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| From left: H.M. Wynant, William Self, George Clayton Johnson, Arlene Martel, Earl Hamner, Jr., Bob Butler, and Richard Matheson. Photo by Francisco Arcaute. |
GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON: Yes, I’d be happy to do that. The
year was 1959. All of us were thirty years old, full of energy. All of us were
striving to write stories like Ray Bradbury. Richard Matheson was one of those
people, Charles Beaumont another. I saw what they were writing, which to my way
of thinking was existential literature. It always asked the question, "What
if?" It begged for you to suspend your disbelief. These stories could not
happen in the real world. You had to understand that there was going to be some
magic in these stories; something which Rod Serling called the "Twilight Zone"
would happen in these stories. So I got under the influence of Matheson, and
Beaumont, and Nolan, and Jerry Sohl, and Theodore Sturgeon, a whole raft of
very, very progressive people who were writing short stories for magazines like
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was a more literary thing
than the normal science fiction. It’s also been called "speculative
fiction." But basically the art form of the age was "realism."
These plays were realistic. We must not forget that Rod Serling was a
playwright. He wanted to write plays. Television just happened to come along.
And he wrote plays for the camera. Right now, the best Twilight Zones are
little, filmed, one-act plays. That is the place where the new literature will
go, into this existential way of thinking, the new media where every man can be
potentially his own distributor, where all of the old "lines" are not
found. I was asked at one of these gatherings what I thought Rod Serling would
be doing if he were alive right now. I think he’d be fighting for net
neutrality, producing a television show for the cell phone, the tiny screen,
and I think this stuff they’re talking about: "mob-isodes" or "webisodes"
the coming thing. How they will run it, I said, I have no idea, but you can bet
they will.
Requested to elaborate on the process by which a Twilight Zone episode went from the idea stage to a teleplay, George continued:
GCJ: We writers worked for Buck [Houghton]. Rod hardly
saw us. He was the final judge, but if Buck said it was okay, you could bet Rod
would say it was okay, too, because they were dreadfully in sync. Both of them
did their jobs, there was never any conflict that I saw between them. Both of
them had this quality that most of my friends had – they were men of honor.
They believed in honesty and sincerity. They were real to an extreme. I’ll tell
you a story. Charles Beaumont saw the [tele]play that was called The Velvet Alley.
Rod Serling’s last Playhouse 90, I think. When Chuck met Rod, he said, "Rod,
I’m so glad to meet you, but so we won’t get off on the wrong foot here with
everybody praising you for The Velvet Alley, I think The Velvet Alley is the
worst piece of crap that has ever been." Well, this obliged Rod to give it
to Chuck with the "bark-off" and before long they were talking to
each other in the evening over the telephone, and it was obvious that Chuck was
Rod’s favorite, because Chuck was able to think in other categories. I think The
Twilight Zone gave us that permission. You must remember that we were living in
a very buttoned-down Eisenhower world, with Richard Nixon as vice president,
and everybody had black shoes and brown shoes and if you didn’t wear a suit you
were a nobody. That anything official had to be ceremonial. It was a very, very
painful time to live in. There was no permissiveness. No freedom of thought.
And then along came The Twilight Zone. And people started thinking of the
phenomenon of telepathy. I had a vision the other day of a guy in downtown LA
shouting into the air. "What do you mean forty dollars? I wouldn’t pay
forty dollars for that." Cut to New York – "Forty Bucks, you’ll pay
forty bucks." The only thing wrong with that picture is they don’t have
cell phones.
MSZ: Sure, and one thing I want to mention about that is
that because The Twilight Zone was shot at MGM, they had access to all the props,
costumes, sets and the backlot, of course, with anything MGM had ever done. So
they used a lot of stuff from Forbidden Planet, the list goes on and on, and so
when I was a producer on Sliders [circa 1995 – 2000] the first question I asked
them was could we use some of the props et cetera that Universal had from other
productions, because I’d heard that about Rod and The Twilight Zone. So George
or Earl, I don’t know if you want to talk about being on that backlot?”
GCJ: I came in near the end of the MGM era. I was hired
along with Richard Matheson, and Theodore Sturgeon and Jerry Stohl, to develop a
television pilot for Herbert F. Solow who had been Gene Roddenberry's boss at Desilu
Studios, but who was now head of production. And he gave us carte blanche to go
walk around the backlot and made a point of the fact, if you need a fireplace,
there’s a half dozen of them, take one. And it became very clear to me that
with all of those sets, over all those MGM years, all of that stuff was
available. We also went to their library. They had a huge facility which had all
of the scripts that they had ever done. All of the research books that
directors and producers had ordered in order to acquaint themselves with some
era of time. And I looked at that room full of history and was appalled to have
them tell us that they were going to dismantle the entire thing because it was
like, old stuff. And I was thinking what a loss – I was there, they were going
to tear down the backlot – I think it was Universal – where they had an entire
Western street. That was a time of great transition there, really. And it was a
shame to me to watch Hollywood melt. Right now you can’t make a black and white
film. There’s no black and white videotape. You can denature the film and screw
with it, but the whole idea, unless you go back to black and white film, nobody
– Eastman gave it up, and then suddenly no black and white film, so the art
itself is suffering as a result of this modern technology.”
WILLIAM SELF: I’ve been listening to this and it occurs
to me that one of the things that distinguishes The Twilight Zone from all the
other television shows is the photography. I put on a show and I won’t know
what I’m looking at – it could be The Twilight Zone. It has a certain "clean"
look about it. And we should give all of that credit or a lot of it to a man
named George Clemens, who isn’t here. George had been an assistant cameraman.
When I first started at Schlitz, I had an Academy Award-winning cameraman named
Russ Harlan and his assistant was a guy named George Clemens. And when Russ
left, George became head photographer and then I suggested George to Rod
Serling. And I think what he brought to the show was a clean, clear look, that
has never been surpassed. It may have been equaled, but never surpassed, and he
deserves a great deal of credit.”
GCJ: Now when I watch television, I turn it on, it’s a
drama, an episodic drama. I’ve got to sit through an autopsy. Every bloody show
– what are they preparing us for?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: You guys worked in basically what many
would consider a golden age and you’ve obviously made one of the biggest
contributions to that age, given what you were just discussing. Did you see
television going in the direction it eventually went in, to where it is today? What
do you think about it and what is it contributing to our culture compared to
the contributions that you feel you have obviously made?
GCJ: I really do think it’s a terrible failure of the
imagination. We saw Quincy, and I’ve seen every story that I’ve seen since on
that show with Jack Klugman. A story about a coroner and it’s all crime scene
stuff. It all takes place in a lab. You’ve got a three minute rock video
playing over a microscope. House is an example. It’s the same story every week:
A guy comes in. He’s got a disease. They treat him. He gets worse. They treat
him again. He still gets worse. They treat him again. And he’s standing there
dying, and House says, "Aspirin, I’ve read about aspirin." Every darn
week, and I want to say to Hollywood, or to the networks, or whoever is
responsible for all this stuff, shame on you.
GCJ: It is really lovely to be praised
for work you did fifty years ago. That’s really true – these things that we are
looking at – fifty years ago, is when we were doing them. We were young, full
of enthusiasm, captivated by the whole idea of being a part of Hollywood. And
so now when I look back on all of this, I think what a poorer world this would
be without The Twilight Zone. Because I believe that The Twilight Zone was just
as responsible for the change that took place in America during the sixties as
were the student demonstrations and the breakdown of this "eat the scale"
system in America where Ike Eisenhower's slogan was "Auto-Buy Now!"
The flower children were very much a part of that. The
Twilight Zone was very much a part of that, because it gave us permission to
think in other categories and to start to discard some of our old prejudices
and to begin to look at things differently. Black revolution, this whole change
in the social mores of the country, they all happened after 1959.