Johnson sums up his approach to fantasy in this way: For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise its foolishness. If its not about something then its just oddballsville for oddballsvilles sake. If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting. The game must be like a game of chess, it must have restrictions set on it. A man with one miraculous talent but not two. A man with one miraculous talent, howeverthere are certain kinds of imposed rules on how that works and what it must be about, and ultimately it must be about human beings, it must be about the human condition, it must be another look at infinity, it must be another way of seeing the paradox of existence.
A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS (2/3/61)
Written by George Clayton Johnson
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: James Sheldon
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: stock
Cast:
Hector B. Poole: Dick York Miss Turner: June Dayton Mr. Bagby: Dan Tobin Mr. Smithers: Cyril Delevanti Mr. Sykes: Hayden Rorke Mr. Brand: Harry Jackson Driver: Frank London Newsboy: Anthony Ray
Mr. Hector B. Poole, resident of the Twilight Zone. Flip a coin and keep flipping it. What are the odds? Half the time it will come up heads, half the time tails. But in one freakish chance in a million, it’ll land on its edge. Mr. Hector B. Poole, a bright human coinon his way to the bank .
After paying for his morning paper with a coin that lands on edge, mild bank clerk Hector Poole finds he has the power to read peoples minds but it gives him nothing but trouble. His revelation that Sykes, a businessman applying for a sizeable loan, intends to bet it on the horses in a desperate attempt to repay embezzled funds results in the man storming out of the bankan act that greatly displeases Bagby, Pooles boss. Then Poole overhears Smithers, an old and trusted bank employee, thinking about going into the vault, filling his briefcase with money, and escaping to Bermuda. Poole tells Bagby, who searches Smithers briefcase and finds travel folders, a sandwich, and a pair of socks. Smithers thoughts were no more than a recurring daydream. Poole is fired. Miss Turner, a fellow-employee who has a crush on Poole, tries to console him, but she doesnt know what to think of his claim that hes telepathic. Just then, Bagby rushes up. Sykes has been arrested Poole was right. He offers Poole his old job. Miss Turner sends Poole the thought that he should press for a promotion. Using information hes gained telepathically about Bagbys weekend plans with his mistress, he blackmails Bagby into making him an office manager and giving Smithers a free trip to Bermuda. Leaving with Miss Turner, Poole buys an evening paper from his usual newsstand, where the newsboy has been keeping his earlier miracle-coin standing on edge all day. But the coin Poole now tosses knocks over the other and his telepathic powers are gone.
One time in a million, a coin will land on its edge, but all it takes to knock it over is a vagrant breeze, a vibration or a slight blow. Hector B. Poole, a human coin, on edge for a brief time in the Twilight Zone.
The first of George Clayton Johnsons four Twilight Zone scripts was his lightest, but the easy tone doesnt detract from it. The episode is charming and funny, and it does have a point: that people do things without thinking about them and think things without having the slightest intention of doing them. Or rather, that telepathy isnt all its cracked up to be.
The humor in this piece is precarious, requiring just enough exaggeration to be funny but not so much as to seem ridiculous. Fortunately, both the acting and direction were up to the task. Dick York (pr^-Bewitched), June Dayton, Dan Tobin and the utterly delightful Cyril Delevanti all perform their roles with just the proper sense of self-satire.
This was the first of six episodes directed by James Sheldon. Beyond guiding the episode, Sheldon also conceived two funny bits of business. In the first, Hector Poole overhears some sympathetic thoughts about himself and at first believes them to be coming from a bust of George Washingtonwhen theyre actually from Miss Turner. In the second, Poole, deliberately eavesdropping on the thoughts of the banks customers, idly strolls up to a woman who is smiling blissfully and holding a stack of moneyonly to find that shes thinking absolutely nothing.
On the set during the filming were George Clayton Johnson and his wife Lola. He recalls that the reaction to his story was very favorable. Dan Tobin said that it was a darn clever idea. He thought that it would make a series, of what would happen to people who came into contact with that coin. So I wrote a presentation called A Penny For Your Thoughts, and I wrote a story about a gambler who got the coin which allowed him to read thoughts. He was in a big poker game and he knew he was going to win, hed won one poker game and another and another, because he could read the minds of the other players. Now its finally the biggest poker game of all, and its all very obscure. He is taken to this very special place to meet with this very famous gambler, and the very famous gambler is an Orientaland the Oriental thinks in Chinese when hes watching the cards!
The dearest memory that Johnson holds regarding A Penny For Your Thoughts stems from another incident that occurred during the filming. I felt sort of like a stranger on the set, he recalls. It was the Twilight Zone set, not mine, and I felt like I was being allowed to eavesdrop by even being allowed to be there while it was done. And while this was happening, Rod came through with a couple of people, visitors that he had brought on, and he saw me and Lola and he stopped to introduce us to these people. And his attitude toward me was one of great respect. It wasnt like, Tm Rod Serling and this is one of the flunkies on the set, it was more like, Look, heres the man who wrote this absolutely wizard thing that were making right now. It really built my ego and made me feel worthwhile.
THE TROUBLE WITH TEMPLETON (12/9/60)
Written by E. Jack Neuman
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Buzz Kulik
Director of Photography:George T. Clemens
Music: Jeff Alexander
Cast: Booth Templeton: Brian Aherne Laura Templeton: Pippa Scott Barney Flueger: Charles S. Carlson Willis: Sydney Pollack Freddie: Larry Blake Sid Sperry: King Calder Marcel: Dave Willock Ed Page: John Kroger Eddie: David Thursby
Please to present for your consideration Mr. Booth Templeton, serious and successful star of over thirty Broadway plays, who is not quite all right today. Yesterday and its memories is what he wants, and yesterday is what he’ll get. Soon his years and his troubles will descend on him in an avalanche. In order not to be crushed, Mr. Booth Templeton will escape from his theater and his world and make his debut on another stage in another world that we call the Twilight Zone.”
Feeling very old and very tired, Templeton longs for those years in the twenties when his beloved wife Laura was alivethe only truly happy time in his life. When Willis, a brash young director, severely dresses him down for arriving late to the first rehearsal of a new play, he rushes from the theater and finds himself back in 1927. Searching, he locates Laura in a speakeasy. Although as lovely as he remembered, her manner is quite the opposite; she is flirtatious, vulgar, and self-centered. His idyllic memories destroyed, he returns to the theater and the present. But he has inadvertently brought back a memento: several sheafs of paper Laura was fanning herself with. Inspecting them, he sees they are pages of a script, entitled What To Do When Booth Comes Back. Realizing the entire thing was staged for his benefit so that he would stop dwelling on his past and get on with living his life Templeton is filled with a new self-confidence. Commanding Willis respect, he plunges energetically into rehearsing the new play.
Mr: Booth Templeton, who shared with most human beings the hunger to recapture the past moments, the ones that soften with the years. But in his case, the characters of his past blocked him out and sent him back to his own time, which is where we find him now. Mr. Booth Templeton, who had a round-trip ticket … into the Twilight Zone.
The Trouble With Templeton marked the only contribution to The Twilight Zone of E. Jack Neuman, a friend of Buck Houghtons and writer-producer of eleven pilots which have become TV series, among them Mr. Novak, Dr.
Kildare, Petrocelli, and Police Story.
Of Templeton, Neuman says, I had often toyed with the notion of You cant go home again, and it should have been, You shouldn’t go home again, ever, which is what I was trying to say here. Although the script is beautifully written, Neuman wasnt able to labor on it long. I wrote it in about a day, he recalls.
Cast as Templeton was Brian Aherne, and a better choice could not have been made. Like Templeton, Aherne had been a great actor, superb as the Emperor Maximilian in the movie Juarez. At fifty-eight, he was still a remarkably handsome man and a perceptive and skillful performer. But when he received the Twilight Zone script, he didnt know what to make of it. When I first read the script I thought the writer must surely be out of his head, he said at the time. Then Rod Serling … suggested I have a look at one of the earlier shows. Id never seen it before, as Im not much of a TV fan. Then I realized what twilight zone meant, and that the script was really as excellent one.
Brian Aherne was just a charming, wonderful, delightful man, a terribly professional man, and one of the nicest people that Ive ever worked with, says Director Buzz Kulik. He was very touched by what he had to do. It was very, very real to him. As for himself, Kulik admits that he too was moved by the material. Maybe it was because it was about show business, maybe because I could relate to it myself much more than most things, but Ive always had a very special affection for that show.
The Trouble With Templeton has in it one of the most visually beautiful scenes of the entire series. This occurs in the crowded, smoke-filled speakeasy in which Templeton finds Laura (very well played by Pippa Scott). The place is loud with conversation and raucous music. At one point, Laura breaks into an absurd-looking Charleston. Templeton tries to grab her, to stop her. She slaps him and says, Why dont you go back where you came from? We dont want you here! She returns to her dancing. The camera follows the devastated Templeton as he rushes out. The moment he exits, all those in the speakeasy immediately fall silent and still. The smoke which had suggested gaiety a moment before now suggests a ghostliness. The camera pans across the room back to Laura. She steps forward. The expression on her face is one we have not seen before,
one we immediately realize reflects her true nature: beautiful, intelligent, full of sorrow and longing. The lights behind her dim, leaving her alone in space. Then the light goes down on her, and all is black.
The biggest concern we had, says Kulik, was that we would make sure that everybody understood that she was playing a part, that she was really forcing herself to do this to get him to go back, you see. He adds modestly, It seemed to work.
Also cast in The Trouble With Templeton was Sydney Pollack, a friend of Kuliks who is today a top film director with credits which include They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, The Way We Were, and The Electric Horseman. Ironically, the part Pollack played in Templeton was that of an abrasive young stage director. Buzz Kulik admits that the role had a bit of a private joke to it. He and I knew a producer-director in New York, and I didnt think very kindly of this man, he and I had had our struggles through the years, and so had Sydney. And the thing about this fellow this man we were vaguely imitatingwas that he came from Georgia. He had lost his accent, much of it, except that when he became angry or uptight or nervous, he fell back into his youthful patois. We had to give this character some kind of additional color, so we thought, lets make him this fellow that we both knew.
THE INVADERS (1/27/61)
Written by Richard Matheson
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Douglas Heyes
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Cast:
Woman: Agnes Moorhead Voice of Astronaut: Douglas Heyes
This is one of the out-of-the-way places, the unvisited places, bleak, wasted, dying. This is a farmhouse, handmade, crude, a house without electricity or gas, a house untouched by progress. This is the woman who lives in the house, a woman who’s been alone for many years, a strong, simple woman whose only problem up until this moment has been that of acquiring enough food to eat, a woman about to face terror which is even now coming at her from … the Twilight Zone.”
Hearing a strange sound on her roof, the woman goes up to investigate and sees a miniature flying saucer out of which emerge two tiny, robot-like
creatures. A battle for survival ensues, with the creatures tormenting the woman with a ray gun and one of her own kitchen knives. Finally, she manages to grab hold of one, battering it into lifelessness. With an ax, she destroys the saucer and the remaining creature within. Before he is killed, he sends a message to his home planet not to send more ships to this world of giants. The lettering on the side of the saucer readsU.S. Air Force!
These are the invaders, the tiny beings from the tiny place called Earth, who would take the giant step across the sky to the question marks that sparkle and beckon from the vastness of the universe only to be imagined. The invaders, who found out that a one-way ticket to the stars beyond has the ultimate price tag. And we have just seen it entered in a ledger that covers all the transactions of the universe, a bill stamped paid in full,’ and to be found … in the Twilight Zone.
Its been mentioned previously that Richard Matheson was, and is, a master of the horror form, yet none of his Twilight Zone scripts to this point had explored this genrenot until The Invaders.
Again, Buck Houghton looked to Douglas Heyes to pilot a difficult episode. Immediately, Heyes had a number of suggestions. For the lead he wanted Agnes Moorhead, an actress who, during her long career, played everything from Orson Welless mother in Citizen Kane to Elizabeth Montgomerys in Bewitched. The reason that I suggested her, says Heyes, was that she had done a radio show called Sorry, Wrong Number, which was a half-hour tour de force where she used nothing but her voice, and I said, Heres a half-hour tour de force where the woman doesnt use her voice at all!
All might have seemed clear to Heyes, but not to Agnes Moorhead. She looked at me very curiously when she came in, Heyes recalls. I said, What is it? She said, Well, Ive been reading the script and Ive been trying to find my part! There was only one woman, and there were no lines, and most actresses skimming through a script look to see what the woman has to say. Shed looked through the whole part and couldnt find anything the woman had to say!
So Heyes had his lead, but what about the others, the little men? I didnt want to do this with process photography or with tricks, a la Dr. Cyclops or something, says Heyes. He decided that the tiny creatures should be the exact size they were shown to be. By having them that size, she was able to grab them physically and hurl them across the room, which made it far more interesting than if you were using process and she couldnt really touch them.
With his art background, Heyes had no difficulty in making a sketch ofwhat he wanted. These characters were then made, oddly enough, by the makeup department. They modelled them from my drawing, which was sort of based on the Michelin Tire Man. The reason I made them this kind of bulky round shape is that, first of all, they should not look like human beings, but secondly, after the fact, you had to say they were human beings. Ah hah! Then therefore, they were in inflated spacesuits, right?
The figures that were crafted were made of foam rubber and painted gold to give them a metallic sheen. Watching the episode, one would assume that they were given movement by some internal mechanism, but this wasnt the case. Heyes reveals that there was a slit up the back of each figure, through which a person could insert his hand. To walk, the person put his fingers in the hollows of the legs. To raise the arms, the fingers went in there. Consequently, the figures could not move their arms and legs at the same time. A little ray gun was made to light up by running a wire to an external battery with a button on it. The same was done with an antenna on one of the creatures heads. To disguise the arm sticking out of the back, Heyes claims that the operator wore a black sleeve, making it invisible against a dark background. And he should knowhe was the operator!
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Heyes not only gave movement to the tiny figures, he gave them voice as well. Apart from Serlings narration, there is only one speech in the entire show, that of the remaining, dying astronaut warning Earth. That was my voice, says Heyes, because I was those little guys.
There were still plenty of challenges left to overcome. The flying saucer the little men land in was easy; simply pull the miniature ship from Forbidden Planet out again (although a rougher model was made for those shots in which the woman attacks it with an ax). Then there was the interior of the cabin. Since at the end it was revealed to be on an alien planet, nothing could be obviously of Earth origin, yet nothing should be so peculiar as to telegraph the ending. So we used just the basic things, says Heyes. A curtain was just basically a curtain, a chair was just the shape of a chair. There was no style that could be attributed to any particular period in history or place, yet basically it came down to what would be on a farm in the most primitive type of communities.
The cabin used was a small one, and was a considerable challenge. Among those responsible was director of photography George Clemens, whose moody camera work adds immensely to the suspense. Most challenging to him was a scene in which Moorhead had to carry a candle from room to room, with the candle supposedly the only light source. I would say that was a problem, says Clemens. To truly make it look right, you have to visualize where your shadows change lights. Clemens put lights all over the set with dimmer switches, and dimmer boys to work them. In that particular picture, I had to take over a couple of dimmers myself, being able to know just what I wanted and the time to make the moves. But I think I had about six dimmer boys, six lights, and all that had to be synchronized. One source would come up and the other would go out as she went from room to room. I was very happy with the result I was able to achieve, because it looked real to me after I finally got it.
Twilight Zone Companion Page 19