Shatner miniseries goes boldly where no prank has gone before

In a way, Riverside, Iowa, was asking for it.

As the "Star Trek" faithful know, William Shatner's character, the beloved Jim Kirk, was born — no, in fact, will be born — in Iowa sometime in the 23rd century.

Seizing on that crumb of information a couple of decades ago, an enterprising member of the town council of Riverside, population 928, boldly went where no Iowan had gone before and erected a sign proclaiming his community "The Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk."

From that audacious act grew Riverside's "Trek Fest" — featuring $3 vials of "Kirk Dirt," themed costume contests and mockups of such sacred sites as the bridge of the Starship Enterprise — an annual event that over the years has made its way into newspaper stories and travelers Web sites.

So it was probably just a matter of time until Riverside's cheeky little joke on Hollywood prompted Hollywood to turn the tables.

The result is Spike TV's "Invasion Iowa," a four-hour reality miniseries about the making of a make-believe movie, airing at 9 p.m. tomorrow through Friday.

"Joe" was an elaborate hoax in which a man believed himself to be competing in a reality show when, in fact, all the other participants were actors.

"Iowa" ups the ante by making the pretend production a science-fiction movie set in Riverside. The star? None other than Kirk's alter ego, Shatner himself. The target of the ruse? The entire population of the town.

"There was this delicious idea," Shatner said. "What happens if we take a movie company to a small town [and record] the perennial soap opera of a movie [production] where there's always something going wrong?"

Last year, Reese, Wernick and Shatner, also one of the show's producers, did just that.

Shatner, who won an Emmy last year as loopy lawyer Denny Crane in ABC's "The Practice" (Shatner and Crane moved on to "Boston Legal"), played himself, the movie's director and star.

With him, in addition to the producers and crew, were his nubile leading lady, a starlet named Gryffyn (played by actress Desi Lydic); Max (Garz Chan), an irritable studio exec with a British accent and a perpetual sneer; Herb (Michael J. O'Hara), Shatner's puppy dog of an assistant; Tiny (Kirk Ward), the star's boisterous body double and nephew; and Steve (Ernie Grunwald), Shatner's tofu-brained spiritual adviser.

The plot of the movie is as silly as the entourage, involving an android she-villain with the improbable name of Disintegratrix 3000 and a plot twist in which a virtuous farm girl — played, like many of the faux film's characters, by a local amateur — offers to bear the child of Shatner's character in order to save her town from ruin.

Ridiculous? Of course. But have you seen what real moviegoers are paying $8.50 a pop for these days?

For the most part, Riverside welcomed the filmmakers with open arms.

Scores of would-be actors and extras lined up to audition for parts, happy to sing "Pinball Wizard" if Shatner demanded it or to repeat a line "with a Cajun accent this time" if that was what the star wanted.

One local man even donned a Priceline.com T-shirt to serve as a walking product placement for a Web site Shatner has been advertising for years.

The Canadian-born star, who has spent decades doing what even some fans recognize as a tongue-in-cheek William Shatner impression, seemed to charm almost everyone he met.

What other 74-year-old could get away with observing that a group of Riverside women who appeared to be exactly his own age, give or take a few months, reminded him of "the grandmother you always wished you had"?

The disagreeable Max, on the other hand, caused eyes to roll wherever she went, particularly when she demanded that something be done about "that horrible smell" on the pig farm Shatner & Co. chose for one of their locations. Throughout, Shatner said, the idea was to keep the joke going but also to keep it from turning sour or mocking.

"This is an improv show," he said. "I didn't know what was going to come out of my mouth next, nor did I know what was going to come out of [the Riverside people's] mouths. My fellow actors were ready to pounce, like boxers, because we wanted to keep it alive, keep it amusing [but] keep it kind. It was an enormous challenge."

And, of course, there was the apprehension everyone from the Spike production felt about informing the good people of Riverside, after more than a week of shooting, that they'd been taken for a ride.

As Shatner sees it, he and his fellow pranksters needn't have worried.

"Did we hurt their feelings? Did we stun them with the truth?" he asked.

Shatner said no, absolutely not.

Riverside Mayor Bill Poch, reached by phone last week, said yes, at first.

When Shatner told him about the hoax, "I just looked at him and put my head down," recalled Poch, who, before the film crew came to town, had spent days showing a location coordinator around. "It wasn't a low point in my week or my month. It was a low point in my life."

But that was before he learned what was in it for Riverside: $100,000 from the producers, earmarked for municipal services, plus a $12,000 donation from the cast and crew for a school book fund. That, combined with the chance to see Riverside on TV, if not in a movie, seemed more than fair to him, the mayor said.

"You know," Poch said, looking back on the experience, "I'll admit I wanted to be a part of hit moviedom, and Hollywood-dom and all of that. Was I ever suspicious? Not really. Some of it didn't make any sense, but I think the attitude was, these people are our guests and we're not going to insult them."

Poch did say that his 21-year-old son, Mike, who played a small role in the fake movie, quickly guessed what was going on: " 'It's reality TV,' he told me, but I didn't believe him."

Tom Wheeler, of the state's Iowa Film Office in Des Moines, also felt Riverside and Iowa came out ahead.

"I think there are two things going on," said Wheeler, who, unlike Poch, had a chance to screen about two hours of "Invasion Iowa" before his phone interview.

"The people from Hollywood are saying, 'We're funny people, it's OK to laugh at us,' and the people from Iowa are saying the same thing, really. So I don't find it insulting. And remember, every time someone mentions the show, they've got to mention Iowa."

Then there's the production's official blog at www.spiketv.com, which features upbeat posts from a variety of Riverside residents who took part in the show ("I was an extra ... I sure had a blast"), as well as a smaller number of complaints ("I think it was a very disrespectful thing to do").

Not surprisingly, Shatner was of the opinion that a good time was had by all.

"We didn't really dash their dreams, we enlarged them," he said grandly. "They're on national television from Tuesday to Friday. Many of my motion pictures didn't last that long."