[ed. One of the best tv shows, ever. Ever.]
An airliner vanishes from the sky. Intruders stray across unenforced borders. Technophobes succumb to gadgets while automatons steal their jobs. Identities are erased. Aliens lurk.
After the framework for each installment in The Twilight Zone has been teased, the camera whip-pans to Rod Serling, the embodiment of American anxiety. He presides from a safe distance — tucked into a witness stand, a corner booth, a Culver City soundstage — and talks through his teeth, wrists clasped at the waist. Reinforced in this device, perhaps the most effective method of introduction ever designed for television, is the secret formula of The Twilight Zone — the act that isolates. As spellbound travelers wander through empty towns and doppelgängers chase each other down deserted streets, only the viewer and the narrator share their findings. Were cameras and kinescopes unable to track these subjects as their lives spiraled out of control, there would always be Serling’s monologues to encapsulate the unexplainable. A pitch, a premise, a nightmare.
Accepting his second Emmy for Best Teleplay Writing, in 1957, Serling said, “A writer rarely gets an opportunity to get in front of the camera, so I’m gonna take this opportunity.” Two years later, the Twilight Zone pilot would air on CBS, the first of 156 episodes, 92 of which were written or adapted by Serling. As head writer and narrator, appearing on-camera from the second season until the fifth and final in 1964, Serling would perhaps reconsider his remark at the Emmy podium. While his deadpan monologues appear to be the model of composure, he once quipped, “Only my laundress really knows how frightened I am.”
While Serling holds his iconic on-camera stance, two scars hide in plain sight. One is from the shrapnel that tore through his wrist during a bomb blast at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in 1944. The other is a twice-broken nose, received not from combat, but during his training as a paratrooper in Georgia and Louisiana, where he boxed as a flyweight with his fellow “paraguys,” as he affectionately called them. Known for his berserker style, Serling tried his hand at the Golden Gloves, though he promptly retired from boxing when his nose was bashed for the second time, during his 17th and final fight.
In his work, Serling would return often to the hardships of the war-weary, but he reserved some of his most powerful observations for broken-down boxers, particularly those who failed to achieve stardom. Serling’s fighters would never be heavyweight champions, the men who come the closest, as Norman Mailer once wrote, to being “the big toe of God.”
With boxing as my through line, I immersed myself in Serling’s work, beginning with his radio dramas of the 1940s through the avalanche of teleplays, screenplays, and novellas he completed before his death in 1975. I searched his archives and pored over letters of rebuke he mailed to bigots and censors who menaced the media landscape. I listened to Dictabelt recordings of screenplays he acted out for his secretary to transcribe. And I spoke with a range of voices influenced by Serling’s legacy. David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, suggested that The Twilight Zone prepared his generation for hallucinogenic drugs. Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, praised Serling for his embrace of irrationalism in a world that couldn’t be explained by the scientific and technological revolutions of the late 1950s. Rick Baker, who terrified a generation with his makeup artistry for “Thriller” and An American Werewolf in London, recalled being inspired to dress as an ape at drive-in screenings of Planet of the Apes— another celebrated script written by Serling — and emerge from his trunk to scare unsuspecting moviegoers. Anne Serling, author of As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling, recalled watching her first episode of The Twilight Zone at the family cottage in upstate New York and being “absolutely horrified” by what kind of material her otherwise fun-loving father was writing in his backyard office back in Los Angeles.
Throughout this search, I was reminded of the ingenuity of television’s most provocative voices at the midcentury mark. As noted by the late John Frankenheimer, who directed several Serling scripts for big and small screens, there were no old days when he and other television pioneers like Serling got their start. “We were the old days,” he said. Circumnavigating censors at that time was commonplace. In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1959, Serling recounted his frustrations in trying to bring an unvarnished account of the murder of Emmett Till to air on The United States Steel Hour in 1956. After the location was shifted from Mississippi to New England and even Coca-Cola bottles were removed from the set to satisfy sponsors’ fears of a Southern connotation, Serling knew he needed to escape even further, to other planets if necessary, to smuggle his socially conscious messages onto American airwaves. Less than three years later, The Twilight Zone was born.
Likewise, when Serling used sports as a portal to connect with viewers, he often did so with a light touch, presenting an escape from the everyday. There was “Casey at the Bat” with robots, or his segment for an unmade Twilight Zone film, in which baseball’s most bruising slugger turns out to be a figment of the imagination of a lonely hot dog vendor at Shea Stadium. But when Serling focused on boxing, he achieved a level of verisimilitude that is particularly striking. He addressed issues of race and class head-on. He drew from his own memories during the most combative and challenging chapter of his life. Dodging censors and skittish sponsors, he landed punches in prime time. It was this side of Serling that I hoped to connect with — the fighter’s instincts that helped change the face of a new medium.
by James Hughes, Grantland | Read more:
Image :Glueck
An airliner vanishes from the sky. Intruders stray across unenforced borders. Technophobes succumb to gadgets while automatons steal their jobs. Identities are erased. Aliens lurk.
After the framework for each installment in The Twilight Zone has been teased, the camera whip-pans to Rod Serling, the embodiment of American anxiety. He presides from a safe distance — tucked into a witness stand, a corner booth, a Culver City soundstage — and talks through his teeth, wrists clasped at the waist. Reinforced in this device, perhaps the most effective method of introduction ever designed for television, is the secret formula of The Twilight Zone — the act that isolates. As spellbound travelers wander through empty towns and doppelgängers chase each other down deserted streets, only the viewer and the narrator share their findings. Were cameras and kinescopes unable to track these subjects as their lives spiraled out of control, there would always be Serling’s monologues to encapsulate the unexplainable. A pitch, a premise, a nightmare.Accepting his second Emmy for Best Teleplay Writing, in 1957, Serling said, “A writer rarely gets an opportunity to get in front of the camera, so I’m gonna take this opportunity.” Two years later, the Twilight Zone pilot would air on CBS, the first of 156 episodes, 92 of which were written or adapted by Serling. As head writer and narrator, appearing on-camera from the second season until the fifth and final in 1964, Serling would perhaps reconsider his remark at the Emmy podium. While his deadpan monologues appear to be the model of composure, he once quipped, “Only my laundress really knows how frightened I am.”
While Serling holds his iconic on-camera stance, two scars hide in plain sight. One is from the shrapnel that tore through his wrist during a bomb blast at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines in 1944. The other is a twice-broken nose, received not from combat, but during his training as a paratrooper in Georgia and Louisiana, where he boxed as a flyweight with his fellow “paraguys,” as he affectionately called them. Known for his berserker style, Serling tried his hand at the Golden Gloves, though he promptly retired from boxing when his nose was bashed for the second time, during his 17th and final fight.
In his work, Serling would return often to the hardships of the war-weary, but he reserved some of his most powerful observations for broken-down boxers, particularly those who failed to achieve stardom. Serling’s fighters would never be heavyweight champions, the men who come the closest, as Norman Mailer once wrote, to being “the big toe of God.”
With boxing as my through line, I immersed myself in Serling’s work, beginning with his radio dramas of the 1940s through the avalanche of teleplays, screenplays, and novellas he completed before his death in 1975. I searched his archives and pored over letters of rebuke he mailed to bigots and censors who menaced the media landscape. I listened to Dictabelt recordings of screenplays he acted out for his secretary to transcribe. And I spoke with a range of voices influenced by Serling’s legacy. David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, suggested that The Twilight Zone prepared his generation for hallucinogenic drugs. Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, praised Serling for his embrace of irrationalism in a world that couldn’t be explained by the scientific and technological revolutions of the late 1950s. Rick Baker, who terrified a generation with his makeup artistry for “Thriller” and An American Werewolf in London, recalled being inspired to dress as an ape at drive-in screenings of Planet of the Apes— another celebrated script written by Serling — and emerge from his trunk to scare unsuspecting moviegoers. Anne Serling, author of As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling, recalled watching her first episode of The Twilight Zone at the family cottage in upstate New York and being “absolutely horrified” by what kind of material her otherwise fun-loving father was writing in his backyard office back in Los Angeles.
Throughout this search, I was reminded of the ingenuity of television’s most provocative voices at the midcentury mark. As noted by the late John Frankenheimer, who directed several Serling scripts for big and small screens, there were no old days when he and other television pioneers like Serling got their start. “We were the old days,” he said. Circumnavigating censors at that time was commonplace. In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1959, Serling recounted his frustrations in trying to bring an unvarnished account of the murder of Emmett Till to air on The United States Steel Hour in 1956. After the location was shifted from Mississippi to New England and even Coca-Cola bottles were removed from the set to satisfy sponsors’ fears of a Southern connotation, Serling knew he needed to escape even further, to other planets if necessary, to smuggle his socially conscious messages onto American airwaves. Less than three years later, The Twilight Zone was born.
Likewise, when Serling used sports as a portal to connect with viewers, he often did so with a light touch, presenting an escape from the everyday. There was “Casey at the Bat” with robots, or his segment for an unmade Twilight Zone film, in which baseball’s most bruising slugger turns out to be a figment of the imagination of a lonely hot dog vendor at Shea Stadium. But when Serling focused on boxing, he achieved a level of verisimilitude that is particularly striking. He addressed issues of race and class head-on. He drew from his own memories during the most combative and challenging chapter of his life. Dodging censors and skittish sponsors, he landed punches in prime time. It was this side of Serling that I hoped to connect with — the fighter’s instincts that helped change the face of a new medium.
by James Hughes, Grantland | Read more:
Image :Glueck
