Imaginary Worlds - Rod Serling's Key of Imagination

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

Witness if you will a writer: Rod Serling. This is the story of a man with a vision -- a vision of what television could be if only men ceased to operate out of fear and greed. But Rod Serling has a plan. He will use the camouflage of monsters, both real and imagined, to reveal what cannot be said about society, and what Mr. Serling himself cannot say about his own fears and regrets. And those monsters dwell in a state of mind called . . . The Twilight Zone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I always enjoy a good Rod Serling impersonation, because his voice is just so much fun to do. I offer you a recipe. Combine one part small town neighborhood with a dash of missing trophy and what you're left with is a gumball fit only for a madman. The time is now on an evening very much like the one we have just witnessed.

Presented for your consideration, Springfield, an average little town with a not-so-average monster. But Rod Serling wasn't doing an intentionally spooky voice. That's just how he talked. Also, that style of writing, tonight, for your approval, a podcast. That was not intentionally affected. That's just how he talked. Also, that style of writing, tonight, for your approval, a podcast. That was not intentionally affected. That's just how he wrote. And along the same lines, it's been difficult to revive the Twilight Zone,

though certainly not for lack of trying. There was a movie in 1983, a reboot in 1985, another reboot in 2002, and of course, the latest one is on CBS All Access. And the verdict in all of these reboots has been the same. Something's missing. In fact, the latest series has inspired a lot of think pieces about what's missing,

from the fact that you can show and say anything on TV now as opposed to the 50s and 60s, to the fact that the new show is an hour long instead of half an hour. And as many people have pointed out, we already have a Twilight Zone in our era, Black Mirror. And those are all valid points. But I think what's missing is Serling's voice, not his literal voice, but his voice as a writer. Because over the show's five seasons, he wrote most of the episodes. And this weird, five seasons, he wrote most of the episodes, and this weird, spooky universe was deeply personal to him. He used it to work through major issues that would define his life's work. By the way, I am going to discuss many of the twist endings from the classic Twilight Zone episodes,

in case you've never seen them, or the endless parodies of them. Now first, to understand what defined Rod Serling's outlook on life, you need to know where he's from. Binghamton, New York. Now there was nothing unusual about Binghamton when Serling was growing up, but that's the point. It was the quintessential all-American small town slash city. Mike Pfeiffer lives in Binghamton.

He's actually part of a small group of locals who've been working for years to brand Binghamton as the hometown of Rod Serling. Mike gives tours around town and he hosts many Rod Serling festivals. And he says Serling's family was very well known in Binghamton. Serling's father ran a butcher shop that was so popular when Rod Serling was eight years old, they bought him a motorized bicycle so he could deliver meat all around town. It gave him a real work ethic at a young age. His brother Robert would say that he made more money than the father did at the butcher shop by delivering stuff. He had such personality in his eyes and the women would melt and just give more money and big tips. On the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling would later create exact replicas of locations from his childhood,

down to the carousel that he used to play on as a kid, even though the show was filmed 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles. Nick Parisi is the author of Rod Serling, His Life, Work, and Imagination. His desire to go back to Binghamton and go back to his childhood, that comes up first in an episode called Walking Distance, which is probably my favorite Twilight Zone episode about a burned-out executive

who just wants to go back to his childhood and relive those days of cotton candy and carousels and that kind of thing. The character in that episode literally revisits his childhood and meets himself as a kid. Martin, I only wanted to tell you that this is a wonderful time of life for you.

Don't let any of it go by without enjoying it. There won't be any more merry-go-rounds, no more cotton candy, no more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you that this is a wonderful time for you. Mike Pfeiffer says even though Binghamton wasn't mentioned in these episodes, the locals knew what Serling was doing. The very first episode in the pilot, Where Is Everybody, with Earl Holliman, there's something that's very prominent to those that grew up here. There's a famous ladies' apparel store that was right on the main street across from their meat market called

Resnick's. And in the episode, you see Earl Holliman going over to this truck. It says Resnick's, the panel truck. And he's talking to a lady that turns out to be a mannequin. When he opens the door, she falls out on the ground, and he knows it's a mannequin. You're the first person I've seen. Look, I really don't want you to be frightened or anything, but I was wondering if there's a doctor or something. Now, there is a Twilight Zone episode called The After Hours,

which is about mannequins. But the store in that episode is not based on Resnick's. It's actually a recreation of a different department store that Serling remembered in Binghamton. That store, as it's portrayed in The After Hours, is really unique. I've even taken tours there from the museum to look at the layout of the elevator banks and the layout of the glass display cases. He really, really worked hand in hand on a set to get the image he wanted. I'm a mannequin. That's what I am. I'm a mannequin. And it was my turn, your turn, to leave us for a month. When you come to mirror image, the other,

the bus station episode, again, it's formatted so well it was filmed in MGM. But he just made sure the details were just the way the building was laid out. I've taken tours in there too. Bus to Cortland, Syracuse, Buffalo, now arriving. And here is Rod Serling in 1972, talking with a group of students about his chronic nostalgia. In my case, it's a hunger to be young again, a desperate hunger to go back where it all began. And I think you'll see this as a running thread through a lot of things that I write.

So what killed his childhood? World War II. He enlisted to serve the day after his high school graduation. Nick Parisi says Serling really wanted to be a paratrooper, and he worked hard to get into the 511th Parachute Infantry. Kind of the irony, this is, you know, the greatest warning about, you know, be careful what you wish for. You may get it. You know, he wished to be a paratrooper and he was assigned to a Parachute Infantry Regiment. And they were used as an infantry regiment. You know were used as a as just a traditional ground infantry so he spent a lot of time in combat he they he trained in new guinea for about six months and then they went to

to lady where they were going to go through some heavy jungle and you know jungle warfare and when he arrived in lady their first you know one of their first And when he arrived in Leyte, their first, you know, one of their first missions was basically to just kind of traverse this mountain range at the middle of the island and get from one side to the other and essentially just kill everything on the way, just to make it across, you know, just clear out the enemy. So this was, for him and everybody else, it was 30 days of hell. Amy Boyle Johnston wrote a book called Unknown Serling, which looks at Serling's work beyond the Twilight Zone. She says throughout

his career, Serling is obsessed with the cruel irony of war and the unpredictable hand of fate. In fact, there's one particular story that he wrote that ended up in three different shows that he worked on before the Twilight Zone. Didn't end up in The Twilight Zone, but ends up in three other shows that he wrote. And the plot of this story is the same each time. A scout of five soldiers, three or five soldiers is sent out. And what happens is they can communicate back to the base, but the base cannot communicate with them. And what happens is that in order for the 500 soldiers behind to proceed, they need to bomb the area where the scout team is. And they can't tell the scout team that this is going to happen and that they're going to bomb the area. And

eventually what happens is they need to send the bombs and the scout team is decimated in order for the team behind to live. Serling was in communication, so if this were a true story, he would have been the guy on the radio hearing from the scout team, unable to warn them of their fate. I would bet that happened from how he returns to this again and again and again. It would seem that that would haunt anyone who had ever experienced that. When he got out of the military, he admitted that he got into writing as a form of therapy. He said, I pursued writing as a way to get these things out of my gut and onto the paper. So he really did consciously make that decision that he was going to deal with his military trauma in writing.

As far as the Twilight Zone goes, the most autobiographical he got in the Twilight Zone was in an episode called The Purple Testament, which is actually set in Lady in 1945. And he actually uses some of his buddy's names from the war in that episode for the guys who got killed. Sergeant. Who'd we lose? Lots of wounded. Maybe 10, 12.

Four dead. Hibbert, Horton, Morgan, and Levy. Levy, the last name you heard, was a good friend of Serling's. Melvin Levy was the jokester of the group, and he was killed when a crate of food landed on his head after their platoon had gone without food for a week. They were friends and certainly helped to bury the body the next day. And, you know, this voraciously hungry guy and all of them gets killed by a crate of food.

I mean, it doesn't get any more purely ironic than that. And that certainly had to have an effect on his worldview. When I heard the story of Melvin Levy, the first thing I thought about was the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last, which was about a man who only wants to be alone to read books. By the end of the episode, he ends up being the lone survivor of a nuclear war, and he finds himself alone on the steps of a library full of books. And then his glasses break. Now that is the ironic twist that everybody remembers, the glasses breaking. But what always struck me was the moment afterward,

when he looks up to God, or the God of the Twilight Zone, and says, the Twilight Zone, and says, That's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was all the time I needed. That's not fair. That's not fair.

But the death that would haunt Serling the most happened back home. His father died of a heart attack while he was deployed overseas. He requested permission to leave to go to the funeral and it was denied. And so he never got to say goodbye to his father. And his father was only 52 years old when he died of a heart attack. For Serling, his father and Binghamton are one. He came back disillusioned and he never, Binghamton never really existed again for him. His childhood ended the day he left for war.

Years later, Rod Serling's daughter Anne wrote a memoir about him. And Mike Pfeiffer says when he read it, that's when he finally got a sense of how devastated Serling was by the death of his father. Ann would tell that whenever they came back every summer, that he would two or three times while he was visiting, you know, out there, he would drive in by himself. He wanted to be alone. And he would just drive around the old house, the parks, where the shops were, where the meat market was. And he had a lot of letters. His mom and dad wrote him faithfully in the service, and he wrote them back faithfully. And he has all those letters. And Anne Surley would say she'd just go out, she'd see him sitting on the shore there, just reading the letters over and over and weeping.

He just never had that closure. Although he tried. In that episode, I mentioned earlier walking distance, but a man who literally revisits his childhood. There's a really touching scene. The man reunites with his father and was particularly eerie is that he's now the same age as his father. And you, you know, Pop? Yes, I know. I know who you are.

I know you've come from a long way from here. A long way and a long time. But you do know other things, don't you, Martin? Things that'll happen. happen yes I do after his father's death Serling moved elsewhere and set out to find his voice as a writer and his work ethic was mind-boggling to quote the musical Hamilton he wrote like he was running out of time. And he was. That is all after the break. Let's jump to September of 1959, right before The Twilight Zone launched.

Now at this point, Rod Serling was a household name, but he was associated with high-quality TV dramas. You might be thinking, wait, but The Twilight Zone is a high-quality TV drama. That is not how most people thought about culture back then. In 1959, high-quality meant realism, like the show Playhouse 90, where Rod Serling had written a critically acclaimed episode about a boxer with brain damage called Requiem for a Heavyweight. Science fiction, on the other hand, was considered lowbrow. It's the stuff they played at drive-in movies. So when Serling announced that he was going to create The Twilight Zone, people were baffled.

I mean, he was known for speaking out about contemporary issues like civil rights, and now he's going to do a show about UFOs and aliens? So he sat down for an interview with a very well-respected TV journalist, Mike Wallace. Is pre-censorship, though, involved? Are you simply writing easy? In this particular area, no, because we're dealing with a half-hour show, which cannot probe like a 90, which doesn't use scripts as vehicles of social criticism. These are strictly for entertainment. These are potboilers.

Oh, no. I wouldn't call them pot boilers at all. Well, these are very adult, I think, high quality, half-hour, extremely polished films. But because they deal in the areas of fantasy and imagination and science fiction and all of those things, there's no opportunity to cop a plea or chop an ax or anything. Well, you're not going to be able to cop a plea or chop an axe or anything. Well, you're not going to be able to cop a plea or chop an axe because you're going to be obviously working so hard on the Twilight Zone that, in essence, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, you've given up on writing anything important for television,

right? Yeah. Well, again, this is a semantic thing. Important for television? I don't know. If by important you mean I'm not going to try to delve into current social problems dramatically, you're quite right, I'm not. Now this is a famous interview because Serling is lying through his teeth. He knows perfectly well that he's going to use the Twilight Zone for social commentary. So who is he trying to fool? The network? The advertisers? The public?

Let's back up to the late 1940s. After the war, Serling went to Antioch College, where he started writing as a kind of therapy. In fact, Amy Boyle Johnston found an early story of his where he put war itself on trial. After college, he got a job working at a Cincinnati radio station called WLW. And he got a reputation as somebody who was not afraid of a fight. He believed in equality. He believed in women's rights. I was told a story that when he worked at WLW as a writer, and there was a janitor who was African-American who worked downstairs that wanted to get radio work of speaking. And Sterling would go down and fight for this janitor to get a speaking role because they wouldn't hire him. They would only hire him as a janitor.

And when he was in Cincinnati, he created a TV show called The Storm, where he began to play with a lot of ideas that would eventually find their way into the twilight zone. But the first time he came to national attention was with a TV movie called Patterns, which was about a corporate executive in a cutthroat business world struggling with morality. Now back then a TV movie was essentially a play performed live on television, and Patterns was so critically acclaimed they performed it again on a different night, which was completely unheard of back then. Again, Nick Parisi. The stardom that it brought to Rod Serling was he did have a little bit more freedom to at least listen to his conscience a little more and say, you know, I'm going to try to say something more in my scripts. I've always wanted to. And he did get into some very early stuff that he did in Cincinnati where he addressed some controversial topics. But on national television, he hadn't done it.

But after Patterns, he said, yeah, I'm going to do this. And he almost immediately got into trouble. They just bashed him for trying to address social issues on television. And he gained a nickname, Television's Angry Young Man, because he did want to address, you know, social issues on television. And he gained a nickname, television's angry young man, because he did want to address these things. And he very rarely got a chance to do it in the way that he wanted to do it. His biggest clash with the network came over a TV movie called Noon on Doomsday. It was inspired by the murder of Emmett Till. And Serling was particularly fascinated by the mob mentality of the white people in Mississippi who rallied around the killers because they saw them as one of their own being persecuted by outsiders and media elites.

Again, here's Serling from that Mike Wallace interview. And I wrote the script using black and white. Then it was changed to suggest an unnamed foreigner. Then the locale was moved from the South to New England. And I'm convinced they'd have gone up to Alaska or the North Pole if, and using Eskimos as a possible minority, except I suppose the costume problem was of sufficient severity not to attempt it. But it became a lukewarm, vitiated, emasculated kind of show. You went along with it. All the way. I protested. I went down fighting, as most television writers do, thinking in a strange, oblique, philosophical way that better say something than nothing. In this particular show, though, by the time they had finished taking Coca-Cola bottles off the set

because the sponsor claimed that this had southern connotations, suggesting to what depth they went to make this a clean, antiseptically, rigidly acceptable show. He could have had an easier time trying to say something if he was a playwright or a novelist. Even films were starting to directly tackle issues like race and class at that point. But he feared that TV was the only medium that he was suited to write. And he was really good at it, especially the half-hour format.

And he believed in television, not the way it was in the 1950s, which was basically westerns, game shows, and sitcoms, but the potential of television to speak to contemporary issues quickly and directly. And Amy says television needed him just as much as he needed it. Serling was held up to be the mark of what a TV writer could be. Whenever someone said TV has this patch shows, it's entertainment, it's cheap, it's whatever. CBS could always say, here is Rod Serling. This is CBS, the Tiffany Network, could hold up Rod Serling and say,

this is one of the finest writers out there and he's writing for us. His next big battle was over genre, not content. He wrote a TV movie called The Time Element, which was about a guy in the 50s who suddenly finds himself on the eve of Pearl Harbor trying to warn everybody. The fantastical concept was a very hard sell. But when it finally aired, The Time Element was a huge hit, and is now considered a backdoor pilot or a proof of concept for The Twilight Zone. You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension,

a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into the Twilight Zone. And in the Twilight Zone, war comes up over and over and over again.

And a lot of his stories about astronauts, to me, always felt like stories about soldiers who just found themselves in a very strange mission in a hostile location. Another theme he kept coming back to in the Twilight Zone was a lost golden age. Like the episode A Stop at Willoughby, where a stressed-out executive thinks that he's found a portal to an idyllic 19th century town along his commuter rail to Manhattan, even though he's not sure if the town of Willoughby is actually real. Willoughby. Next time. Next time I'm going to get off.

But death is lurking everywhere in the Twilight Zone. Just jumped off the train, did he? Shouted something about Willoughby, then ran out to the platform, and that was the last I saw him. Another theme that Serling kept coming back to over and over again was social isolation. And in the way he wrote the characters in those episodes, you can really feel that he has a tremendous amount of faith in their humanity, or he's absolutely appalled by their lack of humanity,

even though these characters are of his own invention. You know, he really did believe in human connection. He believed that we have to be connected to each other. We have to be involved with each other and engaged with each other. Any episode that had to do with space travel generally touched on that idea of the astronaut being away from humanity, that you need the companionship, you need the connection. The Lonely, another first season episode, was like that. Alicia, she weighs more than 15 pounds. That's exactly the point now, Corey. Our ship is stripped

right now. We only have enough room for you and that ledger and that pencil of yours. Now you're going to have to leave that robot behind. She's not a robot. She's a woman. You don't understand. You leave her behind, that's murder. Corey, Corey, Corey, now wait a minute. I haven't got any choice. Another theme that runs throughout his work is the story of a person that's considered obsolete, whether it's a washed-up movie star or a librarian in a fictitious totalitarian state. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under M for Mankind in the Twilight Zone. And he got to address social and political issues like mob mentality

using the metaphors of science fiction. In fact, one of the most famous examples is The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, which is about a white suburban neighborhood that seems idyllic until there's a blackout. And someone suggests the blackout might be part of an alien plot. Your wife's been doing a little talking, Steve, about some of the odd things you've been doing. Go ahead. What's my wife said? Let's get it all out. Let's pick out every idiosyncrasy of every man, woman, and child on this whole street. By the time these friendly neighbors are tearing each other apart because they can't figure out who might be the undercover alien spy, we pull back to discover that this was a plot put in motion by aliens

who were using paranoia to soften the ground for invasion. Understand the procedure now. Just stop a few of their machines and radios and telephones and lawnmowers. Throw them into darkness for a few hours and then sit back and watch the pattern. And this pattern is always the same? With few variations. They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find. And it's themselves.

dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves. Serling made us question what we can do and who we are. Serling asked, what is your role when you see someone not being treated well before you, for whatever reason? Serling said, do you have the right to stand up? Should you stand up? Will you stand up? Serling believed that humans had the choice to behave correctly, but it was up to them to decide to do so. So did it work? Did he fool the network and the advertisers? Nick Parisi thinks so. There are certain people who just don't quite get science fiction or don't quite get fantasy. You know, in my book, I talk about one particular person who happened to be one of the Twilight Zone sponsors. He would reportedly call his advertising agency every Monday morning and ask them to explain the show to him that was on Friday night.

He just didn't get it. Although Amy Boyle Johnston thinks it may not have been true for everybody. We show certain Twilight Zone episodes to fifth graders in this country, and we show them the monsters are doing Maple Street, and they understand that this is not just about McCarthyism, but this is about the other and creating the other and the dangers of that. So if fifth graders can understand that this is about McCarthyism and this is about the threat of the other, CBS executives, some of the smartest men in advertising, understood exactly what was going on.

But they had the ability to look people in the eye and say, we had no clue. But on the other level, I don't believe one word of that. It gave them deniability. But there were not hordes of people offended by The Twilight Zone. In fact, the ratings were not that great. After three seasons, CBS canceled the show. Serling moved back to the East Coast, got a job teaching, when he learned that CBS changed their minds. They got two more seasons out of it before the network finally pulled the plug. Mike Pfeiffer says Rod Serling was bitter. He had a lot at stake in that show.

I mean, literally, he owned half the show. You know, he was hurt when it was canceled. So when CBS approached him about, you know, buying their rights, he sold out. Carol was against it. And, you know, Rod wished he never did because from day one when it went into syndication, it's never left the air. So much of the world. It was always a sore point that he sold out so cheaply, never dreaming there would be reruns like this. He was mad that he felt like he got robbed financially, but he did not think the show

had a cultural impact. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the world was becoming scarier, and the social issues he cared about were coming to the forefront of everyday life, and yet he saw TV becoming more and more vapid. His first show after The Twilight Zone was a Western that got canceled, and then he ended up creating a show that was very similar to The Twilight Zone called Night Gallery. But he found himself working with a producer who didn't respect him, didn't give him creative control. Serling was pretty miserable. In fact, the most memorable episode of that series, one that he wrote, which was called They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar, had eerie parallels with Serling's life.

It is about a middle-aged man who just so happens to be a World War II veteran, and he feels like he has nothing left to give. His time has passed. He's given all he can give. And in that episode, Rod Serling gives this character his boyhood home address, 67 Bennett Avenue. I want to go to 67 Bennett Avenue. Hey, wait a minute. You don't live there.

The devil, I don't. You used to live there. Now you live in a high-rise on Norton. I don't live there. I just wash my socks there. I live at 67 Bennett Avenue. It's a two-story white frame house. Katie and I bought it six months after we were married. That's empty now, Randy. They're tearing down the whole block, every house.

They're going to build an apartment complex. It is classic Rod Serling, story of an obsolete man in a cutthroat business world full of remorse for a lost golden age. The main character is a widower, but his obsession with not having had enough time with his wife echoes Serling's remorse that he never had enough time with his wife echoes Serling's remorse that he never had enough time

with his father. And the real tragic irony is that a few years later, Serling died of a heart attack at almost the same age that his father died, leaving the same emotional impact on his children. But he left a positive legacy as well. His family had great memories of him as a devoted husband and father. He also went into academia, where by all accounts, he was a very generous teacher, and his legacy did not go unnoticed in Hollywood either. He was so ahead of his time in thinking about what TV could say and how a series could be run by a writer with a singular point of view. He is now considered the first showrunner, as we would understand that term today. You know, Vince Gilligan, who was the

creator of Breaking Bad, has said that Rod Serling has always been his lodestar. But of course, Serling's big legacy is The Twilight Zone. Although Amy says the show became iconic for mixed reasons. When I was a child in Northern California, we had five channels. And CBS played The Twilight Zone consistently on Friday and Saturday nights because there was no cost for them. We rarely ever saw Alfred Hitchcock Presents because it still had residuals. And while it's unfortunate for the Serling family, absolutely. One of the reasons why it had gained in popularity before DVDs, before VHS, was because TV was playing this when they weren't playing a lot of other things. The other great thing about his writing is that he didn't resolve many of his stories or even many of the mysteries within the stories because he's asking tough questions about thorny issues that we don't know how to resolve. And modern remakes often try to fix them and put the end at the bottom,

and Serling didn't do that. And if you watched the Twilight Zone episode with someone, you could turn to them and say, what do you think happened? Both of you could come up with wildly different things, but they could both be probable in that world. And those ambiguous endings let the be probable in that world. And those ambiguous endings let the stories linger in our minds. The great thing about The Twilight Zone was you thought about it as you were watching it. As it unfolded, it unfolded in your consciousness. You're not being told a story,

you're being invited to live it. And I think that's why it still resonates. And the questions Serling asked are so eloquently displayed that we still watch and feel as if someone has understood an anxiety we have as well. And in the realm of digital streaming, Rod Serling's voice is still speaking to us. We can hear him anywhere, anytime, which is like something

out of the Twilight Zone. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Mike Pfeiffer, Amy Boyle-Johnston, and Nick Parisi. There are so many interesting things about Rod Serling I didn't get to talk about, like the fact that he wrote the first draft of Planet of the Apes, and the Statue of Liberty

at the end was his idea. If you want to learn a lot more about Rod Serling, I'm including a list of all the books that I mentioned in the show notes. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emalinski and imagineworldspod. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. your next stop the twilight zone