William Shatner Played a Great Prank on Director Richard Donner During Production on THE TWILIGHT ZONE
It seems like William Shatner has always had a fun and playful sense of humor. Even way back in the early 1960s, the actor was stressing the hell out of the creative team with his hijinks.
Shatner worked with director Richard Donner on one of the most popular episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. This was not an easy shoot for Donner as the production was plagued with issues. One of the hard aspects of the series was the plane, it had to be lifted high above the ground to make it look like it was really flying. Donner explained:
"It was a tough shoot. It was an airplane ... in a tank, elevated way off the ground. We had to climb up. We had massive wind machines. We had lightning machines. We had rain machines. We had effects machines working because we had to also turn the engines. There were no computers or anything to do it. Everything had to be live. Everything had to be synced."
With the stress on Donner super high, Shatner thought it would be a great time to pull a prank on the filmmaker. That prank involved making Donner think that Shatner had fallen to his death! Shatner partnered up with Edd Byrnes on the prank. While visiting the set that day to say hello to his wife, Asa Maynor, who played the flight attendant in the episode, Shatner and Byrnes spotted an articulated dummy on set, and that sparked the idea.
In an interview with the Academy Television Foundation, Donner shared his experience as the prank played out:
"I hear this screaming and yelling and everything, and I run back and I see [Byrnes and Shatner] fighting. And then they went behind the body of the airplane, and all of a sudden, I see Shatner fall off the wing and fall all the way to the bottom — it's concrete — and he hit the ground. [...] I thought he was dead, man. And I came running up and I grabbed him, and then everybody's standing around laughing."
What a horrible yet amazing prank! Shatner and Byrnes had planned the whole fight on the wing of the plane which led to Byrnes pushing the dummy off right when Donner was looking at them. Donner seriously thought that Shatner was dead and the shoot was already so stressful, that what went through Donner’s mind was:
"Honestly, my first reaction was, 'Don't tell me I have to shoot the whole show over again.'"
The only thing he cared about in that moment wasn’t Shatner’s well-being, it was the fact that he didn’t want to have to shoot the whole show over again! I love these kinds of stories!
Via: /Film