There is no other show that has undoubtedly inspired film makers and writers like this series, and is still one of the best shows on T.V. Here’s a great article from starlog celebrating it’s 50th anniversary! Plus a great comment below with classic quotes worth spending a few minutes on.
-JDV
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A giant of the genre, Rod Serling welcomed TV viewers to another dimension, a land known to all of as THE TWILIGHT ZONE. In the process, one of TV’s “Angry Young Men,” already famous for his live TV dramas (and movies) REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT and PATTERNS, truly became a legend.
Serling also steered a TV Western (THE LONER), presented a later genre TV anthology (NIGHT GALLERY), voiced countless commercials, narrated numerous documentaries and co-scripted the film version of PLANET OF THE APES.
In this BRIEF interview, conducted in 1974, just a year before his death, Serling stopped to consider the challenge of a writing career and his own life in THE TWILIGHT ZONE.
STARLOG: What do you think when looking back on your two genre TV series?
ROD SERLING: TWILIGHT ZONE was very innovative for the time. NIGHT GALLERY I’m not as proud of.
STARLOG: What are you involved in now [1974]?
SERLING: I just finished writing a feature. It is uncast right now. I have no television plans at this time. No more series…those are for young men.
STARLOG: On a TV show, who has the real control? Where is the power?
SERLING: The director has the real control, also the writer. Franklin Schaffner, [the director] who did PATTON, was great with STUDIO ONE and PLAYHOUSE 90.
STARLOG: How do you feel about Erich von Daniken’s theories as proposed in CHARIOTS OF THE GODS, the TV special released theatrically that you narrated.
SERLING: Much of it is fact. Some of it is pretty wild.
STARLOG: If indeed you believe it to be fact, don’t you think your narration, since you’re so heavily identified with science fiction, actually takes away from the theories’ credibility?
SERLING: No. I DON’T feel I am identified with SF. I am identified with fantasy. And I’m NOT exclusively a fantasy writer.
STARLOG: What did you think of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY?
SERLING: It was a nice production, but it was too long. I particularly liked the idea of giving the computer [HAL] a brain. Reasoning for computers is not too far away. Here they gave it logic and it developed its own.
STARLOG: Was STAR TREK a favorite TV series of yours?
SERLING: It was well-produced. The first episodes were good. But they got too far-out later. They got away from science.
STARLOG: What do you think of the future of science fiction?
SERLING: Science fiction now is, and must be, very realistic. Science fiction must be based on science fact. The idea of astronauts landing on planets run by Orientals [as in FLASH GORDON, the planet Mongo and Ming the Merciless] doesn’t work anymore. In fact, a man writing on nuclear fission was questioned for a day-and-a-half about how he knew about the Bomb. The government questioned him a while back—he was just writing.
STARLOG: Could we digress a bit and talk about your background?
SERLING: After high school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted, so at 18, I joined the Army. After the Army, I went to Antioch [College], where I majored in physical education. Then, I changed my major over to English literature and literature studies. I even thought about the Army as a career for a while, but I decided on English. When I was in school, I wrote and sold dramatic scripts for radio, for shows such as LIGHTS OUT. I sold radio scripts in 1949 and 1950 for $150 and no residual payments. I worked on STARS OVER HOLLYWOOD for television in 1950 and 1951. I still see excerpts from it on TV, but I don’t get any residuals. Now on shows, I get payment for the first five telecasts.
STARLOG: Could you tell me why you weren’t satisfied with NIGHT GALLERY when compared with THE TWILIGHT ZONE, for which you won six Emmys?
SERLING: I wrote the first shows [of NIGHT GALLERY] that first year. Then, the network [NBC] started rejecting a number of them. Later, I was mainly the host for the series. The series went from an hour to a half-hour. The audience felt cheated. TWILIGHT ZONE was a half-hour. Then, 18 of them were an hour long. Then, we returned TWILIGHT ZONE to the half-hour format.
STARLOG: What about ZERO HOUR, the new radio show you’re associated with?
SERLING: So far we’ve canned 13 of them. Patty Duke, John Astin and others have done them. I haven’t written any of them. I’ve hosted all of them. On TWILIGHT ZONE, I wrote the vast majority of shows and produced quite often. I am slated to ink five of the ZERO HOUR shows.
STARLOG: What would be the ideal working conditions?
SERLING: The ultimate would be to have an ideal marriage of the writer and director’s aims on a project. I’ve worked with many directors, not just stuck with one.
STARLOG: What’s your advice to someone who wants to get into the business?
SERLING: It was easier in the old days to get into the business. Anyone with real talent will find a way to make it.
STARLOG: You teach a college course in Creative Writing.
SERLING: Yes. At Ithaca, I have a small class…under 10 students. I teach it in eight-week sessions in the summer. We do a lot of writing. I give a situation, for instance—a man leaves his wife, or a man turns to crime. I tell the whole class to write a story on a particular theme. We read them aloud and analyze them. We analyze more than criticize. To criticize is about the easiest thing in the world. I also teach a course in spring, and one in fall, in film criticism. Each of these crash courses is nine days.
STARLOG: In closing, could you tell me what it is that INSPIRES you to write?
SERLING: It varies with the writer. Usually, it’s just part of a general compulsion that the professional writer has to put down on paper an idea, a point-of-view, a concept or set of values.
And the major problem is of course discipline—SELF-discipline. Writing is tough—no question about it. But the toughest thing about it is that you’re your own boss and you punch your own time clock. You’ve got to learn to do it religiously.
Conducted in 1974, this interview was originally published in STARLOG #203 (1994). It has been abridged for posting here.
- Rod Serling had already earned acclaim for his television writing (“Requiem for a Heavyweight,” “Patterns,”) but found himself fighting CBS to get “The Twilight Zone” on the air. He would have repeated conflicts with network censors throughout his career.
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GREAT AND GRAND ALMIGHTY QUOTES OF EDWARD RODMAN SERLING by Dane Youssef
Rod Serling was perhaps one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Not merely to his chosen major field of television, but in general. A man who defined a lot of whst television stood for, even today.
When you see a program of real weight and depth, social commentary and insight, that Rod’s inspiration you’re seeing. Like Elvis, James Brown and even Shakesphere, he had a rippling effect, touching every other aspect of the medium of TV around him.
One of the few precious men who made it so “the idiot box” didn’t have to entirely live up to its name. Television was mostly just saccharinely sweet light fluff with no weight or real meaning. Serling thought the small screen could do bigger, better things. And so he set out to prove it. The self-righteous stubborn little bastard set to raise the bar with scripts like “Patterns” and “Requiem For A Heavyweight.”
And with his incarnation of “The Twilight Zone” and “Night Gallery,” he started playing the keys on his typewriter like Beethoven at a grand piano, and he changed all that.
Not to mention the lesser-known “A Storm in Summer.” Damn it. The little bastard He just had to go out and make writing for TV a respectable profession and pursuit. He demanded quality. He made quality.
Week after week after week after… well, that’s usually where he skipped a week or so. He was the first to admit that writing on a deadline for a serial TV show forced him to crank out a few stinkers. But he was a true wordsmith. A craftsman like Woody Allen or Raymond Chandler. Little Roddy knew how to make one single sentence really sing.
He had as many powerful proverbs as the Bible. I put down a brief re-cap of some of his all-time greatest hits.
Which is your favorite?
“I don’t enjoy any of the process of writing. I enjoy it when it goes on if it zings and it has great warmth and import and it’s successful. Yeah, that’s when I enjoy it. But during the desperate, tough time of creating it, there’s not much I enjoy about it. It tires me and lays me out, which is sort of the way I feel now. Tired.”
“Some people possess talent, others are possessed by it. When that happens, a talent becomes a curse.”
“There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.”
“Everybody has to have a hometown, Binghamton’s mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive make-up of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that’s familiar because that’s where you grew up. When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that’s one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I’ve still got a hometown. This, nobody’s gonna take away from me.”
“I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I’ve written there is a thread of this: a man’s seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”
“Imagination… its limits are only those of the mind itself.”
“I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.”
“If you need drugs to be a good writer, you’re not a good writer.”
“Hollywood’s a great place to live… if you’re a grapefruit.”
(on being born on Christmas Day, 1924) “I was a Christmas present that was delivered unwrapped.”
“Fantasy is the impossible made probable; science fiction is the improbable made possible.”
“Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it. I succumbed to it.”
“I don’t want to fight anymore. I don’t want to have to battle sponsors and agencies. I don’t want to have to push for something that I want and have to settle for second best. I don’t want to have to compromise all the time, which in essence is what a television writer does if he wants to put on controversial themes.”
(On the decision to cancel the “Twilight Zone”): “We had some real turkeys, some fair ones, and some shows I’m really proud to have been a part of. I can walk away from this series unbowed.”
“You’re travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination–next stop, the Twilight Zone!”
(during the third): “I’ve never felt quite so drained of ideas as I do at this moment. You can’t retain quality. You start borrowing from yourself, making your own clichés. I notice that more and more.”
(His reasons for less involvement on “The Twilight Zone” by the third year): “First is extreme fatigue. Second, I’m desperate for a change of scene, and third is a chance to exhale, with the opportunity for picking up a little knowledge instead of trying to spew it out.”
“Coming up with an idea is the easiest thing in the world… writing it down, that’s the hard part. I put the paper in the typewriter, I put my hands on the keys.. and I bleed.”
Words to live by. To die by. And to write by.
Rod Serling… a stamp of greatness.
Now… what’s your favorite?
FOR THE RODMAN
–Eternal Love for God Serling, Dane Youssef
Wow! Thanks for posting this Dane, very cool.