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The dreams, nightmares and life experiences of Rod Serling become a haunting challenge to the way we think and watch TV.
Twilight Zone, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"
OB: October 11, 1963, 9:30 p.m EST,. CBS
I was born three months after this episode first aired.
Twilight Zone, "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross"
OB: January 17, 1964, 9:30 p.m. EST, CBS
I was three days old when this episode first aired.
The first one I ever saw was "Kick the Can."
I must've been eight or so. It was a slow Saturday afternoon, and I found it on a station in Huntsville, Alabama, in a syndicated rerun. I saw the opening moments: an elderly man at a rest home, announces his son is here to take him home. The scene intercuts his goodbyes to his fellow residents with scenes of children playing "kick the can." He gets in the car with his son, and the car only goes a short distance before it pulls over. (Even at that age, I knew what that meant.) The son can be heard saying he never promised to take him home, just that he'd come to talk about it. The sad, broken man gets back out of the car, holding his suitcase, knowing he'll have the humiliation of going to back to his fellow residents and saying "Well, so much for that," but probably nothing that cheerful. He picks up the kids' can and walks around with it. The boy, about my age, says "Hey mister! That's our can! Hey mister!" But instead of yelling at the children and telling them to go home (as most old people in my real-life Alabama neighborhood tended to do) or just giving him back the can, he just stares at it, as he sits under a tree. And I seemed to instinctively know what that meant, too.
Then I saw another man walk out from behind some bushes, talking directly to the camera...Rod Serling, the man I already knew from Night Gallery...and he sets the scene for us, making sure we know that children's game is definitely going to matter. "It will shortly become a refuge for a man who knows he will die in this world, if he doesn't escape...into the Twilight Zone."
I was hooked.
The rest of the episode (the man thinks the can is the ticket to the fountain of youth...and he's right) was delightful...then, sad, even heartbreaking. I am so happy this was my introduction to the fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It truly spoke to me. It never in my life dawned on me until that afternoon, that any senior citizen in the history of the world ever wanted to be a child again. I think it even made me ask my grandparents about that idea.
As television came out of the 1950s and evolved from live dramas to film, The Twilight Zone forever raised the stakes on what we could do on TV. Its unique formula was to tweak its world like someone twisting the contrast and brightness knobs on a period black and white TV set: one knob pushes the picture ever so slightly into the land of fantasy, the other makes the rest of the picture that much more realistic. Creating the "unknown" wasn't even the most creative part; the all-too-human, all-too-real emotional reaction of the characters is where the show excelled.
It also combined the best parts of television past and future: combining the staging, blocking, camerawork, and often the writing quality, of live 1950s TV dramas like Studio One and Playhouse 90, with the special effects that would later populate The Outer Limits and Star Trek. And if The Outer Limits was meant to prey on our fears of the unknown and the march of science, The Twilight Zone was meant to warn us about those very fears. It made us face our worst nightmares about nuclear anxiety and the Cold War, and what we might find as we got ready to catch up to the Russians in space. It made us realize that our biggest concerns should be our reactions to all of that. And it did it all within the vision of Rod Serling.
Born on Christmas Day 1924 in Syracuse, New York, Serling grew up nearby in Binghamton. This is where he often acted out movies he saw, pulp novels he read, and even worked on a stage in his basement. In high school he wrote editorials for the school paper and joined the debate team. He put off college long enough to enlist in the Army, taking up boxing while stateside before being shipped out as a paratrooper to the Philippines. Serling, wounded in action, saw death every day, including a freak accident in which a crate of food supplies fell on a fellow soldier who was entertaining the platoon with comedy.
When Serling returned home from the war, he used the G.I. Bill to attend Antioch College in Ohio. He met, and married, his wife Carol during this time. Serling worked at the campus radio station, acting and especially writing scripts. He got his big break winning a contest to have a script produced for the network radio program Dr. Christian. While waiting for that story to air, he sold another one to CBS' Grand Central Station. When he submitted radio scripts that did not air, he began in 1950 to submit some to television as well. When one was rejected, he submitted it to another show. Serling had done 71 when one of them, "Patterns," a Mad Men-type drama set in an executive suite, was picked up by Kraft Television Theater. It ended up being his most acclaimed work to date, bringing in glowing reviews, a special encore performance later that season (in those live days before reruns were invented), and ultimately being made into a movie. More scripts followed, including another one, Playhouse 90's "Requiem for a Heavyweight," which drew even more acclaim and suddenly put him in heavy demand.
Serling's biggest problems, however, were sponsors and censors, many of which were sometimes interchangeable. Some of the requests were just silly; the line "Got a match?" was stricken from "Requiem for a Heavyweight" in deference to Playhouse 90 co-sponsor Ronson Lighters, and all references to the Chrysler Building in New York were removed from a Ford Theater script, right down to the building being airbrushed out of a skyline picture, by request of the Ford Motor Company. But other instances were more chilling. When Serling wanted to write a play about the racially-motivated murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, the script ended up being watered down to a more generic story about a foreigner in an unnamed small town.
Fed up with all of the censorship, Serling longed to write for his own show, answerable to his own vision and his own demands, and the sponsors could just take it or leave it. He chose science fiction, as both sci-fi literature and movies were beginning to reflect adult themes in allegorical ways...for instance, the pods in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" were a stand-in for McCarthyism and fear of expressing certain beliefs. He wrote his first ever science fiction script, "The Time Element," about a man who keeps dreaming he's in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and no one will listen to his warnings that the Japanese are coming. The script aired on Desilu Playhouse, and CBS was so impressed it sold as the pilot to what would become The Twilight Zone.
Serling's anthology series opened with the episode "Where is Everybody?" about a man who shows up in a town that's completely empty, even though cars are on the street, food is in restaurants and grocery stores and there's even a lit cigarette in an ashtray. The series quickly received rave reviews and high ratings, and many of the series' most beloved episodes came from that first season. One of them was one of Serling's personal favorites and one of the first I hear mentioned in conversations, "Time Enough at Last." That's the episode in which Burgess Meredith plays the bookworm who's harassed and bullied by his boss and his wife over his love to read. Then when he's in the vault of the bank where he works, enjoying a lunch hour with a good book, a bomb wipes out the city. The guy gets his bearings and figures out where to find the food and supplies, then realizes there's no more job or boss, no more nagging wife, he can now go to the library and read all he wants. Just as he stacks up everything he wants to read, he bends over to get one more book...and his thick glasses fall off, hit the steps and shatter, leaving him permanently vision-impaired and crying, "It's not fair! I had time!"
My favorite, "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," was another parable about the still fresh wounds of McCarthyism and how they got there, with neighbors on a pretty suburban street (the same one used 20 years earlier for Mickey Rooney's "Andy Hardy" movies) seeing a UFO, and accusing each other of being the invading aliens making the power go on and off. The twist ending finds the real aliens manipulating the power from afar, for that very effect of turning the neighbors against each other. "Walking Distance" is a bittersweet, nostalgic look back at Serling's own small town upbringing, and at what happens when a grown man finds himself back in the town of his youth, face to face with his childhood self. The result was not what he expected and was actually a heartbreakingly harsh lesson on the need to protect memory from the jaded experience of time. "A Stop at Willoughby" also revisits an old, turn of the century small town, this time about a commuter who constantly dreams of it as a train stop between his cruelly high-pressure job and an empty existence at home with a dissatisfied wife. It has an even more downbeat ending, as we see the man finally get off the train and walk happily into the town. Then, modern day, we see his body hauled off in a hearse belonging to a Willoughby Funeral Home; he had actually stepped off the moving train to his death.
All of those were written by Serling (with "Time Enough at Last" being an adaption of a short story by someone else), and like the rest of the series, were somehow or another inspired by Serling's life experiences. The Twilight Zone, really, was just a route for Serling's life journey, as themes like war, racism, the right to free expression (and Serling's politically liberal views on those last three), childhood, small towns, big city pressures, censorship, sudden death, men who love to talk, aviation and space flight, even occasional ventures into old time radio and even one episode about TV production itself, all wove themselves through this tapestry. This being an anthology show, by nature, the results weren't always consistent, but when the show connected, it was art, and some of the best television of all time. It's also my second favorite TV show.
And now, Serling had more artistic freedom, though he'd be reined in on other production matters. He no longer found lines censored to appease nervous, controversy-shy network executives or control-happy sponsors. If one advertiser wasn't happy, there were usually others, say, Pall Mall cigarettes or Prell Shampoo or Pepsi or Crest, to take their place.
Over the show's five year run, Serling wrote 92 of the show's 156 scripts, many from his own original ideas. This, however, put him back onto the treadmill he ran in the early to mid 1950s, where he constantly churned out scripts that began to become less consistent. Then the show ran into problems with the network; CBS President Jim Aubrey complained about the show's episodes going over budget (due to special effects, set decoration, location shoots and makeup). He ordered the second season to be a few episodes shorter, and some of the episodes to even be shot on videotape at CBS Television City as a money saving device.
The show was actually cancelled after season three; its replacement, an hour long sitcom called Fair Exchange, failed, so what was now called Twilight Zone was brought back as an hour long format to fill up the timeslot in the spring of 1963. Serling, however, always preferred the half hour format; many of the hour long episodes are heavily padded with extra dialogue and even entire scenes repeating themselves at length. Its fifth and final season, the one in which I was born and that is the focus of this blog, the show went back to a half hour. Despite the vision and heavy script output by the show's legendary executive producer, neither of the scripts I'm profiling were actually written by Serling.
By now the show had a new opening, the theme and narration best remembered by fans: "You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone."
The week I was born was a typical, not-special-but-workable, script called "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross," adapted from a Henry Slesar short story by Don McNeely. Don Gordon plays the jerk of a title character, Sal, who drives up in a Lincoln Continental...which we find out shortly is not his. It belongs to someone who hired him to wash it, in fact. He's trying to get Leah Maitland (Gail Kobe) to go out with him, but she's done with him. He thinks it's because she's a social worker and he's one of her cases, "a crumb with dirt on my hands," who defends himself with an eye-rolling declaration, "I don't need books to show me which way is up. "We're just two people who are never going to understand each other," Leah tries to explain. Her father, very cool to Sal's overtures, shows up at the door and Leah goes in. Sal punches the door and growls, "Why can't I want something in my life and get it?"
Serling, in his open, describes Salvadore as "volatile mixture of fury and frustration" and tells us he's now hospital bound. "Ambition: shows great determination toward self-improvement. Estimate for potential success: a sure bet for listing in 'Who's Who' in the Twilight Zone.'"
For his broken hand, Sal gets to spend a night in the hospital, with an elderly bed mate (portrayed by veteran character actor J. Pat O'Malley). The old man asks about Sal's broken hand, and discusses his chest congestion, which could turn into pneumonia, suggesting Sal's the lucky one. "Young man, you could break both legs and an elbow, and you'd still be swimming inside of a month!" Sal then tells him "You take my busted hand, and I'll take your lousy cold!" and the old man says it's a deal.
Sure enough, Sal wakes up with a perfectly fine hand and a cough. The old man begs for his cough back, concerned his hand will never heal at his age. Sal laughs and says "All deals are final!" as he gets his clothes out of the hospital room closet and leaves.
He then makes a deal with the Lincoln owner, Mr. Halpert, an older man who's rich and still likes to party. Sal promises to sell him his years (26 of them apparently) for $1 million plus the apartment. Mr. Halpert laughs him out of the place as he accepts the deal, but Sal promises he has a big surprise coming.
Sure enough, in the next scene. we see a much older Sal trying to lowball his years back from a younger doorman at what's now his apartment. At first the young man is reluctant, saying "the days may be dull but I wouldn't swap my nights for all the crown jewels in a golden bucket," but then says O.K. as Sal writes out a $1,000 check for a year of the guy's life. The fellow promises to tell his friends and perhaps sell a couple more years himself.
After a commercial break, the older Sal gets into an elevator with a new building worker, starts talking to him...and by the time they're on the ground floor, Sal is young again, while the elevator operator has suddenly aged decades in a matter of a few floors. So, Sal is now youthful and rich...but we'll see he has yet to put a dent in that awful, awful personality of his.
He has a chat with Mr. Maitland, whose approval he wants to date his daughter (since Dad has apparently a lot of influence over his daughter). Mr. Maitland still doesn't like Sal, even though he's happy to see him turn his life around. Sal, flashing that personality of his (and proving Dad's point), then wants to know what makes him so "top shelf...teaching in that rattrap school all your life...no, not teaching, babysitting?! And you come home from the war, and what do you bring? A game leg, and a handful of crummy souvenirs!"
That last part has him gesturing to some guns and things on the apartment wall. Dad asks if Sal could be a good husband and if he loves his daughter; Sal just says he wants her and can buy her anything she wants.
Leah comes home in the middle of this, and is impressed with how Sal looks and talks; Sal explains he paid a "friend from college" to coach him on his speaking skills. Leah agrees to go out with him and makes out with him at his fancy apartment, but then tells him, being attracted to him was never the problem. The needy jerk vows, "You tell me what kind of guy you want and I'll be that guy."
"It doesn't work that way," Leah says.
"Well, I've got a Christmas morning surprise for you, baby--it works that way with me!" he responds, vowing he can be anything he wants. She explains the man she marries will have compassion like her father and he just doesn't. Sure enough, what she expresses as a plea for humanity is interpreted by Sal as "I have daddy issues, so you'll have to push this button right over here."
Sal takes her home and talks to Mr. Maitland for a bit. He offers the old man $100,000 and tersely tells him to "Let that sum stir around in your head for a minute."
Final scene, Sal drives up with Leah in what's now his Lincoln (a perfect symbol of material success), and actually says the words "I love you" to her (something he avoided all episode long), She excuses herself to her room and Sal talks alone to her dad. He is contrite, explaining he wanted Leah originally because she was a prize,a symbol, but has now (just in the last day, apparently) gotten to know the true her. He apologizes for all the grief and worry he caused Mr. Maitland, who repeats his vow that he won't marry Leah.
"I'm asking you for forgiveness, compassion?" Sal says.
"Compassion? Don't you remember? I sold it to you yesterday." Mr. Maitland takes out a gun and shoots Sal dead. Sal has learned his lesson the hard way: if your vision of improving yourself involves taking things or buying them like a commodity, you'll never live to see much of a life.
As Sal lies on the floor, we hear Serling's narration: "The Salvadore Ross Program for Self-Improvement. The all-in-one sure-fire success course that lets you lick the bully, learn the language, dance the tango, and anything else you were to do, or think you want to do. Money-back guarantee, offer limited to, the Twilight Zone."
This is a so-so episode in a hit-or-miss season. Serling didn't write this one, but he did write a very romantic one a week earlier, "The Long Morrow," about a man who's supposed to go into suspended animation for a lengthy space voyage, only to meet a woman the day before the mission and fall in love with her. There are a lot of stories like these two this season, and I suspect it may have been intended to lure more female viewers, who weren't usually a big part of sci-fi audiences in those days like they are now.
Still, the season has a lot of all-time great episodes, great pieces of sci-fi/fantasy and television. "In Praise of Pip" concerns Jack Klugman as a washed-up numbers runner who just found out his son was critically injured in Vietnam. This Serling-penned early look at the conflict includes one of Klugman's all time greatest performances, as his son Pip suddenly returns to him--in his younger, childhood self, at a deserted amusement park, for one last ride on all the attractions. "A Kind of Stopwatch" has an obnoxious, overly-talkative man (perhaps modeled after Serling's own younger self) who finds a stopwatch that makes time stand still. Mickey Rooney puts on a bravura one-man show in the title role of "The Last Night of a Jockey," who swears one day he'll be "big" again. (Wrong thing to say, Mickey.)
"You Drive" is a "reverse Christine"--a 1956 Ford Fairlane Club Sedan that comes to life, acting as the nagging conscience of a hit and run driver. "Living Doll," inspired by Mattel's "Chatty Cathy" doll, is about a toy who declares war on a cold, abusive stepfather (Telly Savalas), his attempts to rid the doll acting as a stand-in for his abusive tendencies toward wife and stepdaughter. "I am the Night--Color Me Black" is one of Serling's all time most vehement, nakedly political scripts, about a town where a man is about to be executed, in which the sun suddenly won't come out and it remains dark. To underscore the point of this early 1964 episode, a radio announcer mentions the names of other locations suffering the same problem: half the city of Berlin, the entire nation of Vietnam, a street in Dallas Texas, the entire city of Birmingham Alabama, and part of Chicago. The darkness, clearly, is supposed to be hate, sadness and hopelessness.
And then there's the chilling, spellbinding piece of science fiction that could be one of the greatest TV episodes in the genre in all of history--not to mention William Shatner's greatest ever performance that doesn't involve him being Captain Kirk or attorney Denny Crane. "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" was written by possibly the series' greatest non-Serling writer, science fiction great Richard Matheson ("I am Legend"), who we lost just last year; it's directed by Richard Donner, who later directed the "Lethal Weapon" movies and the first two Christopher Reeve "Superman" films.
Just three years before he'd be the captain of the Starship Enterprise, Shatner plays a man terrified of the plane trip he's about to take. And it's for good reason: Robert Wilson, 37, husband, father, and salesman, had a nervous breakdown on his last flight that resulted in an emergency landing. As we see him taking a seat next to his loving, comforting wife, he gets nervous as he eyes the handle to the emergency exit, which, as it turns out, is where he's sitting. He also jumps when he hears the pilot secure the door, and questions whether he's fully cured. "It's all over now, Bob, and mama's taking you home," says his wife, Julia.
Switch to Serling explaining that Bob is on sick leave from his previous breakdown, and saying this time he'll go "all the way to his planned destination, which despite what Mr. Wilson thinks, is in the darkest region, of the Twilight Zone."
After the commercial, Wilson starts to settle down for his trip home. The fact that it's raining and there's thunder and lightning isn't helping his nervousness much. Then he sees it for the first time: that now iconic creature on the wing. "There's a man out there!" he exclaims to the stewardess and his wife, but sure enough, when they all look, he's gone. Wilson takes some kind of pain reliever, and then gently pulls the curtain back...
Obviously there's another freakout, and he's gone...seconds later, Wilson sees the woolly-looking creature "land" on the wing again. (The creature has no wings, he just glides in as if he's being held by an invisible parachute.) Then just before the commercial break, Wilson's mouth drops open as we see the creature start to pull up a sheet of metal to tinker with the engine wiring.
This is all very effective. Shatner's character knows he had a nervous breakdown earlier and knows what everyone's gone to think..."I know I had a mental breakdown. I know I had it in an airplane. I know it looks to you as if the same thing is happening again, but it isn't. I'm sure, it isn't," he tells his wife. The look on her face shows she believes otherwise. At the same time, Wilson is terrified that he's actually seeing something real, and that the plane could crash if he doesn't convince someone to keep an eye on the left engine.
Air travel has accelerated during this time, as the arrival of the jet age has now carried more people to and from their destinations by plane. This, however, is a twin propeller plane, which harkens back to the World War II days when air corps pilots claimed to see "gremlins" on the wings of their aircraft...and sure enough, Wilson mentions that possibility to his wife.
The fact that the creature can just safely walk around and not lose his balance on a flying airplane also makes us wonder if the visions we're seeing along with him aren't some sort of hallucination.
Julia goes to get the pilot to take to Bob. They discuss the creature, who the pilot claims to have seen. He tells Bob they won't make a big deal out of it to alarm the other passengers but thanks him for telling him. Bob appears to resent the condescension. The pilot tells the stewardess to give him "one of those pills" so he'll be "out for hours."
As Bob sends his wife off for water, he sneaks over to a highway patrolman who's on the same flight, to get his gun. (We saw the trooper get on the flight at the beginning; as we saw in "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross," Twilight Zone always adhered to the rule about Chekov's Gun.) Bob takes the gun and heads back to his seat, with a haunting expression on his face knowing he's facing a terrible fear by embarking on a terrible, questionable, desperate act...then fastens his seatbelt and grabs the knob on the emergency exit. (The show also believes in "Chekov's Emergency Exit Knob," apparently.) The panel flies away, almost sucking Bob out of the plane, as he fires the gun at the creature and sees it clutch its chest and go down.
The final shot has Bob being taken out of the plane on a stretcher,in a straightjacket. The trooper is shaking his head, Julia is vowing to see him soon, the pilot thinks he tried to commit suicide. Bob leans up, saying--maybe to his wife, maybe to the pilot, maybe to himself or just to us--"I know, but I'm the only one who does know, right now." He's loaded into an ambulance.
Serling tells us, over a shot of the plane's wing, with a police car and the ambulance in the background, "The flight of Mr. Robert Wilson has ended now. A flight not only from point A to point B, but also from fear of recurring mental breakdown." The camera pans slowly down to wing, to bent, pulled-up plate as Serling continues: "Mr. Wilson has that fear no longer, though at the moment he is as he has said, alone in his assurance. Happily, his conviction will not remain isolated too much longer, for happily, tangible manisfestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even as so intangible a quarter, as the Twilight Zone."
It's a brilliant piece of science fiction, with that science including the study of psychology. Shatner, who gets mocked a lot for his acting style, will not get that from me, not for this: his abject horror of seeing his life and that of everyone else on the plane threatened, while knowing no one will ever believe him through no honest fault of his own, is heartrending and convincing. And it's a set piece: basically, this has four scenes to it, all either on the plane or directly next to it, yet the action makes the time fly by (no pun intended). The least convincing part of the episode is the creature's appearance like it's wearing a large sweater; the remake in the 1983 "Twilight Zone: the Movie" (with John Lithgow in Shatner's role) improved upon it by making the creature part of the "Alien"/"Predator" tradition.
Overall, The Twilight Zone is the vision of one righteous man with a lot of passion...perhaps it's Rod Serling's own "Willoughby," a dream, or series of dreams, on his life's journey, composed of fragments of his own experiences and the beliefs that tie them all together. Yet, it's a universal series of dreams. There's something that, while other black and white series from the 1950s and 1960s are long forgotten, keeps this show selling Blu-Rays and drawing viewers to Syfy every New Year's weekend. And that's quite a feat: the show is known for its shocking twist endings,and they're often a leading part of an episode description. ("Remember the time Roddy McDowall was the astronaut welcomed to Mars...then they put him in a Martian zoo?") By nature, those endings should only work once...yet people like me keep coming back, over and over.
Availability: the entire series is on DVD, Blu-Ray and Hulu and is rerun on two different cable networks.
Next time on this channel: the gorilla born the same day as me.
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