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Patreon Preview: Two from the Twilight Zone

Patreon Preview: Two from the Twilight Zone

Note: This is a preview of “Writing in the Fifth Dimension”, my 1,700-word interview with The Twilight Zone Companion author Marc Scott Zicree, originally published in the 22 April 2005 installment of CS Weekly. To read the full interview, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It came from the morgue…” level.

With Image Entertainment re-releasing The Twilight Zone on DVD, one might wonder what a nearly fifty-year old black and white show bereft of special effects could offer in this world of cgi spectacles. The answer to that question is good storytelling.

Writer-producer Marc Scott Zicree “wanted to learn how to make high quality television,” and this desire led him to conclude that the best way to discover the ins and outs of good tv was to study shows from the past, a notion which led him to The Twilight Zone. Finding a dearth of material on the subject, Zicree realized that the only way to get the information he sought would be to compile it himself. The result was The Twilight Zone Companion. Published in 1982 after five years of research, the book examined the series in detail, becoming a model for future treatises on further series.

The Twilight Zone was the brainchild of three-time Emmy winning writer Rod Serling. A veteran of live-broadcast anthologies like Playhouse 90 (1956–90), Serling started out in radio before moving to television. The 1956 workplace drama Patterns—about an aging employee replaced by a young up-and-comer—launched a series of well-received works that established him as one of the new medium’s best and brightest.

Zicree picks up the story: “During the fifties, although [Serling] was one of the top writers working in television, he was increasingly censored by the sponsors and by the networks. He would try to write about the murder of Emmett Till, or political issues…and, by the time it got on the air, the meaning was totally lost.” Frequently, Serling would find himself being forced to cut words like “American” and “lucky” from scripts because the cigarette firm sponsoring the show didn’t want its audience reminded of competing brands.

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

Note: This is a preview of “The Long Twilight”, my 1,700-word interview with Rod Serling’s widow, Carol Serling, originally published in the 21 April 2006 installment of CS Weekly. To read the full interview, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It came from the morgue…” level.

It has been over thirty years since Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling died at age fifty, but the writer’s most famous creation continues to endure in syndication, on DVD, in books, and in academic discourse at this weekend’s Rod Serling Conference being held at Ithaca College in New York, where Serling taught.

Since her husband’s death, Carol Serling has maintained the writer’s legacy, allowing students of dramatic writing everywhere to benefit from his skill as a storyteller.

I phoned Serling at her home in the Pacific Palisades to learn about her singular perspective on her husband’s legacy. After asking where I was—Burbank, “Oh, just over the hill from here,” she said—I started at the beginning of the Serlings’ story.

How did you meet Rod Serling?

We met in college…a couple of years ago. [She laughs.]

We both went to Antioch College. Rod was home from the war—World War II—and I was a college freshman. We got married two years into our college experience and the rest was history.

[Antioch is a liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, OH. Rod Serling met Carol Kramer in 1946 and they married in 1948. While still in college, Serling began writing and producing radio plays. After graduation, he started selling radio and television scripts—first in Cincinnati and later in New York and Los Angeles—becoming one of the latter medium’s most successful dramatists by the mid-1950s.]

How did The Twilight Zone come about?

He wrote a story called “The Time Element” and it was on the Desilu Playhouse; it was a big anthology show. It was the story of someone who knew that [the sneak attack on] Pearl Harbor was going to happen, a good show with William Bendix. It was really exciting, these Japanese planes coming over and this guy knows it’s going to happen [but] how can he stop it?

[Hosted by Desi Arnaz, “The Time Element” debuted on the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse over the CBS network on 24 November 1958.]

Rod had been trying to sell this idea of Twilight Zone to CBS, and they shelved it and hadn’t done anything with it; I don’t know if it was months or years. The reaction to the Desilu show was so overwhelmingly positive that they dragged the idea out again and got started.

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

Patreon Preview: David Gerrold Interview

The Martian Child by David Gerrold.

Note: This is a preview of “New Frontiers & Old Enterprises”, my 2,600-word interview with David Gerrold, originally published in the 7 March 2008 installment of CS Weekly. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It came from the morgue…” level.

The writer of the Star Trek’s episode, “The Trouble With Tribbles,” David Gerrold won literary science fiction’s highest accolades for the true story of how he adopted his son, The Martian Child, and recently returned to his roots to resurrect a long-shelved story for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Decades after they were originally written, two of Gerrold’s most personal stories have finally reached the screen, though neither is quite the same as they started out. The Martian Child chronicles Gerrold’s (played by John Cusack in the film) real-life adoption of his son, Sean (known as Dennis and played by Bobby Coleman in the film), and won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards before vanishing into development limbo for a decade, only to emerge as a screenplay by Seth E. Bass and Jonathan Tollins.

“Blood and Fire,” an AIDS allegory originally written for Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, is finally seeing the light of day as part of the fan-produced Star Trek: New Voyages series with Gerrold helming the story from the director’s chair. As the former hits DVD and the latter closes in on its internet release, I caught up with Gerrold to learn the history of both projects.

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer / Editor

Patreon Preview: Children of the Streets Essay

Children of the Streets by Harlan Ellison (Edgeworks Abbey Archive, 2020). Cover photograph by Marty Woess.
Children of the Streets by Harlan Ellison (Edgeworks Abbey Archive, 2020). Cover photograph by Marty Woess.

Note: This is a preview of “From the Gutters to the Streets”, my 2,200-word article on Harlan Ellison’s fourth short story collection, Children of the Streets, originally published in the now-out-of-print Archive edition of that book. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It came from the morgue…” level.

Harlan Ellison’s fourth short story collection, Children of the Streets, was—until the twenty-first century—one of the writer’s most elusive collections. Compiled as a follow-up to his first book of juvenile delinquency tales, The Deadly Streets (Ace Books, 1958), the collection was originally titled Children of the Gutters, a phrase that still appears in several of the story-specific introductions. 

“Ten Weeks in Hell,” the general introduction, was Ellison’s first professional sale, to Lowdown magazine. Despite paying the author $25, the magazine ran someone else’s words with the title “I Ran with a Kid Gang” under the byline of Phil “Cheech” Beldone—the alias Ellison used while undercover with the Barons in Brooklyn—and alongside a photograph of the author with an airbrushed scar in the October 1955 issue. …

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer / Editor

Patreon Preview: Blade Runner

Note: This is a preview of “From Electric Sheep to the Final Cut: The Evolution of a Blade Runner”, my 2007 essay on the evolution of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel across twenty-five years of cinematic re-edits. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It Came from the Morgue…” level.

Cover art by Harry Sehring.

Like many cinematic adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s literary output, Blade Runner takes its hook from the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but uses the book as a starting point to develop the ideas in a new direction. Blade Runner, as adapted by writers Hampton Fancher and David Peoples and realized by director Ridley Scott, inverts much of the novel’s intent by altering the nature of the story’s protagonist and the audience’s viewpoint on the world where he lives.

Written in 1966 and published two years later, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? told the story of bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his pursuit of renegade androids in a feel-good consumer culture occupying a dying Earth of 1992. Dick’s book presented a society wherein citizens flaunted their empathy by caring for an ever-decreasing supply of live animals, or pretending to do so, in the case of the eponymous electric sheep. The depleted state of livestock was the result of a radioactive cloud that constantly eroded the genetic code of those who remained on Earth rather than emigrating to its prosperous off-world colonies.

If the prospect of eventually being classified as “a special”—too gene-damaged to reproduce or hold down a worthwhile job—wasn’t reason enough to leave Earth, the deal was sweetened by a free custom-designed android for every colonist, but these slaves were illegal on Earth. It was Deckard’s job to “retire”—a euphemism for “kill”—any that make their way to the homeworld.

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

Patreon Preview: J. Michael Straczynski

Note: This is a preview of “The Write Place with J. Michael Straczynski”, my previously unpublished 8,700-word interview with J. Michael Straczynski. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $10 “Fresh copy!” level.

“The best part of it is knowing that it wasn’t due to personality, lord knows,” said J. Michael Straczynski of his writing success. “It was due to making black marks on a piece of paper. Over and over again. For thirty or forty years. Somewhere along the line, you learn something. That’s how you become a writer. You sit down at a keyboard, and ten years after, when you stand up again, you’re a writer.”

“They’re exquisitely arranged black marks,” I said. “They’re not just tossed out there.”

“One certainly hopes so,” said Straczynski.

This career-spanning interview from 2008 focuses on the craft of writing in general, but makes reference to the challenges of showrunning Babylon 5 (1993–8), the frustrations of Crusade (1999) and Jeremiah (2002–4), as well as Straczynski’s success with Changeling (2008) and the difficulties he faced in adapting World War Z (2013) and the unproduced They Marched Into Sunlight.

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

Patreon Preview: MirrorMask

Note: This is a preview of “The Men Behind MirrorMask”, my 2005 interview with Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. To read the full interview, please join my Patreon account at the $5 “It Came from the Morgue…” level.

With fifteen years of award-winning collaborations in the comicbook industry, writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean embarked upon a new phase of their respective careers with the creation of MirrorMask, a film produced by the Henson Company, co-plotted by Gaiman and McKean, with the former writing the screenplay and the latter directing the film.

“The first real conversation about it was between [producer] Lisa Henson and Neil Gaiman, because Lisa knew Neil,” said Dave McKean.

Gaiman continued, recounting Henson’s initial approach, “Would you like to write a family fantasy film? You’ve got a four-million-dollar budget and it could be anything.”

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer

Doctor Who Literature: Paradise Towers

I listened to Bonnie Langford’s reading of the book and it was splendid. The cover art is by Alister Pearson, who defined the look of Doctor Who art when I wandered into the cosmos.

Build high for happiness!

On 30 November 2024, I recorded the first of three Doctor Who Literature podcasts I was booked to do after my initial appearance in March 2023. As the trio are in relatively rapid succession—each novelizing a story from one of Sylvester McCoy’s three seasons in the title role—I suggested to host Jason Miller that we record them in the reverse order of publication, River Song-style, with us referring back to things in future episodes.

As I mention in this episode, disappointingly—for me—recorded first, I am wont to take things one step beyond reasonable. (Rrroll that R for the full McCoy.)

Happily, Jason—the other Jason, the one that hosts the show—fulfilled my long-standing desire to meet Jim Sangster, whose work I’ve admired for decades, so I’ll forgive his chonologia…next time.

Wallscrawl stating "Pex Lives".
©1987, 2021 by BBC Studios.

You can listen to our discussion of Doctor Who: Paradise Towers by Stephen Wyatt on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube, and don’t forget to have a look at Jim’s video—featuring the vocals by Antony Owen—that cracked me up just before we started recording.

I’m passing the virtual hat…

Welcome to Humanity Is My Business, the online home of the Jason Davis.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing for Creative Screenwriting, Cinescape, or Collider; my work for Babylon 5 Books or with Harlan Ellison; or my books, Writing The X-Files, the Babylon 5 Encyclopedia, or the behind-the-scenes saga of my forthcoming making of Babylon 5 books, I invite you to take a look at my newly launched Patreon account.

I’ve been a freelance writer since 2003, and much of my early work—interviews with writers, including Guillermo Del Toro, Rockne S. O’Bannon, and J. Michael Straczynski; essays on Blade Runner, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Godfather; and other oddities I’ve likely forgotten I wrote—has been unavailable for years. I’ll be exhuming a couple of these every month in “It came from the morgue…” at the $5 level.

First up is “Knocking Over the Candy Shoppe”, the essay I wrote for the now-out-of-print Archive edition of The Deadly Streets by Harlan Ellison. You can read the first couple paragraphs here to see if it takes your fancy.

For patrons who join at the $10 level, there’s “Fresh copy!” These are newly written pieces—some based on older works, but completely re-written or expanded by more than 50%, or both—that allow me a creative outlet beyond the aforementioned Babylon 5 project that consumes most of my waking hours.

The initial offering is a 2007 interview with Steven Moffat, discussing his writing for Coupling, Doctor Who, and his then-forthcoming series, Jekyll. A bit of this was published in CS Weekly, the long-defunct online companion to Creative Screenwriting, but it’s more than doubled in length. I went back to the original interview recording and got every bit of writing advice the future Doctor Who showrunner had to offer.

You can see a few paragraphs of the Moffat piece here, to see if it’s your cup of tea.

For those who don’t want to go the Patreon route, but appreciate my work and want to offer a digital tip, I’ve also established a Ko-Fi account.

Whether you found me via Creative Screenwriting, Cinescape, Collider, Babylon 5 Books, HarlanEllisonBooks.com, Writing The X-Files, the Harlan Ellison Books or Babylon 5 Preservation Project, Patricia Tallman’s B5 Events, or my Write Your Story workshops, I appreciate you taking time to explore my anarchic little website.

Thank you for your interest.

If you find my work worthy of a contribution via Patreon or Ko-Fi, thank you for the support. It is appreciated more than you know.

Be well,
JASON DAVIS

Patreon Preview: Steven Moffat

Note: This is a preview of “The Strange Comedy of Doctor Who and Mister Moffat”, my 3,300-word interview with Steven Moffat. To read the full essay, please join my Patreon account at the $10 “Fresh copy!” level.

“I always wanted to be a writer,” said Steven Moffat, thumbing a goodnight text to his wife—eight hours in our future and headed for bed—into his Blackberry. “There was never a time where I wanted to be anything else. I can’t recall any other ambitions, quite honestly.”

It was Saturday, 17 February 2007, and we were sat in a quiet corridor of the Los Angeles Airport Marriott, the din of a nearby convention underscoring our conversation.

“The very first things I wrote were an adaptation—a very bad one, as you’d expect from a seven-year-old—of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and endless Doctor Who stories. I have the distinction—this year—of writing my own new version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Doctor Who; hurray, I’ve really made progress there.”

To continue reading, please join me on Patreon. Your interest in my work is much appreciated.

JASON DAVIS
Freelance Writer