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    Ultra-Actors: William Shatner
    Ultra-Actors: William Shatner
    Ultra-Actors: William Shatner
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    Ultra-Actors: William Shatner

    By Bunny Ultramod

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    About this ebook

    We all know and love William Shatner now, but there was a time in the 60s, when his career was just getting started, and in the 70s, when he was experiencing a post-Star Trek slump, that he appeared in a series of surprising -- and often quite demented -- series of low-budget films and television films.

    "Ultra-Actors: William Shatner" takes a look at 21 of these films, almost everything he made from his first lead performance until "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" revitalized his career. Here's your chance to find out about such little-seen oddities as:

    Incubus: A horror film shot entirely in the invented language of Esperanto, and a cursed production that found many of its cast members dead in the few years after it was made.

    Impulse: In which Shatner plays a psychotic con man in Florida who ineptly stalks a little girl.

    Kingdom of the Spiders: It's William Shatner against tens of thousands of superintelligent tarantulas whose primary mode of attack seems to be to fall out of grates onto people.

    The Devil's Rain: Shatner is kidnapped by Satanists and has his eyes plucked out by them, and takes revenge by making them melt for what feels like the last half of the movie.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBunny Ultramod
    Release dateMay 20, 2011
    ISBN9781458034571
    Ultra-Actors: William Shatner
    Author

    Bunny Ultramod

    Bunny Ultramod, AKA Max Sparber, is an arts journalist and playwright from Minneapolis. He is also a member of the punk pop band The Ultramods.

    Read more from Bunny Ultramod

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      Book preview

      Ultra-Actors - Bunny Ultramod

      ULTRA-ACTORS: WILLIAM SHATNER

      By Bunny Ultramod

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2011 Bunny Ultramod

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      SERIES INTRODUCTION

      INTRODUCTION

      THE EXPLOSIVE GENERATION (1961)

      THE INTRUDER (1962)

      THE OUTRAGE (1964)

      ALEXANDER THE GREAT (1964)

      INCUBUS (1966)

      WHITE COMACHE (1968)

      SOLE SURVIVOR (1970)

      THE ANDERSONVILLE TRIAL (1970)

      THE PEOPLE (1972)

      GO ASK ALICE (1973)

      INCIDENT ON A DARK STREET (1973)

      THE HORROR At 37,000 FEET (1973)

      IMPULSE (1974)

      BIG BAD MAMA (1974)

      PRAY FOR THE WILDCATS (1974)

      THE TENTH LEVEL (1975)

      THE DEVIL'S RAIN (1975)

      MYSTERIES OF THE GODS (1976)

      KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977)

      CRASH (1978)

      DISASTER ON THE COASTLINER (1979)

      SERIES INTRODUCTION

      ACTING is not always a subtle art.

      There are actors that are saddled with reputations for overacting or for eccentricity that they bring to their performances. These actors are often disparaged — think of Sean Penn complaining that Nicolas Cage is no longer an actor ... He could be again, but now he's more like a ... performer.

      I can't disagree with Penn, but I don't believe that the distinction is important. Some films call for nuance. Some call for size. Cage is capable of both. It's hard to imagine a more careful, understated performance than the role that netted him an Academy Award: his drunken, suicidal lawyer in Leaving Las Vegas. But that sort of performance would have been out of place in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a film that is equally excellent, but mad and oversized, set in a post-Katrina New Orleans in which Cage plays a drug-addled, corrupt cop who is coming unglued.

      There is something about actors who are capable of this sort of bigness that leads to unusual resumes. They often find themselves the favorites of independent and genre filmmakers alike, probably because both styles of film often require a certain expressionistic sensibility. And perhaps there is something in these performers' personalities that cause them to be particularly attracted to films that share their eccentricity, where they can indulge themselves. Or perhaps they are just so hard to place in mainstream films that they are generally cast for their freak appeal — look at Crispin Glover's career for an example of this.

      Many otherwise reserved performers have it in them to be spectacularly weird when called on to do so, and we shall complete this series with a collection of some of the maddest performances from actors who are otherwise known for dignified performances. This will also give us a place to discuss actors who have somehow managed to contain their urge to chew scenery in mainstream films that are too tasteful to attract the attention of this series. (Unfortunately, this describes much of the career of Al Pacino, despite his truly unhinged performances in Scarface and Dick Tracy.) The focus of this series will be on actors whose entire careers seem to consist of providing the biggest performances they can in the oddest films imaginable. Some of these actors are big stars, but most are character actors — and often these are the people with the most interesting careers, as they navigate the peculiar back alleys of non-mainstream filmmaking.

      I don't agree with Gloria Swanson when, in Sunset Boulevard she declares that she's still big, it's the films that got small. Oh, she was big all right — it's one of the biggest performances ever put onscreen. But movies are still a big place too. Most of the films I will detail in this series are small-budgeted, but vaulting in ambition and theme, and huge in unabashed weirdness.

      There will always be a place for the overactor, if they don't mind getting a little dirty and making the sort of film that Sean Penn sneers at. It's a pity, too. In many of his early films, such as Taps and The Falcon and the Snowman, Penn showed real potential to be a grade-a ham. Instead, he chose to pursue the path of good taste, and what do we end up with? As great as his skills are, he's just another actor. He could have been a performer.

      INTRODUCTION

      It's hard to know precisely what people think of William Shatner. Many hold an undeniable affection for him, thanks, in no small part, to a succession of career-defining roles in three successful television series. There was Star Trek, of course, which found Shatner helming a starship as Captain Kirk, a young captain, still vital and ready to fight, but with a cocksure ease at command. And there was T.J. Hooker, a 1980s police drama in which Shatner played a 15-year veteran of the police force who goes back on the beat to hunt down the criminals who killed his partner. This show may be best remembered for a Saturday Night Live parody, which took Hooker's habit of leaping onto the hoods of escaping cars to ludicrous extremes, with Shatner riding on the hood of a car for hours, unsure what his next move should be, or how to get off.

      By this time, it was pretty clear that Shatner had developed an unusual sense of himself. He always had an odd sense of humor — you can find videos online of Leonard Nimoy describing pranks Shatner pulled on him — and starting in the 80s on, he easily slipped into deliberate self-parody. He played an incompetent, bewildered variation of Kirk in the second Airplane movie, and made a series of commercials in which he mocked — and celebrated — his much-parodied recordings of the 60s.

      And then came Denny Crane, his character from Boston Legal, which netted Shatner multiple Emmys and a Golden Globe. Crane was part parody, part eccentric, and, yet, somehow, wholly human. Shatner somehow managed to pull the neat trick of creating a role that commented on, and teased, public perceptions about him, but also remained a believable, and sometimes heartbreaking, character. So what do people think about Shatner now? Do they see him as a personality, the way Charo or Charles Nelson Reilley were seen? Is he seen as an aging eccentric? Is he taken seriously as an actor, or is he just offered a succession of showy comedic roles? Is he seen as being a ham, albeit an enjoyable one?

      We'll leave it to posterity to make up its mind about William Shatner. The purpose of these essays is an experiment, really. Prior to getting cast on Star Trek, Shatner appeared in a selection of fascinating but generally forgotten films and television movies, and then, after Trek, his career tanked, to a certain extent. He wound up taking bit roles on television shows, supporting roles in television movies, and lead roles in low-budget exploitation and genre films. Such is the life of an actor — when it's what you do for a living, you do what you have to.

      But you can either do it as a mater of routine, with barely a thought put into it, or you can take each role as a challenge. And Shatner is far too interesting an actor to do anything by rote. If you are going to understand his work as an award-winning actor — and one who has managed to craft a persona that can legitimately be

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