On an anthology show like The Twilight Zone, the stories are the stars. We had no leads with fat weekly salaries, no recurring characters to service, no continuing storylines. As a result we could sometimes attract feature actors and directors who would never have consented to appear on an ordinary episodic drama. I got very lucky with “The Road Less Traveled.” My script was sent to Wes Craven. He liked it, and agreed to direct.
We speak of television programs running an hour (most dramas) or a half-hour (all sitcoms), but of course the shows themselves are nowhere near that long, since commercials eat up a large amount of that time. In the mid ‘80s, an “hour-long” drama was roughly forty-six minutes long, a “half-hour” sitcom about twenty-three minutes.
Of course, when you shoot a script, it is very rare that you will get exactly as much film as you need. Most rough cuts run long, by anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. No problem. The show’s editors, working with the director and the producers, simply take the tape into the editing room and trim, until they have forty-six or twenty-three minutes of footage, as required.
Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone was a half-hour program for most of its run. It is those episodes that most fans recall. The show actually expanded to a “full hour” for one season, but those hours are seldom seen in syndication, since they will not fit into the same time slots as the rest of the series run. Whether an hour or a half-hour, however, Serling’s Twilight Zone featured only one story per episode.
TZ-2 was an hour-long show, but it used the format of another Serling series, The Night Gallery, rather than that of the original Zone. Each hour was made up of two or three unconnected tales of varying length. It was seldom as neat as dividing one forty-six-minute hour into two twenty-three-minute half-hours. One week, the show might have a thirty-minute episode teamed with one that ran sixteen minutes; the next week, a twenty-one-minute segment with a twenty-five; the week after an eighteen, a fifteen, and a thirteen. It did not matter how long the individual segments ran, so long as they added up to forty-six minutes after editing.
“The Road Less Traveled” was too long (and too expensive). But it was felt to be a strong script, and had a very strong director in Wes Craven, who shot some terrific film. When Wes turned in his director’s cut, it was longer than all but a few of our previous segments, but it was also a powerful little film. The decision was made to make only minor trims to Wes Craven’s cut. If the hour ran long, time could always be taken out of the other segment to get us down to the necessary forty-six minutes.
The show as finally assembled paired a thirty-six minute cut of “The Road Less Traveled” with a ten-minute version of … well, to tell the truth, I no longer recall which second-season episode I had drawn as my running mate. The show was edited, color-timed, scored. Effects were added, along with the opening and closing narrations. Around the office, Mike Cassutt and my other friends were congratulating me. There was talk of Emmy Awards for Wes Craven and Cliff DeYoung. The show was delivered to the network, locked and finished and ready for broadcast.
Then CBS took The Twilight Zone off the air.
It should not have come as a shock. Our ratings had been weak at the end of the first season, and had only gotten weaker during the second. Even so, the network was not canceling the show. Not quite. Instead they were taking us off the air for “retooling.”
Gloom descended on the MTM lot as we sat around our offices waiting for the other shoe to drop. Soon enough it did. We were going back on the air, in a new time slot … as a half-hour show. The original Twilight Zone had enjoyed its greatest success as a half-hour, CBS reasoned; perhaps we could do the same. And by the way, no more of this two or three stories per show stuff. From now on each episode would be a single story, twenty-three minutes in length. As for those episodes already in the can, they would have to be re-edited to fit the new half-hour format.
“The Road Less Traveled” was broadcast on December 18, 1986, but it was not the show that I had been so proud of. A truncated, mutilated remnant aired instead. Thirteen minutes had been excised, more than a third of the episode’s original length. The pacing was shot to hell, and much of the character development was gone.
If any of you chanced to catch “The Road Less Traveled” in syndication, it was the butchered version you saw. The original thirty-six-minute cut was never aired, and so far as I know only two copies of it still exist on tape. Wes Craven has one, I understand. I have the other. I would show it to you if I could, but I can’t. All I can do is let you read my script.
For what it’s worth, I can’t really quarrel with the network’s decision. The Twilight Zone was dying; CBS had to try something. The half-hour format was worth a shot. In hindsight, the series might have been better off if it had been a half-hour show right from the start. So I cannot fault the suits for making the change. I only wish they had waited a week, until after “The Road Less Traveled” had been aired.
Sad to say, ratings showed no notable improvement, and CBS finally pulled the plug halfway through the second season. A short time later, a third incarnation of The Twilight Zone arose from our ashes, and produced thirty cheap new half-hour shows which were bundled with our episodes to make a syndication package. TZ-3 inherited our unproduced scripts and filmed a few of them (most notably Alan Brennert’s fine adaptation of “The Cold Equations”), but otherwise had no connection to its predecessor. Or to me.
The Twilight Zone was a unique show, the perfect series for someone like me. My first thought when it went off the air was that I was done with Hollywood. Hollywood was not done with me, however. The corpse of TZ-2 had scarcely cooled before I found myself writing a treatment for Max Headroom. A few months after that one of my TZ scripts got into the hands of Ron Koslow, the creator and Executive Producer of a new urban fantasy series called Beauty and the Beast that would be making its premiere in the fall of 1987. I was not convinced I wanted to do another show, but when my agents sent me a tape of Koslow’s Beauty and the Beast pilot, the quality of the writing, acting, and cinematography blew me away.
I joined the staff of Beauty and the Beast in June of 1987, and spent three years with the series, rising from Executive Story Consultant to Supervising Producer. It was a very different sort of show than The Twilight Zone had been, but once again I found myself working with some terrific actors, writers, and directors. The show was twice nominated for an Emmy Award as Best Dramatic Series. I wrote and produced thirteen episodes, did uncredited rewrites on a score of others, and had a finger in everything from casting and budgeting to post-production, learning a great deal in the process. By the time Beauty and the Beast died its premature death, I had the experience and the credits to dream about creating and running a show of my own.
Fast forward to the summer of 1991. I was back at home in Santa Fe (though I worked in Hollywood for ten years, I never actually moved to Los Angeles, and would flee back to New Mexico and Parris the moment my current project wrapped). Since the end of Beauty and the Beast, I had written the pilot for a medical show and the screenplay for a low-budget science fiction movie (it wasn’t so low-budget after I got done with it). Neither had gone anywhere, and no new assignment was in the offing, so I started work on a new novel. Avalon was science fiction, a return to my old future history. The writing seemed to be going well, until one day a chapter came to me about a young boy who goes to see a man beheaded. It was not a part of Avalon, I knew. I knew I had to write it too, so I put the other book aside and began what would ultimately become A Game of Thrones.
When I was a hundred pages into the fantasy, however, my lovely and energetic Hollywood agent Jodi Levine called to report that she’d gotten pitch meetings for me at NBC, ABC, and Fox. (CBS, the network that had aired both The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast, was the only network that did not want to hear my ideas. Go figure.) I had been telling Jodi that my werewolf novella “The Skin Trade” would make a swell franchise for a series, and asking her to get me in to pitch it. Now s
he had. So I put A Game of Thrones in the same drawer with Avalon and flew out to L.A. to try and sell the networks on a buddy series about a hot young female private eye and an asthmatic hypochondriac werewolf.
It’s always best to have more than one string to your bow when fiddling for networks, so I noodled with some other notions on the plane. Somewhere over Phoenix, the opening line of “The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr” came back to me. There is a girl who goes between the worlds …
By the time I got off the plane, that line had mutated into a concept for an alternate-world series I called Doors (it was later changed to Doorways, to avoid confusion with Jim Morrison’s band and Oliver Stone’s film). It was Doors that ABC, NBC, and Fox all responded to, not “The Skin Trade.” I flew home thinking that Fox was the most likely of the three to bite, but ABC was faster on the trigger. A few days later, I had a pilot.
Doorways became my life for the next two years. I took the project to Columbia Pictures Television, where my old Twilight Zone colleague Jim Crocker joined me as Executive Producer. The rest of 1991 I spent writing and rewriting the pilot. I did several story treatments and beat outlines before going to script. The toughest question I faced was deciding what sort of alternate world Tom and Cat should visit in the pilot. After long consultations with Jim Crocker and the execs at Columbia and ABC, I went with “winter world,” a stark post-holocaust Earth locked in the throes of a nuclear winter. My first draft, as usual, was too long and too expensive, but Crocker seemed pleased with it, as was Columbia.
ABC was pleased as well … with the first half of the script. Unfortunately, the network guys had changed their minds about what should happen when Tom and Cat go through the first door. Winter world was too grim, they now decided. If we went to series, we could go there for an episode, certainly, but for the pilot ABC felt we needed a less depressing scenario.
It meant tearing up the entire second half of my script and doing it all over, but I gnashed my teeth, put in some late nights and long weekends, and got it done. In place of winter world, I sent Tom and Cat to a timeline where all the petroleum on Earth had been eaten some years earlier by a bioengineered virus designed to clean up oil spills. Needless to say, this caused a rather major … ah, burp … but civilization recovered after a fashion, and the resulting world was far less grim than winter world had been.
In January 1992, ABC gave us a production order for a ninety-minute pilot. To offset some of the projected budget deficits (my script was too long and too expensive), Columbia also decided to produce a two-hour version for European television. Academy Award winner Peter Werner was hired to direct, and preproduction began. Casting was a hell and a half, and actually caused us to delay the shoot (with fateful consequences further down the road), but we finally found our regulars. George Newbern was perfect as Tom, Rob Knepper made a splendid Thane, and Kurtwood Smith was so good in his dual role as Trager that we would have brought him back many times had we gone to series. For Cat, we had to go across the ocean to Paris, where we discovered a brilliant and beautiful young Breton stage actress named Anne LeGuernec. I remain convinced that if Doorways had gone to series, Anne would have become a huge star. There was no one like her on American television, then or now. We found some great people for our guest roles too, adding Hoyt Axton as Jake and Tisha Putman as Cissy. Finally we were go to roll.
When we screened the rough cut for ABC that summer, we got an enthusiastic reception and an order for six back-up scripts, so we would be ready to go into production as a mid-season replacement in 1993. I wrote one of the six scripts myself, hired some terrific writers to do the other five, and spent the remainder of 1992 and the first few months of 1993 doing rewrites, going over pattern budgets, and getting ready to go to series.
It never happened. ABC passed. The why of that remains a matter of conjecture, though I have my theories. Bad timing might have been a part of it. By the time we finally found our Tom and Cat, we had missed the development window for the ’92 fall season. We seemed to be a lock for the fall of ’93, but there was a shakeup at ABC before that decision day rolled around, and both of the execs who had supervised the pilot ended up leaving the network. We might also have made a mistake when we agreed to scrap winter world, which would have given the second half of the show a visual and visceral impact that no-oil world could not match. The test audiences and focus groups would have gotten a much different idea of the dramatic potential of the series from a world in more desperate straits.
Or maybe it was something else entirely. No one will ever know for certain. After ABC pulled the plug, Columbia screened the pilot for NBC, CBS, and Fox, but it is a rare thing for one network to pick up a project developed for another. Heinlein said it best: if you let them piss in the soup, they like the flavor better.
Doorways died. I mourned a while, and went on.
You don’t forget, though. Ten years have passed, but it still makes me sad to think what might have been. It gives me great pleasure to include the script in this retrospective. No writer wants to see his children buried in an unmarked grave.
I debated a long time over which version of the script to use here. The later drafts are more polished, but in the end I decided to use the first draft, the one with winter world. The two-hour European cut of Doorways has been released on videotape everywhere but in the U.S.A., and large crowds saw the rough cut of the ninety-minute version at the test screenings we did for MagiCon, the 1992 worldcon in Orlando, Florida. But no one has ever visited winter world till now. And what could be more appropriate for an alternate-worlds story than to present an alternate version of the script?
Doorways will always be the great “what if” of my career. I wrote other pilots—Black Cluster, The Survivors, Starport—but Doorways was the only one to get beyond the script stage, the only one to be filmed, the only one to come within a whisker of winning a spot on a network’s primetime schedule. If it had, who knows? It might have run for two episodes, or for ten years. I might still be writing and producing the show today, or I might have been fired two months into the series. The only certainty is that I would be much, much richer than I am at present.
On the other hand, I would never have finished A Game of Thrones, or written the other volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire. So maybe it all turned out for the best after all.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE: “THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED”
FADE IN
INT.—LIVING ROOM—NIGHT
JEFF MCDOWELL and his wife DENISE, an attractive couple in their late thirties, are cuddled together on their couch, watching TV. She’s sleepy but contented; he’s rapt on the screen. The light of the TV plays over their faces. The furnishings are eclectic, not expensive or terribly chic, but comfortable. There’s a fireplace, with bookshelves to either side stuffed with magazines and plenty of well-read dog-eared paperbacks.
O.S. we HEAR dialogue from the original version of The Thing: the exchange “What if it can read minds?” “Then it’ll be real mad when it gets to me.” Jeff smiles. Behind them, we SEE their five-year-old daughter, MEGAN, enter the room.
MEGAN
Daddy, I’m scared.
As Megan comes over to the couch, Denise sits up. The girl climbs up into Jeff’s lap.
JEFF
Hey, it’s only a space carrot.
Vegetables are nothing to be scared of.
(beat, smile)
What are you doing down here anyway?
Aren’t you supposed to be in bed?
MEGAN
There’s a man in my room.
Denise and Jeff exchange looks. Jeff hits the pause button.
DENISE
Honey, you were just having a bad dream.
MEGAN
(stubborn)
I was not! I saw him, Mommy.
JEFF
(to Denise)
My turn, I guess.
Jeff picks up his daughter, carries her toward the stairs.
JEFF
(cheerful, reassuring)
(aside, to Denise)
If he reads minds, he’ll be real mad when he gets to me.
CUT TO
INT.—MEGAN’S BEDROOM
as Jeff opens the door. A typical untidy five-year-old’s room. Dolls, toys, a small bed. A huge stuffed animal, fallen on its side, fills one corner. The only light is a small nightlight in the shape of some cartoon character. Megan points.
MEGAN
He was over there. He was watching me, Daddy.
JEFF’S POINT OF VIEW
as he looks. Under the window is a shape that does indeed look like a man sitting in a chair, staring at them.
BACK TO THE SCENE
Jeff turns on the overhead light, and suddenly the man in the chair is nothing but a pile of clothes.
JEFF
See. It’s nothing, Megan.
MEGAN
It was a man, Daddy. He scared me.
Jeff musses his daughter’s hair.
JEFF
Just a bad dream, Megan. My big girl isn’t scared of a little nightmare, is she?
He carries her to bed, tucks her in. Megan looks uncertain about the whole thing; she sure doesn’t want to be left alone.
JEFF
Dreamsongs 2-Book Bundle Page 86
