One of the best writers and one of the best directors in the genre. Its a shame they never worked together, because I'm sure it would have been fantastic.
shareInfluential personas in my life, for sure ! Put out some serious vibes.
shareI always thought "The Cemetery" from "Night Gallery" was one of the best episodes that show ever did. And while it was smoothly mounted I would have loved to have seen what a true master like Hitchcock could have done with Serling's sharp script.
shareThey both did more for the medium of TV than most ever will.
shareI agree with your high regard for Messrs Serling and Hitchcock, but for the life of me I can't see these two men working together. They had very different personalities and styles. Rod Serling was down to earth and he seemed always, whatever the project, to be looking for meaning, for morals. Alfred Hitchcock strikes me as more interested in manners than morals, in style rather than the substance Serling was nearly always so earnest about. I don't mean to say that Hitchcock's work was all superficial. His films often cut deep, very deep; and he was a far more subtle artist than Serling. One has to (if you'll excuse the expression) "dig" more with Hitchcock. Rod Serling nearly always stated things outright, while Hitchcock liked to be playful and overall had an elusive, difficult to pin down personality, as man and artist.
shareSome pretty stupid commentary here. Serling was a WRITER: Hitchcock a DIRECTOR. And to state that Hitch
was "style over substance" only shows off the last poster's ignorance. There was a tremendous amount of
subtext in Hitch's work, which is why he is often cited as the greatest American director of the 20th century.
Can't you think of something better to do than writing nasty posts? Jesus H. Christ, you're are a f/ing nuisance. Please find another board to pollute.
shareLol! WHY, because, unlike you, I KNOW what I'm talking about?? Get LOST, dude.
shareI hear you, mate. Too bad Hitch became a naturalized US citizen which makes it easy for someone like Mr Bennett to casually call him an 'American' director.
shareThanks. It's the personalizing that gets to me, the need to go for the jugular that irks me. Yes, Serling was a writer, Hitchcock a director. Did I suggest otherwise? There was great depth in Hitchcock's films, the ones he was serious about; however his style was understated and he used much droll humor. Psycho, though, is exceptionally serious for a Hitchcock picture, and yet it too has humor along the way. Black humor.
shareLike the train going into the tunnel at the conclusion of "North By Northwest"?
shareWe need an ignore button here big time.
shareTelegonus-- the "Ignore" button appears to have been newly created! Do you see it? Gary can vanish at a click of a button!
Good to see you, as always.
There was a kindness and social awareness in Serling's work that did not exist in Hitchcock's. That isn't good or bad, they are just different. Speaking for myself, I enjoy re-watching TZ far more than AHP. By the way, Hitch only directed 17 episodes of the entire AHP series, which ran from 1955-1962. So TZ is really more representative of Serling's vision than Hitchcock's AHP.
Thanks, Jennie. Now I see it. I hate using ignore, reserve it for trolls. GB isn't a troll. I sense that he wants to talk film and communicate with other people, and then he snaps, often AT SOMEONE, and the chat goes south big time. Some of what he writes makes sense. I read some his posts on the old IMDB and sometimes agreed with him. He's been civil to me a couple of times, and I've reciprocated once or twice, but it's a slippery freakin' slope. My disposition is diplomatic by nature, and I like to help heal rifts between people (etc.). I don't sense an evil person in the guy, just a really angry one with a lot of hate he doesn't know what to do with. Oh well, enough on that topic.
Yes, Rod Serling often wore his heart on his sleeve. In Hitchcock's case, no, but then he wasn't a writer, and yet after a certain point, when he became a media superstar in the Fifties,--sort of the Walt Disney of his field--he could pick and choose his projects as he pleased. His choices were often quite dark. An AHP episode he directed, The Crystal Trench, is grim and disturbing, and while someone else wrote the story I can't help but see Hitchcock in there somewhere, and it's a sad sight.
Rod Serling could be a tough guy in his way, and there are times when he seems to have a cruel streak. A first season ep I saw last night, What You Need, presents a very unfortunate man, bitter and defeated, as a potential murderer. An older man, a peddler with psychic abilities senses the danger in him, and the younger man comes to (an expected) bad end. Yet as some mentioned on the old IMDB,--and I agree--the episode didn't give the poor loser much of a break. He was pathological all the way through. Okay, some people are, however the story was set up as a whimsical tale with a moral,--it originally aired on Christmas night, Serling's birthday, btw--and seems an odd choice for that particular holiday. I like the episode, and whenever I watch it I always wish the old peddler could came come up with something better for the younger man than a pair of scissors and a leaky pen that enabled him to win at the track.
Telegonus,
You are truly a good man. I find what you write to be so inspiring because you show such emotional intelligence and compassion. Based on what you have posted on the IMDb boards several years ago, I know that you have gone through some very hard times in your own life. But I never detect a trace of bitterness in anything you write. That very fact attests to what an evolved person you are. I have no idea what you do now for a living, but I hope it involves something where you can help other people, because I sense that is something at which you truly excel. You can be a MovieChat guru in teaching people to treat others with decency and respect.
Back to TZ-- I actually like "What you need." To me, it seems more of a companion piece for "One for the Angels" since they both involve peddlers. When it comes to the peddler in "what you need," I think he came to the realization that the younger man (Fred?) was beyond help and he just had to help himself. I think people who have filled the roles of enablers often have to deal with this type of decision .
Thank you very much for the kind words, Jennie [insert blush emoticon]. I hope that I can live up to your high opinion of me, by which I mean no one's consistently good. The older I get the more I realize just how at the core of all of us is ambiguity (and it kissin' cousin, ambivalence). Nobody likes to talk about such things, or few people do, and it's admittedly not easy stuff to deal with,--but there it is.
The Twilight Zone boards are actually a good place to deal with stuff like this, which is all over the Zone. It's at the core of Walking Distance,--a favorite of many--and it's in Elegy, too (the one with Cecil Kellaway as the asteroid caretaker).
As to What You Need, yes, I thought of the One For The Angels connection. The younger man probably WAS beyond help, and the casting of Steve Cochran sealed it. He really makes the episode work for me, was one of the few good looking actors who could play such a character and make him credible. They needed a fairly big guy, but Jack Warden was too hail fellow well met, Claude Akins too "down home", Lee Marvin, too strange looking, with his villainous potential already built into his face. Also, these actors had, each in a different way, a rather "starry" larger than life quality, while Steverino, a big guy himself, could make himself look small, near anonymous.
Serling and Hitchock could both be very good at enhancing the dream-like quality of some of their more haunting works by omitting certain details. Like in "Vertigo" we're never shown how Stewart gets off that ledge in the beginning. Did he ever get off that ledge? The master withholds this detail other, lesser filmmakers would have eagerly explained away. The result is from the outset we're unable to get our bearings which Hitchcock uses to his advantage the further the movie progresses .... With Serling it's stuff like the mysterious intentions of the beings from the parallel worlds in "Mirror Image." All we know is they've targeted Paul and Millicent. Who else are they after? Is every one Millicent encounters at the train station -- excluding Paul -- already replaced? "Mirrors" lack of answers strengthens the nightmare logic of the piece.
shareFor what it is worth, I have read that Hitchcock met with Rod Serling one or two times in the sixties to discuss Serling writing a Hitchcock film. The Birds specifically, and then I think, another project that was left unmade.
As I recall, it was Serling who declined the work.
Serling was very busy with The Twilight Zone, and I only recall one major movie with a Serling script in the sixties -- Seven Days in May (1964) a fine all-star political thriller.
There's also the issue that, given some of the films we know Hitchcock made in the sixties -- The Birds, Marnie, Torn Curtain...Rod Serling may not have been interested in writing them. The Birds was from a short story about a British farmer and his family and needed a complete "opening up and re-write"(Joe Stefano, scripter of Psycho, turned it down, saying 'it was short, but not a story.") Torn Curtain was Hitchcock's own original idea. Marnie needed a major re-write. And none of them were quite "up Serling's alley."
Indeed, in the sixties as his success from Psycho had set him up as a "big deal director," Hitchcock took meetings with many screenwriters and STILL couldn't get them to come along. I recall that he took a meeting with Wendell Mayes, who wrote "In Harms Way" and better-known films. And with James Goldman -- William's brother. And Herb Gardner, the guy who wrote A Thousand Clowns(which won Martin Balsam his sole Oscar.) He even tried to interest Nabokov("Lolita") in writing a screenplay.
Very interesting. Rod Serling did the screenplay adaptation for Planet of the Apes in 1968
shareAh, yes. Planet of the Apes!
Maybe Rod Serling didn't write many movie screenplays, but what he DID write were pretty important.
And surely the producers of Planet of the Apes saw THAT story as right up his alley.
The sad thing is that Serling died relatively young -- 50, I think -- of a heart attack evidently hastened by his personal intensity and cigarettes.
I've told this story elsewhere, but I went to a seminar at an LA college where Serling appeared. Around 1974 or '75. He showed us an episode of Night Gallery he had written called "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar," about a middle-aged man who loses his job, maybe his marriage...and his favorite WWII era bar...all in the same week. Its a depressing story at first, but gets a happy ending for the man.
Well, Serling noted that while he gave his story a happy ending, all of us "young college kids out there" needed to be forewarned that middle-age would be a rough and bleak time in our lives to come, as the toughness of jobs and the threat of job loss loomed. He seemed out to warn us that our youth was going to be the best time of our lives.
He seemed very depressed.
And he died not too long after that speech.
Wow-- what a great anecdote. You know, I have never liked that particular episode of Night Gallery-- but I hear it was his personal favorite. As I have written before on the IMDb site, I think men have a greater tendency than women to sentimentalize their past. Rod Serling was very sentimental about his childhood and young adulthood. It is very sad that Rod Serling seemed so depressed. I remember when he passed away. I was very young but had just started to watch Twilight Zone. There was an incredible feeling of loss for someone I had never met.
But back then, it seemed that "middle aged" happened much earlier than it does today. Back then, folks married and started families in their 20's. And back then, "middle-aged" started when you were around 36. Witness how many male characters in TZ are 36
That's very true about the age thing and how middle-age -- and old age! -- came a lot earlier back then. For people who grew up in the Depression and wars thereafter, there was a literal toll being taken.
I recall how bleak Mr. Serling was at that seminar -- it was a bit of a shocker, how bleak he was in his remarks to us, we were just expecting some Twilight Zone reminiscenes. But I'm here to say that, having reached middle age myself...it doesn't have to be that bad.
Surely there were challenges and physical aches and pains and issues on the jobs/love front but...they were all surmountable and on balance, I've had a pretty good time.
I feel in retrospect that Mr. Serling sold us the wrong story that day. I feel sorry that maybe he was simply expressing how HE felt that day. Maybe he felt bad physically that day.
But no matter...he left us a legacy of good-to-great works, including one of the most famous TV shows of all time.
PS. Also some time in the mid-seventies before his death, I saw, at a student film festival, a cheapo "college student film" which was like a Twilight Zone episode, complete with Serling intro...done by the REAL Rod Serling. He did it as a favor to the college student, who had written to him. The movie probably cost $300 to make. It was an act of goodwill and generosity on Serling's part. So he wasn't THAT depressed.
So true, EC: the age thing, I mean. My father looked old to me when he was twenty years younger than I am now. He was already gray, wore glasses, had deep lines in his face, liked to take naps. It wasn't ill health, either. Just living. He made it to eighty and a bit beyond.
I think that some of this was more than the war and the Great Depression. Yes, for sure, okay, and thank you David McCullough and Tom Brokaw, but egads, have we had it easy? In some ways, yes. A reasonably comfortable childhood and adolescence for the middle class and even in many cases lower middle and "high" working class (a union or government job, a big corporation with a good retirement plan). For those "well fixed" the thirty to thirty-five years after the world war were pretty good economically, not so much socially.
The social upheavals of the Sixties and all that followed changed the game forever. We had to cope with a lot internally, whether it was sex, drugs and/ or rock and roll. For many of us it was almost like LIVING in The Twilight Zone (or The Outer Limits, or one of the preachier episodes of Dragnet). There was a lot to adjust to, and IMO even in retrospect we don't like to admit as much,--my sense is that it's "liberal guilt" for a lot of us--which saves us, or many of us, from the kind of pedantry that was the stock in trade of our parents' generation.
Oops! Back to Rod: he seemed to take life hard. Things were either good for him or bad for him. You can see it in his writing, especially for The Twilight Zone. Humor was not his strong point. He could have used more. I sense that he took himself awfully seriously. In the PBS American Masters episode on Serling they interviewed director John Frankenheimer, who knew Serling well, and I found his comments on Serling the most intelligent and perceptive of all, especially his final one on how Serling felt bad about not getting into the "big leagues" as a writer,--along the lines of maybe Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams, I would imagine--and he said, without a hint of meanness (because it was true) that Rod didn't make it to the top cut because he never really tried. I agree: Rod Serling was a mainstream commercial writer for television and the movies, and he remained working in the niche in which he was most comfortable.
So true, EC: the age thing, I mean. My father looked old to me when he was twenty years younger than I am now. He was already gray, wore glasses, had deep lines in his face, liked to take naps. It wasn't ill health, either. Just living. He made it to eighty and a bit beyond.
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I don't know if your father served in the military, but that seemed to take a lot out of men(and some women.)
We've gotten smarter about food and exercise(if we want to be) and life , while decidedly rougher in some ways(job security) is easier in others(men and women can share the workload, people seem to adapt even through hard times given safety nets, etc.)
I suppose I don't want this to turn into a political conversation because I know how times can be hard and employment issues are perhaps not for the bringing up at an "escapist" film chat site. Still, SOMETHING seems to be keeping the Post Vietnam war generations looking and feeling younger. Movies maybe. Sex, hopefully. "Fun" definitely(hike, ride a bike, play golf.)
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I think that some of this was more than the war and the Great Depression. Yes, for sure, okay, and thank you David McCullough and Tom Brokaw, but egads, have we had it easy? In some ways, yes. A reasonably comfortable childhood and adolescence for the middle class and even in many cases lower middle and "high" working class (a union or government job, a big corporation with a good retirement plan). For those "well fixed" the thirty to thirty-five years after the world war were pretty good economically, not so much socially.
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The TV series "Mad Men" captured some of this -- although its leading characters were generally wealthy, high ambition people. But...comfortable living, difficult lives. The show posited happy marriage as almost an impossibility, what with the changing sexual mores and bountiful opportunities on all sides. Meanwhile...how to deal with women's rights? With race?
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The social upheavals of the Sixties and all that followed changed the game forever. We had to cope with a lot internally, whether it was sex, drugs and/ or rock and roll. For many of us it was almost like LIVING in The Twilight Zone (or The Outer Limits, or one of the preachier episodes of Dragnet).
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Yeah. On the "Dragnet" front, I have to admit even I was shaken when so many of our young rock stars overdosed so young, including "the three Js" -- Jimi, Janis, and Jim. Something just didn't feel RIGHT about "enjoying" entertainers whose lives were self-snuffed not far out of youth.
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There was a lot to adjust to, and IMO even in retrospect we don't like to admit as much,--my sense is that it's "liberal guilt" for a lot of us--which saves us, or many of us, from the kind of pedantry that was the stock in trade of our parents' generation.
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Yeah. I mean, I missed the draft. I got no complaints.
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Oops! Back to Rod: he seemed to take life hard. Things were either good for him or bad for him. You can see it in his writing, especially for The Twilight Zone. Humor was not his strong point. He could have used more. I sense that he took himself awfully seriously.
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The proof seemed to be in his fate. He was tightly wound, angry. I DO remember the bitterness and bleakness in his remarks to us that 1970's day. Add in the smoking and I won't say a heart attack was inevitable, but perhaps more "on track."
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In the PBS American Masters episode on Serling they interviewed director John Frankenheimer, who knew Serling well, and I found his comments on Serling the most intelligent and perceptive of all, especially his final one on how Serling felt bad about not getting into the "big leagues" as a writer,--along the lines of maybe Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams, I would imagine--and he said, without a hint of meanness (because it was true) that Rod didn't make it to the top cut because he never really tried. I agree: Rod Serling was a mainstream commercial writer for television and the movies, and he remained working in the niche in which he was most comfortable.
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I recall reading of Serling TV play ABOUT a writer of TV plays, and how one line he wrote read something like this:
"You keep trying to break away, and so they give you more money. And more money. And MORE money. And one day, you can't break away."
Sounds really tough, Rod. But I'm sure it hurt him. Also, as we know, The Twilight Zone adventure ended for him around 1965(or 1964? I'm on the experts' page for heaven's sake..) and he needed a few years out there to re-connect with Night Gallery, which wasn't really HIS show(and which had, in later seasons, some really silly "blackouts" between stories.) There may have been some struggle there we just didn't think about.
It's funny you mention the "big leagues" as including Eugene O'Neill or Tennessee Williams. While, yes, I believe they are great writers, I have no desire to repeatedly read their plays or see them again. Last week, I saw a highly regarded production of "The Hairy Ape." While I could appreciate it, I really can't say it was enjoyable. Actually, I find Williams and O'Neill to be massively depressing writers.
In contrast, I'd say that Serling's work is loved by a far wider audience. That should count for more. As long as one's work resonates with people who can appreciate it, that should be a greater reward.
Neither O'Neill nor Williams were "happy" writers, I agree, Jennie. O'Neill was depressed and alcoholic all his adult life, and while I consider a great writer he was a far from great human being. His plays attract me with their moody gloominess. I like O'Neill's romantic take on life for all the negativity in is work. It's sort of the romance of ideas, with his plays showing the way to if not happiness, understanding. There's great strength in his work.
Williams was more sybaritic, also a romantic but maybe not so depressed as O'Neill, whom he admired greatly and whose approval he sought and got very early in his career. Something in Williams just sort of quit,--my sense is that it was his shrink who did it [laugh emoticon, please]--and starting with Cat On A Hot Tin Roof it's like he became what historian A.J.P. Taylor called George Bernard Shaw: the Playboy Of the Bourgeoisie. I actually get this more from Williams than from Shaw. He rallied once or twice later but something is missing from his work after the mid-Fifties. I think he lost faith in himself as a writer and wanted to be Good. Ugh! Not good for an artist. In his work, I mean.
Oh well, a ramble after just watching the Twilight Zone episode The Hitch-Hiker. Talk about a downer! Actually, I find it sort of darkly beautiful. Inger Stevens sells the TV version. It's one of those stories, almost an anecdote, that needs to be told right to work at all. Lucille Fletcher did a fine job of it, and I noticed that Rod Serling did the adaption for the Zone. The script rather gives it all away too obviously in the first scene, but no matter, as in a short time it's almost soothing, like an Edward Hopper painting with words and in motion. It's evocative, and near the end, after poor Inger's inability to convince the sailor that the hitch-hiker is real, her pleading with him to stay, and after the phone call to New York, it becomes strangely poetic.