CS. Exactly. I think $60,000 was the budget. They were on a really tight budget and when the show was over CBS said, “We’ll never recoup the costs of this program.” They came to Rod and said we’ll buy you out because you’re so over budget, so on and so forth. So they bought him out. Of course that was the biggest mistake he ever made. That was before syndication.
FM. He had said a few times that he didin’t really care how he was remembered, just that he was remembered. So what is it that you really want people to remember about your husband? CS. That he was a very caring person. He felt that man’s inhumanity to man was the biggest sin. It just wasn’t right. As I said, back in the civil rights days, so on and so forth, he really felt strongly about man’s inhumanity to man. People should treat each other with respect and dignity. He gave a lot of speeches on college campuses. He’d be out there fighting today, I think, you know, for the good fight.
Monkeying around on the set of PLANET OF THE APES, for which he wrote the original screenplay— including the twist ending, considered to be amongst the best finishes in cinema history.
than his time in the war, which was a big thing. There are a lot of other things in THE TWILIGHT ZONE like the extraterrestrial and the supernatural. What kinds of things was he into that influenced him in that direction? CS. Well, he was crazy about science fiction but he never considered himself a real sci-fi writer. He came into the field late and left after five years. There were a lot of people laboring in those vineyards that knew far more and wrote much more, it just gave him a vehicle that he could use. Poe and Lovecraft, he just loved to read those stories. Hemingway of course isn’t sci-fi, but he liked that work a great deal. And all through college he read a lot of books of social consciousness and I think it sort of, it was the beginning of his opening up and understanding what was going on in the world and the civil rights movement later on.
FM. All the different writers for THE TWILIGHT ZONE kind of had their own thing. Richard Matheson is considered the horror guy. Charles Beaumont was the guy who seemed like he was always living in THE TWILIGHT ZONE. What do you think characterized your husband’s stories? CS. Well, it sounds sort of ponderous and pretentious maybe, but he had a message and he wanted to get it across. And the reason I think they’re so timeless is a lot of those TWILIGHT ZONEs still work today, there are still the same kinds of problems. There were others that were just pure entertainment that he wrote, most of those would have been adaptations. But he had this feeling, he had things that he wanted to say and he said them. Also, there’s a lot of nostalgia, going back in time. I think he needed to get that out, too.
FM. I grew up watching it and my dad was a big fan, so he sort of raised me on it. Later in life after I’d gone to film school and I was watching it, I realized a lot of the shows took place on just one or two sets; it was very simple. They were almost like stage plays, yet they were so powerful and got a great deal across, so much so that I didn’t even realize that they weren’t jumping around to twenty different locations.
FM. You have done an outstanding job keeping the legacy alive with the anthologies and things that you’ve edited. Do you have more in store? CS. Well, the big series is the ten book series AS TIMELESS AS INFINITY. Right now number nine is just about to come out. When we do the last one, it will have been all Rod’s scripts, and I think that’s kind of an important collection. You know, we printed the scripts and put in memories and memorabilia about the show. So there’s one more of those coming out. Supposedly there’s a biopic. I’m not too sure about that at this point. It’s funny, I keep thinking every year that it’ll go away, and it never does. [Laughs]
FM. It’s proof that when something is good, it endures. CS. Well, it’s strange. You just hum the little song and everybody knows what THE TWILIGHT ZONE is. The term is so familiar with everyone.
FM. You probably didn’t anticipate that this was what you were getting yourself into when you saw him riding that bike like a monkey. CS. How did you know? [Laughs] You’re so right.
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