Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse, where the begin
nings of w h at would evolve into Twilight Zone were first seeded with the Rod Serling teleplay, "The Time Element. "
D o you have any mementos from "The Time Element"?
I can read you a couple of letters Rod sent me.
Here is a fax dated June 17, 1960:
Dear Bert,
I can 't give you residuals for doing our "pilot, " but you can have use of the Emmy three days a week, and every other weekend. Bless you for your cordial note. See you soon.
Cordially, Rod
Another one from May 22, 1961:
Dear Bert,
Your note was a delight and it reminds me that I owe you another thank-you for the gracious ad in the trades a couple of weeks ago. Talented people, I suppose, are at somewhat of a premium around here; And when the talented people were as gra
cious as you are, it makes for quite a combination. you're getting the story you wanted to get. To see the actual film, what the director is strug
gling with, and the glamour of so-called sets,
Did you have any multiple productions during your episodes?
One at a time. You had a crew that stayed with you for the year, so that was the best way.
Some shows, because of their economics, do two at a time, but we did one at a time.
Did you scout any of the outside locations yourself?
Generally, if there was something special,
week's pictures. The set is a very bad place for Producer Bert Granet visits the set during the filming of
a producer to be, whether it's moving pictures "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville."
or television. Why? Because sets are built big
you'd go out and look at it. If not, you'd send a man out with a Polaroid camera and have him come back, and you'd say, "That's fine. "
Television didn't lend for very much going on in the studio; it was expensive to send the whole crew out.
Any input on the types of sets or backgrounds being used?
Yes, you saw them, but at a certain point the communication becomes easy, the people understand you and you understand them -well, you get different working arrangements.
Time is at a great premium in television because you're developing scripts, you're developing casting, you're cutting others' pic
tures, you're scoring them, you're putting in
A shot of the crew seconds before filming a scene in which Burgess Meredith displays his ultimate strength in
"Mr. Dingle, The Strong."
sound effects, you're looking at prints which go on the air, and your day is pretty much occupied. I would always tell my secretary to put the dirtiest work there is early in the morn
ing, to get it over with. And it's repetitious, it's very hard, and frequently you go to bat with a show that you don't want to do, because there is nothing else available. It would be great if good writing were available to you at any given moment. There weren't many guys that
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could write like Rod, but he wasn't always the best writer on the show.
There are all sorts of production problems that are devoid of having anything to do with the creative quality of a Twilight Zone story. I have never known anybody that started out to make a bad picture or a bad television show.
Whether you're in television or pictures, there are systematic demands. You've started out to get a big star, but the big star says, "I like it, but I've got something better." So you immediately compromise with some lesser personality. You start out going for this director, but he's already got a job. So, frequently, you can't do exactly as you want, but you have to go, because that show's got to be on the air two weeks from now.
Were you happy with "The Time Element" and what it achieved?
Well, it didn't particularly achieve anything for me; it achieved a hell of a lot more for Rod, who made a lot of money on it. I never forgave Rod for not offering me a partnership when he established it. Now, The Untouchables I owned, that's a little different. I still get paid after forty-odd years for places from Madagas
car to Timbuktu.
That's quite an achievement to have your work still showing and appreciated by so many people. beyond your control, where you finally reach a point where you have to make a decision and go! You can have as much integrity as you want, but if the gods aren't with you, you're in a corrupt situation where the true matter would be to say, "No, let's not make it because this isn't right." But television doesn't behave that way. have a lot of things, but once it's maximized to the point where it's repetitious, it becomes a living. You do it to the best of your ability, with all the uncontrollable forces that are con
stantly working against you, where actors get drunk, and you've got to replace them, and Feet," written by Richard Matheson, who for this kind of story was much better than Rod.
Dick Donner directed " 20,000 Feet," who was a very good director for it.
Was that a difficult shoot?
No, we used to go through Metro and look and see what standing sets they had of an air
plane set; the story was written around the set.
I thought Dick did a better job than Spielberg when Spielberg did The Twilight Zone as a pic
ture. George Miller directed the episode in the film, and he tried to clamp on to a few things, but it didn't work. I was disappointed in it, though I think Spielberg is a talented man. He obviously wanted to put his own imprint on it.
When the original turns out good, it's very hard to put an imprint on it with a remake, because it usually turns out lousy.
With the gremlin, it's how little you see of it, and not how much you see of it. I had to recut it and even cut short shots because supplemen
tary ideas are much more vivid and frighten
ing. That way you have a chance to examine what causes fright.
Another great episode you produced was
"On Thursday We Leave for Home," with James Whitmore, and directed by Buzz Kulik. What did you think of Kulik's work?
Buzz worked for me several times, and he worked for me at Desilu too. He was a very competent director. Matter of fact, he shot one of the funniest scenes I've ever seen. It was straight. I remembered Buzz directed that shot;
when I saw it, I snickered.
There was an episode that Ida Lupino directed,
"The Masks."
Yeah, "The Masks" was a pretty good one.
Toward the end of the show, it just got
repeti-tive. I find in science fiction there's a limitation to what you can write and what you can imag
ine, and that starts from Jules Verne on. Once you've been there, the second time - no mat
ter how good it is - it's not quite . . . It's like frustrated actor. If life had been what he want
ed, he would have been a movie star. He loved the Hollywood scene. That appealed to him.
Actor Milton Selzer, in full prosthetic makeup, proudly displays his mask of "avarice" from the episode,
"The Masks." The masks were designed by makeup artist William Tuttle, crafted by Tuttle, Charles Schram and the makeup team, and were constructed from a papier·mache Styrofoam material.
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Actress Barbara Nichols receives direction from Jack Smight during the taping of "Twenty-Two."
Nichols is given some glycerin drops for a teary-eyed scene.
"Stopover in a Quiet Town" was a story written by Earl Hamner. Did you know Earl well?
I never got to know Earl; Earl developed the script, brought it in, it was workable. If the script was workable, I had little to do with the writer, because why screw up something that's good? To put your own identification mark?
Being a producer also means exerting tact when somebody is a better writer than you'll ever be.
I think some producers today have a tendency to mess with the mix a bit too much.
Well, they'd be so stuck with ego and insecurity that they have no contribution. It's like criti
cism. I see a lot of things that are at the expense of some writer; the critic has made marvelous satirical jokes at their expense with their criti
cism. They seldom realize that criticism is also considered good work. The talent gets fucked up if you listen to critics. You should do your work with a minimum outside help; there's only one person who deserves to see your work -that's the publisher. Don't give it to a thousand people to read, because most people think of criticism as criticism, otherwise they'll just give you a fair shake, a "very good," meaning it stinks. I also learned to never show a pilot that I made to anybody except those who can buy it.
There's an inherent jealousy amongst creative people, because they see their own career merit
ed against your own.
On The Twilight Zone, do you recall having to do any big changes to your productions?
No, they either went out good or fair or bad.
You didn't have much time to change it once you made it. It wasn't like a motion picture, where you can come back and say, "Let's do some retakes on that." You were too close to the line of being on the air.
Whatever I worked on happened for better or worse. When I left Twilight Zone, strangely,
Wonderful behind·the-scenes shot of the crew rigging a lifeboat during the filming of "Judgment Night."
I was still at CBS. They had a series called The Great Adventure, and Rod couldn't conceive of me ever leaving. There was a lot of hostility between the two of us, except I was getting
Yes, it does, but at last analysis, I'm not deco
rating the Sistine Chapel, I'm only making a television show. When people begin to take themselves too seriously - I can understand the motion picture, that you'll work on a pic
ture a year, year and a half - of being highly other early television plays for Rod?
No. I had a friend, Bobby Parish, who direct
ed some of the early shows. Bobby introduced me. I said I had to get good writers to supplant the actors that I could no longer get, that Playhouse 90 got. Because theirs was on Kinescope and mine was on film. So I needed good writers, so he introduced me to Rod and we seemed to hit it off, and Rod says, "Well, I don't have anything. Oh, I remember, there's something CBS shelved, but I don't know whether you'd like it or not." I said, "Well, do you mind if I try to look at it? " And he got me a copy, I bought it from CBS for $ I O,OOO, I remember. And that became "The Time Element."
But I don't see anything that should be put in a time capsule, on any of these things we do.
Well, The Twilight Zone has been shown for years,