Or, Writing Inside The Twilight Zone
Traveling through the five-season span of The Twilight Zone, and marveling at the sheer number of episodes that were broadcast, it seems incredible that at least another season’s worth of tales were either commissioned, purchased or written with a view to broadcast, only to fall at some earlier hurdle. In our universe, at any rate. Elsewhere, on another planet, in another dimension, maybe each and every one of them was completed. You’ll find them in the TV Guide . . . as published in the twilight zone.
A thirty-minute adaptation of “The Time Element,” the putative pilot that was instead diverted to the Desilu Playhouse, might top any list of the show’s greatest casualties, while Edmond H. North’s “The Triggerman” and John Cecil Holm’s “The Other Side of Yesterday” were both purchased early join in the show’s lifetime, but never adapted.
Later, during season five, Serling solicited a pair of shorts by “Incident at Owl Creek” director Robert Enrico, “The Mocking Bird” and “Chickamauga,” only for them to be abandoned when the projected sixth season failed to materialize.
The Uninvited Postponement
Many other stories certainly crossed Serling’s desk—across the years, The Twilight Zone was one of those shows for which anybody with half an eye for sci-fi and fantasy thought they could (or should) be writing, and of all the unexpected trials that Serling found himself facing once the show got under way, one of the most vexing was the screeching of sundry unknown authors, claiming this story or that was a direct lift from one that they had submitted for consideration.
Without exception, however, these were scripts that had been returned to sender, often unread. Only occasionally were outside writers actively encouraged, with season three seeing no less than four of their number then left disappointed. Robert Arthur’s “Satan and Sam Shay” was first published in The Elks Magazine’s August 1942 edition and previously adapted for the Canadian radio anthology Buckingham Theatre in 1950. “The Uninvited Guest,” written by Pat O’Neil, was scheduled for filming in late 1961, for broadcast in early 1962, before being dropped. “Nevermore” by OCee Rich went the same way; and so did “A Length of Rope,” written by Chester S. Geier for the April 1941 issue of Unknown Worlds magazine.
The rights to that tale were purchased for $300, and even a brief synopsis of the story marks its suitability for the show, as a man saves the life of a mysterious stranger and is rewarded with a length of magical rope. Be careful how you use it, though; it has been known to turn viciously on its owners in the past. Perhaps it was the similarities to season two’s “Dust” that scuppered its chances.
George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan collaborated on another lost offering to the third season, a chilling saga of aviation nightmare titled “Dream Flight”—in which an airline passenger’s recurring nightmare begins to take place in reality, in precisely the same order as the nightmare. Only by breaking the sequence and introducing a new action to the drama can the unfolding disaster be averted. Again, season two’s “Twenty-Two” might well have felt too close in content.
Season five saw several Charles Beaumont stories (or at least credits) run, as Rod Serling pulled out all the stops to help his ailing friend. One story that did not move before the cameras, despite having been purchased, was “Free Dirt,” the horrifying tale of a fruit and vegetable gardener who routinely visits the local cemetery and carts away the soil discarded when fresh graves are dug. He cannot even begin to imagine what will grow in that soil, however. The story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in May 1955.
Beaumont was also behind “Who Am I?,” the tale of a man who looked in the mirror one morning, and found a stranger staring back at him. The story was assigned a production number (#2627) and scripted, as usual, by an uncredited Jerry Sohl, but ultimately came to naught.
We have already mentioned (in chapter three) the loss of a season-five adaptation of Arch Oboler’s “What the Devil?” With Oboler ranked among the crown princes of suspense radio’s golden age and one of Serling’s own heroes, most notably through the 1942–1943 series Lights Out!, The Twilight Zone had no hesitation whatsoever about purchasing the rights to the tale that kicked off that series in the first place. And many regrets when it was subsequently canceled.
We also mourn Richard Matheson’s “The Doll,” another tale that was apparently all ready to go before the cameras (production #2617) before being canceled—apparently, Matheson alleged, because producer William Froug did not enjoy his writing. Matheson enjoyed the last laugh, however. In 1986, “The Doll” was one of the “classic” thrillers adapted for the Emmy-winning anthology series Amazing Stories.
Fittingly, Froug, too, fell victim to season five’s penchant for raising hopes and then dashing them. His script “Many, Many Monkeys” (production #2634) was abandoned because its premise of darkness enveloping the world’s evildoers was too similar to Serling’s own “I Am the Night—Color Me Black.”
It’s not quite Talky Tina, but this enchanting Rod Serling doll could certainly keep her company when she’s not tormenting Telly Savalas.
© Debbie Ritter/uneekdolldesigns.etsy.com
Future Tales
Serling did not abandon anthology television once The Twilight Zone ended its run, even though movie work was clearly more to his liking. When NBC hired him as the distinctly Twilight Zone-esque host of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, they also picked up his ability to write a tight, chilling narrative, and several of the tales he told during that series’s three-season run could easily have stepped out of The Twilight Zone itself.
“The Cemetery,” “Eyes” and “Escape Route,” the three stories that comprised the new series’s pilot episode on November 8, 1969, were classic Serling; while the eleven episodes he penned for season one (amounting to all but two of the total season) included “The Little Black Bag” and “The Nature of the Enemy” (first broadcast December 23 1970); “The House” and “Certain Shadows on the Wall” (December 30); “Make Me Laugh” and “Clean Kills and Other Trophies” (January 6, 1971); “Pamela’s Voice,” “Lone Survivor” and “The Doll” (January 13) and “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” and “The Last Laurel” (January 20). Several of these, “Tim Riley’s Bar” in particular, have been ranked among his best-ever work.
He was equally prolific throughout the show’s second season: the opener “The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes” (September 15, 1971) was followed by “A Death in the Family” and “The Class of ’99” (September 22); “A Fear of Spiders” and “The Academy” (October 6); “Midnight Never Ends” (November 3); “The Diary” (November 10); “Dr. Stringfellow’s Rejuvenator” (November 17); “The Dear Departed” (December 1); “Cool Air” and “Camera Obscura” (December 8); “The Messiah on Mott Street” (December 15); “The Different Ones” (December 29); “Green Fingers” (January 5, 1972); “Lindemann’s Catch” (January 12); “The Miracle at Camafeo” (January 19); “The Waiting Room” (January 26); “Deliveries in the Rear” (February 9); “You Can’t Get Help Like That Any More” (February 23) and “The Caterpillar” (March 1).
As the show ran down during its third season, however, so Serling’s output slowed: he contributed just four broadcast stories to this final fling: “Rare Objects” (October 22, 1972); “You Can Come Up Now, Mrs. Millikan” (November 12); “Finnegan’s Flight” (December 17) and “Something in the Woodwork” (January 14, 1973).
Serling later complained that many of his scripts were being either altered beyond recognition or rejected outright, and is even said to have dismissed the show’s latter days as “Mannix in a cemetery”—a reference to the long-past-its-best detective show that was then approaching its sixth successive season (and would ultimately limp on until eight).
Night Gallery was canceled following that third season, in spring 1973, but Serling was not absent from the field for long. That same September, he reappeared as the host of Zero Hour, a syndicated radio anthology that broke its tales into five thirty-minute parts, broadcast Monday through Fridays.
He would not be writing for the show, although his presence certainly allowed Zero Hour to enjoy a sense of continuation from The Twilight Zone. Still, it is one of the great tragedies of American television that Serling would not live to witness the true rebirth and flowering of his best-known creation.
A Week Without a Twilight Zone
On a number of occasions throughout its five-season run, The Twilight Zone found its regular weekly pattern of broadcasts disrupted either by repeats or by other programs entirely.
Iran: Brittle Ally
The first of these fell on December 18, 1959—coincidentally around the same time as Serling’s doctor ordered him to bed for a few days, to recover from a bout of exhaustion. CBS shunted the show aside in favor of the third in a series of current affairs specials examining the modern world and America’s role within it. Biography of a Missile and The Population Explosion had already aired; this week, Iran: Brittle Ally went behind the scenes of the Persian Gulf kingdom that was simultaneously one of the most oil rich but politically fragile nations in the region.
It would be twenty years more before revolution brought down the last of the Shahs and Iran arose as the world’s first truly successful Moslem theocracy. But the Shah and his increasingly autocratic government were only in place because of an Anglo-American coup d’etat in 1953—itself designed to ensure Iranian oil wells remained in Western hands, as opposed to falling to the nearby Soviets.
Discord was fermenting long before the exiled Ayatollah Khomeni returned to the country in 1979; Western eyes, not to mention their security services, were nervously eyeing the nation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Iran: Brittle Ally was one of the ultimate scenario’s earliest heralds—in much the same way, it could almost be said, as the show that it displaced in the week’s television schedules was a herald for so many other half-imaginable futures.
The Twilight Zone was absent from the screens once again on April 22, 1960—preempted by a special edition of Playhouse 90 titled “Journey to the Day,” set in a state-run asylum where half a dozen patients (among them, Mike Nichols and film veteran Mary Astor, still stunning in her early fifties) were undergoing group therapy.
May 27, 1960, saw the show again preempted for a current affairs program, and one that was very close to Rod Serling’s heart. In its stead, viewers were treated to a special edition of Edward R. Murrow’s CBS Reports series, dealing with the then hot topic of public school integration and titled Who Speaks for the South?
And on June 24, 1960, with the season finale just one week away, a repeat broadcast of “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” kept the audience on exquisite tenterhooks.
We Interrupt This Broadcast to Bring You Politics
The Twilight Zone entered its second season in fall 1960, with the prime-time schedules already ripe for disruption. It was an election year, and for the first time in history, the two candidates, Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy, had agreed to a series of four televised events.
Screened on all three major networks, the first of the four aired on September 26—a bad night for Nixon, as the bronzed, handsome Kennedy calmly squared up against the somewhat disreputable-looking man whose scruffy appearance was only amplified by a recent dose of flu, a painful knee injury and his own admission, “I can shave within thirty seconds before I go on television and still have a beard.”
Political pundits claimed the debate was a tie, but a poll of the first debate’s seventy million viewers declared Kennedy the winner by a country mile. And Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley reportedly took one look at Nixon and gasped in horror, “My God, they’ve embalmed him before he even died.”
Friday October 21 marked the fourth and final debate before the country went to the polls, and with The Twilight Zone just one of many programs forced to sit the evening out, the nation watched as Nixon firmly swept away his past missteps. Even partisan viewers declared the debate a draw, and when election day came, on November 8, the voting itself was so tight that the Electoral College needed to be deployed, to declare JFK the victor despite the Republicans carrying four more states than his Democrats.
Stops at Willoughby and Points Beyond
November 19, 1960, saw The Twilight Zone broadcast Richard Matheson’s “Nick of Time” tell of a machine that could predict the future. So, another question for the fortune-telling machine. Will The Twilight Zone be on next week?
No, it won’t. Its slot on November 25 1960 was devoured by another of the hour-long CBS Reports, with Edward R. Murrow this time looking into the plight of America’s migratory farmworkers, in a feature called Harvest of Shame.
It would be business as usual the following week, but just one month later, on December 30, 1960, CBS rescreened “A Stop at Willoughby.” Further repeats would be seen on February 17, 1961 (“A Passage for Trumpet”), March 17, 1961 (“The After Hours”) and April 14, 1961 (“The Mighty Casey”), while May 19, 1961, saw the show break for ukulele maven Arthur Godfrey’s latest television special, On the Go.
Season three suffered just one interruption, on December 8, 1961, when The Twilight Zone was preempted by the second in a new, occasional series of hour-long Westinghouse Presents dramas, Piper Laurie in “Come Again to Carthage.” Season four, however, lost three weeks out of its run: on March 28, 1963, when viewers were treated to a second run for “The Thirty Fathom Grave,” and April 25, 1963, which brought a reprise of “In His Image.”
Neither would there be a new episode of The Twilight Zone broadcast on May 16, 1963. In its stead, the third-season story “Still Valley” consumed the first thirty minutes, followed by a TV special titled Faith 7, scheduled, and widely trumpeted, to feature the first television pictures ever to be transmitted from a U.S. manned space capsule, the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission that concluded the Mercury space program.
Launched the previous day, the craft performed twenty-two orbits of the Earth before astronaut Gordon Cooper returned home. Cooper was commencing his seventeenth orbit, over Cape Canaveral, Florida, when he began transmission, a series of slow-scan black-and-white images.
Unfortunately, technical difficulties prevailed. All three networks had interrupted their scheduling to broadcast the historic moment, but in the end, NBC alone would carry the footage . . . a spectral astronaut, distinguishable only his helmet and hoses, was the only definable object . . . and even they would tape-delay it. The experiment would have to wait until a future mission, but Twilight Zone fans would have just seven more days to get through before their show returned with its season finale.
Death of a President
There would be no visit to the twilight zone—or to any place that wasn’t Dallas, Texas—on November 22, 1963, as the United States reeled from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Like every other program scheduled for broadcast that weekend, the latest episode of The Twilight Zone, Richard Matheson’s “Night Call,” would go unseen (it was finally rescheduled for broadcast in February).
The Twilight Zone would suffer just two further breaks in transmission as season five neared its end. First, on June 5, the show was preempted by a ninety-minute special titled D-Day Plus 20 Years: Eisenhower Returns to Normandy, reliving that most crucial of Allied operations through the eyes of the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The following week, the network ran a repeat of Richard Matheson’s “Steel.”