Quote of the Day (Francis Ford Coppola, on Art and Time)

“Art controls time, it always has. From the moment someone first painted a picture, they were stopping time.”—Oscar-winning American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, “The Gambler,” WSJ. , October 2024

Quote of the Day (Steve Tesich, on ‘A Time of Post-Truth and Post-Art’)

“This new era is a time of post-truth and post-art. Truth and art don’t exist anymore because man has been diminished. The artist today is a clown, an entertainer. I fight against this image, and I would rather die than become the same. Art is the only religion for me, because at least while I write I can believe in a truth. This is a hard time. It is when neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky are read. All the conditions exist, except the most important ones, for man to become a human being.”—Oscar-winning Serbian-born American screenwriter (Breaking Away), playwright, and novelist Steve Tesich (1942-1996), interviewed by Dejan Stojanovic, “A Few Moments with Steve Tesich,” Views, April 1992

The image of Steve Tesich accompanying this post was taken in front of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, 1991, by Marko Rakocevic.

Quote of the Day (Douglas Coupland, on College Teaching as a Nerve-Racking Form of Public Speaking)

“One form of public speaking not usually recognized as such is teaching. I’ve had a few experiences in educational situations and they’ve been worse than flies crawling over my face. I don’t know if it’s me or what, but having to speak to college students is like having to address a crowd of work-shirking entitlement robots whose only passion, aside from making excuses as to why they didn’t do their assignments, is lying in wait, ready to pounce upon the tiniest of PC infractions. You can’t pay teachers enough to do what they do. Having been in their shoes, even briefly, has converted me into an education advocate. Double all teaching salaries now.”— Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist Douglas Coupland, “Observations: Getting Off the Stage,” originally printed in The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015, reprinted in Bit Rot: Bit Rot: Stories + Essays (2017)

The image of Douglas Coupland that accompanies this post was taken Mar. 17, 2022, in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, by the Wylie Agency of New York City.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘My Little Chickadee,’ As Mae West Teaches Math Her Way)

(An out-of-town gold digger in the West vows to tame a class of rowdy adolescent boys who have driven the local schoolmarm into a nervous breakdown.)

Schoolboy [uncredited]: “We was doin' arithmetic on the blackboard when Miss Foster took sick.”

Flower Belle Lee [played by Mae West]: “Oh, arithmetic... I was always pretty good at figures myself.”— My Little Chickadee (1940), screenplay by Mae West and W.C. Fields, directed by Edward F. Cline

Quote of the Day (George Meredith, on The Plight of Those ‘Hot for Certainties’)

"Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!—
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!"—English poet-novelist George Meredith (1828-1909), Modern Love (1862)

The image accompanying this post shows Bette Davis and Olivia DeHavilland in the 1942 film adaptation of Ellen Glasgow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, In This Our Life—a title taken, as seen in the passage above, from this George Meredith poem.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on Speeches ‘That Comfort Cruel Men’)

"From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord!”—English man of letters G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), “A Hymn: O God of Earth and Altar” (1914) 

Flashback, October 1959: Serling’s ‘Twilight Zone’ Takes Viewers to ‘Another Dimension’

With three Emmy Awards for writing already to his credit, Rod Serling began to air in October 1959 the first episodes of the series that not only consolidated his status as one of the pioneers of quality television but also established him as a legend of the science fiction and fantasy genre: The Twilight Zone.

Even with endless imitations, parodies, and revivals at the hands of others, it’s easy to lose sight of just how different The Twilight Zone was from what might be termed “alternative futures” at that time.

Serling would have none of the little green men invading Earth, mad scientists, and assorted other creatures that reflected American paranoia about the Red Scare in the 1950s. The quotidian existence of his characters was one that his mass audience could relate to, only for these everyday figures to be launched, as one of the show’s famous intros put it, into “another dimension, a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.”

The themes that Serling consistently explored were alienation, prejudice, loneliness, colonialism, climate change, domestic abuse, and war—a subject that its creator knew all too much about, having seen action in the Pacific Theater in WWII. (This summer, a Serling short story believed to have been lost for 70 years and based on his wartime experiences, “First Squad, First Platoon,” was published in The Strand Magazine.)

The series first saw light as “The Time Element,” a Serling script deep-sixed by CBS until it was resurrected and run as an episode of “Desilu Playhouse.”

The network, realizing its mistake in burying the project, now gave the green light to what turned out to be the pilot proper for the show, “Where Is Everybody?”

The Twilight Zone arrived on TV in the heyday of the anthology series, a genre that also gave rise to such acclaimed shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Playhouse 90, The Naked City, and Thriller (which I discussed in this prior post).  

Serling wrote or adapted 92 of the 156 episodes of the original The Twilight Zone, but as time went on he also enlisted the services of Charles Beaumont (who wrote another 22), Richard Matheson (16) and the future creator of The Waltons, Earl Hamner Jr. (8).

So much of The Twilight Show has passed into legend: from the eerie theme composed by Marius Constant, twist endings a la O. Henry, and Serling’s onscreen lit cigarette (the product of a three-pack-a-day addiction dating back to his wartime experiences).

Serling’s deep voice and staccato delivery of the introductions and conclusions made him as indelible a narrator as Alfred Hitchcock. But he was nobody’s original idea as host.

According to Josh Weiss’ post from March of this year on the SyFi Wire blog, the services of Westbrook Van Voorhis, famous as the narrator of The March of Time radio program, were engaged—until hearing his voice on the pilot left network execs feeling he was too “pompous-sounding.”

The idea of Orson Welles was then floated, and though that voice was certainly memorable, it would have come at a cost that would have ballooned the show’s budget. Finally, Serling suggested that he try it. To everyone’s delight, it worked out wonderfully.

For years, the creepy nature of the show left me a bit leery about viewing it. In the last few years, however, I’ve relented, and have developed some favorites among the episodes:

·         “Nightmare at 20,000 Square Feet,” with William Shatner as the airplane passenger convinced that a monster only he can see is out to wreck his flight;

·         “The Jungle,” with John Dehner as an engineer back from a hydroelectric power project in Africa, increasingly discomfited by signs that a witch doctor’s curse may be coming home to roost;

·         “Eye of the Beholder,” about a young woman undergoing a surgical procedure meant to make her look “normal”;

·         “Time Enough at Last,” on a bookworm finding himself with no distractions from his reading after a nuclear attack; and

·         “What's in the Box,” with William Demarest and Joan Blondell as an unhappy couple feuding after his TV set shows him quarreling with and killing her.

If The Twilight Zone made Serling, it could also be said to have unmade him. The non-stop demands on his time as executive producer, host, and chief writer—and of battling the show’s advertisers (McCann-Erickson) and network censors over tone and content—left him running on empty in the fourth and fifth seasons. “You can't retain quality,” he lamented. “You start borrowing from yourself, making your own cliches.”

They also left him craving adulation from the public and critics he had achieved with his on-air presence, leading to short-lived lucrative but creatively unsatisfying 1960s ventures as a game-show host, documentary narrator, and commercial pitchman for Schlitz Beer and Famous Writer’s Correspondence School.

When he did return to his typewriter, he flailed in a new entertainment landscape where his ideas were downgraded, disregarded or sidelined.

His screenplay for Planet of the Apes, for instance, was revised by Michael Wilson (the famous ending, involving the Statue of Liberty, was his major surviving contribution), and on the early 1970s series Night Gallery, he possessed no creative control, leading to complaints that it was a low-grade knockoff of The Twilight Zone.

His constant smoking and stress caught up with him, and death came to Serling in 1975 at the age of 50 amid heart surgery. A decade after its cancellation, the series that he helmed—more of a success d’estime than a commercial hit in its original network run—was already a cult favorite in syndication.

Over the years it’s influenced the likes of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, George Lucas, James Cameron, J.J. Abrams, M. Night Shyamalan, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jordan Peele (who would become the showrunner and host for a 2019-2020 remake of the series on CBS All Access.