William Shatner’s acting career had come a long way in the nearly ten years since his graduation from McGill and Joseph Shatner’s worries about his son’s career path. He was firmly entrenched in the television industry in both the United States and Canada as a highly sought-after actor. While most of his television roles were airing on American networks, he hadn’t forsaken the CBC. He returned to Toronto several times a year to star in television productions including Julius Caesar (as Mark Antony) and The Well, appearing alongside Corinne Conley and future Star Trek castmate James Doohan.
Nineteen sixty-one was a milestone year for Shatner. He turned thirty in March and, in April, signed on to costar with Julie Harris and Walter Matthau for his Broadway return in A Shot in the Dark, Harry Kurnitz’s adaptation of Marcel Achard’s farcical stage comedy L’Idiote. The show was scheduled to open in October at the Booth Theatre on West Forty-Fifth Street. That spring, he was involved in an automobile accident, a two-car collision while driving on Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles, and was “shaken up.” According to newspaper reports, the accident occurred when, trying to make a left turn onto Oxnard Street, he collided with a car driven by a Sherman Oaks realtor. “Neither driver was given hospital treatment,” a local newspaper reported.1
In June, Gloria gave birth to their second child, daughter Lisabeth, who joined big sister Leslie in the growing Shatner family. Bill kept himself in good physical shape and was fit and trim; his hairline, receding since his mid-twenties, was camouflaged with a succession of artfully placed hairpieces.
Nineteen sixty-one was also the year in which Bill returned to movie-making on both ends of the production spectrum—snaring a starring role in the low-budget Roger Corman drama The Intruder and a supporting part in Judgment at Nuremberg, a splashy big-budget Hollywood feature with an all-star cast.
Filmmaker Roger Corman, five years older than Shatner, was carving out a niche for himself with his no-frills approach to producing and directing starting in 1954 with The Monster From the Ocean Floor, which he produced for $12,000. By the time he became interested in The Intruder, Corman had an impressive track record for filming on the cheap yet always turning a profit, partly by hiring little-known actors (who would eventually become big stars)—including Charles Bronson and Jack Nicholson, who starred in Machine Gun Kelly and Cry Baby Killer, respectively, both produced by Corman and released in 1958. He was said to have shot Little Shop of Horrors (Nicholson had a cameo as a masochistic dental patient) in two days and one night.
“I had developed the script for The Intruder from Chuck Beaumont’s novel about this racist demigod who comes to a small town where they’re about to integrate the local high school,” Corman said. “I didn’t have a great deal of money, so I knew I was going to have to go with an unknown, and somebody had told me about Bill, who was new to Hollywood but had built a very good reputation in New York on Broadway.”2 Corman reportedly considered Tony Randall, among others, for the lead role of Adam Cramer “when [he] thought [he] was going to have a bigger budget.” He was partnering on The Intruder with his younger brother and frequent collaborator, Gene. “But I never even made an offer to [Randall or the others] when I realized that my brother and I had to finance the film ourselves—that the usual companies we worked with, which financed our films, wouldn’t finance this one,” he said.3 Bill recalled that he was paid the “Corman salary” for his starring role (read: not very much). “He thought he was getting me for a good price,” he said. “He didn’t realize . . . I’d have paid him to play this role.”4
Charles Beaumont, a prolific writer, had penned nearly twenty episodes of The Twilight Zone and wrote The Queen of Outer Space, a campy science fiction movie. The Intruder, Beaumont’s second novel, published in 1959, told the tale of a charismatic, smooth-talking white supremacist named Adam Cramer, who arrives in the small Southern town of Caxton just after the Supreme Court has ordered an end to school integration.
Corman figured he could shoot the movie on location in Southeast Missouri, mostly in the town of Sikeston, in three and a half weeks and for under $100,000. (Some reports cite the movie’s budget as $80,000.) “I brought only, I think, four actors from Hollywood and [for the rest] I got local people because I thought they would have the right accents and look and act Southern, which they did,” Corman said. “Bill was going to have to come in completely prepared because there was not a great deal of time on the set for rehearsals and so forth, so most of Bill’s preparation was done before the picture. He understood what he was doing and came in very well prepared and actually helped the local actors, taking them to the side, talking with them.” Frank Maxwell, Beverly Lunsford, Jeanne Cooper, Robert Emhardt, and Leo Gordon joined Shatner in the cast; Beaumont, fellow Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson, and author William F. Nolan appeared in smaller roles (Beaumont most prominently as the town’s high school’s principal). For the part of Joey—the black high school student (wrongfully) accused of raping a white classmate—Corman chose local resident Charles Barnes, a nineteen-year-old high school honors student who went on to study engineering at the University of Missouri.5
It was a difficult shoot that stretched over July and August under the hot Missouri sun; Corman said the production was “run out of a couple of towns” by local authorities who didn’t care for its subject matter. There were death threats against Corman, the actors and the crew. Corman settled on Sikeston, located in the “boot heel” of Missouri between Kentucky and Tennessee, to shoot most of the movie. “Everything looks Southern,” he said. “It was the perfect location. I was under the laws and protection of a Midwestern state, even though it’s this little area in the South. Everything worked out according to plan—except the ‘protection’ of a Midwestern state was essentially zero.”
Bill and the film’s cast and crew stayed in a motel just outside of Sikeston; upon their arrival, a local policeman arrived to brief them on their “escape route,” since the town had learned what The Intruder was about—and the townspeople were not happy. Shatner claimed later, in a likely apocryphal tale, that the town’s only integrated group was a prison gang whose sole job was to kill everyone involved with the movie.6
The Intruder opens with Adam Cramer stepping off the bus in Caxton in his shiny white suit and tie (which he wears throughout the movie). Before too long, the smiling, charismatic hatemonger is flirting with the teenage daughter (Lunsford) of the town’s fair-minded newspaper publisher (Maxwell) and sleeping with Vi (Cooper), the sultry wife of Sam (Gordon), his traveling-salesman neighbor. Cramer, “a charlatan who earns money out of the terrible business of fomenting hate,”7 has one purpose: to rile up the townspeople of Caxton in the days leading up to the local high school’s integration. He claims to be a member of the Patrick Henry Society; when asked about his line of work, he answers “social reform.”
In a pivotal scene early in the movie, Cramer whips the mob into a frenzy with an impassioned speech on the courthouse steps—a hate-filled rant against the NAACP, “headed by a Jew who hates America!” Bill came down with a case of laryngitis two days before filming the scene and, the day before his big speech, spoke to no one for twenty-four hours in order to protect his voice. Corman needed reaction shots from the crowd for the rally scene; trying to save Bill’s raw vocal chords, he fooled the extras who turned up for the scene by getting them to cheer with talk of their hometown St. Louis Cardinals—and inciting their anger by mentioning the hated University of Alabama football team. While Bill gesticulated histrionically (and mutely) to the crowd, Corman shot him from behind. It wasn’t until around midnight, when most of the crowd had gone home, that Bill delivered his lines for the camera.
“He came through with a raspy quality in his voice [that] actually helped the sequence and he was able to say what he did not say in the long shots,” Corman noted.8 A local newspaper publisher told Shatner and Corman the next day that many of the extras in the crowd scene had witnessed a lynching in a nearby tree; waiting for them to leave before Cramer spewed his incendiary lines was a smart move, he told them.9
The Intruder was a daring film for its time; the Civil Rights Act had been passed four year earlier, in 1957, but was largely unenforced in the South, and the year before, four young African American college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, refused to move from a Woolworth’s lunch counter without being served. Segregation was a way of life; tensions in the region were high.
In The Intruder, Adam Cramer whips those tensions into hysteria—a black church is bombed, killing its minister; Caxton’s pro-integration newspaper publisher, Tom McDaniel (Maxwell), survives a brutal attack but loses an eye and breaks several ribs; and Joey—who’s falsely accused of rape by McDaniel’s confused daughter, Ella (Lunsford)—is chained to a schoolyard swing and nearly lynched by the mob. Corman ran into trouble shooting that scene, which closes the movie. Recounting the trouble, he said:
I remember one day, toward the end of filming, Adam puts Joey on a swing outside a school. I was supposed to shoot two days for that sequence, and when we shot the first day, everything was fine. We came back the second day, and the chief of police and a couple of cars met us at the city limits. He said, “If you come into the city, you’re all going to be arrested. Just turn around and go home.”
My brother, who was producing, took him aside and started talking nonsense so that I could keep shooting. So, we turned around and went back to Sikeston; I remembered there were some swings in a public park there. The only problem was the height of the swings, which were different in each place and I had to allow for that. Each time I showed something that showed the height of the swings, I would cut away to somebody in the crowd. Nobody has ever noticed that they were different heights.
* * *
Bill’s second movie of 1961, filmed earlier that year in Berlin and Hollywood, promised another kind of oppressive, tense atmosphere—but also the promise of a handsome payoff: a career boost for the young actor.
For Judgment at Nuremberg, veteran producer/director Stanley Kramer had assembled an all-star cast featuring Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Maximillian Schell, and Richard Widmark. Kramer would direct the movie, a fictionalized, melodramatic take on the Nuremberg trials, which brought Nazi officials high and low to justice between 1945 and 1949 under a four-country Allied military tribunal (the United States, Britain, France, and Russia). Bill was hired by Kramer for a small role after flying to Los Angeles and meeting with the director.
Judgment at Nuremberg, written by Abby Mann, focused on the trial of four Nazi-era judges. Tracy played American Chief Trial Judge Dan Haywood, overseeing the Nazi judges’ trial; Lancaster and Werner Klemperer played defendants Ernst Janning and Emil Hahn, while Schell took the role of German defense counsel Hans Rolfe. (Klemperer and Schell reprised their roles from the 1959 Playhouse 90 episode “Judgment at Nuremberg,” which aired on CBS.)
Bill had acted in several television productions written by Mann, who might have helped land him his Judgment at Nuremberg role as West Point graduate and US Army Captain Harrison “Harry” Byers, Dan Haywood’s clerk/liaison. (Martin Milner, who was starring with George Maharis on CBS’s Route 66, played the role in the Playhouse 90 production.) Bill’s role wasn’t very big but gave him the chance to share screen time with the great Spencer Tracy, who was considered by many to be the finest actor of his generation.
Tracy, then sixty-one and a lifelong alcoholic, was suffering from kidney problems during the shoot and was nearing the end of the line. (He died six years later.) But he still commanded the screen and would garner an Oscar nomination for his performance as Dan Haywood in Judgment at Nuremberg. If the film’s large cast was unaware of or unschooled in the extent of the Nazi-era atrocities when they signed on to the project, that was soon rectified: Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann required everyone to watch the movies filmed by Allied soldiers liberating concentration camps in Germany and Poland and throughout Eastern Europe. The horrific images, which had yet to be seen by the general public, were projected on two screens set up on either side of a stage.10 Bill remembered the “absolute silence” once the images began to flicker on the screens,11 followed by the occasional gasp and audible sobbing. “A lot of the cast and crew were Jewish, so this picture had an even deeper impact on us,” he said. “Every day I went to work feeling like I was doing something important.”12
In the movie’s most gripping scene, Judge Haywood delivers a rousing eleven-minute summation of his verdict—a scene the great Spencer Tracy did in one take, astonishing everyone on the Judgment at Nuremberg set, including Bill Shatner. (His Harry Byers announces to the courtroom that Judge Haywood has made his decision.) “He was so intimidating to me that . . . trying to ingratiate myself I said to him, ‘Oh, Mr. Tracy, that was really wonderful. I didn’t know film actors memorized things like that.’ And he never spoke to me after that. He went back into his dressing room and never talked to me again.”13
* * *
“If the show is good it all won’t mean a thing,” Harry Kurnitz said of A Shot in the Dark, his adaptation of Marcel Achard’s comedy L’Idiote. The show marked Bill’s return to Broadway; it had been though several titular iterations (The Naked Truth, The Maid’s Room) on its journey from Paris to New York City before producer Leland Heyward made the final decision. He rounded out the cast of A Shot in the Dark with Julie Harris, Donald Cook, Gene Saks, and Louise Troy.
Bill was looking forward to his return to the New York stage following a busy winter and summer shooting Judgment at Nuremberg and The Intruder. In September, A Shot in the Dark kicked off its pre-Broadway, out-of-town tour at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, under the watchful eye of veteran stage director Harold Clurman. Bill was convinced, from the very start of rehearsals, that the venerable Clurman, a cofounder of New York’s Group Theatre and the second husband of venerated actress/acting teacher Stella Adler, was gunning for him. He was convinced, for reasons unknown to him, that Clurman never wanted him in the play—and that he was out to make the actor’s life as difficult as possible. “He seemed to get a perverse joy out of insulting me,” Bill said, noting that Clurman questioned his every stage move, mannerism, and even his acting ability.14 It was an inauspicious start.
The out-of-town run was further darkened by the sudden death of sixty-year-old star and Broadway veteran Donald Cook, who suffered a heart attack and died in New Haven in early October. Clurman suggested Walter Matthau as a possible replacement, and an urgent call went out to the actor, who was twenty years younger than Cook, to see if he was interested. Matthau, who’d turned forty-one the day Cook died, had appeared in a few movies (most notably opposite Andy Griffith in 1957’s A Face in the Crowd); his Broadway resume boasted roles in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Guys and Dolls, and a 1959 Tony Award-nominated turn in Once More, with Feeling! He was interested. Cook died on a Sunday; his understudy, Joel Thomas, replaced him when A Shot in the Dark opened the next day in Philadelphia. Matthau went to see the show, signed a contract, and rehearsed for two days before appearing onstage with his new costars that Friday. The role was a turning point for Matthau, earning him a Tony Award the following April and launching his Oscar-winning career.15
Julie Harris, who was already a Broadway veteran at age thirty-six, with two Tony Awards under her belt (for I Am a Camera in 1952 and The Lark in 1956), took center stage in A Shot in the Dark as its protagonist, Josefa Lantenay, a vibrant, impulsive, lusty chambermaid (she rarely wears underwear) who’s discovered—naked, unconscious, and with a gun by her side—with the body of her murdered Spanish lover, Miguel. Josefa admits to killing Miguel, though her story continues to change, and we learn that she’s protecting her secret lover—eventually revealed as her boss, wealthy French banker Benjamin Beaurevers (Matthau). Examining Magistrate Paul Sevigne (Shatner), who’s handling his first big case since being promoted to Paris from a small town, is charged with putting all the pieces together. He’s eager to please both his bosses and his status-hungry wife, Antoinette (Diane van der Vlis). As events unwind, he discovers that Beaurevers’s jealous wife, Dominique (Louise Troy), is the real killer—thinking that she’d shot and killed her husband, and not Miguel.16
A Shot in the Dark opened at the Booth Theatre on October 18, 1961, to middling reviews. The New York Times wrote that Paul Sevigne was “played attractively by William Shatner” and noted the show’s “fresh lines” but claimed they were “intermittent.”17 Bill’s hometown newspaper, the Montreal Star, raved about its favorite son and his new stage venture: “It is a neatly contrived crime mystery, enlivened by comedy that is full of surprises, situations and dialogue whetted to razor sharpness . . . Prominent in the cast is William Shatner, product of McGill University and the Canadian Stratford Festival, who performs admirably as a young investigating magistrate.”18
Despite its lukewarm reviews, A Shot in the Dark proved to be a bona fide Broadway success, playing to packed houses as the calendar turned to 1962. But if Bill hoped that A Shot in the Dark would be his big break, he was sorely disappointed. He was pleasant enough in the role and was always mentioned in reviews, but his costars, Walter Matthau and Julie Harris, received the lion’s share of critical attention as A Shot in the Dark finally completed its journey in September 1962 after a run of 389 performances. “Fourteen months was enough,” he said tersely. He might have felt differently had he even been considered for the play’s big-screen Hollywood adaptation, which opened in 1964. The movie, directed by Blake Edwards, who cowrote the script with William Peter Blatty (future author of the 1971 novel The Exorcist), removed Paul Sevigne from the plot completely, replacing him with clueless Sûreté Inspector Jacques Clouseau—Peter Sellers’s breakout character from The Pink Panther. A Shot in the Dark launched Sellers (and Clouseau) into cinematic history.
Bill, who turned thirty-one in March, was growing frustrated with the arc of his career. While he was working steadily in television, the movies, and now on Broadway, the big break was eluding him. What else could he possibly do? “I know I’m a good actor. But I’m not a star and I’m no longer a supporting player,” he said knowingly at the time. “For me the big leap forward never came. I keep plugging away and hoping for the best.”19
Judgment at Nuremberg opened in theaters in December 1961 to critical acclaim; Bill’s supporting performance as Harrison Byers was largely overlooked and rarely mentioned in reviews of the film—which was understandable, given the movie’s megawatt stars (Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster et al.) It was almost as if he’d never even appeared in the movie.
The reviews for his starring role as Adam Cramer in The Intruder, which also opened for an early release in December, were mostly positive—when anyone bothered to pay attention to the low-budget Roger Corman flick. Despite its incendiary subject matter, the movie made little lasting impact despite several bold critical assertions. “William Shatner masterfully plays the bigot,” Variety noted in its brief review. The New York Herald Tribune called it “a major credit to the entire motion picture industry,” while the Los Angeles Times lauded The Intruder as “the boldest, most realistic depiction of racial injustice ever shown in American films.”20
Part of the problem with The Intruder’s release was that Corman was having trouble finding a distributor for the movie. “It was totally about the subject matter,” he said. “They told me, ‘This film won’t make any money.’ And they were right. It got wonderful reviews. Bill got brilliant reviews.”21 The New York Times, which finally got around to reviewing The Intruder in May 1962, thought the movie’s “highly explosive material is handled crudely and a bit too clumsily for either conviction or comfort” but praised Bill’s performance as “unctuous and deceitful in a provokingly superficial way.”22 His costar, William F. Nolan, said: “[Shatner’s] performance as Adam Cramer was one of the outstanding acting performances of the year. If the movie had been a mainline movie distributed by a mainline company, I think Shatner certainly would have at least been nominated for an Academy Award. He certainly deserved it. I don’t think to this day he’s done as well [in the movies] as he did in The Intruder.”23
* * *
At this point in his career, Bill Shatner could look back at the “what ifs” and wonder if he had let too many good opportunities slip through his fingers. While he was preparing for A Shot in the Dark on Broadway, both The Defenders and Dr. Kildare premiered in September 1961 on CBS and NBC, respectively, launching memorable runs with stars Robert Reed and Richard Chamberlain. Was Bill kicking himself for passing up both television roles to chase a dream of movie and theatrical stardom that was growing more distant with each project? He claimed not to care whether he worked in movies, television, or the theater—as long as he was working. “There is crass commercialism in all three media,” he told columnist Dusty Vineberg in his hometown Montreal Star. “There are still some idealists in all media. Acting’s all the same. You take a deep breath and say the words and that’s acting.”24 He did admit to dream movie roles—a drama directed by Elia Kazan, a musical scored by Richard Rogers. Those hopes, at this point, were receding into the rearview mirror of his career.
He was still a marketable, in-demand television actor, and now he turned his attention to the small screen, more out of necessity than obligation. The live television productions in New York on which he’d thrived from the mid-’50s to the early ’60s were scarcer now as the industry migrated toward filmed and videotaped productions and moved west to Los Angeles. Bill had plenty of work, including appearances on popular television shows such as The Dick Powell Theatre, 77 Sunset Strip, Route 66, and Burke’s Law—and on lesser-known series. He costarred on Lamp Unto My Feet, an ecumenical religious series that aired Sunday mornings on CBS. Bill made several Lamp appearances, including a two-part episode, “The Cape,” about parents coping with a mentally challenged child. It aired in September 1962 with costar Jerry Stiller.
The work was steady, but it still wasn’t enough to instill confidence in him vis-à-vis his ability to support his growing family. “I had kids, a wife and a dog and $1,800 seemed to be the glass ceiling for me,” he said of his per-episode fee at the time. “I could get well below that, but I could never get above it and I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to get more than $1,8000 ahead here,’ so art and commerce were vying with each other even at that moment.”25
In the midst of shuttling back and forth between television studios, Bill was hired by producer Selig Seligman to star in Alexander the Great, a weekly series created by Robert Pirosh, whose resume boasted cowriting credits on two Marx Brothers movies (A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races) and a 1949 Oscar for writing the screenplay for the World War II movie Battleground. Pirosh envisioned Alexander the Great as a retelling of the historic Battle of Issus in 333 BC, in which the Macedonian army, led by Alexander the Great, defeated the much larger army of the Persian Empire. Bill would play Alexander the Great; the cast included future Batman star Adam West, Joseph Cotten, Simon Oakland, and John Cassavetes.
The two-hour pilot for Alexander the Great was filmed over a six-month period in the Utah desert (St. George) in 1963 at a reported cost of $750,000. Bill spent a year preparing for his role, getting himself into top physical shape (he was thirty-two years old—the same age Alexander was when he died), and learning how to shoot a bow and arrow and “to ride a horse at a gallop bareback” as Alexander had done.26 The cast was outfitted in lavish period costumes “in which the men wore little loincloths and the women carried trays of grapes and wine and wore as little as permissible.”27 West, who was playing Alexander’s merrymaking sidekick, Cleander, recalled that he and Bill were supposed to switch leading roles each week. “Four o’clock in the morning out in the desert of St. George, Utah, where it was mighty cold, they were putting body makeup on us so we could wear our little thongs and ride around on Arabian studs and fight the Persians,” he said. “You had to see this thing. It was like ‘Land of the Lost.’ But Bill was remarkably effective. I think he’s always good. If you’re one of those people who have presence and poise and that aura, whatever you want to call it, things work, and it entertains people.”28 But Alexander the Great failed to entertain any buyers and Seligman could not sell the pilot. It was shelved until five years later, when ABC aired Alexander the Great on its children’s anthology series, Off to See the Wizard, in order to capitalize on the success of its homegrown Batman star West and Bill Shatner’s newfound fame on Star Trek.
So, the television work continued. Bill returned for a second visit to Rod Serling’s CBS series The Twilight Zone in an episode entitled “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. The half-hour episode, written by Richard Matheson and directed by Richard Donner, centers around jittery salesman Bob Wilson (Shatner), who’s just been released from a six-month stay in a sanitarium after suffering a nervous breakdown during a cross-country flight. Now, Bob is returning home, on an airplane, with his empathetic wife, Julie (Christine White). He’s determined to put his past behind him and get his life back—until he looks out of his window and, in the rain outside, sees a furry, gremlin-like creature trying to destroy one of the airplane’s wings. (The gremlin was played by acrobat/stuntman Nick Cravat, who’d worked closely with Burt Lancaster.)
But since this is The Twilight Zone, Bob is the only person who sees the creature, and as his hysteria ramps up, everyone else on the plane, including his wife, thinks he’s having another meltdown. Unable to convince anyone that the gremlin exists, Bob grabs a passenger’s gun, smashes out his window, and shoots at the creature, nearly getting sucked out of the airplane as he fires off a few rounds in the driving wind and rain. Cut to the runway. The plane has landed, and Bob is taken away on a stretcher in a straitjacket. “I know,” he says to no one in particular. “But I’m the only one who does know . . . right now.” The camera then pans to an aerial view of the plane’s metal wing—which is severely twisted and damaged.
The mythology surrounding the Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode has grown exponentially since it first aired in 1963, in what was then The Twilight Zone’s penultimate season. (It ended its five-year run in June 1964 after 156 episodes.) Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is considered one of the anthology series’ best installments and has been spoofed multiple times, including on the animated Fox television series The Simpsons, on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, and by Jim Carrey in the movie Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. The episode was revived in 1983 for Twilight Zone: The Movie, with John Lithgow playing John Valentine, a version of Bob Wilson (who has a fear of flying). In 1999, Bill guest-starred on Lithgow’s NBC sitcom, 3rd Rock from the Sun, where their characters referenced the Twilight Zone episode.
At the time, though, it was just another acting job. “I probably wouldn’t have remembered too much about it a month and three or four other shows later,” Bill said.29 He recalled the “claustrophobic” set, of being “pinned in the seats and being unable to move,” and he believed that the episode struck such a resonant chord by tapping into “a twinge of some universal nightmare.”30 “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” director Richard Donner recalled having fun on the set, particularly when Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, starring in ABC’s 77 Sunset Strip, stopped by to see his wife, Asa Maynor, who played the put-upon, flustered stewardess in the episode.
“It was late at night and Bill and Edd and she planned this little game behind my back where they staged what looked like a fight between Bill and Edd on the wing of the airplane, which was twenty feet off the ground,” Donner said. “I heard the commotion, turned around to see what it was, and I see Edd Byrnes hitting Billy and he fell from the wing to the floor. And I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s it. He’s as good as dead.’ And as I ran over, Bill stepped out of the plane. They had a dummy rigged to look like Bill in his [Bob Wilson] outfit.”31