While Joe Dante is a fantastic director, he is a terrible magician. Hire him for your child’s birthday party and you’ll be paying therapy bills for years on end.
of the original, with a happy sunset and blooming flowers, Dante explains it wasn’t intended to be that way. “There was a goof up. The clap of thunder that introduces George’s episode [“Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”] was supposed to be over the end
of my episode to indicate maybe all is not well. I meant it to be like, yeah it looks good now, but who knows what will happen with Anthony in the future. He’s not even an adolescent yet.” Would Dante ever be interested in
approaching another TWILIGHT ZONE episode if a sequel was made? “The episodes of this show are so pure and perfect how they are. The combination of the period, the actors and the black and white, is hard to beat.”
westerns to comedy to mystery to sci-fi.” While the move was natural to Amari, very few television shows had made a successful transition to radio, something not lost on skeptical CBS executives. And his request was coming fifty years after radio’s golden era. “They thought I was nuts, but I explained how I thought it could work better on radio because the theater of the mind is so powerful.” In 2002, after a well-received pilot earned him the green light from CBS and the blessing of Serling’s widow Carol, Amari recruited
writer Dennis Etchison to dredge the vaults and get to re-working the original show’s scripts. Next priority was the selection of a host. Enter Stacy (MIKE HAMMER) Keach. Keach, a self-avowed TWILIGHT ZONE fanatic who credits watching his father, William Stacy Keach, work on early radio programs
like TALES OF THE TEXAS RANGERS with getting him into the business, was careful in his approach. “I wanted to make it original,” says the iconic actor and author, “but I didn’t want to completely disregard Rod Serling. I wanted to give certain homage to him, and I did so with a rhythm and inflection that is Serling-esque.” Once the host was a lock, the guest stars started rolling in. Lou Diamond Phillips, Jason Alexander, Fred Willard, Adam West, Henry Rollins, and many more came on board. After working through all 156 original episodes, broadcasting via satellite, internet, and over 150 regional stations around the country, Amari headed into production on new, original, TWILIGHT ZONE scripts. “This thing is its own entity now. I am really excited about these new stories, and I think it adds more excitement for the series.”
More on the radio series at
www.twilightzoneradio.com. FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • JAN/FEB 2012 71
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