00:00Hi, I'm Mark Scott Zickrey, author of The Twilight Zone Companion, and you are watching
00:04Life Minute TV.
00:05Hi, I'm Anne Serling, and you're watching Life Minute TV.
00:10You're traveling through another dimension.
00:16That voice, those looks, that groundbreaking show that can only be Rod Serling's The Twilight
00:22Zone.
00:23It captivated millions, and still does to this day, through its 156 episodes available
00:30to stream on Paramount+.
00:32You can also buy The Twilight Zone The Complete Series on Blu-ray.
00:36This Christmas marks what would have been Serling's 100th birthday.
00:39We caught up with his daughter Anne, who wrote a memoir honoring the legacy of her dad, and
00:44Mark Scott Zickrey, author of The Popular Twilight Zone Companion, to celebrate the
00:49man, the myth, and the legend this holiday season.
00:52It's stunning to think that my dad would be 100 years old.
00:56I can't even imagine him as an old man.
00:58He was only 50 when he died.
01:01And my last image of him is this tan face, and this wavy hair, and not looking old at
01:09all.
01:10So it's stunning, but it's also lovely that people remember him so fondly.
01:14I'm really glad that we're commemorating Rod's 100th birthday.
01:17Again, there's always the bittersweet quality that Rod died at 50, and now here we are at
01:22100.
01:23And even as a 100-year-old, I'm sure he would have had a lot to say about the current situation.
01:29But his work has lasted.
01:30And when you realize this is from the late 50s and early 60s, and yet it's still every
01:36bit as timely, every bit as powerful as it was when it initially aired, I think that's
01:40a testament to one of the great artists who's worked in any medium, actually.
01:46He's television's Leonardo da Vinci, really.
01:48And I think Rod is famous in two ways.
01:50One is that he was this amazing writer, this amazing creator of television, that was his
01:54art form, but also this phenomenal media personality.
01:58There's only a handful of them, James Dean, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, but Rod Serling, he's
02:04beloved and recognizable by millions of people around the world.
02:09It's phenomenal.
02:10I've had people tell me that they thought of my father as their father, and several
02:16actually that said they had tumultuous childhoods, and that my dad got them through watching
02:22his episodes and seeing him introduced.
02:26And no one would be more surprised than my father, who's remembered like this.
02:31People who are young now don't really understand the incredible power of television when there
02:35were only three networks.
02:37Everyone watched pretty much everything, one way or another.
02:40You knew who all these people were, and because they came into your home every week, they
02:45did have a feeling of being your family, a feeling of great familiarity.
02:47But with Rod, I think it's even more than that, because there's a feeling of authenticity.
02:52The man who's there on the screen, you feel that if you ran into him in a restaurant or
02:57a bar, you'd love to just sit down with him, and that he'd be as wonderful in person as
03:02he was on screen.
03:03And that's why Anne's memoir about her dad is so wonderful, because she takes us into
03:09that world, and we get to know so much more about Rod, and I'm so glad you wrote that
03:13book, Anne.
03:15Sometime after he died, I started another book called In His Absence, and I hadn't even
03:21begun to navigate the grief.
03:24So it took me years to write as I knew him, and again, one of the reasons was I find writing
03:30cathartic as my dad did, and so it was a way to work it out.
03:35I also wanted to know more about the professional side of my dad, and lastly, I wanted to address
03:44how some people had thought he was this dark, tortured soul, because my father was the
03:48polar opposite.
03:49He was silly, he was funny, he loved the Flintstones, he loved animals, he was a practical joker,
03:59just the opposite of what one would imagine.
04:01Yeah, and I'd like to add something to that, because again, there were several biographies
04:06that sort of positioned Rod as this dark, tragic figure who was so disappointed in life
04:11and so broken by life, and it's a total fiction, and very unfair to Rod, because he had an
04:19astonishing life force, both creatively and personally.
04:23He was so alive and so active, and such a great dad, such a wonderful person.
04:29When I was a kid, the three shows that made me want to be a writer were the original Star
04:32Trek, the original Outer Limits, and the original Twilight Zone, and by the time I got out of
04:37college with my art degree, I knew I wanted to be a writer-producer working in television,
04:41but there were no classes in that, there was no way to learn it, and it was two years
04:44after Rod's death, and I thought, well, maybe I'll be able to learn how to make great television
04:49by exploring the greatest show ever made, and beyond that, I was a huge fan of the show,
04:55of course, how could you not be?
04:57And I met one of the writers, George Clayton Johnson, when I was 16, at a convention, because
05:02I noticed that the same writers' names were on all these different shows, and they were
05:06the writers who were writing the books that I was reading, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson,
05:09Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury.
05:13So I wanted to meet these people, and so I met George Clayton Johnson, he wrote Kick
05:16the Can and Nothing in the Dark, two great Twilight Zone episodes, and he was very encouraging,
05:22and so when I came up with the idea of doing The Twilight Zone Companion, George introduced
05:26me to a couple of other people, Buck Houghton and Jerry Soule, and then I reached out to
05:30others who had worked on the show, and before I even approached Anne's mom, Carol, because
05:34she had already turned down major journalists, and I had like one short story credit, I interviewed
05:3830 people for three months who had worked on the show before I even went to Carol, and
05:43if Carol had said no, it would have been no, but I thought, look, I've got to know what
05:47I'm talking about, and I have to know how I'm going to be able to do this book.
05:50I was 22 years old at the time, and she said, yes, you have access to everything, which
05:55was incredibly gracious and generous of her, and so I was crawling through, the house was
05:59exactly as Rod had left it in Pacific Palisades, the room full of Emmys and all the other awards
06:06he had won, and the attic full of his scrapbooks and scripts, and all of these things, even
06:12his dog was still there, the Irish Setter, well, the book was rejected by 25 publishers
06:16over a two-year period, if not for my wife saying, keep going, and let's figure out what's
06:20not working here, a lot of editors who hadn't grown up watching The Twilight Zone said,
06:25well, why would anyone want a book on a show that's gone off network 15 years ago, and
06:30they didn't understand that there was an enormous audience, and so once The Twilight Zone was
06:34published, The Twilight Zone Companion was published and was a success, that did open
06:38the gates for every show imaginable, fans writing for those shows, and the reason I
06:43wrote the book was I wanted to learn how these men who wrote The Twilight Zone came to have
06:51minds like that, how they, what shaped them, what made them who they were, and these incredible
06:55brilliant writers, and Rod Serling, you know, wrote the majority, he wrote 92 of the 156
07:01episodes.
07:02You know, he dealt with the human condition, and sadly, so many of these issues are still
07:08so prevalent and so relevant.
07:11And I think the other thing is that Rod, as well as having a phenomenal, brilliant mind,
07:17he also had an incredible heart, and that heart comes across, I mean, you know, people
07:21talk about someone wearing their heart on their sleeve, well, Rod was handing his heart
07:24to the audience, basically, he was saying, you know, and he was not a cynic, he was not
07:28a pessimist, he was an optimist, he was hopeful about the human condition, he was always
07:33rooting for the little guy, and that comes across, and I think you can watch Twilight
07:37Zone episodes again and again because of their compassion, because of their humanity, because
07:41of the truth, the authenticity in them, it's not about the twist ending, if it was just
07:47about that, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because it would have come and gone, because
07:51it would be trivial, but The Twilight Zone is not trivial, it speaks to all of us in
07:55a deep way, and, you know, you can't watch an episode like Monsters Who Do on Maple Street
08:00without a profound understanding of how mob hysteria works, and, you know, and I think
08:06Rod's message is always, if we can do better, let's do better, and, you know, we just love
08:11him for that.
08:12Well, he wanted to tell these important issues, you know, he wanted the story of Emmett Till
08:16out there, and the quote, and Mark, you've said this too, he realized that he launched
08:24into The Twilight Zone because he realized an alien could say what a Democrat or a Republican
08:29couldn't.
08:30Well, again, he was being so censored, I mean, it was fascinating, because it was really
08:34a gilded cage, he was, if he was writing about something that was not controversial, like
08:41an aging boxer, you know, like Requiem for Heavyweight, then there was no problem, but
08:46if he wanted to write about politics or about racial issues, you mentioned Emmett Till,
08:50the black teenager who was murdered, Rod tried a couple times to write a TV play about
08:55that, and it was so censored that it was meaningless, ultimately, and that's what drove him into
08:59The Twilight Zone, the fact that he had so much to say, and he was being muzzled, and
09:04he was right, that by writing science fiction, fantasy, horror, he could write about the
09:09threat of nuclear war, he could write about race relations brilliantly, and it would slip
09:13by the censors.
09:14I had not actually watched a lot of The Twilight Zone when my father was alive, and I only
09:20did, after he died, more to see him than the actual episode, and one of the ones I watched
09:27some time after he died was In Praise of Pip, and it was so interesting, because there's
09:33dialogue in there between Jack Klugman and Bill Mumy, it says, who's your best buddy,
09:38Pip, you are, Pop, and it was a routine that my father and I did, who's your best buddy,
09:44you are, so I literally found my dad, again, in The Twilight Zone, that episode, and Death's
09:52Head Revisited is an incredibly powerful one, Walking Distance, I think it's so relatable
09:59for so many people.
10:00These are great episodes, all of them, and again, they're so deeply personal with Rod,
10:07I mean, a lot of people don't know Rod was Jewish, and so the Holocaust had enormous
10:14power, meaning for him, and so Death's Head Revisited is about the ghosts of the concentration
10:19camp inmates coming back to exact justice on a commandant who comes back after the war
10:25out of nostalgia.
10:26It's a great episode, and In Praise of Pip is about a man who's willing to sacrifice
10:31his life to save his son who's been wounded in Vietnam, and I think it may be the first
10:36representation of Vietnam in an American drama series, but it's about the love of a father
10:43for his child, and I'm working with Bill Mumy now on the new show we're doing, Space
10:48Command, and I worked with him on Babylon 5, but I first got to talk with him about
10:53his work when I interviewed him for The Twilight Zone Companion, and he did three episodes
10:57of Twilight Zone, and he's terrific in all three of them, and In Praise of Pip is just
11:02Jack Klugman, when he was working with Bill Mumy, because he was a little boy at that
11:06point, this is before Lost in Space, and he said to Bill, he said, listen, I'm going to
11:11be very emotional, and I'm going to be really going through a lot of emotions, don't be
11:15upset by that, and he really walked with him through those scenes, because they are very
11:20emotional, because basically he sees his son as a little boy in this amusement park they
11:24used to go to, and it's just, it's beautifully shot, Klugman is incredible in that episode,
11:30and it's, yeah, these are jewels, these are amazing episodes if you've never seen them.
11:36I urge people to just go out and watch all of them, because they're just, they're classics
11:42because they deserve to be.
11:44On the Christmas day, I'm actually going to be on a coast-to-coast, this live radio show
11:47that I do with George Noory, who's a huge Twilight Zone fan, and we'll be commemorating
11:51Rod and taking phone calls and having people share their reminiscences, say he was a Christmas
11:55present that was delivered unwrapped.
11:58So Anne, do you have plans?
12:01We're just, we're going to be in Utah with our daughter and grandkids, and you know,
12:07I always take a moment on my dad's birthday just to be alone and to think about him.
12:13Yeah, and then happy birthday, Rod, and thanks for the wonderful Christmas present that you
12:18were and are and what you gave us.
12:23To hear more of this interview, visit our podcast, Life Minute TV on iTunes and all
12:27streaming podcast platforms.
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