I found I could sell everything I hadand I did, Serling said later. I realize now I was wrong; a lot of them should have stayed in the trunk … I had three bad shows on the air in [one] two week period. Not since the British raided Cologne had so many bombs landed in such a small space in such a short time.
The movie offers were taken up, too. The first script that Serling worked on was 20th Century-Foxs Between Heaven and Hell, which was eventually done by six other writers. Serling: I turned in a script that would conservatively have run for nine hours on the screen. I think it was about 500 pages long. I didnt know what the hell I was doing. They just said, Heres fifteen hundred a week, and so I just wrote and wrote. I lay claim to the fact that there were some wonderful moments in itbut in nine hours of film, my God, there has to be a couple of wonderful moments if a guy just blows his nose!
Serling wrote a handful of screenplays during this period which were never made, including an adaptation of John Christophers science fiction novel No Blade of Grass. Other than Patterns, only one Serling script was produced, a western called Saddle the Wind, of which he later said, I gave better dialogue to the horses than the actors.
This is not to say everything Serling wrote during this period was bad. His screenplay for Patterns, in which he expanded his original script from a running time of fifty-three minutes to eighty-four minutes, was skillful and intense. Then, too, there was The Rack, an hour-long drama on the United States Steel Hour, which was an honest and powerful investigation into the after-effects of mental torture on American POWs in Korea (later made into a film starring Paul Newman, with a script by Stewart Stern). But nothing he wrote during the year or so following Patterns seemed to have either the same dramatic punch or the power to remain long imbedded in the public mind. This point was driven home to Serling when, during a network interview, he was introduced as Rod Serling, the man who wrote Patterns and (a long pause) . . and … well … here he isRod Serling.
The pressure was on. I had something to prove, first to others and then to myself. I had to prove that Patterns wasnt all I had. There had been other things before and there would be other things to follow.
On October 4, 1956, CBS debuted a ninety-minute, weekly series called Playhouse 90. The aim of the show was ambitious: to recruit the best actors, writers and directors and to air shows of a quality never before seen on television. In this aim, they were largely successful. Stars on Playhouse 90 included Paul Muni, Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas, Cliff Robertson, Jason Robards, Ethel Barrymore, Shirley Booth, Boris Karloff, Franchot Tone, Geraldine Page and Sterling Hayden. Original presentations included The Miracle Worker, Judgment at Nuremberg, and The Days of Wine and Rosesall later made into films. Three out of every four shows were to be live, with the fourth on film. Budget was set at $100,000 per episode.
The first episode was Forbidden Area, with a script by Serling from a novel by Pat Frank. The cast consisted of Charlton Heston, Vincent Price, and Tab Hunter. If either Serling or the executives behind Playhouse 90expected to have their reputations made by this show, they were quickly disillusioned. The reviews were not glowing, nor should they have been, considering the plot of this Cold War thriller. Air Force nuclear bombers are mysteriously being blown up in flight. One-eyed Major Charlton Heston suspects sabotage. Ultimately, the enemy within is uncovered. Tab Hunter, a cook in the Strategic Air Command kitchen, has been smuggling bombs inside the coffee Thermoses the bomber pilots have been taking with them on their flights! It presented a war drama that ran the gamut of hokum, wrote a less-than-enthusiastic Jack Gould in the New York Times. Mr. Serlings script had everything in it but the proverbial kitchen sink. Clearly, this was not the play to top Patterns.
But as it turned out, the second Playhouse 90 was Requiem for a Heavyweight, the first original ninety-minute show ever written for television, aired October 11, 1956. An enormously touching story, it starred Jack Palance as Harlan Mountain McClintock, a fighter on the rapid and ugly decline, Keenan Wynn as his unscrupulous manager, Ed Wynn as his sympathetic trainer and Kim Hunter as a concerned social worker.
Serlings close friend, producer Dick Berg, was with Rod that evening. I spent the night with him at his house in Connecticut with our respective wives the night that Requiem ran, and I must say he was quite uncertain as to what the reception would be. Those were the live television days and you waited until the New York Times arrived the next morning before you could determine whether or not you had a good show. And while we felt rather warmly toward it, there was no persuading Rod that it worked until Jack Gould of the New York Times told him it worked.
And in fact, our morning New York Times arrived and the review was missing, because Gould simply wanted more time. And when the later edition came with the review, it was the first of thousands all over the countryand, of course, it was the accolade of the decade.
Requiem for a Heavyweight swept the 1956 Emmy Awards, winning for best single show of the year, best teleplay, best direction (Ralph Nelson), best single performance (Jack Palance), and best art direction (Albert Heschong). Serling was also awarded the Sylvania Award, the Television-Radio Writers Annual Award for Writing Achievement, and the George Foster Peabody Award (the first writing award ever given in the seventeen-year history of the Peabodys).
The years that followed were bright for Serling. In 1957, his adaptation of Ernest Lehmans short story, The Comedian, starring Mickey Rooney, won him his third Emmy. The Dark Side of the Earth, about the unsuccessful Hungarian revolt against Russia, won critical acclaim. So, too, did A Town Has Turned to Dust and The Rank and File in 1958 and The Velvet Alley, his partially autobiographical story of a TV writers rise to the top, in 1959. All of these were scripts for Playhouse 90 and each one brought him $10,000. In January of 1958, he signed a contract with MGM to write four screenplays for a total of $250,000. In February, he, Carol, and daughters Jodi and Anne, ages five and two respectively, moved into a sumptuous, two-story house in Pacific Palisades.
Artistically and financially, Serling was a very successful man. So why then, in 1957, did he begin looking for an alternative to Playhouse 90 and motion pictures, an alternative that would eventually become The Twilight Zone?
Perhaps a small part of the answer comes from this seemingly trivial fact: prior to the initial broadcast of a show hed written, it was decided that the Chrysler Building had to be painted out of New York skyline as seen through an office window on the set because the sponsor of the show was the Ford Motor Company.
Or this: on a program called Appointment with Adventure, the words American and lucky were stricken from his script and United States and fortunate put in their place because the sponsor was a tobacco company concerned that the words might remind viewers of rival brands of cigarettes.
Or this: prior to the broadcast of Requiem for a Heavyweight, the line Got a match? was struck because the sponsor was Ronson lighters.
Or, more importantly, this: in 1956, Serling wrote Noon on Doomsday for United States Steel Hour. The plot concerned a violent neurotic who kills an elderly Jew and then is acquitted by residents of the small town in which he lives.
Before the show was broadcast, a reporter asked him if the script was based on the Emmett Till case, in which a black, fourteen-year-old boy was kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi and the murderers were acquitted by an all-white local jury. Serling replied, If the shoe fits … Variety and others reported that Noon on Dooomsday was based on the Till case. Three thousand letters poured into the offices of U.S. Steel threatening a boycott. I asked the agency men at the time how the problem of boycott applied to the United States Steel company, Serling later wrote. Did this mean that from then on that all construction from Tennessee on down would be done with aluminum? Their answer was that the concern of the sponsor was not so much an economic boycott as the resultant strain in public relations.
U.S. Steel demanded changes in the script. The town was moved from an unspecified area to New England. The murdered Jew was changed
to an unnamed foreigner. Bottles of Coca-Cola were removed from the set and the word lynch stricken from the script (both having been determined too Southern in their connotation). Characters were made to say This is a strange little town or This is a perverse town, so that no one would identify with it. Finally, they wanted to change the vicious, neurotic killer into just a good decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong. 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. It was The Time Element, an imaginative time-travel fantasy that had been aired on The Storm in Cincinnati. He expanded the script to an hour and had his secretary type these words on the front page:
THE TWILIGHT ZONE
THE TIME ELEMENT BY
ROD SERLING Then he submitted it to CBS.II / ENTERING THE TWILIGHT ZONE
Lets not kid ourselves about Twilight Zone. A lot of luck was involved in selling that to anyone. It was a show no one wanted to buy.
To say that CBS greeted The Time Element with less than open arms would be an understatement. They did buy the script, but then promptly shelved it. And it would undoubtedly have remained on the shelf to this day, gathering dust like so many other worthy projects, had it not been for the efforts of a man named Bert Granet.
Even today, Granet seems a tough, hard-nosed realist who fights hard for the things he wants. In 1958, he was producing Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, a series featuring pedestrian dramas three weeks out of four and situation comedies starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz every fourth week. In years past he had encountered his share of difficulties while producing motion pictures such as Berlin Express, directed by Jacques Tourneur, and The Marrying Kind, directed by George Cukor and starring Judy Holliday, but on Desilu Playhouse he faced a new problem: how to lend prestige to a television show that had absolutely no pretensions to great art.
Granet went about solving his problem in two ways: first, by securing big-name film actors to star and, secondly, by buying up scripts from top television writers. Rod Serling was definitely a name he wanted on the credits of his show.
Through a mutual friend, television and film director Robert Parrish (who later directed One for the Angels, A Stop at Willoughby, Mr. Bevis, and part of The Mighty Casey for The Twilight Zone), Granet was introduced to Serling. Rod remembered that he had once sold something to CBS, and CBS wasnt doing anything with it, Granet recalls. So, using great persuasion, I found out what it was, got to CBS, and bought it for what was a lot of money at that timeten thousand dollars.
The Time Element was put on the production schedule of Desilu Playhouse for the 1958-59 season. As with every other script of the series, McCann-Erickson, the advertising agency representing Westinghouse, the shows sponsor, had script approval. Granet recalls their reaction. I got a call from New York: Absolutely, flatly no. They didnt want any unfinished stories. They wanted neat bows at the end where each story wrapped up, unlike Twilight Zone stories which gave you many outs, many possibilities of using the imagination.
So I said, Well, I want to do it. And with that, they flew out about four important vice-presidents to tell me why not. And I must say, at this point all it would have meant was swallowing ten thousand dollars in not doing it. But [Desi] Arnaz backed me up.
Reluctantly, McCann-Erickson relented, but not before setting up a few conditions. They said if we did it I had to make a blood promise that I would never do that kind of a story again. Then there was the matter of the script itself. In Serlings original draft, the main character tries unsuccessfully to warn the Army of the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. But Westinghouse had a number of government contracts; they couldnt risk offending the Pentagon. The character would not try to warn the Army.
Once past this point, the production moved ahead smoothly. Granet hired director Allen Reisner, a talented man who had worked with Serling material before. Together, they assembled a cast of strong professionals, with William Bendix in the lead, supported by Martin Balsam, Darryl Hickman, and Jesse White. The budget was approximately $135,000.
On November 24, 1958, The Time Element was aired on CBS. The story, as finally presented, was an intriguing one. Pete Jenson (Bendix), a part-time unsuccessful bookie, card dealer and bartender, seeks out the aid of Dr. Gillespie (Balsam), a psychiatrist. He explains that hes been having a recurring dream in which he finds himself in Honolulu on December 6, 1941the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In his dream, he trie
s to warn a number of people of the attack, including a young naval ensign (Hickman) and his bride (Carol Kearney), and a newspaper editor (Bartlett Robinson). Predictably, no one takes him seriously.
Dr. Gillespie understands perfectly how this could be a most unpleasant dream, but he is astounded when Jenson reveals that he believes these events are real, that he is in fact going back in time! The doctor tries to explain to Jenson the plain impossibility of time travel, but Jenson counters with:
Ive never been in Honolulu in my whole life before, except during that dream. So after the first couple of times I dreamed this I decided Id put it to a test. I knew the ensigns last name. It was an odd one: Janosky. He told me that he and his girl had come from a little town called White Oak, Wisconsin. I placed a call there. There was only one Janosky in the book. A woman answered the phone. She told me she was his mother. I told her that I was an old friend of his from Honolulu and I asked was he there … And then she told me that her son and his wife were killed in Honolulu on December seventh, 1941.
On the psychiatrists couch, Jenson falls asleep. His dream picks up where it last left off, on the morning of December 7, 1941. Through the French doors of his hotel room he sees a number of Japanese planes coming in for a bombing run. Jenson cries out, I told you! Why wouldnt anybody listen to me? His only answer comes with the sound of an explosion, as the panes of the French doors shatter and the room comes down on top of him.
In his office, Dr. Gillespie lifts his head with a start. He is alone. Vaguely, he knows something is amiss, but what? He checks his appointment book; no appointments today. To steady himself, he goes into a bar down the street and orders a drink. On the wall behind the bar, he notices a picture of Pete Jenson. For some reason he cant quite put his finger on, he feels a sense of disquiet.
Whos the guy in the picture? he asks the bartender (Paul Bryer).
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