I went to Buck Houghton, who resolved it with a compromise. However, it was a compromise. It never did what I wanted it to do, which was to have everybody in the audience saying, Why arent they moving? Why are they all just doing this strange thing? And I wanted the sound of the voices on chorus to rise until the hackles rose on the back of your neck. So, the compromise was, I suppose, the best of what Buck could achieve in trying to be fair to an editor with whom he had to work again and a director who was being very adamant.
I didnt forget that, and I felt that therein lay a reason why so many shows that Id seen on television had seemed stamped out. There was no individual style.
As a direct result of that very genuine anger, I called up Buzz Kulik and Lamont Johnson and all those guys, and we all got together. I told them what I just told you, and I said, Have you guys had similar experiences? You should have heard the roar that Sunday morning! I said, Why arent we doing something about it? and we all agreed that we could. I said, Lets form a committee to assist the Guild to start taking positions with Management that will protect our rights as artists! They all agreed, and thats begun a campaign thats still not ended.
Thanks to Silversteins actions, significant changes have been made. Today, that could never happen, he says. If an editor said, I wont cut it that way, hed be fired right there on the spot, or if he werent fired somebody else would be called in. He would just simply have to do it, there would be no question about it, none.
END OF YEAR TWO
For Serling, the spring of 1961 was like a replay of the previous year. Again there were the host of awards including another Hugo, and the 1961 Unity Award for Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations. Then in May, another Emmy, again for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama. In accepting, Serling held up the award and addressed the shows other writers, saying, Come on over, fellas, and well carve it up like a turkey.
Serling wasnt the only Twilight Zone member to pick up an Emmy that year. George Clemens nabbed one for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography for Television. No one could possibly have deserved the award more.
The spring of 1961 also found CBS toying for the first time with the idea of expanding The Twilight Zone from a half hour to an hour. True, just two years earlier the network had made Serling alter his concept of the series from an hour to a half hour, but now the network reasoned that a bigger Twilight Zone would attract a bigger audience. Ultimately, CBS decided not to lengthen The Twilight Zone during its third season. Frankly, Im glad of it, Serling said at the time. We can keep that vignette approach … Little did he know that less than a year later he, Beaumont and Matheson would be busy crafting hour-length scripts.
Thus The Twilight Zone survived its second year. So far, sixty-five episodes had been produced. The worst had been no less than entertaining and the best had been unforgettable. Soon, the quality of the show would begin to slip, but for now the series was at its peak, a peak which few television series before or after would attain.
ROD SERLING
Ive never felt quite so drained of ideas as I do at this moment, Rod Serling said in April of 1961. Stories used to bubble out of me so fast I couldnt set them down on paper quick enoughbut in the last two years Ive written forty-seven of the sixty-eight Twilight Zone scripts, and Ive done thirteen of the first twenty-six for next season. Ive written so much Im woozy.
For Serling, fatigue was finally beginning to overcome his enthusiasm. Its just more than you really should do, he said. You cant retain quality. You start borrowing from yourself, making your own cliches. I notice that more and more.
Other of Serlings talents than writing were just being called into service, however. With the start of the third season, the American Tobacco Company replaced General Foods as a sponsor alternating every other week with Colgate-Palmolive. As a part of the deal, it was arranged that Serling would do a plug for the cigarette sponsor at the end of every show sponsored by American Tobacco. A typical plug went like this: Very often, when you write for a living you run across blocks, moments when you cant think of the right thing to say. Now, happily, there are no blocks to get in the way of the full pleasure of Chesterfield. Great tobaccos make it a wonderful smoke. Try em, they satisfy.
TWO (9/15/61)
Elizabeth Montgomery
Written and Directed by Montgomery Pittman
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: Van Cleave
Cast:
Man: Charles Bronson Woman: Elizabeth Montgomery Stunt Double: Sharon Lucas
This is a jungle, a monument built by nature honoring disuse, commemorating a few years of nature being left to its own devices. But its another kind of jungle, the kind that comes in the aftermath of mans battles against himself. Hardly an important battle, not a Gettysburg or a Marne or an Iwo Jima. More like one insignificant comer patch in the crazy quilt of combat. But it was enough to end the existence of this little city. Its been five years since a human being walked these streets. This is the first day of the sixth yearas man used to measure time. The time: perhaps a hundred years from now. Or sooner. Or perhaps its already happened two million years ago. The Place? The signposts are in English so that we may read them more easily, but the placeis the Twilight Zone.
While searching for food, a young woman wearing the tattered uniform of the invading army encounters an enemy soldierone intent on declaring peace. Initially, she is violently distrustful of him a situation which only intensifies when they remove two working rifles from a pair of skeletons. Later, though, when she admires a dress in a store window, he removes it and gives it to her. She goes into a recruiting office to slip it on. Unfortunately, the propaganda posters within rekindle the old hatreds; she rushes out and fires off several rounds at him. The next day, the man returns, dressed in ill-fitting civilian clothes. To his surprise, the woman is wearing the dress. Finally having put aside the war, she joins him and the two of them set off, side by side.
This has been a love story, about two lonely people who found each other … in the Twilight Zone.
Two, the third season opener, was both written and directed by Montgomery Pittman (1920-1964), a man whose talents in both departments were considerable. His first assignment on The Twilight Zone had been directing Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up, but it was Two that demonstrated the full range of his abilities.
Born in Louisiana and raised in Oklahoma, Pittman had a wide variety of experiences before becoming a director. As a teenager, he joined a travelling medicine show with his older brother. Eventually, his travels took him to New York where he became an actor, associating with the likes of Marlon Brando and Steve Cochran. Arriving in California in 1949, he decided to forsake acting for writing. He wrote several films, including a script (uncredited) for Antonionis II Grido. In television, his credits included Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, where he met Buck Houghton. Finally, exasperated by the way in which his scripts had been mangled by incompetent directors, Pittman turned to directing in order to insure that his work would get from his brain to the screen with the least amount of muddle.
In Two, Pittman gives us an optimistic tale set in an extremely bleak world. The time is presumably after World War III, the setting a devastated town inhabited only by the dead, with the exception of two enemy soldiers. It is fairly clear that Bronson represents an American soldier and Montgomery a Russian. In fact, her single line is PrecrassnyRussian for pretty. This is a gritty and realistic story of survival, told with a minimum of dialogue yet with the emphasis always on characterization.
Charles BronsonWe shot it at the old Hal Roach Studio when it was standing, Houghton continues. It had weeds in the street, theater marquee letters hanging sideways, and we didnt have to do hardly a thing to it. At MGM, wed have had to put out our own weeds and tear up our own windows and everything. This was an old backlot street that was about to be torn down, plowed under.
In Two, the characters go against the ste
reotype. It is Bronson, broad and muscular, with a face like an eroded cliff, who is the pacifist. Montgomery is the one who is suspicious and quick to violent action. Those who remember her from Bewitched might be shocked by her appearance here: long brown hair, smudged face, pretty in a peasantish way but not at all the glamour girl.
Liz Montgomery, at the time, was so dedicated to her art, Montgomery Pittmans widow, Maurita, recalls. Most girls want to look really pretty for the camera. Monty had to fight her, really, because she wanted to make her eyes really black. She got too much makeup on, she was making herself too haggard.
Montgomerys dedication to the role shows, and it was not an easy part by any means. You find yourself reacting to things you never reacted to before, she said at the time. You find it difficult not to exaggerate every look, every action. You think nobody will notice you unless you ham it up. You have to underplay every scene in a play of this type. But I must say I never enjoyed doing a show as much as I did Two.
THE ARRIVAL (9/22/61)
Written by Rod Serling
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Boris Sagal
Director of Photography:
George T. Clemens
Music: stock
Cast: Grant Sheckly: Harold J. Stone Paul Malloy: Fredd Wayne Bengston: Noah Keen Airline Official: Robert Karnes Ramp Attendant: Bing Russell Dispatcher: Jim Boles Tower Operator: Robert Brubaker
This object, should any of you have lived underground for the better part of your lives and never had occasion to look toward the sky, is an airplane, its official designation a DC-3. We offer this rather obvious comment because this particular airplane, the one youre looking at, is a freak. Now, most airplanes take off and land as per scheduled. On rare occasions they crash. But all airplanes can be counted on doing one or the other. Now, yesterday morning this particular airplane ceased to be just a commercial carrier. As of its arrival it became an enigma, a seven-ton puzzle made out of aluminum, steel, wire and a few thousand other component parts, none of which add up to the right thing. In just a moment, were going to show you the tail end of its history. Were going to give you ninety percent of the jigsaw pieces and you and Mr. Sheckly here of the Federal Aviation Agency will assume the problem of putting them together along with finding the missing pieces. This we offer as the evenings hobby, a little extracurricular diversion which is really the national pastime in the Twilight Zone.
The mystery begins when Flight 107 out of Buffalo lands and taxis to a perfect stop, with no luggage, no passengers, no crewand no pilot! Sheckly, an FAA investigator with a record of no unsolved incidents in twenty-two years, inspects the plane, accompanied by Malloy and Bengston, two executives with the airline. Although the names on the passenger manifest seem familiar to Sheckly, none of their relatives has contacted anyone at the airport. Even stranger is the fact that each of the men sees the planes seats a different color and its serial code a different sequence. Sheckly is convinced the plane is an illusion. To prove it, he sticks his hand into one of its spinning propellors. The plane immediately disappearsas do the men who are with him! Sheckly finds Malloy and Bengston in the airports operations room, but neither of them has any memory of the mystery; Flight 107 arrived right on schedule. Then Bengston remembers: a Flight 107 out of Buffalo did disappear, it was lost in the fog and never foundseventeen years earlier! It was the one case Sheckly never solved … and it has come back to haunt him.
Picture of a man with an Achilles heel, a mystery that landed in his life and then turned into a heavy weight, dragged across the years to ultimately take the form of an illusion. Now, thats the clinical answer that they put on the tag as they take him away. But if you choose to think that the explanation has to do with an airborne Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship on a fog-enshrouded night on a flight that never ends, then youre doing your business in an old stand … in the Twilight Zone.
The first show of the new season written by Serling (although the second aired) was The Arrival, which sets up a nifty mystery but then cops out by making the whole thing a hallucination on the part of the investigator. In reviewing it, Variety pointed out something inexplicable in the shows conclusion: . . how does the FA A investigator, in his hallucination, know the names and faces of actual people (the airlines operation chief and p.r. director) he has never seen before? The mystery is never explained. Variety added, The show now seems to be feeding off itself… . Last Fridays episode, unless it proves to be an exception in the new skein, doesnt augur well for the future of the series. Twilight Zone seems to be running dry of inspiration.
THE GRAVE (10/27/61)
Written and directed by Montgomery Pittman
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: stock
Cast: Conny Miller: Lee Marvin Mothershed: Strother Martin Johnny Rob: James Best Steinhart: Lee Van Cleef Ira Broadly: Stafford Rep lone: Ellen Willard Jasen: William Challee Corcoran: Larry Johns Lee Marvin and Ellen Willard Pinto Sykes: Richard Geary
Normally, the old man would be correct: this would be the end of the story. Weve had the traditional shoot-out on the street and the badman will soon be dead. But some men of legend and folk tale have been known to continue having their way even after death. The outlaw and killer Pinto Sykes was such a person, and shortly well see how he introduces the town, and a man named Conny Miller in particular; to the Twilight Zone.
After Sykes is gunned down by a group of townspeople, Miller a gunman hired by the town to track Sykes down but who never caught up with him, perhaps by choice learns that on his deathbed Sykes vowed to reach up and grab Miller if he ever came near his grave. Johnny Rob and Steinhart bet Miller he wont have the courage to visit Sykess grave. Determined to win the bet, Miller goes to the grave, kneels down, and plunges a knife into the earth to prove he was there. But as he rises, something grabs him and pulls him down. The next morning, Johnny Rob, Steinhart and several others find Miller dead beside the grave. What happened seems clear: the wind blew Millers coat over the grave, in the dark he stuck his knife through it, when he tried to rise his coat pulled on him and the shock killed him. But then Sykes sister lone raises a disquieting fact: the previous night the wind was blowing away from the grave!
Final comment: you take this with a grain of salt or a shovelful of earth, as shadow or substance, we leave it up to you. And for any further research check under G for ghost in the Twilight Zone.
The Grave, a spooky story of the Old West, is moody and genuine, with many fine character performances by the likes of James Best, Lee Van Cleef, Strother Martin, and Stafford Repp. The man in the starring role, however, did cause some problems.
We had a guy who was a little too heavy on the bottle, director of photography George Clemens remembers. We werent going to use him between four and the night, so he spent the time over at a bar very close to MGM. When we started that night he was so rough on this horse I knew it backed the horse right up to a picket fence and then both of them went through and I thought he was going to kill himself! He got out and wanted to work!
So we had to call the nights work off. And I told Buck, I sez, Fire the son of a bitch! Just recast. But they wouldnt go for it and we went on. Eventually, it ended up as a very fine picture… . This is him Lee Marvin.
To leave the story at this point would be to do Marvin a disservice. The next day he apologized to the crew, Buck Houghton recalls, because, he said, Everybody was ready to work and I wasnt, and Im terribly sorry, and you just watch me go today. And by God, he put in a days work that would knock your hat off.
NOTHING IN THE DARK (1/5/62)
Written by George Clayton Johnson
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Lamont Johnson
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: stock
Cast:
Wanda Dunn: Gladys Cooper Harold Beldon: Robert Redford Gladys Cooper Man: R. G. Armstrong
An old woman livi
ng in a nightmare, an old woman who has fought a thousand battles with death and always won. Now shes faced with a grim decisionwhether or not to open a door. And in some strange and frightening way she knows that this seemingly ordinary door leads to the Twilight Zone .
So terrified is elderly Wanda Dunn that Mr. Death who can assume any number of disguises will kill her with his touch that she has barricaded herself in her cold, dark tenement apartment for years. But when policeman Harold Beldon is shot just outside her door, she overcomes her fear and drags him inside. Later, a burly man breaks through her door. Wanda, thinking him Mr. Death, faints. Actually, hes merely a contractor hired to demolish the condemned building; he tells Wanda she must leave then he departs. Wanda realizes the contractor couldnt see Beldonit is Beldon who is Mr. Death! But he has not come as a merciless destroyer. Gently, he bids her take his hand. She doesand is surprised to see her dead body across the room. No longer afraid, she allows Mr. Death to lead her outside … into the sunlight.
There was an old woman who lived in a room and, like all of us, was frightened of the dark, but who discovered in the minute last fragment of her life that there was nothing in the dark that wasnt there when the lights were on. Object lesson for the more frightened amongst us in or out of The Twilight Zone.
George Clayton Johnsons Nothing in the Dark, is thematically similar, although superior to, Serlings One for the Angels, and is also related to The Hitch-hiker. Once again, Mr. Death makes an appearance.
For this episode, Buck Houghton hired a director with whom he had not worked before. Lamont Johnson (no relation to George Clayton Johnson) had previously been an actor (performing Tarzans voice on the radio) and a stage director. In the years since The Twilight Zone, he has made a name for himself directing both feature films (One on One, Lipstick) and movies for television (My Sweet Charlie, That Certain Summer; The Execution of Private Slovik, Fear on Trial). The whole mystique of The Twilight Zone appealed to me as a tremendous, drenching relief from the Dr. Kildares and Have Gun Will Travels and things that I was doing, he says. These were wonderfully theatrical games for me, and it was a joy to do them.
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