Howelings

Losing at the Movies Part 2

BY MARK HOWELL

KONK LIFE STAFF WRITER

 

Following our column on the movie and theater travails of Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan last week, we have encountered some information hitherto unknown to us about a famous television and film writer and director.

He is none other than Rodman Edward “Rod” Serling, the screenwriter, playwright, producer of live TV dramas and narrator of his own notorious science-fiction anthology TV series, “The Twilight Zone.”

The new information comes from an online site, the “Education Forum for Teachers and Educators,” specifically its “Controversial Issues in History: JFK Assassination Debate” division.

Turns out that it was Rod Serling who authored the 1963 motion picture “Seven Days in May,” itself a notorious piece of work about a military conspiracy to overthrow the presidency, which President Kennedy himself permitted to be filmed in the White House.

It also turns out Serling’s “Twilight Zone” series was cancelled by CBS within months of his writing a letter critical of the findings of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy — (whose “chief architect of various fictions”) in the choice words of the Education Forum was Allen Dulles, the CIA Director whom JFK had fired. Dulles was also a senior partner at a Wall Street transnational corporate law firm where he also managed the financial portfolio of CBS chairman, William Paley.

A year later, as President Lyndon Johnson and the Joint Chiefs and the CIA committed to putting combat troops into Vietnam, Serling then scripted an anti-war plea for cooperation between nations for ABC TV titled “A Carol For Another Christmas,” starring Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers, the only TV movie ever directed by the great movie director Joseph Mankiewicz.

It aired once and then was suppressed for 48 years.

Writes Douglas Caddy, a teacher from Houston, in the Education Forum: “That movie certainly has Rod Serling’s imprint on it. The dialogue is uniquely his. And Peter Sellers in the scene near the end gives a memorable performance. Its message will be ignored today at our peril as it was 50 years ago when the LBJ-military-industrial complex asserted itself after JFK was executed in Dallas and escalated the war in Vietnam.”

Serling was admittedly a wild man whose war record left him with a markedly bruised psyche. Just weeks before his wedding, he earned $1,000 testing a newly invented jet ejection seat. He survived, but barely, telling friends three other men had been killed before he made the test.

And it was after being knocked out in a 1961 boxing match with Archie Moore that Serling is reported to have said: “Man, I was in the Twilight Zone!”

Then in 1972 he wrote the screenplay for “The Man” from the Irving Wallace novel about a black senator from New Hampshire (played by James Earl Jones) who becomes President Pro Tempore of the Senate, then assumes the U.S. Presidency by succession.

In 1975, Serling suffered a minor heart attack and was hospitalized. He spent two weeks at Tompkins County Community Hospital before being released. A second heart attack led to 10 hours of open-heart surgery, already considered risky at the time. He suffered another heart attack on the operating table and died two days later at the age of 50.

*****

 

Quote for the Week:

 

“It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”

— Rod Serling

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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