address issues that he couldn’t address straight on with regular television; there were too many taboos and sponsors didn’t want it to happen. So Rod could do it in outer space or as he said it, “put those words in the mouth of a martian,” and say the same thing he wanted to comment on, social evils and that sort of thing. Actually, the censors weren’t too tough on him with TWILIGHT ZONE. I don’t think they understood what he was trying to say. Which was good. [Laughs]
FM. It seems like all the battles he always was fighting were with the sponsors. CS. Well you’re right, but that was before. One of the most important things he’d done was a story, sort of based on the Emmet Till killing in the south, and the sponsors and the network had made him change not only the victims, but also the locale. Actually he said, the name of the script was “Town Has Turned to Dust”, and he said when it was finished the script had turned to dust. And he was very frustrated, so this escape into THE TWILIGHT ZONE gave him the vehicle, and within those parameters he could write what he wanted to.
FM. Was he the kind of writer that would set times during the day to write or was he the kind of person who needed to get it out until
A true master of his craft. No success without sacrifice. Serling doing what he did best: writing. Always writing.
it was done, so if he needed to spend 30 hours writing, that’s what he would do? CS. He always worked in the morning—get up early in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, go to work. By noon he was pretty much finished. In the TWILIGHT ZONE days sometimes he’d go over to MGM where they were shooting. But his work was mostly early morning and through the morning. Sometimes if there was a deadline he’d work at night too.
FM. It’s amazing, because rarely in TV do you find a situation where one person is writing the vast majority of the scripts for a show. So people always wonder how he found the time. Now they have teams of people writing for these series and he’s turning out almost a hundred episodes. CS. That’s true, I think he wrote 92 of them. In the beginning they were so easy for him, this fertile imagination he had, he’d see something and it would immediately give him a clue as to where he was going to go with the script. The stories were vignettes, they ran, what, 25 minutes at the most? They were easy for him. He could work on those very quickly. He used to spend days and months on his anthology, but in the beginning THE TWILIGHT ZONEs were really a piece of cake. He enjoyed them and they came easy.
FM. You say “in the beginning.” What happened over the course of the different seasons that made it not as easy? CS. Well, he said himself, that by the fifth season he felt he was meeting himself coming around the corner. There are just so many plot lines. I mean how many times can you fly to Mars? [Laughs]
FM. Exactly. What kind of literary influences did he have? Other 58 FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • JAN/FEB 2012
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