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“I’ve Got an Idea for a Brand New Show”

Pitching and Piloting The Twilight Zone

Although there probably was never a time, at least since he first heard Lights Out, when Serling was not entertaining the notion of his own weekly drama-thriller-chiller anthology, it was not until May 1957 that he truly set the wheels in motion, when he approached CBS with a proposal for a show he had already titled The Twilight Zone—adopting the title, although he claimed to be unaware of this, from a piece of U.S. Air Force slang. The “twilight zone” is what pilots called the area they passed through as they flew between night and day.

Why now? In a way, because the network demanded it. On September 1, 1955, back in the glowing aftermath of “Patterns,” Serling signed a contract that granted CBS exclusive first option rights to his work—a maximum of twelve different ideas, of which nine were to be full outlines, six full scripts and four complete adaptations.

In return, he would receive $1,500 per adaptation, rising to $2,000 in the third year; $2,500, rising to $3,333.33, per script, and a guaranteed $288.46 per week. It was a generous deal, but it demanded some serious hard work.

Within the space of just five days that first November, Serling was responsible for no less than three broadcast teleplays: “Incident in an Alley” on the U.S. Steel Hour on November 23; “Portrait in Celluloid” on Climax! on November 24; and “The Man Who Caught the Ball at Coogan’s Bluff” for Studio One on November 28. Between the broadcasts of “Patterns” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” CBS aired a staggering thirteen Serling plays—so many that even some reviewers began to complain of fatigue.

Serling’s workload had not lightened since then, either, and neither had his ambition. It was time, he decided, to lift himself out of the rut and routine of writing isolated scripts for other people’s shows. He wanted one of his own.

It was not going to be an easy sell. Leo Guild, columnist at the New York Herald Tribune, reminded readers that Serling was not the first established writer to float an idea of this type to the networks.

“Ray Bradbury, famous science fiction writer, tried to sell a similar [one] but, after a pilot was made, the network officials scoffed. They said the public wouldn’t sit still for a whole series about such subjects as food that makes a man invisible and Saturn dwarfs attack Pittsburgh.” The writer also learned, from talking with Serling, that “when Bradbury was turned down, Rod felt his project was impossible.”

Shooting Arrows into the Air

That was then, this was now. CBS listened to his pitch, read his proposal, expressed an interest. But spring 1957 turned to summer, which became fall. Negotiations were underway, but they were glacially slow. It would be early 1958 before the Daily Register announced that “Rod Serling is preparing a new science fiction series, [The] Twilight Zone, for CBS TV airing next fall,” the news getting out the same day that Serling set up his own production company, Jo-Nan Productions—named for his two daughters, Jodi and Anne.

A pilot episode had apparently been agreed upon, “I Shot an Arrow into the Air,” and filming was tentatively scheduled to commence within the next couple of months, pending the appointment of a producer and director (twenty-eight-year-old New Yorker John Frankenheimer was one of the names being bandied about).

The pilot set out the show’s premise from the opening moment, a Serling voice-over that warned the viewer that “there is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It lies in a boundless area full of light and shadow. Between what man has experienced and what man can dream. Between his grasp and his reach. Between science and superstition. Between the pit of his fears and the sunlight of his knowledge. This area can be called the Twilight Zone.”

“I Shot an Arrow into the Air” was the story of a young invalid boy, David Henniker, who befriended an alien . . . unknowingly, at first; the man, who introduced himself as John Williams, was simply a Good Samaritan who rescued David from some local bullies.

But the fact that the man has clearly been in some kind of accident, right around the same time an alien spacecraft crashed a few miles away, and that he was bleeding green blood probably tipped the boy off. Soon, Williams was explaining his mission to David—a fairly standard 1950s explanation about coming to earth to benefit mankind, but changing his mind when he realized what a bunch of warlike primitives these humans actually were. So he was off, but promised that they’d meet again one day.

He left the boy with one gift—the scientific know-how that would, twenty years later, see David selected as the pilot of humankind’s first-ever manned satellite. And on his very first flight, mission control watched in wonder as his satellite was first approached, and then joined, by a second. The promised reunion took place in orbit.

Serling left no doubt in anybody’s mind why he had set up his own production company. Nothing could be said or done without first clearing it with the sponsors, with even the most innocuous phrase capable of causing offense. During the making of Requiem for a Heavyweight, Serling was taken to task for including the word “match” in the script, because one of the sponsors made cigarette lighters. A character could not “ford” a river if the sponsor was a rival car manufacturer; could not eat sandwiches if the sponsor sold toasters.

Nobody could be described as being “lucky” on a program sponsored by a cigarette manufacturer that was not Lucky Strikes, and criminals on death row could not be sent to the gas chamber if the sponsor manufactured gas stoves.

Neither did he pull that example out of thin air. Industry gossip was still incredulous over the demands placed on the Playhouse 90 production of “Judgment at Nuremberg,” in which the sponsor, a manufacturer of gas stoves, refused permission for there to be any reference whatsoever to the German death camps’ preferred method of exterminating their victims. Gas was clean, gas was comfortable, gas was safe. There could be no suggestion that it had anything to do with those nasty Nazis.

Neither would Serling escape this pettiness in the future. Deep into the first season of The Twilight Zone, “Judgment Night” was hit by the objections of a sponsor who manufactured instant coffee, objecting to a British Naval officer suggesting they have a cup of tea. The line was eventually changed to “a tray of food.”

Indeed, even before that, Serling’s nominal independence made very little difference. The Twilight Zone had not even formally been accepted before CBS started raising objections to elements of the scripts that formed the backbone of Serling’s proposal.

The terms “God,” “damn” and “hell” were all placed on a more or less forbidden list, while there were also concerns voiced regarding the use of the term “club foot” in another submitted script, “The Happy Place.” It might, it was feared, prove offensive to anybody who themselves suffered from that particular affliction—reminding us that the oversensitivity of the modern age is by no means itself a modern development.

Martians That Don’t Look Like Men

Being head of his own production company brought with it other unexpected headaches. Every writer and literary agent in town seemed to have his address, and, as soon as the news of the new show got out, it was as if every one of them had the perfect script for him. Except none of them were perfect, at least at that time, because Serling hadn’t even shot a pilot episode, let alone confirmed the show’s existence. Patiently, Serling returned each submission with a politely worded rejection.

Other pitches arrived from what we might call other interested parties . . . self-appointed experts in science fiction, for example, such as veteran writer (and creator of the early 1950s show Tales of Tomorrow) Theodore Sturgeon.

Indeed, according to Twilight Zone historian Martin Grams Jr., Sturgeon’s missive all but opened with a slice of self-aggrandizement that would have convinced most recipients to bin it unread. “If you don’t know who I am, you haven’t done enough reading in the sci-fantasy field to do full justice to Twilight Zone.”

Yes. Thank you for that.

In fact, Serling not only read Sturgeon’s letter, he also retained it in his files, and it was, in fact, a remarkably sober distillation of the manifold pitfalls that Serling could expect to encounter once the show got off the ground. That said, however, Sturgeon’s observations were scarcely news.

No less than today, almost sixty years on, the target audience for a show such as The Twilight Zone was cynical, was demanding, and did expect way more in terms of realism than the average weekly television show’s budget could ever deliver. Modern shows combat this with increasing resort to computerized graphics, or CGI technology. In the 1970s, the ubiquitous “blue screen” held sway, whereby the desired monsters or whatever could be introduced to the action without actually needing to make the monster in question (grotesquely enlarged footage of bugs was a universal favorite).

In the late 1950s, neither of these technologies existed, nor any of the others that would subsequently be taken for granted. If you wanted a monster, you built a monster. If you wanted a volcano, you built a volcano. And if you wanted a six-foot-nine actor with a long neck for sticking electrodes on, you hired one.

There were few shortcuts, no easy ways out, and no escaping the fact that an actor dressed as an alien was always going to look like an actor dressed as an alien, no matter how many appendages were glued to his costume. Rock musician Frank Zappa, around 1973, even had a “bad movie monster” routine in his live show, a preamble to the song “Cheepnis.”

“I think the name of the film was It Conquered the World and the . . . did you ever see that one? The monster looks sort of like an inverted ice-cream cone with teeth around the bottom. It looks like a . . . teepee and it’s got fangs on the base of it, I don’t know why. . . .”

Sturgeon’s fears were very real, then. But one of Serling’s earliest determinations was that there would be no such flaws in The Twilight Zone. Assuming it ever got off the ground.

There Is Not a Happy Place

Barely had Jo-Nan Productions been launched than Serling was closing it again, as the CBS negotiations ground on and it became clear that “two months” had been an awfully optimistic schedule for shooting the pilot. He would promptly form a new production company, Palisades Productions, but that too would perish before The Twilight Zone finally came into being, under the aegis of Cayuga Productions, named for the New York State lake where the family owned a summer cottage.

Ultimately the proposed pilot episode, too, would be canned (“I Shot an Arrow into the Air” would eventually be repurposed as the Twilight Zone episode “The Gift”), while “The Happy Place” would also soon be abandoned.

Having already objected to the use of the phrase “club foot,” CBS now found itself getting cold feet about the story itself, a futuristic America in which anybody exceeding the age of sixty-six (for men) and sixty-four (for women) was politely escorted to the Division of Relaxation and Contentment, Department for Aged Citizens, North American Section . . . and executed.

Which the organization’s director, Mr. Harris, believed to be a mighty fine thing until the age limit was lowered to sixty, and he realized that his own father, a brilliant surgeon, was just months away from the gas chamber. Cue a massive personal crisis as Harris was forced to pit his career against his family . . . in the midst of which, his father made a break for freedom.

He was caught, however, and shot down in the ensuing gunfight, only for Harris to later discover that it was his own son Paul, the surgeon’s grandson, who gave the old man’s whereabouts away. For Paul, though he was but a schoolboy, was a dutiful servant of the state. So dutiful that he believed the age limit should be lowered even further. To fifty-five, maybe, or even fifty.

That “The Happy Place” owes an enormous debt to George Orwell’s 1984 goes without saying. In one of that novel’s most chilling revelations, we discover that children were actively encouraged to spy, and inform, on their own family members, if they even suspected that their actions, their thoughts . . . their very dreams, even . . . were in some way contrary to the state’s way of thinking.

That was not why CBS rejected the script, however. They did so because they realized, even if Serling didn’t, that there was barely a sponsor in America who would apply either their name or their cash to a show that advocated the mass slaughter of America’s elderly.

A few years later, Serling offered up much the same story under a different title, “The Obsolete Man,” and with no reference to old age anyplace in the tale. Again CBS turned it down. No matter what their operators’ guiding principle might be, or how reasonably their purpose was phrased, death camps were not the American way.

Increasingly, then, the future of The Twilight Zone was growing less and less certain, with Serling’s own enthusiasm receiving a personal setback when his mother passed away on March 5, following a stroke.

At the end of April, however, Variety reported that “[the] pilot for Rod Serling’s new hour-long film series for CBS will roll the early part of May . . . and negotiations are on for Jack Warden to essay the lead in the [pilot episode], ‘The Time Element.’ Bob Parrish, theatrical film director-writer, will make his TV debut directing the segment which will be co-produced by Serling and Charles Russell. Format of the series is scientification and fantasy.” And little more than a month later, the same publication announced, “the Columbia Broadcasting System has signed Rod Serling, writer, to a one-year exclusive television contract beginning next fall.”

The continued delays had wiped out any hope that The Twilight Zone might take its place in the fall 1958 lineup, and Serling had been forced to concede a number of other points, including the length of the show. All of his plans, and scripts, to date had been predicated around a sixty-minute time slot. CBS, however, required just thirty, and so weary was Serling of the constant negotiations—which had now consumed a year of his life—that he agreed.

Fan art has long been crucial to the continued saga of The Twilight Zone. Joshua Zaitz’s 3D Pop Art captures the spirits of both the show and the era in which it was created.

Joshua Zaitz/PopsicArt-dot-com

In Praise of My Little Margie

He was not happy, but necessity insisted he put a brave face on his disappointment. Besides, even at his most uninspired, he told Variety, “my shows will be better than My Little Margie, and if it weren’t for my shows we might have two My Little Margies.”

Poor My Little Margie! Gale Storm and Charles Farrell’s sitcom had been off the screens for three years by then, a summer 1952 replacement for I Love Lucy that ran to four full seasons before finally being canceled. But even then, there was something irresistibly quaint about its so-sweet homespun narrative of a feisty, wisecracking daughter continually coming to the rescue of her rather dull, and certainly naive, investment firm executive father.

Far worse premises would surface in the future realm of the American sitcom . . . far worse are still foisted on us today. Remember Bosom Buddies and shudder.

But, for a long time, making a mockery of My Little Margie was the default setting for anybody wanting to point out what Serling called “the raunchy mediocrity of the [television] medium,” albeit one that he did not believe was confined to that particular genre of programming. In late 1959, Serling reminded readers of TV Guide, “when Gunsmoke corrals an audience, the next season will see a herd of imitators varying in title and star but painfully similar. Peter Gunn goes off on a caper, and the next season fourteen other actors take out private-eye licenses, and the television audience is exposed to a diet of sameness that makes dial-switching superfluous.”

Though they had accepted the new show, CBS also insisted that Serling continue contributing to Playhouse 90, although only one of his scripts, “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” would ultimately be screened. However, there was one piece of good news in amidst all the compromises. The quality of the proposed pilot episode, “The Time Element,” was such that the network intended screening it as written, despite it now being twice the length of the time slot available to it. The solution was to remove it from The Twilight Zone altogether and place it within one of the already-flourishing anthology series. It was, as the New York Times reported in June, “being considered by Studio One for presentation at the end of the summer.”

In the Presence of Mine Allies

In fact, Westinghouse, the sponsors of Studio One, initially rejected “The Time Element” almost as quickly as they read it, objecting to its somewhat harsh portrayal of the U.S. Army as a hidebound bureaucratic mechanism with no scope for thinking even marginally outside of the box.

Serling rewrote the offending elements of the script, around the same time as it was announced that Westinghouse Studio One was to be reborn as Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse—produced by the then-darlings of American sitcom television Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz Jr. and alternating hour-long versions of the old I Love Lucy show with new commissioned dramas.

Arnaz himself was the show’s host, and had proved himself to be a staunch supporter of Serling’s script—as indeed were the critics. “An unusual and absorbing drama,” wrote the New York Times. “The humor and sincerity of Mr. Serling’s dialogue made ‘The Time Element’ consistently entertaining.”

With William Bendix, Carolyn Kearney and Martin Balsam ranked among its stars, “The Time Element” was broadcast on November 24, 1958, drawing such an audience that it would ultimately be ranked among the most successful broadcasts in the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse’s entire history. Within two days of its broadcast, CBS had received over sixty-four thousand letters from viewers, almost all of them written in praise.

“The Time Element” played on several of Serling’s personal demons, most notably the Pacific War and the nightmarish effects that what is now called post-traumatic stress could have, years after the event, on its participants—in this instance, a survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941

He had been suffering vivid, violent nightmares ever since, and was finally persuaded to visit a psychiatrist—where we, the viewers, discovered that the patient himself died during the attack. It was the psychiatrist who had been battling the nightmares for the past seventeen years.

In every respect, “The Time Element” conforms to the qualities that we now associate with The Twilight Zone. In every regard, with its blending of Serling’s personal fascination with madness and war, and a wicked twist at the end of the tail, it is now regarded as quintessential Serling; and at the time, as the peak of his writing career so far.

The following morning’s New York Times enthused, “Rod Serling is one of the pioneer television writers who still stays in the medium even though he is as articulate as video’s expatriates about television’s limitations. Last night he once again came up with an unusual and absorbing drama, ‘The Time Element,’ in which William Bendix showed anew that he is a fine serious actor as well as a clown.”

He remained modest, however. Asked from whence his ideas came in the TV special Writing for Television, Serling merely explained,

Ideas come from the Earth. They come from every human experience that you’ve either witnessed or have heard about, translated into your brain in your own sense of dialogue, in your own language form.

Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized.

Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone.

Nevertheless, his latest brush with censorship left Serling seething, leaving him determined to never again write a TV drama unless it was one of his own creation.

Serling would remain an outspoken critic of censorship, even comparing his experiences with those of other, wholly dissimilar shows. In 1964, English comic and commentator David Frost arrived in Philadelphia to launch an American version of the satirical television series That Was the Week That Was, which propelled him to such great heights in his homeland.

Ultimately the show would fail to take off in the United States, being canceled after just one season. But even before then, Serling—addressing an audience at Broome Technical Community College in Binghamton, New York—admitted that while he admired the show’s bravery in confronting heavy social issues, still he suspected it was subject to “pre-censorship,” with the result that it was able to make “very few cogent comments on some of the tough problems of the day.”

One that he especially admired, however, was a sequence that linked cigarettes to lung cancer—a very brave decision in an age when tobacco companies were responsible for some 14 percent of the entire television advertising budget. Including, as it turned out, a sizable chunk of his own show’s.