Martin Grams Jr - The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic

The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic

2014 Martin Grams Jr. All Rights Reserved.

Foreword Title 2014 George Clayton Johnson. All Rights Reserved.

The Twilight Zone is a registered trademark of CBS, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This version of the book may be slightly abridged from the print version.

Published in the USA by:

OTR Publishing, LLC

PO Box 252

Churchville, Maryland 21028

www.martingrams.com

ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0

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Table of Contents

A Belated Letter to Rod Serling

by George Clayton Johnson

September 22, 2008

Mr. Rod Serling

Somewhere in The Twilight Zone

Dear Rod:

I believe that your name, Rod Serling, has become as recognizable as the title of your landmark show itself. I also believe that someone who wanted to carry on the Twilight Zone tradition might call their new series simply The Rod Serling Show without infringing the CBS trademark title and still reach the Twilight Zone audience.

By now, having watched most of the episodes several times I can easily picture you in my imagination as a character, very dapper in your neat black suit, living in cyberspace made out of pixels like Max Headroom knowing everything that is happening on the World Wide Web and in the lives of the people who log on ready to intrude into the scene itself with a trenchant commentary to provide a necessary moral dimension to the lives of those young cell-phone viewers who love surfing the net and will track down the show if those new stories are any good.

Congratulations, Rod, on your well-deserved Global celebrity. A lot of people are now giving you a lot of attention, including one fellow in particular. You may be aware that one of your devoted fans, writer Martin Grams Jr., has been working his butt off forever on a massive book about the making of The Twilight Zone television series for that self-same audience. He showed me part of his manuscript. I believe you will be pleased. I congratulate the guy for his admirable dedication to getting the details straight. I also praise OTR Publishing for having the wisdom to recognize the singular contribution that you have made to television history. The book will get a lot of attention from the fans of the show of which, as you know, there are many. Next year is the 50th anniversary of your series and the show is as hot as ever with all of the episodes available on DVD from Image Entertainment. Barry Hoffman of Gauntlet Press is publishing The Complete Twilight Zone Scripts of Rod Serling in many volumes. Almost all of the other scripts are now in print and selling well. They show up here and there with increasing frequency as stage-plays.

What an astonishing shelf-life for a piece of television entertainment and a great testament to the timeless nature of the program and the quality production you brought to the project.

At first, The Twilight Zone had a small audience which helped keep executive hands off, thankfully, and allowed you and Buck Houghton to run things the way you wanted.

Although you were legally obligated to write the bulk of the scripts you were permitted to hire other writers to help out which brings in Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson to take up the slack but as fast and as good as these two gifted men were there was a need occasionally for other writers to add their sparkle to The Twilight Zone which brings in Earl Hamner and Reginald Rose and Montgomery Pittman and a few others including me.

This was long ago when, with my wife Lolas permission, who said, You cant tie a mans legs together and expect him to run, I had quit my drafting job at U.S. Steel after buying a house on the G.I. Bill with neither of us knowing how wed make the necessary monthly payments without a regular income.

Id then spent five solid, anxiety-ridden years becoming a beatnik existentialist trying to write slightly surreal off-beat short stories without any success whatever.

By that time my house was facing foreclosure and I was in debt with doors closing on all sides.

When I got that $500 check from Cayuga Productions as payment for the non-exclusive right for you to adapt my story All Of Us Are Dying into an episode of your excellent television series, The Twilight Zone, it heartened me as you can well imagine.

All Of Us Are Dying was my first sale to television, indeed, my first short-story sale and it was, fortunately, enough money for me to pay several months of delinquent house payments and to buy groceries besides. It gave me hope.

The suspenseful job you did with my story transforming it into The Four Of Us Are Dying episode of The Twilight Zone taught me a lot about television drama.

The episode aired on New Years day, 1960.

Change was in the air.

I noticed that many of your finest pieces and many of the stories you bought to adapt were basically filmed stage plays which was something I believed I could learn to write. You and Buck Houghton gave me a chance to prove I could do it with A Penny For Your Thoughts.

Your acceptance of my script put me on a permanent search for story ideas dealing with the imaginary some of which found their way to the screen. The hidden hand was at work that day for your decision to buy my material had far-reaching consequences still at work now. That precious house is paid for, I havent any debts and I find the door open to me wherever I go, all stemming from your generous act.

I find that for me, Rod, some things have to be put in writing for them to be real. And so:

For all of your kindness to a beginning writer and for the powerful influence you have had on my life with Lolas, with heartfelt gratitude, both Lola and I thank you for letting me play in your brilliant game and for allowing me to shine by your reflected light.

Sincerely,

George Clayton Johnson

Pacoima, California

Introduction

The year was 1959. Bill Veeck, head of a group that purchased a controlling interest in the Chicago White Sox, presented an unexpected specialty one afternoon in Comiskey Park. Little spacemen showed up to capture Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, proving that the bizarre and unexpected would be accepted by the crowd who cheered with amusement.

In the November 7, 1959 issue of TV Guide, Rod Serling commented, Heres what The Twilight Zone is: Its an anthology series, half-hour in length, that delves into the odd, the bizarre, the unexpected. It probes into the dimension of imagination but with a concern for taste and for an adult audience too long considered to have I.Q.s in negative figures. The Twilight Zone is what it implies: that shadowy area of the almost-but-not-quite; the unbelievable told in terms that can be believed. Heres what the program isnt: Its not a monster rally or a spook show. There will be nothing formulad in it, nothing telegraphed, nothing so nostalgically familiar that an audience can usually join actors in duets.

Writer George Clayton Johnson probably described Twilight Zone best when he referred to the series as wisdom fiction. In 1959, Rod Serling told Clarence E. Flick, supervisor of the Radio-Television Curriculum at San Jose State College, that the series was inspired and designed for that willing suspension of disbelief. For more than fifty years, The Twilight Zone has become an established landmark on the map of television history.

As a fan of the series, I read a lot of books and magazine articles about the program. I absorbed the wealth of information that came from those periodicals. Over the years, I purchased and collected a large number of papers related to Serling and The Twilight Zone, including production sheets, casting call sheets; internal correspondence, tax forms, contracts and many other sources I consider of value from private collectors and eBay. After reviewing the materials, I started to realize that many of the books and magazine articles were printing misinformation. One example was Marc Scott Zicrees The Twilight Zone Companion, which had producer William Froug recall purchasing the French film, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, for $10,000. The fact is, according to Cayugas financial papers, the film was purchased for $20,000 plus an additional expense of almost $5,000 for editing and sound sync fees. Worse, I began noticing how many books were consulting previous publications (rather than consulting studio and archival documents), resulting in the reprint of the same misinformation.