Facts, Fables, and Footnotes for the Week of October 2, 2022

OCTOBER 2 — OCTOBER 8

The Twilight Zone premieres on CBS.

On October 2, 1959, a very literary show premiered on CBS. It was called, of course, The Twilight Zone. Not literary, you say? Tell that to Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson.

When CBS greenlit the first season, Rod Serling was contracted to write 80 percent of the scripts. To fill out the remainder, he sent out an open call to writers—and received 14,000 manuscripts in the first five days. None of them were useable, and Serling decided he had to try another tack: getting established genre writers on board. One of these genre writers, of course, was his hero, Ray Bradbury.

In an interview with Sam Weller, Bradbury remembers that the two writers met in 1958, a year before the premiere of The Twilight Zone on CBS. Serling was a friend of John Gay, with whom Bradbury was already working, and they sat together at a Writers Guild awards dinner. “After dinner, Rod said he was starting a series, a fantasy series, but he didn’t really know what he was doing, he needed help,” Bradbury said.

I said, “Come to the house with me right now and I’ll give you books that will help you.” I gave him copies of books by Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, John Collier and Roald Dahl. I said, “Now you’ve got a complete idea of what your show should be like. Buy some of these stories or hire these authors to work for you, because you can’t do the whole thing yourself.”

By all appearances, Serling read the books Bradbury gave him. He also reached out to some of the writers Bradbury had turned him onto, including Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson. Beaumont, Matheson, and Bradbury read a few of Serling’s sample scripts and liked the project, all agreeing to contribute.

Pretty immediately, Serling had his core writing crew: Richard Matheson, who is still most famous for the early vampire novel I Am Legend, would contribute 16 episodes, including the iconic “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” and Charles Beaumont would be credited with 22 before his untimely death from an unspecified brain disease at 38.

But Bradbury had less success adapting his work for The Twilight Zone. His first script, “Here There Be Tygers,” was accepted but never filmed. (The party line was that his scripts were “too expensive to shoot,” but it sounds a little more complicated than that.) In the end only one Bradbury original made it to the series: the 100th episode, “I Sing the Body Electric!,” is an adaptation of an unpublished Bradbury story.

Did Rod Serling plagiarize Ray Bradbury? Keep reading here.

SPONSORED BY THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE

Announcing the 2022 Cundill History Prize Shortlist

The Cundill History Prize recognizes and rewards the best history writing in English. Administered by McGill University in Montreal and awarded by a distinguished jury, the Cundill History Prize honours the abiding passion for history of its founder, F. Peter Cundill, by encouraging informed public debate through the wider dissemination of history writing to new audiences around the world.

Check out this year's 2022 shortlist.

MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM

Write. You write. That’s the only way. You keep writing and if you have any talent at all, which of course is a necessity, you will get better and better as you write. But you got to keep writing. You should not go to those classes or seminars or sit around some guru and talk literature. You’ll never get anywhere that way. It’s pleasant. It’s enjoyable, but the only thing a writing class has to offer is that you have to write. You should instill that in yourself. Be persistent and constantly write in whatever field that appeals to you most. You’ve got to keep writing. That’s the only answer.

In other (old)

news this week

Charles M. Schulz’s countercultural masterpiece Peanuts debuts (October 2, 1950) • Revenge king Edgar Allan Poe is found delirious in a Baltimore gutter under mysterious circumstances; it’s the last time anyone will ever see him before his death—after which they will see him a fair amount (October 3, 1849) • Extremely British satirist Anthony Trollope quits his job at the British General Post Office in order to write full-time (October 3, 1867) • A California Superior Court judge rules that Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” is of “redeeming social importance” (maybe even one of the most iconic poems in the English language?) and thus not obscene (October 3, 1957) • The first issue of Esquire is published, with stories by Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Dashiell Hammett (October 4, 1933) • Model, poet, and artist Elizabeth Siddal is exhumed at Highgate Cemetery in London in order to recover the manuscript of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poems buried with her (October 5, 1869) • Thousands attend the funeral of French novelist Emile Zola at the Cimetiere de Montmartre in Paris (October 5, 1902) • Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree is published (and 60 years later, someone fixes the ending) (October 7, 1964) • The brilliant Toni Morrison becomes the first Black American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (October 7, 1993)

“People who don’t write think that writing is just the physical act, but first come all the steps of thinking it out before.”

Born this week in 1950

“I’ve never written the things I’d like to write that I’ve admired all my life. Maybe one never does.”

Died this week in 1979

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