Twilight Zone Companion (21 page)

Suspended in time and space for a moment, your introduction to Miss Janet Tyler,; who lives in a very private world of darkness, a universe whose dimensions are the size, thickness, length of a swath of bandages that cover her face. In a moment well go back into this room and also in a moment well look under those bandages, keeping in mind, of course, that were not to be surprised by what we see, because this isnt just a hospital, and patient 307 is not just a woman. This happens to be the Twilight Zone, and Miss Tyler, with you, is about to enter it.

Lying in a darkened hospital room, her head entirely wrapped in bandages, Janet Tyler, whose hideously abnormal face has made her an outcast all her life, waits to see if the last treatment has succeeded in making her look normal. This is her eleventh hospital visit the maximum allowed by the State. If it is a failure, she will be sent to a village where others of her kind are segregated. Unseen by her, only heard, the shadowy figures of her doctor and her nurse come and go. On televisions throughout the hospital, the Leader of the State speaks of glorious conformity, as Miss Tylers bandages are gradually removed. Revealed, her face is extremely beautiful. The doctor draws back in horror. The treatment has been a failure! As the lights are turned on, we see the faces of the others: misshapen, asymmetrical, like something out of a nightmare. Crying hysterically, Miss Tyler runs from her room, down several hallways, and finally into a room where she comes face to face with another freakWalter Smith, a strikingly handsome man in charge of an outcast village in the north. He has come to take her there. Gently, he assures her that she will come to have a sense of belonging and that she will be loved. He advises her to remember the old saying: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Now the questions that come to mind. Where is this place and when is it, what kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm? The answer is, it doesnt make any difference. Because the old saying happens to be true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence, on this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out among the stars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned … in the Twilight Zone.

After Mr. Dingle, the Strong, Serling demonstrated that he hadnt lost his touch with The Eye of the Beholder, an episode that is indisputably one of the series finest.

What makes this episode remarkable is the artistry of its creators: the delicacy and sensitivity of Serlings writing, the directorial imagination and control of Douglas Heyes, the superb delivery of all the actors, the visual beauty and technical perfection of George Clemenss camera work, the alien and moody score by Bernard Herrmann, and the brilliant makeup work by William Tuttle.

From the first, Buck Houghton realized that this script required a great deal of imagination and innovation if it was to succeed. I think that Eye of the Beholder is probably the most difficult directors job that ever came down the pike. I was scared to death of that, the problems of making that picture in such a way that the tag wasnt foreseen long before you got there. To Houghton, Douglas Heyes was the obvious and immediate choice for this most difficult of shows.

Essential to the credibility of the piece was that the makeup revealed at the climax be both repulsive and convincing. Production manager Ralph Nelson saw that we got the time, William Tuttle recalls. Now, this is something that I cant recall any of the other television productions doing. Theyd come in the day before and expect a miracle for the next morning.

From the beginning, Heyes and Tuttle worked together closely. As a matter of fact, says Heyes, the first problem on the makeup on that was that it was going to be too expensive. Fortunately, Heyes had had experience in this area. I had started as a cartoonist at Walt Disneys and had been an art director and so on. When we did those faces for Eye of the Beholder, Tuttle had just done The Time Machine, and he had created those Morlocks. When he told me the problem as far as cost, I went down to his department and I saw some of the pieces that he had put the Morlocks together with, and I said, Bill, why cant we do something like this, just make some pieces and paste them on?

The idea was sound, and the final makeup consisted of variations of a brow piece and a large piece that covered the nose, cheeks and upper lip. These were cast in foam rubber and attached to the actors faces with spirit gum. To remove them, acetone was used.

The physical appearance of the uglies also involved a collaboration between Tuttle and Heyes. Doug came up and got his fingers in the clay, Tuttle remembers. Wed model some things, and then hed take a look and offer some suggestions, and it sort of evolved from that. As for the initial concept, Tuttle explains, The idea was to make them look like pigs, with the big nostrils and the piglike nose.

Heyes elaborates: The important thing about that group of people was that although they had to look slightly different, they had to conform, they had to be the same species. They couldnt all be different monsters.

In all, about twelve actors portrayed the uglies. We didnt take masks of each one, says Tuttle, but we took three or four different ones and modelled them so they looked different, and then before theyd cast the people wed try them on, see if one would fit another one. In other words

we didnt have to do twelve different ones. On a thing like this, the more distortion you get the better.In the end, Heyes was glad that what was originally planned had been too expensive. They were thinking of doing complete makeups on everything, and actually it was better not to, because the individual characteristics of the actors could still show uptheir cheekbones, their jawlines, their ears. Another thing is that by doing that, I was able to photograph the backs of heads and ears and things like that, which were perfectly normal. It was only frontally that they looked different. What emerged was a makeup that was horrifying, unique, and unforgettable.

In Serlings original script, the doctors and nurses were presented as unsympathetic, but Heyes felt that portraying them as such would be a tip-off, so he decided to take a different approach. I cast the show without looking at the actors. I kept my back to them until after Id heard them, because what I wanted from the doctors and the nurses were the most sympathetic voices that I could hear.

The only major role left to cast was that of Janet Tyler, the main character, and that presented a major problem: The important surprise is that the girl who emerges from the bandages is incredibly beautiful by our standards, says Heyes. So it doesnt really matter, I said, if that girl is a great actress or not so long as shes a great beauty. It does matter that the girl under bandages is a great actress, but were not going to be able to see her. Now, its very difficult to find a great beauty who is that great an actress, so my original concept was that it would be easier to find a great actress who could do the voice and then find a great beauty who could look like that.

Accordingly, Heyes cast two actresses to play the lead. The first was Maxine Stuart, as the woman under wraps. Heyes cast her because of her voice, because her voice did not suggest a beautiful girlit suggested a strong, harsh, realistic woman, and therefore the unveiling would be a surprise.

Maxine Stuart, who today is still active on stage and television, finds it ironic that she was cast to play only part of the role. Its absolutely right for Hollywood to do a script about conformity and then demand that your leading lady conform to a standard of beauty. I do understand that, though. They were saying something. They wanted a really beautiful beauty to point up the difference.

Nevertheless, Ms. Stuart found the role a delight, particularly the fact that her entire head was covered and that she could not see the other actors. It was heaven, she says. It was like I was in my little womb. I was acting all alone. I didnt have to be bothered with all those others. (Ironically, Serlings original title for the script was A Private World of Darkness.)

God, she gave a fantastic performance, says Douglas Heyes. I figured this was strictly a vocal performance, but she also did great gestures.Her hands were terribly expressive. I later used her in other things, but this was the first time Id ever worked with her.

The other actress cast in the leadthe beautywas Donna Douglas. Although not well-known at the time, she soon would be, as Jed Clam-petts daughter Ellie on The Beverly Hillbillies. She was not yet known to anybody, but she was absolutely beautiful, says Heyes. So I said, Youll have a few lines, but later Maxine Stuart will dub them in her voice.

It turned out that Donna was a very good actress, and she hung around during the entire performance, the playing of scenes under bandages, and when it came to the time that she was unveiled and she had these words to say, she did them so accurately in the same voice that we never dubbed her.

The single most difficult aspect in filming The Eye of the Beholder lay in hiding the faces of the doctors and nurses without limiting camera movement. To accomplish this, Heyes and George Clemens worked together to block every movement of camera and actor perfectly. As a result, The Eye of the Beholder is choreographed as meticulously as a ballet.

The trick in that, Heyes recalls, was to keep you from seeing them for a great part of the story, yet I didnt want it to be obvious that I was only using hands and inserts and hearing dialogue. So I evolved a very complicated camera movement, by which you were seeing these doctors and nurses all the time but actually they would be passing one another at exactly the same moment that the camera would be, so that you wouldnt really see their faces, or theyd go behind a pillar just as they were turning toward the camera and so onand the place was shadowed. And my justification for playing it that way was that the girl who was under bandages couldnt really see them, so I was using it as her viewpoint. In other words, she knew that they were there, but she didnt know what they looked like. So in a kind of way it made that credible, the fact that we didnt know what they looked like, either, because she didnt.

Heyes recalls the particular challenge of the crucial scene when the bandages are being removed from Janet Tylers head. While they were unwrapping her, I wanted the effect of her point of view as the layers of gauze became less and less until, little by little, she was able to see outlines of shapes and so forth.

I told George Clemens what I wanted. I said, T want to have something in front of the camera so that it will be her point of view. Well, that was one of the advantages of rehearsing with the crew before we shot, because Clemens got a fish bowl and hung it in front of the camera, and wrapped the fish bowl. So the icns was shooting from inside the fish bowl, and when the bandages were unwrapped over the fish bowl you saw layer by layer beginning to get less and less until you began to see outlines.

Says Clemens, It was one of the few pictures that I remember Heyes working nights on. We worked till midnight or one oclock one night to finish it.

Finally, filming was completed. But what everyone, especially Buck Houghton, wanted to know was, would it work?

I remember the first time I had a chance to try that on somebody who was completely fresh to it was Lud Gluskin, who was in charge of music for CBS and a very, very bright man about the musical scoring problem, Houghton remembers. Lud had a lot to do, he didnt read the scripts or anything. He came to a final cut and would talk about how to do the music. He was a very imperturbable old German. At the time, Lud must have been sixty-five, and he was pretty hard to move. And at the end of that he said, Jesus Christ! Really?! So I knew we had a pretty good picture.

NICK OF TIME (11/18/60)

Written by Richard Matheson

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Richard L. Bare

Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast:

Don Carter: William Shatner Pat Carter: Patricia Breslin Counter Man: Guy Wilkerson Mechanic: Stafford Rep Desperate Man: Walter Reed William Shatner and Patricia Breslin Desperate Woman: Dee Carroll

The hand belongs to Mr. Don S. Carter; male member of a honeymoon team en route across the Ohio countryside to New York City. In one moment, they will be subjected to a gift most humans never receive in a lifetime. For one penny, they will be able to look into the future. The time is now, the place is a little diner in Ridgeview, Ohio, and what this young couple doesn’t realize is that this town happens to lie on the outskirts of the Twilight Zone

While waiting for their car to be repaired, the couple decide to grab a meal in a local diner. Don, superstitious by nature, is intrigued by a table top fortune-telling machine that dispenses little cards answering yes or no questions. Although the answers are extremely general, he soon becomes convinced that the machine has correctly predicted two events: his promotion to office manager and a close call he and Pat have while crossing the

street. Rushing back to the diner, he begins to furiously feed pennies into the machine, totally unable to make a single decision for himself. At this point, Pat who has been skeptical all along and is dismayed at the machines power over her husband rebels, telling Don he mustnt waste his life on a cheap machine, that they must make their futures themselves. Buoyed by her love and by her confidence in him, Don is able to shake off the machines influence and his own superstitions. They exit the diner, free to determine their own destinies. Just then, another couple, looking worn and harried, enters and proceeds to the same machine. Desperately, they ask when they might be allowed to leave the town. Like Don and Pat, they have been snared but they havent escaped.

Counterbalance in the little town of Ridgeview, Ohio. Two people permanently enslaved by the tyranny of fear and superstition, facing the future with a kind of helpless dread. Two others facing the future with confidencehaving escaped one of the darker places in the Twilight Zone.