Up Till Now: The Autobiography

thought “Priceline” was the name of the company. Priceline-dot-com is the name of the company.
    Well, what does that mean, dot-com?
    It means Priceline is an Internet company.
    So why don’t we say that? Dot-com made no sense to me. But I did my job.
    The commercials were successful, but radio and newspaper advertising has limited impact, so Priceline.com decided to advertise on television. It turned out that the copywriter on the account, Ernest Lupinacci, was a big fan of my 1968 album The Transformed Man . The “cult classic,” as I like to refer to it. As he later told me, he’d also seen me on the Science-Fiction Movie Awards, and “the image was burned into my retina.” Ernest Lupinacci deserves a tremendous amount of credit—especially for admitting that in public. Using that album for inspiration, he wrote a series of moody TV commercials in which I appeared as a sort of sorry lounge singer, talk-singing the money-saving praises of Priceline.com—in my own inimitable style—to the melodies of well-known songs of the 1960s and ‘70s.
    Priceline.com offered me a large number of additional stock options to do the TV spots. Indeed, they were playing my song. I immediately suggested they double it, and they agreed. Two decades earlier people had ridiculed that album, suggesting that I sounded “in dire need of padded restraints,” but because I had taken the risk and done The Transformed Man I was finally able to truly appreciatethe meaning of the word “laughingstock.” Because that’s what I was being paid—laughing stock.
    The commercials actually were very good. In one of them, for example, I was very hip. “I wanted to chill but making all of my own travel arrangements was freaking me out, so I went to Priceline.com...You want some of this? You know what to do, dawg!”
    In another one I was Pete Townsend-raucous, at the end of the spot grabbing a guitar from a band member and smashing it, declaring defiantly, “If saving money is wrong, I don’t want to be right...”
    “When the moon is in the Seventh House . . .” began the Priceline.com version of “Age of Aquarius,” “. . . it’s a whole new age of consumer power. With Priceline.com millions of beautiful people have named their own price and saved a load of bread...”
    We did ten different spots. The reception was immediate and extraordinary. The objective was to bring attention to this new company, and it worked. Within a week I had been invited to appear on Good Morning America, CNN, Entertainment Tonight, Howard Stern, and several other shows to discuss the campaign. Jay Leno played two of the spots on the Tonight Show . Eventually the commercials were parodied on Saturday Night Live and even became an answer on Jeopardy . Slightly more than a year after they began running, Price-line.com was the second-most-recognized Internet company—behind only Amazon.com. More than half of all adults in the country had heard of it. The value of the stock eventually rose to $162. Wait, let me write it out, one hundred and sixty-two dollars per share. At that value Priceline.com was worth more than General Motors. The shares held by the owner of the company were worth approximately $12 billion. His ambition, he told me one night, was to build a university. Not endow a university, build it. On paper, and in my head, I was a rich man. No longer would I be Bill “I lost my life savings in uranium” Shatner; instead I had become Bill “the savvy dot-com millionaire” Shatner. Now who didn’t know how to made a great investment? I would never have to worry about having eighteen hundred dollars in the bank again. In fact, I wasn’t even certain thebank vault was large enough to hold all my money. I might have to buy a new bank!
    However, there was one problem, just one slight problem. According to some ridiculous Federal Trade Commission rules people who held a certain type of insider stock weren’t allowed to sell for an extended period of time. A lockup, it’s called. And every single one of my $162 shares was locked up. I couldn’t sell a single share. And as I watched helplessly, and with astonishment, the value of the stock fell to five dollars. Let me use the symbol, $5. Eventually it went down to pennies. Here’s how bad it got: the company had given me the use of a car—they asked for it back. As it turned out, the uranium deal had been a lot less painful. In that deal I was rich for only a few hours.
    Call me “Lost my