Shatner Talks 'Showtime' Antics

William Shatner (James T. Kirk) recently spoke about the fun he had with Robert DeNiro and Eddy Murphy on his new movie 'Showtime.'

"The wonderful part of working with these actors was their complete freedom," Shatner wrote on his official web site. "We had many spontaneous moments while filming, and I got caught up in them. We ended up doing riffs when this happened, so many of the scenes I'm in we made up as we went along."

"One of the funniest moments came in a scene I was filming with Robert DeNiro (I guess I can call him "Bobby" now)," Shatner explained. "I was supposed to be showing him how to play a 'real' cop ala TJ Hooker. So the scene I was in involved dipping my pinkie in some pretend cocaine and sniffing it. The sense memory I used was ammonia, so the look I gave was like someone who was sniffing ammonia.

"I guess the eyebrow lift I did took him off guard, but Bobby cracked up and couldn't stop laughing. His back was towards the camera and he was facing me, and I had to keep a straight face. I found myself staring at this face I had seen in dozens of movies, cracking up because of something I had done."

'Showtime' opened in movie theatres last Friday, and did a respectable business at the box office.It opened in third place behind 'Ice Age' and 'Resident Evil,' with takings of $15.4 million in its first weekend. The movie is a spoof of buddy cop movies where two very different cops are forced to team up on a new reality based T.V. cop show. Besides Murphy and DeNiro, Rene Russo stars in the film. Shatner plays himself in the movie.

In order to promote 'Showtime, the actor made an appearance on the Late Night With Conan O'Brien show on Thursday. He appeared on stage wielding a video camera, filming the appearance for inclusion on WilliamShatner.com.

Shatner talked about a charity paint ball event he is organising. "Well, it's not celebrity necessarily," said Shatner, "We need 4,000 people, so there's only [room for] 3,500 celebrities and we need about 500 ordinary people."

"It's for charity, and its going to be like 4 thousand people, paint balling," he said, clearly excited by the event.

To read more from William Shatner, follow this link to WilliamShatner.com. His appearance on the Conan O'Brien Show can be downloaded as a 10.3MB zipped Real Media format from this page at Voyager's Delights.

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
 Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!