A Talent in Twilight
"I don't think it far-fetched that he should have been as impressed as he was by science fiction, particularly because he had much on his mind politically and in terms of social condition, and science fiction -and Twilight Zone specifically -gave him as much flexibility in developing those themes as he might have had anywhere else at that time." - Dick Berg, Producer and Friend
1957-1964, Wanderings In The Zone:
Towards the end of the 1950s, live television was facing mass extinction. The simple economic reality of the fact was unavoidable: a live show could be broadcast once and once only, while a show on film could be rebroadcast as often as was financially viable.
In 1957 Rod Serling opened his filing cabinet and retrieved a half-hour script he had originally written some time prior to graduating from Antioch. "The Time Element," was a time-travel story, which had been aired on The Storm back in Cincinnati. Believing that the early script still held potential, he set about expanding it to an hour and had his secretary type the following, seemingly simple, words of description on the front page:
"THE TWILIGHT ZONE"
THE TIME ELEMENT
BY
ROD SERLING
Rod Serling then submitted the script to CBS...The outcome of that submission became a matter of television history.
"Now I know why people keep scrapbooks -just to prove to themselves that it really happened." - Rod Serling
1964-June 28th, 1975, Requiem For A Reluctant Icon
For the remaining eleven years left to him following the cancellation of his most famous creation, Rod Serling continued to chain smoke his way through a career which had already seen its days of glory pass forever. Not long after the Twilight Zone had gone off network, Rod made the unwise decision to sell his rights in the defunct series to CBS for a considerable lump sum. His wife explained the reasons behind his decision thus: "One reason that my husband ultimately sold out, was that the show often went over budget and CBS said they would never recoup the costs. Needless to say, they have, many, many times."
Despite the sad fact that his best work was already behind him, in 1964 Rod managed to summon enough of his old magic to win his sixth Emmy, for "It's Mental Work," a memorable episode of Bob Hope Presents The Chrysler Theatre starring Lee J. Cobb as the owner of a bar who has a heart attack, Harry Guardino as a bartender and Gena Rowlands as a cocktail waitress. 1965 saw him begin work on another series, The Loner, an experimental Western that starred Lloyd Bridges as a former Union cavalry officer. The Loner concentrated on character and motivation rather than overt gunplay, and although short-lived, the show was generally well received by the critics, who particularly applauded Rod's thoughtful and unconventional scripts.
However, as had happened so many times before, as it would happen again in the future, Rod began to experience interference from network executives to bring the series more into line with the traditional Westerns that had preceded it. Incensed, Rod appealed to the press, charging that the CBS vice president in charge of programming had demanded that he insert more violence. Stung into rapid response the V.P. countered that he had meant 'action -" running gun battles, etc."
Rod was unhappy with the results. "Some weekends I wish Friday would move into Sunday and skip Saturday so there wouldn't be any Loner," he said. He soon got his wish, as halfway through the season The Loner was cancelled.
Over the months and years, which followed, Rod continued to become involved in a wide-ranging and eclectic variety of projects. Including a two-year term as President of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, overseeing the 1965 and 1966 Emmy Awards. A popular celebrity, and in truth ever increasingly drawn to the easy money which came with it, (and which he never stopped hating himself, privately recognising it as a wasteful, undignified squandering of his talent), in 1969 he presided over the game show The Liar's Club. 1970 saw him host for Rod Serling's Wonderful World of... a local Los Angeles program examining such human failings as prejudice, gluttony, snobbery and so forth; while 1973 saw him lending his distinctive voice to the presentation of Zero Hour; a syndicated dramatic radio show. In addition, he also narrated the Jacques Cousteau specials, and a number of programs dealing with ancient astronauts, UFOs and similar speculative subjects. And, naturally, there was the writing, although the majority of his work now lacked the skill and passionate insight of his peak years. 1968, gave us "Certain Honorable Men," a limp, uninspired political drama starring Van Heflin, Peter Fonda, Pat Hingle and Will Geer; 196, heralded the debut script for The New People, a short-lived ABC TV series; in 1970 "A Storm in Summer" on Hallmark Hall of Fame, dealt with the confrontation between an elderly Jewish delicatessen owner and a black youth. Although the production received extremely mixed notices, it nevertheless received Emmy awards for star Peter Ustinov and as best dramatic program.
There was also a number of well paying screenplay adaptations, including Planet of the Apes (1967), for which Rod wrote the first three drafts of the script that was highly faithful to the book. Ultimately, when it was decided that this would be too expensive to produce, Michael Wilson was hired to rewrite Rod's script to present a more primitive simian world, although both writers shared on-screen credit.
"Rod was much less than a happy and contented man in the last ten years of his life, I think there's little doubt of that," noted close friend, producer Dick Berg. "His own self-esteem had deteriorated, I don't think this depressed him, but I do think it made him less comfortable here and somewhat disenchanted with the business."
Actually, hand-in-hand with his overall decline in health due to a combination of incessant smoking, over exposure to the sun, and still punishing work habits, Rod was facing increasing bouts of depression and bitterness over his decline in status as a serious writing talent. Dick Burg when on to explain it thus: "Because you must understand that he enjoyed an exalted status in those first three to five years, it was a rarefied situation. Serling and Chayefsky were the two major names from the golden era of television. And to move from that to becoming a member of the army of working journeymen writers was a great comedown. In Hollywood, he was a guy taking assignments. Quite frustrating, particularly for a man of such spirit."
Rod was allowing himself to be taken in too many different directions at once, serious writer, TV star, media commodity. Often, the work he accepted purely on financial grounds, saddled him with ambiguous feelings. This was especially true of his decision to take part in commercials." How could I turn those offers down?" he asked a reporter rhetorically at one point. "I spend eleven months on a screenplay but get about the same money for a one-minute commercial."
On December 13, 1966, NBC aired The Doomsday Flight, a TV movie written by Rod which concerned a mentally-disturbed former-airline mechanic who plants a pressure bomb set to explode below 4,000 feet aboard a commercial airliner. The movie was an instant ratings success, gathering the second-highest rating of the l967 season (surpassed only by the network showing of The Bridge on the River Kwai). Rod's delight quickly turned to horror however, when the first bomb threat came at 10:45 P.M., while the movie was still being broadcast. During the days that followed, TWA, Eastern, American, Pan Am and Northwest Airlines all received similar threats. Within a mere six days, the total had risen to eight. Each, quite naturally, had to be taken seriously. Rod was aghast. "I wish to Christ I had written a stagecoach drama starring John Wayne instead," he told the papers. "I wish I'd never been born."
Fortunately, the events following The Doomsday Flight were the low point for Serling. Other projects would almost certainly disappoint him, but none would equal that particular experience for sheer nightmarishness.
November 8 1969 saw the premiere on the NBC network of Night Gallery, a TV movie consisting of a trio of bizarre stories written by Rod. One of the Trio, "Eyes", was about a wealthy blind woman [Joan Crawford) who ruthlessly tries to purchase another person's sight. Eyes marked the professional directorial debut of an up-and-coming young director named, Steven Spielberg. A pilot for a possible series, it was the highest-rated program of the evening. Recapturing some of his old Twilight Zone magic, Rod received a special Edgar Allen Poe award by the Mystery Writers of America for his script. Delighted, NBC gave the show the go-ahead.
Rod Serling's Night Gallery, was produced at Universal by Jack Laird, and debuted during the 1970-71 season as a group of six episodes that rotated with three other series, McCloud, The Psychiatrist, and San Francisco International, under the umbrella title Four-in-One. Unlike Twilight Zone, each episode of Night Gallery consisted of several stories, interspersed with comedic vignettes, all with a supernatural bent. As he had on Twilight Zone, Rod was involved as both host and major contributor. In 1971, the series earned a place of its own, running opposite Mannix on CBS. In 1972, in what was to be its final season, the series was cut from an hour to a half hour. Undoubtedly, the series' high watermark was its two Emmy nominations, both for skilfully written, thoughtful character and original pieces from Rod. One was "The Messiah of Mott Street," the other "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" and both recaptured Rod's work at its very best, writing with sensitivity, insight and power equal to much of his superior early work.
Throughout the late 60's and into the early 70's, Rod taught writing in Los Angeles and Ithaca, New York, as well as lecturing at colleges across the USA, voicing strong opinions and in particular openly condemning the Vietnam War. "He gave so much of himself to other people," noted director Ralph Nelson. "I met a woman who recalled that once a guest speaker dropped out at the last minute, and she called Rod and said, 'I'm desperate and I can't pay you anything.' He said, 'Well, let me think it over and I'll call you back in thirty minutes.'
"He called her back in fifteen minutes and said, 'I'll be on the next plane."'
But the end was drawing inexorably near, as during the May of 1975, Rod was admitted to a hospital after experiencing a mild heart attack. A little under a month later, he was re-admitted, this time for a coronary bypass operation. Complications arose after ten hours of open-heart surgery, and on June 28, 1975, in Rochester, New York, Rodman Edward Serling died, aged fifty years, six months and three days.
"His death reminded me of an airplane crash," His brother Bob commented: "in the sense that there is never any single cause of a crash; it's always a culmination, a combination of circumstances that build, each on top of the other, and climax in the accident. There was no single reason for Rod's death. I think it started with heredity: he had a family history of arteriosclerosis from my dad's side of the family, of high blood pressure from my mother's. The second adverse circumstance was his smoking four packs of cigarettes for God knows how many years -like twenty, twenty-five years. This had to have an effect on him. Third was his personality. He was so dynamic, so volatile, so intense about everything that -although we don't know everything about the effects of personality on a heart attack -I suppose he was just literally an accident going someplace to happen."
Memorial services were conducted on July 7, 1975. The late Gene Roddenberry, the creator and producer of Star Trek, said of Rod, "The fact that Rod Serling was a uniquely talented writer with extraordinary imagination is not our real loss. These merely describe his tools and the level of his skill. Our loss is the man, the intelligence and the conscience that used these things for us. No one could know Serling, or view or read his work, without recognizing his deep affection for humanity, his sympathetically intense curiosity about us, and his determination to enlarge our horizons by giving us a better understanding of ourselves. He cared and, I suspect, perhaps too deeply too much of the time. He dreamed of much for us and demanded much of himself, perhaps more than was possible for either in this place and time. But it is that quality of dreams and demands which makes the ones like Rod Serling rare. . . and always irreplaceable."
In his last interview, several months before his death, Rod Serling said, "I just want them to remember me a hundred years from now. I don't care that they're not able to quote a single line that I've written. But just that they can say, 'Oh, he was a writer.' That's sufficiently an honoured position for me."
Although ultimately he will be forever inextricably linked to the enduring memory of his single most successful creation, Rod Serling was paradoxically much more and much less than the wildfire talent that created, then doomed him to be forever trapped in the shadow of the Twilight Zone. At his peak, his talent and commitment to quality blazed bold new trails across the wilderness of the early days of the now Golden Age of American television drama. He was both a unique creative talent, and a flawed human being.
When all else is said and done the inescapable fact remains that his writing, his vision, his imagination helped alter the course of television history. The man himself is gone, but his legacy has touched us all.
Return to Top of Page
