"A Game of Pool"

A game of life or death. Fats Brown (Jonathan Winters) attempts
to teach young pool shark Jesse Cardiff (Jack Klugman)
about the price of being the best.

“A Game of Pool”

Season Three, Episode 70

Original Air Date: October 13, 1961

Cast:

Jesse Cardiff: Jack Klugman

James Howard Brown (a.k.a. Fats Brown): Jonathan Winters

Crew:

Writer: George Clayton Johnson (original teleplay)

Director: Buzz Kulik

Producer: Buck Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson

Director of Photography: Jack Swain

Art Direction: George W. Davis and Phil Barber

Set Decoration: H. Web Arrowsmith
Assistant Director: Darrell Hallenbeck
Editor: Jason H. Bernie
Story Consultant: Richard McDonagh

Sound: Franklin Milton and Bill Edmondson

Music: Stock

And Now, Mr. Serling:

“Next week we engage in ‘A Game of Pool.’ That’s both an activity and a title. A play written by George Clayton Johnson and starring Mr. Jack Klugman and Mr. Jonathan Winters. It’s the story about the best pool player living…and the best pool player dead. And this one, we submit, will stay with you for quite a while. Next week on the Twilight Zone, ‘A Game of Pool.’”

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:

“Jesse Cardiff, pool shark. The best on Randolph Street. Who will soon learn that trying to be the best at anything carries its own special risks in or out…of the Twilight Zone.”

Summary:

            Empty pool hall. Randolph Street, Chicago. Young pool hustler Jesse Cardiff spends his life here pledging to one day be the best at his craft. While practicing alone after hours one night he decides that he is the best pool player that ever walked the streets of Chicago. Better even, than the legend, Fats Brown, dead fifteen years now. If only he could play one round with the late legend he could claim his rightful title.

            In another world somewhere, Fats Brown quietly plays a game of pool by himself. A voice summons him to a pool hall on Randolph Street in Chicago. He picks up his belongings and prepares to leave.

            Back on Randolph Street Cardiff hears a voice behind him and turns to find a familiar face hidden in the shadows. It belongs to Fats Brown. He is here, he says, to challenge Cardiff’s claim of being the best pool player on Randolph Street. It takes some harsh prodding but Cardiff agrees to play the big man. But it doesn’t come without risk. Brown proposes to make it a life or death affair. If Cardiff wins then he lives. If he loses, he dies.

            Cardiff racks the balls and Brown breaks them, a break that sends two balls gently into the railing and then back towards the formation, leaving it up to Cardiff to scatter the balls. Impressed, Cardiff is caught off-guard by this maneuver but doesn’t let it shake him. He gently nudges one of the loose balls leaving the original triangle unbroken. Then he smiles. Brown calls the fifteen ball and misses, leaving Cardiff the run of the table.

            They continue like this for hours, with Cardiff in the lead. Then Brown begins to land every single shot, rarely giving Cardiff an opportunity to shoot. It appears the young hustler has been hustled. At the end of the night they are nearly tied with Cardiff only two points ahead. He needs to sink one ball to win. Brown does everything he can to distract his opponent, causing Cardiff to miss. Brown takes his last shot and misses, leaving Cardiff with a pocket-hanger. If he sinks this, he wins. He’ll get to live and he will be the greatest pool player of all time. He begins to boast to Brown, throwing the big man’s words back in his face. Brown informs him that he would actually like to see the young man win but warns him that if he does he “may win more than he bargained for.” Cardiff brushes him off and sinks his last shot. He picks the cue ball up and gives it a kiss. He is king.

            Brown simply says, “thanks.” Cardiff asks him what he means and Brown tells him that he will find out whenever he tries to leave Randolph Street. Cardiff turns away for only a second but when he turns back Brown is gone. Cardiff then comes to the realization that he is the only one who will ever know that he beat the legend, Fats Brown. But at the moment, it doesn’t matter.

            Later, far away somewhere. A broken Jesse Cardiff rests his head on a pool table. A voice tells him to report to Mason’s Pool Hall, Sandusky, Ohio. Weary and exhausted, Cardiff reluctantly stumbles off to defend his crown.

Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:

“Mr. Jesse Cardiff, who became a legend by beating one, but who has found out after his funeral that being the best of anything carries with it a special obligation to keep on proving it. Mr. Fats Brown, on the other hand, having relinquished the champion’s mantle, has gone fishing. These are the ground rules in the Twilight Zone.”

Commentary:

            “A Game of Pool” marks the fourth contribution and second original teleplay from writer George Clayton Johnson, cementing his foothold as an invaluable voice on the program. Widely considered a highpoint in the show’s run, it set the bar exceedingly high for pure dramatic tension. The most interesting, and discussed, aspects of “A Game of Pool” is the casting of comedian Jonathan Winters (1925 – 2013) in the dramatic role of the ghost of pool hall legend Fats Brown, and the changing of George Clayton Johnson’s original ending into the light and irreverent ending seen in the episode.           

            Jack Klugman (1922-2012) portrays Jesse Cardiff, an angry young pool player who has dedicated an unhealthy amount of his life to the game and longs to be remembered as the best to ever play. Klugman, as noted in previous posts, already had a successful career as a dramatic actor who developed his craft on the stage and in live anthology programs of the 1950s, as well as in such feature films as Twelve Angry Men (1957). Klugman and Serling first worked together in 1959 when the young actor appeared in Serling’s semi-autobiographical Playhouse 90 production, “The Velvet Alley.” Klugman’s “everyman” stage persona likely appealed to Serling a great deal and made him an obvious choice when casting The Twilight Zone. Serling reportedly postponed production on Season One’s “A Passage for Trumpet,” Klugman’s first appearance on the show, specifically to accommodate the actor’s filming schedule. Klugman would become arguably the most recognizable actor to grace the series, turning in excellent star performances in four above average episodes. His relationship to the show was such that by the time production began on “A Game of Pool” he was willing to accept offers for work on the series without first reading the script, such was his respect for Rod Serling and the quality of the writing on the series. Although he would go on to achieve pop culture immortality in the television adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple and later on the NBC medical drama Quincy M.E., The Twilight Zone is still considered one of the jewels of his long career.

            With the unusual nature of “A Game of Pool,” two actors on two simple sets (the pool hall and the afterlife set), the actor cast opposite Klugman would need to be effective and have the acting talent to carry an intensely compact story. Initially, Buck Houghton sought an actor like Jack Warden, the gruff actor who previously appeared in the first season episode, “The Lonely.” However, Rod Serling had an ace in his pocket. Martin Grams, Jr., author of the book The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic (OTR, 2008), indicates correspondence which Rod Serling had previously received from Jonathan Winters in which the popular television comedian expressed interest in appearing in an episode of the series. At the time, according to this correspondence, Serling had nothing in line that would suit Winters but assured Winters that a call would come when something came up that they could both get behind. Whether or not this is the method in which Winters was actually hired to portray Fats Brown is inconsequential. Serling did have a great amount of imput with casting and it is probable that he recommended Winters for the part. 

            Winters did not quite fit George Clayton Johnson’s original description of Fats Brown. Though Winter's had the build of the Minnesota Fats-like character, Johnson wrote him as bearded and ponderous. It quickly became evident, however, that Winters was going to make the character his own. Johnson was an avid pool player at the time he wrote “A Game of Pool” and was especially enamored by the 1959 novel The Hustler by American novelist Walter Tevis. The novel tells the story of a young, ambitious pool shark named Fast Eddie Felson who challenges pool legend Minnesota Fats only to lose and receive a much needed lesson in winning and losing and the price of being the best at something. According to Johnson, he was working on a story that would eventually become “A Game of Pool” (originally titled, “The Pool Player”) when he first read Tevis’s novel. Johnson took the general premise and theme of the novel and compressed it into a dialogue-filled sketch that focused on Cardiff’s obsession with being the best and his ignorance at ignoring the world around him. But while Felson learns his lesson at the end of the novel, Cardiff, at least in Johnson’s original script, does not and the story ends with him falling even deeper into his obsession.

20th Century Fox released a film adaptation of The Hustler in September, 1961, directed by Robert Rossen and starring Paul Newman as Fast Eddie and Jackie Gleason (another comedian in a breakout dramatic role) as Minnesota Fats. The similarities between The Hustler (both the novel and the film) and “A Game of Pool” are profound, so much so that George Clayton Johnson considered changing the name of Fats Brown to something more prosaic, like John Brown, to disguise the debt owed to the Walter Tevis story. And although Johnson’s script owes much to the novel, no one involved with the episode could have known for certain of the similarities between Rossen’s film and “A Game of Pool” as the former was theatrically released on September 25, 1961 and the latter filmed two months earlier, in late July. Despite the similarities, however, the show delivered an end product with enough dramatic tension to challenge even such a venerated American film as The Hustler.

            Though Jonathan Winters would appear on hundreds of television broadcasts throughout his long career, he was mainly known as a comedian on television variety shows at the time he appeared in “A Game of Pool.” The episode served to show the quality talented comedians could bring to a dramatic series. This was not the first time The Twilight Zone presented a well-known comedian in a dramatic fashion. The first season episode “One For the Angels” featured comedian Ed Wynn in a dramatic role, though Wynn had already displayed his dramatic skills in Rod Serling’s Emmy Award winning Playhouse 90 production “Requiem For a Heavyweight” in 1956. An interesting note here is that both Wynn and Jonathan Winters, when first attempting a dramatic role, would fall into comedy routines when accidentally flubbing a line or missing a mark as a way to ease the tension of the transition.

            In 1960, Jonathan Winters began recording comedy albums and would continue to do so throughout his career, albums which would eventually pull in eleven Emmy Award nominations. It was an obvious course for his career as he had been performing voice work for commercials since the mid-1950s. Winters launched his career on radio after an impromptu talent show entry (and win) and would move on to commercials selling beer and trash bags and appearances on television. During this time he also began doing stand-up comedy and quickly gained a reputation within the comedy circuit for his unique blend of quick-witted impressions and deadpan facial expressions. Today he is considered a master of improvisational comedy. In 1954, Winters made his first appearance on television on the talent show Chance of a Lifetime. By the end of the decade Winters had his own television show on NBC and was a frequent guest of Jack Parr’s Tonight Show and The Steve Allen Show. By the early 1960s Winters was interested in diversifying his resume and thus came the letter to Rod Serling expressing interest in appearing on The Twilight Zone.

            The decision to broaden his acting career came at a difficult period in the comedian’s life. Time spent on the road away from his family and the pressure of non-stop touring caused Winters to suffer a breakdown and subsequently spend two weeks under psychiatric evaluation in 1959. In 1961, Winters was again admitted for psychiatric evaluation in Belmont, California for an even longer stay, some reports stating as long as eight months, which would have allowed very little time between his discharge from Belmont and the filming of "A Game of Pool." After this period of difficulty, Winters quit touring the stand-up circuit and focused on television work and his recording career. 
           At the time, Hollywood’s attitude towards mental illness was very different than it is today and artists who had been publicly outed as unstable were often slighted and ignored by the industry. Winters likely wanted to prove himself as a performer by venturing into unfamiliar terrain. “A Game of Pool” was the first of many serious dramatic performances that would showcase the actor’s flexibility. According to Buzz Kulik and Buck Houghton, Winters was very nervous about his performance and was very eager to do it well.

           Though originally written to be a ponderous character, Winters played Fats as focused, intense, a bit patronizing. He exudes confidence, wisdom, and pressure. He doesn’t need to verbally berate the young, blindly confident Jesse Cardiff. The mannerisms and facial expressions of Winters told the audience everything going on inside the character’s head. It is a testament to Winter’s mastery of expression that he was able to be subtle in his performance and still bring across more than enough dramatic tension to keep the encounter between the two men lively and believable.

            Buzz Kulik would direct a total of nine episodes of the show before it was over, many of them overlooked classics such as Season Two’s “Static” or “The Trouble with Templeton.”  But “A Game of Pool” is arguably his greatest achievement. Realizing that the script was deliberately simplistic, Kulik shoots the episode with a restrained attitude, leaving much of the focus on the relationship of the actors. The episode has an unusually high number of extreme close-ups, revealing endless beads of sweat dripping down the faces of the actors, emphasizing the effort given by both the characters and the actors. This is one of only a handful of episodes that does not feature stalwart director of photographer George T. Clemens. Jack Swain steps in for Clemens here and does a fine job. He would go to work on five more episodes during the third season. It is likely that the Emmy Award which George T. Clemens received after his exceptional work on the second season of the series meant more calls for his skills behind a camera on other television and film projects. 

            The most reported aspect of “A Game of Pool” is the fact that the ending as filmed was not that as written by George Clayton Johnson. This is interesting chiefly because The Twilight Zone was seen as a series that served the writer more than other series and production rarely changed anything about the script without the writer’s approval. An episode such as “Long Distance Call” from the second season required rewrites to suit a more effective ending but was served by the fact that the writers, Charles Beaumont and William Idelson, were available on the set to do the rewrites then and there and therefore not impede the tight shooting schedule. Perhaps “A Game of Pool” would have been served the same way but for the fact that George Clayton Johnson was unable to be present on the filming of the episode.

            At the time of production, Johnson was on the set of the 1962 Roger Corman film, The Intruder. This film was an adaptation of the 1959 Charles Beaumont novel of the same name, in which a racist named Adam Cramer (portrayed by William Shatner) incites racially motivated violence in a fictional Southern town. Beaumont and Johnson both had roles in the film and were therefore devoting a sizable amount of time to the film while in the midst of production on the third season of The Twilight Zone. In a much later interview with author Matthew R. Bradley, Johnson recalled how Buck Houghton called him at the time of filming "A Game of Pool" to tell him there was a problem with Johnson’s ending and that they were considering a new conclusion to the show. Director Buzz Kulik told author Marc Scott Zicree (The Twilight Zone Companion) that it required three attempts before they settled on an ending upon which they could wrap the episode. The ending George Clayton Johnson wrote was never filmed for the original series and would have to wait until the 1980s Twilight Zone series to be realized with rather uninspiring results. Johnson’s original ending can be read in its entirety in Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion.

            As written, Jesse Cardiff loses the game to Fats, much as Fast Eddie loses to Minnesota Fats in The Hustler. Though Fats Brown told Jesse that the terms of the game were life and death this turns out to be a bit of a bluff as Fats tells Jesse that he won’t die then and there but would instead live out his life as a second rate player and die forgotten while he, Fats, would live on in the minds of those that followed the game as a legend and the best there ever was. The episode was to end with Jesse raging against this fate and promising to practice harder than ever in the coming years and to again one day challenge Fats’s mantle as legend. Johnson was particularly eager to see Jack Klugman deliver the final furious lines of dialogue as the writer noted that Klugman was particularly talented at this type of enraged defiance in his performances.

            Though the reasons for the change are hazy at best, the show was, by the third season, well aware of its own reputation as a series which displayed the O. Henry-type twist ending on stories. For the casual fan of the series this is the quality most often recalled about The Twilight Zone and it stands to reason that production felt the need to insert this type of twist in all of its episodes. Though Johnson’s original ending packed a dramatic punch it may have been seen as too subtle, too straight forward drama for a series that traded in fantasy. Although the filmed ending does alleviate some of the hard earned tension built up in the episode, it does present some interesting design elements and reveals interesting aspects of character.

            As mentioned, in 1989 the first Twilight Zone revival series filmed a new version of “A Game of Pool” for its third season, with Esai Morales as Cardiff and Maury Chaykin as Fats Brown. It was directed by Randy Bradshaw. The decision to remake such an exceptionally well-crafted and revered episode is due likely to the controversy surrounding the original ending. The producers chose to utilize Johnson’s original script for this version and, unfortunately, the result is fairly underwhelming. The plot of the episode, up until its denouement, is much the same as in the original. One notable difference, however, is that the episode begins with the pool hall closing for the night and briefly features a handful of other actors instead of just the two leads. The time period is also updated to then present day 1989. Morales and Chaykin both deliver competent but forgettable performances and Bradshaw’s direction is similarly uninspiring. In his interview with Bradley, George Clayton Johnson says that he was even more disappointed with this second version, featuring his restored ending, than he was with the original episode. 

          A macabre touch during the afterlife scenes, for both Fats and Jesse, is that all the balls on the pool table are black, thus making it impossible to play anything but a solitary game of the traditionally competitive sport, highlighting the loneliness that is part of the baggage of being the best. It is interesting to note as well the difference in character when viewed in the afterlife. At the beginning of the episode Fats is seen actively playing pool in the afterlife, dutifully taking his cue along when the next challenger is announced by a disembodied voice. On the other hand, Jesse is seen as dejected and weary when he finally achieves his legendary mantle. The moral, perhaps, is be careful what you wish for, and that the burden of being a legend can be heavy indeed.

            The ending as filmed is not quite as bad as many viewers and critics have made it out to be despite an inappropriate flourish of light music to end the episode, which, in general, treads along a dark path. Though the changing of the original writer’s intentions is rarely a good idea, the episode remains a favorite of viewers and one of the two dozen or so most highly regarded episodes by those of us that analyze the series. One positive aspect of the episode is that it fully utilized George Clayton Johnson’s skill as a writer of tough, street-wise dialogue and his unerring sense of drama using little more than two or three characters. Although “A Game of Pool” largely represented a change in Johnson’s writing style, from sentimental, Ray Bradburyesque stories to tough, noir-type fiction, it is a transition easy to follow from the writer's previous work. Johnson was writing the streetwise type of story as early as his stroy treatment that was eventually filmed as Ocean’s 11 in 1960. The viewer may also look to Rod Serling’s adaptations of “The Four of Us Are Dying” and “Execution” to see that Johnson’s story ideas were often on the tougher end of the spectrum, replete with violence and noir-ish sensibilities. Of course, Johnson would go on to write his share of light and touching material, such as “Nothing in the Dark,” “Kick the Can,” and “Ninety Years Without Slumbering,” episodes which are much more sentimental and optimistic than “A Game of Pool.”

Grade: A+

Notes:
--Information on Jonathan Winters's nervous breakdowns of 1959 and 1961 was taken from "Jonathan Winters, Unpredictable Comic and Master of Improvisation, Dies at 87" by William Grimes, New York Times, April 12, 2013. Accessed on 4/1/2016. 
--Jack Klugman also appears in Season One’s “A Passage for Trumpet,” Season Four’s “Death Ship,” and Season Five’s “In Praise of Pip.”

--Director of Photographer Jack Swain lent his talents to five other episodes, all during Season Three:

            “Deaths-head Revisited”

            “Still Valley”

            “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”

            “The Fugitive”

            “Hocus-pocus and Frisby”

--“A Game of Pool” was adapted as an episode of the 1980’s Twilight Zone revival series. It was directed by Randy Bradshaw with Elias Morales as Jesse Cardiff and Maury Chaykin as Fats Brown. It features George Clayton Johnson’s original script with updated material by Will Bermender. It originally aired on February 4, 1989. 
--"A Game of Pool" was adapted into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring Wade Williams (Falcon Picture Group).  

--Jordan Prejean and Brian Durant

Remembering Earl Hamner, Jr. (1923 - 2016)

"Television has the power and the ability to enlighten, to educate, to lift viewers to new levels of experience, but there is also a lot of vulgarity. Too much of what we see seems to be written from the groin. I urge you to write from your heart."  --Earl Hamner, Jr.

Earl Hamner, Jr. brought a style and creative voice to American television that was uniquely his own. He created worlds that were both a reflection of his life and personality and also a welcome escape from an era marked by war and political corruption. He offered the world a warm alternative to cynical comedy shows, gritty police programs, and the increasingly bleak independent film movement of the 1970’s. His vision was a positive one, full of hope and optimism that America would pull out of its slump and move on to happier days. Hamner contributed eight original teleplays to The Twilight Zone and was the last living writer to have penned an episode of the show. He passed away on Thursday, March 24. He was 92.

Hamner holds a unique place on the relatively short list of writers who contributed to The Twilight Zone. He was not part of the close-knit community of fantasy and science fiction writers that Beaumont, Matheson, and Johnson belonged to. He came from a vastly different part of the country (Schuyler, Virginia, an isolated village on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains) and his sensibilities were also very different. While Hamner has several episodes that are imitative of the style and formula that had already been established on the show, he was at his best when he simply wrote what he knew. His best episodes feature simple characters and small-town settings and bear a stronger resemblance to southern folklore than golden-age science fiction stories.

A writer with many skillsets, Hamner jumped from medium to medium writing novels and short fiction and penning scripts for film, television, and radio. He came to write for The Twilight Zone through his friendship with Rod Serling. The two met years before at an award ceremony and had kept in touch through the years (Serling later replaced Hamner when he resigned from radio station WLW in Cincinnati). By the time he sold his first teleplay, “The Hunt,” to the show in 1962 he had already published two novels, Fifty Roads to Town (Random House, 1953) and Spencer’s Mountain (Dial Press, 1961) but was virtually unknown in the television and film industries. The Twilight Zone was the break he needed. In 1970 Random House published The Homecoming which Hamner adapted into a Christmas special for CBS the next year. The special did well and Hamner was approached to adapt it into a television series. So he created The Waltons. It ran for nine years and became one of the most celebrated television programs of all time, winning thirteen Emmy Awards, including two for Hamner. The Waltons offered Hamner every creative outlet he needed. Similar to Serling’s involvement on The Twilight Zone, Hamner acted as executive producer, head writer, and host of the program, providing the opening and closing narration to each episode. The show ended in 1981 but several television specials aired in the subsequent years. After The Waltons, Hamner created Falcon Crest in 1981, a soap-opera style series about the California wine industry starring Jane Wyman. This show was also an enormous success and ran for nine seasons.

While Hamner’s episodes may not have always been the right fit for the show he managed to bring something unique to the table. Characters and places and themes rarely seen on television at that time. The Twilight Zone never apologized for being a uniquely American program. It is a product of its time and its place. Earl Hamner’s scripts for the show shed light on a different America, one largely unfamiliar to most the American television audience. He did not judge his characters and presented them in the only way he knew how. Upon viewing Hamner’s work on The Twilight Zone, one can see an immensely talented writer, still young, working in an unfamiliar medium, trying to find the right outlet to express a voice that was uniquely thoughtful and intelligent. Lucky for all of us, he found it.

Earl Hamner, Jr. (1923 - 2016)

The Twilight Zone:

“The Hunt” Season Three

“A Piano in the House” Season Three

“Jess-belle” Season Four

“Ring-a-Ding Girl” Season Five

“You Drive” Season Five

“Black Leather Jackets” Season Five

“Stopover in a Quiet Town” Season Five

“The Bewitchin' Pool” Season Five

Selected Bibliography:

Fifty Roads to Town (Random House, 1953)

Spencer’s Mountain (Dial Press, 1961)

You Can’t Get There from Here (Dial Press, 1965)

The Homecoming (Random House, 1970)

The Twilight Zone Scripts of Earl Hamner, Jr. (Cumberland House Publishing, 2003)

Twilight Zone: 19 Original Stories on the 50^th Anniversary (story “The Art of the Miniature”) (Edited by Carol Serling, Tor, 2009)

Poe’s Lighthouse (story “A Passion for Solitude”) (edited by Christopher Conlon, Cemetery Dance Publications, 2006)

The Bleeding Edge: Dark Barriers, Dark Frontiers (story “The Death and Life of Caesar LaRue”) (edited by William F. Nolan, Jason V. Brock, Cycatrix Press, 2009)

The Devil’s Coattails: More Dispatches from the Dark Frontier (story “The Woods Colt”) (edited by William F. Nolan, Jason V. Brock, Cycatrix Press, 2011)

Selected Screenplays:

Palms Springs Weekend (1963)

Charlotte’s Web (1973)

Where the Lilies Bloom (1974)

Selected Television Credits:

The Kate Smith Hour "The Hound of Heaven" (an earlier, shorter version of Hamner's first Twilight Zone episode, "The Hunt," which featured John Carradine as Hyder Simpson and a very young James Dean as the Messenger) (Jan. 15, 1953; CBS) 
Wagon Train "The Wanda Snow Story" (original teleplay) (Jan. 17, 1965; ABC)
ABC Stage 67 "The People Trap" (teleplay by Hamner based on the story by Robert Sheckley) (Nov. 9, 1966; in 1971 Hamner adapted this into a feature length film for ABC called The Last Generation)
The Invaders "The Watchers" (teleplay by Hamner and Jerry Sohl, story by Michael Adams) (Sept. 19, 1967; ABC)
Heidi (teleplay by Hamner based on the novel by Johanna Spyri) (1968, NBC)

The Waltons (series creator, writer, host) (1972 – 1981)

Apple’s Way (series creator, writer) (1974 – 1975)

Falcon Crest (series creator, writer) (1981 – 1990)

Night Visions (anthology series which aired first on Fox then on the Sci Fi channel, segment “The Doghouse,” original teleplay) (2001)

http://www.earlhamner.com/about.html

An Interview With Author Christopher Conlon

Christopher Conlon is one of our favorite writers here in the Vortex. He has done as much as anyone to illuminate the writers behind The Twilight Zone in various books and essays. Chris edited the 2009 Bram Stoker Award winning book He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson, which included the first publication of the screenplay for Burn, Witch, Burn! (A.K.A. Night of the Eagle) a 1962 film based on Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife (1943) and adapted in collaboration by Twilight Zone writers Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson.* 

Chris also compiled two volumes of the work of Twilight Zone ghostwriter Jerry Sohl: Filet of Sohl (2003), a volume which includes two unproduced Twilight Zone scripts, and The Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl (2004).  Chris edited the 2006 anthology Poe’s Lighthouse: All New Collaborations with Edgar Allan Poe, which included new work from Twilight Zone writers George Clayton Johnson and Earl Hamner.

Chris has been one of the chief chroniclers of the Southern California Group of writers, a close-knit group of like-minded, creative individuals drawn to one another in the Los Angeles area in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Members included Twilight Zone writers Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, George Clayton Johnson, Jerry Sohl, and John Tomerlin, as well as such accomplished writers as Chad Oliver, William F. Nolan, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Harlan Ellison. We highly recommend you read Chris's definitive account of the Group. Chris also wrote the essay “Buried Treasures: The Twilight Zone’s Unseen Episodes” for Dark Discoveries #14 (Summer, 2009).  

Chris is an accomplished fiction writer whose work has strong appeal for fans of The Twilight Zone. He was a Bram Stoker Award finalist for A Matrix of Angels and Midnight on Mourn Street. Booklist calls Chris “One of the pre-eminent names in contemporary literary horror,” and Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson said “Conlon is a consummate literary artist.” Learn more about Chris’s writings here. Be sure also to follow the link to Chris's blog and read his moving remembrance of the late Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson. 

Chris became a friend of George Clayton Johnson in the ‘90s and worked on Johnson’s 1999 retrospective All of Us are Dying and Other Stories, writing an introduction and conducting a long and informative interview with Johnson as sectional interludes in the book. As the George Clayton Johnson scripted episode “A Game of Pool” is the next episode we will be covering as well as a personal favorite here in the Vortex, we reached out to Chris to get his thoughts on Johnson, the Southern California Group, The Twilight Zone, and how it all influenced his own writing. Chris was kind enough to take time out to answer a few of our questions.

*The screenplay is available only in the hardcover first edition from Gauntlet Press and is not included in the paperback edition.

Vortex: What first led you to the Southern California Group of writers and how have they affected your own work as a writer?

Conlon: Well, I was aware of several of them individually from a very early age thanks to Twilight Zone. By the time I was twelve the names Beaumont, Matheson, and Johnson were very familiar to me, since I was an inveterate credits-reader. But it wasn’t until I read Zicree’s Twilight Zone Companion when it first came out in the early ’80s that I became aware of the Group. I was fascinated, because I so desperately wanted to be a writer myself—I was about 19 at that point—and this became an ideal for me of how writers could interact. Growing up I didn’t know any writers. I didn’t even know any kids who wanted to be writers. My family thought I was some kind of freak. The whole idea of a group of deeply-bonded creative types meeting, workshopping, collaborating, driving around, going to late-night restaurants, talking about stories, talking about life, was inspiring to me. Much of what I’ve written owes a clear debt to those men, including their mentors Bradbury and Serling.

Vortex: A lot of the Group's best work, especially their work on The Twilight Zone, seems ageless, still able to resonate with a modern reader or viewer. What is it about the work that you feel lends it this quality?

Conlon: I believe that Twilight Zone endures for the same reason that the great film noirs endure, and the great Hitchcocks. In the end, they’re about the central preoccupation of our time—anxiety. So many of the great musicals, great comedies, great Westerns and such have faded into obscurity, of interest only to film buffs or historians; but Twilight Zone just goes on and on, because each new generation struggles with its own anxieties. Some are specific to the time—the arms race, Communism, terrorism, whatever—but others are eternal, existential. Questions of mortality, identity, the nature of reality. Twilight Zone dealt so powerfully with those that the stories still speak to us over a half-century later. It’s pop surrealism; Kafka for the masses. The black-and-white image is vital, too—black-and-white gives a heightened quality with its super-contrasted, super-dramatic chiaroscuro effects. Twilight Zone wouldn’t have been the same in color, any more than great noirs like Kiss Me Deadly or Detour or great Hitchcocks like Psycho. One classic series that partook of some of these elements I’m talking about, The Fugitive, went to color in its final season, and it was a disaster. The stories were all right, but that heightened feeling of dread that the show generated was gone—lost in a wash of colorful blah that took away the shadows and contrasts and pools of threatening darkness and just made everything look cheap and shoddy and as bright as a cartoon.

Vortex: George Clayton Johnson's output for Twilight Zone was relatively small but of exceedingly high quality. What are your general impressions of his work on the series and on “A Game of Pool” specifically?

Conlon: George came into his own as a writer on Twilight Zone. In episodes like “Nothing in the Dark” and “Kick the Can” he displayed a poetic lyricism that was reminiscent of Bradbury, but his scripts were far more effective because George’s dialogue, unlike Bradbury’s, was diamond-sharp, natural, real—Serlingesque, in fact. “A Game of Pool” is a perfect example, and nearly a perfect episode. The ending, which was not George’s, was tacked-on by Serling and Co. in a rare moment of bad judgment, and George hated it. Still, for most of its length it’s as good as any episode of Twilight Zone. You know, I suspect that only other writers really understand how good George Clayton Johnson was. Some kinds of writing—Bradbury’s short stories come to mind—display styles that allow anyone who is even semi-literate to look and say, “Well, now, that’s great writing.” George was more subtle than that. But if you think what he did was easy, well, you just sit down and try to write a twenty-two minute teleplay that contains exactly two characters in one scene on one tiny set—and make it so gripping that it’s unforgettable. When you can do that, you’ll understand just how good George really was.

Vortex: Jerry Sohl was a ghostwriter on several Twilight Zone episodes credited solely to Charles Beaumont. You've edited volumes of Sohl's short stories and television scripts. Tell us how these books came about and what is your estimation of Sohl's contributions to The Twilight Zone?

Conlon: Jerry Sohl is truly the “ghost” writer of Twilight Zone. Like most of his novels, his three scripts for the show weren’t terribly original, but his sheer professionalism and storytelling ability made them memorable—“Living Doll” is based on an idea that was old hat even in 1963, but Sohl’s story construction and characters and dialogue turned it into a classic anyway. As for the two books, Filet of Sohl and Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl, I got in touch with Jerry a few years before he died and interviewed him for “Southern California Sorcerers.” I’d always been curious about his two unproduced scripts, “Who Am I?” and “Pattern for Doomsday,” which were mentioned in Twilight Zone Companion—they’d been accepted for production in the last season but were killed by William Froug. After Jerry died I asked the family about those scripts. One thing led to another, and eventually they were published in Filet of Sohl. One delightful thing for me was the fact that after the book was published I met Carl Amari, producer of The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas, and acted as a kind of friendly agent for the Sohls in selling him the audio rights to those two scripts. He produced both of them—Henry Rollins starred in one ("Pattern for Doomsday"), Sean Astin in the other ("Who Am I?"). So those old forgotten scripts that had been gathering dust in Jerry’s files for forty years were finally done, under his own name—and on The Twilight Zone, no less! I was so happy to have played a role in that.

Vortex: Your essay “Southern California Sorcerers” is the most definitive history of the Group to date. What did the research entail? Were you able to speak directly to writers from the Group?

Conlon: I interviewed several people by phone and by letter, yes. George and William F. Nolan were my primary sources. I corresponded with Sohl, as I’ve mentioned, and talked with Matheson and Ellison as well. The rest of the job was finding printed sources with relevant material—easier said than done in that pre-Internet era, or at least before I was online myself.

Vortex: Do you have a favorite episode of The Twilight Zone and, if so, why is it your favorite?

Conlon: “Walking Distance” is my favorite episode. Always has been, always will be. It represents all its major contributors—Rod Serling, Robert Stevens, Gig Young, Bernard Herrmann—working at the absolute peak of their powers on a story that’s beautiful and profound and universal.

Vortex: Besides the two Sohl collections and your Richard Matheson tribute anthology He Is Legend, which of your books do you think Twilight Zone fans might be most interested in and why?

Conlon: The obvious choice would be Poe’s Lighthouse, which I conceived and edited—it contains original stories by something like two dozen writers, including Earl Hamner and George Clayton Johnson—in fact, I think George’s story may have been the last one he had published in his lifetime. As for my own writing, the Twilight Zone fan might be well-served by my newest collection, The Tell-Tale Soul: Two Novellas, a pair of long stories on the dark side—one a kind of literary thriller and tribute to Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” the other a gentle rural fantasy about an alternate early 20th century with robots. The author of the book’s introduction, John Pelan, actually titled his piece “Christopher Conlon’s Twilight Zone,” so the connections would seem to be pretty clear. I’m glad about that.

Chris mentioned that "Walking Distance" is his favorite episode of the series and he wrote a fantastic article on the episode which you can read here. We want to again thank Chris for taking time to answer our questions and we hope to do this again soon.

"The Passersby"

Lavinia (Joanne Linville) listens to a ballad sung by
a confederate sergeant (James Gregory)

“The Passersby”

Season Three, Episode 69

Original Air Date: October 6, 1961

Cast:

The Sergeant: James Gregory

Lavinia: Joanne Linville

Charlie: Rex Holman

The Lieutenant: David Garcia

Jud: Warren Kimberling

Abraham Lincoln: Austin Green

Wounded Soldier: Bob McCord

Crew:

Writer: Rod Serling (original teleplay)

Director: Elliot Silverstein

Producer: Buck Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George W. Davis and Phil Barber
Set Decoration: H. Web Arrowsmith
Assistant Director: Darrell Hallenbeck
Editor: Bill Mosher
Sound: Franklin Milton and Bill Edmondson

Music: Fred Steiner

“And Now, Mr. Serling:”

“Next week we move back in time to April, 1865, the aftermath of the Civil War, at a strange, dusty road that leads to a most unbelievable adventure. On our show next week: ‘The Passerby.’ This one is for the Civil War buffs, the mystics among you…or any and all who would want a brief vacation…in the Twilight Zone.”

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:

“This road is the afterwards of the Civil War. It began at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and ended at a place called Appomattox. It’s littered with the residue of broken battles and shattered dreams. [Enter the Sergeant who stumbles upon the home of Lavinia and sees her sitting on the porch in a rocking chair.] In just a moment, you will enter a strange province that knows neither North nor South, a place we call…the Twilight Zone.”

Summary:

            April, 1865. The Civil War is over. An endless line of soldiers trudge down a long, arduous road. On this road is a Confederate Sergeant. He leg is wounded and he walks with a crutch. He carries with him a worn out guitar. Tired, he stops at the home of a young woman named Lavinia and asks her for a drink of water. She obliges and they began to talk. She tells the Sergeant that her husband, a Confederate Captain, was killed. He rests under the shade of a tree and plays his guitar awhile.

            Lavinia spots a soldier she knows on the road. She runs to him and throws her arms around him. She tells him that there were reports that he had been killed. He appears unfazed by this and continues walking. Later on, a Union Lieutenant arrives at the house. He asks for a drink of water. The Sergeant chats with him a moment and Lavinia disappears into the house. The Sergeant then recognizes the Lieutenant as the man that saved his life. Lavinia appears on the porch with a shotgun in her hand and announces that she is going to kill the Lieutenant. The Sergeant informs her that this man saved his life and pleads with her to spare his. After a struggle for the gun she fires at the Lieutenant at point blank range but does not hit him. The Sergeant then recalls an incident where he thought the Lieutenant was killed when an artillery shell exploded near him. Puzzled, the Sergeant holds a lantern up to the Lieutenant and finds that his face is horribly mangled. The Union officer thanks Lavinia for the water and rides away.

            The next day another soldier stops by the house. It’s Lavinia’s husband, Jud, whom she believed dead. She runs to him and collapses in his arms, crying. Jud tells her that he is not staying. He is to continue on the road. She begs him to stay but he insists on leaving. He tells her he believes the road will take them to the afterlife. Lavinia finally realizes what everyone else seems to know already: that she and Jud, and the Sergeant, are all dead. After Jud leaves, the Sergeant informs her that he is also leaving. Not wanting to accept her fate, she begs him to stay. She does not want to be alone. But the Sergeant bids his farewell. She is then greeted by President Abraham Lincoln, the last casualty of the Civil War, who informs her that he is the last man on the road. Not wanting to be left behind, she runs after Jud as the late president trails quietly behind her.

Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:

            “Incident on a dirt road during the month of April, the year 1865. As we’ve already pointed out, it’s a road that won’t be found on a map. But it’s one of many that lead in and out…of the Twilight Zone.”

Commentary:

            “The Passersby” is the second in a handful of episodes concerning the American Civil War. Serling, who saw extensive combat as a paratrooper during World War II, had deep-seated anxieties of war and the destruction that human beings were capable of bestowing upon one another. As a fantasy program, The Twilight Zone has an unusually large number of episodes with war-time settings, most of which were penned by Serling. He had already explored the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the Season Two episode, “Back There,” and he would continue to examine the Civil War in Season Three’s “Still Valley,” his adaptation of Manly Wade Wellman’s story “The Valley Was Still.” During Season Five the show aired a French adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s famous Civil War story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” directed by Robert Enrico.

            “The Passersby” is loosely recycled from a script Serling penned for NBC’s Matinee Theatre in 1958 entitled “The Cause.” In this earlier script, set in the months after the Confederacy’s surrender in the Spring of 1865, a guitar-wielding soldier named Jud meets and falls in love with a woman from the opposing side of the war. They agree to leave the past in the past and focus on building a new life together. The woman’s loyalty is tested when a family member expresses disapproval over her relationship. In “The Passersby” Serling restructured this story, keeping the time period, setting, and various character names and combined it with a theme he had already explored several times on The Twilight Zone and would continue to do so time and time again: mistaken self-identity. In this episode the Sergeant and Lavinia are unable to grasp the fact that they are both dead even though death is literally marching in front of them. This episode shares an unmistakable likeness to “The Hitch-Hiker” and “Judgement Night” (both from Season One and both penned by Serling although the former is an adaptation). But the theme of mistaken self-identity is not limited to episodes where the protagonist is unaware the he or she is already dead. “The After Hours,” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” and “The Lateness of the Hour” all feature characters, usually the main character, that are unaware of or unwilling to accept their identity. It’s an effective device and one that can lend itself to a wide range of stories, both light and dark. Charles Beaumont’s episode “A Nice Place to Visit” also explores this theme as does Richard Matheson’s “A World of Difference” and his Season Four masterpiece “Death Ship.”          

         While the twist at the end of this episode isn’t really much of a surprise to anyone, except maybe Lavinia, Serling and director Elliot Silverstein focus instead on the relationship of these two strangers and the haunting imagery around them. Through well-crafted dialogue Serling explores the psychological scars of war and loss. He also touches upon the dangers of isolation and prejudice. He does this by painting a beautiful dynamic between two very broken people. A story that begins as two strangers casually getting to know one another becomes something much more compelling.

Likely realizing that the audience would foresee the ending Silverstein chooses to use this to the episode’s advantage leaving it obvious that the endless procession of soldiers marching in front of Lavinia’s home are headed to the afterlife. Excluding the Sergeant, the soldiers appear disoriented and disconnected from the world around them. They walk with an almost mindless lethargy not unlike the living dead in many zombie films. The set design, saturated in the southern gothic tradition, also suggests an afterlife setting of some kind. It is this over indulgence of haunting imagery, framing the tender relationship between Lavinia and the Sergeant, which gives this episode such an unusual atmosphere.

Serling’s major blunder in this episode is the highly unnecessary appearance of Abraham Lincoln in the final scene. By the time the late president arrives the twist has been revealed to the audience (several times) and his presence does not accomplish anything. It feels forced and gimmicky and kind of offsets the earlier discourse between the two main characters.

The lead actors take center stage in this episode and they both turn in compelling performances. James Gregory makes his second appearance on the show. His first was a brief role in the pilot episode, “Where is Everybody?” The problem with his role in “The Passersby” is a mistake in either casting or script editing. At one point in the episode Gregory implies that he was young man, a teenager perhaps, when he first left for the war only a few years before. Gregory was fifty at the time of this episode. This is a minor error but one that could easily have been avoided by omitting just one line. Joanne Linville was already a seasoned television actress, appearing mostly in smaller roles. She is convincing and authentic here as Lavinia. She presents a vulnerability that makes Lavinia’s flaws forgivable and makes her a sympathetic and even a likeable character.

While this episode is an enjoyable one, with intelligent dialogue and fine acting and direction, I find it is not one that requires more than a viewing or two. The dynamic between the two main characters is interesting and believable but there are too many gimmicks (the Union Lieutenant, Jud, Lincoln) that remove the audience from the heart of the story. Still, if you have not seen it, it is definitely worth a viewing, but it probably won’t be one that stays with you for years to come.

Grade: C

Notes:

--As mentioned, James Gregory also appeared in the pilot episode, “Where is Everybody?” He also appeared in an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery titled "Stop Killing Me."

--Elliott Silverstein also directed “The Obsolete Man,” “The Trade Ins,” and “Spur of the Moment.”

--The Passersby was adapted into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring Morgan Brittany.

--Brian Durant

"The Shelter"

"The Shelter”
Season Three, Episode 68
Original Air Date: September 29, 1961

Cast:

Bill Stockton: Larry Gates
Grace Stockton: Peggy Stewart
Paul Stockton: Michael Burns
Jerry Harlowe: Jack Albertson
Martha Harlowe: Jo Helton
Frank Henderson: Sandy Kenyon
Mrs. Henderson: Mary Gregory
Marty Weiss: Joseph Bernard
Mrs. Weiss: Moria Turner
Man: John McLiam

Crew:
Writer: Rod Serling (original teleplay)
Director: Lamont Johnson
Producer: Buck Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George W. Davis and Phil Barber
Set Decoration: H. Web Arrowsmith
Assistant Director: Darrell Hallenbeck
Editor: Jason Bernie
Sound: Franklin Milton and Bill Edmondson
Music: Stock

And Now, Mr. Serling:

“Next week on The Twilight Zone, we use a camera like an X-ray and look under the skin of a neighborhood of men and women. It’s a little experiment in human nature and behavior on the night that a Conelrad broadcast shatters their composure with an announcement of terse terror: a bomb is coming. Most of our stores are a little far out. This one is very close in. You’ll see what I mean next week when we present ‘The Shelter.’”

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:

“What you are about to watch is a nightmare. It is not meant to be prophetic. It need not happen. It’s the fervent and urgent prayer of all men of good will that it never shall happen. But in this place, in this moment, it does happen. This is The Twilight Zone.”

Summary:

            While a birthday party is taking place for Dr. William (Bill) Stockton in his suburban home, surrounded by his family, friends, and neighbors, Bill’s son, Paul, informs the party goers of an emergency radio broadcast. The President of the United States has issued a yellow alert after unidentified flying objects have been detected heading toward the United States. In the context of the Cold War, this means a probable nuclear attack. The party goers quickly disperse and Bill’s family prepares to enter their fallout shelter, which had been installed the previous summer, by gathering food, water, and various other supplies. Soon, the water and the power shut off in the home, heightening the alarm.
            Though the neighbors have previously teased Bill about the construction of his fallout shelter, they now begin to arrive with their families in tow to seek his aid in this moment of crisis. None of the neighbors have followed Bill’s lead and constructed a fallout shelter of their own. Bill quickly locks his family into their shelter and tells all who come begging at the door that there is not enough space, oxygen, or supplies to let anyone else in. The shelter was designed for the survival of three people: Bill, his wife, and their son.

            The response from the neighbors is shocking anger and violence. The neighbors, in an attempt to be chosen by Bill to be allowed into the shelter, begin to verbally tear each other down, exposing secret prejudices and hatreds. Desperation gathers the neighbors together in an attempt to use a battering ram to get through the door of Bill’s shelter and spoil the Stockton’s attempt at survival. While the neighbors are in the process of breaking down the door to the fallout shelter, another radio broadcast is heard. The previously unidentified flying objects are identified as satellites. The threat is over, yet the damage done through the panic will change their lives as friends and neighbors forever.

Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:

No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact: for civilization to survive the human race has to remain civilized. Tonight’s very small exercise in logic from The Twilight Zone.”

Commentary:

"So each stood there with a secret thought, while the voice of the radio announcer, quivering with a barely perceptible tension, kept on repeating the announcement over and over again in the same studiedly dispassionate voice - the well-rehearsed ritual of a modern Paul Revere on a twentieth-century night-ride."
           -"The Shelter" by Rod Serling,  New Stories from the Twilight Zone (1962)

           It seems unavoidable but to view Rod Serling’s “The Shelter” in the context of his enduring first season episode, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” There is no denying the many similarities. Both episodes present a Middle-American neighborhood sent into hysteria over a perceived threat, one a series of tricks (and the instigation of an imaginative child), the other a false alarm. Both feature similar American archetypes designed to represent the American “everyman” or “everywoman” (though, with one exception, noticeably lacking minority representation). Both episodes present moments of mob violence which must have been shocking to see on early 1960's American television (until the arrival of footage from the Vietnam war, that is). Both episodes tackle the ugly problems of middle century America head-on in an unblinking manner, most especially the inner prejudices each of us secretly harbors and keeps hidden from our neighbors and friends.  
            Rod Serling often revisited previous material on the series but rarely did so without presenting a new way of looking at the subject matter. “The Shelter” is no exception, and the episode has achieved a reputation for quality drama independent of its connection to the earlier episode. Martin Grams, Jr., author of The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic (OTR, 2008), notes that reprint rights for the one-act play were quickly bought by Charles Scribner’s Sons for inclusion in a contemporary textbook. Serling's "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" has been a staple of American textbooks since the late 1960s. "The Shelter" was also one of the show’s best reviewed segments at the time of its initial broadcast and viewer response was immediate and enthusiastic. During a radio interview with Bob Crane, Serling stated that the episode received 1,300 letters and cards over a two day period after the initial broadcast. Listen to the full interview here.  It provides fascinating insight into Serling’s impetus for writing “The Shelter” as well as a contemporary discussion on the topic of fallout shelters.
            Whether or not “The Shelter” would have been written and produced had Serling not first had success with “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” is something we will never know. "The Shelter" did allow Serling to approach elements of the earlier episode and make changes to better suit the timely treatment of the theme. It is interesting to consider what the view of the two episodes would be had “The Shelter” been first to air. One of the fundamental differences in the two episodes is that by the third season of the series, Serling no longer felt the need to cloak his socially conscious episodes in the trappings of science fiction in order to camouflage the message to the viewer and elude the ire of corporate sponsors. The steady ratings and the Emmy Awards ensured the show could be plainly bold in its approach to sensitive social matters.
           “The Shelter” offers nothing as trite as the “little green men from space” invasion backdrop of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” Besides a flyover sound effect near the beginning of the panic, and the use of the term “unidentified flying object,” “The Shelter” offers no such imaginative removal from the issue at hand. Serling was attacking the real anxieties of the American public with a realistic doomsday scenario. In “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” the viewer intuited what Rod Serling was really talking about when he talked about alien invaders: the red scare, irrational prejudice, unwarranted paranoia, fear of the outsider among us, a horror of cultural assimilation. “The Shelter” requires no such interpretation. It spells out its message clearly and in relative terms, even to a viewer removed from the initial broadcast by more than half a century. It is this quality and the immediacy of the topic which gives the episode its power to stun the viewer, even upon repeat viewings. Though Serling’s closing narration states “No moral, no message, no prophetic tract,” he immediately states the episode’s moral and message: “for civilization to survive, the human race has to remain civilized.”
  
            Serling was drawn back to the themes of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” because the anxiety over imminent nuclear war had greatly increased even in the two years since the broadcast of that first season episode. No longer were Americans only frightened by a silent, insidious Communist invasion (the "sixth columnists" of the earlier episode) but also by the threat of sudden, spectacular apocalypse. The main ingredients missing from “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” are the threat of immediate doom and the symbolic image of the fallout shelter and what they represented to the average American at the height of the Cold War. The fallout shelter was a powerful enough symbol to prompt Serling to revisit the earlier material by exploring what would happen during a panic if only one person in a neighborhood possessed a fallout shelter. Would we hold it together or would we, when faced with our own deaths, collapse into violence and savagery? What would be the ethical answer to the problem for the one family that possessed the shelter?

"Let us take a hard look at the facts. In an atomic war, blast, heat, and initial radiation could kill millions close to ground zero of nuclear bursts. Many more millions - everybody else - could be threatened by radioactive fallout. But most of these could be saved. The purpose of this booklet is to show how to escape death by fallout." 
         -Introduction by Leo Heogh, Director of the Office of Civil and Defense                                     Mobilization, to The Family Fallout Shelter (1959) 


            By 1961, the fallout shelter had grown into an emblem of the American way of life. An entire manufacturing industry grew up around the anxiety of atomic war and many Americans with the financial means to do so seriously considered the construction of a fallout shelter on their property. Sundry items were being marketed based on their effectiveness in a fallout situation.
            “The Shelter” offered Serling an opportunity to present a timely episode about a looming social and political issue as well as revisit previous material in an attempt to mold it differently and see how it behaves. One of the key differences in “The Shelter” and the earlier episode is that, in “The Shelter,” Serling juxtaposed the inherent tension of the episode with moments of levity, which served to heighten the horror as it unfolded. Once viewed, even the episode’s simple title takes on a blackly humorous double meaning. “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” doesn’t present such a juxtaposition. Instead, the tension begins immediately with a flyover sound effect and only increases to the violent conclusion.
            Serling chose to begin “The Shelter” with a birthday party, a universally identifiable event that displays the close connections between the residents of the neighborhood in order to present a stark contrast to the manner in which the episode will play out. Serling understood that to better bring home the impact of the theme the viewer must be made to see the characters together in a pleasant social setting. We must believe that these characters have long enjoyed agreeable relations. Moments in the script allude to frequent get-togethers and barbecues. As an added measure of plausibility, Serling makes the birthday party one characterized by drunkenness, which can logically explain at least some of the impulsive and irrational behavior after the panic begins.
           Even when the tension mounted to the near breaking point, Serling and director Lamont Johnson take a moment to show two children secretly partake of the half-eaten, forgotten birthday cake on the dining room table while their parents discuss desperate solutions to their dire situation. It is a wonderful moment that lends the episode a frightening verisimilitude. 
            Another difference in the two episodes is the logical catalyst that propels the panic. However believable the viewer finds the likelihood of a young boy’s imagination, together with some unusual electrical phenomena, igniting a panic, there is little doubt that such an emergency radio broadcast as depicted in “The Shelter” was something very likely to be on the minds of most adult Americans in 1961. That, along with the pervasive presence of the party goers’s drunkenness, present a very likely scenario for panic, regardless of time or place. It is the sharp contrast between a joyful party and the sudden onset of very real physical danger that lends “The Shelter” an alarming, disorienting quality. Serling suggested that when frightening events happen quickly, people may seek the temporarily recourse of an emotional state in which one can react on a purely instinctive level.

            This brings to mind another episode of broadcast history which may have inspired Serling in constructing both “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and “The Shelter.” This was the October 30, 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air. Presented as a news bulletin, this radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel caused controversy as it convinced some listeners that the Earth was actually being invaded by hostile extraterrestrials, presumably causing panic in the streets. Though reports of the mass hysteria caused by the broadcast have been exaggerated in the ensuing years, due mostly to contemporary newspaper attempts to discredit radio in the latter medium’s early days, the myth of the Mercury Theatre broadcast quickly became a permanent part of American popular culture, to the point of attaining something close to the status of folklore. If the reader is interested in learning more about it, they would do well to read Slate's article on the persistent myth of the broadcast, written by Jefferson Pooley and Michael J. Socolow.
             Though a child is partially responsible for the initial paranoia in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” children are even more prevalent in “The Shelter,” as the subject of saving the children becomes a point of both strength and fear, and is one of the chief catalysts of violence as the tension increases. “The Shelter” presents the story in the form of a ticking clock, a countdown to Armageddon, which serves to better justify both the fast pace of the half-hour program and the sudden change in behavior of some of the characters. It all happens a bit too quickly in "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and the events cannot quite justify the quick pacing. Another important similarity between the two episodes is that Serling chose darkness as the moment when the panic really heats up. He suggested that it is easy to continue to be rational as the lights remain on, but once we are cast into darkness we begin our descent into madness and savagery. This is by no means a new idea or an outmoded one if the viewer will only recall the panic of the Y2K scare at the beginning of the 21^st century, when the idea of a new Dark Age briefly placed the world on edge.
            Serling wisely chose to set “The Shelter” within the home and shows the viewer only small glimpses of the panic on the street, whereas “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” takes place wholly outside on the street and we are not privy to the sanctuary of the characters’s private lives. In the earlier episode the houses are like fortresses whereupon the people stand guard on front porches. The change is fundamental to the impact of the story, as seeing the destruction within a home, the most private space of the family, is more forceful than a confrontation on a street in an American neighborhood.

            The preceding is not an attempt to present “The Shelter” as a superior example of the theme first explored in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street," or to present the episode as wholly dependent upon the other, but only to suggest that “The Shelter” is deserving of being viewed in a positive light outside the shadow of the earlier, and more famous, episode. Of course “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” has the advantage of originality of concept as well as, despite the Emmy Award-laden talent in front of the camera for “The Shelter,” perhaps the most talented ensemble of character actors of any episode of the series. Actress Mary Gregory, who portrays Mrs. Henderson, wife of Frank, in “The Shelter,” is the only cast member to appear in both “The Shelter” and “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” The latter episode remains one of the jewels in the crown of Rod Serling’s efforts on the show and was a rich enough concept to produce a second take on the theme that is nearly as powerful as the original.

            “The Shelter” features the debut of director Lamont Johnson on the series. Johnson was a mainstay on the third season and directed some of the finest episodes of the show, including “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” and a pair from writer George Clayton Johnson, “Nothing in the Dark” and “Kick the Can.” Lamont Johnson also directed Charles Beaumont’s excellent fourth season episode “Passage on the Lady Anne,” his sole directing credit on the series beyond the third season. Johnson also directed “One More Pallbearer,” a Rod Serling-penned episode that is thematically related to “The Shelter” in that it revolves around a fallout shelter, though the episodes differ radically in their approach to the subject. With the departure of Douglas Heyes after the second season of the series, it was fortunate for producer Buck Houghton to acquire the talents of a director like Lamont Johnson, a former actor who well understood the requirements of dramatic storytelling. Much like with Douglas Heyes, many of the best scripts would be funneled to Lamont Johnson.
            Johnson (1922-2010) was born in Stockton, California and began his acting career in 1951 performing on syndicated radio programs, portraying characters as diverse as Tarzan and Archie Goodwin, assistant to actor Sydney Greenstreet’s Nero Wolfe. Johnson made the move to acting in films and television before finding his niche behind the camera in the director’s chair, working almost entirely in television. His efforts yielded eleven Emmy Award nominations and eight Director’s Guild of America Award nominations. Johnson finished his career with two Emmy Awards and four Director’s Guild of America Awards. Despite the fact that Johnson’s efforts on The Twilight Zone were very successful, he rarely worked within the fantasy genre outside of the series and was never called upon to helm episodes of similar programs.
            Unfortunately, Lamont Johnson did not think highly of “The Shelter,” or, more specifically, of Rod Serling’s script for the episode. Author Marc Scott Zicree quotes Johnson in The Twilight Zone Companion (Bantam, 1982) as saying: “It was too uptight with its own self-righteousness, I think. I found it an interesting idea, I think the thesis was excellent, but I think its devices and general style of writing were a little too pompous.” This low opinion of the episode is one shared by Zicree as well. The episode is certainly pessimistic (one might say realistic) in nature and perhaps this quality engineers a negative response from those more in tune with the lighter, reassuring episodes. Uncomfortable truths, after all, are designed to make one uncomfortable. Perhaps, as Serling noted in his preview narration, it is a little too “close in” for some viewers, lacking as it does that comforting barrier of fantasy found in most other episodes. Stephen King, in Danse Macabre (1981), his survey of mid-century horror in media, described the episode this way: "rarely has any television program dared to present human nature in such an ugly, revealing light as that used in 'The Shelter,' in which a number of suburban neighbors along Your Street, U.S.A., are reduced to animals squabbling over a fallout shelter during a nuclear crisis." "The Shelter" revels a side of ourselves that we would rather forget, or worse, believe doesn't exist at all.
            In any case, “The Shelter” remains a powerful episode that still speaks to many societal problems being experienced by Americans in the 21^st century, nearly sixty years after its initial broadcast. If it is derivative in places it is equally original in others. It is interesting to contemplate the personal impact on the viewer of “The Shelter” during its initial broadcast, as little of American television was willing to be as dark, daring, and blunt as was The Twilight Zone when Rod Serling turned his talents to tackling a timely social issue. Serling would by no means be finished with the concept after “The Shelter,” as he would approach the themes at the heart of the episode in later episodes such as “The Midnight Sun,” "Dust," “On Thursday We Leave for Home,” “The Old Man in the Cave,” and “I Am the Night-Color Me Black.”

Grade: B

 Notes:

-Academy Award and Emmy Award winner Jack Albertson (1907-1981), best known for the sitcom Chico and the Man and the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, also appears in the fourth season episode “I Dream of Genie” as well as in “Dead Weight,” a segment of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

-Sandy Kenyon, born Sanford Klein (1922-2010), also appears in the episodes “The Odyssey of Flight 33,” from season two, and “Valley of the Shadow” from season four. Kenyon also has credits on Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond and The Outer Limits. Kenyon was an accomplished voice actor for animated television late in his career.

-Jo Helton also appears in the season four episode “On Thursday We Leave for Home.”

-As stated before, actress Mary Gregory has the distinction of also appearing in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” as well as the second season episode, “The Lateness of the Hour.” She appeared on Rod Serling's Night Gallery in "The Different Ones."

-John McLiam also appears in the fourth season episode “Miniature,” as well as in uncredited roles for the third season episode “The Midnight Sun” and the fifth season episode “Uncle Simon.”

-Despite the fact that Rod Serling adapted “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” into a short story for his 1960 collection Stories From the Twilight Zone, he felt confident enough in similar episode “The Shelter” to adapt it into a short story as well for his 1962 collection New Stories From the Twilight Zone.

-“The Shelter” was adapted into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring Ernie Hudson.

 --JP