PLUME: As a teacher, do you foresee this as something that you will always do?

SHIMERMAN: Yes. Because, like acting and writing, they’re great joys to me, and there’s no reason why I should give them up. I don’t charge very much, so I always can find students. It’s not about making money at all, it’s really about trying to hand on to next generation some of the skills that I’ve learned over the course of my lifetime. The teaching is truly a joy. That’s probably also why I do my union work as well.

PLUME: What kind of feeling do you get when you see your students in projects?

SHIMERMAN: When they’re doing it right, I feel like a doting mother.

PLUME: And when they’re getting it wrong?

SHIMERMAN: When they get it wrong, I think, “Well, maybe I could have spent more time with them.”

PLUME: Have you had students return back to your classes?

SHIMERMAN: No, because at this particular camp that I teach at, usually if you’ve gone through it once, that’s sufficient. You don’t come back. I do, on occasion, get people who I have taught at those camps call me up and say, “I have an audition for something, can I have a private coaching?” I of course say yes. In fact, I’ll often run into people, actors who are now working – young actors who are working, like, a lot – and they’ll say, “Do you remember me?” And for the most part, I really don’t’ look at my students, so I don’t remember them. I’ll say, “No.” And they’ll say, “Well, you taught me … I’ve never forgotten those classes.” I figure, well, they must be using it if they’re working. So I’m very happy about that. That’s very gratifying, to have somebody who’s in their 20’s or 30’s come back to you and say, “I studied with you when I was 19,” or something like that. It’s very gratifying, because not having any children, it’s a way of my having an effect on the next group of people to follow me.

PLUME: As an extension of that, speaking about your union work, what was the appeal of that?

SHIMERMAN: Well, understand that during the course of our conversation here, on occasion I have said I’ve felt the need to pay back people who were kind to me, when I needed someone to be kind to me. The union has taken care of me and my peers for a very long time, in the sense that it sets up salaries and sets up working conditions. It sets up insurance, it sets up pension, it sets up different ways to make sure that I am protected when I go to work, and that I get a living salary. The then-president of the Guild came to me and said, “We don’t have many working TV actors on the board. Would you think about coming on the board?” Now, understand, when that happened, I was doing Deep Space Nine, I was doing Buffy, I was doing other projects, I was teaching, and I was just beginning to write, as well. But I thought, “Why not? There must be time in the day for this, as well.” It was my way of giving back to my community. My community has been very good to me, and I wanted to give back to them and I wanted to help make their working conditions as good, if not better, than the ones that I work under. I had the great privilege and honor to have been one of the lead negotiators in about half a dozen different major contracts for the Screen Actor’s Guild. In fact, we’re all waiting to find out the results tomorrow on whether the Screen Actor’s Guild will cease to exist and in a sense be reborn as a new entity.

PLUME: Is this the SAG/AFTRA vote?

SHIMERMAN: Yup. The votes are coming in tomorrow, and I spent most of this year working on the preparation for the new entity. I was one of the architects for the constitution, and for the last couple months I’ve been one of the main proponents of why people should vote for it.

PLUME: Is it your belief that it will pass?

SHIMERMAN: My belief is to wait and find out tomorrow.

PLUME: What are the biggest challenges facing the new entity?

SHIMERMAN: One of the reasons for the need for this, is that there are two unions, two actors unions in existence as of right now. There are more than two, but there are two actor’s unions that deal with television and, to some extent, movies. That’s AFTRA and SAG. SAG is sort of the – in my opinion – the bigger of the two, but both unions are claiming jurisdiction to digital technology. AFTRA’s wages and working conditions are less beneficial to the actor than SAG’s are. So what’s happening is that producers are becoming more and more aware that you can get actors for cheaper on the AFTRA contract, so they’ve been going to AFTRA when they shoot digitally, instead of going to SAG. What’s happening now is that it’s turning into a union warfare between the two, as both unions try to keep its signatories. The merger would put an end to that warfare. On the other hand, the first thing that the new union would have to do would be to raise all the lower AFTRA rates to be comparable to the SAG rates. That will be the primary, first step of the new union, and when that happens that will be a tough fight, but I think it’s a doable thing.

PLUME: So the producers are obviously lobbying against this.

SHIMERMAN: Oh yeah. Would you want to pay more money for what you were getting for cheaper before? Yeah, the producers will probably be against this. Although they’ve already made some concession to the directors in a similar situation, and that’s a very promising sign.

PLUME: Would you say that it will be a long and difficult process to solve?

SHIMERMAN: Yes, it will be a long, difficult process. Yes, it will be a long and difficult and hard-fought process.

PLUME: With a positive end result.

SHIMERMAN: I hope so. A negotiation’s a negotiation. Anything can happen in a negotiation. We always hope for the best.

PLUME: When did your writing career start?

SHIMERMAN: My writing career started about 5 or 6 years ago …

PLUME: Out of a desire to have less free time?

SHIMERMAN: Yeah – exactly. Most of the male actors on Deep Space Nine, like TNG, all wanted to become directors. And they did become directors. I, for the most part, didn’t want to be a director, but I did want to be a writer because I had been a writer as a young man. There was something happening in Deep Space Nine – and in all of Star Trek, actually – it had to do with the caste system. The caste system, as far as the world of Star Trek, was that some creatures were thought better of than others. People wouldn’t look at the individuals of that race, they’d rather look at the species instead – which, to me, typifies racism. So myself and two other writers got together to formulate some pitch ideas for new episodes for Deep Space Nine. We took in two pitch ideas plus this racism pitch, and writers in a very nice manner turned us down on all three projects. As we left the building, the other two writers and I were despondent, and I said, “You know, this racism idea, this would be better as a book anyway.” And I knew that one of my partners wanted to be a novelist. Eric, the third person, decided he didn’t want to write a book, but David and I played with the idea. We expanded the outline and we expanded the ideas, and so we wrote a book. It ended up being a very popular, very well-selling Deep Space Nine novel called The 34th Rule. From there I went on, and through Pocket Books, the same publisher, was able to pitch – and they bought – a series of three novels based on the Elizabethan character named John Dee. Over the course of the next five years I had written three novels about John Dee.

PLUME: This would be The Merchant Prince?

SHIMERMAN: The Merchant Price. The first two novels, like 34th Rule, were always done with a writing partner. The third novel for Merchant Prince I pretty much wrote on my own. I did have a writing partner, but it turned out that my contribution turned out to be about 90% and my writing partner has graciously decided to take her name off the novel, because she said she didn’t write that much.

PLUME: What were the benefits, early on, of having a writing partner?

SHIMERMAN: Well, like an actor, an actor is only as good as the actor he’s working – or she’s working – with. There’s a theory of acting called neighborhood playhouse technique, which believes that all your life comes from the other actor. That was what I was trained in and that’s what I believe in. So, when you have a writing partner, you can bounce ideas back and forth across the table or across the computer at each other, and it gets better because you’re both seeing the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s contributions. I found that to be a really enjoyable process. Because of my time schedule, it just seemed impossible to me that I could write an entire novel by myself. So those were two factors for having writing partners. The last novel just turned out that I had the time, and the subject matter was so much more interesting to me than it was to my writing partner, that I just put in a whole bunch more time writing than she did – and eventually, when the smoke cleared, I had written pretty much all of it.

PLUME: So when are we going to see The Merchant Prince on film?

SHIMERMAN: A number of people have asked that, but I haven’t started the process yet of trying to pitch that. Primarily because all I really wanted to do was right a book. It got published, and I’m very proud. It sold very well, I’m very proud of that. So I achieved the goal I wanted. Now, having another life is really sort of secondary or tertiary to any thoughts of writing it. But, I suppose, I live in Hollywood – that is a path I should follow. I should at least look into it.

PLUME: It would make a great mini-series.

SHIMERMAN: Could be, yeah. It’s a path I should look into. Maybe I could sell it to Joss. That would be good.

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