you first started working on the series?
I knew him in some of the early days of live
And then when Twilight Zone was in the mid
dle of its first season, Rod called me and said he would be interested in getting some script help, because it was just him, and Buck Houghton was producing. Buck wasn't a writer and I was tied up. Anyway, when I was free at the end of that television season, I said,
"Boy, I'd love to have joined you."
So I went over to Twilight Zone as we devel
oped season number two, and Buck was still producing, and my impression of Rod, which I got very, very early, was that he was highly intelligent and very passionate about what he did. He had a tremendous intensity to him in terms of his personality, and he was very pro
fessional and did things in his way. I mean, it was his voice, which I don't think was imposed on material, it's just the way instinc
tively and naturally it came out of him. And I liked him very much. He was really a decent person, a person of tremendous goodwill and generosity. So I was attracted to him as a per
son who was significant as a human being -that, and above and beyond, his talent. I found it a very intriguing experience to be around
Rod. We were not social pals ever, but I would run into him a great deal because we frequented the same places. The same restaurants and the same movie houses, so we'd see each other a dress rehearsal of The Red Skelton Show. Red was a wonderful ex-vaudeville comic who really specialized in a great deal of pantomime, and Red's dress rehearsals were legendary. I went with Rod once or twice, and Red would know he was out there. In the classic way of vaudeville, Red Skelton would not use the actual punch line of the joke in the sketch. He would do mumbo jumbo, because all of those comics who were trained in vaudeville, they'd botch up the timing if they actually rehearsed the punch line. Jackie Gleason was like that.
They wanted the punch line to be fresh, and so he would do mumbo jumbo. It was dress rehearsal and the cameras were moving
Rod Serling and director Mitchell Leisen going over the jail sequence in the script for "Escape Clause."
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A "Time Eno ugh at Last" ph oto, autographed b y Burge 55 Meredith.
Thomas Gomez and David Wayne star in "Escape Clause." Seen here is the filming of the scene when the Devil, Cadwallader [Gomez], stamps his signature on the contract for Bedeker's soul [Wayne].
around and so on, but it would be absolutely filthy, whatever Red would say, absolutely filthy. And, of course, Rod would fall on the floor laughing. Rod was a great fan of come
dy, a great, great jokester. If I would run into him at a cafe or something, he'd come right up to me and say, "Okay, two guys walk into a
Rod wanted me on the show because he want
ed somebody else in story other than himself.
He wanted, in effect, a classic old-fashioned story editor, someone whose job was to find material, work with writers in developing it, and so on. And that was the thrust of my job.
I was also assisting Buck in many of the pro
duction details. So the title was associate pro
ducer, but the job was to find the stories.
A special-effects man on the extreme left created the smoke.
What was involved in being story editor for the series?
There was a great deal of material that was submitted to us. The agencies submitted mate
rial to us, individual writers would call up, but mostly on Twilight Zone, it was my specific search for story ideas. Buck and I would drive out into the vast MGM back lot, and it was just extraordinary, it was like a city. They had everything. They had a magnificent French vil
lage street, which they used in everything, and they would simply redress it from one movie to the next- They had every conceivable thing.
And one time we were out there, we were driv
ing past this one area and we both said at the same time, "Boy, that looks like the post-holo
caust, it looks like the nuclear war has hit this place. " So we began to talk about it, and out of that, and long discussions with Rod, came the story that Burgess Meredith was in, "Time Enough at Last-"
The other side of my job was to work with the
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Cast and crew during the filming of a scene from
"The Trouble with Templeton."
writers. I remember a young writer who was really fascinated with science fiction named George Clayton Johnson, and George was pre
senting a lot of ideas and so on, and Rod said to him directly, "You've never written a screen
play before, a teleplay before, and I don't want to start you on Twilight Zone. Show us your stories, but we'll have to have somebody else write the teleplay, because it's complex." I'm putting it in crude terms; Rod was very courte
ous. And George was close with Charlie Beaumont and Richard Matheson, so he came with professional credentials in terms of his professional associations. So one day, he sub
mitted a story, and Rod called Buck and me and said, "I want Del to work with this guy and get a teleplay out of him." I said,
"Absolutely." So George came in and was as much of a character then as he is now, and we sat down to work together and it was not easy.
And the reason was a very favorable one for him, because he didn't know it at the time, but he had a particular voice, he really did. And it was just instinctive with him, and I would tell him with "A Penny for Your Thoughts," "You make up the rules for this story. In other words, whatever you say, you have to stick with it, you have to stick with the rules. Can he overhear the guy next to him? Can he overhear the peo
ple out in the street? You know, what does he overhear? And whatever you decide, that's the rule, and then you stick with it. You create your universe for this story." So we worked that way, and it was a struggle. But finally he got the script out and it was his, and I want to emphasize this - every word was his. I would not touch it. I worked as a guide for him. I wouldn't touch it. Every word was his and it turned out to be a very good show, and then of
Inger Stevens in the car rigged for running shots from the worked mostly with Richard Matheson, Charlie Beaumont; I worked somewhat with Richard. It was really weekly television and you just couldn't let the ball drop. If you were busy with something, somebody else had to do it. Essentially, Rod worked more as one who work. That's the way that worked out.
So, what would you say is the look and feel of a Twilight Zone episode?
First of all, it was unique in its time. There was
nothing on the air that had the look and the
pens next? Really the craft of telling a story in 26, 27 minutes, or whatever it was. And so, it Zone, generally speaking, you didn't know the ending, or didn't guess the ending, and how they got there was also interesting. So we had a kind of double whammy in Twilight Zone.
The look of the show was essentially the pro
duction design and the cinematography of George Clemens, and that had an otherworldly look that was really worked on very carefully.
That was where Buck was very, very promi
nent, in setting up that look. It wasn't necessar
ily tricky camera angles. It was the lighting, it was the whole classic mise-en-scene, the way that it really came across. And so it had a dif
ferent physical appearance than other shows that were on television at the time, or really other feature movies. It had its own look, and that had a lot to do with George Clemens as cinematographer - the lighting particularly and the camera angles - which were not nec
essarily director's choices, it was just the style of the show. So the look was unique for its time.
Did you visit the set when episodes were being filmed?
Not often, but I did visit the set for profession
al reasons. I was only on the set because there was a problem - a story problem, a script problem, a line wasn't working, something of that type. There were a couple of exceptions to
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I n a scene from "The Eye of the Beholder," the doctor (William D. Gordon) and nurses (Jennifer Howard and Joanna Heyes) attempt to calm an upset Janet Tyler (Maxine Stuart).
that. The show that we used to open the sec
ond season was "King Nine Will Not Return,"
and this was very rare, we shot it on location, interiors and exteriors. We went up to Edwards Army Air Base up in the Mojave Desert, we drove up there - it was an intense heat, by the way - and this was the story of a lost WWII B 2 5 bomber which had been covered up by the shifting sands. It starred Robert Cummings, who was a prominent actor of the time, and I was with it every shot for the entire shoot. Bob was having problems in the
tremendously intense heat, and he had to get into this mock-up of the plane, which increased the heat. And we had a nurse there with a towel wrapped in ice, and she would go up to Bob and put the towel on his neck between shots, and she did it to all of us. She cooled off all of us. But that was a time when being there all the time was important, because Bob Cummings would have a lot of problems with the fact that he was in this intense heat and he would say to the director, a fellow named Buzz Kulik, "Look, I've only got one or two of these takes in me, then you've got to get me out of here." And so there were some line adjustments, and so on. So I was, with that, on set all the time.
Generally, Buck would call me and he'd say,
"Listen, get down to stage so-and-so, there's a
problem with such-and-such," and that was when I was on the set. But that was not often.
Generally speaking, both Buck and I stayed away from the actual shooting. Buck would go down at the end of the day's shooting to talk it over with George Clemens, the cinematogra
pher, and after we saw dailies, then usually Buck would go down and talk to the director.
What was Buck like?
Buck was tall and lean and he had a kind of country-boy air about him, although he was a city boy. He used a lot of barnyard similes all the time, you know, "Like a rooster hopping on a junie bug." But he had a kind of all
American country-boy quality, and very intel
ligent, very well read. Buck had come up through the production side. He started out at Paramount when he was very young and he design, he knew enough about cinematogra
phy to talk to a cinematographer, and costum
ing, and so on. He was really fully grounded in all of these aspects, just a terrifically knowl
edgeable man, and he was all over that lot all the time. I would walk in to his secretary and
Rod Serling graciously signs books for fans at a bookstore.
part of it, and that was the great advantage because they had all the stuff there. Now, nat
urally we were charged - that was expensive stuff - but it was there, it was available. So we were fortunate in that way.
Would you say Rod liked the celebrity status, yet remained humble toward the public?
It was that strange paradox. There was that cafe up on Sunset Boulevard, Villa Nova was the name of it, an Italian place, it's kind of a hangout. And I would see him there occasion
ally, and after he would come in, he'd greet everybody at the bar, he'd make jokes and everything else, he'd go off to a booth with whoever he was having dinner with, and be in absolute isolation. He'd be in a back booth and he wouldn't want any contact after that.
So there was always that paradox. I think it fed him with a lot of dramatic storytelling that he liked, but he was an interesting guy that way, because he reveled in the celebrity status.
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Actors Douglas Spencer and M ichael Fox are fitted into their Martian suit for " Mr. Dingle, The Strong."
Hollywood kind of gave him the boot later on, didn't they?
Yeah, yeah, it was bad. It was really a strange thing. Part of it was Rod's fault, because he was ubiquitous - I mean, on television every time you turn your set on, he was doing a commercial, you know. And he was good at it, he was terribly good at it. He was selling every conceivable product, and so he was all over the place and I think that kind of wore out the welcome a little bit. But what troubled me in those days was that the way television thinks and works, he was considered old hat about
three, four, or five years after Twilight Zone.
And that just didn't make any sense - it was this industry, this town. You know, "Bring me the next person, bring the next hot person. "
It's a deeply impersonal, indifferent field that is constantly looking for the next Orson Welles to come in and save us all.
And in years after that, again, I was never a social pal of Rod's, but I would run into him so much and we were very friendly when we'd see each other, and I would see him occasionally during this time, and during Night Gallery.
And I said to him, "Look, with no comment on the show, but what are you doing up there?" And he told me, "Look, they're using me simply as the host, just using my name and getting me up there as the host. " He said he had no input into the content of the show at all, and he was pretty bitter about it. But on the other hand, why did he make the deal?
Director of photography George T. Clemens on location during the shoot of "The Bewitchin' Pool."
Vera Miles, director John Brahm, property master Jack Poll yea, assistant director Edward Denault, and an unknown woman, on a break during the production of
"Mirror Image."
Well, Serling did turn down the offer to be executive producer for Night Gallery, fearing it would reach the stress level of Twilight Zone. In hindsight, it's really a shame Night Gallery produc
er Jack Laird didn't make use of Serling's talents and experience beyond his script contributions and role as host.
Well, I knew Jack Laird, and I knew him when he was struggling as a writer. He'd been an actor as well. I think that Jack suddenly thought, "I want to do what Rod did with Twilight Zone. I want this to be mine." And it was a huge mistake, because Jack was not that kind of a talent. He had talent, but it was not
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Martin Milner behind the scenes of "Mirror Image."
really the original voice that Rod was. And I think that a lot of that came from Jack him
self, who wanted some kind of identity and I think messed it up because of that. If he'd been smart, he would have used Rod for everything that Rod had to offer, and then he himself would have prospered.
Were there any multiple Twilight Zone productions going on? Or was it always one episode at a time?
Oh, we had one episode shooting, one in development - that is to say, a director was already working with a location manager and with us if necessary, in terms of the script. And then the third area was that the next script was in a near-ready position. In other words, we tried to do it that way, that script one was being shot, script two was written and being prepared, and script three was being completed in the writing. So we always had a lot of balls to juggle, particularly if there were significant makeup problems. Or, you know, we had aliens, and testing the lighting, there was
A shot during filming of the scene when Millicent Barnes speculates that a double from a parallel universe is trying to take over her life.
always that need to have George Clemens and maybe his camera operator or somebody shoot the look of some makeup or a monster face or something, so there was a lot of testing going on. So it was sometimes things worked, and sometimes they didn't.
Had you submitted any of your own stories?
Well, to tell you the truth, when I went to Twilight Zone, Rod said, "I want you to real
ly work with the writers, you know, if you have any idea," but what he was saying to me was, "I'm not hiring you to write these, I'm hiring you to work with the writers." And I had a number of ideas that I passed on, when Buck and Rod and I had our meetings. And Rod would take them and use them in some way. So I never had an idea that completely became an episode. It would be a character from this one, an incident in that one, and so on. And that was the job; it was a story
meet-During the taping of "The Lateness of the Hour" (the first of six taped episodes), preparations are made for the emotional scene when I nger Stevens's character Jana breaks down once she finds out who she really is.
ing, and I was very facile in those days, and I presented a lot of ideas.
I gave Rod one of his big laughs from the whole second season. We were talking about an alien story, and an alien in my favorite set
ting for Twilight Zone, a diner. You know, there's a diner, a dozen people are in there, and a guy serving coffee and hamburgers and whatever, small town. And a guy comes in, takes his hat and coat off and puts them on the rack, comes in and sits down, orders some coffee and pie or something. And I remember
ting for Twilight Zone, a diner. You know, there's a diner, a dozen people are in there, and a guy serving coffee and hamburgers and whatever, small town. And a guy comes in, takes his hat and coat off and puts them on the rack, comes in and sits down, orders some coffee and pie or something. And I remember