Realm of Imagination
How do you make a movie about Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone series? That’s the intention of Bureau of Moving Pictures’ Andrew Meieran and screenwriter Stanley Weiser (W, Wall Street), according to Deadline’s Mike Fleming. But you can’t just make one of those “this happens and then that happens” biopics. You need a thematic through-line and a compelling psychological undercurrent.
I thought about the project this morning and wrote Weiser (whom I’ve gotten to know a little bit over the years) the following:
“It strikes me that the only way to write a movie about Rod Serling is to portray him in a sense as the odd guy who sees weirdness and fantasy and unsettling nightmares in real life. And a guy who, until he hits it big with The Twilight Zone in ’59, is regarded by many as a bit of oddball (and a very short oddball at that, at only 5′ 4′) who doesn’t have the skills or resolve to fit into the button-down culture of the 1940s and ’50s.
“I’m not saying Serling literally resembled, let’s say, the perspiring and hysterical William Shatner character in Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, but he was partly that guy along with every other character on that series who saw past the tidy veneer and into the inner weirdness and oddness of things as they actually are. But that tension of being the oddball in a world of straight-arrows led to stress and anxiety and the relentless smoking of cigarettes, and finally an early death from cancer at age 50.
“I remember Serling saying that you’re initially delighted and over-the-moon from making $10,000 a week as a hotshot producer-screenwriter, and then you get used to it, and then you start living in terror that they’re going to take that away from you.”
I honestly this kind of biopic will work better as a made-for-cable drama. It sounds very intriguing but it’s not big-screen material.
Serling’s widow Carol Serling will be a producer along with Meieran, Fleming reports.
I would come at it from the point of view that Serling was a subversive and one of the most cynical men who ever lived. At least with Serling’s scripts, the fantasy in TZ was just window dressing to get to the nasty man’s-inhumanity-to-man stuff.
I’m still in awe of Charlton Heston’s speech to his fellow astronauts as they’re hiking through the Forbidden Zone at the beginning of Planet of the Apes. Time has not cut the level of venom in that speech one bit.
I always got the sense that a lot of Serling’s “Twilight Zone” success was based on roping in the oddballs, not so much being one of them. He’d buy tons of material from geniuses like Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury and was able to very skillfully turn these into episodes of television as he was an excellent TV writer. Part of the problem with “Night Gallery” was that he didn’t have that level of contributor there and though he, himself, was writing at the same level, the high concepts and “what if’s?” weren’t there. Yes, Bradbury only got one “TZ” script made and sold what, thirteen or so scripts? But the whole look and feel of “TZ” comes from stuff Bradbury was pioneering in his very American speculative fiction. Could be way off base, though.
I agree. A Serling bio-pic should be a feature-length Twilight Zone episode shot in B&W with the trademark minimal set-design. I think Justin Theroux would make a good Serling. And the film shouldn’t start off with his childhood and then hit all the bio-pic points along the way. It should start in medias res w/ Serling already having established himself and the show. I always thought that PKD’s FLOW MY TEARS…was a great way to approach the story of someone famous. Have Serling wake up one day and no one knows who he is. Or maybe that he’s literally trapped inside his own television show. Or go superweird and shoot the whole thing Italian Neo-Realist style but with Fellini-esque floruishes. Who knows. There are some many ways to approach this story, so many cool and weird ways, but you know they play it straight, because that’s the safe thing to do.
This is easy: make it a biopic of Serling as if Serling was the only man alive who knew all the Twilight Zone stories were true, and that sharing them was the only way he could keep sane.
H.P. Lovecraft on the Tiffany Network.
Some good ideas here.
I definitely like the Theroux casting as Serling, which would obviously put it on a cable venue (where it probably belongs, anyway).
I guess you’re right about Theroux, Citizen. Exhibit “E-12″ as to why I could never work in the film industry. I have ten-cent ideas.
Hi there i liked it.
Any time some dude is all “Remember that Twilight Zone where…”, I get up and leave. People who are into TZ have this form of Asperger’s where they think everybody has seen and remembers every episode ever, and they start going on and on and describe the episode in longer detail than it would take to watch it. I saw a bunch of them in like ’84 because I was so fascinated by the Landis/Spielberg/Dante/Miller movie, but I was 11 and I don’t remember a single thing about any one of them. It seemed like a cool show, for sure, but it’s good advice to run for the hills if you get trapped with some dude with an encyclopedic recall of every “classic” episode.
PLEASE ask Weiser to include in the script some explanation of the Kanamit platform-heels conundrum. Some of us haven’t had a good night’s sleep for weeks!
Serling read pretty damn voraciously, and from the outset was scrupulous and attentive about clearing rights and giving screenwriting credit where credit was due, paying due respect to the writers whose work he optioned for the Twilight Zone series.
As time went on, and Serling’s stress levels rose, he made occasional errors of recall, and forgot having read certain stories, only to smack his forehead when reminded of a certain story when someone spotted a similarity. (But he still paid off like a gentleman on those occasions.)
The man drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney, and chewed up his central nervous system far too soon. There was also a problem with one of his best writers, Charles Beaumont, who was suffering from a massively degenerative disease of the central nervous system, and sometimes confused other folks’ work with his own.
Beaumont was such a marketer that he usually had several guys ghosting for him, and once got confused and sold the same script to two different production organizations. (He covered that one by doing a “rewrite” on one of the scripts himself, effectively turning it into a different story — and, be it, noted, improving it in the process. )
I remember seeing Rod Serling in interviews expressing frustration with what was then a pre-cable three network universe. I bet he would have loved the wider scope offered by the HBO’s etc. of today.Nice to see his widow Carol, is involved in the possible new biopic.
I think they should go the “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” route. That his job as a Hollywood screenwriter was just a cover for some weird, underground government mischief. Or, that he was some communist spy, double agent, or whatever.
Serling’s life isn’t movie material: no broad strokes, just lots of subtle victories.
But if they insist, the only way to go is to focus on his struggle with homogenized television. Serling got resistance from network executives about exploring more incendiary social issues; he disguised it under the cover of genre fiction. (There’s a cool video with Mike Wallace where he basically swears up and down the show will just be silly fun.) The conflict is Serling vs. Network Suits, and “TZ” was his ammunition.
Has a movie about a genre writer ever worked, though? “The Whole Wide World” was okay, but Robert E. Howard was bugfuck.
Serling wakes up one day to discover that another man named Rod Serling has taken over his life. No one believes that he’s the real Serling and he goes mad and is arrested. At the jail Serling tells an incredulous investigator all the details of his life (in flashback, of course) and eventually convinces him that he really is the real Serling. They race from the police station and confront the imposter, who turns out to be…….
@TheEnvelopePlease has a good idea in the basic conflict’s characters – Serling v the Network Execs.
Also, the broader cultural story would be a good way to frame it. Serling was the 60s before the 60s were the 60s.
Another series of gems can be had in the cameo realm – Serling worked with a ridiculously impressive list of names.
@Wrecktem:
…Chris Carter??
Sterling was really cool, but its hard to see movie material there – unless they could do some kind of genera sense of how American culture and politics was as weird as the Twilight Zone in that period. The first series of the Outer Limits was better than the Twilight Zone.
Bandsaw Vigilante is on to something: if anyone deserves a docudrama, it’s Charles Beaumont, not Rod Serling. Born to an abusive mother who dressed him like a girl, learning macabre humor from two aunts who took guardianship of him, scamming his way into free meals through the use of a good suit, friendships with the important SoCal fantasists of the era (Bradbury, Matheson, Ellison, William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson), his first meeting with Serling where he tells him his novella in Playboy was the worst he’d ever read, and yes, his peculiar death from presenile dementia where he was 38 but looked twice the age.
He’d be too tall for the role, but I always thought Quentin Tarantino had enough of the staccato speech and attitude to play Serling in some fashion.
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