February 4, 2025 • 30 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Rod Serling was the most prestigious writer in American television. As creator, host, and primary writer for The Twilight Zone, Serling became something more: an American icon. Here to tell the story is Nick Parisi, author of Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. Rod Serling was
the most prestigious writer in American television. His creator, host,
and primary writer for The Twilight Zone, Serling became something
more an American icon. Here to tell the story is
the author of Rod Serling, His Life Work and Imagination.
(00:34):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Hey, I'm Nick Feresi. I'm the author of Rod Sterling,
His Life Work and Imagination. And I'm also the current
president of the Rod Sterling Memorial Foundation. We are a
five oh one c three charity that's based in Binghamton,
New York, which is Rod Sterling's hometown. The Rod Sterring
Memorial Foundation was founded by a group of Rod Sterling's
(00:58):
colleagues and friends nineteen eighty five, and they were a
group of people who were passionate about the idea that
Rod Sterrolling's work was not forgotten, and it hasn't been.
Rod Stroling was a Christmas baby born on December twenty fifth,
nineteen twenty four. He was born in Syracuse, New York,
but he and his family moved to Binghamton when Rod
(01:21):
was maybe eighteen months old, and he always looked back
on his time in Binghamton. His childhood in Binghaton as
being particularly idyllic. This is something that came up in
his work over and over again, his love for his
hometown and his desire to go back to his childhood,
and this certainly came up later in the Twilight Zone
as well as outside of the Twilight Zone. So when
(01:42):
he was eighteen years old, he volunteered to serve in
the army. This was not too long after Pearl Harbor.
He was barely eighteen years old. He weighed about one
hundred and fourteen pounds, He was five foot five. He
was a little guy, but he had this desire to serve,
and he had this desire to do what he thought
(02:02):
was right, which was fight the Nazis. He was born
into a Jewish family and he was very proud of
his Jewish heritage. And he became a paratrooper. He served
with the eleventh Air Born five hundred and eleven Parachute
Infantry Regiments. And it's, you know, should be said that
this is something that it's not something they just gave
you. You know, It's not that he wanted to be a
paratrooper and they said, okay, you can be a paratrooper.
(02:24):
He had to literally earn his wings, so he had
to do the jumps and survived the jumps, so, probably
to his dismay, maybe he was not sent to fight Nazis,
but he was sent to the Pacific Theater to fight
the Japanese and his units mission was they were sent
to Lady to Philippines. Their mission was to take back
(02:44):
the island from the Japanese, and the American forces and
Filipino guerrillas had pretty much cleared the island by the
time Rod's regiments arrived. However, the Japanese had all retreated
to the Mayanad Mountains in the middle of the islands.
So their mission was to cross those mountains and essentially
(03:05):
kill anything that they saw on the way and just
make it across. And every man that served in this
mission remembered it as thirty days of hell. And by
the time Rod Sterling and the rest of those guys
got across that mountain, they were different people. Rod Serling
was certainly a different person. He saw some terrible things,
he saw some major combat, he saw lots of his
(03:26):
buddies get killed, and it scarred him. It scarred him
for life. And when he came back from the military,
he carried that with him as every other veteran did.
But Rod Serling he turned it into writing. He very
explicitly said that he turned to writing as a form
of therapy to get all of this war trauma out
of his gut and onto the page.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
I was traumatized into writing by wars, by going through
a war, in a combat situation and feeling a desperate
sense of a terrible need for some sort of therapy.
Get it out of my gut, right it down. This
is the way it began for me.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
So when he first came back from serving, he enrolled
at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and he immediately
began writing. Everything that he wrote at that point was
war influenced, and his writing teacher at the time, a
man named Nolan Miller, encouraged him to get all this
stuff out, and he did. And now we're talking about
(04:24):
the late forties when Rod is going to college. He
graduated in nineteen fifty, and this of course is the
very beginning of television. So Rod Sterling initially was writing
for radio because that was the only game in town.
So he began writing radio scripts. He wrote for the
college radio station, and he also sent them out to
(04:44):
every radio station across the country, and they were all
rejected over and over again. All of his scripts were rejected.
At one point he said he collected about forty rejection
slips in a row. But he was very persistent. So
he honed his craft writing for radio, and when television
came along, he was one of the guys who saw
immediately that television was the way to go. It's hard
(05:06):
to imagine now, but back then, you know television. There
was a lot of people who look down their nose
of television though they would call it, it's just radio
with pictures, and they thought maybe it was a fad
and it wouldn't and you know, it wouldn't last. And
Rod Serling was one of us. Know he knew that
this was the way to go, and he also saw
the potential in it as a message deliverer, a message
(05:27):
delivery system. He believed that his writing was meant to entertain,
but it was also meant to give some sort of
a message, and for rad it was the things that
he was passionate about. So yes, the war, of course
was one of the issues that he wrote about, but
other social issues like prejudice, like scapegoating, like the fear
(05:48):
of the other.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
The purpose of a dramatic show, which is used as
a vehicle of social criticism is to involve an audience
to show them wherein their guilt lies, or at least
indeed their association. But when you're talking about a bunch
of cavalrymen knocking off a bunch of poor redskins and
putting them into a reservation, the audience needed to have
no association, certainly no guilt. How many Indians have they
(06:11):
pushed into a reservation. But if indeed you talk about
a denial of a man putting his garbage can next
to yours, whether he's fought in Vietnam or wherever, by
virtue of his color, now you're getting into a universal
guilt which they should feel, or at least in quite understand.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
These were issues that were very, very important to Rod Sterling.
And the irony, of course, is that you really couldn't
talk about these things on television at the time, and
he would always run up against problems with the sensors
and the advertising agencies. So Rod would have to make
his points in other ways. But what happened was the
(06:50):
first thing that happened was he became a star. He
became a star long before this Twilight Zone. And this
is something that maybe people don't really realize, is that
Rod Sterling was the most prestigious writer in television before
the Twilight Zone. And it began in nineteen fifty five,
very specifically with a show called Patterns. He wrote a
show called Patterns. It aired on the Craft Theater. It
(07:11):
was a one hour live performance in January of nineteen
fifty five. And after that show aired, it got reviews
like nothing on television had ever gotten before. And this
is something that will sound like an exaggeration. People will
think it's that it's not the way it was. But
(07:31):
the critic for the New York Times, Jack Gold, said
it was the best thing he'd ever seen on television
from a standpoint of writing, directing, acting, and production. It
was the best thing he'd ever seen on television.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Name your terms, all terms of negotiable.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
I don't think so, not mine, all right, I.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Just do not waste any time doing trading. As of now,
your salary is doubled, your stock option is doubled, right
down the line, your expensive counties, whatever you make it.
Add to that a new title vice president.
Speaker 5 (08:08):
I want a lot more than that. You're not going
to take me on as just another vice president you
can push around. You take me as someone who hates
you down to the bare nerve. Nothing in the world
will ever change that. I'll argue, would you contradict you?
Fight you in every way? I know how I'll do
everything in my power to push you out and take
your place myself.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Go ahead and try.
Speaker 6 (08:32):
Let's just stay both.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
You have yourself a deal, have a drawn up.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Of course, television had only been around about five or
six years at that point, but still it was seen
as a real watershed, a landmark for live television. And
the next day, right you know, Rod Serling said, the
moment that that show went off the air, my phone
started ringing and it never stops.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And you've been listening to Nick Parisi, the author of
Rod Serling his life, work and imagination. You've also been
listening to Rod Serling himself. And we love to do
that in our pieces. Born on Christmas in Binghamton, New York,
he described his childhood as idyllic, but at eighteen, right
after Pearl Harbor, he joins the Army. He's Jewish, he's
(09:17):
proud of it, and he wants to kill Nazis, only
he ends up in the Pacific fighting the Japanese instead,
another brand of virulent racists. At the time, what the
Japanese did to the Chinese and everybody else around them
made him almost as bad as Nazis.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
And then when he.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Comes back from the war, writing becomes his therapy, and
boy he goes in deep, first to college, then writing
for radio, and then up pops this new medium, television.
When we come back, more of Rod Serling and the
Twilight Zone and in the end, the story of a
television prophet. Here on our American stories, and we continue
(10:09):
with our American stories and with author Nick Peresi sharing
with us the story of Rod Serling, and you're going
to be hearing from Rod Serling as well. And we
were just talking about Patterns, a nineteen fifty six boardroom
television drama. It was a huge hit. The screenplay was
written by Rod Serling, and it got great critical reviews.
(10:31):
Let's return to the story here again is Nick Perici.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
And that show made him a star overnight, and it
gave one of his first Emmy Award for Best Dramatic Writing,
and the following year he won his second Best dramatic
writing Emmy Award for Requem for a Heavyweight, which was
maybe even better review than Patterns had been. And now
that validated recuem from a Heavyweight, validated him as the
most prestigious writer in television, and so he started to
(10:59):
have enough power. He started to get ambitious about telling
those stories he wanted to tell about racism, about prejudice,
about anti semitism, about cowardice and bravery. And by this
point Rod Stroing was most outspoken. Whenever he was interfered
with it by the censors, he would go to the
media and tell him exactly what happened. Not just because
(11:21):
he wanted his own work to be as he wanted
it to be, but he believed the television had the
potential to tell these stories, to send these messages to
millions of people. And remember this is a time when
there were only three networks, so there were eighteen million people.
Twenty million people would watch one particular show at any
given time. And he saw the power in that and said,
(11:43):
we have a responsibility to educate the public about these issues.
And when they gave him the chance to make to
create his own show, he went back to something that
was very dear to him, which was science fiction and fantasy.
Speaker 7 (11:57):
Well, the towilet zone is in essence and imaginative, itinerary
of storytelling in which we utilize basis of fantasy, science fiction,
the occult, extrasensory perception, anything that is imaginative, wild, or
as in the States we call it kooki. In normal
earth bound drama, if a man is on top of
the building and it's burning of necessity, he has to
(12:18):
crawl down either a ladder or go through a skylight,
or is rescued by a helicopter. In the twilight zone,
he grows wings and he flies off. But as I say,
this is a program of imaginative storytelling and utilizing the
idea of going back in time or forward in time.
This has provided considerable basis of storytelling in our particular series.
(12:42):
I'm the kind of a guy who is now in
that aging late thirty early forty bracket in which suddenly
there is a tremendous, bittersweet, poignant feeling about wanting to
go back to another time. In my case, it would
be the pre war early teens time, which we're particularly
happy for me, and on occasion I will go back
to my old hometown and walk through the streets and
(13:03):
the places that I grew up in and feel a
sense of great loss that I wish I could recapture it.
And I think the answer is you simply cannot go
home again. It's quite impossible.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
He always loved science fiction and fantasy, even when he
was a kid. I mean, he read the Pulse, he
read amazing stories. One of his favorite all time movies
was the Original King Kong. He loved fantasy and monsters
and things like that. And he said to himself, you know,
if I do that science fiction show that I've always
wanted to do anyway, maybe I can get away with
some of these messages that I've been trying to do
(13:36):
in streat drama, and I can put it in the
guise of fantasy and science fiction and get away with it.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of
sight and sound, but of mind, a journey into a
wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the
sign posts up ahead.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Your next stop put the Twilight Zone.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
And he very famously said that I found that in
the Twilight Zone I could have a Martian say things
that I couldn't have a Republican or a Democrats saying,
and that's the way he did it. If you put
the words and the mouths of robots or the mounds
of aliens on another planet where you put this, you
set the story in the future, then all of a
sudden it has enough distance for the network not to
be so nervous about it. And he found that he
(14:29):
was able to do that.
Speaker 6 (14:33):
You walk into this room at your own risk, because
it leads to the future, not a future that will be,
but one that might be.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
This is not a new world.
Speaker 6 (14:44):
It is simply an extension of what began in the
old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who
has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on
the pages of history since the beginning of time. It
has refinements, technological ev answers, and a more sophisticated approach
to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one
(15:06):
of the super states that preceded it, it has one
iron rule. Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
These these I'm not absolete. I have a function, I
have a purpose.
Speaker 8 (15:25):
Please these.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
I want to serve the state.
Speaker 8 (15:30):
Please please No, I'm not obsolete. Oh no, I'm please, please,
I'm not absolutely no, I want a service state.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
The Chancellor, the late Chancellor was only partly correct. He
was obsolete, But so is the state, the entity he worshiped,
Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize
the worth, the dignity the rights of man, that state
is absolutely a case to be found under m from
mankind in the Twilight Zone.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
So he was able to do things like the Monsters
Are Due on Maple Street, which is as blatant a
social commentary as Rotster ever wrote. And yet he got
away with it with no problems from the network's, no
problem from the sponsors. Why because it was science fiction,
and because not only was it cloaked in this allegory,
but it was also just the fact that science fiction
(16:27):
was kind of looked down upon at the time, especially
in television. It was looked as something for six year
olds or eight year olds. It wasn't looked at as
an important thing like Playhouse ninety was. So the networks
to some extent were just saying, well, you know, Rod's
over there in his playgrounds, He's got his half hour
show on Friday night at ten o'clock. It's not don't
worry about it. It's okay. Nobody's paying attention to it anyway,
(16:48):
and they let him get away with these things.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
I think in its best run, Twilight Zone got roughly
a thirty one or a thirty two share, which in
television terms says that it is a mild success. It
is not a runaway hit. It's not gun smoke, and
it's a very questionable item as to whether or not
we'll renew it if indeed something else comes along that
looks much more publicly acceptable. Now, what that thirty one
(17:11):
share meant was approximately twenty five million people watching, which
is a far sized audience. That's more than what Shakespeare
you know, during the first hundred years. But in the
strange rhythmic arithmetic of television, this was not considered a
major show. Oddly enough, the show became more popular after
it went off the air in terms of the name
twilights On being kind of interchangeable with strange little witticisms
(17:35):
throughout our language. It became a funny little colloquialism that
people used.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Again, you have to put yourself in the time frame.
This is nineteen fifty nine when this show aired. Science
fiction and fantasy. The general public, the general television viewing public,
were not familiar with the tropes of science fiction and fantasy.
Even things like time travel, just simple things that we
think now are very simple and straightforward, were confusing to
the audience at the time. He was educating the television
(18:05):
viewing public on these tropes of science fiction and fantasy
as he went along. He was teaching them about time travel,
about alternate dimensions, about doppelgangers, about all these things that
are science fiction tropes that the general public they didn't
know about these things. So he was really teaching the
(18:25):
public about these things, and that knocked down some doors
for science fiction writers who came afterward.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
And you've been listening to Nick Parisi tell the story
of Rod Serling and what a story. Indeed, wreck William
for a heavyweight the TV version it would become a
terrific movie too. Put him on the map as a
force in television writing, production, and directing. And then he
wanted to well comment on social matters and social issues,
(18:53):
and he gives birth to the Twilight Zone. It's science fiction, yes,
but within it he could well, he could encode messages,
he could say things through characters like a Martian that
he couldn't say as human Republicans or human democrats. Moreover,
it was sort of a side thing for the TV network.
See he had just enough popularity to survive, but not
(19:15):
enough to have the focus on him from the networks
and of course science fiction well it just wasn't taken
as seriously. And when we come back more of the
story of Rod Serling here on our American stories, and
(19:38):
we continue with our American stories and with author Nick Peisi,
his book Rod Serling, His Life, Work and Imagination is
a must read. Pick one up for yourself, the family,
wherever you get your books. Let's pick up where we
last left off with Serling himself talking about why he
did what he did and how he did it.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Did not start very long after the Twilight Zone ended,
and Gene Roddenberry would would credit Rod Sterling and say
I couldn't have done this without Rod Sterling because the again,
the concepts in Star Trek were you know, outlandish for
the time, but Rod Sterling had warmed them up, had
warmed up the audience, so they now you understood a
lot of these things that Geene Roddenberry was trying to
(20:20):
get across in Star Trek so and it just went
on from there. I mean, the Outer Limits came a
little bit after Twilight Zone, and you know, every again,
every science fiction series that came after it owes some
debt to The Twilight Zone, to Rod Sterling and to
Star Trek afterward. But it just was, you know, standing
on the shoulders of giants. That's that's where it began.
And Rod Sterling was the one who knocked down those doors.
(20:42):
So Rod Sterling went from being the most prestigious writer
in television and probably the most recognizable, to being a
television star. In the second season of The Twilight Zone,
that's when he started appearing on camera to do his introductions.
So in the five seasons of The Twilight Zone ran
from nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty four, Rod won
two more Emmy Awards. He had won three before the
(21:04):
Twilight Zone. Now he won two for the Twilight Zone
and he ended up with six. He won one after
the twilight Zone, and which is a record for Best
Dramatic Writing. And he created this show that is among,
if not the most influential series in television history. And
the amazing thing also about Rod Sterling is that it
(21:24):
doesn't end with science fiction and fantasy. If you ask
any of the show runners and writers from the most
famous dramas of the last fifteen years, things like Breaking Bad,
mad Men, the Sopranos, the people who created those shows,
David Chase, Vince Gilligan, these people worship Rod Stirling. They
see Rod Serling as the gold standard. They see him
as the original showrunner. He was the first writer to
(21:48):
really take the reins of a series and make it
to be his vision.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Very often I find that within the framework of the
science fiction or fantasy genre, the use of traveling back
in time is a very effective way of producing contrasts uh,
of producing a kind of a free wheeling storytelling device,
which is why I used going back in time. And
there's another reason, which very much relates to any discussion
(22:15):
of creativity, is that every writer, and I don't think
there are any I can't conceive of anybody not falling
into this pattern. Who writes has certain special loves, certain
special hang ups, certain special preoccupations and predilections. In my case,
it's a hunger to be young again, a desperate hunger
(22:38):
to go backward. It all began, and I think you'll
see this as a running threat and through a lot
of things that I write. And part of creativity, of course,
is being able to have the capacity to convey that
kind of hunger, that kind of nostalogy, that kind of
bittersweet feeling to those who have.
Speaker 5 (22:57):
Never had it.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
And that was it. And for the first three seasons
of The Twilights On, Rod Sterling oversaw everything about The
Twilight Zone from Morning Tonight. He produced the show, He
narrated the show, He wrote ninety two of the one
hundred and fifty six episodes of it. He he was
the on screen presence, He did all the promotion for
the show. And then after The Twilight Zone, he hosted
(23:20):
a show called The Night Gallery, rod Sterling's Night Gallery.
He did. I would argue some of his best writing
for The Night Gallery. And on top of that, oh,
by the way, he co wrote the original Planet of
the Apes. In roughly twenty five years, he wrote about
two hundred and fifty scripts that were produced either on television, radio,
or feature films, and a lot of actors and producers
(23:42):
directors wanted to work with Rod Sterling, and particularly actors.
Actors loved to Rod Sterling's words, They loved to do
his stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
One of the major problems with strong writers who deal
in dialogue above plot, which happens to be I think
more of my fourth than plot dialogue. If you look
at some of the pages of the stuff I've written,
and even some of the good things, shut your eyes.
You won't know who's talking because they all talk alike,
and who do they talk like?
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Me?
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Now that's wrong, and it's something I've got to lick
over the years, but it's the most common literary problem
I think of strong dialoguists.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
So the Twilight Zone now it runs like Who's who
of Hollywood stars. To some extent, I am. Robert Redford
was on the Twilight Zone. Bert Reynolds was on the
Twilight Zone. Jack Klugman did four Twilight Zone episodes. Burgess
Meredith did four Twilight Zone episodes. Agnes moorehead, Carol Burnett,
Telly Savalis, William Shatner start in two very famous Twilight
(24:44):
Zone episodes. Four members of the Starship Enterprise Bridge crew
were on the Twilight Zone. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, George Taka,
and James doing So. There were four members of the
star Bridge crew who appeared on The Twilight Zone and they,
you know, Jack Klugman would say that when he got
a script, if they it was Rod Sterling, he didn't
need to read it. He just said, yeah, yeah, I'll
(25:05):
do it. I'll do it. Of course I'll do it.
So he was able to attract these people, and he
was also able to attract these the other talent like
the writers of Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson,
these people who wanted to write for a show like
The Twilight Zone because there wasn't anything on TV like
The Twilight Zone at the time. It was the first
science fiction and fantasy series that truly treated the genre
(25:28):
from an adult perspective. Before this, you know, it was
bug Eyed Monsters, it was the B movies. It was
that type of that type of an idea. And Rod
Sterling took his playhouse ninety sensibility and brought it to
the genre of science fiction and fantasy. And he put
that same level of care into this these thirty minute
(25:49):
filmed science fiction episodes as he did to his ninety
minute live dramas, and that made all the difference in
the world, because now it really was it was quality
and Charles Beaumont of the writers, when he read the
first script for The Twilight Zone, which is the pilot
episo called where is Everybody Now? This is an episode
about a man who seems to be suffering from amnesia.
(26:11):
He wakes up or he's wandering through a deserted town.
He doesn't know who he is, he doesn't know how
he got there. And Charles Beaumont when he read this script,
he said, this was not nothing earth shaking in terms
of the idea. This idea of last man on Earth
kind of thing had been done in science fiction plenty
of times. But he said, what separated this from everything
else was quality. Quality in the scene set up, quality
(26:33):
in the dialogue or in this case, monologues, because there's
only one person's being in this, and in the quality
jumped off the page, you said, And that's what made
this different. And that's a lot of times the Twilight
Zone is seeing now as this this. You know, uh,
these great ideas, these these amazing ideas. Where these ideas
come from, But if you look at it now, it
really was more about the quality. It could have been
(26:56):
a simple idea. It could have been an idea that
could have been cliched, but Rod Stroling wrote it with
so much more care that it elevated it into something else.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Most television fiction that I watch has very little relevance.
I think it's one thing to say, we will now
have a program called mod Squad, say and we will
have one black man and one Oriental and one Hawaiian
to show this marvelous melting pot concept. But I think
that's all together phony. I don't think that's I think
at best condescension and at worst exploitation. The fact is
(27:33):
that we have so distorted the pure ethnic minority over
the years by making every black man a banjo player
and the village idiot and a coward, that suddenly we're
going to reverse switch he is now a brain scientist,
or an atomic scientist, or anyone of unequal distortion at
the other end. Needless to say, I much prefer the
distortion on the good scale, on the good side of
the scale. But all television fiction I find quite irrelevant
(27:56):
and quite unrelated. But if I had a group of
stories to select, I think, by virtue of its mass
media form, I would try to choose those stories that,
though even science fiction and genre would be tellable in
terms of the most acceptable human terms that we now know.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
They created something that is still running in twenty four
hour marathons on Fourth of July and New Year's Eve
and still airing around the world, and they're still trying
to duplicate it in reboots and everything else, and they
still haven't been able to do it. And why, well,
it's It'd be hard to say that it's not because
(28:36):
they don't have Rot Serling. And Rot Serling sadly died
in nineteen seventy five. He was only fifty years old.
He died of a heart attack. He died on the
table during open heart surgery. And he left behind an
amazing body of work for a man who only lived
to be fifty years old and like I said, didn't
start his career until he was twenty five, so it
(28:58):
was last twenty five years. He left us with an
amazing body of work.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
And a terrific job on the production. Editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler and a special thanks to
Nick Perisi, author of Rod Serling, His Life, Work and Imagination.
My goodness, it was just so remarkable to listen to
Rod Serling, that voice and his thoughts in his mind.
The things he was talking about still resonating deeply today.
(29:29):
I love what he talked about writers having special love,
special preoccupations, and his a desperation to be young again,
of course knowing that could never happen, and the bittersweetness
of it all, and my goodness, the career is he launched.
The actors he attracted, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Agnes Moorehead,
(29:49):
William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy and Jack Klugman said he
wouldn't even read the scripts. He would just say yes
to whatever Rod Serling wrote. What a twenty five five
years it was, producing perhaps one of the most important
and influential shows in American television history. The story of
Rod Serling in so many ways the story of American imagination.
(30:14):
Here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. Rod Serling was
the most prestigious writer in American television. His creator, host,
and primary writer for The Twilight Zone, Serling became something
more an American icon. Here to tell the story is
the author of Rod Serling, His Life Work and Imagination.
(00:34):
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Hey, I'm Nick Feresi. I'm the author of Rod Sterling,
His Life Work and Imagination. And I'm also the current
president of the Rod Sterling Memorial Foundation. We are a
five oh one c three charity that's based in Binghamton,
New York, which is Rod Sterling's hometown. The Rod Sterring
Memorial Foundation was founded by a group of Rod Sterling's
(00:58):
colleagues and friends nineteen eighty five, and they were a
group of people who were passionate about the idea that
Rod Sterrolling's work was not forgotten, and it hasn't been.
Rod Stroling was a Christmas baby born on December twenty fifth,
nineteen twenty four. He was born in Syracuse, New York,
but he and his family moved to Binghamton when Rod
(01:21):
was maybe eighteen months old, and he always looked back
on his time in Binghamton. His childhood in Binghaton as
being particularly idyllic. This is something that came up in
his work over and over again, his love for his
hometown and his desire to go back to his childhood,
and this certainly came up later in the Twilight Zone
as well as outside of the Twilight Zone. So when
(01:42):
he was eighteen years old, he volunteered to serve in
the army. This was not too long after Pearl Harbor.
He was barely eighteen years old. He weighed about one
hundred and fourteen pounds, He was five foot five. He
was a little guy, but he had this desire to serve,
and he had this desire to do what he thought
(02:02):
was right, which was fight the Nazis. He was born
into a Jewish family and he was very proud of
his Jewish heritage. And he became a paratrooper. He served
with the eleventh Air Born five hundred and eleven Parachute
Infantry Regiments. And it's, you know, should be said that
this is something that it's not something they just gave
you. You know, It's not that he wanted to be a
paratrooper and they said, okay, you can be a paratrooper.
(02:24):
He had to literally earn his wings, so he had
to do the jumps and survived the jumps, so, probably
to his dismay, maybe he was not sent to fight Nazis,
but he was sent to the Pacific Theater to fight
the Japanese and his units mission was they were sent
to Lady to Philippines. Their mission was to take back
(02:44):
the island from the Japanese, and the American forces and
Filipino guerrillas had pretty much cleared the island by the
time Rod's regiments arrived. However, the Japanese had all retreated
to the Mayanad Mountains in the middle of the islands.
So their mission was to cross those mountains and essentially
(03:05):
kill anything that they saw on the way and just
make it across. And every man that served in this
mission remembered it as thirty days of hell. And by
the time Rod Sterling and the rest of those guys
got across that mountain, they were different people. Rod Serling
was certainly a different person. He saw some terrible things,
he saw some major combat, he saw lots of his
(03:26):
buddies get killed, and it scarred him. It scarred him
for life. And when he came back from the military,
he carried that with him as every other veteran did.
But Rod Serling he turned it into writing. He very
explicitly said that he turned to writing as a form
of therapy to get all of this war trauma out
of his gut and onto the page.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
I was traumatized into writing by wars, by going through
a war, in a combat situation and feeling a desperate
sense of a terrible need for some sort of therapy.
Get it out of my gut, right it down. This
is the way it began for me.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
So when he first came back from serving, he enrolled
at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and he immediately
began writing. Everything that he wrote at that point was
war influenced, and his writing teacher at the time, a
man named Nolan Miller, encouraged him to get all this
stuff out, and he did. And now we're talking about
(04:24):
the late forties when Rod is going to college. He
graduated in nineteen fifty, and this of course is the
very beginning of television. So Rod Sterling initially was writing
for radio because that was the only game in town.
So he began writing radio scripts. He wrote for the
college radio station, and he also sent them out to
(04:44):
every radio station across the country, and they were all
rejected over and over again. All of his scripts were rejected.
At one point he said he collected about forty rejection
slips in a row. But he was very persistent. So
he honed his craft writing for radio, and when television
came along, he was one of the guys who saw
immediately that television was the way to go. It's hard
(05:06):
to imagine now, but back then, you know television. There
was a lot of people who look down their nose
of television though they would call it, it's just radio
with pictures, and they thought maybe it was a fad
and it wouldn't and you know, it wouldn't last. And
Rod Serling was one of us. Know he knew that
this was the way to go, and he also saw
the potential in it as a message deliverer, a message
(05:27):
delivery system. He believed that his writing was meant to entertain,
but it was also meant to give some sort of
a message, and for rad it was the things that
he was passionate about. So yes, the war, of course
was one of the issues that he wrote about, but
other social issues like prejudice, like scapegoating, like the fear
(05:48):
of the other.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
The purpose of a dramatic show, which is used as
a vehicle of social criticism is to involve an audience
to show them wherein their guilt lies, or at least
indeed their association. But when you're talking about a bunch
of cavalrymen knocking off a bunch of poor redskins and
putting them into a reservation, the audience needed to have
no association, certainly no guilt. How many Indians have they
(06:11):
pushed into a reservation. But if indeed you talk about
a denial of a man putting his garbage can next
to yours, whether he's fought in Vietnam or wherever, by
virtue of his color, now you're getting into a universal
guilt which they should feel, or at least in quite understand.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
These were issues that were very, very important to Rod Sterling.
And the irony, of course, is that you really couldn't
talk about these things on television at the time, and
he would always run up against problems with the sensors
and the advertising agencies. So Rod would have to make
his points in other ways. But what happened was the
(06:50):
first thing that happened was he became a star. He
became a star long before this Twilight Zone. And this
is something that maybe people don't really realize, is that
Rod Sterling was the most prestigious writer in television before
the Twilight Zone. And it began in nineteen fifty five,
very specifically with a show called Patterns. He wrote a
show called Patterns. It aired on the Craft Theater. It
(07:11):
was a one hour live performance in January of nineteen
fifty five. And after that show aired, it got reviews
like nothing on television had ever gotten before. And this
is something that will sound like an exaggeration. People will
think it's that it's not the way it was. But
(07:31):
the critic for the New York Times, Jack Gold, said
it was the best thing he'd ever seen on television
from a standpoint of writing, directing, acting, and production. It
was the best thing he'd ever seen on television.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
Name your terms, all terms of negotiable.
Speaker 5 (07:46):
I don't think so, not mine, all right, I.
Speaker 4 (07:51):
Just do not waste any time doing trading. As of now,
your salary is doubled, your stock option is doubled, right
down the line, your expensive counties, whatever you make it.
Add to that a new title vice president.
Speaker 5 (08:08):
I want a lot more than that. You're not going
to take me on as just another vice president you
can push around. You take me as someone who hates
you down to the bare nerve. Nothing in the world
will ever change that. I'll argue, would you contradict you?
Fight you in every way? I know how I'll do
everything in my power to push you out and take
your place myself.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
Go ahead and try.
Speaker 6 (08:32):
Let's just stay both.
Speaker 5 (08:34):
You have yourself a deal, have a drawn up.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Of course, television had only been around about five or
six years at that point, but still it was seen
as a real watershed, a landmark for live television. And
the next day, right you know, Rod Serling said, the
moment that that show went off the air, my phone
started ringing and it never stops.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And you've been listening to Nick Parisi, the author of
Rod Serling his life, work and imagination. You've also been
listening to Rod Serling himself. And we love to do
that in our pieces. Born on Christmas in Binghamton, New York,
he described his childhood as idyllic, but at eighteen, right
after Pearl Harbor, he joins the Army. He's Jewish, he's
(09:17):
proud of it, and he wants to kill Nazis, only
he ends up in the Pacific fighting the Japanese instead,
another brand of virulent racists. At the time, what the
Japanese did to the Chinese and everybody else around them
made him almost as bad as Nazis.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
And then when he.
Speaker 1 (09:34):
Comes back from the war, writing becomes his therapy, and
boy he goes in deep, first to college, then writing
for radio, and then up pops this new medium, television.
When we come back, more of Rod Serling and the
Twilight Zone and in the end, the story of a
television prophet. Here on our American stories, and we continue
(10:09):
with our American stories and with author Nick Peresi sharing
with us the story of Rod Serling, and you're going
to be hearing from Rod Serling as well. And we
were just talking about Patterns, a nineteen fifty six boardroom
television drama. It was a huge hit. The screenplay was
written by Rod Serling, and it got great critical reviews.
(10:31):
Let's return to the story here again is Nick Perici.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
And that show made him a star overnight, and it
gave one of his first Emmy Award for Best Dramatic Writing,
and the following year he won his second Best dramatic
writing Emmy Award for Requem for a Heavyweight, which was
maybe even better review than Patterns had been. And now
that validated recuem from a Heavyweight, validated him as the
most prestigious writer in television, and so he started to
(10:59):
have enough power. He started to get ambitious about telling
those stories he wanted to tell about racism, about prejudice,
about anti semitism, about cowardice and bravery. And by this
point Rod Stroing was most outspoken. Whenever he was interfered
with it by the censors, he would go to the
media and tell him exactly what happened. Not just because
(11:21):
he wanted his own work to be as he wanted
it to be, but he believed the television had the
potential to tell these stories, to send these messages to
millions of people. And remember this is a time when
there were only three networks, so there were eighteen million people.
Twenty million people would watch one particular show at any
given time. And he saw the power in that and said,
(11:43):
we have a responsibility to educate the public about these issues.
And when they gave him the chance to make to
create his own show, he went back to something that
was very dear to him, which was science fiction and fantasy.
Speaker 7 (11:57):
Well, the towilet zone is in essence and imaginative, itinerary
of storytelling in which we utilize basis of fantasy, science fiction,
the occult, extrasensory perception, anything that is imaginative, wild, or
as in the States we call it kooki. In normal
earth bound drama, if a man is on top of
the building and it's burning of necessity, he has to
(12:18):
crawl down either a ladder or go through a skylight,
or is rescued by a helicopter. In the twilight zone,
he grows wings and he flies off. But as I say,
this is a program of imaginative storytelling and utilizing the
idea of going back in time or forward in time.
This has provided considerable basis of storytelling in our particular series.
(12:42):
I'm the kind of a guy who is now in
that aging late thirty early forty bracket in which suddenly
there is a tremendous, bittersweet, poignant feeling about wanting to
go back to another time. In my case, it would
be the pre war early teens time, which we're particularly
happy for me, and on occasion I will go back
to my old hometown and walk through the streets and
(13:03):
the places that I grew up in and feel a
sense of great loss that I wish I could recapture it.
And I think the answer is you simply cannot go
home again. It's quite impossible.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
He always loved science fiction and fantasy, even when he
was a kid. I mean, he read the Pulse, he
read amazing stories. One of his favorite all time movies
was the Original King Kong. He loved fantasy and monsters
and things like that. And he said to himself, you know,
if I do that science fiction show that I've always
wanted to do anyway, maybe I can get away with
some of these messages that I've been trying to do
(13:36):
in streat drama, and I can put it in the
guise of fantasy and science fiction and get away with it.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of
sight and sound, but of mind, a journey into a
wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the
sign posts up ahead.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Your next stop put the Twilight Zone.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
And he very famously said that I found that in
the Twilight Zone I could have a Martian say things
that I couldn't have a Republican or a Democrats saying,
and that's the way he did it. If you put
the words and the mouths of robots or the mounds
of aliens on another planet where you put this, you
set the story in the future, then all of a
sudden it has enough distance for the network not to
be so nervous about it. And he found that he
(14:29):
was able to do that.
Speaker 6 (14:33):
You walk into this room at your own risk, because
it leads to the future, not a future that will be,
but one that might be.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
This is not a new world.
Speaker 6 (14:44):
It is simply an extension of what began in the
old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who
has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on
the pages of history since the beginning of time. It
has refinements, technological ev answers, and a more sophisticated approach
to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one
(15:06):
of the super states that preceded it, it has one
iron rule. Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.
Speaker 4 (15:18):
These these I'm not absolete. I have a function, I
have a purpose.
Speaker 8 (15:25):
Please these.
Speaker 4 (15:29):
I want to serve the state.
Speaker 8 (15:30):
Please please No, I'm not obsolete. Oh no, I'm please, please,
I'm not absolutely no, I want a service state.
Speaker 6 (15:45):
The Chancellor, the late Chancellor was only partly correct. He
was obsolete, But so is the state, the entity he worshiped,
Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize
the worth, the dignity the rights of man, that state
is absolutely a case to be found under m from
mankind in the Twilight Zone.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
So he was able to do things like the Monsters
Are Due on Maple Street, which is as blatant a
social commentary as Rotster ever wrote. And yet he got
away with it with no problems from the network's, no
problem from the sponsors. Why because it was science fiction,
and because not only was it cloaked in this allegory,
but it was also just the fact that science fiction
(16:27):
was kind of looked down upon at the time, especially
in television. It was looked as something for six year
olds or eight year olds. It wasn't looked at as
an important thing like Playhouse ninety was. So the networks
to some extent were just saying, well, you know, Rod's
over there in his playgrounds, He's got his half hour
show on Friday night at ten o'clock. It's not don't
worry about it. It's okay. Nobody's paying attention to it anyway,
(16:48):
and they let him get away with these things.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
I think in its best run, Twilight Zone got roughly
a thirty one or a thirty two share, which in
television terms says that it is a mild success. It
is not a runaway hit. It's not gun smoke, and
it's a very questionable item as to whether or not
we'll renew it if indeed something else comes along that
looks much more publicly acceptable. Now, what that thirty one
(17:11):
share meant was approximately twenty five million people watching, which
is a far sized audience. That's more than what Shakespeare
you know, during the first hundred years. But in the
strange rhythmic arithmetic of television, this was not considered a
major show. Oddly enough, the show became more popular after
it went off the air in terms of the name
twilights On being kind of interchangeable with strange little witticisms
(17:35):
throughout our language. It became a funny little colloquialism that
people used.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Again, you have to put yourself in the time frame.
This is nineteen fifty nine when this show aired. Science
fiction and fantasy. The general public, the general television viewing public,
were not familiar with the tropes of science fiction and fantasy.
Even things like time travel, just simple things that we
think now are very simple and straightforward, were confusing to
the audience at the time. He was educating the television
(18:05):
viewing public on these tropes of science fiction and fantasy
as he went along. He was teaching them about time travel,
about alternate dimensions, about doppelgangers, about all these things that
are science fiction tropes that the general public they didn't
know about these things. So he was really teaching the
(18:25):
public about these things, and that knocked down some doors
for science fiction writers who came afterward.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
And you've been listening to Nick Parisi tell the story
of Rod Serling and what a story. Indeed, wreck William
for a heavyweight the TV version it would become a
terrific movie too. Put him on the map as a
force in television writing, production, and directing. And then he
wanted to well comment on social matters and social issues,
(18:53):
and he gives birth to the Twilight Zone. It's science fiction, yes,
but within it he could well, he could encode messages,
he could say things through characters like a Martian that
he couldn't say as human Republicans or human democrats. Moreover,
it was sort of a side thing for the TV network.
See he had just enough popularity to survive, but not
(19:15):
enough to have the focus on him from the networks
and of course science fiction well it just wasn't taken
as seriously. And when we come back more of the
story of Rod Serling here on our American stories, and
(19:38):
we continue with our American stories and with author Nick Peisi,
his book Rod Serling, His Life, Work and Imagination is
a must read. Pick one up for yourself, the family,
wherever you get your books. Let's pick up where we
last left off with Serling himself talking about why he
did what he did and how he did it.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Did not start very long after the Twilight Zone ended,
and Gene Roddenberry would would credit Rod Sterling and say
I couldn't have done this without Rod Sterling because the again,
the concepts in Star Trek were you know, outlandish for
the time, but Rod Sterling had warmed them up, had
warmed up the audience, so they now you understood a
lot of these things that Geene Roddenberry was trying to
(20:20):
get across in Star Trek so and it just went
on from there. I mean, the Outer Limits came a
little bit after Twilight Zone, and you know, every again,
every science fiction series that came after it owes some
debt to The Twilight Zone, to Rod Sterling and to
Star Trek afterward. But it just was, you know, standing
on the shoulders of giants. That's that's where it began.
And Rod Sterling was the one who knocked down those doors.
(20:42):
So Rod Sterling went from being the most prestigious writer
in television and probably the most recognizable, to being a
television star. In the second season of The Twilight Zone,
that's when he started appearing on camera to do his introductions.
So in the five seasons of The Twilight Zone ran
from nineteen fifty nine to nineteen sixty four, Rod won
two more Emmy Awards. He had won three before the
(21:04):
Twilight Zone. Now he won two for the Twilight Zone
and he ended up with six. He won one after
the twilight Zone, and which is a record for Best
Dramatic Writing. And he created this show that is among,
if not the most influential series in television history. And
the amazing thing also about Rod Sterling is that it
(21:24):
doesn't end with science fiction and fantasy. If you ask
any of the show runners and writers from the most
famous dramas of the last fifteen years, things like Breaking Bad,
mad Men, the Sopranos, the people who created those shows,
David Chase, Vince Gilligan, these people worship Rod Stirling. They
see Rod Serling as the gold standard. They see him
as the original showrunner. He was the first writer to
(21:48):
really take the reins of a series and make it
to be his vision.
Speaker 3 (21:52):
Very often I find that within the framework of the
science fiction or fantasy genre, the use of traveling back
in time is a very effective way of producing contrasts uh,
of producing a kind of a free wheeling storytelling device,
which is why I used going back in time. And
there's another reason, which very much relates to any discussion
(22:15):
of creativity, is that every writer, and I don't think
there are any I can't conceive of anybody not falling
into this pattern. Who writes has certain special loves, certain
special hang ups, certain special preoccupations and predilections. In my case,
it's a hunger to be young again, a desperate hunger
(22:38):
to go backward. It all began, and I think you'll
see this as a running threat and through a lot
of things that I write. And part of creativity, of course,
is being able to have the capacity to convey that
kind of hunger, that kind of nostalogy, that kind of
bittersweet feeling to those who have.
Speaker 5 (22:57):
Never had it.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
And that was it. And for the first three seasons
of The Twilights On, Rod Sterling oversaw everything about The
Twilight Zone from Morning Tonight. He produced the show, He
narrated the show, He wrote ninety two of the one
hundred and fifty six episodes of it. He he was
the on screen presence, He did all the promotion for
the show. And then after The Twilight Zone, he hosted
(23:20):
a show called The Night Gallery, rod Sterling's Night Gallery.
He did. I would argue some of his best writing
for The Night Gallery. And on top of that, oh,
by the way, he co wrote the original Planet of
the Apes. In roughly twenty five years, he wrote about
two hundred and fifty scripts that were produced either on television, radio,
or feature films, and a lot of actors and producers
(23:42):
directors wanted to work with Rod Sterling, and particularly actors.
Actors loved to Rod Sterling's words, They loved to do
his stuff.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
One of the major problems with strong writers who deal
in dialogue above plot, which happens to be I think
more of my fourth than plot dialogue. If you look
at some of the pages of the stuff I've written,
and even some of the good things, shut your eyes.
You won't know who's talking because they all talk alike,
and who do they talk like?
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Me?
Speaker 3 (24:10):
Now that's wrong, and it's something I've got to lick
over the years, but it's the most common literary problem
I think of strong dialoguists.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
So the Twilight Zone now it runs like Who's who
of Hollywood stars. To some extent, I am. Robert Redford
was on the Twilight Zone. Bert Reynolds was on the
Twilight Zone. Jack Klugman did four Twilight Zone episodes. Burgess
Meredith did four Twilight Zone episodes. Agnes moorehead, Carol Burnett,
Telly Savalis, William Shatner start in two very famous Twilight
(24:44):
Zone episodes. Four members of the Starship Enterprise Bridge crew
were on the Twilight Zone. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, George Taka,
and James doing So. There were four members of the
star Bridge crew who appeared on The Twilight Zone and they,
you know, Jack Klugman would say that when he got
a script, if they it was Rod Sterling, he didn't
need to read it. He just said, yeah, yeah, I'll
(25:05):
do it. I'll do it. Of course I'll do it.
So he was able to attract these people, and he
was also able to attract these the other talent like
the writers of Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson,
these people who wanted to write for a show like
The Twilight Zone because there wasn't anything on TV like
The Twilight Zone at the time. It was the first
science fiction and fantasy series that truly treated the genre
(25:28):
from an adult perspective. Before this, you know, it was
bug Eyed Monsters, it was the B movies. It was
that type of that type of an idea. And Rod
Sterling took his playhouse ninety sensibility and brought it to
the genre of science fiction and fantasy. And he put
that same level of care into this these thirty minute
(25:49):
filmed science fiction episodes as he did to his ninety
minute live dramas, and that made all the difference in
the world, because now it really was it was quality
and Charles Beaumont of the writers, when he read the
first script for The Twilight Zone, which is the pilot
episo called where is Everybody Now? This is an episode
about a man who seems to be suffering from amnesia.
(26:11):
He wakes up or he's wandering through a deserted town.
He doesn't know who he is, he doesn't know how
he got there. And Charles Beaumont when he read this script,
he said, this was not nothing earth shaking in terms
of the idea. This idea of last man on Earth
kind of thing had been done in science fiction plenty
of times. But he said, what separated this from everything
else was quality. Quality in the scene set up, quality
(26:33):
in the dialogue or in this case, monologues, because there's
only one person's being in this, and in the quality
jumped off the page, you said, And that's what made
this different. And that's a lot of times the Twilight
Zone is seeing now as this this. You know, uh,
these great ideas, these these amazing ideas. Where these ideas
come from, But if you look at it now, it
really was more about the quality. It could have been
(26:56):
a simple idea. It could have been an idea that
could have been cliched, but Rod Stroling wrote it with
so much more care that it elevated it into something else.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Most television fiction that I watch has very little relevance.
I think it's one thing to say, we will now
have a program called mod Squad, say and we will
have one black man and one Oriental and one Hawaiian
to show this marvelous melting pot concept. But I think
that's all together phony. I don't think that's I think
at best condescension and at worst exploitation. The fact is
(27:33):
that we have so distorted the pure ethnic minority over
the years by making every black man a banjo player
and the village idiot and a coward, that suddenly we're
going to reverse switch he is now a brain scientist,
or an atomic scientist, or anyone of unequal distortion at
the other end. Needless to say, I much prefer the
distortion on the good scale, on the good side of
the scale. But all television fiction I find quite irrelevant
(27:56):
and quite unrelated. But if I had a group of
stories to select, I think, by virtue of its mass
media form, I would try to choose those stories that,
though even science fiction and genre would be tellable in
terms of the most acceptable human terms that we now know.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
They created something that is still running in twenty four
hour marathons on Fourth of July and New Year's Eve
and still airing around the world, and they're still trying
to duplicate it in reboots and everything else, and they
still haven't been able to do it. And why, well,
it's It'd be hard to say that it's not because
(28:36):
they don't have Rot Serling. And Rot Serling sadly died
in nineteen seventy five. He was only fifty years old.
He died of a heart attack. He died on the
table during open heart surgery. And he left behind an
amazing body of work for a man who only lived
to be fifty years old and like I said, didn't
start his career until he was twenty five, so it
(28:58):
was last twenty five years. He left us with an
amazing body of work.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
And a terrific job on the production. Editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler and a special thanks to
Nick Perisi, author of Rod Serling, His Life, Work and Imagination.
My goodness, it was just so remarkable to listen to
Rod Serling, that voice and his thoughts in his mind.
The things he was talking about still resonating deeply today.
(29:29):
I love what he talked about writers having special love,
special preoccupations, and his a desperation to be young again,
of course knowing that could never happen, and the bittersweetness
of it all, and my goodness, the career is he launched.
The actors he attracted, Robert Redford, Burt Reynolds, Agnes Moorehead,
(29:49):
William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy and Jack Klugman said he
wouldn't even read the scripts. He would just say yes
to whatever Rod Serling wrote. What a twenty five five
years it was, producing perhaps one of the most important
and influential shows in American television history. The story of
Rod Serling in so many ways the story of American imagination.
(30:14):
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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