Sharon Stone, Heather Locklear Aim Guns, Portraying Cops, Priceless

     Big blonde hair power, 1985, L.A., station wagons and rust-free Pintos.  LCPD, Sergeant T.J. Hooker's fictitious unit, a police academy combining classroom, outdoors training, plus on the street patrol experience.  Hooker (William Shatner), or is he a time-stranded Captain Kirk?, leads these youths through their paces, waddling in his black, tight cop uniform.  Why wear black long-sleeved shirts and long black pants, everything tight, as the LAPD and fictional LCPD do?  It's the often very hot Greater L.A. Area!  Is it simply a tactic to make the cops more likely to snap, using sartorial discomfort as an excuse to discharge firearms?

     Watching T.J. Hooker three and a half decades after it was made, the show comes across very pro-police, Dragnet fashion.  That popular TV show had Jack Webb glorifying the LAPD each week with dramatizations of actual cases. 

     "Only the names have been changed."  Sergeant Friday carries a badge, a gun, restraints, and a sap to club unruly hopheads.

     In Hooker, there are good cops and bad cops, mostly good.  Hooker lives by the gun, has been shot at, probably shared a water-jail cell in South Vietnam alongside John Savage, Robert DeNiro, and Christopher Walken.  Hooker does mention his time in Vietnam.  Sergeant Hooker neither says he did, nor does he say he didn't, torch villages, rape and murder while working for the Pentagon.  

     Hooker's divorced, has a daughter--she gets kidnapped, it's really not surprising that storyline happens at some point--he's a loner in his personal life, like Captain Kirk.  While California dreaming he bangs Michelle Phillips.  Some kind of high class graphic designer, like a Laura Mars-type woman (reference to The Eyes of Laura Mars, reviewed in this blog), who is suddenly, incredibly interested in a tight-ass cop who looks like Michael Myers.

     And Hooker, like Michael Myers, has killed lots of people, or, "punks."  In keeping with the Reagan era macho wiping-away-the-scum-of-society viewpoint, like that President's jibe calling poor mothers "welfare queens," T.J. Hooker and its concurrent hit cop show, Miami Vice, punch hard with the wounding and killing.  

     Hooker's sense of honor, though, is his strong point, as is his love for his daughter.  In one episode he gives excellent advice to a kid who lost his cop father, in another he's respectful and helpful as he can be with his brief girlfriend, played by one of the two Mamas, not Cass, after she's raped.

     "Hollywood Starr," episode seventeen of the fourth season, aired Saturday, February 23rd, 1985.  Sharon Stone occupies the first several minutes.  She's a cop, her name is Starr, the script writers didn't give her a normal-sounding name, like Starkey, so they went with Starr.  Dani Starr.  Protagonist of her own TV series!  

     This episode was a pilot for a Sharon Stone cop show!

     Are you fucking kidding me?  

     In what parallel universe did this show get picked up and put on TV in Parallel September 1985?  Were recordings made, and is it possible to see them?  I imagine it going on for five or six seasons, Parallel Sharon's career made completely different, maybe sticking mostly with television roles?

     The episode has different incidental music, Detective Starr is heavily featured.  She looks great, her acting is not good.  Sorry Stone fans.  I know, I'm one of you.  I fucking love Sharon Stone, but she developed as an actress over time.  In 1985 her lines were uttered flatly, she seemed held back, or like she hadn't yet figured out what she was trying to do while on camera, though she knew she'd get it someday.

     Also in her early career her voice still lingered in her nasal passages, becoming lower as just a few years passed, or maybe Paul Verhoeven directed her to speak more deeply because by Total Recall, five years after this failed pilot, she sounds much better, and different, as well as far more confident.

     Dani Starr, a widow, was married to a mafioso, a killer probably, maybe somebody who spoke in a colorful way, might've told funny stories at the deli where he liked to hang out before he'd make his collection rounds.  Or so I guess.  

     She wears a gold ring on the designated finger.  She carries a revolver.  She drives a red Mercedes Benz convertible, a very nice car, I've been a passenger in one just that color, red sporty Kraut car driving north on the Pacific Coast Highway, but Dani drives hers with Captain Kirk on board.  It's not the first time he's been part of a TV show setting up the launch of another show.  In 1968, "Assignment:Earth," last episode of the second season of Star Trek, was a pilot involving a time-traveling human who'd been living with distant aliens.  Teri Garr was the pilot's female lead and Robert Lansing was the time-traveler, Gary Seven.  The show didn't make it, like Hollywood Starr.

     I paid little attention to this episode's plot.  Dani has a pet turtle.  A big one.  A tortoise, maybe.  In one shot, William Shatner holds in his hands an armored beaked amphibian of platter-width, gray and slow, an alien to this time-traveling Kirk, given by Gary Seven his Temporizer, bumming in 1980s L.A., killing time pretending to be a cop, a teacher at an academy, bringing Star Fleet discipline to Earth Police.  He intends to transport these young folk, including Stacey (Heather Locklear and, as a stowaway, Heather's first husband Tommy Lee of Motley Crüe) to the Enterprise once it comes to pick him up.  

     If it comes, Kirk thinks, glancing with a little polite smile at preoccupied Dani as she drives her Merc forty-five miles an hour around a sharp curve.

     "Steady!"

     His friendly hand quests towards her right hand gripping the wheel, then withdraws.  

     Might get into an accident.  She's really crazy.  She's like a Splendor in the Grass type.  I should've been in that movie, not Warren Beatty!  I could've had his career!  I could've been a better Clyde Barrow than he!  Oh, me and Faye Dunaway, God, way she looked in the sixties, I'd give my left ear, Van Gogh-wise, to have acted in that film with her.  I worked with Micheal J. Pollard in "Miri," the one where a teenaged girl falls in love with me.  Michael Pollard is in Bonnie and Clyde, full circle.  

     I wonder if Dani Starr's show will get picked up by ABC?  I'm wearing the clothes of my fake identity, this Tom Jefferson Hooker man.  Mr. Scott, before I left on this mission, gave me a mind-fogger.  It only took me three minutes to convince the LCPD Chief of Police I'm Sergeant T.J. Hooker, here's my made-up story, made-up credentials, it's real to you, you like me, you respect me, you seek my word when you don't know what to do.  

     If they only knew how easily I could, once the Enterprise returns, destroy the surface of this entire planet.  Not that I'm going to do that.  I just could.  

     T.J. Hooker thinks, Poor kid.  You're going to have to get through this, Dani.

     (Note: Dani feels guilt having shot her first man, who was holding a large handgun to an old woman's head on a bus.)

     Dani says something like, "I know I had to do it but I still feel bad."

     Captain Kirk remembers his first kill.  Level 4 School, Davenport, Iowa.  Walking home from school, threading apartment towers, nine year old Kirk gets hit on the back of the head with a rock thrown by Merv Agile.  Kirk turns and blasts the aggressive no good boy he's hated for four years with a homemade phaser.  Merv disintegrates for twenty seconds.  Looking down, Merv watches, astonished, as his body vaporizes, leaving behind an iron stink, following a high-pitched scream.

     Nine year old Jimmy Kirk grins: "It works!"

     T.J. Hooker's own Merv Agile story involved the same initials, but Mackie Avern was a large taxi driver renting T.J.'s mother's basement, with the exposed pipes, the dripping in places.  He had a metal-framed bed next to his seatless toilet.  T.J., home early from school due to teacher illness, heard rhythmic metallic squeaking.  Even then with the inquisitiveness of a cop, teen T.J. investigated.  A naked 25 watt bulb lit dully his mother spread open on top of Mackie Avern's white rounded abdomen.  Random black body hairs sprouted everywhere but sparsely out of Mackie Avern's body, his legs, arms, and the hands gripping T.J.'s mother's factory machine-fast buttocks.

     Revolted even more than you are, T.J. got his father's gun.  T.J. ended their affair.  T.J.'s mother hid his crime.  T.J. and his mother moved to a spot along a highway near the California-Arizona border where Mrs. Irene Hooker set up shop as a "motelier," with 

H O O K E R  

M O T E L

     Brisk business followed, stagnation too.  The first day they were open, with no customers yet, three cops visited over the course of the day, each of them questioning the motel's name.  Irene Hooker showed each cop her driver's license, proving her surname.  Each cop suggested she change the motel's name, or change her name, the last policeman saying it with a flirtatious smile.  

     T.J., overhearing, seethed in the parlor behind the office, where he'd already begun building a one-man jail cell.  I'd be a better cop than those bozos!

     Kirk's favorite made-up part of T.J. Hooker's life was his wild weekend in Bangkok in sixty-seven.  Smoked something made him feel weird, he bumped into things, knocked baskets off of outdoor shopping stalls, tripped over a dog, walked through a bar where a shooting occurred as he walked through it.  

     In truth, Lieutenant Hooker's Miller Beer had been spiked by an enemy agent, or a CIA man.

     Subjectively, the drug kept Hooker in this clumsy state for an hour or so, but it was really nine hours.  He came to on his bed, clothes sweated-through, ready to return to Saigon, to his office, to his Hanh, the twenty-one year old Vietnamese secretary assigned to him by the South Vietnamese government.

     How he missed her!  Getting up, he reminisced about his many kills committed on the Hooker Motel property.

     Unsolved murders of the 1950s, boy, Hooker thinks, I could've contributed two or more chapters worth of content for such a volume.  

     A change of shirt, a washing of armpits, T.J. is ready to find the creep who spiked him, give him something.

     Captain Kirk finds Dani Starr attractive.  "Dani, do you look at the stars?"

     Dani, eyes on the road, laughs, quizzical look in her eyes.  "I see them in movies."

     Captain Kirk points up with his thumb.  "Up there, Dani, the staaarrrrrs!!!"

     Dani says, "Oh!  Okay.  Yeah, sure, I've seen them, but in L.A. you know, with the lights.

     Captain Kirk: Would you like to be a cop on Beta Draconis 9?

     Dani looks at him a moment: "What?"

     Kirk says, "The Chief of Police of the First City owes me favors--I saved his world from destruction, not once, but twice.  He needs a plucky Earther with a kill under her belt."

     Dani checks mirrors, pulls over.  Earth automobile traffic zooms by.  It's 1985.  Sharon Stone is about to try to face down a far more experienced actor.  Or was about to do so.

     Kirk puts away Mr. Scott's handy invention, the DX-2 Mind Fogger, guinea-pigged on Captain Kirk first to convince him the invention should not be given to any 1980s person.

     After Kirk fogs Dani's mind, he convinces her she'll perform in two great entertaining movies enjoyed by viewers for many, many years, and she will eventually be taken seriously as an actress in spite of her flat performance in "Hollywood Starr."  

     There's a two second shot in this episode of the tortoise eating lettuce.  The tortoise is actually a spaceship.  A blend of inorganic and organic matter.  Inside, hyper-dimensional beings exist within a volume the size of the turtle's interior, but size has no meaning there, nor does there.  Somehow, the turtle flies.  It can bombard a city.  It can make crop circles.  

     Kirk never sees the turtle fly, but maybe he does in the alternate universe series, Hollywood Starr?

     Kirk knows he can easily convince Dani Starr to come with him on board the Enterprise.  He can take her to Beta Draconis 9, show her the sights, the Execution Pit, the Museum of Sorrows, the Institute and Historical Museum of War Crimes Committed By the Last Dynasty.  

     He'll wait and see.  She needs to get this case behind her, as does Hooker.  

     Hmm, he muses.  One week it's Mama Michelle, the next it's Catherine Tramell.

     Kirk, being from the future, has seen Basic Instinct.  He's seen Sharon Stone.  

     In "Mirror Mirror," he reasons, the alternate universe Kirk has a Captain's Woman.  Why can't I have one?  If the Federation objects, I'll turn pirate.  Any of my crew, up to and including Bones and Mr. Spock, who do not join my pirate enterprise, will be ejected into space.  Kirk out.

     Dani presses the gas again.  Kirk hasn't yet gotten used to bad drivers.

     "Beta Draconis 9 sounds like a nice place to go to," she says.  "I think I'll move there."

     Kirk smiles at his finger massaging the MindFogger's dose trigger.

     Sergeant T.J. Hooker quick grabs the MindFogger from Kirk's self-assured grasp!

     On go the metal cuffs! Hooker puts em on tight!  Kirk can't fucking believe it!  Arrested by his own false identity!  Figuring it out is like trying to unravel all the implications of Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly.  Is Bob Arctor going to go home for Thanksgiving and will he remember to bring for proof the sinister blue flower underlying the drug plague, Substance D?  Or is Bob Arctor too brain-fried from his own Substance D use to remember he must do this to get the word out about the corporation profiting from addicting its customers to Substance D.

     Sergeant Hooker read A Scanner Darkly and didn't understand it.  Hooker doesn't like druggies.  He did concede the premise of an undercover cop getting spied on by his overt cop identity is an interesting one.

     Biggest fink of all is when you fink on yourself.

     He must be able to read thoughts, Kirk thinks, perhaps in a primitive way, but there's more to this T.J. Hooker than I previously imagined for him.

     "What's this?" Hooker says, exuding confidence, standing tall before his doppelgänger.  

     "My communicator."

     "What happens when I open it?"

     "It chirps."

     "That's it?"

     "It's a toy, from Thailand.  They're in market stalls all over Bangkok, chirping."

     "What's this then?  Is it a toy?"

     "No.  Point it at the chain of the handcuffs and press the yellow button.  Aim it--yes, good.  Fire!"

     "Oh, you're a crafty devil," Sergeant Hooker says.  "I don't know how you mind-fucked me--you must be from the future."

     Fist to the face, Shatner goes down, comes back up, right cross left jab to gut, Shatner bows at the waist in pain, they merge into a double Shatner, Janus-faced, one Shatner visage on each side, but there is no sculptor nearby to capture the majestic godlike appearance of this dyadic Shatner! 

     Dani Starr hasn't seen any of this.  I'm not even sure it happened but I'm going along with...yes, it happened.

     The T.J. side wants to terrify punks.

     The Kirk side wants the Enterprise to return, use ship's phasers to separate the Shatner Twain.

     T.J. and Kirk both suggest at the same time (Kirk, incidentally, has to buy T.J. a Coke) a double date with Dani Starr, who agrees, bringing along Sharon Stone.  Kirk and T.J. separate their joined bodies by mutual agreement and effort for the sake of not having to decide which of them must eat looking away from the dining table.

     Stone, Kirk, Hooker, and Starr, eat seafood, drink enough for relaxation to set in, and take a walk on the nighted beach.  Kirk holds Starr's hand.  Hooker arrests Sharon Stone for littering after she tosses a gum wrapper with her chewed gum in it on the dry sand.  Hard cop knee in her back, wrists positioned to be cuffed, dominancy doodle.  

     "Hooker!" Kirk's voice blends with the waves, their crash and hiss.  "Let her up!  Your pre-Star Trek past has caught up with you!  The police are coming to get you for the Hooker Motel Murders!  Run!"

     Dani Starr runs up to Kirk, sees her colleague Hooker stumble on a sand dune then get up and dwindle into darkness.  

     "Hooker?!"  

     Wind louder than her yell, she jumps over reclining Sharon Stone's legs, runs in speed-inhibiting sand to the dune where no T.J. Hooker could be seen, nor could she.

     

     Sharon Stone stood, looked all around.  Sand, surf, rocks, dunes, blackness, stars.

     She was the only one there.

Vic Neptune