RM. He did two of my TWILIGHT ZONEs and I thought he was marvelous in both of them.
FM. It seemed that when they re-did “Nightmare” for the movie they didn’t give John Lithgow as much emotional room to work as Shatner had in the original. RM. Yeah, the fact that the character had a nervous breakdown in the version that Bill Shatner did I thought worked a lot better, whereas John Lithgow was just unnerved by the whole prospect of flying, which was disappointing to me because the director [George Miller], when I found out that he was going to direct it, I was overjoyed.
FM. The thing that amazed me re- watching the shows growing up was that they often were very simple and included only a few actors in just one or
two locations. Yet they carried a significant amount of weight and power within them. RM. Yeah, well Rod being a writer himself, he gave the blessing to good writers and that allowed us to do whatever we wanted. They didn’t really mangle anything we did. And they were well cast, well directed, the music was usually good. It had a class to it.
FM. So you really had a lot of freedom as a writer to tell your story? RM. Yeah. I’m sure that I had to do some rewriting after the first draft, but usually what was filmed was what I had written word-for-word.
FM. That’s great. It’s rare in episodic TV to have that kind of freedom. RM. Yeah, and I’m sure that was because of Rod Serling, who respected writers.
FM. What were some of your favorite episodes? RM. I like the one that they turned into REAL STEEL [“Steel”, Season 5, 1963] with Lee Marvin. I thought that was very good. I liked a number of them. I liked “Night Call” with Gladys Cooper, that Jacques Tourneur directed.
FM. Absolutely. Is it true that you had a final episode that didn’t make it on
the series but ended up becoming an AMAZING STORIES episode?
RM. Yes. John Lithgow got an Emmy for it.
FM. But not all the episodes you wrote would be considered horror or suspense. “Once Upon a Time” with Buster Keaton is slapstick comedy with visual gags and pratfalls right out of the silent comedy era. RM. I remember that there was a lot more movement in my script. I had a whole sequence in a car with Buster Keaton going through the car wash. I guess that it was too costly so they ended up doing a long scene with Jesse White in a repair shop.
FM. What did you think about season four when they changed from thirty to sixty minutes? RM. I think a half hour is the best length for that kind of story. I did a couple of hour longs that I think were not too bad. Half hour is ideal, two hours is obvious for a full length feature, and an hour is trying to get a two hour picture into an hour, and it doesn’t work that well. I don’t know why they went to it now, I guess they just felt that that was the salable form.
FM. But for season five, the final season, they returned to the half-hour format. RM. The last season was really one of my best.
FM. Is it true you write with yourself in mind as the main character? RM. Oh, I think most writers do that. In all my stories, my novels, it’s always my point of view.
FM. So you were Bob Wilson on the plane with the gremlin? RM. [Laughs] Yeah, I always visualize how I would react.
FM. Where did that story come from? RM. It originated when I was on an airplane flying from NY to California and the sky was covered in clouds. I thought it would be interesting to see somebody out there skiing. And I was going to make a story on that, then I decided no that’s not very scary. So I turned it into a gremlin.
FM. What about the other Shatner episode, “Nick of Time”? RM. My wife and I went to a movie in the northern part of the [San Fernando] Valley. We stopped at a coffee shop to get a cup of coffee and there was an answer machine
FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • JAN/FEB 2012 61
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