"Where Is Everybody?"

Earl Holliman, first resident of
The Twilight Zone

“Where Is Everybody”

Season One, Episode 1
Original Air Date: October 2, 1959

Cast:
Mike Ferris: Earl Holliman 
Air Force General: James Gregory 
Doctor: Paul Langton 
Reporter #1: James McCallion
Air Force Colonel: John Conwell
Reporter #2: Jay Overholt
Air Force Captain: Carter Mullaly
Reporter #3: Gary Walberg
Air Force Staff Sergeant: Jim Johnson

Crew: 
Writer: Rod Serling (original teleplay) 
Director: Robert Stevens 
Producer: William Self
Director of Photography: Joseph LaShelle 
Art Direction: Robert Clatworthy and Alex Golitzen
Set Decoration: Russell A. Gausman and Ruby Levitt
Assistant Director: Joseph E. Kenny
Editor: Roland Gross
Makeup: Bud Westmore
Sound: Leslie I. Carey and Vernon W. Kramer
Music: Bernard Hermann

And Now, Mr. Serling (recorded in 1961 for a re-run of the episode): 
“I’m about to show you a picture of something that isn’t what it looks like. Pleasant little town? It isn’t this at all. It’s a nightmare. It’s a chilling, frightening, journey of one man into a mystifying unknown. You’re invited to join that man in a most unique experience. Next week, Earl Holliman asks, and you’ll ask with him, Where is Everybody?" 

 "Here’s an item we forgot. A moment for the people who pay the tab. It’s often said that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’  Case in point. Before we meet again try Oasis. You’ll know what I mean.”

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:
“The place is here, the time is now, and the journey into the shadows that we’re about to watch could be our journey.”

Summary:

             Mike Ferris is traveling on foot down a rural highway when he wanders into a quaint little town that looks like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, a quiet, idyllic place, complete with town square, drugstore, diner, and movie theater. It will become the setting of his nightmare. He has no memory of who he is and no known destination. The town shows all the normal signs of a functioning community except for one essential element: there are no people. Ferris wanders into a café where a jukebox plays to an empty room. A smoking cigar lies unattended in an ashtray in the local police station. A phone rings inside a phone booth but no one is on the other end of the call. As he wanders from place to place Ferris grows suspicious. He feels like he is being watched. As night falls on the town, his paranoia and loneliness finally eat away at what is left of his rationality. He collapses against a stoplight, frantically pushing the ‘walk’ button and pleading for someone to help him.

            Cut to a different place entirely. Mike Ferris is being observed on a monitor by a group of military officials. The ‘walk’ button he believes himself to be pressing is actually the panic button inside the isolation chamber that he has been strapped into for the past 400 hours. Ferris is an Air Force astronaut aboard a simulated flight to the moon. Upon witnessing his fragile condition, the General in charge of the project decides to have Ferris removed from the chamber.  After a few moments Ferris regains his grasp on reality and inquires of the staff doctor as to why he believed he was in an imaginary town with no people in it. The doctor explains to Ferris that man has an instinctive need for companionship and without it the mind will begin to make up scenarios in order to fight the loneliness. As he is being taken away by medical personnel he realizes that when the time comes for him to go on a real flight to the moon there will be no panic button to push and no one to come and rescue him from his own mind. 

Rod Serling’s closing narration: 
“Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in the void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting…in The Twilight Zone.”

Commentary:

"The sensation was unrelated to anything he'd ever felt before. He awoke, but had no recollection of ever having gone to sleep. And, to mystify him further, he was not in a bed. He was walking down a road, a two-lane black macadam with a vivid white stripe running down the center. He stopped, stared up at a blue sky, a hot, mid-morning sun. Then he looked around at the rural landscape, high, full-leafed trees flanking the road. Beyond the trees were fields of wheat, golden and rippling."
                    -"Where Is Everybody?" by Rod Serling (Stories from the Twilight Zone (1960))
             
       As the premiere episode of The Twilight Zone, “Where Is Everybody?” perfectly sets the tone for the series.  The episode begins as Mike Ferris discovers a mysterious town with signs of life in every direction but no visible inhabitants. In the second act, the conflict escalates to a suspenseful climax as Ferris’s paranoia mounts and his reasoning begins to deteriorate. In the final scene, we see that he is not in a town at all, but in an experimental isolation chamber. Thus, all the pieces of the puzzle come together. This would become the formula used throughout the series and the show’s success is due largely to the simple format of an ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary situation. This format grabbed the audience’s attention within the first few minutes and held it to the finale where there would usually be some sort of twist or a logical explanation of events. Many of the hour-long episodes in the fourth season suffer because they cannot successfully fit this format. 

                An interesting aspect of "Where Is Everybody?" is the number of symbols and motifs in the episode which would be repeated throughout the course of the series. There is the symbol of the broken clock, seen again in "Time Enough at Last" and "A Kind of Stopwatch." There is the otherworldly call in a phone booth, seen again in "The Hitch-Hiker" and "The Jungle." There is also the recurring symbol of a mirror, one of the show's most oft-repeated images, seen in episodes such as "Mirror Image," "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room," "The Mirror," and "The Masks." Mike Ferris also enjoys a drugstore sundae, seen again in "Walking Distance." 

             In terms of the approach to fantasy, however, “Where Is Everybody?” is atypical in that by episode's end it is revealed to be almost entirely devoid of any fantasy elements. For the pilot episode, Serling understood that his job was not to write a science fiction masterpiece; he needed to sell the show to CBS and creating something commercially viable was essential. CBS had twice shot down his previous attempts at a fantasy program when he submitted "I Shot an Arrow Into the Air," about an alien encounter, and a time travel fantasy, "The Time Element." 
           
           Once the series was ordered, Serling turned in a script titled "The Happy Place," about a near future in which citizens over the age of sixty are sent to idyllic rest homes in order to be euthanized. The script was passed on by pilot producer William Self, causing a brief rift between the two men, who had only recently met on the occasion of coming together to create The Twilight Zone. Self imparted to Serling that the type of dark and powerful drama he was accustomed to writing on Playhouse 90 was not going to sell the series to the network. Serling came to understand what the network executives did not want to see. They did not want a far-out concept or a bleak story. Thus, he deliberately toned down the fantasy aspect with "Where Is Everybody?" 

             Producer William Self held experience in virtually every form of film and television production by the time he came to an executive role in program development at CBS. The Twilight Zone was Self's maiden project in his new executive role. Self began acting in the 1940s in feature films and worked in that capacity until 1952, when he stopped acting and moved to the production side of the young medium of television. One of Self's early jobs was to oversee production on China Smith, a low-budget adventure series featuring future The Twilight Zone performer Dan Duryea. China Smith was also co-written by Jack Laird, future producer of Rod Serling's Night Gallery. Self later oversaw production on the Schlitz Playhouse of the Stars where he hired a young production assistant from RKO named Buck Houghton as story editor on the series. During his time on that series, Self created Meridian Productions, several members of whom, including cinematographer George T. Clemens and Production Manager Ralph W. Nelson, would later become valued production members on The Twilight Zone. When Self exited his producer role on the series after the pilot episode, he recommended to Serling that Buck Houghton be considered as regular producer on the series. Houghton's subsequent three-season run as producer was the apex of the series and he fit both molds required of him on the show, that of a producer who could be counted upon by the network as well as one intuitively in-touch with the creative side of production.

             Serling initially got the idea for "Where Is Everybody?" while walking around an empty studio backlot, which resembled a real town but was devoid of people. A similar experience inspired Earl Hamner Jr. to craft his thematically related fifth season episode, "Stopover in a Quiet Town." This subtle approach to fantasy compliments the first half of the episode rather nicely in that there is only a suggestion that anything supernatural is occurring. However, once the curtain is drawn and it is revealed that all of the events we are witnessing are taking place in Ferris’s mind, the lack of the supernatural seems to take the audience in an unanticipated direction. It takes the viewer into an entirely new story with new characters, a new setting, and a new perspective of the protagonist. 

                 Serling would use this device in several other episodes. “King Nine Will Not Return,” the premier episode of the second season, shares much in common with "Where Is Everybody?" and concerns the pilot of a World War II bomber who awakens after a crash to find that his crew has mysteriously vanished. At the end of the story it’s revealed that the entire event has taken place in his mind (or has it?). “King Nine” is a more complex episode given that the main character is struggling not only with the burden of loneliness but with the guilt of abandoning his crew, which makes the ending slightly more believable. The two episodes are also related in another manner. One of the regrets Serling had about "Where Is Everybody?" is that it is devoid of any fantasy. When Serling adapted the story for his 1960 volume, Stories from the Twilight Zone, a book released just as the first season was finishing its initial broadcast, he added a moment at the end of the story in which a ticket stub from the imaginary movie theater is found in the pocket of Ferris's uniform. In the story, Ferris reached into the box office and took a ticket, tearing it himself at the usher stand as he entered the theater. The scenes give the eerie suggestion that Ferris had actually been in some other world, whether one of his imagining or not is left to the reader's own imagination. When Serling came to write "King Nine Will Not Return" to open the second season of the series, he added a similar scene to the end of the tale in which sand is found in the pilot's shoes, giving the impression that it was not a hallucination at all but that he may have actually gone back in time. 

Loneliness is the primary theme at work in "Where Is Everybody?" The show would return to this theme many times throughout its five season run in episodes like “The Lonely,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” “Nothing in the Dark,” “Two,” “Miniature,” “Probe 7 – Over and Out,” and many more.  The main element which fails to lend it verisimilitude is the fact that, on some level, Ferris knows he is in an isolation chamber. He is aware that he is being monitored by people who are there with him in the same room, and he also knows that the panic button is his get-out-of-jail-card which he can press at any time to end his claustrophobic nightmare.  It seems doubtful that under such fail-safe circumstances his mind would construct such an elaborate hallucination.  It is also amazing how fast he recovers from what is presumed to be a complete mental collapse. He is able to regain his senses enough to rationally answer the doctor’s questions, although this can be excused due to the limitation of time.

“Where Is Everybody?” is an episode which depends, almost entirely, on the performance of its lead actor. Earl Holliman is completely believable as the frantically lost Mike Ferris. His role is not an easy one, considering that his character is alone for the majority of the episode and speaks aloud to himself as a way of providing exposition to the audience. Holliman later recalled what he thought of as "dreadful" read-throughs with Serling, director Robert Stevens, and producer William Self, in which Holliman was essentially forced to deliver a protracted monologue, unable to engage in the accustomed practice of reading with another performer. It is an incredibly effective performance in that there is never a moment when Holliman loses the audience’s attention. Holliman initially did not want to take the role. Despite appearing in the famous 1953 film Forbidden Planet, Holliman was not fond of science fiction and fantasy. But the opportunity to work with Rod Serling and the quality of the script ultimately decided him in favor of doing the pilot. Serling later wrote Holliman a letter of praise citing his performance as essential not only to the success of "Where Is Everybody?" but also to the future success of the series. For Holliman, this sort of praise was the most satisfying form of compensation and he kept Serling's letter famed upon a wall in his home for many years afterwards. 

Rod Serling and Earl Holliman

      Holliman was born in Delhi, Louisiana in 1928 and studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse and UCLA. In 1956 he won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture for his role as Jim Curry in the film The Rainmaker, starring Burt Lancaster and Katherine Hepburn.  His other notable film appearances include Forbidden Planet (1956), Giant (1956), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), the latter with John Wayne and Dean Martin. In the 1960’s he began a long and versatile television career. On the same night that “Where is Everybody?” was first broadcast (October 2, 1959) Holliman also appeared in the starring role of the first episode of the short-lived CBS western series Hotel de Paree, which also featured Strother Martin and Jeanette Nolan, both of whom would later feature on The Twilight Zone. From 1974 to 1978 he starred as Lieutenant Bill Cowley in the CBS series Police Woman with Angie Dickinson. In 1983 he was featured in the critically acclaimed mini-series The Thorn Birds. 

        Holliman later recalled to interviewer Douglas Snauffer that the entire first day of shooting on "Where Is Everybody?" was lost due to a camera malfunction. To make matters worse, Holliman discovered he had the flu and was running a high fever. The effects of the illness can be heard in Holliman's hoarse voice at moments in the episode.

The episode also owes a great deal to director Robert Stevens, whose fluid camera work brings Serling’s script to life. In one of the more memorable shots from the series, Stevens frames Earl Holliman as he races down the stairs in the movie theater and runs straight into, and shatters, a full length mirror; it is only here that the audience realizes Stevens was not actually filming Holliman but rather Holliman’s reflection in the mirror. In the early 1950’s Stevens made a name for himself as director, writer and producer on the live CBS series Suspense. Today he is best remembered for his prolific work on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, where he directed nearly fifty episodes between the two shows.

       The final aspect of "Where Is Everybody?" which bears mention is the excellent musical composition by Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann possessed an almost unique talent for capturing the otherworldly in his melancholy scores. Herrmann was a prolific composer for film, television, and radio, renowned for his collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho, etc.). The Twilight Zone was very fortunate to acquire Herrmann's talents throughout the course of the series, as he would lend his distinctive music to some of the most enduring episodes, including "Walking Distance," "The Hitch-Hiker," "Eye of the Beholder," and "Living Doll." Herrmann's original title theme music, featured during the first season, is the preferred theme music by many fans of the series, ourselves included. 

Despite its relatively minor flaws, “Where is Everybody?” remains an immensely enjoyable episode, one which holds a distinctive place in the lexicon of popular culture as the beginning of one of the most celebrated series in the history of American television.

Grade: B

Grateful acknowledgement to:
-"Self Appraisal," interview of William Self by Tom Weaver, Starlog #299 (June, 2002)
-"Enter the Zone," interview of Earl Holliman by Douglas Snauffer, Starlog #252 (June, 1998)

Notes:

--The original opening sequence to the pilot episode was different in several ways. The biggest difference was that Serling was not the narrator. Serling and producer William Self cast veteran voice-over actor Westbrook Von Voorhis to be the voice of the show. After CBS bought the pilot, however, everyone agreed that a new narrator was needed to avoid sounding like every clichéd science fiction movie of that era. Also, the original opening features images of galaxies and stars with Von Voorhis stating that "there is a sixth dimension." This was later replaced with the animated sequence that was used for most of the episodes in the first season. Serling also rewrote the opening narration to say “There is a fifth dimension…” after he was informed that there were, in fact, only four dimensions.

--This episode was shot in the famous courthouse square on the Universal Studios (then Universal International) backlot where To Kill a Mockingbird and Back to the Future would later be filmed. Universal provided its backlot to CBS as a favor and did not, at the time, provide studio access to television productions. CBS acquired backlot and studio services at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, which gave the show much of its quality appearance.

--Serling later wrote that he got this idea from walking around a movie backlot one day and was struck with how frightening it would be to walk into a city with no inhabitants. Also, the scene where Holliman gets stuck in the phone booth supposedly comes from a real incident where Serling believed he had locked himself in a London phone booth.

--"Where is Everybody?" was adapted into a short story by Rod Serling in Stories From the Twilight Zone (Bantam, 1960). It was also made into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring John Schneider (Falcon Picture Group, 2002).

--James Gregory also stars in the season three episode, “The Passerby,” and in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery titled "Stop Killing Me."

--Paul Langton also stars in the season four episode, “On Thursday We Leave for Home.”

--James McCallion appears in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery titled "The Diary."

--"Where is Everybody?" was adapted into comic book form for the 1979 book Stories from the Twilight Zone (Bantam; Skylark Illustrated Book) by Rod Serling, stories adapted by Horace J. Elias and illustrated by Carl Pfeufer. 

--Brian Durant and Jordan Prejean