Maybe the Twilight Zone is real.
Just as producer Michael O’Hara was finishing a discussion last year about yet another deal for a true-life story, Hollywood lawyer Renee Golden wondered, almost in passing, if he would be interested in some unproduced material in the possession of Carol Serling, the widow of Rod Serling, creator of “The Twilight Zone.”
Indeed, he was. Unbelievably, the first item was a 90-minute unproduced script, “Where the Dead Are,” the last teleplay by Serling, who died at 50 in 1975.
“This script was larger than life,” said O’Hara, who, with his partner, Larry Horowitz, received an Emmy nomination for “Switched at Birth” in 1991. “The story is imaginative-even the dialogue comes alive. There is one scene in which there are eight pages of dialogue between two people, and it holds up. Serling was a wordsmith.”
O’Hara and Horowitz read a lot of the material but found much of it formulaic with “interchangeable characters,” O’Hara said.
But they also found a 10-page treatment for “The Theater,” another eerie tale from “The Twilight Zone.” They snatched this up too, and the result, along with the 90-minute “Where the Dead Are” episode, will be seen this spring when CBS airs “The Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics.”
In “Where the Dead Are,” a Boston surgeon played by Patrick Bergin travels to a New England village just after the Civil War to find a reclusive scientist, played by Jack Palance, who may hold the key to a bizarre medical mystery. Filming began in November in Wilmington, N.C.
In “The Theater,” longtime Serling collaborator Richard Matheson adapted the story about a career woman, played by Amy Irving, who sees her life unfolding on the screen of a local movie theater. Irving, who co-stars with Gary Cole, will be reunited with Robert Markowitz, who directed her in “Voices” and who also will direct “Where the Dead Are.”
“The magic of Serling’s storytelling is his imagination,” O’Hara said. “It is so different, and there is a lack of that today.”
But O’Hara, who produced ABC’s mini-series “Murder in the Heartland,” said the current climate of network television today would hinder a writer with an imagination as vivid as Serling’s.
“If this was not written by Rod Serling, nobody would make this material,” he lamented. “That is sad, but that is the reality.”
Serling, a playwright known for his work on “Playhouse 90,” including the classic “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” first entered “The Twilight Zone” on Oct. 2, 1959, when CBS broadcast the premiere of the science fiction anthology. Its last broadcast with Serling as host was Sept. 5, 1965.
O’Hara said he hopes to create an event out of the two-hour special, possibly hosted by an actor who appeared in the series-such as Robert Redford, Robert Duvall or Peter Falk-or writer-director Sydney Pollack.
“We would like to make this a tribute,” O’Hara said.
Screenwriter Matheson, who worked on all “The Twilight Zones” episodes, recalled Serling as a very intense man who had a purpose in his writing.
“He always wanted to say something,” he said. “He had a moral agenda to put across to the great majority. His non-`Twilight Zone’ work was socially aware.”
Serling was no Hollywood tyrant when it came to work or collaboration. “He was one of the nicest in the business,” Matheson said. “I never had a problem. He was genial, receptive and appreciative. He was a gentleman-that is the perfect word for him.”
Matheson was aware of the cache of unproduced “Twilight Zone” material but did not know how they surfaced.
“I was surprised,” he said. “Maybe they were in the attic or maybe they just fell out of the twilight zone.”
“It was in the bottom of a filing case,” Carol Serling revealed. “It was just there.”
Carol Serling said she discovered the works while packing her late husband’s material to send to Ithaca College in upstate New York, which is the repository of much of his work.
“Interest in `The Twilight Zone’ has never died,” she said. “So many of the stories are timely today. `The Twilight Zone’ doesn’t go away.”
Among her husband’s favorite episodes was “Time Enough at Last,” a tale about a bank clerk (Burgess Meredith) who never had enough time to pursue his love of reading. He discovers that he is the only survivor of an atomic attack, which allows him enough time for reading. It sounds like a happy ending-until he trips and breaks his glasses.
Another favorite, she said, is “The Eye of the Beholder,” the tale of a young woman who was born with a facial deformity who undergoes corrective surgery. When the bandages are removed, she is beautiful to TV viewers.
But then the audience sees the faces of the doctors and nurses-all of them reptilian. The woman, viewers discover, lived in a world where deformity was considered beauty and she now was an outcast, led away to her society’s version of a leper colony.
“He had a fabulous imagination,” Carol Serling said. “He could see things we might not see or might not hear. And then he would turn it into a full-blown story.”
