Robert Serl ing is Rod's older brother and the c riti·
cally acclaimed author of novels such as The Left
ous nonfiction books on the airline i ndustry. He was a technical advisor for the Twilight Zone episode,
"The Odyssey of Flight 33, " and worked as an avia
tion editor for U nited Press I nternational.
What was it like being the brother of Rod Serling?
Rod was a good-looking son of a bitch, wasn't he? Geez, he looks like the Reader's Digest ver
sion of Cary Grant. I look more like Mickey Rooney. Are you ready for the revelation of the year? Rod didn't write any of the Twilight Zone scripts, I wrote all of them. He photographed better - that's why he got all the credit.
I could give you a little background first. I was seven years older than Rod. How the hell I'm still alive and he's dead I don't know. It's a matter of genes, I guess. Rod inherited my dad's genes, and on my dad's side of the family
Seat, The President 's Plane Is Missing, and A rare autograph from both o f the Serling brothers;
Something's A live on the Titanic, as well as numer- Rod wasn't the only brother with a sense of humor.
there wasn't a single male who lived to see 60.
My mother's family and I inherited hers -apparently had longevity. I had an uncle who was still chasing girls when he was 93, and he buried four wives. I'm 87 and I'm still active.
I'm doing my 24th book. Anyways, I worked with Rod on one Twilight Zone, "The Odyssey of Flight 33," which was a story in itself. And I saw sides of him, of course, that nobody else saw - his self-deprecating sense of humor, and sometimes his insecurity.
What do you think separated The Twilight Zone from all the other television series?
The quality of the writing, and the fact that a lot of Rod's works were sermons disguised as science fiction. He had comments on social problems, and the way he handled it was a very subtle way of getting a message across. It was like giving you medicine and putting sugar coating on the pill. He was good at that. It's a funny thing, Rod was a liberal and I'm a kind of a moderate conservative, and the only fights we ever had were over politics. Until we went
A behind·the-scenes shot of Serling and director Mitchell Leisen going over the script of "Escape Clause."
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A shot of Charles Bronson from Montgomery Pittman's third-season opener, "Two."
out to dinner with our respective wives one night and almost got into a fistfight. I don't remember what the subject was, but we shook hands and made up later, and agreed never ever to get into a political thing.
Did Rod ever talk to you about selling the rights to Twilight Zone to CBS?
No. I didn't even know it until much, much later. I think it was after his death that I found out about it. Carol, his widow, told me once she lost probably $4 million. But Carol also said it wasn't Rod's fault. His agent recom
mended it, his lawyer, his accountant, every
one was telling him, " Go ahead and do it, Twilight Zone is dead." And he got a pretty good penny for it, too. I don't remember what the dollar figure for the rights were, but I don't think Rod would have sold it if he had got some better advice.
You couldn't predict that Twilight Zone
"Two" stars both Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery, as The Man and The Woman, in the story of two opposing survivors of a world war that learn to live together.
would go into syndication and that it would become almost a cult. Who could predict there would be a science-fiction channel that would have a Twilight Zone marathon, around July the fourth every year, 24 consecutive hours of Twilight Zone? Nobody could have foreseen that. One thing, it was black and white, and color was just around the corner. I probably would have sold the damned rights to it myself.
Rod was a good businessman, he really was.
He's taken a rap for selling Twilight Zone rights, but looking back in the context of the time, he was tired, the series had been on for five years, and nobody could have predicted the success of the syndicated show. Certainly not I Love Lucy, or Twilight Zone, or any of those.
Tell me a little bit about when you and Rod were kids.
You know, when we were kids we used to act.
Three years before Elizabeth Montgomery landed her broomstick as Samantha Stephens in Bewitched, she took a magical side route through The Twilight Zone.
I was seven years older, but even with that age spread we were fairly close when we were lit
tle kids. But we'd see a movie on a Saturday afternoon and then we'd come home and act it out. When we acted out westerns, we'd fill my father's whiskey shot glasses with ginger ale, down the hatch. I remember we saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Fredric March, in I 9 3 3 .
March won an Academy Award for it. That story has fascinated me ever since I read that, the short story it was taken from. We had bought a chemistry set and we picked some kind of concoction up where the bubbles and the steam and smoke rose from this mixture.
And we'd drink it. I had a set of false teeth and I'd shake behind a couch and I'd come up with the fangs showing. was still in high school when I went in the army after Pearl Harbor. I was in the army when he graduated high school and went in the para
troopers. We didn't see a hell of a lot of each other until after the war. I didn't discuss careers with him at that stage. I remember when I came home from college, I was kind of a - well, Rod called me "a phony intellectual." I was into sym
phony music, and it used to steam him to hear me play T chaikovsky. As I say, we corresponded, but we didn't get close until after the war, because we didn't see that much of each other.
Biographers have mentioned that his nightmares based on war experiences helped inspire some story ideas.
I know it. He went to Antioch College, same as I did. Only I graduated long ago; he didn't go until after the war. I visited him out there in Yellow Springs, Ohio, once. And I took him and Carol to Springfield, which is nine miles away from Yellow Springs, where our college was. We went into a restaurant called the Wagon Wheel, I still remember, and Rod was drinking Southern Comfort. Well, he couldn't hold any kind of exotic drink. He could drink a lot of beer, but give him something with hard liquor and he was a basket case. Well, he got loaded on Southern Comfort and started hav
ing delusions of the Japanese coming into the restaurant after him. And we had to quiet him down, drive him back to campus, and I took him up to his dormitory room and stuck him
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Here's a great shot looking down on the filming of a scene in "Two," when "woman" reacts to "man" by throwing a cleaver ( Montgomery shown at half cleaver), a skillet, a bottle, and then another skillet. Eventually, man fights off woman and knocks her to the ground, providing a somewhat false start to this relationship.
in the shower and put him to bed. He didn't remember a thing the next day.
But I know he had nightmares about the war.
And a lot of his Twilight Zone scripts and a lot of scripts he wrote for television, the dramas, reflected the experiences he had and what he saw. He could joke about it, he had the most self-deprecating sense of humor of anybody I knew, and I do too. We shared that.
He had some very intense experiences in the war, didn't he?
Oh, he did, yeah. One of the sleazy biogra
phies written about him implied that somehow he got a Purple Heart that he hadn't earned.
Which was total, absolute bullshit. You didn't get Purple Hearts by walking into a store and buying one. And I saw that wound, that shrap
nel wound. I was visiting him once, and all of
a sudden I looked down and there's blood streaming from his knee. The shrapnel wound had opened up after playing table tennis. And when I read the biography of his that implied that he hadn't really been wounded, holy crap!
How did you come about getting the job of writing the cockpit dialogue for the Twilight Zone episode
"The Odyssey of Flight 33"?
I was visiting Rod in L.A. We went out to MGM, where they're filming Twilight Zone, and he picked up his mail, and in the mail was a brochure for American Airlines advertising a 707 cabin mock-up. American had used it for flight-attendant training, but they had built a new one for their new flight academy at Fort Worth. And the old one was up for sale or rent for a Hollywood studio. I don't know what the hell triggered something in Rod's mind, but he never looked at any of the mail except for that brochure. So help me god, he just stared at it.
We go up to the car, it was a Lincoln Continental, and he wouldn't let me even look at it, let alone touch it, afraid that my eyeball would fall out and damage the paint. But he says, "You drive." Holy cow! I say, "Okay. " So we're driving, he's still sitting in the white seat looking at the brochure, and all of a sudden he says, "Hey, suppose you were in a jet going across the Atlantic and you hit a freak tail
wind, and you were going so fast, like 3,000 miles an hour ground speed, that you broke a time barrier. And when you came in over New York, you were in prehistoric times." I said, "A hell of an interesting concept, but it can't hap
pen." He said, "Well, maybe you're right, I'll think about it some more."
I go back to Washington, D.C., to resume my job as aviation editor of UP!, and I get a call from him. "Remember the idea I had for a jet that goes back in time? " I said, "Yeah." "I need the cockpit dialogue on what would hap
pen." I said, "You need what?" "They need to
Filming a shot in "The Big Tall Wish," when the opposing fighter, played by Charles Horvath, wins the bout with Ivan Dixon's Bolie Jackson.
read what happened in the cockpit if that would happen. " "How the hell can I give you dialogue for something that can't happen?"
And Rod says, "Well, give me, like, radio checkpoints. Or what would the crew be doing if something like that happened. " So I said, brought his air maps with him and we looked at radio checkpoints and stuff. And discussed, you know, let's just suppose you hit that freak tailwind, and something like that happened, what would you be doing in the cockpit? What radio checkpoints would you be trying to get?
Which ones would you be passing over so fast, that you couldn't get a fix on it? Well, he gave me a lot of the stuff and I sent it to Rod, and there was "The Odyssey of Flight 3 3 ."
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Speaking of embarrassing moments, all that seems to be missing here is a bag of "Serling's Pretzel Rods of the Zone," sponsored by our good friends of "Cavender Is Coming."
Any cut scenes or dialogue from "Flight 33"?
No. I wish I could do it over again, because I Manha ttan Island, all right." This is after they saw the dinosaur. Well, in the age of the dino
saurs there wasn't any Manhattan Island. That whole damned topographical landscape changed millions of years ago. And I never caught that in the script. Anyways, it probably wouldn't have done me any good, because Rod fell in love with the idea of going back to the age of the dinosaurs. I think he told me that that one little five-second clip of the dinosaur cost him $ 2,500 to get that footage.
After "Flight 33," was there any talk of you writing a story or script for Twilight Zone?
No. My forte wasn't scripts or drama, mine was fiction and mostly nonfiction airline histo
ries and books on air safety. I never had the gift for dramatic dialogue like he did.
The Twilight Zone had a very efficient production.
Have you noticed any other flubs?
I wish I could have seen Twilight Zone in pro
duction. I would have had a permanent love affair with it. Sometimes I had wished he would have asked my help on a couple of scripts. One of the best ones, you know,
"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," had a terrible technical error in it. Nobody but a nut like me would have noticed it. The airplane in the movie was a Convair 240, a twin-engine air
plane. It's very hard to tell, but I swear, it was a Convair. Well, in the script it talks about the flight engineer coming back to talk to William Shatner. Well, the Convair 240 was a two-man crew, they didn't have any flight engineers.
Did you ever have a chance to meet the main producer of Twilight Zone, Buck Houghton?
Yes, many times. He was a gentleman. I loved him. He was a terrific guy. He was the only Twilight Zone producer I ever met, and the only other person I ever met on Twilight Zone was one of the earlier casting directors, Pat Rose. What a gorgeous girl; I had a crush on her. She was beautiful.
She must have had a real talent for casting, because The Twilight Zone had some great people on there.
I don't care if she couldn't cast King Kong, she was gorgeous.
I think the thing about Buck was that his talent for production really matched Rod. It was a good balance.
I think they were the best of all the Twilight
Zone writer/producer teams; Buck and Rod worked together better than any of the others.
And I'm not deprecating any of the others. But I think they were on the same wavelength. If award-winning plays like "Requiem," "Patterns, "
and "The Comedian"? H e started off winning out six that were real turkeys. The quality for
Out on location for "The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms,"
the stars, Ron Foster, Warren Oates, and Randy Boone go over the script.
an anthology show like that, where you had to come up with a different plot and a differ
ent cast every week, was incredible. Rod could get very defensive. I also think there was a tremendous amount of jealousy toward him in the industry. Among fellow writers and some producers, like Bert Granet, who wasn't the only one. I know Rod feuded with Ray Bradbury. Bradbury is a classic case of a writer becoming jealous of someone who became a sudden science-fiction guru on tele
vision, and Bradbury wasn't on television. He had a lot of jealousy toward my brother.
Maybe that's standard operating procedure in Hollywood, to be jealous. I think Rod did too much apologizing to some of these guys who would unload on him. I'd feel like just going to battle with them.
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During the train sequence, Inger Stevens looks o n in complete terror of "The Hitch-Hiker."
The thing with Ray Bradbury is weird, because Rod had a lot of respect for Bradbury.
I know it. Rod was not jealous of anybody. I never heard him utter one word indicating that he was jealous toward another writer. I've even had people tell me he was jealous of me, because of The President's Plane Is Missing, taking off while Rod was right at the height of his own career. As if I had stolen some of his thunder. That is total bullshit. He was as proud of me as I was of him. I will say that without ever fearing any reputation. He was my brother and we loved each other, and I
cried like a brother when he passed on.
It's hard to believe that he died when he was only 50 years old. You mentioned how he had inherited your father's heart condition. I guess it was a combination of that and all the cigarettes he smoked, and the high stress of being a big celebrity in Hollywood.
And you couldn't break him of that goddamned smoking. Four packs a day.
What kind of cigarettes did he smoke?
Unfiltered ones?
It depended on who his sponsor was. At one time I think he smoked Camels, I think he smoked Marlboros. Chesterfield was a spon
sor once.
How much of himself did he put into his work?
Quite a bit. A classic example was "The Velvet Alley" [on Playhouse 90]. Art Carney was in it and played a writer who changed agents. The one who had been his agent for years, when he went to Hollywood. That was autobiographical. The other one that he wrote that was autobiographical ["Exit from a Plane in Flight" on Bob Hope Presents the the modern paratroopers. I've seen pictures.
He looks happy.
Yeah, he loved it. That was something about Rod, he hated to fly and yet he could jump out of a fucking airplane. I think his fear of flying dated back to the war. He was a great guy with airline people. Some airline guy wrote me once and says, "Your brother sent me a teletype message from one of their intercoms about selling Rod a ticket." They said he was the nicest VIP they had ever talked to, and he was.
He loved airline people, like I did.
But he was afraid of flying.
Oh man, you go up in an airplane with him and this is "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." I used to hate to fly with him. Carol told me he'd take a tranquilizer before a flight. There was a funny part of it - he flew all the time, and for Rod to go coach, I mean, that was like riding in the baggage compartment. He loved the good life.
How did becoming a celebrity affect him?
He loved it, it didn't go to his head, he was
very gracious. If someone asked him for an autograph, he felt it was an honor to be asked.
He felt that way all his life. He used to drive his wife crazy when they'd go into a restaurant and had trouble eating. Someone would recog
nize him and next thing you know he had 20
people around him at a table. He never, never tried to push anybody away, or "Go away, I'm busy," or "See me later." He always tried to accommodate people, and he was like that till the day he died. He was a sweet guy.
The only thing he did, as a celebrity - I thought he got a bum rap - he was one of the first celebrities to do commercials. And he took a beating on it. One of the biogra
The only thing he did, as a celebrity - I thought he got a bum rap - he was one of the first celebrities to do commercials. And he took a beating on it. One of the biogra