Up Till Now. The Autobiography

in absolutely perfect shape. In real life, though, I was actually in pretty poor shape. Marcy pointed out that I’d better start training. I began dieting, which meant basically eliminating food from my diet, and started jogging six or seven miles a day. Finally, when I got really desperate I went to a weight-loss center in the Malibu hills, a place that guaranteed you would lose twenty pounds in a week. There really is only one way you can lose that much weight that quickly, and generally it’s illegal under the Geneva Convention. For a week all I did was hike, drink water, and eat carrot sticks; hike, drink water, and eat more carrot sticks. They didn’t have single rooms in this place, and because I insisted on staying by myself they cleared out a storage closet for me. I put in a cot and slept there.
    I can just imagine what the other people who were there that week must have said when they got home: poor Bill Shatner was there and he must really be doing badly. He had to sleep in a closet.
    I lost twenty-five pounds that week. When I went home I was definitely in fighting shape—I could’ve killed somebody for a decent meal.
    The $15 million budget eventually swelled to $45 million, and almost half of that was spent on special effects. The problem was the plot. Nothing happened, and it took more than two hours for it notto happen. The studio had spent all that money on special effects and they wanted the audience to see them. And see them. And see them. Warp speed never went so slowly. Gene Roddenberry wanted the Enterprise to be the star of the movie. So the film was replete with tedious shots of the Enterprise flying through space. There goes the Enterprise. Here comes the Enterprise. Whoops, there it goes again. Meanwhile, we never had a complete script. Every morning we’d be handed new pages. The result was the plot was too complex and the film was too talky.
    I know Robert Wise was a wonderful director, just not for this film. He hadn’t been a fan of the series, so he never understood its appeal. He was a very nice person, a master technician, but he didn’t have a clue about Star Trek . What I admired most about him was that he never left the set. He sat in his director’s chair and he watched whatever was going on. If it took two days to set up the lighting for a scene, he was there every minute directing the lighting crew. When they were decorating the set, he was there to tell them where to hang the photographs. The only time he left was for lunch and an occasional bathroom break.
    Neither Leonard nor I could stand the picture. We were bound together by our mutual need to try to save this movie. It was just so ponderous, so serious. We had seen each other many times since the series had ended, but it was while making this film that we actually became friends. Good friends. We did everything we could to try to inject some humanity into it. Typically, in each episode after we’d destroyed the alien, we’d have a humorous wrap-up scene on the bridge. Our characters had an opportunity to play off each other. In the movie script I had a few lines thanking each member of the crew for coming out of retirement to save the universe. When we were rehearsing the scene Leonard ad-libbed a very clever line. I started by telling Dee Kelley, “I’ll have you back to Earth shortly.”
    To which Dee replied, “Oh, Captain, you know, I might as well stay.”
    Then I turned to Leonard, and told him, “Mr. Spock, I’ll take you back to Vulcan.”
    I don’t remember the line that was written for him, but he said, “Captain, if Dr. McCoy is to remain onboard, my presence here will be essential.” It was a great line, perfectly defining the relationship between Bones and Spock, and everyone laughed. But after the rehearsal Wise told us, “You know, the feeling is that the humor is inappropriate.”
    That was the problem with the script. It was just too absurdly serious.
    The night the film opened I snuck into a theater in Westwood. The moment the theme music started the entire audience started cheering. They were screaming—and the picture hadn’t even started yet. It was amazing. The audience had been waiting a long time for this film. Although it received generally poor reviews, it was a substantial commercial success.
    Honestly, I don’t remember precisely what I was thinking as I sat in that dark theater watching this movie. I might have been thinking about how incredibly fortunate I was to be at