Tripping Through The Twilight Zone

Twilight Zone
Stages Theater Fullerton
Through July 16
Fridays and Saturdays at 11pm
Created by Rod Serling
Directed by Darri Kristin,
David Campos, and Frank Tryon
Five Scoops of Bosco

You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead — your next stop, the Twilight Zone. —Rod Serling

By Allen Bacon
Bosco Fullerton/Daily Bosco

When I was a teenager growing up in Fullerton, one of my most frightening experiences was the night (while watching my Grandma and Grandpas house when they were on vacation) I decided to watch an episode of the Twilight Zone.

It was a cold Friday January night in Fullerton in the mid-70's. It was raining and the wind was howling. I had all of the lights off in the big house and it was 11 PM. They used to show the Twilight Zone reruns on KTLA channel 5 at 11 PM after the news.

This particular night they ran the episode "In The Eye of The Beholder". Remember...That was the one where the young lady had just undergone radical plastic surgery on her face and the whole show you never see her doctors or her face until a very unexpected twist at the very end. If you haven't seen it, I won't give away the ending...Pretty cool stuff. Not the scariest Twilight Zone I would ever see, but mixed with the dark, the rain, the wind, being alone in a big house by myself..it was scary enough.

So, how fitting, around 40 years later, that Stages Theater in Fullerton, under the skillful direction of Darri Kristin, David Campos, and Frank Tryon is recreating on stage live six of the shows best episodes. The show runs until July 16. Ironically, for me, the shows begin at 11 PM on Friday (and Saturday) nights.

The first two shows just concluded last night. "The Man in the Bottle", A story about a discontented curio shop owner who thinks he's finally found happiness when a genie he discovers in an old bottle grants him four wishes. This episode featured the wonderful acting of Joe Parrish, Cynthia Ryanen, Mark Coyan, Jami McCoy, Robert Nunez and Frank Tryon

The second show of the evening in the first group was "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" was a fictional morality play about how at the age of 19 everyone must undergo an operation that makes them beautiful...and identical to everyone else but one girl desperately hangs on to her own identity. This show featured Mo Arii, Frank Tryon, Doreen Jones & Lauren Sanatra. Both of the first two episodes were directed by Stages Darri Kristin.

Starting this Friday night June 24 at 11 PM and running until July 2 will be two more episodes.

"Four O'Clock" is the story of political fanatic Oliver Crangle who has determined that at 4 PM he will eliminate all his enemies by shrinking them. But his plan proves to be a little shortsighted... This segment will feature Frank Tryon, Darri Kristin, Amanda DeMaio and Hal Ley.

After the intermission "What You Need" is a story about a two-bit thug who thinks he's found the key to a better life in an old sidewalk salesman who has the uncanny ability to tell people what they need the most. This show features Sean Hesketh, Dan Meyers, Richard Burnes, Andrea Freeman, Jason Sutton, Jeffrey Larson, Wendy Karn and Brett Schickling.

Both of these upcoming segments are directed by David Campos

Starting on July 8 and running until July 16, two new episodes of the Twilight Zone will be up including "The Trade-Ins" and "A Stop at Willoughby" These shows will be under the direction of Frank Tyron.

If you are a fan of Twilight Zone you will absolutely love these episodes brought to life in the intimate setting of Stages Theater.

The Twilight Zone was an American anthology television series created by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. The series consisted of unrelated episodes depicting paranormal, futuristic,or disturbing events; each show typically featured a surprising plot twist and was usually brought to closure with some sort of message.

The series was also notable for featuring both established stars (e.g., Cliff Robertson, Ann Blyth, Jack Klugman) and younger actors who would later became famous (e.g., Robert Redford, William Shatner, Burt Reynolds, Mariette Hartley, Shelley Fabares, Ron Howard).

Rod Serling served as executive producer and head writer; he wrote or co-wrote 92 of the show's 156 episodes. He was also the show's host, delivering on- or off-screen monologues at the beginning and end of each episode. During the first season, except for the season's final episode, Serling's narrations were off-camera voiceovers; he only appeared on-camera at the end of each show to promote the next episode (footage that was removed from syndicated versions but restored for DVD release, although some of these promotions exist today only in audio format).

The "twilight zone" itself is not presented as being a tangible plane, but rather a metaphor for the strange circumstances befalling the protagonists. Serling's opening and closing narrations usually summarized the episode's events in tones ranging from cryptic to pithy to eloquent to unsympathetic, encapsulating how and why the main character(s) had "entered the Twilight Zone".

In 2002, The Twilight Zone was ranked #26 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.

By the late 1950s, Rod Serling was a regular name in television. His successful teleplays included Patterns (for Kraft Television Theater) and Requiem for a Heavyweight (for Playhouse 90), but constant changes and edits made by the networks and sponsors frustrated Serling, who decided that creating his own show was the best way to get around these obstacles. He thought that behind a television series with robots, aliens and other supernatural occurrences, he could also express his political views in a more subtle fashion.

"The Time Element" was Serling's 1957 pilot pitch for his show, a time travel adventure about a man who travels back to Honolulu in 1941 and unsuccessfully tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. The script, however, was rejected and shelved for a year until Bert Granet discovered and produced it as an episode of Desilu Playhouse in 1958. The show was a huge success and enabled Serling to finally begin production on his anthology series, The Twilight Zone.

The Twilight Zone premiered on television the night of October 2, 1959 to rave reviews. "...Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I actually look forward to seeing. It's the one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily News. Others agreed. Daily Variety ranked it with "the best that has ever been accomplished in half-hour filmed television" and the New York Herald Tribune found the show to be "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year."

Even as the show proved popular to television's critics, it struggled to find a receptive audience of television viewers. CBS was banking on a rating of at least 21 or 22, but its initial numbers were much worse. The series' future was jeopardized when its third episode, "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" earned a 16.3 rating. The show attracted a large enough audience to survive a brief hiatus in November, during which it finally surpassed its competition on ABC and NBC and convinced its sponsors (General Foods and Kimberly-Clark) to stay on until the end of the season.

With one exception ("The Chaser"), the first season featured only scripts written by Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, a team that was eventually responsible for 127 of the show's 156 episodes. Additionally, with one exception ("A World of His Own"), Serling never appeared on camera except to announce the next episode, instead doing voice-over narrations. Many of the first season's episodes proved to be among the series' most celebrated, including "Time Enough at Last", "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street", "Walking Distance" and "The After Hours". The first season won Serling an unprecedented fourth Emmy for dramatic writing, a Producers Guild Award for Serling's creative partner Buck Houghton and the Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation.

Bernard Hermann's original opening theme lasted throughout the first season. Towards the end of the season, the original Dali-esque "pit and summit" opening montage and narration was replaced by a piece featuring a blinking eye and shorter narration, and a truncated version of the theme.

The second season premiered on September 30, 1960 with "King Nine Will Not Return", Serling's fresh take on the pilot episode "Where Is Everybody?". The familiarity of this first story stood in stark contrast to the novelty of the show's new packaging: Bernard Herrmann's stately original theme was replaced by Marius Constant's more jarring and dissonant (and now more-familiar) new guitar-and-bongo theme. The blinking eye was replaced by a more surreal introduction inspired by the new images in Serling's narration ("That's the signpost up ahead"), and Serling himself stepped in front of the cameras to present his opening narration, rather than being only a voice-over narrator (as in the first season).

A new sponsor, Colgate-Palmolive, replaced the previous year's Kimberly-Clark (as Liggett & Myers would succeed General Foods, in April 1961), and a new network executive, James Aubrey, took over CBS. "Jim Aubrey was a very, very difficult problem for the show", said associate producer Del Reisman. "He was particularly tough on The Twilight Zone because for its time it was a particularly costly half hour show....Aubrey was real tough on [the show's budget] even when it was a small number of dollars." In a push to keep the show's expenses down, Aubrey ordered that seven fewer episodes be produced than last season and that six of those being produced would be shot on videotape rather than film, a move Serling disliked, calling it "neither fish nor fowl".[citation needed]

The second season saw the production of many of the series' most acclaimed episodes, including "The Eye of the Beholder" and "The Invaders". The trio of Serling, Matheson and Beaumont began to admit new writers, and this season saw the television debut of George Clayton Johnson. Emmys were won by Serling (his fifth) for dramatic writing and by director of photography George T. Clemens and, for the second year in a row, the series won the Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation. It also earned the Unity Award for "Outstanding Contributions to Better Race Relations" and an Emmy nomination for "Outstanding Program Achievement in the Field of Drama".

In his third year as executive producer, host, narrator and primary writer for The Twilight Zone, Serling was beginning to feel exhausted. "I've never felt quite so drained of ideas as I do at this moment", said the 37-year old playwright at the time. In the first two seasons he contributed 48 scripts, or 73% of the show's total output. He contributed only 56% of the third season's output. "The show now seems to be feeding off itself", said a Variety reviewer of the season's second episode, who couldn't understand Serling's endless and exhaustive treatment of themes.[citation needed]

Despite his avowed weariness, Serling again managed to produce several teleplays that are widely regarded as classics, including "It's a Good Life", "To Serve Man", and "Five Characters in Search of an Exit". Scripts by Montgomery Pittman and Earl Hamner Jr. supplemented Matheson and Beaumont's output, and George Clayton Johnson submitted three teleplays that examined complex themes. The episode "I Sing the Body Electric" could boast: "Written by Ray Bradbury." By the end of the third season, the series had reached over 100 episodes.

The Twilight Zone received two Emmy nominations (for cinematography and art design), but was awarded neither. It again received the Hugo Award for "Best Dramatic Presentation", making it the only three-time recipient until it was tied by Doctor Who in 2008.

In spring 1962, The Twilight Zone was late in finding a sponsor for its fourth season and was replaced on CBS' fall schedule with a new hour-long situation comedy called Fair Exchange. In the confusion that followed this apparent cancellation, producer Buck Houghton left the series for a position at Four Star Productions. Serling meanwhile accepted a teaching post at Antioch College, his alma mater. Though the series was eventually renewed, Serling's contribution as executive producer decreased in its final seasons.

In November 1962 CBS contracted Twilight Zone (now sans the The) as a mid-season January replacement for Fair Exchange, the very show that replaced it in the September 1962 schedule. In order to fill the Fair Exchange timeslot each episode had to be expanded to an hour, an idea which did not sit well with the production crew. "Ours is the perfect half-hour show... If we went to an hour, we'd have to fleshen our stories, soap opera style. Viewers could watch fifteen minutes without knowing whether they were in a Twilight Zone or Desilu Playhouse", Serling responded. Herbert Hirschman was hired to replace long-time producer Buck Houghton. One of Hirschman's first decisions was to direct a new opening sequence, this one illustrating a door, eye, window and other objects suspended Magritte-like in space. His second task was to find and produce quality scripts.

This season of Twilight Zone once again turned to the reliable trio of Serling, Matheson and Beaumont. However, Serling’s input was limited this season; he still provided the lion’s-share of the teleplays, but as executive producer he was virtually absent and as host, his artful narrations had to be shot back-to-back against a gray background during his infrequent trips to Los Angeles. Due to complications from a developing brain disease, Beaumont’s input also began to diminish significantly. Additional scripts were commissioned from Earl Hamner, Jr. and Reginald Rose to fill in the gap.

With five episodes left in the season, Hirschman received an offer to work on a new NBC series called Espionage and was replaced by Bert Granet, who had previously produced "The Time Element". Among Granet’s first assignments was "On Thursday We Leave for Home", which Serling considered the season's most effective episode. There was an Emmy nomination for cinematography, and a nomination for the Hugo Award. The show returned to its half-hour format for the fall schedule.

Serling later claimed, "I was writing so much, I felt I had begun to lose my perspective on what was good and what was bad." By the end of this final season, he had contributed 92 scripts in five years. This season, the new alternate sponsors were American Tobacco and Procter & Gamble.

Beaumont was now out of the picture entirely, contributing scripts only through the ghostwriters Jerry Sohl and John Tomerlin, and after producing only 13 episodes, Bert Granet left and was replaced by William Froug—with whom Serling had worked on Playhouse 90.

Froug made a number of unpopular decisions; first by shelving several scripts purchased under Granet's term (including Matheson’s The Doll, which was nominated for a Writer's Guild Award when finally produced in 1986 on Amazing Stories); secondly, Froug alienated George Clayton Johnson when he hired Richard deRoy to completely rewrite Johnson’s teleplay Tick of Time, eventually produced as "Ninety Years Without Slumbering". "It makes the plot trivial", complained Johnson of the resulting script, insisting he be given screen credit for the final version of the episode as "Johnson Smith". Tick of Time became Johnson’s final submission to The Twilight Zone.

Even under these conditions, several episodes were produced that are well remembered, including "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", "A Kind of a Stopwatch" and "Living Doll". Although this season received no Emmy recognition, episode number 142, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"—a 1962 French-produced short film which was modified slightly for broadcast—received the Academy Award for best short film in 1963.

In late January 1964, CBS announced the show's cancellation. "For one reason or other, Jim Aubrey decided he was sick of the show... [H]e claimed that it was too far over budget and that the ratings weren't good enough", explained Froug. But Serling countered by telling the Daily Variety that he had "decided to cancel the network". ABC showed interest in bringing the show over to their network under the new name Witches, Warlocks and Werewolves, but Serling wasn't impressed.

"The network executives seem to prefer weekly ghouls, and we have what appears to be a considerable difference in opinion. I don't mind my show being supernatural, but I don't want to be booked into a graveyard every week." Shortly afterwards Serling sold his 40% share in The Twilight Zone to CBS, leaving the show and indeed all projects involving the supernatural behind him until 1969, when Night Gallery debuted.

Information in last half of this article is from Wikipedia