a wagon trainas it rolled west—to the stars. Initially Roddenberry wanted Lloyd Bridges to play the lead role of Captain Pike, and when Bridges turned him down the part went to Jeffrey Hunter, who was best known for playing Jesus Christ in the movie King of Kings . The pilot also starred an actor named Leonard Nimoy playing an alien named Mr. Spock. As Leonard remembers Roddenberry telling him, “I’ve got this alien and I want him to look kind of satanic.” Basically that consisted of a severely curved eyebrows and large pointed ears.
    NBC turned down the Star Trek pilot, complaining that there wasn’t enough action in it, that it was “too cerebral.” It required the audience to think too much. But the concept was so intriguing that the network agreed to pay for a second pilot. Apparently Hunter’s wife began making all kinds of demands on Roddenberry, who finally fired him. To replace him he needed an actor who was not too cerebral. So he offered the role to Jack Lord, who later starred in Hawaii Five-0 . Supposedly Jack Lord asked for 50 percent ownership of the show. That’s when Roddenberry called and asked me to look at the pilot with him. I guess he felt I was the perfect choice for the lead role in a show that wasn’t too intelligent for its audience and whom he didn’t have to pay a lot of money. And for me, all I had to do was replace Jesus Christ.
    The first pilot was a wonderful, magical story in which Jeffrey Hunter is lured to a planet by an alien species in hopes that he will mate with a deformed human female who had survived a crash landing there. To convince him to