Steve Goldin, Forry Ackerman, Kathleen Sky, and George Clayton Johnson at Buena Park (1979)
Right: “THE FOUR OF US ARE DYING”
was the judge… don’t they know it? No, they say, and they take him and the next thing you know, it’s happening again. And he’s right—they’ve all played different roles in this same damn drama involving him. Rod Serling did some wonderful ones. I could go on and on
about Rod. He wrote 150 of the bloody things. I don’t know how he did that. Allegedly with a tape recorder and a couple of good secretaries. And he kept up with hosting the show, and being an actor in the show, and doing all kinds of promo and trips… he was on the set a remarkable amount of time. I remember him bringing some people on the set, while Lola and I were there… Lola is my wife, without whom I could not exist. And he introduced us—‘This guy is the guy who wrote the dandy thing we’re filming right now!’ And I thought, dandy… what a wonderfully odd word to use.
It was almost a career boost, that Rod Serling would talk about us in this familiar way, put in his own special language. He was a very literate, intelligent fellow. I admired him a
lot because he had won all of those Emmys… anything that came from the east coast that had any quality had his name on it. He was always very careful to maintain a very high level of quality in his own work. I know that if my work wasn’t on par with Beaumont’s, or with Matheson’s, then Rod wouldn’t buy it. So he really kept me on my toes. I even have my own TWILIGHT ZONE-type series. I call it THE EXISTENTIAL PLAYHOUSE. It basically features little one-act plays that can be done in a limited space, with very few sets— very few props—because the stories themselves are so strong… the idea of a playhouse that is the focus of the energy. The stories taking place on that little stage are ‘existential’ stories, because this is not a stage on Broadway. This is a stage on the floor of hell. It’s a different abstract space. The right kind of a soundtrack or musical score behind the images appearing out of the dark would be reminiscent of the nightmare landscape, where suddenly a big face will loom up in front of you. Or suddenly you whirl and there’s a whole different… the abruptness, and dislocation, and the slightly psychotic aspect of things, so that perhaps they’re given to you almost out of order. But at the last moment, your mind reassembles them and you see that they make incredible sense.
FM. You don’t need to tell a story in chronological order, a lot of the time. It’s all the same story, even if you put it in the right order afterwards. GCJ. Some of the best things come together at the very end, when you ‘get it’. A story without a really good ending is not a good story. No matter how artful the rest of it is, if it doesn’t have a killer ending… even a slight story with a killer ending is immortal. Because endings make good stories.
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