Twilight Zone Companion (30 page)

Incident on a small island, to be believed or disbelieved. However; if a sour faced dandy named Ross or a big, good-natured counterman who handles a spatula as if hed been bom with one in his mouth, if either of these two entities walks onto your premises, youd better hold their hands all three of them or check the color of their eyes all three of them. The gentlemen in question might try to pull you into … the Twilight Zone.

In a story precis written October 12, 1958, titled The Night of the Big Rain, Serling laid down the basics of this story, with one big difference the alien turns out to be a stray dog that the operator of the diner has adopted. In the intervening years, sanity must have prevailed, for when Serling wrote the script (originally titled Nobody Here But Us Martians) he played fair with the audience and revealed one of the people in the diner as the Martian. This didnt stop him from putting in a twist, though, and having the fellow who runs the diner reveal himself as a Venusian!

Directed with style and humor by Montgomery Pittman, Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up is genuinely entertaining. Veteran character actor Jack Elam, made up as an old man, performs outrageously and wonderfully, spouting lines like, Shes just like a science fiction, thats what she is! A regular Ray Bradbury! With his wild eyes and exaggerated movements, he seems every bit the Martian, which is exactly what hes supposed to seem. Actually, hes just a decoy.

In the end, we see how the Martian differs from an Earthling as he lights a cigarette and drinks a cup of coffee using three hands instead of two. The effect was easy to accomplish: someone crouched behind John Hoyt, reaching an arm around and under one of Hoyts real arms. The arm was clothed in the same materials as Hoyts arms and an overcoat was draped over Hoyts shoulders to obscure the fact that the extra arm didnt originate from his body. With plenty of rehearsal to insure a fluidity of movement between the three hands, the illusion was complete and perfect.

John Hoyt as the real Martian reveals his third arm

Not so successful was the way in which the Venusian (Barney Phillips) differed. In the end, he pushes back his soda jerks hat to reveal a third eye. Unfortunately, it looked pretty much like one you might buy in a joke shop. It didnt come that easy, though. Barney Phillips reveals, They had run a wire over my head concealed in my hair and one of the property men was concealed behind me, manipulating the trigger on the wire to effectuate the rolling of the eyeball in the socket. They had done a very big makeup job. They made a cast of the eye socket. I guess they must have spent well over a day working with me fitting that device prior to the actual shooting of the show.

Says Buck Houghton of the third eye, We tried that two ways. We had the actor with an eye in his head, and we were also going to try it with a double exposure. But the double exposure didnt work at all because you could still see through it. And it wouldnt have allowed for hardly any movement, but we could have had it blink, which we couldnt do with the other one.

In spite of its failings, the third eye definitely had an impact. Says Barney Phillips, Every time that that particular segment is televised, without exception, the next day Im greeted by somebody, some total stranger along the way, who says, My God, wheres the third eye?

THE OBSOLETE MAN (6/2/61)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Elliot Silverstein

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast:

Romney Wordsworth:

Burgess Meredith Chancellor: Fritz Weaver Subaltern: Joseph Elic Guard: Harry Fleer 1st Man: Barry Brooks 2nd Man: Harold Innocent Woman: Jane Romeyn

You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future, not a future that will be but one that might be. This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances,

and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the superstates that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace… . This is Mr. Romney Wordsworth, in his last forty-eight hours on Earth. Hes a citizen of the State but will soon have to be eliminated, because hes built out of flesh and because he has a mind. Mr. Romney Wordsworth, who will draw his last breaths in the Twilight Zone.

In this future society, all books have been banned, along with all religion. Wordsworth, a God-fearing librarian, is judged obsolete by a chancellor of the State and sentenced to be executed in a manner of his own choosing. He is granted three requests: that only his assassin know the method of his death, that he die at midnight the next day, and that he have an audience. Forty-five minutes before he is to die, he invites the Chancellor to his room and reveals that he has chosen to be killed by a bomb set to explode precisely at twelve. He then locks the door, trapping the Chancellor. A TV camera will broadcast all that transpiresand Wordsworth will prove which is stronger, the will of the State or that of the individual. At first, the Chancellor hides behind his bravado, but soon it becomes clear that no one is coming to save him. Wordsworth calmly reads from a forbidden Bible. The minutes tick by. Finally, the Chancellor cries out, In the name of God, let me out! Wordsworth hands him the key and the Chancellor bolts from the roomnone too soon. The bomb explodes and Wordsworth is killed. But he has triumphed; when the Chancellor returns to his court, he finds he has been judged obsolete and replaced. Loyal members of the State surround him and tear him to pieces.

((The Chancellorthe late Chancellorwas only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so was the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under M for mankind … in the Twilight Zone.

The final show of the second season was The Obsolete Man, Serlings cautionary tale of a neo-Nazi superstate of the near future. Although it is well acted, Serling has stacked the deck too much, presenting the story in such black-and-white terms that there is no controversy. The viewer can sit at home smug and comfortable, certain that he would never be part of such a State.

These criticisms notwithstanding, The Obsolete Man is still a remarkable episode, thanks in large part to the contribution of director Elliot Silverstein. Silverstein had come from live theater, and later he would direct such films as Cat Ballou and A Man Called Horse. In this, the first of four Twilight Zone episodes he would direct, he imposes upon the proceedings his own unique theatricality. From the first, he made it clear what he wanted.

Says Silverstein, It was vaguely reminiscent of some of the German films of the twenties, and there was a certain amount of expressionism in the style of the performances and the sets. Indeed, the major set of the piece, the room in which Meredith is judged, is quite unlike anything seen before on The Twilight Zone. The walls are completely covered with black velvet. There is a single, long, narrow table. At the end of it is an immensely tall, narrow lectern, behind which the Chancellor stands elevated and apart. The only other feature of the room is the door, which opens from the middle. Like the table and the lectern, it is long and narrow.

That was very tough to do, says Silverstein, because a door that high had never been built in television before. It was twenty-five feet, an enormously high thing. I had done some work like that in the theater before I came to Hollywood, so it was a very natural thing for me to just automatically adapt what I had already done and use it in this.

The people too are unusual. Starkly uniformed, they stand at attention on either side of the table, arms at their sides, their shapes mirroring the shapes of the table, the lectern and the door. The lighting is harsh, casting long, narrow shadows. The first words of the episode come from the subaltern (Joseph Elic). Wordsworth. Romnzy. Obsolescence. A curiously harsh monotone, that Silverstein reveals was inspired by the sound of Joseph McCarthys voice during the Army-McCarthy hearings.

One sequence of events which occurred during the making of The Obsolete Man has had repercussions that have extended far beyond The Twilight Zone. Silverstein explains: There was a key scene and a key moment in the expressionistic sequence, when these two high, vertical doors open and Fritz Weaver comes in to be addressed and judged, and the place was ringed by automaton-like witnesses. Now, it was reminiscent, of course, both in structure and in my view of it, of Franz Kafkas The Trial. Vaguely reminiscent, not in the story but in the feeling.

Sometime before this, I had a nightmare that involved sound, a group of people standing and looking at someone and just going, deep-throated, Aaahhhh … and it would grow stronger in intensity and move very slowly up the chromatic scale as it grew in intensity, but it had to grow in intensity first. I tried to reproduce that sound with this chorus which surrounded Fritz Weaver. I wanted them to do absolutely nothing but stand there and start this deep-throated, growl-like Aaahhhh, until it reached a pitch of volume that required something else to happen, like a cover on boiling water; until the water boils high enough, the cover wont move.

So they started. Aaaahhhhhhhhhh … making their voices get lower rather than higher as they went louder, and they stared at him with a kind of insane fury. Then, when they could go neither lower nor louder, I had them start moving slowly forward, and as they reached him they leaped on him like a pack of mad dogs and dragged him along the table.

The editor was working very well with me until we came to that moment. He showed me this rough assembly and he had them moving immediately, as soon as they started to growl. I said, No, no, you dont understand. You see, in the master shot I have them standing there. He said, Well, so what? I said, Well, that is how I staged the scene. I want them standing there until their voices reach a certain pitch. The master is a message to you and to everybody else. He said, Well, I dont want to cut it that way. I remember very clearly, I felt my temperature and my blood pressure go up. I said, You what? I dont want to cut it that way. Its ridiculous. I said, Its only ridiculous because you havent done it before. I want it this way. He said, I wont do it.

I went to Buck Houghton, who resolved it with a compromise. However, it was a compromise. It never did what I wanted it to do, which was to have everybody in the audience saying, Why arent they moving? Why are they all just doing this strange thing? And I wanted the sound of the voices on chorus to rise until the hackles rose on the back of your neck. So, the compromise was, I suppose, the best of what Buck could achieve in trying to be fair to an editor with whom he had to work again and a director who was being very adamant.

I didnt forget that, and I felt that therein lay a reason why so many shows that Id seen on television had seemed stamped out. There was no individual style.

As a direct result of that very genuine anger, I called up Buzz Kulik and Lamont Johnson and all those guys, and we all got together. I told them what I just told you, and I said, Have you guys had similar experiences? You should have heard the roar that Sunday morning! I said, Why arent we doing something about it? and we all agreed that we could. I said, Lets form a committee to assist the Guild to start taking positions with Management that will protect our rights as artists! They all agreed, and thats begun a campaign thats still not ended.

Thanks to Silversteins actions, significant changes have been made. Today, that could never happen, he says. If an editor said, I wont cut it that way, hed be fired right there on the spot, or if he werent fired somebody else would be called in. He would just simply have to do it, there would be no question about it, none.

END OF YEAR TWO

For Serling, the spring of 1961 was like a replay of the previous year. Again there were the host of awards including another Hugo, and the 1961 Unity Award for Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations. Then in May, another Emmy, again for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama. In accepting, Serling held up the award and addressed the shows other writers, saying, Come on over, fellas, and well carve it up like a turkey.

Serling wasnt the only Twilight Zone member to pick up an Emmy that year. George Clemens nabbed one for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography for Television. No one could possibly have deserved the award more.

The spring of 1961 also found CBS toying for the first time with the idea of expanding The Twilight Zone from a half hour to an hour. True, just two years earlier the network had made Serling alter his concept of the series from an hour to a half hour, but now the network reasoned that a bigger Twilight Zone would attract a bigger audience. Ultimately, CBS decided not to lengthen The Twilight Zone during its third season. Frankly, Im glad of it, Serling said at the time. We can keep that vignette approach … Little did he know that less than a year later he, Beaumont and Matheson would be busy crafting hour-length scripts.

Thus The Twilight Zone survived its second year. So far, sixty-five episodes had been produced. The worst had been no less than entertaining and the best had been unforgettable. Soon, the quality of the show would begin to slip, but for now the series was at its peak, a peak which few television series before or after would attain.

ROD SERLING

 Ive never felt quite so drained of ideas as I do at this moment,  Rod Serling said in April of 1961. Stories used to bubble out of me so fast I couldnt set them down on paper quick enoughbut in the last two years Ive written forty-seven of the sixty-eight Twilight Zone scripts, and Ive done thirteen of the first twenty-six for next season. Ive written so much Im woozy.