another hand. And what he knows is that the hand that was cut off is regrowing a man, and there’s only room for one of them. When Rod read the story and said oh my god I want to buy it, I thought… it’s me and Rod. We’re going to be linked together— bride and groom. Two weeks later, he calls me back to tell me that his sponsor, an outfit called General Foods, told him that the idea of a man chopping his hand off over the dinner table was not their idea of how to sell food. They made it adamantly clear—“You can’t do it.” So I bought it back, and just recently I’ve been talking to some people about “Sea Change” and how to use it.
“THE HOWLING MAN”
telling one joke after another. You couldn’t get close to talk to him. He was just doing his act. So I didn’t get much of an opportunity to talk to Rod other than to greet him, shake his hand, and let his mind register the fact that I was a friend of Bradbury’s, and of Beaumont’s.
FM. But he knew who you were after that. GCJ. And when I submitted a short story to him through an agent—the story was called “All Of Us Are Dying”—Rod adapted it into a script called “The Four of Us Are Dying”. And what he did in taking my little short story, using it like an armature to make a statue… I looked at this and marveled. It was much more dangerous and strange, dark and eerie. Frightening! But I loved it.
I immediately started thinking about that touch of strange, that element of fantasy that takes a mainstream, realistic story and makes it into one of the TWILIGHT ZONE episodes. I gave him another story called “Execution”, and again he bought it, and adapted it into a magnificent thing. I offered him a third
thing, although it’s crazy the way that worked out. The story was called “Sea Change”. The story is about a man who gets his hand chopped off, and it looks like he’s going to die, but instead, he regrows
FM. In a current project? GCJ. I’m doing a book; it’s called MAGICAL THINKING. And I’m writing a little essay about what I mean by that. Is wishing on a star meaningful? Is there a point to it? “I want to be a real boy”? Is that meaningful? Well, in some ways, it’s not. What I did was try to find more things like that. Like mind reading, telepathy. Is that possible? Being able to move things with your mind, control the fall of dice on a table—is that possible? The more I could think that way, the more I could come up with storylines that would please Rod Serling. He immediately offered to buy the fourth
story I submitted to him, called “A Penny For Your Thoughts”. I thought I would take advantage of the leverage that I had, and I said to him, “I love that you want to do it, but I would love to write a script based on it.” They took an option out for the first draft of the teleplay. So I wrote “A Penny for Your Thoughts” as a script based upon my own story, which had Dick York playing a bank clerk who, through some miracle, was able to read the minds of some people in the bank. That, along with “Ocean’s Eleven”—which was the first thing I ever sold to anybody (it took six years to get that to the screen)— allowed me access to the Writer’s Guild of America, and all the literary privileges that come with that distinction.
FM. So it took a while for you to actually
start writing the screenplays. In the beginning, you were writing actual literary short stories? GCJ. Yeah. I also wrote an awful lot of outlines. See, the game of television in those days—it’s changed quite a bit—but in those days, if you had a good agent… I had access to one who didn’t want to sign me, but was willing to take my material and submit it under their heading, so people would know that it came from an agency. And that gave it a certain legitimacy in the eyes of Hollywood. So I looked around at other shows I could write for. My agent said, you’ve got to get something an hour long. You can’t make your whole career on half-hour stories. So I got a job writing for ROUTE 66. I got Walter Matthau to play the lead in it. Then I got a job writing for THE LAW AND MR. JONES. I wrote a story called “The Boy Who Said No”. And in each case, the producers would read my outlines… or, they would listen to my pitch, and then encourage me. They had realistic stories, but even there I found myself a touch of ‘strange’ to the story. Almost like a signature—I wanted to have that fantasy overtone.
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