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| Josephine Hutchinson as the wondrous Electric Grandmother |
“I Sing the Body Electric”
Season Three, Episode 100
Original
Air Date: May 18, 1962
Cast:
Grandma:
Josephine Hutchinson
George
Rogers (Father): David White
Salesman:
Vaughn Taylor
Aunt
Nedra: Doris Packer
Tom
(age 12): Charles Herbert
Anne
(age 11): Veronica Cartwright
Karen
(age 10): Dana Dillaway
Anne
(age 19): Susan Crane
Tom
(age 20): Paul Nesbitt
Karen
(age 18): Judee Morton
Crew:
Writer:
Ray Bradbury (original teleplay)
Directors:
James Sheldon and William Claxton
Producer:
Buck Houghton
Production
Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
Director
of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art
Direction: George W. Davis and Phil
Barber
Set
Decoration: Henry Grace and H. Web
Arrowsmith
Assistant
Director: E. Darrell Hallenbeck
Casting:
Stalmaster-Lister
Editor:
Jason H. Bernie
Sound:
Franklin Milton and Bill Edmondson
Music:
Nathan Van Cleave
Story
Consultant: Richard McDonagh
And Now, Mr. Serling:
“The
name Ray Bradbury has become synonymous with a new horizon of American writing.
Next week on The Twilight Zone we present a typical Bradbury tale. It also
has typical Bradbury ingredients, including a grandmother built in a factory.
Now if this doesn’t intrigue you, then I’m simply not doing justice to a most
intriguing tale. I hope you’ll join us next week for ‘I Sing the Body
Electric.’”
Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:
“They
make a fairly convincing pitch here. It doesn’t seem possible, though, to find
a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good,
except, of course, in The Twilight
Zone.”
Summary:
George
Rogers struggles to keep his family together after the death of his wife. Aunt
Nedra pressures him to find someone who can bring togetherness to the home
before he loses his children, Tom, Anne, and Karen. By chance, the family
notices an advertisement, “I Sing the Body Electric,” from Facsimile Limited, a company which specializes in
creating life-like domestic robots. The family decides to investigate.
They
encounter an eccentric salesman who shows them the composite parts of a robot,
a variety of eyes, hairstyles, ears, arms, torsos, and voices, from which the
family can choose. Anne, the middle child, despises the idea of someone, or
something, taking the place of her mother, whose death has elicited great anger
in the young girl. The other family members, however, agree to give it a try.
The
robot arrives in the form of a genial older woman whom the children name
Grandma. She can do wondrous things like speak from her hands, produce kite
string from her finger, and make marbles appear in the palm of her hand. She
is kind and loving. While Tom and Karen are welcoming, Anne rejects Grandma.
After
one particularly angry outburst, Anne runs from the house. Grandma follows and
learns that Anne is angry because the death of her mother has left the child
feeling betrayed. Anne rushes into the path of oncoming traffic but Grandma
shoves her out of the way in time. Grandma is hit by a truck but is unharmed. After
this frightening situation, Anne finally accepts Grandma.
Rod Serling’s Middle Narration:
“As
of this moment the wonderful electric grandmother moved into the lives of
children and father. She became integral, important; she became of the essence.
As of this moment they would never see lightning, never hear poetry read, never
listen to foreign tongues, without thinking of her. Everything they would ever
see, hear, taste, feel would remind them of her. She was all life and all life
was wondrous, quick, electrical, like her.”
The
children grow into young adults at which time Grandma must return to Facsimile
Limited in order to be repurposed. The children wish her a sad farewell and
thank her for all the wonder she has brought into their lives.
Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:
“A
fable? Most assuredly. But who’s to say at some distant moment there might be
an assembly line producing a gentle product in the form of a grandmother whose
stock-in-trade is love. Fable, sure, but who’s to say?”
Commentary:
"I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge
"I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge
of the soul."
-Walt Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric,"
from Leaves of Grass (9th ed., 1892)
I.
The
story of Ray Bradbury’s sole contribution to The Twilight Zone is the larger story of Bradbury’s surprisingly
unfruitful relationship with series creator Rod Serling. Other than Serling,
Bradbury seemed the perfect writer for the series, and much has been written on
the Bradburyesque qualities found in many of the show’s offerings. This is
hardly surprising given that Bradbury was a formative influence on three of the
show’s principal writers and, to a lesser degree, on the writings of Rod Serling. Serling
acknowledged as much in his scripts with references to “Dr. Bradbury” in “Walking
Distance,” and “the Bradbury account” in “A Stop at Willoughby,” references
which some view as validation not only of Serling’s admiration for the
writings of Ray Bradbury but of his appropriation of the writings of Ray Bradbury.
A
likelier reason is that, at the time he composed these early episodes, Serling imagined
Bradbury would be a major contributor to the series, thus the subtle tip of
the cap to the famous fantasy writer. Serling and Bradbury initially met in 1958
through a mutual friend, screenwriter John Gay. Over the course of the next
year the two Los Angeles residents occasionally visited one
another’s homes, striking up an easy friendship. It was this easy friendship which made the disintegration to follow so unexpected and unfortunate.
Bradbury
was present during the early stages of Serling’s creation of The Twilight Zone, even proclaiming a role in the development of
the series via the recommendation of several science fiction and fantasy
authors that Bradbury felt Serling should feature on the series. A typical example of Bradbury's account of his early involvement in the creation of the series can be found in Bradbury's introduction to a
reissue of John Collier’s short story collection Fancies and Goodnights (New York Review Books, 2003). Bradbury writes:
“A few years later,
after an awards dinner I attended with Rod Serling, the creator and host of
‘The Twilight Zone,’ he confessed that while he was soon to start a new series,
he knew not half enough about fantasy and science fiction.
“’Come,’
I said and led him down to my basement to stack his arms with Richard Matheson,
Charles Beaumont, Roald Dahl, and, on top of the stack, John Collier.
“’There,’
I said. ‘There’s your ‘Twilight Zone.’”
This
account was frequently given by Bradbury and sometimes the list of recommended authors
expanded in the telling to include George Clayton Johnson and Bradbury himself. The interesting aspect of Bradbury’s account is the suggestion that Serling was
out of his depth when it came to fantasy and science fiction. To be sure,
Serling was not primarily a science fiction and fantasy writer but one
questions whether Serling knew so little about the genres that he needed to be
directed to modern writers. Of course, Serling went beyond the small group
suggested by Bradbury to bring to The
Twilight Zone the work of contemporary writers Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore,
Damon Knight, Price Day, Lucille Fletcher, Jerome Bixby, Manly Wade Wellman,
Henry Slesar, Malcolm Jameson, Paul Fairman, and Lyn Venable, as well as
produce episodes from unpublished work by such writers as Madelon Champion,
Frederic Louis Fox, and Lee Polk.
Serling was an avid
reader of fantasy and science fiction in his boyhood and young adulthood and was
experimenting with fantasy scripts as far back as his days as a student at
Antioch College. Then there was “The Time Element,” Serling’s long-gestating time
travel script which aired on The
Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse in November, 1958. It was largely on the strength of
“The Time Element” that CBS gave the go-ahead to develop the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone.
Still,
the accepted narrative when Serling announced his new series in 1959 was that
Serling was a science fiction novice who was treading upon territory familiar
to writers like Ray Bradbury, who needed to illustrate to Serling what
constituted quality genre fiction. Due to Serling’s success as a dramatist, however,
science fiction writers were initially willing to give Serling a chance to
prove his worth. Consider this excerpt from Charles Beaumont’s article “The Seeing I,”
written for the December, 1959 issue of The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to herald the arrival of The Twilight Zone.
“Is
it any wonder that we scoffed? What did Rod Serling know about the field,
anyway? Sure, he could rip off an occasional Emmy-winning Playhouse 90 script, but did that give him any right to invade our
demesne?
“Answer:
Yes.”
As
indicated by the final two words, Bradbury, Beaumont, and Matheson, writers who were present at a special presentation of the pilot episode, as well as those writers Serling
entrusted with his first nine scripts for the series, remained open-minded when
entering The Twilight Zone. As a
result, Beaumont and Matheson became major writers on the series. Beaumont also helped to expand the writing circle on the show to include many members of the Southern California School of Writers, such as George Clayton Johnson, John Tomerlin, Jerry Sohl, OCee Ritch, and William Idelson.
Beaumont
continued his article for F&SF by giving his reaction to Serling’s script for the pilot episode,
“Where is Everybody?” This episode later became a focal point for the rifts
in the relationship between Serling and Ray Bradbury.
“Old
stuff? Of course. I thought so at the time, and I think so now. But there was
one element in the story which kept me from my customary bitterness. The
element was quality. Quality shone on every page . . . And because of this, the
story seemed fresh and new and powerful.”
Beaumont
concluded: “Bradbury and Matheson read the scripts also, and in very little
time we all decided to join The Twilight
Zone team.”
By the time Bradbury’s contribution to the series reached broadcast three years later, his
personal and professional relationship with Rod Serling eroded to the point of
animosity and accusation. Although it likely took Serling by surprise, he was aware that certain science fiction and fantasy writers harbored bad feelings toward him during his time on The Twilight Zone. In a 1963 interview with Gamma magazine, during Twilight Zone's fourth season, Serling stated: "I know I've been knocked by some veteran science fiction writers who've spent the better part of their lives in this creative area - I've been called an opportunist who's taken this story form that these guys have sweated out for years and used my reasonably affluent name to just step all over them and get my show on the air. Well, all I can say to these people is, I'm sorry they feel this way. Zone was an honest effort on my part. I tried not to step on any toes, but with a show such as this, you're almost bound to." At times, Serling must have felt as though he'd traded in his previous and well-documented fight with the censoring body of television sponsors for a fight with both professional and amateur writers over claims of plagiarism.
Ray Bradbury
was not averse to speaking of his time on The Twilight Zone despite an avowed dislike
of doing so. As such, nearly the entire picture we have of his relationship with Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone has
been given to us by Bradbury himself, through book introductions, interviews,
and the recollections of his friends and biographers (in particular Sam Weller, Marc Scott
Zicree, and Jonathan R. Eller) whom Bradbury occasionally provided with
information about his time on the series.
Serling
largely kept silent on the issue. Only in interviews late in his life did he offer an opinion on why Bradbury was not featured on the series more, namely that Bradbury’s prose style was difficult to adapt to dramatic television form, an opinion shared by Serling's first producer on The Twilight Zone, Buck Houghton. It is telling, however, that for the final interview of his life Serling repeatedly stated, in one form or another: “I
yield to no man in my respect for Ray Bradbury.”
II.
The thing to remember when beginning to examine the falling out between Rod Serling
and Ray Bradbury is that The Twilight
Zone was a series with a single staff writer: Rod Serling. A major reason the network approved the series was the assurance that the Emmy Award-winning writer would
provide most of the scripts. Serling was the selling point to the network, to
the sponsors, and to the audience. As a result, he became the visual
representation of his creation in a way few television writers have before or since. Though
The Twilight Zone was never a ratings
winner, it was a well-marketed series with a flood of accompanying books, comic books, toys,
board games, and, later, computer games, magazines, radio shows, films, and revival series,
much of which featured the likeness of Rod Serling (for more on this, see our essay on the marketing of Rod Serling). Serling became the face not only of The Twilight Zone but also of the most
accessible representation of science fiction and fantasy in American culture of the time. As a result, he was placed
under critical scrutiny by professionals in the science fiction and fantasy
fields, many of whom likely felt it was their right to possess such valuable exposure and influence, not to mention monetary revenue.
All other story material
used on The Twilight Zone, published
or unpublished story, original or adapted teleplay, was purchased on a
freelance basis with the purchase decision left to Serling and the show’s
various producers. This meant that, despite his friendship with Serling and his
marginal assistance in developing the series, Bradbury was forced to submit his
work to production as a freelance writer and await acceptance or rejection.
It
is also important to remember that no writer, Serling included, was immune to
having their work rejected or go unrealized on the series. William Self, producer of the pilot
episode, shelved Serling’s
original pilot script, “The Happy Place,” a grim dystopian tale which Self
felt was too bleak to sell to the network. “The Happy Place” was never
produced on The Twilight Zone.
George Clayton Johnson,
who provided some of the show’s most memorable episodes, twice saw his work for the series fall through. The first occurred when he sold his story “Sea Change”
to production only to have producer Buck Houghton ask Johnson to buy the story
back since a sponsor, a food manufacturer, took objection to the story’s grisly subject matter.
Later, an original teleplay collaboration between Johnson and William F. Nolan,
“Dreamflight,” was purchased for the series but never filmed.
Even more astounding rejections accompanied the arrival of fifth season producer William Froug, who promptly made his
presence felt by shelving a number of previously accepted teleplays by the show’s leading writers (Matheson, Beaumont, Jerry Sohl) as well as exciting newcomers, such as Arch Oboler,
to bring in his own stable of writers (including his secretary!) and produce
such dreadful episodes as “Caesar and Me,” “From Agnes – With Love,” and “Come
Wander With Me.” In a bit of ironic justice, Froug's own original script, "Many, Many Monkeys" was also shelved, likely due to its similarity to Rod Serling's "I Am the Night - Color Me Black," although Froug believed it was due to gruesome aspects of the story. The script was later produced for the third, and final, season of The Twilight Zone revival series in 1989.
Even with the generally agreeable
working conditions on The Twilight Zone, the
freelance writers on the show understood the creative power to be had in developing their own
series. Charles Beaumont, in the midst of writing
for The Twilight Zone in 1960, attempted, unsuccessfully, to
sell his own anthology series, Out There*, using original material from Richard Matheson, John
Tomerlin, George Clayton Johnson, Jerry Sohl, Ray Bradbury, Ray Russell, and
himself. Beaumont earlier attempted
to get The Charles Addams Theatre off
the ground without success, despite having Charles Addams aboard the project. By early 1963, Beaumont had settled on an attempt to magnify the contributions of other writers on The Twilight Zone by proposing to Bantam Books an anthology tentatively, and rather ludicrously, titled Stories from the Twilight Zone Not Written by Rod Serling. Despite initial support from Serling, the book never appeared and the stories would not appear in a single collection until 1985 in The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories. A
short time before The Twilight Zone premiered, Ray Bradbury failed to launch his own anthology series, Report from Space. It would be more than a quarter of a century
before Bradbury successfully landed his own series, The Ray Bradbury Theater, in 1985.
In the immediate years after The Twilight Zone left the air, its
writers were still attempting to replicate Rod Serling’s success when The Green
Hand, a creative corporation consisting of writers Richard Matheson, Jerry Sohl, George
Clayton Johnson, and Theodore Sturgeon, unsuccessfully attempted to sell an
anthology series titled A Touch of
Strange (inspired by Sturgeon’s 1958 story collection of the same name) to Michael Eisner, Programming Director at ABC. Matheson had previously written a teleplay,
“Thy Will Be Done,” for an aborted anthology series titled Now Is Tomorrow in 1959. Even
Roald Dahl, doing his best Rod Serling, and producer David Susskind could last
no longer than half a season with their excellent but little-seen anthology
series ‘Way Out, which ran concurrent with the second season of The Twilight
Zone. Dahl had more success later with his Tales of the Unexpected on British television. Despite attempts by
others at the time, only Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling were able to
use a genre anthology series to proliferate their images on a national scale.**
The preceding is not intended to assume any sort of envy of Rod Serling by the writers on the series. On the contrary, most of the writers for the series had a great working relationship with Rod Serling and understood Serling's contributions and importance to television drama. In a 1981 interview for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Richard Matheson gave a glimpse of what it was like working with Serling on The Twilight Zone:
"Working on The Twilight Zone was fun. Rod always had the writer of an episode sit down at a table with the actors and director during rehearsals. We'd always be there to make whatever corrections had to be made and to help out wherever possible. In retrospect, I realize how rare that was -- giving writers a chance to get involved in the production. . . It was great being there for the rehearsals and the shooting, and having input in the show."
When asked whether he envied Serling's position as creator/host/lead writer/executive producer on The Twilight Zone, Matheson responded: "No. Rod was the one running the show. He always seemed like the mentor. He had the wonderful success behind him of shows like Requiem for a Heavyweight and Patterns. Rod was the heavyweight."
The preceding is not intended to assume any sort of envy of Rod Serling by the writers on the series. On the contrary, most of the writers for the series had a great working relationship with Rod Serling and understood Serling's contributions and importance to television drama. In a 1981 interview for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Richard Matheson gave a glimpse of what it was like working with Serling on The Twilight Zone:
"Working on The Twilight Zone was fun. Rod always had the writer of an episode sit down at a table with the actors and director during rehearsals. We'd always be there to make whatever corrections had to be made and to help out wherever possible. In retrospect, I realize how rare that was -- giving writers a chance to get involved in the production. . . It was great being there for the rehearsals and the shooting, and having input in the show."
When asked whether he envied Serling's position as creator/host/lead writer/executive producer on The Twilight Zone, Matheson responded: "No. Rod was the one running the show. He always seemed like the mentor. He had the wonderful success behind him of shows like Requiem for a Heavyweight and Patterns. Rod was the heavyweight."
III.
Ray Bradbury
experienced prior success writing for dramatic series on radio and television,
particularly with the long-running Suspense radio
program and the early seasons of Alfred
Hitchcock Presents on television. Several of Bradbury’s stories were
also adapted for radio on the NBC program X
Minus One by prolific script writer Ernest Kinoy. Bradbury co-wrote
the Academy Award-nominated film Moby
Dick (1956), a largely unpleasant experience Bradbury later
fictionalized in several stories as well as his 1992 novel Green
Shadows, White Whale. Bradbury also received a Writer's Guild nomination for his 1962 drama "The Jail" for Alcoa Premiere, and received annother Academy Award nomination that same year for the short film Icarus Montgolfier Wright, based on his 1956 story and co-written with George Clayton Johnson. There was precedence for Bradbury to have success
getting his scripts dramatized on The
Twilight Zone. One could easily imagine such Bradbury stories as “The
Crowd,” “The Lake,” “Zero Hour,” The Fox and the Forest,” “The Playground,”
“The Scythe,” or a dozen others making a relatively easy transition to The Twilight Zone.
According to
correspondence presented by Martin Grams, Jr. in his book The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic, Bradbury
submitted a version of “I Sing the Body Electric” to Rod Serling as early as
1959, just as the first season of The
Twilight Zone went into production. Serling read the script and was ultimately unsatisfied with it. He sent the script back
to Bradbury and wished him well in placing the material with another market. Bradbury took the rejection in stride and filed the teleplay away,
beginning work on adapting the story to prose under the simplified title, “Electric.”
Meanwhile, Charles
Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and George Clayton Johnson, all of whom counted Ray
Bradbury as a close personal friend as well as their most significant literary mentor, began regularly selling their
work to The Twilight Zone, resulting
in such memorable early episodes as “Perchance to Dream,” “A World of
Difference,” and “The Four of Us Are Dying.”
Bradbury’s second
submission to the series was a teleplay adaptation of his 1951 short story
“Here There Be Tygers,” which originally appeared in Raymond J. Healy’s anthology
New Tales of Space and Time. “Here
There Be Tygers” is a tale of far space exploration in which a group of
astronauts, accompanied by a megalomaniac mineralogist, land on a sentient
planet which can conversely produce their most fantastic wish or their
most terrifying nightmare. Among the effects featured in the story are men
flying through the air, fish jumping out of the water, a large, futuristic
drill burrowing into the earth, and a display of earthquakes, volcanoes, and
dinosaurs.
Bradbury’s script was
rejected purely from a production standpoint. It was untenable under
the budgetary constrictions on the series. Although The Twilight Zone occasionally boasted impressive set design (“The
Chaser,” “Time Enough at Last,” “The Obsolete Man”), the series rarely attempted large-scale special effects, such as
in “The Odyssey of Flight 33” or “The Little People.” Instead, reliance was
placed upon minimalist planetary sets (“The Lonely,” “People are Alike All
Over,” “The Little People,” “Death
Ship,” “On Thursday We Leave for Home,” “Probe 7, Over and Out”) or those which
best utilized the MGM backlot (“Elegy,” “Third from the Sun,” “Stopover in a
Quiet Town”). The lush world and astonishing wonders of “Here There Be Tygers”
did not easily fit within this set of production restrictions.
Bradbury tried again a
short time later with an original teleplay titled “A Miracle of Rare Device.”
This tale concerned two drifters who discover a secret view of a cityscape mirage
which changed depending on the observer. Producer Buck Houghton purchased the
teleplay and even moved it into preproduction, assigning director Anton Leader, director of such memorable episodes as “Long Live Walter Jameson” and “The
Midnight Sun,” to the script. For reasons which remain unclear, production on
“A Miracle of Rare Device” halted, never to be resumed. Bradbury adapted
his teleplay into a short story and sold it to Playboy, where it appeared in the January, 1962 issue.
It was at this point in
time that Bradbury’s frustration with Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone boiled over. This frustration manifested itself
most strongly in charges of plagiarism aimed squarely at Rod Serling.
IV.
 |
| Earl Holliman in "Where Is Everybody?" |
The story which Bradbury told both Sam Weller, his official biographer,
and Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion (and recorded by both, Weller in his biography and Zicree in a YouTube video) was that Rod Serling realized his pilot episode “Where is Everybody?” was an
unintentional swipe of Bradbury’s “The Silent Towns,” a story featured in
Bradbury’s famous 1950 story cycle The Martian
Chronicles. Sometimes added to the story is the detail that Carol Serling
was reading The Martian Chronicles when
she viewed “Where Is Everybody?” and pointed out the similarities to her
husband. In a late-in-life interview with Sam Weller, Bradbury claimed to have noticed the similarity between the stories when Serling screened "Where is Everybody?" for potential writers but made no mention of it at the time.
Viewed objectively, “Where
Is Everybody?” and “The Silent Towns” share a single similarity. Both
stories concern a solitary man who suddenly finds himself in an abandoned town.
Here the similarities end. “The Silent Towns” takes place on Mars and describes how all of the
people living on Mars suddenly leave to return to Earth and face the possibility
of a nuclear war. One man stays behind and wanders through the empty Martian landscape.
To his surprise, he discovers that a woman has also elected to stay behind.
When he meets her, however, he finds that she is physically unattractive and quickly abandons her.
Serling’s
story concerns an Air Force pilot undergoing an isolation test in preparation for space travel whose mind fractures and produces elaborate hallucinations symbolizing his
isolation.
For
his part, Serling claimed to have arrived at the idea for “Where Is Everybody?”
while walking through an empty studio backlot street and marveling at the emptiness combined with the feeling that the people who belonged in the houses on the street were watching him from hidden places.
The
story goes on that Serling, realizing his unintentional swipe, contacted
Bradbury to apologize. Bradbury gave his grace that Serling’s admission was
compensation enough. Serling called back, however, and stated that the
situation did not sit right with him and insisted on compensating Bradbury for
the story rights to “The Silent Towns.” Serling promised to get his lawyers on
it and then never followed up. Bradbury never received payment for “The Silent
Towns” and then began to experience the added insult of the rejection of his scripts on his series.
Bradbury previously experienced the unauthorized use of his fiction in other mediums, and this undoubtedly steeled him against the slightest possible similarity between his works and another's. Less than a decade before, Bradbury became aware of
unauthorized adaptations of his stories in comic magazines published by
William M. Gaines under the E.C. Comics banner, home to such titles such as Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt, and
Shock SuspenStories. Bradbury wrote Gaines
a mock-sarcastic letter informing him of the oversight and that Bradbury was
expecting a check for use of the stories. Gaines, along with his
editor Al Feldstein, wrote to Bradbury with an apology and payment as well as an offer to produce authorized adaptations of Bradbury’s stories. Bradbury agreed and the result
was a series of enduring adaptations of Bradbury’s work which are now considered classics of their type.
A few years later, Bradbury became aware of an unauthorized adaptation of his work on the prestigious television anthology Playhouse 90. On October 3, 1957, for the fourth episode of the second season, Playhouse 90 presented a drama by Robert Alan Aurthur titled "A Sound of Different Drummers." Several people close to Bradbury immediately noticed the strong similarity between the drama and Bradbury's famous 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 and informed Bradbury of the transgression. Bradbury filed suit and, though initially unsuccessful, was awarded an undisclosed sum upon appeal but later claimed that the grueling process (which took over three years) dissuaded him from bringing any future litigation to potential cases of plagiarism. See here for a fuller picture of Bradbury's feud with Playhouse 90.
By the time The Twilight Zone came along there was just cause for Bradbury to be defensive about potential unauthorized use of his work.
By the time The Twilight Zone came along there was just cause for Bradbury to be defensive about potential unauthorized use of his work.
The unfortunate exchange
over “Where is Everybody?” corresponded with plagiarism charges leveled at
Serling from an array of professionals and amateurs alike. Serling seemed to be under
constant threat of litigation for the use of story ideas pioneered by others, a
situation engineered in part by Serling's disastrous call for open submissions
during the first season of The Twilight Zone. One prominent example occurred when Serling's first season episode, "The After Hours," was openly challenged by veteran pulp writer Frank Gruber. Although the series settled with the accusers in a handful of instances for Serling's scripts, such as the fifth
season episode “Sounds and Silences,” it was just as often for another writer’s work.
Charles Beaumont’s excellent fourth season episode “Miniature,” for instance,
was the subject of litigation which subsequently kept the episode out of syndication
for decades. The
situation reached a point in which nearly every episode written by Serling was
placed under scrutiny for plagiarism, sometimes with Bradbury leading the charge. Strangely enough, Bradbury even gave Serling grief over being introduced as the creator of The Twilight Zone during the preview segments where the preceding episode was written by another writer. In another bit of unusual advice, Bradbury suggested that Serling hire Charles Beaumont into a position where Beaumont could read over all of Serling's scripts to ensure that Serling was not borrowing from writers he should be paying for the use of their work. Beaumont had earlier offered Serling the same service free of charge when Serling first came under significant fire for plagiarism.
 |
| Gig Young in "Walking Distance" |
The
primary episode Bradbury decried was Serling’s moving first season story
“Walking Distance,” an acknowledged classic of the series. “Walking Distance”
is an episode which shares certain thematic traits with Bradbury’s work but is not a
story which can be traced to a single corresponding Bradbury tale, despite the
efforts of others to do so.*** A closer look at the formative experiences of Serling
and Bradbury illustrates similarities which resulted in “Walking Distance”
being tonally related to Bradbury’s tales of childhood nostalgia. Just
as Bradbury’s fictional Green Town can be traced to his boyhood in
Waukegan, Illinois, so too can Serling’s fictional Homewood be traced to
Binghamton, New York, where Serling spent a largely idyllic childhood. The episode is filled with other hallmarks of Serling's writing, as well. There is the concern about the damaging effects of big business on the individual, a subject which also featured in Serling's Emmy Award winning "Patterns," for Kraft Theatre, as well as in the beloved Twilight Zone episode "A Stop at Willoughby." There is the poignant moment of a father and son relationship, which Serling approached again for "In Praise of Pip" and, in surrogate fashion, for "The Big Tall Wish." Serling's father died while Serling was in the service and Serling's request for leave to attend his father's funeral was denied. Many, including Serling's daughter Anne, have interpreted the father and son scene in "Walking Distance" as a way for Serling to have one final conversation with his own father through his creative work. Then there is the time travel element which was a favorite of Serling's throughout the series, seen again and again in such episodes as "Back There," "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," and "No Time Like the Past."
For a fuller picture of the feud over “Walking Distance,” I recommend Christopher Conlon’s essay “The Many Fathers of Martin Sloan,” which can be accessed here.
For a fuller picture of the feud over “Walking Distance,” I recommend Christopher Conlon’s essay “The Many Fathers of Martin Sloan,” which can be accessed here.
Writers
of science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror cover a lot of the same ground and
similar story ideas are bound to form independently in the minds of two or more
writers. Combine this with the fact that writers in these genres were often presenting new variations on standard themes (ghosts, time travel, robots, dreams, locked room mysteries, etc.) and it is easy to understand how similar stories arise independent of one another. A good example is Rod Serling's first season episode, "Escape Clause," a classic deal with the Devil story, a story type which was the subject of popular literature for at least a century before Serling's take on the theme. Or take the story of the ventriloquist’s dummy discussed
in our episode review of “The Dummy.” Rod Serling was likely inspired by a segment from the
1945 film Dead of Night**** when he
wrote his own tale of this type, and yet
the writers of that film were influenced by a prior work that did not receive screen credit. The Twilight Zone would present another tale of an evil ventriloquist's dummy with the dismal fifth season episode "Caesar and Me."
What
are we to make of Ray Bradbury’s own admission to imitating the works of such writers
as Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Henry Kuttner, and John Collier? What about Bradbury's admission that the structure of The Martian Chronicles was taken from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio? Is
the fictional detective Elmo Crumley found in Bradbury’s 1985 novel Death Is a Lonely Business an admission
to borrowing from the works of the highly regarded detective novelist James
Crumley? Should Bradbury have acknowledged H.G. Wells for borrowing Wells's time machine in "A Sound of Thunder," a short story which was later expanded into a six-novel series? I am not serious, of course. These points are intended to illustrate that the parameters for
judgment on the issue are fluid. It is not terribly difficult to discern the influences which (sometimes strongly) inform a writer’s works, but acknowledged influence and conscious plagiarism
are entirely different circumstances.
The writers on The Twilight Zone were not above
imitating, or at least inspiring, one another. Are not “Static” and “Kick the Can” similar
stories? What about “The Four of Us Are Dying" and "Dead Man's Shoes," or "Long Live Walter Jameson” and “Queen of the Nile,” the
latter ghost-written by Jerry Sohl? Perhaps a more striking similarity can be
seen in Richard Matheson’s “A World of Difference” and Charles Beaumont’s
“Person or Persons Unknown.” One can hardly view Beaumont’s “Elegy,” based on
an early story he wrote under the close tutelage of Ray Bradbury, and not see shades
of Bradbury’s “Mars is Heaven!”, a 1948 story included in The Martian Chronicles as "The Third Expedition" and dramatized on radio and, later, television. With his season one episode, "A Nice Place to Visit," Beaumont, an acknowledged old-time radio enthusiast, borrowed the plot of a 1935 episode of The Fleishmann Hour titled "The Other Place," which was, incidentally, the original title of Beaumont's script. George Clayton Johnson heavily borrowed from
Bradbury’s tale “Death and the Maiden” to craft his moving third season episode
“Nothing in the Dark,” for which Bradbury largely held Serling accountable, under the pretense that Serling knowingly approved production of a plagiarized work.
For a practical perspective, consider series writer Jerry Sohl's response when asked about the issue. When Sohl, ghostwriter for Charles Beaumont on such Twilight Zone episodes as "Queen of the Nile" and "Living Doll," was asked by author Matthew Bradley whether Sohl's fourth season Twilight Zone episode "The New Exhibit" was inspired by Robert Bloch's similar 1939 short story "Waxworks," which had recently been dramatized on Boris Karloff's Thriller series, Sohl replied: "No. We were just producing product, and if something resembled something else, or was very much like it why, that was the way it went. I mean, it was a big hassle. You had so much work to do, you didn't have time for it, really." As Rod Serling stated in an interview with Gamma magazine in 1963, "Under my contract I had to write 80% of the first two season's shows. Now the pressure is off, which is a helluva big help. The grind was more than I'd bargained for. As exec producer as well as writer I had to sweat out all kinds of stuff - ratings, set costs, casting, locations, budgets . . . Time was a luxury. If I dropped a pencil and stopped to pick it up I was five minutes behind schedule." Serling had to work quickly and produce a lot of material. This sort of environment engineered a need to occasionally rely on stereotypical material, which, by its nature, resembled another work.
For a practical perspective, consider series writer Jerry Sohl's response when asked about the issue. When Sohl, ghostwriter for Charles Beaumont on such Twilight Zone episodes as "Queen of the Nile" and "Living Doll," was asked by author Matthew Bradley whether Sohl's fourth season Twilight Zone episode "The New Exhibit" was inspired by Robert Bloch's similar 1939 short story "Waxworks," which had recently been dramatized on Boris Karloff's Thriller series, Sohl replied: "No. We were just producing product, and if something resembled something else, or was very much like it why, that was the way it went. I mean, it was a big hassle. You had so much work to do, you didn't have time for it, really." As Rod Serling stated in an interview with Gamma magazine in 1963, "Under my contract I had to write 80% of the first two season's shows. Now the pressure is off, which is a helluva big help. The grind was more than I'd bargained for. As exec producer as well as writer I had to sweat out all kinds of stuff - ratings, set costs, casting, locations, budgets . . . Time was a luxury. If I dropped a pencil and stopped to pick it up I was five minutes behind schedule." Serling had to work quickly and produce a lot of material. This sort of environment engineered a need to occasionally rely on stereotypical material, which, by its nature, resembled another work.
A conflict arises due to the fact that, although he did not take from the works of Ray Bradbury, there are occasions when Rod Serling all but certainly used the work of another writer without attributing proper credit on The Twilight
Zone. The two most striking examples are the first season episode “Nightmare as a Child,” which bears a strong similarity to Truman Capote’s O. Henry Award story from 1945, “Miriam,” and the
second season episode “The Silence,” an episode Serling later admitted resembled Anton Chekhov’s 1889 tale “The Bet.” We document the story similarities in our reviews of those episodes. The question then becomes whether or not Serling knowingly used another's work without providing payment or credit. It is difficult for this writer to believe that a man like Rod Serling, a humanist with a impenetrable sense of morality and decency, would knowingly steal from another writer, especially a writer he greatly admired, without providing compensation and/or credit. The amount of material he was required to produce and the genre in which he was required to produce it generated the occasional similarities between Serling's stories and previously published material. There is also the strong possibility that in some instances Serling was inspired by something he had previously read but had since forgotten what had inspired him or where he had encountered it. As Serling himself noted in a letter to Charles Beaumont, the situation reached a point where every Serling episode was microscopically examined for the smallest similarity to a previously published story.
V.
In
1961, Bradbury submitted a revised version of his teleplay for “I Sing the Body
Electric” to The Twilight Zone. Producer
Buck Houghton bought it and put it into production in October of that year.
Director
James Sheldon, who had previously directed such episodes as “A Penny for Your
Thoughts,” “Long Distance Call,” and “It’s a Good Life,” was assigned to the
story. There was some remaining trepidation concerning the viability of the
teleplay. The script possessed a unique set of characteristics in that it ran overly long yet
featured an odd narrative structure wherein the traditional story arc finished
well before the required time needed for production. Adding to the problems
with the script was the fact that James Sheldon disliked the choice of
Josephine Hutchinson as Grandma. The episode was shot on schedule but it soon
became clear that something essential was missing from the performance.
After
viewing the initial footage, Serling and Houghton decided
that there was more work to do. In fact, Houghton later described the ensuing process to author
Marc Scott Zicree as nearly a complete reshoot of the
episode. This occurred only one other time on the series with the first season
episode “The Mighty Casey,” which required extensive reshoots, paid for out of Serling's pocket, to account for
the death of actor Paul Douglas. The reshoots on "I Sing the Body Electric" did not begin until February,
1962. As a result, the episode lost two of its players in
director James Sheldon and actress June Vincent, in the part of Aunt Nedra,
both of whom were unavailable at the time. Houghton’s solution was, with the
permission of James Sheldon (a Directors Guild requirement), to bring in
another director, William Claxton, who directed such episodes as “The
Last Flight,” “The Jungle,” and “The Little People.” Doris Packer was brought
in to replace June Vincent. Adding to the frustration was that the reshoots
were driving up the cost of the episode.
Changes
were made to Bradbury’s teleplay which would have repercussions
concerning Bradbury’s continued relationship with Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. Bradbury was asked to
perform revisions to his teleplay but, according to Bradbury, the request came too late in the process
as Bradbury was hard at work on revisions for his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes and had not the time to provide the necessary
revisions to his Twilight Zone script. As a result, a scene which was very important to Bradbury (but not to the overall narrative structure of the story) was
inadvertently excised.
The
scene in question concerns a moment in which George Rogers (David White) asks
Josephine Hutchinson’s character: “Why are there electric grandmothers?” The
brief exchange which followed was intended by Bradbury to illustrate the
differences between being human and the approximation of human behavior. It lasted
roughly a minute and was viewed as superfluous to the overall narrative.
For Bradbury, this
exchange between the father and the electric grandmother was the essence of his
tale and its removal was unpardonable.
The
way in which Bradbury discovered the changes to his script also played a role
in the manner in which he responded. Instead of being informed by Serling that
the scene was cut, Bradbury viewed the episode while gathered at his home with
a group of friends and family. The long road to Bradbury’s work finally being
realized on the program was cause for celebration. Instead, Bradbury was
mortified to view his altered story.
Bradbury’s
response was to inform Serling that both their personal friendship and Bradbury’s
association with The Twilight Zone were
at an end. Bradbury viewed the altering of his script as a violation of trust.
It
is important at this point to dispel a persistent myth about The Twilight Zone. It is widely accepted, due in part to comments from the show's writers, that scripts for The Twilight Zone were
never altered during the course of filming, that the writer’s words were never
changed. This is simply untrue and the many available Twilight Zone scripts bear this out. Although
the work of the writers on the series was strongly protected by Rod Serling, there
were instances in which teleplays had to be altered due to the demands of the
production, whether it was something as small as the changing of character names
or something larger in the narrative structure, such as the addition or
deletion of entire scenes.
No writer on the series was free from these sometimes necessary alterations. The previous broadcast episode,
“Young Man’s Fancy,” included a distinct change to Matheson’s original ending
for the story. An earlier Matheson episode, “Once Upon a Time,” required
numerous changes from Matheson’s original script. George Clayton Johnson’s
second season episode “A Penny for Your Thoughts” featured several small changes
between his initial teleplay and the finished episode. One example is that of a
coin standing on its edge to signify Hector Poole’s mind reading ability. This did
not exist in Johnson’s teleplay and was added during production. For Johnson’s “A Game of Pool," a
completely different ending was substituted for that which was featured in
Johnson’s original teleplay. Johnson’s later episode, “Ninety Years Without Slumbering,”
was so altered during production that Johnson took only story credit for the
episode and used a pseudonym. Charles Beaumont was forced to compromise
on his original vision for the reveal of the Devil in “The Howling Man.”
Beaumont desired a more ambiguous reveal whereas director Douglas Heyes wanted
a literal transformation. Heyes’s version was filmed. In the same episode Beaumont was forced to change the crosses carried by the monks to shepherd staffs. Beaumont’s later episode,
“Long Distance Call,” written with William Idelson, required a complete rewrite
of the penultimate scene, a task which Beaumont and Idelson performed on-set. Rod Serling’s script for “The Midnight Sun” saw the excision of two
characters and two scenes due to time constraints. There are numerous other examples.
The obvious difference between the above examples and what happened on
“I Sing the Body Electric” is that Serling, Matheson, Johnson, and Beaumont were
involved in, or at the very least informed of, the changes made to their scripts. Although Bradbury was informed that changes needed to be made to "I Sing the Body Electric," he was not aware of what those changes were before seeing the initial episode broadcast.
VI.
It
is difficult to discern what director James Sheldon disliked about Josephine
Hutchinson’s (1903-1998) performance as Grandma. The veteran actress exudes
kindness and love without overplaying her hand or allowing the performance to be
debased by cloying sweetness. Hutchinson was born in Seattle, the daughter of
actress Leona Roberts. She began appearing in films as a teenager
through her mother’s connections in the industry. Hutchinson moved into
television in the late 1950s, appearing on such programs as Perry Mason, Kraft Suspense Theatre, The
Sixth Sense, and many others.
There are several suggestions
in the episode that the Electric Grandmother possesses the appearance of the children’s
deceased mother, an element Bradbury dropped in his later prose adaptation of
the story and substituted with the effect that the Electric Grandmother appears differently to each child. Hutchinson was 59 when this episode was
filmed, which would have made her an unusually aged mother to three preteen
children.
The standout member of the
cast is Veronica Cartwright (1952- ) as the child Anne. Cartwright and
her look-alike younger sister Angela both began working in television at very young
ages (Angela featured prominently on Make Room for Daddy and Lost in Space). Veronica
had early roles on Zane Grey Theater and
Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond before
her appearance on The Twilight Zone. She also had a memorable early role in
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, but is
now perhaps better known for her roles as an adult in such films as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Alien, and The Witches of Eastwick.
David White (1916-1990)
rounds out the cast as the father, George Rogers. White is best known for his
role as Darrin Stephens’s boss Larry Tate on Bewitched. Incidentally, that series featured four lead parts
played by actors who also appeared on The
Twilight Zone: Elizabeth Montgomery (“Two”), Dick York (“The Purple
Testament,” “A Penny for Your Thoughts”), Agnes Moorehead (“The Invaders”), and
White.
As
stated before, the only casting change required by the re-shooting of the
episode was that of Aunt Nedra, initially played by June Vincent and performed
in the finished episode by Doris Packer. This character was an homage by Ray Bradbury
to his Aunt Neva, to whom Bradbury was very close. Neva, just ten years
Bradbury’s senior, introduced the young Bradbury to many works of art, music, and
literature. Bradbury considered Neva pivotal in steering the direction of his
creative life.
An underrated aspect of the episode is the music by Nathan Van Cleave, who also composed scores for such episodes as "Perchance to Dream," “Two,” “The Midnight
Sun,” “Jess-Belle,” and “Steel.” Here Van Cleave’s music is by turns achingly
nostalgic and pleasantly whimsical. Hearing Van Cleave’s score in isolation
reveals the narrative power of the composition, conveying as it does all of the
emotion and exposition of the tale without the need of dialogue.
This
episode also features a rare middle narration by Rod Serling, necessitated by
the odd narrative structure of the teleplay. The traditional narrative arc of
the story ends with Anne being rescued by Grandma and their subsequent
reconciliation. However, the episode continues with a brief montage denoting the
growth of the children, followed by an epilogue (without David White’s character)
in which the children, now grown to young adulthood, say farewell to Grandma on
her final day in service to the family.
One area in which the episode is woefully dated is in the idea that a single father could not possibly take care of his own children. It is plainly stated in the episode that George Rogers stands to lose his children if he does not bring a mother figure into the household, a notion which strikes the modern viewer as ludicrous and alarmingly narrow-minded. Wisely, Bradbury downplayed this aspect in later forms of the story.
One area in which the episode is woefully dated is in the idea that a single father could not possibly take care of his own children. It is plainly stated in the episode that George Rogers stands to lose his children if he does not bring a mother figure into the household, a notion which strikes the modern viewer as ludicrous and alarmingly narrow-minded. Wisely, Bradbury downplayed this aspect in later forms of the story.
The
title of the episode is derived from Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name, a
point driven home by Vaughn Taylor’s salesman character in the episode. A version of Whitman’s poem originally appeared, untitled, in the 1855 edition of his
masterwork, Leaves of Grass. In a 1856
edition of Leaves of Grass it appeared as “Poem of the Body.” The poem first appeared as “I Sing the Body
Electric,” with its famous opening lines, in Whitman’s 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass.
VII.
Bradbury,
for his part, found more mileage in the story than its single, problematic
appearance on The Twilight Zone. Bradbury
reworked his teleplay into a prose story published as “The Beautiful One Is
Here” in the August, 1969 issue of McCall’s
(Bradbury later reused the title as the opening chapter of his 2001 fix-up
novel From the Dust Returned). It is
often erroneously reported that the Twilight
Zone episode is an adaptation of the short story. Although Bradbury concurrently worked on his teleplay and a prose version of the story, the production of the teleplay preceded publication of the short story by seven years.
The basic narrative
structure of the story remains the same but is markedly different from the Twilight Zone episode in a number ways.
A principal change is in the children. Whereas the episode features two
girls and one boy, the story features two boys and one girl. The names of
the children are also slightly different. Tom remains the same but the others
become Timothy and Agatha, with Agatha assuming the role parallel to Anne in
the episode. The oldest boy, Tom, narrates the tale. Another name change is to
the Aunt who, in the story, is named Clara.
The story also features a vaguely futuristic setting in which it is common to travel by helicopter
for daily errands and to encounter moving floors in office buildings. Other
changes include the name of the company which produces the Electric Grandmother
from Facsimile Limited to Fantoccini Limited. Fantoccini roughly translates as
puppet or Puppet Theater from the Italian. A final interesting change is to the
ending of the tale. In the story, the children reconnect with Grandma when they
become very old and once again need her daily care.
Bradbury used the story
title “I Sing the Body Electric!” when he included the story in his 1969
collection also titled I Sing the Body
Electric!
1982 saw the appearance
of a one-hour television drama, The
Electric Grandmother, based on the story version of “I Sing the Body
Electric.” This adaptation, by Bradbury and Jeff Kindley, was directed by Noel
Black, who also directed two segments of the Twilight Zone revival series, “To See the Invisible Man” and “Song
of the Younger World.” The Electric
Grandmother adhered closely to Bradbury’s story and initially aired on
January 17, 1982 on NBC. It starred Maureen Stapleton as the Electric
Grandmother, Edward Herrmann as the Father, Paul Benedict as the eccentric
salesman, and Tara Kennedy, Robert McNaughton, and Charlie Fields as the
children. The film was well received. It was nominated for an Emmy Award
for outstanding children’s program and received a Peabody Award.
Bradbury realized his two rejected Twilight Zone
scripts a quarter century later on The Ray Bradbury Theater. “A
Miracle of Rare Device” originally appeared during the third season of the
program on July 14, 1989. “Here There Be Tygers” followed as part of the fourth
season and originally aired on November 30, 1990.
VIII.
There
was likely a time when Ray Bradbury believed he would never be asked about his
work on The Twilight Zone. The series
was a frustrating side road off the main path of his remarkable career and was
best placed in the rearview. He had not needed the series to bolster his career
in any way, not in the way the series bolstered the careers of Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and George Clayton Johnson. Bradbury was already one of the two or three most renowned science fiction writers in the world, and he was quickly elevating his career
to what he viewed as the more respectable world of mainstream fiction.
But The Twilight Zone became a genuine
cultural landmark which even Rod Serling could not foresee happening. Journalists
and authors soon arrived to question Bradbury about his time on the series. What was it like to work on The Twilight Zone? What it was like to
work with Rod Serling? Why weren’t there more Bradbury stories on the series? Bradbury
was forced to dig up his old frustrations time and again, re-opening wounds and
stirring up forgotten anger. As a result, the narrative going forward was that
Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling could not work together on The Twilight Zone; that Bradbury’s sole contribution was unexceptional
and that it was tampered with by Serling. Add in the debate over plagiarism and
by all reports Bradbury’s time with the series was an unfortunate disaster that
destroyed a once-promising friendship between one of the 20th
century’s great dramatists and one of the 20th century’s great
fantasists.
It is unlikely that
Bradbury’s career will ever be cleansed of his association with The Twilight Zone. It seems to be
commented upon in every interview, biography, and profile of the author, and
even makes its way onto packages of the author’s works.
To
be sure, “I Sing the Body Electric” is not a great episode, and it is debatable
whether it is even a good one. Outside of Hutchinson and Cartwright the performances
are little more than serviceable, the pacing is unusual, and the appendix
montage and epilogue (from which David White is unexplainably absent) feel
rushed, insubstantial, and unessential. Yet, the component which is most surprising when we
learn how caustic Bradbury’s relationship to the series became is that the show
worked so closely within the themes, settings, styles, and humanistic character
found in Bradbury’s best work. Many members of the Southern California School of Writers, from Beaumont,
Matheson, and Clayton Johnson to Jerry Sohl, OCee Ritch, and John Tomerlin,
placed their work with the series and in the process created memorable and
enduring stories. That Bradbury, the creative mentor of this Group, struggled mightily to get his work dramatized on the series boggles the mind.
It seems to have simply been a combination of unfortunate
circumstances.
If
there is one fortunate aspect to be found, it is
that neither The Twilight Zone nor
Ray Bradbury were undone by the inclusion of one or the exclusion of the other.
Bradbury went on to become a national treasure. His works, particularly his
early works, The Martian Chronicles, The
Illustrated Man, The October Country, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, will
likely never be out of print and are now considered American classics.
Grade: C
Grade: C
*Beaumont's unrealized series is not to be confused with the science fiction and fantasy anthology series Out There which ran on CBS from October, 1951 until January, 1952. That series was created by Donald Davis and produced by John Haggott.
**Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond (created by Merwin Gerard and hosted /directed by John Newland) ran for 96 episodes over 3 seasons, premiering just months before The Twilight Zone in January, 1959, though Newland lacked the charisma of Serling or Hitchcock. The series also inspired a short-lived revival, The Next Step Beyond. Boris Karloff could also be considered with his Thriller series running 67 episodes over 2 seasons and spawning a long-running comic book series, though it is arguable whether or not Thriller significantly increased the exposure of the already famous film actor. Karloff had earlier experienced failure with The Veil in 1958, in which a dozen episodes were filmed but never aired. Episodes have since been packaged for home video.
**Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond (created by Merwin Gerard and hosted /directed by John Newland) ran for 96 episodes over 3 seasons, premiering just months before The Twilight Zone in January, 1959, though Newland lacked the charisma of Serling or Hitchcock. The series also inspired a short-lived revival, The Next Step Beyond. Boris Karloff could also be considered with his Thriller series running 67 episodes over 2 seasons and spawning a long-running comic book series, though it is arguable whether or not Thriller significantly increased the exposure of the already famous film actor. Karloff had earlier experienced failure with The Veil in 1958, in which a dozen episodes were filmed but never aired. Episodes have since been packaged for home video.
***One Bradbury story which is pointed to as the genesis of Serling’s “Walking Distance” is the 1948 story
“The Black Ferris,” which concerns a carnival worker who uses a magical Ferris
wheel to grow younger or older in order to swindle a wealthy widow out of her jewelry. The
reason for its comparison seems to be Serling’s use of a carousel in “Walking
Distance” to symbolize youth and subsequent growth into adulthood. According to Bradbury biographer Jonathan R. Eller, when Bradbury's story was adapted for the local Hollywood program Starlight Summer Theater in 1955, Bradbury suggested to the program's writer Mel Dinelli that the Ferris wheel be changed to a carousel. When Bradbury reused portions of “The Black Ferris” for his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes he
changed the Ferris wheel in the story to a carousel.
****This 1945 film was strongly
influenced by the English ghost story and was itself a strong influence on Rod
Serling, as he basically adapted three of the film’s five story segments for The Twilight Zone. From the film’s “The
Hearse Driver,” based on a story by E.F. Benson, Serling crafted “Twenty-Two.” From the film’s “The Haunted
Mirror,” Serling crafted “The Mirror.” From the film’s “The Ventriloquist’s
Dummy,” inspired by a story by Gerald Kersh, Serling crafted “The Dummy.”
Additional
Sources and Acknowledgements:
-The
Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller (William Morrow, 2005)
-The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont, Volume One, edited by Roger Anker (Gauntlet Press, 2004)
-The Twilight Zone Scripts of Charles Beaumont, Volume One, edited by Roger Anker (Gauntlet Press, 2004)
-“California Sorcerers” by Christopher
Conlon (Introduction to: California
Sorcery, ed. William F. Nolan and William Schafer, Ace Books, 2001)
-“The Incredible Scripting Man: Richard
Matheson Reflects on His Screen Career” by Matthew R. Bradley (The Twilight and Other Zones, ed.
Matthew R. Bradley, Paul Stuve, and Stanley Wiater, Citadel Press, 2009)
-Interview with Buck Houghton by Marc
Scott Zicree on “I Sing the Body Electric” from The Twilight Zone Definitive Edition DVD
-"The Gamma Interview: Rod Serling" by unknown, Gamma, vol. 1 no. 1 (July, 1963)
-“Rod Serling: The Facts of Life,” an
interview by Linda Brevelle, Writer’s Digest,
1976; accessed November 15, 2017 at The Rod Serling Memorial Foundation
(rodserling.com)
-“Ray Bradbury and The Twilight Zone” by R.K. Cunningham, The University of Illinois
Press Blog (published August 22, 2014; accessed November 14, 2017)
-"Forerunners of 'The Twilight Zone'" by Allan Asherman, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (September, 1981)
-"Forerunners of 'The Twilight Zone'" by Allan Asherman, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine (September, 1981)
-The Internet Speculative Fiction
Database (isfdb.org)
-The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com)
Notes:
--Ray
Bradbury adapted his teleplay into a short story as “The Beautiful One is
Here,” originally published in the August, 1969 issue of McCall’s. Bradbury
reverted to the title “I Sing the Body Electric!” for inclusion in his 1969
story collection also titled I Sing the Body Electric! Bradbury repurposed his script for the 1982 television film “The
Electric Grandmother” (written with Jeff Kindley), which originally aired on
NBC starring Maureen Stapleton and Edward Herrmann. Bradbury contributed to two
episodes of the first revival Twilight Zone series. He provided a story, “The Burning Man” (adapted by J.D.
Feigelson), and an original teleplay, “The Elevator,” for the first season of
that series. The two teleplays which were submitted to The Twilight Zone but not produced, “Here There Be Tygers” and
“A Miracle of Rare Device,” were later dramatized, in somewhat altered form, on
The Ray Bradbury Theater.
--“I
Sing the Body Electric,” the 1969 short story, was included in the 1985 book anthology
The Twilight Zone: The Original
Stories (ed. Martin H. Greenberg, Richard Matheson, and Charles G. Waugh, Avon
Books) despite not being the source
material for the episode. Although Bradbury concurrently worked on a version of
“I Sing the Body Electric” as a teleplay and a story, Bradbury’s filmed
teleplay preceded the publication of his short story by seven years.
--James
Sheldon also directed the episodes “The Whole Truth,” “A Penny for Your
Thoughts,” “Long Distance Call,” “It’s a Good Life,” and “Still Valley.”
--William
Claxton also directed the episodes “The Last Flight,” “The Jungle” and “The
Little People.”
--David
White also appeared in the episode “A World of Difference.”
--Vaughn
Taylor also appeared in the episodes “Time Enough at Last,” “Still Valley,”
“The Incredible World of Horace Ford,” and “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore
Ross.”
--Dana
Dillaway also appeared in the episode “One for the Angels.”
--“I
Sing the Body Electric” was adapted into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring
Dee Wallace, who appeared in the first revival Twilight Zone episode “Wish Bank.”
-JP
Book Covers, from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:
Book Covers, from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:
