Up Till Now (27 page)

We probably had the highest body count on the network; at least one person got shot in every episode. People were constantly leaping between buildings and often falling off rooftops. On one show I put on a fireman’s coat and raced into a burning building to save two kids; on another episode I grabbed onto the strut of a small plane taking off and held on as I became airborne.

I did many of my own stunts. I became extremely proficient with the SB24 side-handle nightstick. In fact, after watching me use it during one scene a crew member said, “Oh, now I understand why they refer to it as a billy club.” Okay, maybe they didn’t and I made that up. But it certainly could have happened. In more than thirty
years my career had progressed from a sword to a stick. Actually, the movements were surprisingly similar. Both weapons were used to block blows, to attack, to fend off, and to bring down the enemy. A police instructor worked with me to get it right. I could twirl that stick and oww! Those memories hurt. Obviously I had to learn how to use it and as every officer knows you bang yourself up pretty good learning the correct way to use it.

In doing the show I gained tremendous admiration for police officers. In most cases it’s a difficult and thankless job. It is the thin blue line that keeps civilization from falling apart. That’s why a bad cop is such a detriment not only to the police force, but to democracy. People working in law enforcement really liked this show. At times they would try to explain to me what the job was all about, what it meant to them, how tough it was. For whatever reason, they felt they could open up to me, that I would understand. Maybe they just wanted to make certain we got it right. But I’ve had several experienced police officers admit to me that on occasion they would see something going down and they would just get out of the way. They would drive off to avoid being involved, often because they didn’t want to go after people breaking certain laws with which they didn’t agree. One officer in particular told me about the dilemma he faced in breaking up drug deals. Was it worth risking his own life to save a drug dealer? They wanted me to truly appreciate the problems they faced every day on the streets.

I saw it myself very late one Friday night as I was being driven home from a downtown L.A. location. We were about to turn when I looked out my window and saw two men and a cop facing off. All three of them were in a crouch, the cop’s hand near his gun. A cop and two bad guys, right out of a movie. Just frozen like that in my memory forever. The car turned the corner and I was out of there, never to discover what it was about or how it ended. But that scene so accurately described the job of a policeman for me.

Only once did I get to touch the reality of the job. I was wearing a uniform—obviously for me it was a costume—and crossing the street when a jeep that was stopped at a light got slammed from behind.
The jeep suffered no damage, while the car that hit it had a crumpled hood. Both drivers jumped out of their cars. I saw what was about to happen and at best we were going to have a California traffic jam. I don’t know what made me do it, but I decided to intervene. I...

. . .
Star Trek
handkerchiefs, towels, address books, cameras, welcome mats, picnic items including paper plates and cups, telephone calling cards, handheld electronic games, stereo headphones, laser disks, sunglasses, school supplies, flight log books, certificates, medallions . . .

. . . saw that the jeep had no damage so I forcefully told the driver, “There’s been no damage to you. Get back in your car and move along. Go ahead.” And he listened to me. I’m certain he didn’t recognize me. I told the other driver, “It was your fault. You got a little damage. Come on, move your car, you’re blocking traffic.” He, too, got back in his car and did as I ordered. And just for an instant I’d felt the power of the uniform. It was an oddly educational experience.

Cops really liked me. It has always been fascinating to me how people assume an actor has the same philosophical beliefs as the character he or she is playing, and Hooker was no different. Many people assumed that in my private life I was the same reactionary person I portrayed. Throughout my career I’ve always tried to keep my philosophical and political beliefs to myself, partly because as a Canadian citizen I’ve felt like a guest in America and, being polite, I didn’t feel it was my place to advocate loudly for my own beliefs. But I don’t speak Esperanto, I’ve never conquered Mesopotamia, I’ve never beamed up, and I’m not Thomas Jefferson Hooker. That didn’t stop police officers from believing that I felt like many of them did. Which led to an unusual situation.

A small group of cops visited the set one day and asked if I had ever heard of Bo Gritz. I hadn’t. Bo Gritz, it turned out, was widely known as a Vietnam veteran who believed the North Vietnamese continued to hold American POWs and had dedicated his life to finding them and rescuing them. He’d been there and come back.
I read quite a bit about him and realized it was an amazing story. “I’d love to meet him,” I told these officers.

About a week later I met Bo Gritz. The greatest American hero of the Vietnam War. He told me, “The only way I survived was to choose the path of death. Everybody else wanted to live. The people who wanted to live did things that got them killed. I said it doesn’t matter if I live or die, if this is where I die, this is where I die. I choose. I’m a warrior.”

Wow. He told me an elaborate story about putting together a Delta Force raiding party, swimming across the Mekong River, and crawling undetected into Vietnam.

Wow. Surveillance photographs had shown long shadows and short shadows in what was believed to be a prisoner-of-war camp. The short shadows would have been Asian—and the long shadows could have been American prisoners. He moved swiftly and with great daring through the jungles to get to the site. But when he finally reached it, there was nobody there. So he retraced his path and swam all the way back. “We know the MIAs are there, Bill,” he told me, adding that he’d written it all down.

Wow. This is an unbelievable story, I thought. And as it turned out, I was right. I just didn’t know it at the time. Instead I told him, “Bo, I want to tell this story. It’s an important story.”

He agreed with me, and told me he would be pleased if I told the story—as long as I paid him for it. I had a discretionary fund at Paramount that enabled me to buy the rights to stories I believed would make good movies. This was one of them. It had adventure and action and the most noble purpose imaginable—saving the lives of American POWs. We finally agreed on a $10,000 option. I gave him the check and asked for a copy of the manuscript. “I’ll get the manuscript to you next week,” he promised.

Oh. The check was cashed and Gritz disappeared. I never saw or heard from him again. However, several months later the media descended on me. It turned out that Gritz apparently had used the money I’d paid him, as well as $30,000 Clint Eastwood had paid him for the same rights, to pay for a secret mission to Laos to try to rescue
American prisoners. It had been a total disaster: He’d been arrested almost immediately after sneaking into Laos, when the guerilla leader he was supposed to meet showed up drunk and unarmed. Somehow reporters became convinced Clint Eastwood and I were funding secret missions—although Clint was paying a lot more than I was.

I never heard from Bo Gritz again. I was mortified by the entire situation. It certainly hadn’t been my intention to get involved in anything this controversial. I just wanted to tell a heroic story— which turned out to be untrue. It was an awful situation, so many families whose husbands and sons had disappeared in Vietnam were given hope by Bo Gritz. I had no idea what was true or fantasy and I didn’t want to raise the hopes of those families that the soldiers they loved were still alive somewhere. Eventually reporters pursued Clint Eastwood—did I mention he gave Gritz $30,000?— and left me alone. The last time I heard his name was in 1992, when he was running for president of the United States with the slogan “God, Guns, and Gritz.” And no, I did not contribute to his campaign.

Like
Star Trek, T.J. Hooker
was a survivor. After four successful seasons on ABC and seventy-one episodes the show was canceled. At that time we still were getting a twenty-seven share, a number most shows running today never reach. Toward the end the producers did make a few minor changes. For example, they moved
Hooker
from Los Angeles to Chicago. They moved the entire show! And worse, they sent Hooker to Chicago without a winter coat. And rather than Adrian Zmed, they gave me a new partner, a black detective who dressed as a Rasta to go undercover. The concept was to exploit the then-popular
48 HRS.
pairing of Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in which I did a reverse
Beverly Hills Cop.
Rather than Murphy’s Detroit detective in L.A., I was the L.A. cop in Chicago.

In very cold Chicago. Beyond-cold Chicago. I am a Canadian, I have lived through Canadian winters. I’ve skiied in races at forty-below temperatures. Take your finger out of your glove, you lose your
finger. But it was never as cold as it was while filming
T.J. Hooker
on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. You didn’t just see your breath; you could take it right out of the air and put it in your pocket until it thawed out. The whole time we were shooting there I lived in fear of the words, “Let’s try it one more time.”

I mean, it was a completely different show, with a new cast. It would have been like moving the survivors of
Lost
to a resort on
Fantasy Island
. “Da plane! Da plane! Uh-oh, dere goes da plane!”

Unfortunately, the seventy-one episodes we’d completed for NBC were not enough for the show to sell in syndication, so CBS bought the rights and scheduled it for late night. For that network I came back to Los Angeles and no one ever mentioned Chicago again. We did a stripped-down version of the show for CBS. Adrian had left the show, and we finished the series with a two-hour prime-time movie entitled
Blood Sport
or, as I refer to it,
Hooker Goes Hawaiian
.

Apparently we’d cleaned up the streets of Los Angeles, because in this movie Hooker was sent to Hawaii to protect the life of an old college friend who had become a United States senator. In Hawaii, according to
The New York Times,
Hooker “runs into hanky-panky, hocus-pocus, the hula-hula and a hint of hari-kari.” When I found myself lying on the edge of a cliff being hit over the head by a sword-wielding stuntman, blood pouring down my face, I knew that either Hooker or I was done. We did end up with ninety episodes, enabling the show to go into syndication, where it eventually disappeared.

Actually, I didn’t have to get hit over the head with that sword to know that I wanted to direct—that realization had come much earlier. I’d worked with literally hundreds of directors in my career, including some of the greatest directors in the history of early television, but for me the best directors were those people who left me alone. I would always approach a role with my own thoughts and my own plan about how I wanted to create a character. Obviously they would stage the scene and tell me where to move, and if it made sense I’d move there. But too often in television young directors want to be
artistes
, they get an opportunity to direct an episode of
T.J. Hooker
and want to use it to build a career. So they try to reinvent the show, talking about subtext and motivation, creative lighting. Here was the motivation on
Hooker
: we had seven days to shoot an hour show within our budget.

It’s the job of the actors who work there every week to protect the integrity of the program. Because I cared about the quality of the show I tested every new director. And if they didn’t know what they were doing I would complain about it. That was my job. We had a young director one week who had drawn elaborate sketches of how he wanted the action to flow. He literally had planned the entire show beat to beat. This was the show that was going to earn him an Emmy, which would lead to an opportunity to direct a major motion picture. So I looked at his sketch and asked, “Just tell me one thing, why do you want to begin this scene with me walking out of the storage closet?”

Obviously the desire of the director to create art and the intention of the actor to get it done can lead to conflict on the set. Some directors believe the worst question an actor can ask is “Why?” Why do I move there? Why I do react like that? “Because I’m the director and that’s what I want you to do” is not the correct answer.

There was little mystery to directing for me. I could say, “I want this camera right over there,” or “Let’s backlight this,” or “You come running across the parking lot and leap onto the hood of the car and grab hold of the wipers and hold on,” so obviously I had the necessary technical knowledge. And the producers of
T.J. Hooker
gave me that opportunity.

I had already completed one arduous directing assignment— I’d directed my wife, Marcy, in a production of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. My friends, if you can successfully direct your wife in a highly dramatic role, you certainly can direct a TV show. Eventually I directed eight episodes of
Hooker
, as well as the opening-credit sequence that we used for most of the series, and Leonard Nimoy directed one. That was the price he demanded to appear in an episode. That, plus money.

Two years after the series ended I was directing my first major motion picture, the $30 million
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
. Gene Roddenberry and Paramount executives had seen the episodes of
Hooker
that I’d directed and were so impressed by my ability to articulate an atmosphere within the confines of the capabilities of modern filmology that they realized I was the perfect choice—actually the only choice—to direct the fifth and most intellectually challenging film in the
Star Trek
saga.

And if you believe that you also believe I saw an alien in the desert. That is not exactly the way it happened. In the original TV series I was signed to be the star, and Leonard was a co-star. I was paid a higher salary. But eventually Leonard’s Spock became so popular that we were both given a Favored Nations clause, meaning whatever I got he got, and whatever he got, I got. If I got a raise, he got the same raise; if he got a cold, I got it. At the time I didn’t think it was totally fair, but I accepted the reality of the business. And then, as we were making the third film in this series of very successful movies, Leonard decided he would act in it only if he were allowed to direct it. The concept of a
Star Trek
film without Spock was as ridiculous as a
Star Trek
film without Captain Kirk. Who would want to see that?