Shatner Rules by William Shatner Read Free Book Online Page B

the price of being me is that many folks think I like to have “Beam me up, Scotty” yelled, screamed, and shouted at me.
    You know, I’ve been acting since 1937—I have done other work! Feel free to clip out this handy guide and keep it in your wallet for the next time you see me in person.

SUGGESTED THINGS TO SCREAM AT SHATNER BASED ON HIS WORK (OUTSIDE OF THE
STAR TREK
CANON)
    Â 
    â€œPut on a fake mustache, Agent Cable!”
    I played nineteenth-century government agent Jeff Cable in the short-lived 1975 ABC series
Barbary Coast
. The character wore many disguises. It makes sense!
    Â 
    â€œLet’s keep America free, brave, and white!”
    This is a super-obscure nod to a line I delivered as the racist hatemonger in Roger Corman’s
The Intruder
. Please make sure not to shout this one at me in a public place.
    Â 
    â€œWhere’s your naked Angie Dickinson?”
    Another nod to the Roger Corman universe, this time to the film
Big Bad Mama
. It’s okay to shout this one in a public place, but please make sure I am not with Mrs. Shatner or my grandkids.
    Â 
    â€œHey, Dad? Say some bleep!”
    Okay, this one is a little awkward. And frankly, I’m still smarting that the show got canceled.

Despite the facts at hand, people have just stuck with “Beam me up, Scotty,” and eventually I got used to having it shouted at me.
    Mockery is a tricky thing with me. Laughing
with
? Fine. Laughing
at
? Trouble. But the problem about laughing
with
is that sometimes you mistakenly join in the derision.
    I certainly understand that shouting “Beam me up, Scotty” to a total stranger is a way to connect . . . with a total stranger. I’m a total stranger who’s been barging into everyone’s living rooms for the past half century, so I guess some folks feel a kind of connection when they see me.
    I brought my car in to be repaired a few weeks back, and the mechanic said, “Must be weird that people come up to you assuming they know you.” He thought about it for a second and added, “You know, we
do
know you, because you’re in our lives daily.”
RULE: Even If You’re a Mechanic Who Wisely Hits upon a Core Issue Concerning My Existence and Place in the World While Working on My Car, I’m Still Going to Haggle with You about These So-Called Labor Charges
    I was always proud of my work on that low-budget, always-about-to-be-canceled science fiction show. I was proud of the fact that I was able to breathe some human life into a series that sometimes had little physical connection to the real world, all the while trying to remember nonsense words while talking into a cardboard prop. But at some point, as a defense mechanism, I just joined in on the big joke.
    In fact, I got
in
on the joke to protect myself
from
the joke.
    A few years back I appeared on a British talk show and was having a nice time, when suddenly the host said, “Take a look at this.” He then proceeded to show a clip from
T.J. Hooker,
an out-of-context clip. Taking something out of context is the stock and trade of the prankster, and my performance in this clip seemed a little . . . blustery.
    The audience laughed while the clip ran, not knowing anything about the reasons for Hooker’s bluster, or the choices I made as an actor while trying to convey the emotions. I could see what this host was trying to do. He was laughing
at
.
    When the lights came up, he was readying his quip, and I jumped in with, “My God, that was awful.” He had nowhere to go, the crowd laughed along with me, and we moved on.
    Did I think my performance was awful? No—the lines were a little overheated; the emotions were the kind that you found throughout television drama in the 1980s. Hooker was written as a walking raw nerve with a badge. He was played so accordingly.
    If I have been involved in some subpar projects over the years, I can assure you the