Twilight Zone Companion (25 page)

The Trouble With Templeton has in it one of the most visually beautiful scenes of the entire series. This occurs in the crowded, smoke-filled speakeasy in which Templeton finds Laura (very well played by Pippa Scott). The place is loud with conversation and raucous music. At one point, Laura breaks into an absurd-looking Charleston. Templeton tries to grab her, to stop her. She slaps him and says, Why dont you go back where you came from? We dont want you here! She returns to her dancing. The camera follows the devastated Templeton as he rushes out. The moment he exits, all those in the speakeasy immediately fall silent and still. The smoke which had suggested gaiety a moment before now suggests a ghostliness. The camera pans across the room back to Laura. She steps forward. The expression on her face is one we have not seen before,

one we immediately realize reflects her true nature: beautiful, intelligent, full of sorrow and longing. The lights behind her dim, leaving her alone in space. Then the light goes down on her, and all is black.

The biggest concern we had, says Kulik, was that we would make sure that everybody understood that she was playing a part, that she was really forcing herself to do this to get him to go back, you see. He adds modestly, It seemed to work.

Also cast in The Trouble With Templeton was Sydney Pollack, a friend of Kuliks who is today a top film director with credits which include They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, The Way We Were, and The Electric Horseman. Ironically, the part Pollack played in Templeton was that of an abrasive young stage director. Buzz Kulik admits that the role had a bit of a private joke to it. He and I knew a producer-director in New York, and I didnt think very kindly of this man, he and I had had our struggles through the years, and so had Sydney. And the thing about this fellow this man we were vaguely imitatingwas that he came from Georgia. He had lost his accent, much of it, except that when he became angry or uptight or nervous, he fell back into his youthful patois. We had to give this character some kind of additional color, so we thought, lets make him this fellow that we both knew.

THE INVADERS (1/27/61)

Written by Richard Matheson

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Douglas Heyes

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Cast:

Woman: Agnes Moorhead Voice of Astronaut: Douglas Heyes

This is one of the out-of-the-way places, the unvisited places, bleak, wasted, dying. This is a farmhouse, handmade, crude, a house without electricity or gas, a house untouched by progress. This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who’s been alone for many years, a strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat, a woman about to face terror which is even now coming at her from … the Twilight Zone.”

Hearing a strange sound on her roof, the woman goes up to investigate and sees a miniature flying saucer out of which emerge two tiny, robot-like

creatures. A battle for survival ensues, with the creatures tormenting the woman with a ray gun and one of her own kitchen knives. Finally, she manages to grab hold of one, battering it into lifelessness. With an ax, she destroys the saucer and the remaining creature within. Before he is killed, he sends a message to his home planet not to send more ships to this world of giants. The lettering on the side of the saucer readsU.S. Air Force!

These are the invaders, the tiny beings from the tiny place called Earth, who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe only to be imagined. The invaders, who found out that a one-way ticket to the stars beyond has the ultimate price tag. And we have just seen it entered in a ledger that covers all the transactions of the universe, a bill stamped paid in full,’ and to be found … in the Twilight Zone.

Its been mentioned previously that Richard Matheson was, and is, a master of the horror form, yet none of his Twilight Zone scripts to this point had explored this genrenot until The Invaders.

Again, Buck Houghton looked to Douglas Heyes to pilot a difficult episode. Immediately, Heyes had a number of suggestions. For the lead he wanted Agnes Moorhead, an actress who, during her long career, played everything from Orson Welless mother in Citizen Kane to Elizabeth Montgomerys in Bewitched. The reason that I suggested her, says Heyes, was that she had done a radio show called Sorry, Wrong Number, which was a half-hour tour de force where she used nothing but her voice, and I said, Heres a half-hour tour de force where the woman doesnt use her voice at all!

All might have seemed clear to Heyes, but not to Agnes Moorhead. She looked at me very curiously when she came in, Heyes recalls. I said, What is it? She said, Well, Ive been reading the script and Ive been trying to find my part! There was only one woman, and there were no lines, and most actresses skimming through a script look to see what the woman has to say. Shed looked through the whole part and couldnt find anything the woman had to say!

So Heyes had his lead, but what about the others, the little men? I didnt want to do this with process photography or with tricks, a la Dr. Cyclops or something, says Heyes. He decided that the tiny creatures should be the exact size they were shown to be. By having them that size, she was able to grab them physically and hurl them across the room, which made it far more interesting than if you were using process and she couldnt really touch them.

With his art background, Heyes had no difficulty in making a sketch ofwhat he wanted. These characters were then made, oddly enough, by the makeup department. They modelled them from my drawing, which was sort of based on the Michelin Tire Man. The reason I made them this kind of bulky round shape is that, first of all, they should not look like human beings, but secondly, after the fact, you had to say they were human beings. Ah hah! Then therefore, they were in inflated spacesuits, right?

The figures that were crafted were made of foam rubber and painted gold to give them a metallic sheen. Watching the episode, one would assume that they were given movement by some internal mechanism, but this wasnt the case. Heyes reveals that there was a slit up the back of each figure, through which a person could insert his hand. To walk, the person put his fingers in the hollows of the legs. To raise the arms, the fingers went in there. Consequently, the figures could not move their arms and legs at the same time. A little ray gun was made to light up by running a wire to an external battery with a button on it. The same was done with an antenna on one of the creatures heads. To disguise the arm sticking out of the back, Heyes claims that the operator wore a black sleeve, making it invisible against a dark background. And he should knowhe was the operator!

Heyes not only gave movement to the tiny figures, he gave them voice as well. Apart from Serlings narration, there is only one speech in the entire show, that of the remaining, dying astronaut warning Earth. That was my voice, says Heyes, because I was those little guys.

There were still plenty of challenges left to overcome. The flying saucer the little men land in was easy; simply pull the miniature ship from Forbidden Planet out again (although a rougher model was made for those shots in which the woman attacks it with an ax). Then there was the interior of the cabin. Since at the end it was revealed to be on an alien planet, nothing could be obviously of Earth origin, yet nothing should be so peculiar as to telegraph the ending. So we used just the basic things, says Heyes. A curtain was just basically a curtain, a chair was just the shape of a chair. There was no style that could be attributed to any particular period in history or place, yet basically it came down to what would be on a farm in the most primitive type of communities.

The cabin used was a small one, and was a considerable challenge. Among those responsible was director of photography George Clemens, whose moody camera work adds immensely to the suspense. Most challenging to him was a scene in which Moorhead had to carry a candle from room to room, with the candle supposedly the only light source. I would say that was a problem, says Clemens. To truly make it look right, you have to visualize where your shadows change lights. Clemens put lights all over the set with dimmer switches, and dimmer boys to work them. In that particular picture, I had to take over a couple of dimmers myself, being able to know just what I wanted and the time to make the moves. But I think I had about six dimmer boys, six lights, and all that had to be synchronized. One source would come up and the other would go out as she went from room to room. I was very happy with the result I was able to achieve, because it looked real to me after I finally got it.

Shooting went quickly and easily. By being able to incorporate my little guys in with her and so forth, I was able to keep it down to a minimum of cuts, says Heyes. I would rehearse for about a half a day with her and with the camera for one piece of film, and then we would do it. It would take like four hours of rehearsal and then four minutes to shoot it. Then another long, long period of rehearsing and then a short piece of film. And when the seven or eight pieces of film were put together, we had our half-hour show.

Surprisingly, one person not enamored of this episode is Richard Matheson. I never liked it, he says. I dont like it today. For one thing, I think its incredibly slow-moving. My script had twice as much incident as they used in the final version; it moved like a shot. The teaser alone, of the woman cutting vegetables and then hearing the noise, it seems like it takes her forever to get up to the roof.

Also, I thought those little roly-poly dolls were ridiculous looking. The way I had written it, you would only catch very quick views of them and never anything clear. To see these little things waddling across the floor was about as frightening as Peter Rabbit coming at you.

Although Matheson is no fan, The Invaders does have its admirers. One of these is writer Theodore Sturgeon. I loved The Twilight Zone says Sturgeon, and I think of all the episodes the one I liked the most was The Invaders. Years ago, a producerhappened to be a very schlock producer, but he knew what he was talking aboutsaid that if a blind man sits in front of a television set listening to a drama and he can tell you afterwards what it was about, then the director, the producer, the writer and everybody else have failed. Likewise, if a deaf man watches a television show and can tell you what the whole thing was about, then it has succeeded. This is a way of underlining the fact that its a visual medium. Well, Matheson wrote that one without one word of dialogue. There were some grunts and screams in it, but no dialogue whatsoever. And it really and truly came to fruition as the kind of visual medium that it is.

The Odyssey of Flight 33.

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Justus Addiss

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast:

Capt. Farver: John Anderson 1st Officer Craig: Paul Comi Flight Engineer Purcell:

Harp McGuire 2nd Officer Wyatt: Wayne Heffley Navigator Hatch: Sandy Kenyon Paula: Nancy Rennick Jane: Beverly Brown RAF Man: Lester Fletcher Lady on Plane: Betty Garde Passenger: Jay Overholts

Youre riding on a jet airliner en route from London to New York. You’re at 35,000 feet atop an overcast and roughly fifty-five minutes from Idlewild Airport. But what you’ve seen occur inside the cockpit of this plane is no reflection on the aircraft or the crew. It’s a safe, well-engineered, perfectly designed machine, and the men you’ve just met are a trained, cool, highly efficient team. The problem is simply that the plane is going too fast and there is nothing within the realm of knowledge or at least logic to explain it. Unbeknownst to passengers and crew, this airplane is heading into an unchartered region well off the track of commercial travelersit’s moving into the Twilight Zone. What you’re about to see we call The Odyssey of Flight 33.

After picking up a freak tail wind that accelerates the plane past three thousand knots and through a shock wave, the crew of Global 33 is unable to raise anyone on the radio. Descending below the cloud cover to get a bearing, they see a Manhattan Island devoid of buildings and populated by dinosaurs. Somehow, they have gone back in time. Their only chance to return to their own time is to try to recapture that tail wind. They succeed in this, and when they descend again they see the familiar skyline of New York City. But all is not wellwhen they raise La Guardia Tower, the voice on the other end claims never to have heard of radar or jet aircraft. In the distance, the crew spies the Perisphere and Trylon of the 1939 New York Worlds Fair. Flight 33 has come backbut not far enough. Running low on fuel, the plane ascends in one final attempt to get back home.

A Global jet airliner; en route from London to New York on an uneventful afternoon in the year 1961, but now reported overdue and missing, and by now searched for on land, sea, and air by anguished human beings fearful of what theyll find. But you and I know where she is, you and I know whats happened. So if some moment, any moment, you hear the sound of jet engines flying atop the overcast, engines that sound searching and lost, engines that sound desperate, shoot up a flare or do something. That would be Global 33 trying to get home from the Twilight Zone.

On the day that Serling first conceived of the episode one of the series most effective and authentic his brother, then an aviation writer for United Press International, was visiting from back East. Rod had taken him to MGM. Robert J. Serling recalls, There was some mail on his desk at Cayuga Productions, and on the top was an envelope from American Airlines, and he opened that just about first. It was a brochure offering a mockup of a 707 passenger cabin to any studio that was going to film a scene. It was something they used in stewardess training and they decided to build another one. They had this one on the West Coast and they were going to rent it out or sell it.