Twilight Zone Companion (19 page)

Leaving Mr Gregory West, still shy, quiet, very happy and apparently in complete control of the Twilight Zone

The final episode of the first season, both in order of production and broadcast, was Richard Mathesons A World of His Own. This comedy, about a playwright who can make his characters come to life by describing them into a Dictaphone, had a curious genesis. Matheson recalls, Actually, the first outline I submitted was a serious one in which it became very nightmarish to him when his characters came to life. I guess it was a little melodramatic for them, so they suggested that I try to lighten it up, and I redid it as a comedy, which I think worked out well.

The casting couldnt have been better: Keenan Wynn as the playwright, Phyllis Kirk as his volatile wife, and Mary La Roche as his long-suffering mistress. From start to finish, the episode is wonderfully funny and sophisticated. Director Ralph Nelson (.Lilies of the Field, Charly and Requiem for a Heavyweight) viewed his task, and rightly so, as akin to keeping one of those glass bubbles on top of a fountain.

A World of His Own employed one of the largest props used in any episode of the series. For one key scene, the playwright had to summon up an elephant in his hallway to block his wife from leaving the house. Rear projection or stock footage of an elephant just wouldnt be convincing; a real elephant had to be brought onto the set.

Buck Houghton remembers the episode with amusement. I came around the stage corner and there was the elephant. And the elephant man was having him go on his nose and then on his back legs, and on his nose and then on his back legs, and then his noseI stood there wondering what this guy was beating this poor elephant to death for. Finallyhe didnt give the next orderthe elephant shit a bale of hay. And he says, Now hes good for two hours. So I went in and I told Nelson, Youve got two hours to use the elephant or were in trouble.

One of the series finest jokes and a perfect capper to the first season was the final gag of the show. For this, Serling makes his first on-camera appearance in an episode. Serling strolls on-camera and addresses the audience. We hope you enjoyed tonights romantic story on The Twilight Zone. At the same time, we want you to realize that it was, of course, purely fictional. In real life, such ridiculous nonsense

Rod, you shouldnt! says West. He walks over to the wall safe and pulls out an envelope marked Rod Serling. I mean, you shouldnt say such things as nonsense and ridiculous! He pulls the tape out of the envelope and throws it on the fire.

Serling looks at this for a moment, says, Well, thats the way it goes, and promptly disappears.

Its an ending that pleases Richard Matheson greatly. I think I was the only one who ever was able to add a sequence where Rod Serling was made to disappear, too. It was the last show of the season, so they felt they could do that.

TAKING ACCOUNT OF THE FIRST SEASON

Production of the first season came to a halt early in April of 1960. In all, thirty-six episodes had been produced, and they had been of such quality that had the series ended right there, The Twilight Zone would still have been a television landmark. This fact was not lost on those at the time. In the spring of 1960, John Brahm won a Directors Guild Award for Time Enough at Last. Buck Houghton picked up a Producers Guild Award for Best Produced Series. The show won awards from Limelight, Radio and Television Daily, and Motion Picture Daily. Perhaps most significantly, the Eighteenth World Science Fiction Convention voted The Twilight Zone the prestigious Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation the first of three such awards the series would win. In April, Bantam Books released Stories From The Twilight Zone, a paperback collection containing Serlings adaptations of six of his Twilight Zone teleplays. The stories were The Mighty Casey, Escape Clause, Walking Distance, The Fever, Where Is Everybody? and The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. Bantam had contracted with Serling to do the book even before the series started filming. Originally, Bantam intended to release the book several months earlier, but wisely delayed the release until the series had attracted a larger audience. Without exception, the reviews were favorable and the book sold well.

On May 11, 1960, CBS announced that The Twilight Zone had been renewed for a second season, with General Foods and Colgate-Palmolive as sponsors. The Twilight Zone had survived its infancy.

Another measurement of the series success related specifically to Serling. Perhaps he first became aware of it while walking down the street or going into a restaurant or theater. Since Patterns, his name had been well-known, but not his face. Now all that was changed. Rod was a TV star.

Fame was not without its drawbacks. Serling: Now people see me on the street and they say, Why, we thought you were six foot one or We thought you looked like a movie actor, and then they look at me and say, Why, God, this kid is five foot five and hes got a broken nose. I photograph far better than I look, and thats the problem.

Serlings children were also having troubles as a result of their fathers fame. I think I was about eight when I realized that Daddy didnt just work, Daddy really did something, Anne recalls. And kids used to say to me, Are you something out of the Twilight Zone? What can you say?

Another problem was that outside of the house, the children could never have their father to themselves. Says Jodi, I was very annoyed by people coming up and saying, Youre Rod Serling. And so I used to ask him, Please, just say youre somebody else. He never would, and he was always very kind to people.

Despite these difficulties, Serlings close friend, producer Dick Berg, thinks he enjoyed his new-found celebrity status. He was a writer for the masses and he wanted to persuade them, entertain them, and be loved back by them. And part of that love came, on a personal level, through recognition, so that actually he was almost a hyphenated writer-actor, if you will, and he rather enjoyed that. There were many of his snotty friends who thought that was sellout time or childish, but actually he was merely living out their fantasies. He figured, if youre gonna do it, be the best, and the best known, and the most highly paid. And all of those came about through this star status which he helped create.

On the afternoon of June 21, 1960, Serling prepared to attend the annual Emmy Awards presentation. He was nominated for his fourth Emmy, for his writing on The Twilight Zone, but he had no expectations of winning. He was up against two very prestigious shows: James Costigans adaptation of The Turn of the Screw on Ford Startime, starring Ingrid Bergman, and Loring Mandels Project Immortality on Playhouse 90. Had he thought he might win, he would have shaved prior to the broadcast, but as he was just going to be another face in the crowd applauding the winner, he really didnt see any necessity for it.

For the most part, the winners were as expected. Laurence Olivier won for The Moon and Sixpence, Ingrid Bergman for The Turn of the Screw, Robert Stack for The Untouchables. And then came the Emmy for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama. And the winner was … Rod Serling!

To say it came as a surprise to him that he won would be an understatement. When he got up onto the stage and accepted the award, he had this to say: I dont know how deserving I am but I do know how grateful I am. Afterwards, he told reporters, Actually, it was probably the happiest moment of my professional career.

A year before, Serling had stepped onto a tightrope that no one had ever tested before. Had he fallen, it would have been a long drop, both in terms of prestige and money. But back in September, hed told Mike Wallace, . . Im not nearly as concerned with the money to be made on this show as I am with the quality of it, and I can prove that. I have a contract with Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer which guarantees me something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars over a period of three years. This is a contract Im trying to break and get out of, so I can devote time to a series which is very iffy, which is a very problematical thing. Its only guaranteed twenty-six weeks, and if it only goes twenty-six and stops, Ill have lost a great deal of money. But I would rather take the chance and do something I like, something Im familiar with, something that has a built-in challenge to it.

Serling had taken the chance, and won.

IV / THE SECOND SEASON

With the debut of the second season, Serling could rest assured that The Twilight Zone had found its audience. On The Twilight Zone he wrote, we now hit approximately five hundred letters a week. We have fan clubs in thirty-one states. And we get an average of fifty story ideas submitted to us each week from people who dig fantasy, the unusual, the imaginative. And this was not a frugal audience: by November, 1960, sales of Stories From The Twilight Zone exceeded 400,000 copies. There were more Twilight Zone products to come this year: a comic book (with each story introduced by a comic-book version of Serling); a record album (featuring the Muzak of Marty Manning and his orchestra and billed as An Adventure in the Space of Sound); a board game, in which players moved their pieces down various maze-like roads to reality; and Serlings More Stories From The Twilight Zone, which went into a second printing two weeks after it was released. Where the products left off, the inventiveness of the fans took over. A black Model A Ford was seen outside a Los Angeles high school with the words The Twilight Zone painted in white across its side. And in Teaneck, New Jersey, The Twilight Zone coffee house opened its doors for business.

The shows popularity brought production bonuses, too. After the first year, there was no trouble getting a cast, George Clemens recalls. The producer would suggest a name to somebody and theyd say, Oh, well, you cant get him. The money is way out of this world. But theyd come in and do Twilight Zone for a half of what they would normally get because it was prestige and it was fun for them.

Despite all of this, this season saw only twenty-nine episodes produced, down seven from the previous year. In the second season, says Buck Houghton, it seems to me that CBS was more concerned about the cost of the shows in relation to the rating it was getting than they were in either the first season or the third season. Indeed, thats the only reason we taped, to save some money. The taping that Houghton refers to is the videotaping of six episodes which was done as a cost-cutting measurea subject we will deal with later in this chapter.

KING NINE WILL NOT RETURN (9/30/60)

Robert Cummings

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Buzz Kulik

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: Fred Steiner

Cast:

Capt. James Embry: Bob Cummings Doctor: Paul Lambert Psychiatrist: Gene Lyons Nurse: Jenna McMahon British Officer: Seymour Green British Man: Richard Lupino

This is Africa, 1943. War spits out its violence overhead and the sandy graveyard swallows it up. Her name is King Nine, B-25, medium bomber, Twelfth Air Force. On a hot, still morning she took off from Tunisia to bomb the southern tip of Italy. An errant piece of flak tore a hole in a wing tank and, like a wounded bird, this is where she landed, not to return this day, or any other day.

Captain James Embry regains consciousness beside the wreckage of the King Nine, utterly alone. He recalls crashing with the rest of the crew, but after thatnothing. His duty is clear; he must find his men and get them to safety. But where are they? He sees the grave of one, mirages of the entire crew, andmost peculiar of alljet aircraft flying overhead. However, there is no trace of his men, and no indication why they left him behind. At his wits end, Embry collapsesand awakens in a hospital bed. In truth, the year is 1960. Seventeen years earlier, Embry fell ill and missed the last flight of the King Nine. Since then, he has carried within him an enormous feeling of guilt. Spying a headline that the wreck of the King Nine had been found in the desert, he fell into a state of shock. His trip back to his plane has been an hallucination. That would seem to account for everything … but how on earth did Embry get all that sand in his shoes?

Enigma buried in the sand, a question mark with broken wings that lies in silent grace as a marker in a desert shrine. Odd how the real consorts with the shadows, how the present fuses with the past. How does it happen? The question is on file in the silent desert, and the answer? The answer is waiting for us inthe Twilight Zone

Like Where Is Everybody? the first season opener, King Nine Will Not Return, concerns a character who finds himself all alone in bizarre surroundings with no memory of how or why he got there. And as with the previous story, this too had its basis in a factual event.

In May, 1959, a team of British geologists exploring the Libyan desert for oil stumbled upon the wreckage of the Lady Be Good, an American B-24 bomber that had disappeared on April 4, 1943. The geologists inspected the plane and found the water jugs full and the guns and ammunition intactbut no trace of the nine-man crew. The Air Force labeled the discovery one of the greatest mysteries in aviation history. This was far too intriguing for Serling to pass up.

In adapting this story for The Twilight Zone, Serling rechristened the plane the King Nine and deposited the ships captain (Robert Cummings) in the middle of the mystery, searching desperately for his lost crew in the desert amid the wreckage. The mystery of the disappearing men is never resolved, but the captains dilemma is. And unlike Where Is Everybody? in King Nine Serling was allowed his final twist.

An unusual episode, the casting of the lead in King Nine proved unusual as well. I wanted Rod to do a script for me to use on one of my specials, Cummings explained at the time. Money is useless in a situation like that. The man is so busy that he cant be tempted with money. It was then that we worked it outhe would supply a script and I would open the new season of Twilight Zone

Robert Cummings and crew

Except for the final scenes in the hospital, King Nine was shot entirely on location in the desert near Lone Pine, California. A war surplus B-25 was bought from the Air Force for $2500 (down from an original cost of $345,000) disassembled, flown to the location, and reassembled there.Production manager Ralph W. Nelson then ingeniously solved the challenge of transporting the cast and crew by arranging for a DC-3 to land on the highway right next to the location.