Twilight Zone Companion (55 page)

The flight of Mr. Robert Wilson has ended now, a flight not only from point A to point B, but also from the fear of recurring mental breakdown. Mr. Wilsonhas that fear no longer; though, or moment, he is, as he has said, alone in this assurance. Happily, his conviction will not remain isolated too much longer, for happily, tangible manifestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even from so intangible a quarter as the Twilight Zone.

Richard Mathesons ingenious Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, starring William Shatner and based on the short story of the same name, was originally published in the anthology Alone by Night (Ballantine, 1961) and included in Mathesons Shock III (Dell, 1966). In setting up the situation, Matheson deftly avoids the cliche oft-repeated on Twilight Zone itselfof the otherwise normal character who witnesses or experiences something out of the ordinary and then is unable to convince others of it (You must believe me! Im not insane!). Here, the first person Bob Wilson must convince of his sanity is himself, and in telling others of what he has seen he risks far more than their disbeliefhe almost certainly guarantees his recommitment. In the end, Wilson succeeds in killing the creature and gaining the assuredness of his own sanity. It is a double triumph.

For Matheson, the idea came from a simple source. I was on an airplane. I looked out the window and said, Jeez what if I saw a guy out

Christine White, William Shatner and the gremlin there? In the story, I spent some time in setting up the main character as a businessman who really was having a nervous breakdown, to the point where he was considering suicide and had a gun in his handbag and was thinking of shooting himself. But of course you couldnt do that on television.

As Wilson, William Shatner is complex, intelligent, insecure. He is a man on the brink, trying desperately to hold on to his recently regained normalcy. Shatners performance was really marvelous, says Matheson. I remember the particular moment when the flight engineer [Edward Kemmer, previously the star of TVs Space Patrol] is trying to reassure him, saying, We see it, too, and the look that crossed his face when he realized that they were putting him on.

Playing the gremlin on the wing is Nick Cravat, Burt Lancasters acrobatic partner (he appears in a number of Lancaster films). As the monster, Cravat wears a mask made by William Tuttle and a furry suit from Wardrobe. Although initially scary (particularly to small children), at close inspection the monster seems all too transparently a man in a furry suit wearing an immobile rubber mask. Matheson was not at all pleased. I didnt think much of that thing on the wing. I had wished that Jacques Tourneur had directed it, because he had a different idea. The man who was inside that suit looked exactly the way I described him in the story. All they had to do was use him the way he was. Tourneur was going to put a dark suit on him and cover him with diamond dust so that you hardly saw what was out there. This thing looked like a panda bear.

The man hired to direct the episode was young Richard Donner (later to direct Superman and The Omen), at the time a television director who had no experience with special effects (I dont know why the hell they hired me, he says). Despite this, he did a wonderful job, and the episode is skillfully acted and shot.

The logistics involved in filming Nightmare at 20,000 Feet were enormous. The set consisted of the interior of an airline passenger cabin with the left airplane wing attached to the outside. This was all suspended over a huge water tank, in order to contain the water from the rain effect. Donner remembers the shooting as one big headache. Because you were suspended up, you had no stage floors. Every movement was a bitch. He lists the factors that had to be considered in virtually every shot. A man flying in on wires. Wind. Rain. Lightning. Smoke, to give the effect of clouds and travel and speed. Actors. You couldnt hear yourself think because of the noise of the machines outside. And fighting time, all the time. It was just unbearable. If any one of those things went wrong, it ruined the whole take. All of this consumed lots of time. We were supposed to take a fourth day in the tank set with the airplane, Donner remembers. Then they found out that the studio had committed it to another company. We had to work all night to finish it up. We went overtime till early the next morning.

In spite of all the difficulties, Donner has only praise for the finished product. I love it, I do love it. Its just such an unusual thing for television, really, to see that much energy go into a little half-hour film. And the story was good, too.

The final story on Nightmare at 20,000 Feet occurred several months after the shooting. Matheson and I were going to fly to San Francisco, Serling recalled in 1975. It was like three or four weeks after the show was on the air, and I had spent three weeks in constant daily communication with Western Airlines preparing a given seat for him, having the stewardess close the [curtains] when he sat down, and I was going to say, Dick, open it up. I had this huge, blownup poster stuck on the [outside of the window] so that when he opened it there would be this gremlin staring at him. So what happened was we get on the plane, there was the seat, he sits down, the curtains are closed, I lean over and I say, Dick at which point they start the engines and it blows the thing away. It was an old prop airplane. … He never saw it. And I had spent hours in the planning of it. I would lie in bed thinking how we could do this.

TRANSITION

With thirteen of the half hours produced and another thirteen in development, Bert Granet received an attractive offer from CBS. They were doing a series called The Great Adventure with John Houseman, and John, God bless him, is one of the most talented men in the business, but he made three shows and was something like $600,000 over budget. CBS had a serious problem, and I think they gave me a quarter of a million dollars for the year to finish the series out. There was no way that Serling could offer Granet an equal salary, so in the middle of the season, Twilight Zone was abruptly without a producer. He was very angry with me when I left, Granet says of Serling, because he felt I was letting him down. But I wasnt doing what anybody else doesnt do in the picture business: protect their own hide for the most money.

Hired to replace Granet was William Froug, onetime president of CBS Radio, a writer-producer-director on radio with Hallmark Hall of Fame and The Columbia Workshop (on which he oversaw production of a radio version of Aldous Huxleys Brave New World) and a writer-producer on television with Alcoa-Goody ear Theater; Adventures in Paradise, The Dick Powell Show, Playhouse 90, and Mr. Novak (later, he would have production chores on Bewitched and Gilligans Island). Froug was an extremely good-natured man who got along well with Serling (he remembers his stint on Twilight Zone as Fun! Wonderful fun!). His taste in scripts, however, differed somewhat from Bert Granet and he abandoned a number of the scripts that Granet had in development, including ones by Matheson, Beaumont, Jerry Sohl (under Beaumonts name) and Arch Oboler (noted for his work on radios Lights Out).

The cancelled scripts were: Mathesons The Doll, about a lonely, middle-aged bachelor who falls in love with a beautiful, handmade doll, searches out the modeland finds that she has fallen in love with a doll that looks like him; Beaumonts Gentlemen, Be Seated, about a future society in which laughter has been outlawed and a humor underground flourishes; Obolers What the Devil! about a couple of murderers who are chased along a highway by a dynamite truck driven by Satan; and two by Sohl Who Am I? about a man who wakes up, looks in the bathroom mirror and finds that his face has changed utterly (a fact that only he seems to recognize); and Pattern for Doomsday, in which a tremendous asteroid is on a collision course with Earth and a computer selects eight people a bacteriologist, a psychologist, a philosopher, an auto mechanic, an artist, a singer, a con man and a shady ladyto escape on the lone spaceship. Curiously, Froug himself wrote a script that was never produced. In Many, Many Monkeys, an epidemic breaks out that causes folds of flesh to cover peoples eyes (the monkeys in the title refers to see no evil, etc.). A nuclear bomb explosion is blamed, but one character thinks the disease is merely a physical manifestation of the hate within people. After buying it, the network shelved it. Says Froug, I think they had the feeling it was too grotesque.

A quote from Froug as reported in Daily Variety, August 30, 1963, clearly illustrates how his conception of the series differed from that of his predecessors: Were not only going way out on stories but in casting as well. One of our stories would be perfect for Jack Benny and another for Lena Horne. One of the segs will be directed by Mickey Rooney and were hopeful of getting Judy Garland for the lead. It would be great teaming with vast promotional possibilities. Ultimately, neither Horne, Benny nor Garland appeared on Twilight Zone. Mickey Rooney did not get his chance to direct, but he did star in one episode, The Last Night of a Jockey.

Once a quality show, Twilight Zone was now reliant almost entirely on gimmicks. This was the year that Virginia Trimble, a nineteen-year-old UCLA astrophysics major supposedly with an IQ of 180toured the country as Miss Twilight Zone in order to promote the show.

Director of photography George Clemens found working conditions far different from those he had enjoyed during the first three seasons. I got along with Froug like any cameraman, but we didnt have the relationshipI had with Buck and Rod. Occasionally, Id go in with ideas on how Id like to do things and he didnt see it my way, so I just gave up. I did less and less of them when he got in there.

The enthusiasm that had fueled Twilight Zone for so long was now almost totally depleted. The result of this affected everyone working on the show including Serling.

William Froug recalls an incident regarding Serlings Probe 7Over and Out that was fairly typical: The script arrived and it was forty-five pages. I said, Rod, its a half-hour show, pal. You above all people know we cant use more than thirty or thirty-two pages. He said, Dont worry, just cut whatever you think we dont need. There were these speeches that went on and on for pages. So I remember taking ten pages out of the script, and it didnt affect it in the least.

With twenty-three episodes yet to go, the end was in sight.

THE LAST NIGHT OF A JOCKEY (10/25/63)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: William Froug

Director: Joseph M. Newman

Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast: Grady: Mickey Rooney

The name is Grady, five-feet short in stockings and boots, a slightly distorted offshoot of a good breed of humans who race horses. He happens to be one of the rotten apples, bruised and yellowed by dealing in dirt, a short man with a short memory who’s forgotten that he’s worked for the sport of kings and helped turn it into a cesspool, used and misused by the two-legged animals who’ve hung around sporting events since the days of the Coliseum. So this is Grady, on his last night as a jockey. Behind him are Hialeah, Hollywood Park and Saratoga. Rounding the far turn and coming up fast on the rail is the Twilight Zone.”

After being banned from the track for horse doping, Grady sits alone in his run-down room, contemplating the ruin of his career and his life. Suddenly, a sardonic inner voice speaks to him, asking him his dearest wish. Grady doesnt have to think about it: he wants to be big. When he wakes from a nap, he finds that the wish has been granted: hes over eight feet tall! Grady is elated, until he gets a call from the racing commissioner telling him hes been given another chance, he can ride again. The horrible realization comes crashing in on him: hes grown even larger and ten-foot-tall giants cant be jockeys.

The name is Grady, ten feet tall, a slightly distorted offshoot of a good breed of humans who race horses. Unfortunately for Mr. Grady, he learned too late that you dont measure size with a ruler; you dont figure height with a yardstick and you never judge a man by how tall he looks in a mirror. The giant is as he does. You can make a parimutuel bet on this, win, place or show, in or out of the Twilight Zone.

The first two of Frougs episodes to be aired were strong shows, exceptions to the rule.

In 1958, Froug had won an Emmy for producing Eddie on Alcoa-Goodyear Theater, a half-hour, one-character tour-de-force starring Mickey Rooney as a two-bit gambler desperately trying to raise some cash. Serlings The Last Night of a Jockey must have seemed like old home week to him.

As Grady, Mickey Rooney runs a gamut of emotions from rage to grief to a terrible self-loathing, and is credible throughout. Serlings script displays both intensity and understanding, but ultimately it is Rooneys acting that carries the show.

LIVING DOLL (11/1/63)

Written by Jerry Sohl

Producer: William Froug

Director: Richard C. Saraflan

Director of Photography:

Robert W. Pittack

Music: Bernard Herrmann

Cast: Erich Streator: Telly Savalas Annabelle: Mary LaRoche Christie: Tracy Stratford Voice of Talky Tina: June Foray

Talky Tina, a doll that does everything, a lifelike creation of plastic and springs and painted smile. To Erich Streator, she is a most unwelcome addition to his household but without her hed never enter the Twilight Zone.

Erich is displeased when his wife Annabelle buys an expensive doll for his step-daughter Christie and even more displeased when the doll tells him it doesnt like him. Initially, he suspects trickery, but as the doll repeatedly vocalizes its hatred of him though only when the two of them are alone he comes to believe it really is alive. He throws it in the garbage, but it escapes and phones him with a death threat. To save himself, Erich tries to burn the doll and saw off its head, but both attempts fail. He throws it back in the trash, trapping it with weights. But his actions have convinced Annabelle hes insane; shes taking Christie and leaving. In order to placate her, Erich by now doubting his own senses agrees to return the doll to Christie. But late that night, investigating a sound, Erich trips on the doll and falls down the stairs to his death. Horrified, Annabelle rushes to him and picks up the doll. My name is Talky Tina, it tells her, and you’d better be nice to me!”