A 74-year-old retired doctor of nuclear medicine and Vietnam-era Navy veteran, Sam Halpern doesn’t take any shit. Halpern’s profane maxims, as recorded and dispatched by his son Justin Halpern on the wildly popular Twitter feed @shitmydadsays, have garnered more than one million followers. Now, the once-struggling 29 year-old screenwriter son has a book deal with HarperCollins (Shit My Dad Says, the book, is out in May), and a CBS sitcom pilot of the same name starring William Shatner. 48 Hour Magazine talks to Halpern Jr. about working with Shatner, hustling a book deal off Twitter fame, and why cutting through life’s bullshit isn’t as easy as it looks.
We shot the pilot and I like it [laughs]. It just depends on what CBS thinks and if they like it. They’ll tell me in about three weeks whether they are going to take it up and pick it up for series.
Even your dad knows Hollywood is cruel and unfair. Have you divorced yourself emotionally from this project, or would you be crushed if it wasn’t approved?
No. I will be crushed. I will definitely be crushed. He can say that all he wants. But it doesn’t matter, I’m still going to be super-bummed out. But it’s hard not to get emotionally invested. It’s hard to remind yourself, “Well, I’m lucky to be here,” because you just want it to happen so badly.
What’s it like to have William Shatner be speaking lines your dad said, or ones inspired by him?
It’s amazing. It’s unbelievable. Shatner is very much like my dad, in real life.
Really?
Yeah, he’s a more cordial version of my dad. He looks like a teddy bear but he’s also a little intimidating. And he doesn’t want to get into any unnecessary conversations, which is just like my dad. You get the sense of “Do we have to have this conversation? Oh, we do? Well, then let’s have it” or “No we don’t? Let’s not have it.”
His Twitter feed is pretty good too.
I love that he ends every tweet with “My best, Bill.”
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David Downs @'48hr'
Illustration by Conor Buckley
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