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Rodman Edward "Rod" Serling (December 25, 1924–June 28, 1975) was an American screenwriter, best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science fiction anthology TV series, The Twilight Zone.
ing was born in Syracuse, New York, the second of two sons of Esther (née Cooper) and Samuel Lawrence Serling. His brother, Robert J. Serling, later became a novelist. Serling was raised in Binghamton, New York, where he later graduated from Binghamton Central High School.
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Quotations
If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.
Speech at Binghamton Community High School (1968)
I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot — we inhale from our Bartlett's.
Speech at Moorpark College, Moorpark, California (3 December 1968)
...a medium best suited to illumine and dramatize the issues of the times has its product pressed into a mold, painted lily-white, and has its dramatic teeth yanked out one by one.
"About Writing for Television", his foreword to a collection of teleplays ("Patterns")
Encyclopedia
Rodman Edward "Rod" Serling (December 25, 1924–June 28, 1975) was an American screenwriter, best known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his science fiction anthology TV series, The Twilight Zone.
Early life
Serling was born in Syracuse, New York, the second of two sons of Esther (née Cooper) and Samuel Lawrence Serling. His brother, Robert J. Serling, later became a novelist. Serling was raised in Binghamton, New York, where he later graduated from Binghamton Central High School. He earned his B.A. in 1950 from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Though brought up in a Jewish family, Serling became a Unitarian Universalist. Serling's family had a summer home on Cayuga Lake, in New York's Finger Lakes region, which inspired the name "Cayuga Productions" for use on Twilight Zone productions.
Military service
Rod Serling served as a U.S. Army paratrooper and demolition specialist with the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific Theater in World War II from January 1943 to January 1945. He was seriously wounded in the wrist and knee during combat and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star.
Serling's military service deeply affected the rest of his life and influenced much of his writing. Due to his wartime experiences, Serling suffered from nightmares and flashbacks. During his service in World War II, he watched as his best friend was crushed to death by a heavy supply crate dropped by a parachute onto the field. Serling was rather short (5'4") and slight. He was a noted boxer during his military days.
Early writing career
Biographers note that throughout his career, Serling was inspired by legendary radio and television playwright Norman Corwin. Both men would trace their careers through the WLW broadcasting franchise to eventually find homes at CBS, and both would be honored for weaving pivotal social themes into their scripts.
In 1951, Serling started to break into television by writing scripts for The Doctor, Fireside Theater, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Lux Video Theater, Kraft Television Theatre, Suspense and Studio One. He also worked for local Cincinnati TV station WKRC (Channel 12), where he wrote a series of live TV shows titled The Storm. The program was a precursor to The Twilight Zone, as was one of the scripts: Requiem for a Heavyweight.
In 1955, Kraft Television Theatre presented another of Serling's scripts, the seventy-second to reach the air. To Serling, it was just another script, and he missed the first live airing. The name of the show was Patterns and it changed Rod Serling's life. Patterns dramatized the power struggle between a corporate boss, an old hand running out of ideas and energy, and a bright young executive being groomed to take his place. It was a huge hit, and was re-aired the following week, which was nearly unprecedented at the time. The script established Serling as a rarity: a television playwright.
More acclaimed teleplays followed, including The Rack, about a Korean War veteran and the effects of torture, the legendary Requiem for a Heavyweight (from CBS's Playhouse 90 series), and several others, some of which were adapted to the big screen. Requiem, like Patterns, was honored as a milestone in television drama. The installment's producer, Martin Manulis, noted in a PBS biography of Serling that after the live broadcast, CBS chairman William S. Paley called the control room to tell the crew that the show had advanced TV by 10 years. The show's director, Ralph Nelson, wrote and directed a television drama four years later for the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse about writing Requiem for a Heavyweight called The Man in the Funny Suit, in which Serling appeared as himself.
Tired of seeing his scripts butchered (removing any political statements, ethnic identities, even the Chrysler Building being removed from a script sponsored by Ford), Serling decided the only way to avoid such artistic interference was to create his own show.
The Twilight Zone
In 1959, CBS aired the first episode of a groundbreaking series, The Twilight Zone. Serling fought hard for creative control, hiring writers he respected (such as Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont) and launched himself into weekly television. He stated in an interview that the science fiction format would not be controversial and would escape censorship unlike the earlier Playhouse 90. In reality the show gave him the opportunity to communicate social messages in a more veiled context.
Serling drew on his own experiences for many episodes, with frequent stories about boxing, military life and aircraft pilots, which integrated his firsthand knowledge. The series also incorporated Serling's progressive social views on racial relations and the like, which were somewhat veiled by the science fiction and fantasy elements of the shows. Occasionally, however, Serling could be quite blunt, as in the episode "I Am The Night — Color Me Black", where racism and hatred causes a dark cloud to form in the American South before eventually spreading elsewhere. Serling was also progressive on matters of gender, with many stories featuring quick-thinking, resilient women, although he also wrote stories featuring shrewish, nagging wives.
The show lasted five seasons (four using a half-hour format, with one half-season using an hour-long format), winning awards and critical acclaim for Serling and his staff. While having a loyal fan base, the program never had huge ratings and was twice canceled, only to be revived. After five years and 156 episodes, 92 of them written by Serling himself, he wearied of the show. In 1964, he decided to let the third cancellation be final.
Serling sold his rights to the series to CBS. His wife later claimed that he did this partly because he believed the studio would never recoup the cost of the show, which frequently went over budget. This proved to be a costly mistake.
The following is a list of Twilight Zone episodes written or adapted from other works by Rod Serling:
Night Gallery
In 1969, NBC aired a Serling-penned pilot for a new series, Night Gallery. Set in a dimly lit museum, the pilot film featured Serling (as on-camera host) introducing three tales of the macabre, unveiling canvases that would appear in the subsequent story segments.
The series, which premiered in December 1970 (its brief first season rotated as one spoke of a four-series programming wheel titled Four in One), focused more on gothic horror and the occult than did The Twilight Zone. Serling, no longer wanting the burden of an executive position, sidestepped an offer to retain creative control of content—a decision he would come to regret. Although discontented with some of producer Jack Laird's script and creative choices, Serling maintained a stream of creative submissions and ultimately wrote over a third of the series' scripts.
By season three however, Serling began to see many of his script contributions rejected. With his complaints ignored, the disgruntled host dismissed the show as "Mannix in a cemetery". Night Gallery lasted until 1973.
While the series has its own cult following, it is not as successful as The Twilight Zone and is generally regarded as a pale shadow of Serling's previous series.
Fiction
Serling wrote a number of short story adaptations of his own Twilight Zone teleplays, which were collected into three volumes of Twilight Zone stories (1960, 1961, 1962), two of Night Gallery stories (1971, 1972), and a collection of three novellas, The Season to be Wary (1968). Two of the novellas in The Season to be Wary were later adapted into episodes of the Night Gallery pilot movie. Serling also released a collection of teleplays, Patterns, in 1957. The collection included the teleplays for "Patterns," "The Rack," "Old MacDonald Had a Curve," and "Requiem For a Heavyweight".
A critical essay on Serling's fiction can be found in S. T. Joshi's book The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004). Joshi emphasises Serling's moralism and the streak of misanthropy imbuing his work, and argues that, far from being merely rewritten scripts, many of Serling's stories can stand as genuinely original and meritorious works of prose fiction.
Later years
Subsequent to The Twilight Zone, Serling moved onto cinema screens and continued to write for television. In 1964, he scripted Carol for Another Christmas, a television adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It was telecast only once, December 28, 1964, on ABC.
On May 25, 1962, Serling guest starred in the episode "The Celebrity" of the CBS sitcom Ichabod and Me with Robert Sterling and George Chandler.
He wrote a number of screenplays with a political focus, including Seven Days in May (1964) about an attempted military coup against the President of the United States; Planet of the Apes (1968); and The Man (1972) about the first African American President.
In a noteworthy speech delivered at Moorpark College, Moorpark California, on December 3, 1968, Serling criticized loyalty oaths, the Vietnam war and social inequity.
Serling had taped introductions for a limited-run summer comedy series on ABC, Keep on Truckin', which was scheduled to begin its run several weeks after his death; these introductions were subsequently edited out of the broadcast episodes. He also wrote the pilot episode for a short-lived Aaron Spelling series called The New People in 1969. Also in 1969, Serling hosted a short-lived syndicated game show, Liar's Club.
In 1973 Serling's teleplay "Storm In Summer" was adapted for the theater. It premiered in San Diego's Off-Broadway Theatre and starred Sam Jaffe, Edd Burns and Patty McCormack. It was directed by James Burrows Although there were plans to bring the show to Broadway, that never happened.
Serling returned to radio in 1974 as the host of a new mystery/adventure series called The Zero Hour. The show aired for two years and Serling wrote several of the scripts. It failed to find a large audience due to its radio serial format and lack of promotion.
Late in his life, Serling taught at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York where he resided for many years, and did voiceovers for various projects. He narrated documentaries featuring French undersea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and (uncredited) performed the narration for the beginning of the Brian De Palma film Phantom of the Paradise.
Death
In 1975, Serling had two severe heart attacks before entering Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester for heart bypass surgery. He had a third heart attack during the operation and died the following day, at the age of 50. He is interred at the cemetery in Interlaken, New York, an area of upstate New York featured prominently in some Twilight Zone episodes.
After his death, several Serling scripts were produced. In 1988, J. Michael Straczynski scripted Serling's outline "Our Selena Is Dying" for the 1980s revival The New Twilight Zone. Rod Serling's Lost Classics (1994) was a TV movie based on a Serling script and an outline for another story (the latter was expanded and scripted by Richard Matheson), In the Presence of Mine Enemies (1997) was set in the Warsaw Ghetto, a science-fiction remake of A Town Has Turned to Dust (1998), and A Storm in Summer (2000) followed.
Awards and honors
During his lifetime, Rod Serling received six Emmys, and his biggest successes in writing include:
He was posthumously inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1985.
Legacy in television
When casting for the role of the shady Mr. Morden for the television series Babylon 5, creator J. Michael Straczynski chose Ed Wasser (who had played a bit part in the series' two-hour pilot TV movie) for the role because of his slick looks, charm, and vocal mannerisms reminiscent of a young Rod Serling.
Serling was ranked #1 in TV Guides list of the "25 Greatest Sci-Fi Legends" (in the August 1, 2004 issue).
More than 30 years after his death, Serling was digitally resurrected for an episode of the TV series Medium that aired on November 21, 2005. The episode, which was partially filmed in 3-D, opened with Serling introducing the episode and instructing viewers as to when to put on their 3-D glasses. This was accomplished by using footage from The Twilight Zone episode "The Midnight Sun" and digitally manipulating Serling's mouth to match new dialogue spoken by impersonator Mark Silverman. The plot of the episode involved paintings coming to life, a nod to both The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery.
The annual Halloween episodes of The Simpsons have regularly featured parodies of classic Twilight Zone episodes. These episodes include "Treehouse of Horror", "Treehouse of Horror II", and "Treehouse of Horror XIV". "Treehouse of Horror IV" borrows the opening from Serling's Night Gallery and includes a segment based on a Twilight Zone episode.
In the episode "The Van Buren Boys" of the sitcom Seinfeld, the main character parodies the writing style of Serling in a scene where he comments "You know, this is like that Twilight Zone episode where the guy wakes up, and he's the same - but everyone else is different!" after being interrogated by another character about which episode he is referring to, he replies "I don't know... they were all like that"
Legacy in other media
Over the years, a number of pop/rock songs have included tributes and references to Rod Serling and/or The Twilight Zone.
In 1982, Dutch rock band Golden Earring scored a hit with a song titled "Twilight Zone".
In 1979, the vocal group The Manhattan Transfer scored a big hit with "The Twilight Zone / The Twilight Tone" a jazz-rock variation of the classic Marius Constant theme from the television series (from their Extensions album; their promotional video clip even had lead singer Alan Paul standing beside a door floating in space, mimicking Rod Serling for the introduction.
On "Threatened", a track from his 2001 album Invincible, pop icon Michael Jackson used samples of Rod Serling narrations from The Twilight Zone as introduction and conclusion to the song, as well as a montage of clips to make Serling rap in the middle section of the tune.
The Twilight Zone was parodied in an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy called "The Billy Zone." During the show, you can see a cartoon version of Rod Serling, and who is beat up at the end.
In the musical adaptation of Hairspray, Amber Von Tussle sings "She's like a living Twilight Zone/Quick, get Rod Serling on the phone!" in the song "Cooties".
Canadian progressive rock music trio Rush dedicated their 1975 album Caress of Steel to the memory of Rod Serling. Lyricist and drummer Neil Peart and his (late) wife Jackie named their only child, a daughter, Selena, after the "Our Selena is Dying" episode of The Twilight Zone. The band's follow-up 1976 smash album, 2112, featured the song, "The Twilight Zone" as a tribute to Mr. Serling and his work.
On April 5, 1993, Midway introduced The Twilight Zone pinball machine which featured a backglass portrait of Serling surrounded by his creations. Tim Kitzrow provided the voice of Rod Serling for the game.
In 1994, the Walt Disney World resort opened its premier free fall attraction titled "The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror" at the Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park in Orlando, Florida. The ride places guests into a fabricated episode of The Twilight Zone, where they are introduced to the story by Rod Serling. The story is that at the height of the Hollywood golden age, a famous landmark hotel holding a gala event is struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. Passenger elevators carrying 5 guests mysteriously vanish after plummeting 13 stories, and the tower has stood derelict since that fateful night. Guests board "freight elevators" that carry them upwards and then laterally into the free fall shaft, where they visit the "5th Dimension" room which references the opening TV title sequence. (Footage from "It's a Good Life" was combined with voiceover work of impersonator Mark Silverman). It is a misconception that Serling's trademark cigarette is absent from his hand due to the family-friendly atmosphere of the ride, as it is actually absent in the original footage as well.
A similar version of the ride appears at Disney's California Adventure and Walt Disney Studios Park. The ride differs in aspects of pacing and tone, generally considered much campier, but Serling is part of the attraction nonetheless. All three editions of the ride feature props from and references to various Twilight Zone episodes.
Tokyo DisneySea has their own version of the Tower of Terror, however the "backstory" departs from the other versions, erasing all ties to "The Twilight Zone" including any reference, mention, or appearance of Rod Serling.
The Korean pop group SES recorded a song called "Twilight Zone" in 2001.
In an episode of Weird Science, The Twilight Zone is parodied. The characters are sent through something called "Sci-Fi Zoned", which sends through similar experiences and characters as some of the Serling's classics, such as "Where Is Everybody". Chet plays the role of Rod Serling.
In an episode of The Facts of Life, entitled, Seven Little Indians, Maurice LaMarche portrays Rod Serling, and narrates the episode when drama unfolds on a dark and stormy night as a killer stalks the store. Serling has a fascination of saying Tootie's name.
In an episode of Family Guy, the neighborhood argues over who stole the Golden Clam trophy in a manner similar to "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street". Rod Serling then comes on screen narrating until Peter accuses him of stealing the trophy and then throws a rock at him. Then, the whole gang chases after him. Later, it is revealed that Brian had it the whole time. When Rod begins narrating about Brian and what he's doing, Brian hits him in the back of the head with a shovel (seeing him as a potential witness) and presumably buries him in the yard.
In another episode of Family Guy, Peter drinks excessively, and after proclaiming that he's sure there will be no lasting effect, the camera zooms into Peter's brain. Only one brain cell remains, wearing glasses, who calls out and happily finds that he's alone with his books. Upon reaching for the first book, his glasses fall off and break, at which point the lone brain cell delivers Henry Bemis's famous line, "That's–that's not fair. That's not fair at all. There was time now. There was, was all the time I needed... ! It's not fair!"
In an episode of Futurama, The Twilight Zone is parodied as "The Scary Door", a show seen watched by Fry and other characters. The Twilight Zone episode referenced is "Time Enough at Last", Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith's character) is seen in a library. As he says "there is time at last" his glasses break. When he says he "can read large print" his eyes fall out. When he says he "can read braille" his hands fall off. Then he screams and his tongue falls out and then he becomes decapitated, prompting Bender to say he "Saw it coming."
Other filmography
The Loner (TV series)Encounter with the Unknown (1975) (narrator)Narrated many of The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau specials produced by Alan Landsburg in the 1960s and 1970s.
See also
The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series),Night Gallery, 1970 to 1973 follow-up series to The Twilight ZoneTwilight Zone: The Movie, 1983 filmThe New Twilight Zone, 1985 revivalRod Serling's Lost Classics, 1994 telefilmThe Twilight Zone (2002 TV series), 2002 revival
Further reading
Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television's Last Angry Man by Gordon F. Sander (Dutton, 1992), ISBN 978-0525935506
External links
- The Rod Serling Archives consists of television scripts, movie screenplays, stage play scripts, films, published works by Serling, unproduced scripts, and secondary materials
- An academic conference focused on studying the creative work of Rod Serling. The next one is scheduled for March 28-29. 2008
- Serling's papers consist of roughly 80,000 documents ranging from scripts to personal correspondence, including a folder of angry letters received by Serling.
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