Twilight Zone Companion Read online

  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 thir
d 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.

  Director Buzz Kulik was a newcomer to The Twilight Zone with King Nine but he soon proved himself one of the series ablest directors. Kuliks great strength as a director lay in his ability to work with actors, a fact borne out by his television work since The Twilight Zone, which has included Kill Me If You Can (the story of Caryl Chessman, starring Alan Alda) and Brians Song. Since King Nine was virtually a one-man show, Kuliks attention to characterization and his willingness to engage in lengthy rehearsal greatly enhanced the production. Additionally challenging was the fact that during most of the show Cummingss lines were contained in voiceover interior monologues (obviously Serlings alternative to the clumsy verbal monologues in Where Is Everybody?). In order to allow Cummingss facial expressions to match his thoughts, the voiceovers were pre-recorded at MGM and then played back on location.

  The attention to detail payed off. As Hank Grant wrote in the Hollywood Reporter, This was a tour de force for Robert Cummings, an extremely difficult role that ran the gamut from relief to joy to panic to crazed hysteriaa performance that should merit serious consideration when Emmy time comes around.

  NERVOUS MAN IN A FOUR DOLLAR ROOM (10/14/60)

  Written by Rod Serling

  Producer: Buck Houghton

  Director: Douglas Heyes

  Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

  Music: Jerry Goldsmith

  Cast:

  Jackie Rhoades: Joe Mantell George: William D. Gordon

  This is Mr. Jackie Rhoades, age thirty-four, and where some men leave a mark of their lives as a record of their fragmentary existence on earth, this man leaves a blot, a dirty, discolored blemish to document a cheap and undistinguished sojourn amongst his betters. What youre about to watch in this room is a strange and mortal combat between a man and himself, for in just a moment Mr. Jackie Rhoades, whose life has been given over to fighting adversaries, will find his most formidable opponent in a cheap hotel room that is in reality the outskirts of the Twilight Zone.

  Sitting in a stuffy, dingy, unbearably hot little room, Jackie finds himself in a terrible predicament. George, a gangster for whom he has done various nickel-and-dime jobs, has ordered him to murder the owner of a bar, an uncooperative old man, at two a.m. Jackie a nervous, frightened, nail-biting mouse of a man knows that hes done for. He hasnt the backbone to refuse George, and if he commits the murder its a certainty hell be caught. Looking for a match, Jackie is terrified to see that his mirror image is already smoking a lighted cigarette. The reflection is actually a different Jackie, intelligent, strong, self-assured. It is the man Jackie could have been had he chosen a better path and it wants out, it wants to take over before its too late. Jackie tries to bolt, but he comes face to face with mirrors in the closet, the bathroom and the hallway. There is no escape. Later, George arrives to deal with Jackie, who has not done the job, but he gets a surprise: this Jackie Rhoades says hes resigning, beats him up, and throws him out. The old Jackie is now in the mirror, and Mr. John Rhoades a nervous man no longeris checking out.

  Exit Mr. John Rhoades, formerly a reflection in a mirror, a fragment of someone elses conscience, a wishful thinker made out of glass, but now made out of flesh and on his way to join the company of men. Mr. John Rhoades, with one foot through the door and one foot out of the Twilight Zone.

  Although King Nine Will Not Return was the first episode aired this season, it was not the first produced. That distinction belonged to another virtual one-man show scripted by Serling one man, but two characters. Once again, Serling was dealing with a type with whom he was seemingly very familiar: the anonymous, insecure, unimportant little man struggling desperately against enormous odds. Here the conflict is a basic one, the internal combat between an individuals weaknesses and fears on the one hand, and his will to rise to the occasion and take control on the other.

  Taking place entirely in a tiny hotel room, Nervous M
an in a Four Dollar Room centers around the dialogue between the main character and his alter ego, who appears in a variety of mirrors. The standard operating procedure here would have been for the actor to play to his mirror image, using split screen. But director Douglas Heyes felt that this would limit the movements of both camera and actor and that it would eliminate the performers sense of playing to someone. Instead, Heyes decided to use rear projection. This was done by filming Mantell as the mirror-self first. All of the mirrors in the hotel room set were actually rear projection screens on which the previously-shot footage was projected. So what Mantell as the real Jackie Rhoades sees and reacts to is exactly what we see in the finished product.

  Joe played all the scenes in this room just as if he was playing with another actor, says Heyes. He could walk up to the guy, walk away from him, cross him, he could do everything. And he could maintain eye contact with him, also, because he was looking right at himself in his mirror.

  Joe Mantell is an actor not generally known, but he should be. You can find him if you look for him. For instance, hes Jack Nicholsons partner in Chinatown, the one who sums up the movie at the end with, Cmon, Jake. Its … Chinatown. In Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room, Mantell demonstrates a tremendous range. In reality, hes playing two parts: the real Jackie, described in the show as always looking like somebodys squeezing [him] through a door; and the mirror image, calm, self-assured, commanding, and intelligent. And, wonder of wonders, both are completely believable. (Mention must be made of Jerry Goldsmiths excellent score; his theme for the real Jackie is ideal nervous, quick, with a rhythm that sounds like scissors cutting.)