Up Till Now. The Autobiography

her other attributes I’d long admired. We had several scenes together. In a wonderfully dramatic moment, Candice looked up at me and stated so proudly, “I would much rather cancel the show than have my girls blown up.”
    To which I responded nobly, “Especially without their knowledge.” Supposedly some of the dialogue came from actual beauty-pageant contestants. It’s possible. For example, the script called for me to ask one beautiful young woman, “Please describe your idea of a perfect date.”
    She thought about this, then said, “That’s a tough one. I would say... April twenty-fifth, because it’s not too hot, not too cold, all you need is a light jacket.”
    For me, it was oddly disconcerting to be working for a femaleproducer. I like to think I’m one of the least sexist men in our universe, not that I ever actually think about it. Because if I did have to think about it, that would indicate I was sexist by nature but trying to make myself aware of it. But I don’t, so it can’t be. Honestly, I love women. I’d never knowingly worked for a female producer before, especially a producer who looked like Sandra Bullock. It was actually kind of scary for me, to be in a situation in which a woman had absolute power. Not that I’m sexist. And while Sandra Bullock was not the director, the director deferred to her. She was in complete charge of everything that happened on the set. I watched her working and thought, wow, that’s an interesting person I’d like to get to know better. We have become nice acquaintances, even if we’ve never had the opportunity to become friends. But I have extended to her something I value very much—an invitation to come to my house and join a large group of friends to watch Monday Night Football.
    And then we’ll just see who’s sexist!
    Miss Congeniality was the first of the several large-budget major-movie-star films in which I appeared—but that didn’t stop me from also appearing in considerably lower-budget films, particularly those that I thought would be fun. In Shoot or Be Shot, for example, I played the role of escaped mental patient Harvey Wilkes, who kidnaps an entire film crew in the desert and forces them to make the movie Shoot or Be Shot .
    Several years later I did another project about making a movie— and this was arguably the greatest practical joke ever played on an entire town. It really is difficult to accurately describe what was happening in my career during this period. But, for no specific reason that I could determine, I had become a bigger star than ever before. I was appearing in movies and on television, I was Priceline.com’s spokesperson, and I made many other commercials, I was writing books, creating and producing projects, even making my first new record album since 1968. I was having a great time doing it all. And almost daily people were approaching me with the most unusual and occasionally intriguing ideas.
    One afternoon I was in the lobby at MTV waiting to start a pitchmeeting. I had several good ideas I wanted to discuss with executives there. Two young men who had produced the successful reality show The Joe Schmo Show were also waiting there to pitch a project. With great enthusiasm they told me they had a concept for a wonderful show for which I would be perfect. Generally, when people have a project for which “Bill, I swear, this is perfect for you,” what they really mean is that they don’t have any money, Robin Williams’s agent has turned it down, and they would like to attach my name to it to get financing.
    But I always listen. You never know. Two days later they came to my office in Studio City and pitched their idea for the greatest practical joke in television history. It was a good old-fashioned hoax. I liked it, I liked it a lot. Remember, I’m the man who tried to convince my daughter Melanie that a giant pine tree had actually once been a bonsai. This was the idea: I would pretend to buy an economically depressed small town and proceed to try to save it by making all kinds of bizarre changes. The first thing I would do, for example, was change the name of the town to... Billville!
    My initial reaction was, that’s genius. And seconds later I pictured a poor single mother with her crippled child crying as she thanked me for saving the lives of everyone in the town by buying it.
    And I would be playing a joke on them all. Ha ha ha, end of career. That would be beyond cruel. But we continued