Twilight Zone Companion Read Online Free
Author: Marc Scott Zicree
Serling: It was a Pier 6 brawl to stop this alteration of character. When it was finally aired in April of 1956, Noon on Doomsday was so watered down as to be meaningless.
Two years later, Serling made another stab at an Emmett Till kind of story with A Town Has Turned to Dust for Playhouse 90. He fared no better.
By the time A Town Has Turned to Dust went before the cameras, my script had turned to dust, said Serling. Emmett Till became, as Time noted, a romantic Mexican who loved the storekeepers wife, but only with his eyes. My sheriff couldnt commit suicide because one of our sponsors was an insurance firm and they claimed that suicide often leads to complications in settling policy claims. The lynch victim was called Clem-son, but we couldnt use this cause South Carolina had an all-white college by that name. The setting was moved to the Southwest in the 1870s … The phrase Twenty men in hoods became Twenty men in homemade masks. They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer.
In the introduction to his 1957 collection of television plays, Patterns, Serling related a series of events which occurred during the production of The Arena, a show for Studio One dealing with the United States Senate. As usual, absurd demands were made. … I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem. To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited. So, on television in April of 1956, several million viewers got treated to an incredible display on the floor of the United States Senate of groups of Senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk.
In general, Serlings experiences on The Arena were little different from those hed had on Noon on Doomsday or A Town Has Turned to Dust. What was different was his conclusion: In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive. To go from this reasoning to The Twilight Zone took no great mental leap. It was an option Serling greeted with relief.
I dont think it far-fetched that he should have been as impressed as he was by science fiction, says producer Dick Berg, particularly because he had much on his mind politically and in terms of social condition, and science fictionand Twilight Zone specificallygave him as much flexibility in developing those themes as he might have had anywhere else at that time. Within the parameters of his own store, such as he enjoyed on Twilight Zone, he could do anything he wanted. He could do a story about Nazis, about racism in general, about economic plight, about whatever, and fit it within the framework. So it became a natural habitat for him creatively.
Other factors contributed to Serlings decision to enter into series television. By the late 1950s, live television was a dying art form. The basic economic reality was inescapable: a live show could be aired only once while a show on film could be shown again and again. Dick Berg: I think its important to understand that in the life of one of the more significant guys of the mid-twentieth century, this science-fiction series was a kind of life raft, an escape hatch. It was an arena for self-expression such as he was no longer able to enjoy with the demise of the live anthology shows on television. And when eight of them went off the air in a twelve-or eighteen-month period, Twilight Zone provided Rod with the most satisfying replacement possible for that anthology market.
So, on a day in 1957, Serling went to his file cabinet and pulled out a half-hour script he had written shortly after graduating college.
Two years later, Serling made another stab at an Emmett Till kind of story with A Town Has Turned to Dust for Playhouse 90. He fared no better.
By the time A Town Has Turned to Dust went before the cameras, my script had turned to dust, said Serling. Emmett Till became, as Time noted, a romantic Mexican who loved the storekeepers wife, but only with his eyes. My sheriff couldnt commit suicide because one of our sponsors was an insurance firm and they claimed that suicide often leads to complications in settling policy claims. The lynch victim was called Clem-son, but we couldnt use this cause South Carolina had an all-white college by that name. The setting was moved to the Southwest in the 1870s … The phrase Twenty men in hoods became Twenty men in homemade masks. They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer.
In the introduction to his 1957 collection of television plays, Patterns, Serling related a series of events which occurred during the production of The Arena, a show for Studio One dealing with the United States Senate. As usual, absurd demands were made. … I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem. To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited. So, on television in April of 1956, several million viewers got treated to an incredible display on the floor of the United States Senate of groups of Senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk.
In general, Serlings experiences on The Arena were little different from those hed had on Noon on Doomsday or A Town Has Turned to Dust. What was different was his conclusion: In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive. To go from this reasoning to The Twilight Zone took no great mental leap. It was an option Serling greeted with relief.
I dont think it far-fetched that he should have been as impressed as he was by science fiction, says producer Dick Berg, particularly because he had much on his mind politically and in terms of social condition, and science fictionand Twilight Zone specificallygave him as much flexibility in developing those themes as he might have had anywhere else at that time. Within the parameters of his own store, such as he enjoyed on Twilight Zone, he could do anything he wanted. He could do a story about Nazis, about racism in general, about economic plight, about whatever, and fit it within the framework. So it became a natural habitat for him creatively.
Other factors contributed to Serlings decision to enter into series television. By the late 1950s, live television was a dying art form. The basic economic reality was inescapable: a live show could be aired only once while a show on film could be shown again and again. Dick Berg: I think its important to understand that in the life of one of the more significant guys of the mid-twentieth century, this science-fiction series was a kind of life raft, an escape hatch. It was an arena for self-expression such as he was no longer able to enjoy with the demise of the live anthology shows on television. And when eight of them went off the air in a twelve-or eighteen-month period, Twilight Zone provided Rod with the most satisfying replacement possible for that anthology market.
So, on a day in 1957, Serling went to his file cabinet and pulled out a half-hour script he had written shortly after graduating college.
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