The Outer Limits Companion

THE OUTER LIMITS COMPANION

DAVID J. SCHOW

Research Associate Jeffrey Frentzen College of Musical Knowledge Lawrence Rapchak Production Associates Douglas Kaufman Gregory Nicotero

A GNP / Crescendo

Book Hollywood, California 1998

THE OUTER LIMITSTMCOMPANION A GNP/Crescendo Book, published by arrangement with the author.

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Copyright

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© David J. Schow, 1986, 1998. All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by David J. Schow. All Rights Reserved. Text design and layout by the author and

Zyborg d.Zign.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored into or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, internet, electronic bulletin board, e-mail or any other means now known and extant or yet to be invented), without the prior written permission of both the copyright holder and the above publisher of the book.

For information

GNP/Crescendo Record Co., Inc., Publishing Division, 8480-A Sunset Blvd./ Hollywood, CA 90069/ TOLL 1-800-654-7029/ FAX (213) 656-0639. E-mail: [email protected]/ WEBSITE: www.gnpcrescendo.com

address: FREE:

Portions of this book appeared previously and in altered form in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, December, 1982 through February, 1985. An earlier edition of this book appeared under the title The Outer Limits: The Official Companion (Ace Books, December, 1986). Published by the Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Teleplay selections appearing in this book are copyright

©

1963-1965 Leslie Stevens, Joseph Stefano and Metro­

Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. Photos and film representations from The Outer Limits television series are

© 1963-1965 Leslie Stevens,

Joseph Stefano

and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., and are used by permission. Photos from the Showtime Network's The Outer Limits television series are

©

1995 Outer Productions, Inc.

All rights

reserved. The Outer Limits is a trademark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., and is licensed by MGM Consumer Products. Visit The Outer Limits website at www.theouterlimits.com. Excerpt from the screenplay Psycho, by Joseph Stefano, on p. 44 copyright

©

by Universal Pictures, a Division of

Universal City StudiOS, Inc. All rights reserved. Courtesy of MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA, Inc. Due to a pagination error this edition contains no Page 186. No information or text is missing. Live with it.

PRINTING HISTORY First GNP/Crescendo edition / August 1998. 10 9 876 54321 ISBN 0-9665169-0-7 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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ACKNOWlfOGfM fNTS The book you now hold in your hands reall y has been years in the making, as they used to say in those old colossal/stupendous/g igantic movie extravaganzas . It was not intended to be. But. Applause, if you please, for our cast of thousands . Above al l , the author must express the deepest possible thanks to Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano, who patiently endured repeated and often exhaustive delving into their pasts, and without whose kindness and assistance this book could not exist. Without their pioneering approach to telev ision, you would be holding air right now, and it is hoped that their work has been done some measure of j ustice. Few words are comprehensive enough to convey the debt of grat itude owed Murray Oken, formerly Western Division director of United Arti sts Television, who contributed selflessly to the project in its early stages . Special thanks, too, to M arilyn Stefano, who i s a great hostess. A long time ago, Jeffrey Frentzen was the only other person on the face of the planet w i l l ing to eat, drink, sleep and l ive The Outer Limits on a 24/7 basis. His efforts remain indispensable to thi s present volume. People who worked on The Outer Limits or with its creators were fundamental to thi s project, and without exception they accommodated many arcane questions and generously supplied information, referral s, photographs or other unique production materials from the program : Allan B alter, Claude B inyon, Jr. , Orin Borsten, Wil l iam B oyett, Ben B rady, John B rahm , Johnny Chambers , Wah Ming Chang, Francis Cockre l l , Ol iver Crawford, Robert C u l p , Jim Danforth , Robert C . Dennis, Meyer " M ike" Dol insky, Richard Dorso, David Duncan , John E lizalde, S idney Ellis, Harlan E llison, John Erman, Roger A . Farris, Joanna Frank, Dominic Frontiere, James Goldstone, Conrad Hal l , B ill Hart, B yron Haskin, Robert Cleveland Johnson, Robert H . Justman, Lee H . Katzin, Milton Krims, Martin Landau, Hugh Langtry, Anthony Lawrence, Paul LeB aron, Seeleg Lester, Stephen Lord, Tasha Martel , Elaine Michea, Ib Melchior, Dav i d McCallum, Lou M orheim, Sam Neuman , John M. Nickolaus, Meryl O'Laughl in, Gerd Oswald, Wil l i am P. Owens, Lindsley Parsons, Jr. , B . Ritchie Payne, Kenneth Peach, Vic Perrin, Fred B . Phi l l ips, John S . "Jack" Poplin, Peter Mark Richman, Dean Riesner, Cliff Robertson, Ralph Rodine, Jerome Ross, Donald S. S anford, Tom Selden, Henry S i lva, Dean Smith, Jerry Sohl, E l l i s St. Joseph, Harry Thomas, Gene Warren , Sr. , Grace Lee Whitney, and Ben Wright. Then there are the many people you may not know, who supplied data, entrusted me with rare or one-of-a-kind Outer Limits memorab ilia (either from their personal collections or by helping to dig them up with Egyptologist fervor) , or otherwise assisted the project w ith their talents, encouragements and adv ice: T. E. D. Klein, Grant Christian, Dave Ayres, Douglas B arrett Anthony Jones, Forrest J. Ackerman , Robert Sabat, Jim Trupin, Peggy Sniderman, Marc Scott Zicree, B ob Reed, Gary Geran i , Bob Skotak, Gene Trindl, Paul Coltrin, Jim Rondeau, Terry Kepner, Abel P. M ills , Jeffrey Talbot, Harry West of KZAZ-TV, Ted Bohus, Susan Dalton of the University of Wisconsin, James H. Bums, Marcus N ickerson, James M . Elrod, Andrew Sniderman, Dr. James A Corrick, Curt Stubbs, Mark K ligman, Jon and Joan Rosen, Trini Ruiz, Randy M artin, Sharon Em ily, Lea Braff, Mick Garri s, Lea E. Harp , Jerry Neeley, Dave Ichikawa, Jeff Weinstein, Brian Math ie, Karl M i l ler, Darren Raley, Larry Rapchak, Mon Ayash, Joel Schulman , Debra Richardson, John Windsor, John Javna, Gary Dumm, Nader Gabbai , Mel i ssa Ann S inger, Ginjer B uchanan, John Rounds, Gerald Hurley, Leo Leiber, Sandra Dodd, Terry Knipe, Shannon Parr and Cathi Milandin, B i l l Warren , Kevin Danzey, Tim Murphy, Jim Mathenia, Bob M artin and Dave Everitt (formerly of Fangoria magazine ) , Colleen Mal one and Mark Hoist of MGM/United Artists, and the very demented folks at KXLU-FM in Los Angeles. Finally, our thanks to the brigade of attorneys who helped us navigate choppy seas : Cynth ia Webb and Richard Weltman, Herbert Nusbaum of MGM/UA, Thomas L. Scheussler, and David Siff. Thank you all , ladies and gentlemen.

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A�KNOWlfOGfM fNTS

B U T W A I T! T H A T'S N O T A l l! The 1 998 edition could not have come to pass without the participation of the folks below; all equally essential and much-appreciated: Neil Norman, Mark B anning and Ray Costa of GNP/Crescendo Records, " Digital " Douglas Kaufman of Zyborg d.zign, Gregory J. Nicotero, Jesus Gonzales , Dominic Stefano, Shakti Chen Stevens, Dominic Frontiere, B ob B um s (at last ! ) , B rendan Dawes (who established a fabulous Outer Limits website in the UK at : http://www.subnet.co.uk/brendan/outer.html). Jeff Kaufman , Sabucat Productions, Amy B arbash, my evil twin David J. S kal , Tracy Torme, Sheldon Teitelbaum, Alex Motamen, Richard Cohen, Fangoria Magazine 's Anthony Timpone, Michael Gingold and Steve Newton, Andrew Asch and Mark Altman of Sci-Fi Universe Magazine, Ted Okuda of Filmfax Magazine, Steven R . Johnson of Delirious Magazine, Michael Key of Makeup Artist Magazine, Alain Carraze of Destination : Series i n France, B ob Stephens of the San Francisco Examinel; Chris Martinez of AP Wirephoto, Tom Weaver (doubleplusgood interview thanks), Michael Cassutt, Chris Turman, Mark B urbey, Danny S oracco and Chris Choin of Dimensional Designs , Scott Spiegel, Steve Bissette, Kyle Counts, Donnie Gillespie, Donovan B randt, Taylor White and John Henny of Creature Features in B urbank, Erin Perry of IN·FINN·ITY Productions , William Lenihan, Richard Cohen, Matthew J. Dewan (the world 's most intense " Fun and Games " fan) , Russell Adams and Lidia Youn of Schulman Photo Lab, Stephen Lord and Harlan Ellison (again), Robert H . Justman ( again and again), Richard Christian Matheson, Ed Asner, Sally Kellerman, Shirley Knight, Henry S i lva, Robert Sampson , Bill Hart, the staff of the Museum for Radio and Television B roadcasting, in New York City (and now, in LA) , Jessie and all the subsequent staff of the still-much-missed Outer Limits Bookstore, Kari Barba of Outer Limits Tattoo, Michael and Tricia Bellocchio of Outer Limits Furn iture & Design, the management of the Outer Limits Lounge in Sparks, Nevada, Debbie Notkin, editor of the Prima Books novelizations of Outer Limits episodes (Volumes I-II-III), Jennifer Fox of Prima Publi shing, Deborah Goodwin, Cristina Dodson and Steven J. Rubin of Showtime Networks, Joe Rhodes of TV Guide , Herr Doktor F. Paul Wilson (your tape is in the m ai l ) , Carol B ua, Susan Toumaian, Denine Nethercutt, and Deborah Waldron of MGM, UA, and/or MGM/UA, the Fax Lady from Vancouver (who wishes to remain anonymous), director B i l l Malone (for requesting - and getting ! - Jeff Corey for our episode of HB O ' s Perversions of Science series, "The Exile" ) , and Arion Berger (with gratitude, for writing " Incredibly Tame Stories: Probing the Outer Limits of S l ick " ) . And yes, w e have more attomies : Legal thanks t o Alan Rubin , Douglas Venturelli and Patti Felker, shining beacons of rationality and hermetically-sealed logic . Finally, my everlasting love to the amazing Christa Faust, Indexatrix . . . who still hasn 't seen all 49 episodes. Yet. -

DJS

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Pr e f a c e t o t�e S e c o n � [� i t i o n The main text of the book you are now holding originally appeared in trade paperback form as The Outer Limits : The Official Companion (Ace B ooks, Berkley Publishing Group, December 1 986), and, prior to that, as a series of eight articles plus an episode guide in Rod Serling 's The Twilight Zone Magazine ( 1 982-85 ) . With any luck, this edition o f the more sanely­ titled Outer Limits Companion should be a more definitive text, incorporating addenda, corrigenda, restored copy, more interviews and more photos. Several new sections detail significant events in Outer Limits history that transpired following publication of the original edition. Every page of the earlier text has been re-examined, re-thought, embellished, and in some instances, rewritten. The first edition was accomplished without recourse to the many digital and word processing miracles routine to the production of this edition - one file of photographs in this present volume was received via e-mai l . By contrast, the first draft of this work in book form was done on a manual typewriter - all 800 manuscript pages of it. The submission draft weighed in at nine and a half pounds . Keeping pace w ith the tech, this edition effortlessly set new extremes for crashing hard drives, corrupting files and losing scanned material i nto the ether. Obviously, some research sources are much richer now than they were in the early 1 980s - tape, disc, and 1 6-millimeter print resources i n particul ar. Another factor, more elusive, is the contention that the single best way to find out about any topic is to commit your observations to print . . . then wait for people to crawl out of the woodwork to correct you. Happily, most of the erroneous data i n the first edition amounted to simple typos or educated conjecture based on incomplete material ( such as the summation of the un produced script, "The Watchbird," the ful l synopsis of which is now incorporated into Appendix II) . On the other hand, as we approach the Millennium we also reach the terminus of available oral h istory on certain subjects . The opportunities to interview film akers who began their careers in the s ilents, for example, are almost all gone. S ince publication of the first edition many fine Outer L imits talents have been Left: David McC a l l u m prepa res to "tilt ti m e " i n "The Forms of T h i n g s U n known . "

lost t o u s forever. I had m y last talk with director B yron Haskin at his home in Montecito, California, on Hallowe'en, 1 98 3 , never suspecting that he was to die the following Apri l . I took what were probably the last photographs of him for publication, and regret that he never got to see the finished book. He was able to relish some of his own peppery quotes, however, in the magazine-article version. Then, on July 4th, 1 989, Vic Perrin died. The Control Voice was gone, silenced. I still have a tape of Vic reading Control Voice speeches that were never aired. Joe and Marilyn Stefano were among the attendees at Vic 's memorial service in Sherman Oaks, and he was elegantly eulogized, but when the speeches were done I think it would not have been out of l ine to give him a round of applause. He was a performer, and it seemed somehow wrong to send him down in silence. It is also worth noting here that Vic's widow, Rita, attempted to get credit for her husband on the Outer Limits video box copy. Quoted in an interview printed in Starlog # 1 55 (June 1 990) , she said, "They said it was too late, that the boxes had already been printed and they owed Vic nothing, contractually. " Within a month of Vic Perrin , Gerd Oswald died. Without Gerd there never would have been access to one of the two existing prints of The Unknown , from which came the frame blowups used herein, in the days before v ideo sampling and "pulls" direct from the tape (or disc) image. He was the single most important director to the visual " identity" of the show, and therefore a crucial component to the longevity it still enjoys. It's a pity he and Vic and B yron were not around to be interviewed by TNT for their Outer Limits Marathons; Haskin's mordant commentary in particular would have been hugely entertaining - and probably censored, especially when he referred to certain network executives as "horse cocks . " Two days before Perrin's passing, staunch Outer Limits regular Ben Wright died. Many others are no longer with us to tell their stories, either, including Warren Oates, John B rahm and Robert C. Dennis ( 1 982), S imon Oakland ( 1 98 3 ) , Walter B urke, Neil Hamilton, Ralph Rodine and Meyer Dolinsky ( 1 984), Kent Smith and Grant Williams (198 5 ) , Ralph Meeker and Abraham Sofaer ( 1 98 8 ) , Robert Webber ( 1 989), John Hoyt (199 1 ) , Robert F. S imon ( 1 992), and Edward Mulhare and Richard Jaeckel ( 1 997). Makeup

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TH [ OUHR liMITS COM PANION artist Fred Phil l ips died March 2 1 st, 1 99 3 , after progressive blindness compel led him to retire from the industry. Midway through the layout process for this edition, in August, 1 997, B ob B urns informed me that Project Unlimited founding father Gene Warren had died. By no means i s this a complete necrology, and I have no intention of rooting through the Acknowledgements and i nserting " the l ate" next to the names of those who have since died. I The single most valuable contributor to " the Project" in its earlier incarnations was Jeffrey Frentzen, here more properly credited as Research Associate. From the l ate 1 970s through the mid1 980s, Jeffs resources and data helped neatly plug the gaps in my own pile of interviews and incunabula. While the writing i s mine (and, I hasten to add, the critical opinions herein, plus any m istake s ) , the legwork was close to a 50-50 split, and there is not a page in this book that i s not touched i n some way by the hard work Jeff accomplished, frequently under trying and adverse conditions . New to this volume are t w o sections on The Outer Limits' unique and compelling music, courtesy of composer and conductor Lawrence Rapchak , himself an attendee at one of the very first Outer Limits "marathons" (in 1 979). Time constraints and my own musicological ignorance prevented inclusion of these long-planned sections i n the first edition, and it i s a pleasure and a relief to be able to incorporate them here. The biggest advantage of the first edition, I've always joked, was that it was printed on such crappy paper stock that it would lay flat no matter what page

it was opened to, and that said paper made the book so l ight it could practically be mailed anywhere in the continental US for a single first class stamp. The paper caused two more serious problems - the severe cropping of several unique photos , and bad photo reproduction all around. These l atter defects have, I hope, been corrected i n the present edition, thanks to the dogged persistence and l ate hours of Douglas Kaufman. Gregory Nicotero, the "N" of KNB EFX Group, also sacrificed his computer to the vampiric needs of the Project, and without his help in grabbing hundreds of frames this edition would contain less than half the pictures it does. Other newfound contributors and helpmates are named as comprehensively as possible adj acent to the original Acknowledgments. The first edition also became quite a hot bootleg item, to j udge by subsequent " work s " entirely dependent upon its information - sans accreditation - and by the number of bastard Xerox copies seen in the offices of assorted production companies, which deserve the obscurity of remaining nameless. No doubt, some readers will feel distressed that thi s volume does not cover S howtime Network's " revival" of The Outer Limits in more detail . Others may lament the l ack of a detailed episode guide for the Showtime seri e s ' proposed 88 segments-which would make this book almost three times its present length, were such coverage attempted to a depth even approximating that lent the original series . That i s another book entirely. A diff e rent book, for another writer to tackle. The original O u ter Lim its the fundamental concern of th is book - has maintained its legendary status without decaying into s imple camp, and I certainly did not think I would be writing about it into the 1 990s. For holding the battery and bulb together for this edition, the credit goes to Neil Norman of GNP/Crescendo Records, who encouraged a revision on the faith that this book had a vast potential audience it had not yet reached. " The O uter Limits - god, that was my life , " Dominic S tefano ( son of Joe) told me on Hallowe'en, 1 995 . Who knows? Perhaps in 2007 I'll be doing this all over again . -DJS 1 3 July 1 997

David J. Schow with Vic Perri n , the Control Voice, at his home i n J u ne, 1 9 84. (Photo: G. Hofl

I For a special Stop Press note regarding Leslie

Stevens, please see Page

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INTRooumON

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I n t rD� u c t iDn There is nothing wrong with your television set .. As recited weekly by the omnipresent, yet never-glimpsed Control Voice, the opening narration for The Outer Limits has one of the highest recognition factors of any catch-phrase in the h i s tory of television-chances are you know it even if you 've never heard of The Outer Limits . Today, the Control Voice seems familiar, l ike an old friend. In the early 1 960s, it was new and decidedly odd. Here was a TV show "host" you could not see, and who might be a ghost, or a machine, or possibly an alien being. It was stuff that was not normal. The central figures in the landscape of commercial TV at this time were a motley bunch. Our medical horizons were being defined by a pair of doctors named Kildare and Casey, the latter with the hopefu l implications o f h i s chalkboard infinity symbol. Legal fireball Perry Mason shared a caseload with The Defenders and a more v igorous , " now " gang who staffed a combination cop show/gavel opera called Arrest and Trial. Vic Morrow was still slugging it out with the Nazis on Combat! while McHale 's Navy yucked it up in the Pacific Theatre. S id Caesar and Joey B ishop were the kings of TV comedy. Fred Flintstone was in prime time. Variety shows top l ined Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason, Danny Kaye, and a newcomer-a lanky, country-boy type named Jimmy Dean (in his pre-sausage days) abetted by one of the first Muppets, a ragged hound dog named Rowlf, whose canine contemporary, Lassie, was a biggie on Sunday nights as a lead-i n to Wal t D isney's program. The Clampett family was entrenched in their Beverly Hills manse, the fragile beauty of Inger Stevens graced The Farmer 's Daughter, youth rebel lion consisted of Fred MacMurray versus My Three Sons, and George C. Scott was in the midst of his acclaimed East Side/West Side series. Audiences were presumed to be singing along with Mitch Miller, dancing to Lawrence Welk, and being caught unawares by Allen Funt 's obnoxiously intrusive Candid Camera . 1 963 was the heyday of the western , and TV ' s most popular cowpokes included Matt D i l l o n and h i s deputy Chester, the whole Cartwright clan, the steer-punchers of Rawhide ( including Clint Eastwood as the ramrod) , and the pilgrims of Wagon Train . The days of Playhouse 90 had come to an end, and many anthology shows (shows without continuing week-to-week characters) had bitten the stage dust. In

1 96 3 , Kraft Suspense Theatre gave the format a last try, as did Chrysler Theatre, with host B ob Hope. The Bell Telephone Hour was still around. Alfred Hitchcock had begun his n inth year of intoning "Good ee-vening " prior to the weekly mayhem on the program bearin g h i s name. S u spense and the supernatural were a dead issue as far as Thriller (hosted by B oris Karloff) was concerned; that series had expired the previous year. Sporadic forays into science fiction were sti l l being made by The Twilight Zone generally very basic tales founded on the staples of science fiction literature, supplied with twist endings, scripted by the top fantasists of the period, and bracketed by the unforgettable presence of Rod Serling. Apart from these shows, the h istory of science fiction on TV had been a dismal one indeed. Tales of Tomorrow ( 1 95 1 -5 3 ) touched science fictional themes now and then, but its stilted, two-act format was overly reminiscent of a high school play. Ziv/UATV 's Men Into Space ( 1 959-60) was mostly concerned with the Destination : Moon angle, featuring rock-j awed space pioneers beset by meteor storms and depletions of precious fuel. When an anthology show made a stab at the genre, it usually followed this lead, as with a Desilu Playhouse segment, " Man in Orbit," which starred Lee Marvin as an astronaut. Science fiction was best served, it seemed, by the police-procedural approach used by Truman B radley for Science Fiction Theatre ( 1 955-56), which gave us arid dramas of chemical mixes and the laws of physics. The alternative was the rash of heavily militarized, proto- Star Trek space operas that had overrun the tube since 1 949, when Captain Video debuted on the Dumont Network. In his j etwash came Tom Corbett, Space Cadet ( 1 950), Space Patrol ( 1 95 1 ) , Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (both 1 95 3 ) , A tom Squad ( 1 95 3 ) , and Commando Cody, Cap tain Z-R O and Jet Jackson , Flying Commando (all 1 95 5 ) . Although The Outer Limits could b e considered a stepchild of Rod Serling's, a more direct conceptual antecedent can be found in the short-lived Way Out ( 1 96 1 ) , which was hosted by fantasy writer Roald Dahl. Way Out featured supernatural horror tales, frequently with downbeat endings, and outrageous monsters created by makeup artist Dick Smith-

THf OUHR liMITS COM PANION presaging the moody Gothic c limate and bizarre beings that would become the backbone of The Outer Limits . The earliest publicity for The Outer Limits d i d use the Science Fiction Theatre approach as a selling point:

Limits' initial promotion was actually l e s s concerned with hewing t o the boundaries of known technology than in providing the network brass with a template they could easily recognize , a past series to which The Outer Limits could favorabl y be compare d . The brochures also Each episode of THE OUTER LIMITS begins promi sed the heady menu of "new worlds beyond with a scientific fact. That fact is dramatized, reality; sights and sounds never before experienced; illumined, projected in to the Future and adventures of th e inn ermost mind, th e farth est de veloped into a highly imaginative yet believable adventure .. . the swift developments galaxies, and all that lies between . " in space, electronics , "miracle " medicine and Twilight Zon e 's true province was fantasy, atomics provide fresh stimuli for the creative although it, too, is most often labeled science fiction. dramatist, and bring "the unknown " more More importantly, it was a hit. " It was a prestigious frighteningly close , more fascinatingly real. show from the moment it went on the air, " said John Erman, who worked as a casting director for both Fortunately, the show shook off thi s programs . "Rod was one of the most celebrated writers dependency o n textbook science early on, though of his day; the show got good ratings and terrific its creator would remain intrigued by (and base acc laim . " For the A B C network bras s , then, most of his scripts on) hard science. The Outer compari son of Th e to Lim its Outer Serl i n g ' s show could only be beneficial . Once it secured a slot in prime time, Th e Outer Limits found its own way, but in retrospect the points of similarity shared by the two are intriguing to note. B y modern stan­ dards, both have two strikes against them by being black-and-white anthology shows­ which means no color, and no continuing char­ acters . Th e Outer Limits ' third strike was that it comprised a TV syndication package of a scant 49 one-hour episode s . If it was " stripped" by local affiliates in syndication (that is, run daily on weekdays, or five times per week ) , it would bare l y provide two Jill Howorth and David McCo l l u m " h ig h six" on the set of "The Sixth F i nger. " (Cou rtesy B o b Burns)

INTRooumON

Alien extras cavort with fem a l e d ress-a l i kes beh ind the scenes of "A Feasi b i l i ty Study. " (Cou rtesy Forrest J. Ac kermanl

Wel l , not exactly. The plot described i s that of an Outer L imits episode titled "Fun and Games "-slightly modified, misted by memory. Outer L im its ' most germane similarity to its half-hour predecessor was that it was blessed with extraordinarily innovative founders . The people in the key production positions were both writers before becoming producers, and what Rod Serling was to The Twilight Zone, Leslie Stevens and Joseph Stefano were to The Outer Limits . Their series would blend science fiction and Gothic horror in l iterate teleplay s , well-filmed a s film, eschewing the prosaic techniques of TV and running contrary to the medi um's entropic flow of dullness. The anthology format (held in such dread by the continuing-character orientation at the network s ) lent itself uncommonly well to

months of non-repeating program material . Run once weekly, it could stretch to a year .. _almost. Among telev ision programs that found their audiences and grew increasingly pop u l ar i n syndication (during a time when syndicated TV was the only way to re-experience these series after their initial broadcasts and reruns), The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone share a rare distinction : They have remained in syndication continuously ever since their network cancellation s . Technically, neither show has been off the air since its inception . Apart from the rej uvenation of endless reruns, both shows have also gained the kind of immortality Joseph Heller unknowingly achieved when he coined the phrase Catch -22-a permanent place in the contemporary idiom . Epi sodes from one serie s are frequently misremembered as being from the other. When the Reader, a Los Angeles tabloid, polled pedestrians as to their favorite TV reruns, they got the following recap from a salesgirl : The old Twilight Zones were scary even though they were in black and white. There was one epi sode I' l l never forget . . . about a crazy scientist who creates a species of wild l izard people who use boomerangs with serrated edges. Then he puts two humans out into the swamp w ith them to see what w i l l happen. The girl is always fall ing and twisting her leg. It's frightening, but I think they finally hack and slash their way out.

"Where ' s my tie? " Wa rren Oates cracks a n un-a l ien s m i l e between ta kes on the set of "The Mutant. "

THf OUHR liMITS COM PANION Andromedan visitor of "The Galaxy Being , " the ant­ l ike extraterrestrial bad boys who were "The Zanti Misfits , " or the swollen forebrained, pointy eared super-intellect of the far future presented in "The S ixth Finger"-as well as the Control Voice 's cadenced invitation to venture ' from the inner mind to . .THE OUTER LIMITS . " For the casual TV fan, this show was obviously not coming from the same place as Bonanza or The Beverly Hillbillies . To find out exactly where it did come from, we must delve into some unusual lives and the formation of one very unusual production company. It is a singular period in the TV timeline: the end of the so-called Golden Age, the genesis of televised science fiction and fantasy, and the inception of a series that has admirably withstood the harsh tests of time and v ideo technology-and beyond. In the words of the Control Voice, you are about to participate in a great adventure. .

"C an you tel l m e a nyth i n g more ? " Robert C u l p a n d Arl i n e Ma rtel consult a " d i g i ta l " computer i n " Demon With a Glass H a nd . "

ground breaking treatments o f fantastic material . Themes so basic that they have since become genre cliches would be unveiled for the first time on TV. The show would be received as an alien element in the monochrome landscape of commercial TV, and its " numbers" would insist that it was not a success. More than three decades l ater, however, people are s t i l l watching it, and t i m e has offered the acknowledgments of popularity and artistic success. In 1 983 the series made the " Critic ' s Choice" section o f Video Review after Stephen King, in his informal, book-length s urvey of the horror field, Danse Macabre , called it " the best program of its type ever to run on network TV." (Just to demonstrate how times have changed since Danse Macabre was published in 1 98 1 , King went on to write, " And by the way, if you get it in your area, warm up the old Betamax and send me the complete catalogue by way of the publisher. On second thought, you better not. It's probably illegal. But treasure the run while you ' ve got it; like Thriller, the l ike of The Outer Limits will not be seen again. " Things did change . . . and in another way, they ' v e gone j ust as King predicted. ) For most viewers, the hallmarks of The Outer Limits were its more well-remembered Stuntman M i ke La ne recoi l s from t h e p u b l i c ity photog ra pher on t h e set o f " Keeper monsters-the shimmering, mouthless of the Purple Twi l i g ht. "

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P l [ A S [ S TA N O B Y Broadcast 1 6 Septe m b e r 1 9 63 Writte n and D i rected by Lesl i e Stevens P i l ot tile: Please Sta n d B y Episode t i t l e : "The G a l axy B e i n g " Assistant D i rector: Robert Justman Di rector of photography: J o h n N i ckolaus CAST: A l l a n M axwel l (Cl iff Robertso n ) . Carol M axwe l l (Jacq u e l i n e Scott). Andromedan B e i n g (Wi l l i a m 0 Doug las, J r. and C h a rles M acQua rry). Gene " B uddy" M a xwe l l ( Lee P h i l i ps). Loreen (Allyson Ames). Caretaker Collins ( Roy Sickner). State Trooper (James Frawley). National G u a rd Major ( B i l l Catc h i n g ) , Po l i c e m a n (Allen Pinson) WITH: Po lly B u rson, May Boss, Don H a rvey, Mavis N e a l , W i l l i a m Stevens, Peter Madsen.

The Andromedan u n leashes a blast of radiatio n .

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Cottage-industry inventor Allan Maxwell has built a high-powered transceiving device adj acent to his commercial radio station, and on it scans " three­ dimensional static " that resolves into the image of an alien who hails from the Andromeda galaxy. Using a translating computer, Allan discovers that the Being i s a tinkerer, much like himself, and they find time for a brief exchange of ideas before an unavoidable social commitment prompts Allan to leave temporarily. A snafu at the radio station during his absence causes his scanner to teleport the Being to Earth, where with its radioactive aura it kills a deejay, fries the station's caretaker, and wreaks havoc as it searches for Allan to help it. By the time Allan is able to conduct the creature back to his transmission shack, the police and National Guard have been called out. When a trigger-happy sheriff accidentally shoots Allan's wife, the Being cauterizes the wound with radiation and saves her l ife . Then it confronts its would-be destroyers with a show of force by wiping out the radio tower with a wave of its hand. "I warn you, " it tel l s the crowd, "there are powers in the Universe beyond anything you know. There is much you have to learn. You must explore. You must reach out. Go to your homes-go and give thought to the mysteries of the Un iverse. I will leave you now . . . in peace. " It reveals to Allan that since it has violated a law prohibiting

contact with destructive societies (such as Earth) , it will be destroyed by its own race. It cannot stay, and it cannot return home. Moving back into the workshop, it say s , " End of transmission" . . . and then tunes itself out of existence by turning down the transmitter power. The planet Earth is a speck of dust, remote and alone in the void. There are powers in the universe inscrutable and profound. Fear cannot save us. Rage cannot help us. We must see the stranger in a new light-the light of understanding . And to achieve th is , we must begin to understand ourselves , and each other.

Network executives are notoriously critical audiences, and this pilot film, with its dazzling alien, its visual/aural assault on the senses, its cosmic plot, and its offbeat Control Voice, might have been too much to digest in a single great gulp. No one in the screening room was more interested in finding out the reactions of the brass than the man who had conceived the whole project. To him, Please Stand By wasn't just science fiction and wasn't j ust another series pilot. This man was pitching a philosophy.

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lfSlI f SHVfNS

T� e l e s l i e S t e v e n s S t o r y One of the things that make me know The Outer Limits was ahead of its time was the restraint placed upon it by the network, by money, by time, keeping it from having its ful l shot. It's l ike something trying t o peck its way out of an egg, only the she l l i s too hard. Let that she l l crack open, and it w i l l all begin to happen. -Leslie Stevens

Conversation with Leslie Clark Stevens III could be a spellbinding, disorienting thing. A keen-eyed, sharply cut, infectiously self-assured man , he spoke ­ rather, he divulged information-in low, rhythmic, carefully-measured units, as though aware his mind was ramming ahead ful l-tilt, and conscious of the need to break his output up into digestible portions so his audience might assimilate it more easily. Thi s process always seemed to amuse him. B ut on occasion he'd share the joke. " A funny thing happens with imaginative material , " he said. "It has to have what I call the taproot into the awe and mystery of the universe, that overtone of truth behind appearances that shows up in all good science fiction. When you start to bullshit science fiction, it goes to pieces sooo fast ! If you're into the absolute quintessence of the emerging new mythological age, read Rhythms of Vision by B lair. He ties together Mitchell , Atlantis , and all those books having to do with cosmic alignment, and the magnetic lines in the Earth, with people like Peter Tompkins you know, the math that occurs in the Aztec pyramids - and then ties that with forms and resonances, with modern , heavy physic s . " One is tempted t o call Stevens' million-doll ar smile a Hollywood smile, the kind intended to melt the hearts of money men like sherbet in a microwave oven . "When you tie all that stuff together, you begin to see the dim outline of the Aquarian Age . . . and that's what The Outer Limits did at its best; that's what a good show has to do. If it doesn't tie i nto the emergence of a new awarenes s , a new age, then it's off target just enough to be a terrible off-putter. " Stevens, a typically robust Aquarius, was born February 3 , 1 924, at Wal ter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC, the only child of Nellie Stevens (nee Milliken) and Leslie Clark Stevens II. His father was a Left: C h a rles Sch neema n ' s promoti o n a l pai nting depicti ng The Outer Lim its ' fi rst contact.

Lesl i e Steven s i n the d i rector's c h a i r, c i rca 1 96 2 .

US Navy vice admiral , a graduate o f MIT and inventor of the arresting gear u sed to land jets on aircraft carriers , a naval attache to Moscow, and an author and artist whose own father, the original Leslie Clark Stevens, h ad been a Methodist c l ergyman and misSiOnary. Stevens described his father as "very hard-science, but imaginative. He rewarded me with a weekly allowance at the rate of a penny a word for memorizing Shakespeare and the B ible . " In 1 934, as part of his schooling at Westminster Abbey, the eleven-year-old Leslie also attended performances of Shakespeare at the Old Vic . "As a result of this exposure and incentive, " he say s , "I decided one afternoon that I was a playwright. I had never written a play, nor could I write one . " B y age 1 2 he had put his first play on paper, and, writing about thi s experience years later for Theatre Arts Magazine, reflected : My first plays were such that sensible friends advi sed me to forget my conviction. Some stil l d o . B ut I could n o more forget it than I could forget my own name. I continued to write . . . During m y beg i n n i n g years I av oided technique; as a consequence, I failed. For over fifteen years I m i sconceived and m isbegot a host of "plays "-hundreds upon hundreds of pages of dialogue devoid of drama. And yet, somehow, the world rewards even the blindest persi stence. Even the most ignom inious of fail ures add up to priceless experience.

At fifteen, while attending Western High School in

THf ounR liM ITS COM PANION scary, " remembered Stevens. B urgess Meredith and Agnes Moorehead were also affiliated with the troupe during Stevens' tour of duty. After nearly a month the truant officers showed up to collect him. " B ut my parents made a deal with them , " he recall s . " With their permission , I stayed out of school, provided I'd go to summer school l ater and gradu ate , which I final l y did . " Young Stevens toured with the company for nearly six months, and after graduating, wrote six plays for various summer stock groups. " I don't think Orson ever knew I was playing hookey; he just took it for granted that I was part of the company, " said Stevens. Actress Vivi a n Nathan and Lesl i e Steven s backstage d u ri n g rehea rsa ls for The Lovers . "He used to make the cast think he had total recall by quoting their l ines to them from the Washington, DC, he entered one of his efforts, "The middle of the house, yelling at them onstage. B ut then, Mechanical Rat , " in a contest sponsored by Orson he'd forget, halfway through the line, and say out of the Welles' Mercury Theatre, which was then touring the comer of his mouth to me, 'What's the next line, what's nation's capital doing Henry IV, Part I. " It was about the next l ine? ! ' I'd prompt him; I held his book while robots , " said Stevens. "It was sort of science fiction, he rehearsed. And then, of course, he would rave on even then ! And the prize was to get to hang around and say, 'Oh, plumed l ike estriches: and the cast would w ith the Merc ury Players . " Stevens won the all be amazed . . . and miss the whole thing. " competition and immediatel y began showing up at In 1 943 h e enlisted i n the U S Army Air Corps and rehearsal s . " Orson started using me as his gofer; I became an intelligence officer, spending the next three guess he thought I was in the company. I'd get him years stationed in Iceland, where he organized small coffee, a newspaper, stuff l ike that. And when they left stage entertainments to boost morale. He came out of Washington and went to Philadelphia, I just went with the service a ful l captain in 1 946, and spent the them ! " following year studying at the Yale School of Drama When Stevens' parents next heard from their son, on his GI B i l l benefits. Then he moved to New York it was by postcard. "They nearly fainted, because they and began a three-year stint with the American Theatre didn't know what had happened to me at first. I told Wing, becoming a night c lerk in a hotel to support them I was safe, and they could reach me through the himself while writing. At 25 he was a night-ward Chestnut Street Opera House. I meant that l iterally, attendant in a psychiatric hospital , and at twenty-eight because I was sleeping in a coil of rope up in the fly a copyboy for Time magazine. "I had the same job for gallery. " Stevens became a stand-in and assistant to the same people in both place s , " he would l ater remark lighting expert Jean Rosenthal. During performances, to TV Guide. "They were all in little rooms , ready to he would don a green doublet for a walk-on role as j ump out the windows , and I had to c lean up after them Hotspur's page. " Anything I could do to get an extra and take them meal s . " During this time he also wrote eight bucks was worth it. I ate well , because in the eleven new plays, and some experimental ventures and Boar's Head Tavern scenes they used real beer, loaves musical revues with a new friend living in Greenwich of bread, and cold vegetable soup, so the actors could Village, a songwriter named Joseph Stefano. actually eat something while they were performing. Inspired by the positive criticism he received from They'd leave all that after every show and I'd eat it former teacher Joseph Anthony, himself an every night . " accompl ished director and actor, Stevens set out to Hotspur, in this production, was played b y John realize one of his dramas on a stage. The year was Emery, then married to Tallulah B ankhead. " She was

lfSlIf SnVfNS 1 95 3 and the play was Bullji·ght. George Axelrod (then famous for The Seven - Year Itch), read and invested in the play; other backers followed suit and an equity bond was posted. When Stevens had a nut of $ 1 0,000, he mounted the production in the Theatre de Lys, a 299-seat venue on Christopher Street i n Greenwich Village. " It's important to note that a Mexican tragedy about bullfighting with no bull involved a definite possibility of failure , " S tevens wryly observed. Hurd Hatfield starred as Domingo del Cristobal Salamanca, a highborn Castilian who fall s from grace and destroys the lives of those around him, eventually causing the death of his younger brother (whom he sees as a better version of himself) in the bullring. The play premiered in January, 1 954, and the enth u siastic reception afforded it by drama critics impelled it through fifty-six performances. With his next p l ay, S tevens stepped up to Broadway, as Champagne Complex ran for 23 nights at the Cort in Manhattan. The " complex" of the title refers to the leading lady's penchant for stripping down to her polka-dot underwear whenever she downs a glass or two of bubbly. Her straitlaced tycoon fiance calls in a "lay psychiatrist" to c ure her, and she fall s for the shrink after a few more sips and strips. Intended as frothy, double-entendre comedy, it was dismissed as slim and one-note by most critics . It did well enough, however, and kept Stevens in the public eye as a playwright. From 1 95 2 through 1 954, Stevens' father had chaired the American Committee for the Liberation from Bolshevism, a private organization created to finance and otherwise aid anti-Communist activities by exiles from the USSR. In 1 95 3 he authored a best­ selling book, Russian Assignment. The senior S tevens was sometimes spotted by reporters , attending his son's plays. He died in 1 95 6 . "I still own his collection of H . G. Wells first editions , " said S tevens. " Between us we had thousands of old pulps, Amazing Stories, and Astoundings. " Stevens' next play was his most ambitious yet, set in 1 2th Century France and focusing on the droit du seigneur, a medieval c ustom s upposedly giving the lord of a manor the right to sleep with the bride of any of his vassals on her wedding n ight. B ut The Lovers struck out, opening May 1 0th, 1 95 6 , at the Martin Beck Theatre and closing in four days. Theatre Arts found some good things to say about it: " [The]

performances had an inherent dignity, and even an occasional loftiness, that Hollywood would do well to match when it undertakes this sort of thing, as it so often does . " It did. The Lovers later became the foundation for the 1 95 6 Charlton Heston epic, The War Lord, directed by Franklin Schaffner. "Flops hurt , " noted S teven s . " Perhaps they deserve to be battered by the press. B ut into every flop there has gone much labor, and I maintain that the very fact the c urtain went up on opening night should bring some degree of recognition. What a flop actually incurs i s abuse, derision, and blanket unemployment . . . I shall never forget the extraordinary disparity between the notices of two of the major New York critics when The Lovers arrived on B roadway. These critics regularly sit in the aisle seats of the fourth row of the center section, on opposite sides of the house . About twenty seats separate the two men , and, as a result, they see the play from slightly different angles. They are both literate, cultured men of integrity, and they both represent maj or newspapers . One had this verdict: 'An impressive work of art.' The other: 'Lamentably thi n . ' The only method I know for surviving their praise or blame is to remember that reviews are expressions of opinion , reflections of personal taste-and that opinion and taste are not well­ defined things that can be assessed with any degree of finality. " While Champagne Complex was sti ll on the boards back East, Stevens broke into TV writing with a script for the prestigious Four Star Playhouse . " Award , " starring Franchot Tone and Ida Lupino, was broadcast June 30, 1 95 5 . He then adapted the 1 944 musical Bloomer Girl for a Producers' Showcase airing on May 28th, 1 95 6 . Kraft Television Theatre produced his teleplay, "The Duel , " the following year, and then came Playhouse 90. Stevens' first script for this hallmark anthology series was " Invitation to a Gunfighter, " a hard, dark tale about a town that hires a gunslinger to assassinate an outlaw (it inspired the 1 964 Yul B rynner film of the same title). Stevens' subsequent Playhouse 90s included "The Violent Heart" (an adaptation of the Daphne Du Maurier story ) , "The Second Man " (based on the Edward Grierson novel), " Charley's Aunt" and "Rumors of Evening. " In " Portrait of a Murderer, " Tab H unter starred in Stevens' study of Donald Bashor, who was executed in 1 95 7 . B y 1 95 8 , Stevens had made Hollywood h i s home,

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THf OUHR liMITS COM PANION

Leslie Stevens ( R ) d i sc u sses h i s script for Marriage-Ga-Round with sta rs Claudette Col bert i n 1 95 8 .

sold h i s first movie script, and had his biggest success on Broadway. The film script was The Left-Handed Gun , based on a Philco TV Playhouse drama by Gore Vidal titled "The Death of B illy the Kid . " A low budget precursor to the nihilist Western s of the mid- 1 960s, the film was Arthur Penn's first feature as a director, and Paul Newman repeated the role he had played in the TV version . More of a psychological study than an oat opera, it incorporates realistic violence and an existentialist tone upon which S teven s , a proponent of the New Wave in European cinema, would later rely when fi lming h i s dark l y disturbing fi lm Private Property. On Broadway, Marriage-Go-Round became the pivotal production of S tevens' play-writing career when it commenced a two-year run of 43 1 performances at the Plymouth Theatre, October 29, 1 95 8 . Charles Boyer played an anthropology

profe s sor who i s vi sited b y the daughter of an old S wedish colleague-a Nordic bombshel l (Julie Newmar) bent on seducing him, so that she may bear a child of guaranteed brain power as well as physical superiority. While Stevens' return to the realm of adult comedy did not garner many critical p l audi t s , his s l i c k l y -conceived, risque fable was a tremendous hit with audience s . S oon 20th Century - Fox was intere sted in a fi l m vers ion of Marriage-Go-Round, and Stevens was forming his own company, Daystar Production s , in partnership with one-time talent agent Stanley Colbert. Daystar' s star client was actre s s Kate Manx-S teven s ' second wife , after Ruth Ramsey, whom he'd wed during his salad days in New York and l ater divorced. While cementing TV and film deals with Fox , Stevens began work on his first independent feature , Private P rop erty , while simultaneou s l y preparing a new C h a rles Boyer a n d play about the cosmetic s industry, The Pink Jungle , for B roadway. B y 1 95 9 , at age 3 5 , he was pulling down $9 ,000 per week, and was firmly in his element in Hollywood's perv asive environment of deal-making and high stakes . B ut was the writing . any good? " There's nothing wrong with being a hack writer, " Stevens told Time magazine-his former employers. "I would point with pride to the inspired hacking of Shakespeare , Michelangelo­ you can go through a big l i st . I am a firm believer in Hollywood's golden future , and thumb my nose at those who cry, Twilight in the Smog ! ' " From the moment his father had begun paying him to memorize the B ard , the connection between writing and money was w e l l e stab l i shed in S tevens' consciousne s s , and he chased his goal relentlessly. " The best artists I know suppress a smile when a member of the audience speaks of their talent or their 'gifts . ' I write in longhand, and

OAYSTAR the pressure of the pencil through the years has created a ridge of callus on my fingers . Whenever I hear talk of talent, the callus seems to throb. But there is another gift - the ability to endure . And endurance and inner conviction, carefully chained to a writing desk, can be a powerful combination. " Obligingly, Time would dub S tevens a " hot writer­ tycoon " and a member of " the new breed; the curious combination of corporation executive and creative artist. " " He was dazzling , " recalled John Erman, who linked up with Stevens at Fox . " He was l ike a blond Orson Welles. He was young, good looking very sure of himself. He had had a terrific success in the theatre, and knew what he wanted and where he wanted to be - a man who was very secure in his craft. I was impressed with him . " Robert Justman , later t o work for Daystar on Th e Outer Limits , said of S tevens, " He was quick to smile and had a good sense of humor. A very charming man, enthusiastic and omnivorously interested in everything. I think he was a sort of Renaissance Man. He was always planning, always try ing to achieve succes sfu l ends, and he sometimes overreached himself. But you don't get anywhere without trying. He affected certain

external characteristics . He always wore a black suit - he had a number of them . " "Leslie was an image maker, " said Claude B inyon Jr. , also soon to sign on with Daystar. " He was one of those guys with a black Lincoln Continental and eight pairs of sunglasses - all black - in the glove compartment, in case one pair got lost or broke or something . I think he wanted to be President of the United States . " True enough, Stevens rarely failed to impress those with whom he dealt in Hollywood. He was a doer, fast and competent, but al so forward-thinking and revolutionary. No one knew quite what to expect of this offbeat and visionary young artist. " Leslie was interested in various philosophies, and was very in charge of his emotions," said Justman. "I think he knew quite a bit about Zen and other Eastern -philosophical -rel igioso kinds of things . B ecause he looked so youthful, with his blond hair and fair skin and unblemi shed complexion, he seemed almost mysterious at times, as if he was ageless, or came from another time, perhaps from the future. " Tom Selden , a production assistant on Outer L imits , added, " Or maybe Leslie just has a portrait in his c loset that's very old . . . "

O a y s t a r Pr o � u c t i o n s Basically, I'm a writer. 1 became a director to protect the writer, and 1 became a producer to protect both of them , and a company owner to protect them all . The artist is a serious danger in thi s business. S uddenl y an arti st w i l l say, " I real ly like this. You guys are tel ling me t o stop at 5 : 30 and wreck an entire sequence when everything is going great? This might go down in history, and you're asking me to save five grand?" -Leslie S tevens

Throughout his career, Stevens had grown to resent interference from the non-creative backers he calls " producer types " -the executives and money men who frequently dismissed him as a writer-for-hire, appropriated credit they did not earn, or handed down commercially-motivated edicts that h ampered his artistic expre s sion .

Independent production was the solution , and in 1 95 9 the trade papers announced the formation of Daystar Production s . " It ' s from Shakespeare, " said Stevens . . "The star that shines in the day is the s u n . I wanted to use ' S olar' but that was already taken by some other company. 1 I'm a great believer in the 'solar channel , ' the realization that the actual body of the sun itself i s conscious-not sentient, but conscious . Now, that usually makes people say, 'Holy shit, what's he talking about, and why isn't he in a lunatic asylum?' There ' s so much to it that to cover i t casually i n a couple of sentences, won't do i t j u stice. B ut it will whet your appetite . . . right ? " The logo o f the new firm was the sun, surrounded by five stars . Years later, S tevens put an " S " in the center of the sun. Other " indie-prods " existed at the time, such as Quinn Martin Production s , which turned out

THf OUHR liMITS CO M PANION Th e Un touchables o n the Desilu S tudios lot. " We called Daystar 'Hol lywood's First Free-Inde­ pendent' because everyone else, like Quinn, was studio-connected, " said S teven s . " We wanted the distinction of not being tied to anyone. " The S teven s - C olbert comb i n e ' s first production was a fi lm titled Private Property ( 1 95 9 ) , also written and directed by Steven s , and bankrolled to the tune of $60,000 by Ray S tark, at that time producer of the lavish film version of Th e World of Susie Won g . S tevens shot most of it at the Hedges Place addre s s he shared with Kate Manx, who starred. The total outlay for sets was $500--0ne month's rental on the empty home just above Stevens' own. Colbert paid nx:k-lxxtorn wages to all participants, and overtirre to no one. To save more money, they even put ll'ffi I:xJlh; in the lighting equiprrent " On studio �, irs like one big taxi 11rtr, nmning all the time," said Stevens, who put 00th cast and crew through two weeks of rigorous rehearsals, then shot the film in ten days. The story involves two Beat-speaking hoodlums, Duke (Corey A l l e n ) and h i s impoten t , s l i ghtly retarded p a l B oots (Warren Oate s ) , who victimize a housewife (Kate Manx) entirely at random . After spying on her from the house next door, Duke ' s plan is to seduce her, then turn her over to B oots . B oth men wind up dead on the bottom of the Stevens s w i m m i n g pool . " Th e seduction-by -proxy campaign inev itably makes one squirm a bit , " reported News w e e k . "Property compel s t h e attention in a way that i s almost hypnotic . " Tim e said that the fi lm " c arri e d the New Wav e crashing into the heart of Hollywood , " and the Catholic Church rated it Condemn ed. 20th Century-Fox was impressed by the boxoffice returns of over one mill ion dollars on S tevens' shoestring investment, and quickly tried to interest Daystar in a five-picture deal budgeted at the same figure .

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"I wouldn't touch a big Hollywood picture with a b arge pole , " S tevens said at the time. " When millions are involved, you have to satisfy the bankers. I want to satisfy myself. I don't need money now; I want freedom-and in the movies you can only have freedom on a low budget. " After completing a never-produced murder­ on-the-backlot script, Mask of Terror, for Fox , Stevens entered into a co-production deal with them for the fi lm v e rsi o n of Marriag e ­ Go-Round, which became one o f Walter Lang's last features (he had directed Tin Pan Alley and The King and J). Julie Newmar reprised her Broadway role while James Mason and Susan Hayward took over the parts played on the stage by Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert. Stevens had also planned to make a novelization of the s t o r y t h e fi r s t publication of Daystar Press, but had to put his literary aspirations hold. "The on disciplines of prose tend to hamper me," he said. ''I'm an 'ear' person and I write dialogue and drama far better, I think. " Stevens became an author in 1 969 with the publication of EST: The Steersman 's Handbook, under the byline L. Clark Stevens. In 1 962, James Mason co-produced and starred in Daystar' s next film , Hero 's Island: an adventure in w h i c h a recently freed indentured servant's fami l y must battle pirates and colonial overseers on an island off the North Carolina coast in l 7 1 8 . " I t was way ahead of its time , " said S teven s , " and a true art film, because who the hell would want to see a movie about indentured servants in 1 9627 It didn't mean anything . " It was filmed on S anta Catal ina I sland, an hour by boat from L A . Today, i n dependent TV production companies are legion, but in 1 962 the story was different. " Daystar was originally formed to make feature s , " said S t e v en s . " B ut we discovered that each time we fini shed a fi l m ,

OAYSTAR we'd lose the whole crew because there was no way to employ them continuously between films. We moved into TV to hold on to the same group of rel i able art i s t s , to keep the crew together through continuity of employment. We went to United Artists and said, 'Look, here ' s a full-fledged production company ready to do stuff. You have anything you want done ? ' " At UA he met Richard Dorso, a vice president in charge of developing new programming, and was handed a l i s t of series concept s , with instructions to check off whatever ideas struck his fancy as possible Daystar fodder. " One of the items on that list was a thing called Rode o . I checked it off, not realizing that that little mention on the list meant that United Artists would later own any show I ever did having anyth ing to do with rodeo performing, because they had originally ' suggested' it. " " Rodeo , U S A " was the pilot teleplay S tevens completed in December, 1 96 1 , and it sold a series, Stoney Burke , for the 1 962-63 season, with UA as the co-owners . Jack Lord played the title character, a rider on the modern-day rodeo circuit, and among his regular sidekicks were Warren Oate s , B ruce Dern, and B il l Hart (later O u ter Limits ' key stuntman ) . " The very fact that we turned out shows was staggering to the rest of the industry, " noted Steven s . " How in the name of God could a company with no soundstages , no e q u ipment, nothing , deliver first-run , ful l ­ production , g l o s s y - g orge o u s stuff, with photography and casts better than theirs? " A quick look at Stoney B u rke 's credit roll provides most of the answer, in that it reads like a dry run for the soon-to-come O u ter Limits dream team . Every episode features at least one actor who would later appear in a pivotal role on Th e O u ter Limits . Many of the music cues composed by Dominic Frontiere to augment cowpunching action found their way into assorted O u te r L i m its e p i s o d e s as p art of Daystar' s permanent l ibrary of s o undtrac k s . Episodes o f Stoney B u rke , weirdly enough, even look l ike episodes of Th e O u ter Limits albeit an O u ter Lim its in which the c oncern s are bronco-busting, rather than hobnobbing with creatures from outer space. Sto n ey B u rke 's production manager was -

Titles a n d logos from the open i n g a n d closing cred it seq uences to Daysto r ' s fi rst TV series, Stoney Burke ( 1 962-6 3 ) .

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THf O UHR liMITS COM PANION Lindsley Parsons , Jr. , a Twilig h t Zon e alumnus who had signed onto " Rodeo, U S A " (retitled " The Contender" ) as an assistant director. He had a knack for unearthing inexpensive locations and hammering together shooting stage rental deals on a day-to-day basis w ith Revue, Fox, and MGM . "Stoney Burke was allegedly shot all over the Midwest, " s aid Parson s . " B ut we shot it mostly in the S anta Clarita Valley, u s ing a bunch of livestock provided by a rodeo s upplier who lived next to the Disney Ranch . " When Daystar took on Th e O u ter Limits , it was Parsons who negotiated a cut-rate deal for the use of the famous MGM backlots, and the soundstages at KTTV-Channel l I on S un s e t B ou l e v ard i n downtown Hollywood. " We had almost total control of those stages , " recalled Parsons . " There wasn't a lot going o n over there . " Originally owned b y C B S and the Times Mirror Company (the " TTV" in KTTV first stood for Times Television) , Channel 1 1 's mainstays were things like the Sheriff Joh n children's show and newscasts . I t was s o l d to Metromedia, Inc . , in 1 96 3 , and today it is the headquarters of the Fox Television Network. " S tage Three was very small, and S tage Four was the big one , " said Parsons . " Ironically, I used to work under S tage Four, watching old movies for a living. I was the guy who cut the plot out of every movie on the air. They called u s 'film editors , ' but it was in a believing sense only. Some Honest John car lot would buy 90 minutes of air time, a 90-minute movie, and w ant a half­ hour of commercials-so something had to go ! " With the Stoney B u rke deal set at A B C -TV and 3 1 more episodes in production, Daystar moved its headquarters, taking over all four floors of the old Crosby B uilding at 9028 S unset Boulevard, strolling distance from such famous industry eateries as S c andia and the Cock and B u l l . S tevens wrote the first eight scripts ( " and rewrote most of the others " ) , and, after bumping Parsons from Assistant D irector to Production Manager, set about devising a flock of new series pilots , most of them advantaging Sto n ey B u rke as a platform for spin-offs . " The pilots were quality product for the price, " s aid Parsons . " Leslie wanted to become a 'mini-major,' the Spelling- Goldberg of those day s . " S tevens was shooting for the sort of continuous , multiple­ series reputation ultimatel y enjoyed by his old

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competitor, Q uinn Martin . Kin ca id was begotten o f the Stoney B u rke episode of the same title, and starred Dick Clark and David Winters as youth counselors . It filmed at the Glendale YMCA and the backlot ranch sets at Columbia S tudio s . D o n e concurrently w i t h Kin caid w a s Border Patrol, based on the " Point of Entry " episode of Sto n ey B u rke . It starred Wil liam Smith as B order Patrol officer Joe Cardiff, and Cesare Danova as the Chief of Police of " Cuidad Central "-two men whose cooperative efforts keep the peace on both sides of the international fence . Ma rk

Vic k e rs ,

Mas t e r

of

Weap o n s

( alternatel y known as Mr. Vic k e r s ) a g g re s s i v e l y c ou n t e r e d the i n d u s tr y ' s e s tabl i s h e d c o p - s h o w format. J . D . C annon starred a s the acerbic M ar k Vickers , n ominall y a w e apons e xp e rt c al l e d upon to help s o l v e crimes , b ut m o r e properly a Z e n theoris t w h o s e deducti v e ability a n d v as t education permit him to a s s emble puzzle pieces in a way no one else c an . " Th e Weapons M an " e p i sode o f S to n ey B u rke intro d u c e d Vickers a s a m an w h o flies from a s s i g nment to a s s ignment in a private p l an e , accompanie d b y h i s right-hand man, the eponymous James Webster (William O . D o u g l a s , J r. ) ; the m y s te r y i s w h y an Amer i c an g o v e rn me n t a l l i as o n is " ac cidental l y " kil l e d b y an I n d i an ( Henry S il v a ) w ith a J ap an es e arrow. The temple s c e n e s w er e shot a t Yama s h i ro , s t i l l i n b u s ines s a s a res t au r ant in the Hol l y w ood H il l s , just above the Magic C astle . A quic k look at " Th e Weapons Man " rev e a l s i t to be the best o f the p o tential spinoffs , w i th p lenty o f room for S te v e n s to indu l g e h i s penchant for e c l ectic p a s s ions and oddball info rmation. The s e ri e s w as to h a v e c o - s t arred Keigh Deigh a s Vickers' a s s istant, and i t s home l o c ation was to have been Ven i c e B each ' s famo u s Win d ward Avenue . The only pilot not o f S to n ey B u rke origin (until another, titled Stryker, was done l ate in 1 96 3 ) was Mr. Kingsto n , which dealt w ith e sp i o n ag e , d r u g s mu g g l i n g , and s i m i l ar action-adventure s i t u ations aboard a globe­ c r u i s i n g l u x u r y l i n e r. F i l m e d aboard the D o m i n i o n Mon a rc h in S e attle, the pilot starre d Walter Pidgeon a s t h e ship' s c aptain, a n d Peter

BlUf RIBBON �RfW Grave s a s the first officer. In anti cipation o f the series , S tevens considered purchasing an ocean liner that w a s up for sale in Italy. B ut the ship w o u l d not be needed. None of Daystar' s new pilots found a b u yer, and Stoney B u rke w a s face d w ith c ance l l ation after only one season on the air. It was at this point S tevens formulated the concept for a s cience fiction show that w o u l d j ump far b e yond

conventional TV fare-j u s t the sort of show that could ful l y utilize the talents of the artists and technicians g athered beneath the Daystar umbre l l a , and who w ere responsible for the high-quality level o f the c ompan y ' s product. The s e w ere the profe s s i onals that S tevens had affectionatel y dubbed the B lu e Ribbon Crew. I

It was Steve McQueen's Solar Productions.

T� e B l u e R i � � o n C r e w "We were crusaders; we were nuts trying to do television better than anyone else , " said Allan B al ter, one of Daystar's nucleus of associate producers . " And Leslie wasn't just a producer. He was a guy who wanted to make the world a better place. " Thi s sentiment w a s echoed by nearly all t h e former employees of Stevens' quirky little independent. They

all considered Daystar a wild and stimulating place to work, a unique, experimental atmosphere remembered with the sort of fondness reserved for family. "We had a marvelous crew, " said Elaine Michea, the company's Production Coordinator. "Leslie hired very good people, many of them young and j ust starting out in the industry. It was the same group,

Mem bers of Daysta r ' s Blue Ri bbon C rew m eet on the Western record i n g stage, October 3 rd , 1 96 3 . ( L-R) : John E l izalde (back tu rned ) , Roger Farris (sunglasses) , Allan Balter, Ron S i lver m a n , J o h n Erman, Les l i e Steven s (who is a l most tota lly obscured by) Dom i n i c Frontiere ( i n white s h i rt and tie) , and (peeking i n at edge of fra me) R a l p h R i s ki n . (Cou rtesy Roger A . Farris)

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THf OUHA liMITS �OM PANION basically, throughout both Stoney Burke and The Outer Limits . " Michea had joined Daystar after working for Philip Yordan's Security Pictures in the 1 950s, as a production secretary on such films as Inherit the Wind and Studs Lonigan . " When we did Marriage-Co-Round, I was Leslie's secretary, " she said. "We had a little office over at Fox. " This phase of Daystar consisted of Stevens, Michea, an accountant named Gerry Fischer, and a hotshot young composer named Dominic Frontiere, who became S tevens' new partner in the company after the departure of Stanley Colbert. Born in 1 93 1 in New Haven, Connecticut, Dom Frontiere had by the age of four studied the violin,

Com poser Dom i n i c Frontiere i n 1 95 7 .

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piano and accordion. A t s i x h e was entertaining regularly at a tavern in the Italian district of his hometown, and the next year studied harmony with famed accordionist Joseph B iviano. At age twelve he played the first of four solo engagements at Carnegie Hal l . An accordion v irtuoso by the time he graduated high school, he repl aced Dick Contino in Horace Heidt's Orchestra in 1 949 and toured throughout Europe, Africa, and the Orient. He also became the musical arranger for all of Heidt's TV and radio shows. In 1 95 2 , Frontiere began to study composing under Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, conducting under Felix Slatkin, and arranging with Robert Van Eps. He had j ust turned 2 1 when composer-conductor Alfred Newman, then the music director of 20th Century-Fox, took notice of the ambitious young man and sponsored his education in the arts of music adaptation and arrangement. Within no time Frontiere was arranging music for such films as Meet Me in Las Vegas ( 1 956), Ten Thousand Bedrooms ( 1 95 7 ) and The Young Lions ( 1 95 8 ) , as well as composing TV music for Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, and Dean Martin. In early 1 95 7 he also recorded his first album, Dom Frontiere Plays the Classics-all on the accordion. Jazz musician George S hearing noted, "Technical l y, 'Flight of the B umblebee' is the high spot, but for an all-round display of taste, 'The Nutcracker S uite' stands out above the rest. " The following year, Dominic Frontiere and his Orchestra recorded the album Pagan Festival, "An Exotic Love Ritual for Orchestra. " Frontiere had become friends with Stevens while providing the music for Marriage-Co-Round in 1 960. Their temperaments c leaved neatly; both enj oyed playing the executive game from the inside, like a pair of mischievous kids stowing away aboard a stuffy, straitlaced yacht party. In addition to his passion for composing, Frontiere was also an extraordinarily keen deal maker. " He knows expenditures, and was very talented on the accounting end , " says John Elizalde, Daystar's music supervisor. "His whole schtick was , 'I don't want to be a producer, I j ust want to make the m u s ic . ' B ut I'm s ure he enj oyed the day-to-day machinations of making Daystar go. " These duties also included casting, dubbing and delivery of each show's answer print, and negotiating contracts with ABC " Dom was into postproduction and music , " said Elaine Michea. "And Gerry Fischer was a CPA who

BlUf RIBBON �RfW was an adv isor to Leslie's financial world. I signed the checks and took c are of the money. " Stevens dealt with story material, with writers and directors, while Frontiere's baliwick was administrative. "Elaine put it all together so we could work , " said Stevens. " She did payroll, timecards, bank stubs, and all of the office records seemingly with ease. She knew the business at a level where she could say, 'Don't hire this person, he drinks too much . ' " Just below this top echelon was a group of titular associate producers that S tevens nicknamed " the Six B right Young Men, " beginning with Leon Chooluck, a Security Pictures veteran and former co-worker of Michea' s who had worked on Private Property, Stoney Burke and most of the failed pilots. When Outer Limits came along, he switched positions with Lindsley Parsons and became production manager. Chooluck Dom i n i c Frontiere a n d Lesl i e Stevens i n 1 96 3 . (Cou rtes y Dom inic Frontiere) . helped Michea recruit many of Daystar's "below-the-line" production personnel , and oversaw would be foolhardy for me to leave Fox, where I was series production on location while Parsons conducted an executive with security and benefits. He asked if his negotiations away from the sets . Chooluck was anything would change my mind, and I told him the privy to all phases of production from script meetings only thing would be if he allowed me to direct. I had through shooting, organizing costs and making sure asked to direct episodic TV at Fox, but they were very everyone was in the right place at the right time. happy with me right where I was. Leslie said, 'All The next Bright Young Man was Ralph Riskin, right, I think you're someone I'd really like to have formerly Frontiere's agent. New projects were his working with me, and if you'll come over to Stoney specialty, and he also worked on most of Daystar's B urke, I ' l l let you direct an episode . ' I told him he'd pilots . Then came Bob B arbash, Stoney Burke 's story better let me direct two, because the first one would be editor, and Ron Silverman, whose new Daystar title rotten ! And he agreed, in a foolhardy sort of way. The was Vice-President of Administration. He was a S i x B right Young Men reall y only had one role each. marketing and research man who had developed his We did get the respon s i b i l ity of asso c iate own private polling system, ANTENA , to compete producership, one out of every six shows. B ut being with the Nielsen ratings. S ilverman had also been a very covetous of his power, Leslie did most of that writer for Variety. Allan B alter's ambition was to write work himself. Our titles were more of an incentive to scripts and produce, he had been a publicity flack for stretch ourselves . " 20th Century-Fox and served the same function at Accordingly, Erman directed the " Image o f Glory" Daystar. and "Joby" segments of Stoney Burke , while each of The sixth Bright Young Man, also from Fox, was the APs in tum enj oyed a "full card" producing credit John Erman. "I had been i n an acting class with Jack during the series' end titles. On The Outer Limits, Lord, who'd signed to star i n Stoney Burke at the time Erman sometimes traveled to New York on a biweekly I was running the casting department at Fox, " recalled schedule, to raid actors from the New York stage. Erman. "Leslie invited me to be Daystar's casting " Dominic's edict was, 'get a name actor; if you can't get director. I watched the Stoney Burke pilot, and while I a name, get a good actor. ' Pretty soon it was thought there were some admirable things about it, I worthwhile for New York actors to fly to LA to do didn't think it was going to succeed. I told Leslie it Outer Limits, in the days when there was still a very

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TH f OUHR liMITS CO M PANION great rivalry between the two cities . " Another Stoney Burke scenarist, Frank L . Moss, was graced with a credit as co-producer of the Please Stand By pilot film . . . a credit which v an ished when Please Stand By transmogrified i nto "The Galaxy Being" and Joseph Stefano became the new series' actual co-producer. The usual Associate Producer duties involved script conferences, working with directors and in postproduction. Apart from their principal functions (Erman in casting, B alter in publicity, and so on) each AP served another purpose, since S tevens enjoyed an environment of quick, sharp dreamers and conceptualizers . " One thing that struck me, " said Erman , " was that Leslie, who was so obviously Aryan, had surrounded himself with all these aggressive, ambitious young Jewish men . " S tevens soon had a chain of command chart distributed throughout the offices in the Daystar B u i lding. "It was l ike a family tree, " said Erman, " w ith Leslie at the top . " " If i t was off the walI, Leslie was for it, " says John Elizalde. " He instituted a night school at Daystar for learning foreign languages, i n anticipation of getting work offers from outside the country. I figured what the hell-we were all there s ixteen to twenty hours a day anyway, so why not consider it? Leslie had a dynastic bent, shall we say. He wanted to establish Daystar as the ne plus ultra of production houses. " Elizalde was j ust one of the below-the-line crew, that is, the personnel who transformed ideas into viable filmed product. "At Daystar there were the dreamers and the workers, " says Lindsley Parsons. "We never really knew just what i t was that the associate producers, or 'assprods,' did since we didn't have to go through them to get to Leslie, who would listen to any of us. Somehow, he enj oyed absorbing and using, in some small way, input from anyone. He'd take it from the craft serv icemen. It was fun to work at Daystar because we had a tremendous amount of freedom. " Parsons was brought in by E laine Michea, along with master set designer Jack Poplin, prop man " Rapid" Richard Rubin, and makeup artist Fred Phillips. Phillips, whose father founded the Motion Picture Make-Up Artists Association, had started as an assistant to Cecil Holland, MGM 's director of makeup, in 1 926. In Michael F. B l ake 's book Lon Chaney : The Man Behind the Thousand Faces (Vestal Press, 1 993), Phillips recalled his association with the one-of-a-kind

c inema legend: I was assigned by Cec i l Holland to help Lon out whenever he had an elaborate makeup, but actuall y I was his " hand me, get me, do me" man . . . When he'd go on the set, I'd carry hi s makeup case for him and would be his eye behind the camera to m ake sure everything was okay. . . It was Lon who taught me how to use cotton and collodion for a number of things.

I n retrospect, Daystar's camera crew is the most impressive ever assembled for TV, and it started with a felIow named Ted McCord. " Ted did major movies," said S tevens, " l ike Treasure of the Sierra Madre , East of Eden, The Sound of Music, all of Bette Davis' films including Dark Victory, and a lot of Joan Crawford's pictures. You just couldn't get any bigger. " McCord shot Private Property, then fel l ill after filming six Stoney Burkes. " On doctor's orders, he couldn't work," recalled Lindsley Parsons. " S o he brought up his camera operator, a young man named Conrad Hal l . " Ever s ince h i s graduation from USC cinema classes in 1 949, Conrad Hall had s urvived by shooting commercial s , industrial films, educational shorts, and a great deal of color 1 6-millimeter work for various Disney animal and nature films. The son of James Norman Hall (author of Mutiny on the Bounty), Hall's first official credits as Director of Photography were logged for Daystar on Stoney Burke . In an interview conducted by Leonard Maltin in 1 970, Hall said, " Working with Ted McCord was such

D i rector of Photog ra phy Conrad Hall a n d F i rst Assista n t Di rector Lee Katz i n in the Daysta r conference room in 1 963 .

BlUf RIBBON ��fW an inspirational thing for me, because here was a man who started when the industry started. He started when he was nineteen, and had been a cameraman for many, many years. 1 saw that this man was not set i n his ways; he was as open as any young man I've ever known in my life-ready to experiment, ready to change his ideas . Working w ith somebody l ike that was very inspirational, to see that you could grow, and not stay in one place, being good at one thing your whole life, and age has nothing to do with it. " Les l i e Stevens had already secured John Nickolaus as titular director of photography for The Outer Limits when Stoney Burke was cancelled. He personally worked out an arrangement whereby Hall would alternate Outer Limits episodes with Nickolau s , i n order t o keep H a l l with Daystar. " Connie H a l l could get so much out of so little, " said Steven s . "Once, he was shooting someone on a balcony, through the branches of a willow tree. He tied a rope to the branches of the tree from below and had someone pull it very gently, giving the branches this wonderfully subtle motion. It cost fifteen cents more and made all the visual difference in the world. Another time, he lit an actress from the center of her forehead with a tiny l ight u sed for close ups. 1 asked him what he was doing that for, and he said, 'Wait till you see it on film ! ' The next day, we ran the rushes, and every time she blinked, these tiny l ittle shadow lines of eyelash were thrown all the way down her face . Now, when you think of what you're getting for the extra two minutes, that's incredible. " " I think everybody i s in great awe o f the technical aspects of cinematography, " said Hal l . " Personall y, I'm more in awe of a mechanic, of a man who knows how to take an engine apart, and put it back together again, and make it work. A camera is nothing; all you have to be able to do i s use a lens, and an f-stop, and know a couple of the minor laws that govern what happens on film, and 1 learned all these things from a guy named Slavko Vorkapich (at USC). 1 knew how to make a camera work l ike a mechanic knows how to make an motor work. 1 knew what happens when you take the film and turn it upside-down, and backwards, and inside-out; when you stop it down and open it up. 1 learned it in two years ... 1 could have learned it in six months or less. The rest of it, there's no way to explain; how the artistry comes out of you is part of you, part of your experiences in life , the way you see things . "

Hall agreed to take on Stevens' new series, and remembers the period as his opportunity to get what he cal l s all the " gimmicks" out of his system : " I was fairly new at the game , and had the chance to experiment a lot , " he said. " Anything 1 ever heard about, dreamt about, or thought up-I tried everything in the book. The Outer Limits became a school for the development of my craft . " When Hall later left TV to do movies, he began, l ike his mentor McCord, to collect Academy Award nominations. Among his notable films of the middle 1 960s were In Cold Blood and Cool Hand Luke , and he won his first Oscar in 1 969 for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Hal l ' s camera operator was William Fraker, who went on to shoot B ullitt and Rosemary 's Baby in the l ate '60s. "His nickname was 'Fraker-sawa' , " laughed Lindsley Parsons . Today, both Hall and Fraker reside at the top of their field. Even Dick Glouner, the man who loaded film into their cameras on Outer Limits, is now a cinematographer in his own right. "I don't think Hall or Fraker would be cameramen today if it wasn't for Lloyd Garnell , " said Jack Poplin, Outer Limits ' art director. " B ecause he taught them a hell of a lot . " Gamel l was Daystar's gaffer (the man in charge of the lighting set-ups) and the inventor of the Garnell Light, a lightweight, portable spotlight of the sort u sed for Hal l ' s eyelash shot. His nickname was "Goldie , " and thus the term " goldie lites" for another type of spotlight he devised. The Outer Limits ' (uncredited) stunt wrangler was B i l l Hart-previously on-camera as "Red" in Stoney Burke-whose first movie job was in The Alamo ( 1 95 9 ) with John Wayne. H art recruited stunt performers and assigned all the gags he didn't pe�form himself (he's the Zanti-covered soldier who does the stairway fal l in "The Zanti Misfits , " for example). A s the new Daystar B uilding fil led up with equipment and personnel , it became a hive-like, all - inclusive post-production facil ity as well as a meeting place and think tank. On the ground floor was the production/accounting arm , and the offices of Gerry Fischer, now titled Vice President/Treasurer in charge of business operations, Elaine Michea, and her payroll man, Robert Johnson, a s inger and announcer l ate of Seattle who was also a skil led CPA. Johnson eventually prov ided many Outer Lim its monster voices a la carte, and by virtue of a strategically produced S creen Actors Guild card wound up with a small role in Hero 's Island.

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TH f OUTfR liMITS COM PAN ION

The Outer Lim its ' foremost F i rst A D (later Prod uction Manager), Robert H. J ustm a n , at home i n 1 9 8 5 . (Photo: JS F)

Jack Poplin was also quartered on the ground floor, along with Daystar's gang of First Assistant Directors-Robert Justman, Lee Katzin, and l atterly, Claude Binyon, Jr. Justman, who was to become Outer Limits ' most versatile and valuable AD (and later, production manager) , had begun as a $50-per­ week freelancer on such productions as Harry Horner 's 1 95 2 film Red Planet Mars. He served as AD on the Robert Aldrich films Apache ( 1 954), The Big Knife ( 1 95 5 ) , Kiss Me Deadly ( 1 95 5 ) , and Attack! ( 1 957), and worked on Aldrich 's first TV series, The Doctors, in 1 96 3 . Justman 's TV experience, at that point, had included work on The Adventures of Superman ( 1 95 3 ) , The Thin Man ( 1 957-59), Northwest Passage ( 1 958-59), and One Step Beyond ( 1 959-6 1 ) , before his recruitment to Daystar by Leon Chooluck. Chooluck also brought in Lee Katzin, another aspiring director, on the basis of film work they had done together in the 1 950s. Katzin had worked his way up to the 1 st AD position on Stoney B urke, and l ike John Erman, had been promised some Outer Limits

shows as director by S tevens. B inyon arrived midway through Outer Limits ' first season, and came from film and TV production work at Warner Brothers. His entree was Lindsley Parsons, with whom he had ridden the same bus to military school in the 1 940s . " I n TV, most ADs are not considered as creative people, " said Justman . "Outer Limits was unusual in that there was a very free exchange of ideas . I felt that I had a creative contribution to make, and that if I could get some of my ideas accepted, that was a kind of 'overscale' payment, what they call 'sweat equity' today. " A 1 st AD functions on the set rather like a stage manager, yelling constantly and s uperv ising all set-ups so that the director may walk in and begin immediately to direct without worrying why, for example, a truckload of fish monster suits is stalled somewhere near the B arham B oulevard offramp instead of in the studio. " The First ADs h ad a terrific amount of responsibility on Outer Limits, coordinating all the various elements of special effects and production, " Katzin said. " We were not a l l that privy t o the initial concepts of the shows . In the beginning, Daystar was prepared four episodes in advance. We'd prepare a show for seven days, then run out onto the floor and film it. S ince at that time there was no such thing as a location manager, we had to get locations, too . " S o what else does a n AD do? "The best he can . . . with l imited resources, " said Justman. Frequently the ADs would gather with Conrad HaJ J , Bill Fraker, and Jack Poplin at a bar near Daystar to, as Katzin put it, "discuss ways to do things on Outer Limits using a lot of imagination and very l ittle money. " The bar was called the Phone B ooth. "As you faced south from Daystar, it was about ten points off the starboard bow, " said J ustman . " I went there with Katzin and the others once or twice. It was a place where scantily-clad young ladies would serve your drinks. That was a big thing, in those day s . " The Phone B ooth 's big gimmick was that each table featured a telephone, from which a c ustomer could phone any other table, or ring up that good-looking waitress across the room. Daystar's second floor housed S tevens' office plus an executive secretary, the Six Bright Young Men and support personnel. One of Stevens' assistants was Lloyd Haynes, l ater the star of the Room 222 series. Dominic Frontiere's office was found on the third floor amidst a c l atterin g aggregation of sound machines and film editing gear. On the top floor, film

BlUf RIBBON �RfW

Claude B i nyon, J r. , B i l l Bixby, a n d the C h risti a n Brothers on the set of

cutters Tony D iMarco, Richard Brockway, and Fred Baretta ran millions of feet of 35 millimeter Outer Limits film through a cluster of moviolas, at first under the superv i s ion of S tevens , and l ater under the watchful eye of producer Joseph Stefano, who taught himself the craft of film editing in these upstairs rooms. " I was also on the third floor, " noted John Elizalde, whose chaoti c arrangement of homemade s i gnal generators, customized osc i l l ators , and primordial synthesizers prov ided most of Outer Limits ' weird sound effects . He was brought into Daystar by Richard Brockway (who had edited Hero 's Island) , and had worked previously with Frontiere at Quinn Martin Productions on a pair of pilots, Skyfighters and The New Breed. Besides sound effects and distorted alien voices, Elizalde did live taping of the Control Voice speeches done by Vic Perrin, and all the postproduction dubbing and looping of dialogue. He and assi stant John Caper, Jr. , also worked in Daystar's basement, where the music cutting equipment was instal led, adding Frontiere's ethereal Outer Limits music to fin ished episodes. The music was either scored (using material Frontiere had composed and timed to fit specific parts of the show) or tracked (which

involved editing music from the Frontiere library into a new form). It was also here that Elizalde added his sound effects to each new show, and he and Caper were assisted by Arthur Cornall, Jay Ashworth, Jack Wood, and a part-timer, Harold Smith. Another of Day­ star's early idea men was M. B. Paul, who was credited as the optical director of unit's photography. He was the on-set superv isor for shots that would include special optical effects, and owned and operated Clambake in 1 967. h i s own equipment (Courtesy of Cla ude Bi nyon, Jr.) rental house. Jack Poplin credits Paul with the invention of the Adlux Trans-Light Screen, an oversized backdrop, l ike a giant color slide, that was inserted into windows or other such openings on a l ive set and lit from behind to provide " instant background. " Director Byron Haskin was soon to s i gn on as an uncred ited "effects superv isor, " but there was very l ittle overlap with Pau l ' s field. Mechanical on-set effects such as wafting cur�ains, falling debris , or off-camera manipulation of props fell to Thol " S i " S imonsen and Pat Dinga. Daystar's costumers were Forrest "T-Bone" B utler and Sabine Manela, who had joined the company as of Hero 's Island. "They worked on some of the actual monster suits , " noted Elaine Michea, "but always from designs provided by the special effects uni t . " Construction and design o f Outer Limits ' unique aliens and creatures was entrusted, for the most part, to a group of i ndependent contractors known as Project Unlimited (about whom more a bit later) , and, on occasion , to makeup art i sts hired to assist Fred Phillips. " Projects" (as the company was alternately called) also provi ded optical effects which were turned over to one of three Hollywood labs spec ializing in

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TH f OUHR liM ITS CO M PANION

The m a n who b u i l t the Outer Lim its sets : Art D i rector Jack Popl i n , i n 1 963 . (Courtesy Jack Popl in)

combining effects with l ive-action footage : Butler­ Glouner, Ray Mercer and Company, and Consolidated Film Industries, Inc. Jack Popl in's crackerjack construction crew-the men responsible for every Gothic interior, every spaceship cockpit, and every moonscape you see in The Outer Limits-included Chester B ayhi ( a propman from Fox w h o became a s e t decorator on the Mr. Kingston pilot) and Tracey R. Bousman, " Dick Tracy " to his pals, who brought his experience at the Chouinard Art Institute to the Outer Limits pilot film. "We were like a club," said Poplin. ''I'd break down a script and hand it to Dick, who would put it into working drawings, then we'd talk with Chet about how to dress it. From there, we'd wing it with a marvelous construction foreman we had, Lowel l Thomas. " " S top and think o f all the control that was necessary to create an illusion for The Outer Limits, " says Lindsley Parsons. "We had to use a tremendous amount of ingenuity and innovation j ust to get the show done; we were a well-oiled machine without pretenses. Leslie sat down and ate with the crew. Anybody was approachable; if you had a better idea, we'd use it. Leslie was very much in favor of people improving themselves . He came up with an honor he bestowed on only two people that I know of, because I was the second. It was a Daystar Employee of the Year medall ion, with the Daystar emblem in gold. Henry

14

Maak (the key grip, or supervisor of the set's " l ifters and carriers " ) got it the first year. " "Daystar was a terrific group who all enjoyed what they were doing, " said Lee Katzin. "We had a lot of fun , worked our collective asses off, and did some first-rate work . " Conrad Hall added, " You keep fighting the feeling that you're in a sausage factory, but enough people cared to make it worthwhile for me. The producer c ared, the directors c ared, the peop l e I was photographing cared, and some of the audience cared. There were people who would say, 'Gee, that's a well­ photographed show. ' " It was time for Stevens t o appl y h i s B l ue Ribbon Crew to a pilot venture less conventional than his failed tries at action-adventure formats. In his own words, he wanted to " stress, dwell on , and get into the awe and mystery of the universe; tap into other dimensions, other beings, and alien stuff that truly went to the outer limits of the imagination . Now, you can only do that for so long until you begin to hear, 'Uh- you're getting pretty far out, there. That may be interesting to a handful of people, but can you bring it back down to Earth so that the big numbers, the masses, will understand?'"

CONSUM[ OR 01[ (Being a Brief Digression into the Essential Nature of the Medium , its A udience, and the Primal Forces that Drive Them)

"To show you nothing ever change s , " said Lesl i e S teven s , " here's something a senior, powerhouse executive said to me this week : " "Leslie , here 's the rules , now. Don 't break them . Do not work for the head. You work for the throat, which means you can grab them by the throat and cut it, or strangle them . Workfor the heart-either break it or make it. Work for the belly- either turn their stomaches or kick them in the stomach . And always go for the groin, you hear m e ? Th roat, heart, belly, groi n . I don 't want to hear head . "

" I swear to god that's what was said to me ! " While S tevens held his Daystar crew in the highest regard, his opinion of the net worth of most TV

CONSUMf OR OIf production executives could charitably be described as a polar opposite. Yet, as company head, he had become one of those executives, and the challenge now was to somehow balance his desire for the artistic with the commercial realities of prime time. The truth, while harsh, was not entirely unmanagable. " You see, " he said, "Television does not exist for any reason other than to make American commerce grind. What TV's financial backers care about is how many people did it reach? Sponsors want to sell the most consumer goods they can possibly sell-soap , automobiles, beer-and the only goal about which they give a fiddler's damn is numbers . The only thing guaranteed to appeal to the largest possible number of human beings is basic, visceral sex and v iolence. They call it 'romance' and 'adventure'-they know how to hide it-but it's still that basic human thing of fight or fl ight or reproduce, in order to peddle products that appeal to the vi sceral animal. And when your program gets gigantic numbers, you're dealing with so many mill ions of people that the only thing they have in common is that they eat, get ill, reproduce-which is the 'sex' aspect-and consume disposable products. " Now, what networks and sponsors are after i s that continuing hook, that addictive quality-a series with a continuing star people will watch, week after week, th is being maximum addiction at minimum cost. Gunsmoke had continuing stars and amortizable sets; you had one town, plus Matt, Kitty, and Doc. Jesus, you could make a fortune on your first ten episodes ! After you've paid off the town, you only have the immediate production expenses, scripts, and casts to pay for. The profit margin on small comedies l ike A ll in the Family -one set and six people-is even larger, where you spend $ 1 00,000 per show, but you get two or three times that in ad revenues. A hundred thousand dollars, clear, every week? Gigantic . "So i f people say, ' I ' m gonna tune this in no matter what,' that means a certain rating can be guaranteed for that timeslot, which means so many dol l ars-per­ thousand for the ads . In dramatic shows, the formula works like thi s : In an hour-long show, you get a death in the first five minutes. I suppose the theory is if we see a fellow primate get smeared, then we're suddenly interested. Then the hero comes along, trying to figure out who did it. He gets into jeopardy, which i s alleviated b y commercial breaks that offer relief-the relief of a beer, of a loan, of a vacation . That pause for relief is always to consume something. Get it? The

theme of every dramatic show on the air is consume or die . "The war as to who is going to be first is lethal to the top three or four executives at each network or company. If they drop behind, they get fired. If they lose half a point and wind up third out of three for a certain number of consecutive week s , then a decapitation occurs . Everybody is thrown out and a whole new team i s hauled in. It's that quaking fear of losing half a point in the ratings that makes them strive for the big n umbers. Huge numbers mean huge audiences, which is what sponsors want, since they have to sell millions of teeny products to millions of people. " Now, there's a severe penalty for that-you lose originality. The first time anything is done, it's not accepted by a lot of people; it may be brilliant and

Science ? Fiction ? You be the judge as t o m o rro w 's wo rld c o m e s a live today.

0:0 0 PM TONIGHT ON XX

•

ABC newspa per ad mat for the pre m iere of "The G a laxy Being , " 1 96 3 .

THf OUHR liM ITS COM PANION wonderfu l , but it's simply bothersome t o people who only want to see something comfortable and familiar. Any aspect of it you could call art-real art-cannot survive when it is repetitive. It's as though the original thing is a classic and the repeated thing i s a cliche. You can't be classic. You can only copy a classic. And when you do all the right things needed to bring off a tremendous success in televi sion, the devil's price you pay is that you cannot dwell upon 'art,' or original ity, because if you do, you're going to lose the big audience, the mass n umbers, and therefore give up your position to do big commercial things . " One o f the best shows ever aired w a s The Six Wives of Henry VlII , on PB S . It got about a six in the ratings . But one of the networks said, 'Hey, this is good enough to broadcast in prime time ! ' When they aired it, it pul led about a three, and the concl u sion i s that the audience isn't there . B ut when you analyze that six, or that three, you discover twelve to sixteen mil l ion people saw that show. That's more audience than Broadway has had in the last four years . It's just that those numbers are so staggering, we fai l to realize that the flops of television are doing better than the Catholic church did l ast week ! " Look at the non-dramatic shows closely. You'll see they deal in sex, fun , and beer drinking. The characters are usually working, trying to get dates, fixing their cars, talking to their friends in a bar; j ust goofing around the way an enormous number of Americans do. There's nothing wrong with that; it's simply that they are the largest number, sort of upper blue col lar. And the upper blue collar does not want to watch science fiction . " When i t came time for Stevens t o field ideas for a science fiction program, there were more than ironclad demographics and the Peter Principal demands of corporate hierarchies to consider. There was also the smal l matter of that pivotal element known as the "hook . "

M [ l N I C I{ ' S f O l lY Daniel Melnick was only twenty-six years old when he was made Vice Pre sident of Programming at ABC in 1 95 9 . For S tevens , in 1 96 2 , talking with A B C meant talking w ith Melnick: " The very origin of The Outer Limits was a conversation between D an and myself. "

16

When S tevens talked with United Artists, it meant talking with Richard Dorso, the programming V P with whom he had developed Stoney Burke into a series . " I had a deal with Leslie as a producer under contract to U A , " said Dorso. " And I said, 'Let's cook up a TV series about science fiction . ' Leslie was a talented, able producer, and I knew the i dea could be sold to A BC . " Dorso had similarly cooked up The Fugitive for Quinn Martin's group, and many other seri e s . " Once Dan Melnick agreed it was something he w anted to see on the air, then we'd p l an how to sell it to people l ike Goldenson and Moore . " Leonard Goldenson was A B C ' s president and chainnan of the board. I Tom Moore, at one time a publicist for a cemetery, was Goldenson's executive VP, and would ascend to the network presidency by the end of 1 96 3 . " Melnick said, 'Definitely, let's do i t , ' " recall s S teven s . " B ut he stressed that o u r concept had t o be presented in 'exhibitor's term s . ' A B C was very uneasy about any departure fro m conventional prog­ ramming, so the only way I could reall y sell it to them was to stress that it was not far removed from a scare show. The one thing Dan u rged me to do was to put a monster in every show, and put it on fast-withi n the first five minute s . B ecause A B C would regard the show as a monster show m ore than anything else. " " My responsibility, " said Dorso, " was to see that the concept w orked , and when i t got to the public, that the show w orked. " S tevens credits Dorso as the man " who held the battery and the bulb together. " A deal for a pilot film was struck w ith Melnick, the third side of the Daystar/UA/AB C triangle. " He called the series Melnick's Folly, " said Stevens . " B y so doing, he disowned it in case it w a s a flop. But i f it w orked, then it became l ike t h e steamboat-it sai l s , therefore Melnick's F o l l y i s a big succe s s . D a n i s very astute, and c apable of hand l i n g h i m self in the Executive Wars. " Melnick had shrewdly fol lowed the Golden Rule of corporate thinking by covering his ass both w ay s . The pilot was titled Please Stand B y at his suggestion. If it flew, he could c l aim a modest measure of credit, and if it died, he could safely say I-told-you-so to A B C . B u t " triple-threat s , " writer/director/producers , were considered p u sh y by the networks, and S tevens' name h ad already acquired a bit of a stigma. The free­ flowing setup at Daystar was not comprehensible to the rigidly compartmentalized bastille at A B C , and to top it off, Daystar's salvo of new pilots was a complete wash. Stevens was anxious to move on to still m ore new projects , including a series based on B u rt S t an d i s h ' s 1 92 0 ' s dime n o ve l s abo u t the adventures of Frank Merriwel l , and a show on contemporary called art work s A merican

MflNICK'S fOllY

�UNITED� ARTISTS

TE LEVI S I ON

Science Fiction Adventures of the Innermost Mind, the Farthest Galaxies . . . and All that Lies Between . . .

U n i ted Arti sts Syn d ication promotional booklet featu ring period 1 96 3 sell g ra p h ic s .

Masterpieces. If Please Stand By was presented to ABC with Stevens appearing to grab too much of the credit, i t m i ght be j i nxed before a single frame of it was seen . S tevens illuminated another hitch: " They felt that a show wasn't a success if i t didn't run endlessly. S o no matter how good Stoney Burke was, it had been cancelled, and they thought of me as not real ly coming through, and that might j eopardize selling Please Stand By to the sponsors . " " To thi s day they call i t running the gauntlet, " said S tevens . " If you can get clear through w i thout getting clobbered, not lose any bodies, and get to the point where they'll actually take your show and put it on, then you've accomplished a very difficult and treacherou s thi ng . " Stevens' solution was t o add n e w blood t o the project in the form of a producer who had some name recognition i n Hollywood a s a v ery succes sfu l

screenwriter. S omeone who could l ine-produce the series if the pilot sold, leaving S tevens to pursue further new projects for Daystar. Once he rolled the final page of Please Stand By o u t of h i s typewriter, S tevens phoned h i s old songwriting partner from the Greenwich Village day s , Joseph S tefano .

I A post that Goldenson still held when the first edition o f this book was publi shed i n

1 986.

11

TH f OUHR liMITS COM PANION

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Joseph Stefano, a compact man with a classically Roman profi le and a remarkable fluidity of expression and emotion. "My mother and father took me to a movie with Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, and Garbo died at the end. ) When we left , I thought it was very sad because we'd never see her in another movie, and my parents explained that she didn't really die, she was j ust pretending she'd died, and that was the movie . And I thought, aha ! Some kids pick up a baseball bat and that's it; I saw that movie, and that was it. After that 1 went to the movies continually; you could get me to do anything if there was a dime or quarter in it for the movies. There were about eight theatres within walking distance of my house, and they changed films every two days. You could go to a different movie every night of the week, which i s almost what I did . " B ut Stefano's show business career was seeded even before that, when at the age of three he won a theatre-sponsored Charleston contest against two dozen older contestants . B orn Joseph William S tefano

in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 5th, 1 922, he was the youngest of the Stefano clan. His father Dominic was a widowed tailor with three children who married a widow, Josephina, who also had three children . " She had three sons, and he had a son and two daughters, and after they married they had two more children-my brother Peter and myself. The others were much older; they were in college by the time I was three. It was l ike gluing together two families that did not get along, and it was a very strange pyramid to be on the bottom of. To me, they were all my family, but the two sets of children were enemies. Eventually my parents broke up. My mother got a house w ith her three sons, who were working by now, Peter, and myself. After a year or so, my father came back, but without his children-he broke up with them, so to speak. It was a very painful situation, losing people who were dear to you, people you weren't supposed to see anymore. It caused all that is good about me, and all that i s bad. 1 escaped early into fantasy, into movies. " B y age ten , S tefano was singing for radio audiences as part of the weekly children's hour, and song-and-dance heavily influenced his school years . Once he discovered " this thing called theatre , " he began composing songs and writing lyrics. The move to Philadelphia l i ttle theatre was inevitable, and Stefano did original musicals, writing " the book" (words), but not the music, mainly so he could be in the productions. "I never thought of myself as an actor, " he said, " until a long time later, after I'd toured. " H e turned 2 1 i n 1 943 , and tried to enlist i n the Navy in order "to get the war out of the way, " but was rejected because he had two punctured eardrums. Not knowing whether this would keep him clear of the draft-hungry Army as well , he spent the next six months at home, not working, waiting for his number to come up. An aunt of young Joe's had a piano, which he transported to his home and began to practice on, religiously. "I had a girlfriend who was teaching me, " he said, "but mostly I j u s t played b y ear. " M i l itary service never materi alized, and the fol lowing year Stefano went to New York to expand his performing experience and wound up going on the road

JOSfPH SmANO m usical soap opera for TV, a collaboration which for a full season as part of a touring company doing would require an extremely fast production pace. "We The Student Prince, and, in 1 945-46, The Merry Widow. He also pulled down a living in New York tried it to see if we could do it, " said Stefano. "We wrote about eight episodes, him doing one half-hour doing nightclub revues. " I auditioned for a nightclub job, playing piano and singing. After the audition, Mervyn Nelson said to me, 'What're you wasting your time singing for? You've written some great stuff here; you should be a writer. Anybody can be a singer. ' That really had a strange, powerful effect on me. I began to think in terms of writing a whole musical, book, songs, and all . I worked on a thing called It's Your Move , rewriting it about fifteen times. It finally got produced off-Broadway in 1 946, at the Provincetown Playhouse. After that I proceeded to make a living by writing popular songs as well as the revue s . " Stefano wrote h undreds o f tunes-pop music and show music, with and without lyrics . "Just a pile of records , " he smiled. " B y 1 95 2 I was making very good money. My first hit was a Karen Chandler tune called 'One Dream . ' It was a hit mainly because of the song on the fl ip side, which I didn't write. " A song titled " Heartbeat" was recorded by a British artist named R uby Murray, and became a Number One hit in England for fifteen straight weeks. Other Stefano tunes were recorded by such artists as Sammy Davis Jr. and Eydie Gorme. While l iving i n Greenwich Vi llage, Stefano first encountered Leslie Stevens , who was then stil l Joe Stefa no at h i s parquet desk i n the Vi l l a d i Stefa no offices at KTIV. (Photo by Leon Chooluck; cou rtesy Joseph Stefa no) trying to crack B roadway as a script per day, and me writing two new songs per day. playwright. "My roommate , S teve, was studying He took the idea to the networks, but nothing ever modern dance, and so was Leslie-he's always been came of it. Then we did a nightclub act for a girlfriend interested in taking classes in everything, even if you of his; he did the patter while I did the original score. were never going to use it. Steve mentioned that he had a roommate who wrote songs, and Leslie said he'd l ike We also did a m usical version of The Pickwick Papers. He did the book and I did the music and lyrics. to meet me, that maybe we could do a nightclub act or something . " Nothing was ever done with that, either. " Meanwhile, Stefano's revue work got him gigs in Stevens conceived the idea o f trying t o d o a

TH f OUHR liM ITS COM PANION Las Vegas and Paris , France, where h e wrote material for the Folies Bergere . After a long period of no contact with Stev e n s , S tefano was asked to do entr'acte music for Champagne Complex. "It was a fun idea," said Stefano, "so I did it. " He also introduced Stevens to his first wife , Ruth Ramsey, a friend of Stefano's from The Merry Widow touring company. " I lost track o f Leslie when h e went t o Hollywood t o do Marriage-Go-Round. The next time he heard of me, I was a screenwriter. That really threw h im . " One January evening in 1 95 3 , S tefano received a call from a boyhood buddy v isiting New York from Philadelphia on business . They arranged to meet at a local bar. " I went over to the j ukebox to see if any of my records were on it," recalls S tefano. "This young girl came over to put a coin in and I said, 'Play that one,' and when she asked why I said, 'Because I wrote it ! ' The song was 'One Dream' and the girl's name was Marilyn. She was secretary of the New York Jazz Society, where these great artists would get together to jam. She l iked my song and invited me to one of the sessions. We started seeing each other, and got married in December of ' 5 3 . " Whi l e S tevens became a much-married m an , Joe and M aril y n remained together ever since 1 95 3 . New York w a s a l s o where S tefano first encountered psychiatric analy s i s , while still a songwriter. " I think analysis i s probably why I began writing in the first place, " he reflects. "As a writer, I'm fearless when i t comes to material that i s disturbing to me. I would credit to the analysis itself the release of inhibitions , of anything that might be repressed . " While producing The Outer Limits , Stefano w a s also undergoing " h ardcore Freudian anal y s i s , " which consisted of lying on a couch and free-associating for fifty minutes every morning, with a doctor who didn't say a word. "Then, having gone through fifty minutes of hell, I'd drive to KTTV and work on the show. It was a very l ush period for me, creatively, and I wrote continually. " B ut what started him writing in the first place? The satori occurred in 1 95 6 , when S tefano was in the middle of a year-long break from songwriting. "I was watching a Studio One or a R obert Montgomery Presents, and I said to Marilyn, ' I could write a play like that . ' B ut I h ad never seen a screenplay before. I finally asked an actor friend of mine what one looked like, and he explained scenes, shot numbers , and the indentations for dialogue. "

Stefano's story, originally titled "The Flower Maker, " featured characters loosely modeled on his parents. "It began essentially as a scenario-what would be called a treatment, today-and ended as a full script. I wrote it almost the w ay you'd do a stage play. " After changing the title to The Black Orchid, he submitted the piece to a New York agent and friend with the improbable name of Daniel Hollywood, intending it for Studio One, an hour-long mystery-suspense series on the air since 1 948. It could be said that Hollywood called right back, in both senses. He'd shown The B lack Orchid to Carlo Ponti, whose most recent production had been the epic King Vidor War and Peace. Ponti wanted the property as a vehicle for his then-wife, Sophia Loren, and asked if Stefano could transform the teleplay to feature-length . Filming was not to commence for a year, due to Loren's other commitments , and in the interim Stefano wrote " an American version of an Italian film" for Ponti's co-producer, Marcello Girosi, from a literal translation of the Itali an screenplay. The film, Fast and Sexy, was shot both ways by Vittorio De S ica, and starred Gina Lollobrigida as a girl who returns to the Itali an village of her birth a wealthy widow after her rich B rooklyn husband dies. S tefano spent two months of 1 95 7 in Italy on the project, which he titled Anna of Brooklyn . "De Sica put a lot of stuff from my version into the Italian one , " said Stefano. "I have a funny feeling that although I wouldn't understand it, since I don't speak Italian , that it would look more l ike my script than the American version. Fast and Sexy was an awful title ! " On the basis of the script Stefano wrote for The Black Orchid, 20th Century-Fox offered him a term contract to write two new screenplays per year for seven years . "It all happened so fast I didn't know where in hell I was , " noted Stefano. "I was suddenly thrust into a position it takes most writers years to get to, and I never thought I'd realize my ambition to be connected with the movies by doing screenplay s . " When the S tefanos finally hauled stakes for California in 1 95 8 , Joe had only one other piece of writing in his folio-a treatment for a drama called "Made in Japan, " which his agent submitted t o Herb B rodkin a t C B S , for Playhouse 90. "Made in Japan " i s a powerful drama about honor, race hatred, innocence versus passion, and the conflict between what is right and what i s legal . Set in post-Occupation Japan, it concerns a soldier of good

JOSfPH STHANO Philadelphia socialite l ineage (Dean S tockwell ) who falls in love with a Japanese girl (Norbu McCarthy) and decides to break it off because she is not his kind of people. His status allows him to slip through the cracks of the law when he inadvertently allows her to die. When he realizes he really did love her, his emotional self-destruction begins. " Made in Japan " i s a n excellent story of characters in crisis, and was awarded the prestigious Robert E . S herwood Award, given by the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Republic to "a television program contributing to the understanding of freedom and j ustice . " Stefano split the $5 ,000 prize with producer B rodkin and director Herbert Hirschman . "I was stunned when it won , " he said. " Everybody thought Judgement at Nuremberg would take it that year. " Then The Black Orchid ( 1 959) was directed by Martin Ritt, who had just done The Long Hot Summer (and would l ater direct Hud and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) . Co-starring with S ophia Loren was Anthony Quinn as a man who falls i n love with the widow of a gangster and fights to convince all their assorted children that a marriage would benefit everybody. "For a kid who saw 42nd Street fifty times, it was thrilling to walk onto the Paramount lot, " said Stefano. "The first time I walked onto a soundstage, the red light went on j ust as I got inside the door. They were shooting a tiny office set at the far end of the stage, and I couldn't see a thing. But I could hear Sophia Loren saying my word s , and it was an unbelievable feeling . " S hortl y after the S tefanos arrived in Los Angeles, Marilyn gave birth to their only child, Dominic, and Joe began his contract work for Fox. "It was very different from what I'd expected. For one thing, I had no idea of the bullshit that goes on. " H i s first taste was a project called A Machine for Chuparosa , about a tiny Mexican village that gets a tractor for the first time. The producer could not decide whether to shoot the film in Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Peru, or the Pyrenees , hopping from one to the next with Stefano in tow to do endless location rewrites . After a month wasted with n o resolution, Stefano asked to be released from his contract. "I went to the front office at Fox and said, 'I know I've written a movie that's gotten great reviews (which The B lack Orchid had, along with winning a Venice Film Festival Award for Sophia Loren's performance), but I need strength . I'm not ready to deal with this sort of thing. ' M y agent h i t the ceiling and told m e I ' d probably never

work at Fox again. Two weeks later I got a call from Fox. " H e did a treatment for Jerry Wald, The Lost Country, which was to star Anthony Perkins as a teacher who fall s in love with a young student. It fel l into limbo and was rewritten two years later by Clifford Odets , eventuall y being filmed as Wild in the Country with E l v i s Presley ! B ut Stefano's early experiences at Fox taught him the value of turning down some assignments: "I learned how to say no. And to this day, I've never regretted not doing something to which I had originally said no. I can't think of a single exception. " H e did say yes, however, t o a variety of TV assignments. " Mainly, I did shows for friends of mine who had series. I saw the pilot for Saints and Sinners and I l iked it, so I did a show called 'Source of Information' for (producer) Adrian Spies . " It featured S cott Marlowe as an unscrupulous ne'er-do-well who steals a play written by series regular Nick Adams, and uses it to interest a hospitalized ex-movie queen in a comeback. "Tony Curtis called and asked me to do a Ford Startime, said Stefano of his next teleplay. "Universal wanted to do a new version of the Juggler legend­ where the guy has nothing to give the Madonna as a gift, so he wants to j uggle for her and the townspeople won't let him . " The script was titled "The Young Juggler. " For General Electric Theatre Stefano did two half-hour dramas. The first was a fictionalization of his father's life, "The Committeeman , " which starred Lee J. Cobb. The other, " Hitler's Secret, " was based on a story written by Richard Oswald, the father of director Gerd Oswald, with whom Stefano was soon to work so closely on The Outer Limits . He a l s o wrote three segments o f The Detectives and several episodes of The Lloyd Bridges Show. The first of these, "A Game for Alternate Mondays," starred Glynis Johns as a woman who habitually takes her daughter to a railroad station every other Monday, which is the only time a train comes through. On each occasion she tell s the girl her father is coming home on the train. B ridges steps off the train one day and is drawn into their fantasy, allowing himself to "become " the father they have pretended will arrive-rather like a version of Waiting for Godot in which someone becomes Godot, just so he can show up at last and end the waiting. /I

Jl

THf OUHR liMITS COM PANION By

1 95 9 , S t efan o decided h e w anted

to make a feature with a "big" director, and after securing a new and stronger agent, Elliot Kastner, he gave him and fellow agent Ned B rown a l i st of ten preferred directors and said " Call me . " The first call was from Otto Preminger, who wanted to adapt Th e Quiet Am erican ( a bestseller on the threat o f Commun i s m ) ; the second, from Wi lliam Wyler. Due to v arious creative conflicts Stefano had to regretfu l l y s a y no t o each o f them . The third call w a s from Alfred H itchcock, w h o h a d r u n into trouble with a low-budget script cal led Psycho when a fi rst draft by James

P.

Cav anaugh proved inadequate (Cavanaugh later became the story editor for Th riller) . H itchcock's agents set up an interv iew at Paramount, and while H itchcock did not l ike The Black Orchid, he did hit it off with Stefano . 2

" I 'd almost turned Psycho down , " said Stefano, " because I'd read the novel and didn't like it. B ut I had ideas about what I could do with the story. H itchcock's eyes lit up when I said, 'If the movie seems to be about this girl who we meet and get to know, who happens to stop at this motel and get murdered half an hour into the picture .. .' A lot of Psych o 's success has to do with your know ledge of movie conventions . It was a movie made for people who watch movies, particularly Hitchcock movie s . If we had killed, say, Grace Kelly, the audience would

The Stevens/Stefa no pa rtners h i p is a n nou nced via trade ads to the i n d u stry-at-Iarge in 1 963 .

expect it was a trick. Janet Leigh was at j ust the right

Winston Graham novel Marn ie , at the time Grace Kelfy

level; you would accept the fact she had really died . "

was interested i n playing the lead role of a kleptomaniac .

With Psycho , Stefano drank deeply from the cup o f dark

In 1 962 Stefano wrote the pilot for the Mr. Novak

Gothic wonders that was to color nearly all of his l ater

series, and adapted the Max Erl ich murder mystery Last

work , part i c u l arly h i s O u ter L i m i ts episode s . The

Train to Babylon into what was to be Gary Cooper's last

combination of the fi lm by Hitchcock (who was steeped

fil m , Th e Naked Edg e . "I started on that script right

in a tradition of brooding, baroque image s ) , the novel by

before Psycho opened, " he said, "j ust when the Writer's

Robert B l och ( who had made the Grand Guignol entirely

Guild went on strike. United Artists was the only studio I

his domain i n modern horror l i terature ) , and the

could legitimately work for, and they offered me the film.

screenplay by Stefano make the movie version of Psycho

At the time, I was i n the hospital , having a disc removed

the ultimate tale for a rainy night.

from my back. I got flowers from H itchcock, with a card

"I agreed to do two more pictures w ith H i tch , " said

Stefano. " B ut I didn't want to do Th e B irds because I

reading, 'Why didn't you have your operation in the cutting room s ? ' "

didn't like i t . " After Psych o , he spent several weeks

When H itchcock decided to proceed with Marn i e , he

writing a one hundred-page treatment based on the

c aJled S tefano agai n . B ut Leslie Stevens had caJled first. " Leslie was building himself a company , " said

THf GAlAXY BflNG Stefano. "He needed Sto n ey B u rke to be renewed, and needed to have more than one show on the air. He was having a hard time. He called at about 1 1 : 3 0 at night and asked if he could come over and talk to me about becoming involved; if ! was w illing to make my company a third party to this new show. About ten minutes after his call, he and Dominic Frontiere walked in, and in another ten minutes, possibly fifteen, I had agreed. And we just took it from there. " "Joe started with us as a kind of figurehead, " said Stevens. "He had a name and he was new blood, which was what we needed to sell Th e O u ter Limits as a series. We hired him, and he came in a day or two before we started shooting the P lease Stand By pilot. " " I was told Hitchcock was very upset because I wasn't available to do Mamie , " Stefano said. "It was insane. How can you get angry j ust because someone is busy? He said, 'Oh, Joseph is busy producing these days, and can't do our little project over here. '" "Joe would be the first person to say that he hadn't produced his left shoe until the day we began shooting the pilot, " said Stevens. "There wasn't much for him to do except stand there and watch us film it. He deserves all the praise in the world, because at the very first he had to stand there and bite his tongue instead of saying, 'Why don't you do th is , Leslie?' or 'Why don't you stop fooling around?' I'm sure he wanted to produce then, but it wasn't his time. He was very professional with me by doing the thing we agreed to do, which was help to sell the pilot. When we went into production on the actual series, Joe came into his own as a producer. " "Each one of Joe's 'firsts' has been a gigantic success, " Tom Selden, Stefano's personal assistant on Outer Limits , points out. "His first script sold as a movie screenplay, his first TV script won awards, and his first series was Th e O uter Limits . " "I was hip to l ife, to people and situations," said Stefano . " I wasn't terribly naive. 1 didn't know much about being a producer. B ut with me, you never hire a producer; you hire Joe Stefano. "

I

It was Love

2

Stefano's dealings with H i tchcock are recounted in detail i n

( 1 92 7), a s i l e n t version of Anna Karenina, which Garbo redid as a talkie i n 1 936.

John Russell Tay lor's Hitch : The Life a n d Times of A lfred Hitchcock (Pantheon ,

1 978). and Donald Spoto's The Dark 1 983). He is quoted extensively

Side of Genius (Little, B rown,

in the sections of both books dealing with Psycho and Mamie.

S f l l l N G T H f P i l OT

A p ilo t should be hard-hitting and noisy. If you get stuck with a quiet scene, have somebody in the room kick over an ashtray ! -Daniel Melnick, to Leslie Stevens

lOG-lINf Please Sta n d By typified Stevens' approach to science fiction : His plot was speculative and fantastic ; his lead actor was a popular film star; his technical j argon was fast, wild-sounding and e s sentially credible, and his affection for hard science as a story springboard was obvious. His script was finished November 1 1 , 1 962, and the pilot was budgeted at $2 1 3 ,000. After a hectic two weeks of preproduction, film started rolling on December 3rd. Shooting took . nine days at a closed-down radio station in Coldwater Canyon, and at MGM on B acklot #4's Andy Hardy S treet and on Stage #3 . The completed footage then vanished into the l abyrinth of the Daystar B uilding, where it was edited, dubbed, and scored. Dominic Frontiere claimed that the opening title theme for The Outer Limits, beginning with the powerful musical " sting" that instantly rivets the viewer's attention, was composed at his desk in fifteen minute s . The music he did for the pilot is eerie, drifting and sonorous, rich with strings-exactly the sort of thing Stevens needed to differentiate his film from the run-of-the-mil l TV product. Rarely used in TV, Frontiere's l arge orchestra lent the pilot a further degree of class.

JJ

TH[ OUHR liMITS COM PANION One of ABC's first questions t o Stevens was, "Who's going to host it? " Most anthologies of the day featured on on-camera host, usually a celebrity, and every show even remotel y associated with science fiction had had one. Stevens asked his new producer, Stefano, if he would like the job a fa Rod Serling. Stefano declined. Then, during a meeting with ABC and UA executives , inspiration struck: "They cornered me on the topic of the host , " said Stevens. "I heard myself say, 'You are a television set. Wel l , turn off! There'll be a little picture-dot, and then a voice would say there was nothing wrong with the set, then the picture would come back on out-of-focus, then, as we took control, it would rol l and flutter. B y then, we'd be in the outer l imits . ' It j ust came to me in a b lind flash, in the middle of a conference, and I thought to myself, my god, that sounds good ! "

Nobody. Nobody a t all. B ut the secrets o f the universe don't mind. They reveal themselves to nobodies who c are . Isaac Newton was a nobody. Michael Faraday was a bookbi nder's apprentic e . . . . The b i g laboratories spend m i ll ions of doll ars, Caro l , and they work slowly and surely, and they get results. But not the big steps. Those come from the human mind, not from the l aboratory. Cal l them inspiration, call them intuition, maybe blind luck. Maybe it's God, saying, "Now's the time . "

PROlOGH The planet Earth is a speck af dust . . .

C l iff Robertson a n d Jacqueline Scott.

ORAMA The major theme of Please Stand By was summed up by Stevens in the closing speech he wrote for the Control Voice. Its minor premise comes from the mouth of Allan Maxwell , when he attempts to justify to his skeptical wife Carol his modest efforts to investigate the unknown. An aggressively normal person who would rather not ponder such things, Carol says, " What makes you think you can discover anything? Who are you?" Allan's reply :

J4

Significantly, " Who are you?" is also the first question asked Allan by the alien, and the real answer is that he is the kind of solitary, science-smart misfit that is the core character for most of Leslie Stevens' Outer Limits scripts. One nice touch is that both Allan and the Being are scientific loners , kindred spirits whose contact is possible only because both of them are breaking rules to satisfy their curiosity-Allan is bleeding power away from the radio station that provides his livelihood, and the Being says he is "not allowed to use equipment for exploration . " Rather than a raygun-slinging octopus come to appropriate all of Earth's v i rgins, lightbulbs, and Dr. Pepper for the nefarious ends of its homeworld, here the alien v isitor is benevolent, even passive. The destruction it causes is unintended, as is the panic it l ater prompts. It is here by acc ident, and only resorts to a show of force to get everybody to shut up and listen to it. This establishes one of The Outer Limits ' archetypes : The humane, quizzical alien who interacts with humans who only hasten its death. As far as the network was concerned, a radioactive

THf GAlAXY BflNG extraterrestrial was a monster regardless of his better qualities, and the first appearance of The Outer Limits ' first monster is a memorable one. Keeping in mind Dan Melnick's admonition to get the monster on-screen quickly, Stevens brings on the B eing 30 seconds into the first reel , as a ghostly coruscation in the " solid static " pattern on Allan's 3D monitor. It resolves to recognizability nine minutes into the show proper, and a nice resonance is established by the fact that as Allan watches his screen, the TV viewing audience is watching him on their screens, just after being told their TV sets were beyond their control. In Please Stand By, a similar " loss" of control results in the transmission of the B eing to Earth. Moral : Don't monkey around with the knobs while someone else is controlling all that you see and hear. The story's conceptual antecedent is the Robert Wise film The Day the Earth Stood Still ( 1 95 1 ) , reduced in scope for TV. The character of the B eing combines the civil pragmatism of K laatu, the alien emissary, with the awesome physical presence of his police robot, Gort. While Klaatu arrives in a flying saucer, the Being, fittingly enough, crawl s forth from a kind of TV screen, and tunes himself out at the end of the show. Both visitors deliver speeches l aced with cosmic profundities after demonstrating their superior Al lyson A m e s frea ks o u t w h i l e Lee P h i l i ps restra i n s her. destructive power, and both fil m s utilize easily alienation from his work is made c lear in what she says identifiable science fiction trappings without when she sees the static pattern on the monitor: "I don't succumbing to a conventional monster-run-amok plot. l ike it. Don't ask me to appreciate it because I can't. It's One convention Stevens does exploit is the fear of cold. It sounds l ike s leet and snow, and it looks like the masses for technology. Carol Maxwell's fear of electricity, frozen. I don't l ike it; I'm sorry. " Fear of the Allan's research has driven them apart, and her unknown (and the machines that probe it) has made

Fi rst contact: Allan a n d the Being i n Alla n ' s m a kesh i ft lab.

Allan an introspective oddball in the eyes of his family and co-workers . His transceiving rig does worse than make no money; it draws so much power that the radio station's signal is reduced to "a feeble beep, " which causes Carol's dislike to tip over into active hostility : " You know we could lose our sponsors ! " But Stevens demonstrates a love for the toys of technology, a willingness to embrace strange new devices in a society of neophobes like Caro l . A l l an ' s c learly impossible transceiver exists not because Please Stand By was any great proponent of 1 960s science, but because Stevens understood that the essence of the science fiction form is spec ulation-not documentation. By keeping one foot firmly in the real world of marriage and bills and sponsors, and the other in fantasy l and (Allan's shed), the story slides neatly into the realm of what if without bothering to explain

J5

TH[ OUHR liMITS COM PANI O N ••

• 4

N 11'

'., . .t:1J '-

. . .

,

.�';P ' , '',' . - :.

The Being ca uterizes C a rol ' s b u l let wound to " stop death . "

the warp and woof o f Alan's gadgetry. We are given a few credible tidbits about radio waves coming in " at 2 1 centimeters" from somewhere Out There. 1 To explain further would engulf the story in the octopoid j ustifications of " hard" science fiction-a digression that a hardhitting, comprehensible and commercial pilot could not afford. Allan Maxwell could almost be Stevens himself, attempting to sell his unusual pilot to a network composed of mentalities l ike Carol and Gene Maxwell-people who sometimes need their horizons broadened directly and eye-wideningly. Stevens also uses the fear of technology as a breach point for his message that science and its devices require the same leery respect that a mariner accords the sea-the potentials for risk, danger, and death are balanced by the opportunities for uplift and discovery. For now, the abrupt announcement that nothing was wrong with the television set put the unsettled viewer right where Stevens wanted him or her.

Erman. " S o we finally gave the part to Lee Philips. At the eleventh hour, Cliff cal l s with the news that he's decided to do the pilot, so I had to consult Leslie since Cliff was very big stuff in those days and his salary was $ 1 0,000, much more than Lee's. Leslie, being courageous and wanting a success, said to get Cliff, feeling he would add to the prestige of the show. Lee chose to play Allan's brother. " S ince the technological exposition in the script was relatively meaningless to Robertson as an actor, Stevens used cue cards and off-camera prompting to help him through the dialogue, eventuall y changing camera angles after every line or two, allowing the speeches to be patched smoothl y together in the editing room. The show's other noteworthy performance was that of William O. Douglas, Jr. , son of the Supreme Court Justice. Douglas had previously appeared in one of Stevens' Stoney B urke episode-cum-spinoff-pilots, "The Weapons Man , " and his mime training under

O R A M AT I S P [ R S O N H The casting of Cliff Robertson as Allan was a coup for Daystar's John Erman, who secured the actor in the wake of his much-lauded portrayal of John F. Kennedy in PT- J 09 . " He took forever to make up his mind," recalls

Robertson , the h i g h est·paid actor ever to work on The Outer Lim its, poses for a public i ty shot while two Daysta r tec h n ic i a n s fiddle a bout in the backg ro u n d .

THf GAlAXY BflNG Marcel Marceau was applied to his portrayal of the Galaxy Being as well as several other creatures he played while under contract to Day star during Outer Limits ' first season. "The face is hidden and the voice is generally distorted, " he noted in an interview. " S o , if they are to be made anything but lunging hulks, characterization must be done with the body, or with a tilt of the head . " "We didn't want some lumbering stunt man in a monster suit , " said Stevens . "Douglas added a touch of weirdness to the way he walked by using a praying mantis as his model; you can see how he looks and Wi l l i a m O. Doug las, J r. turns with his whole body. The creature perceives a world that i s , to him, made of glass-he can't keep his balance, as though he's about to fal l off this transparent place. "

to take a diagnostic look at it. When Phillips said, " It stinks ! " Stevens immediately asked him to fix it. Phi l l i p s drove Wil l i am Douglas to the E l l i s B urman Studios (then in Laguna Beach) and made a life-mask of the actor's face in plaster. " Since I was working on another project at the time , " said Phillips, " I asked Chuck Schram to complete the head. He made it after hours, behind everyone's backs at MGM . " S chram w a s , a t that time, working a s a n assistant to William Tuttle, Twilight Zone 's regular makeup artist. The new head was made of slip rubber and opened only in the back, sealing off the face entirely. Douglas had to draw oxygen through a tube that fed into the mask from an air tank strapped to his chest inside the wetsuit. Large-pupiled eyes from an oversized statue of a crow were implanted into the mask's eyesockets to give the " tri-pupilled" look Stevens had requested. The new mask took three days to complete and was delivered the day before shooting commenced on the

BfHIND THf SCfNfS The Being costume itself was an innovative amalgam of costume, makeup sculpting, and optical effects, rare in an era when TV did most of its monsters in greasepaint. To get the Being to "glow and flicker like a man made out of blue light" (in the words of Gene Maxwell), a brown wetsuit was heavily coated in oil and glycerin, which reflected the brilliant stage l ighting in endlessly shifting patterns . When the film of the Being was negative-reversed, the dark brown costume became glaring white. B ecause of this optical trickery, Douglas could play none of his scenes on the actual sets or with any of the other actors. He was composited with the normal footage in postproduction. To enhance the effects of radiation-light emanating from the Being, Stevens used a mobile acetyline torch rig in some shots, and an extremely bright spotlight called a " scissors arc " in others. While this effect was inspired, the original design of the actual mask worn by Douglas was not. The Being's face was at first a wholly i nadequate papier-nulche construction, and Elaine Michea at Daystar invited her makeup-artist friend, Fred Phillips,

The Galaxy Being " wetsuit" as it a p pea red onscreen, and as i i looked during fi l m i ng , prior to the negative-reversa l effect.

Jl

THf O UHR liMITS COM PANION m icrophone next t o a v acuum c leaner hose and " v alving " the nozzle with the fingers . Elizalde even put the nozzle into h i s mouth to achieve weird sounds, and overlaid this with an MGM sound effects track from Th e Tim e Machin e . " It was a tape called Morlocks , " E lizalde recalled. "It was a composite of elephants and l i on roars and stuff. We needed sounds that were otherworldly, but s o unded l ike s omeone putting out vast amounts of information. I used it as a basic track. " R obert AD First C l i ff Robertson ta l ks t o t h e s u peri m posed a l i e n ; note how t h e Bei n g ' s i mage " bleed s " s l i g htly onto the top Ju stman scouted the edge of the console, shut-down FM station pilot. " I t was a real rush j ob , " said Phillips, who used for exterior shots nestled into the Hollywood fitted Douglas into the contraption on the set. hillside. "I u sed to l isten to a show on that station After seeing his work, S tevens gave Phillips most called 'Concerto from Coldwater Canyon, ' ' ' said of the makeup duties on the pilot, and Phillips Justman. " It was quite cold, and we were up there remained w ith the O u ter Lim its crew o n a in the middle of the night, firing blanks from a per-assignment basis through both seasons of the 5 0-caliber machine gun . " show. The creation of the alien' s distorted electronic voice set another standard for the soon-to-be series. "We used a single-side band transmitter Awaiting S tevens and S tefano in ABC's New and receiver so that the voice would sound York screening room were Leonard Goldenson strange, but retain a maximum of intelligibility, " and Thomas Moore . Daniel Melnick and Richard said John E lizalde. " You can not only modulate Dorso were also i n attendance. sound s , but you c an transfer inflections and " They h ad been watching pilots all week , " emotional qualities . We used this set-up all the recalls S tefano . " I wasn't sure how they'd take thi s time, and then would add filters or echoes or o n e . When I m e t them, something in' the air gave whatever to vary the voice s . " The technique me the idea that it had a lready been seen. " Elizalde used had the unintended byproduct of " I used t o have a man travel w ith all of our producing an actual AM radio transmission that p ilots , " said Dorso, who was there representing radiated within a hundred yards of the Daystar U n i ted Artists . " He ' d sit in the back of the Building-which means that, if you had chanced screening room and t e l l the projectionist to past around New Year' s of 1 962, you might have gradually build the sound volume, unti l , blam! it been able to catch Leslie Stevens' voice, reading h i t at the c l imax . In slow spots, you'd distract the the Galaxy Being's l i ne s , on your car radio at two execs--everybody did it in those day s . Today, in the morning ! 2 they test shows in front of a live audience . " The chaotic " energy noise" of the Being's Accordingly, S tevens told the projectionist to radioactive aura was produced by sticking a

TA G

J8

THf GAlAXY BflNG crank up the sound during Act Four of Please

a potato chip at the buffet table and thinking, shut

Stand By. Having no ashtrays to boot over, Dorso

up , it's sellin g , tha t 's what counts , don 't say a

did his best to distract Goldenson when he caught the Chairman of the B o ard straining to read his watch in the dark. The differences between Please Stand By and " The Galaxy B e i n g " (the title u s e d for i t s broadcast a s the premiere episode of The Outer Limits) versions of the pilot are primarily found i n t h e s o u n d m i x . I n Please Sta n d By, the background music is more subdued, muted, and Frontiere's end title theme i s an expanded version never heard on TV. Allan ' s radio station, KXKVI, spins different dance t u ne s . The B e in g ' s " s ignature noise" includes a n asthmatic , bell o w s huffing-puffing sound, as though it i s having difficulty breathing i n our atmosphere, or it is heard to "pump up" power preparatory to blowing something down with radiation . 3 The shock scene s , such as the discovery of the dead deejay's corpse, are edited to be more impactfu l . In order to speed the film to the first appearance of the alien , some expositional dialogue heard in the "Galaxy Being" version is cut. In Please Stand By, the extra, "bonus " dialogue includes an addendum to the B e i n g ' s l i n e , "I am danger to my galaxy . . . they will come for me . . . destroy your planet"-which sheds a slightly more malevolent light on his fellow Andromedans . When Carol sees the B eing in the transmission shack, she comes completely unhinged, scre ami n g and scrabbling around until Allan gives her a good shaking. The death- scream of ill-fated deej ay Eddie Phillips, as well as the lusty shriek put out by Gene Maxwell's date, Loreen, at the sight of Eddie's charred corpse, were dropped from " The Galaxy Being . " The extra screaming and commotion did not necessarily sell the pilot to the execs , but it helped. After the screening, S tevens noted, "I was watching Tom Moore, and it was really kind of comedic. I stood there while Moore outstretched his hand and walked toward me . . . then went right by me and hugged S tefano ! It was l ike a Chaplin movie; I stood there thinking he was going to hug me. B ut they were all tickled to death, congratulating Joe and telling him how marvelous his show was . That always floored u s-the ones who really worked on the pilot. I was left holding

word! Don 't rock the boat! The fact that it was

going well was all that we really needed. " " Goldenson turned t o m e and said, ' I understand y o u wrote Psych o , " remembered S tefano . "I said that was right and he said, 'Well, keep i t coming . ' (The execs) tied Psycho into horror, and when they saw thi s Galaxy Being on the screen, everybody was in sync-the pilot was scary, Psycho was scary; we want scary show s . My whole i d e a o f science fiction a t the t i m e was monsters anyway-y'know, Th e Th ing . " While S tefano left the screening feeling that Please Stand By was " too different; too intense" for the executives, S tevens was more optimi stic : " Once we showed them the pilot, they knew they had something. They seemed kind of astoni shed by it. B ut it was hard-edged enough to sell itself. " Later in the day, S tefano received a phone call from Dorso i n his hotel room . ABC wanted to buy the seri e s .

I

W h i l e the rev e l ation that A l l an i s "scanning the hydrogen static coming i n at a frequency of

21

centimeters" could be d i s m i ssed as

colorful sci-fi gobbledygook, i t i s essent i a l l y v a l i d . A l l stars contain hydrogen

which,

wavelength of

21

when

ionized,

emits

radi o

waves

at a natural

centimeters. Reading these rad i o waves is one way

astronomers can c h art stars that are so far away they are i n v i s i b l e to conventional telescope s . A perfect ly acceptable way for an alien to contact c i v i l izations that do not su spect its ex i stence is to use those radi o waves as a carrier for a s i gnal . 2

E l i zalde e x p l a i n s :

" B asical l y,

in

AM

rad i o ,

you

modulate the

ampLitude of a carrier wave i n order to make it inte l l i g i b l e .

You

tran s m i t a s i g n a l , u s i n g a m i crophone, and in s i n g l e - s ide-band you lop off half the signal . " On an osc i l l oscope, an AM wavefornl would l ook e x ac t l y l i ke the sine-wave pattern seen during the opening titles for The

Outer Limits.

A M stands for "amp l i tude modul ation , " which

means adj usting the s i ze and breadth of the "peaks" on the waveform . For the tech n i q u e E l izalde describes, the top or bottom half of that s in e-wave-the outgoing sign al-i s e l i m i n ated.

" You broadcast that

and get i t back on a recei ver," h e cont i n u e s , "and you de-tune the recei v e r just a l ittle b i t so the rep l acement of the m i s s i n g side of the waveform-band is not true. That d i storts the s i gnal ; you start getting squawks, and i f you tune too far one way, you wind up sounding l i ke Daisy D u c k . We put a d u m m y L oad on our tran s m i tter so it wouldn't radiate, since we didn't have a l icense to operate a single-s ide-band, b u t i t would c arry for about a h u n d red yard s . " 3

Th i s n o i s e , excised from " T h e Galaxy B e i n g , " w a s u sed l ater for the fi s h creatures i n "Tourist Attraction . "

THf O UHR liMITS CO M PANION

A V i l l a � i S t e f a n o Pr o � u c t i o n I'm sure that as a new producer, I must've done things that shocked people. Because I didn't know how to "be" a producer-al l I knew was how to come up with a movie that I l iked. - Joseph S tefano

Once ABC voted in favor of Please Stand By, a package deal was assembled by the Wil liam Morris Agency, which at the time represented both United Artists and Daystar. "They did two months of contract writing and nothing else," lamented S tevens. "They took advantage of the goose with the pewter egg . " To this day, as a result, William Morris takes 1 0 percent of The Outer Limits ' earnings from syndication sales. ABC was also keen on having S tefano. In fact, Daniel Melnick had sent feelers concerning TV projects Stefano's way about the time S tevens secured him for Please Stand By. In order to become a ful l partner with Stevens and U A , Stefano incorporated as Villa di Stefano Productions - the "villa" being his B everly H i l l s res idenc e . His wife designed the company logo, deriving it from an architectural blueprint of the house. " My company was, in effect, renting me out to Daystar, " said Stefano. " When I got the word that the show had sold, I thought, okay, we're in business . " Initially, Villa d i Stefano's office was several blocks from Daystar, at 934 North La Cienega in West Hollywood. Harlan Ellison, who went there to pitch story ideas , recalled it as " an itty-bitty office somewhere near the Cock and Bull . " Stefano had given Stevens a frank overv iew o f the pilot while still in New York: "To me, it was like 1 950s science fiction movies, which I never saw, never l iked, and wasn't about to produce. I remember telling him that doing 'The Galaxy Being' every week was not my idea of what the show was about, and he said, 'Fine; do whatever you want-it's your show. ' He was terribly angry when Stoney Burke did not get renewed, and the fact that ABC picked up The Outer Limits did not placate him, because he wanted several shows on the air all at once. As soon as it became obvious to Leslie that I knew what I was doing, he kind of backed off from The Outer Limits to pursue other new shows. I certainly didn't enter into it with any idea of pushing him out. The problem always was that you don't need

40

two guys l ike me and Leslie to produce one show. And I think Danny Melnick, right off the bat, knew which of us was going to be making the shows that he wanted to see . " Stefano was introduced t o the four floors of personnel at the Daystar Building. "I couldn't imagine what some of them were doing there," he recalls, bemused. "Leslie just said, 'Well ... they're bright. ' It was l ike Camelot. Leslie would hire people he just liked, whose actual jobs were a mystery to me. I was never sure what Allan B alter's job at Daystar was, for example. But Leslie loved to give jobs to people - he had these great, lavish gifts of love that he would suddenl y decide you were going to be the victim of. One day he told me, 'I've got a man to do all of our script mimeographing. He's kind of expensive, but really worth it.' This man was a murderer who'd just gotten out of prison, was enormously overweight, and gay. And I said, 'Oh, Leslie, that's so wonderful of you; we're so glad to do this . ' He loved being in the position to do people good, but it was never for me or for you. It was always for him, because it made him feel wonderful. " Stevens advised the Daystar crew that whatever Stefano requested must be done, and his time was not to be wasted with any problems, which were to be brought directly to Stevens or Frontiere instead. When S tefano walked onto the set of Please Stand By for the first time, he was surprised to find himself regarded with a mixture of awe and fear-the " image" Stevens had created for him as producer. " B ob Justman said something during a meeting," said Stefano, " and I watched him, thinking, he knows what h e 's talking about. I said to him, 'Stick around, because I'm going to need you . ' He looked at me like he couldn't believe it-this was not the Joe Stefano that Leslie had told the crew about. One day, after a meeting with Edgar Scherick (Melnick's repl acement at ABC), he said, 'You're not intractable ! ' and I thought, oh my god, where did he get that idea? Leslie was protective of me, and wanted to make the show as comfortable as possible. For me , producing was a 'fools rush in' situation . I had no trouble with acc limation, and everybody seemed to be able to do anything I asked them to. " S tefano's education i n the tasks of producership

VillA m STHANO was furious and rapid. From the day regular production of mine without finding flowers in her dressing room. on The Outer Limits commenced, it absorbed all his Everyone w ith a speaking part received a personal time. When he wasn't writing or rewriting, he was telegram from me before they arrived. I treated my meeting with writers, screening actors, or holed up in the editing room s at Daystar, or in tran s i t between studio sets and locations. "Once I started, I realized I had to be at the studio. I couldn't sit around the far end of S unset Boulevard while the crew was working at KTTV or MGM . " He moved Villa di Stefano to one of a cluster of " shabby l ittle bungalows " on the KTTV lot next to the soundstages . Mari lyn Stefano assumed the role of interior decorator. Proudly, Stefano noted, "My office was one of the first in the business to be done entirely in antiques. We had a huge breakfront thing, a seventeenth­ century armoire with big doors that we outfitted as a bar. " Mixed among the required office appurtenances were small Mediterranean end tables and settees . Collector' s pieces in baroque, gilt frames hung from the walls. Stefano's desk was an ornate affair of Italian parquet. " I t was absurd, impractical , " said A l l an Balter. "Like some period villa. " On the other hand, Stefano's assistant Tom Selden said, "The offices were gorgeous, reall y elegant. We had modern things, of course, accessible for story conferences and meetings, but Marilyn did a magnificent job . " The decoration scheme also illustrates another aspect of Stefano the producer, according to Leslie Stevens : "The first day Joe was in the Villa di Stefa n o ' s m a i n men (L-R) : Tom Selden, Joseph Stefa no, and Lou is Morhei m , near CBS Studios on S u n set Boulevard , j ust prior to the network pre m iere of The Outer Lim its. office, he went to Frontiere and (Cou rtesy Joseph Stefa no) requested the antique s . Everyone else had the standard-issue Formica desks . Within a people l ike stars , and we later got a lot of actors month, Joe got his way. He was a real impresario ; the because of that . " Stefano al so sent personal letters of type to order lobster on the set while everybody else congratulation to each writer who worked on the had mixed meat s . " series, a week or so prior to the airdate of each episode. " I was real grand studio style, and they a l l loved B i lleted i n the KTTV bungalow were Lou Morheim, Outer Limits ' recently-engaged story editor, it," said Stefano. "No actress ever appeared on a show

41

THf OUHR liMITS CO M PAN ION and Tom Selden, an ex-actor who Stefano recruited as an assistant after seeing a play he'd directed at the Angels Theatre, Call Me By My Rightful Name­ which starred Robert S ampson and Sally Kellerman, two actors shortly to appear in The Outer Limits . 1 "There was a l arge reception area," recall s Selden, "where you'd find B arbara Wil li ams, who was Joe's secretary and our coordinator. Lou Morheim's office was to the left, Joe's was straight ahead, behind Barbara, and my office was off to the right-that was where Joe did most of his writing. I functioned out of his offlce most of the time while he did rewrites locked up in mine . " Selden joined Villa di S tefano in l ate June of 1 963 , while the " Architects of Fear" episode of Outer Limits was in postproduction. Louis Morheim was the man who bought the Kurosawa film The Seven Samurai and packaged it, in a partnership with Yul B rynner, to produce The Magnificent Seven . With Fred Freiberger (a future producer of Star Trek) , he cowrote The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms in 1 95 3 , adapting it from the Ray Bradbury story, "The Foghorn. " Of The Outer Limits, Morheim said, " I was impressed by the pilot, and I smelled that these guys at Daystar were on the cutting edge of the future; they were not tired old hacks. Leslie Stevens asked me what my criteria would be for j udging whether a script was good or bad, and I started to say, 'Well , I'm a student of Lajos Egri, and-' I never got past the 'and. ' For Leslie, the duck j ust came down. He said, 'You've got the j ob . ' " 2 That same week, at the invitation of producer Irwin Allen, Morheim had previewed the pilot for Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea , . " I knew I could make a much better contribution, as a dramatist, to something like The Outer Limits, " he said. "It was something I wanted to watch. I would never be an audience to something like Voyage . " Morheim and S tefano formed the powerful story-generating combine that became the heart of The Outer Limits . Morheim screened oral story submissions and rode shotgun on the useful ones through the first draft stage . " From the oral submission," he says, " we'd figure two weeks for a treatment or outline, and three more weeks for a first draft, for the balance of the writing, another two or three weeks. So with an organized, professional writer, we're talking two weeks for original material, and six weeks for a teleplay. " "Lou saw all the writers before I did, " said

42

S tefano . " At first, there was maybe one out of ten writers he thought ought to meet me; not much was coming around. When somebody had an idea he liked, it was rare that I didn't l ike it, because Lou knew exactly what I was looking for. " ABC, however, did not. They wanted a more concrete bottom line, a theme statement as to j ust what the hell the new series was supposed to be about. "They were constantly on our backs," says Stevens. "They wanted to know what we were going to do with the show, how we were going to 'control' it. They w anted something on paper as a g u ide l ine for everybody, hence, The Canons of Please Stand By. " The Canons were in the form of a "bible, " or series format booklet, dutifully hammered out by Stefano for distribution to agents and prospective scriptwriters . " It was from Leslie's ideas , " he said, " and based on the pilot. " While it is clear that Stefano considered such an absolute, boiled-down summary to be superfluous, it is also obvious that he had a bit of fun stretching a handful of generalized concepts out to fifteen typed pages (see Appendix I). Prime among the ideas was the " hook" Daniel Melnick had insi sted on, the one-per-week monster effect, which came to be called the " bear. " Stefano explained in a magazine interview: "In the days of vaudeville, when things were going wrong and the audience was getting bored, out would come a comic in a bear outfit. Or a trained bear. That's what we do in each of our shows-we bring on the bear ! " Once ABC got their bible, they objected to Please Stand By as a title. It was still less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and they did not want the program's opening to be misconstrued as a bonafide emergency alert. Stevens took a cue from his Contro l Voice speech, briefly renaming his new show Beyond Control. " Nobody was really happy with that," said S tefano , who wrote his earl ier scripts for the show under this mantle, which one reviewer suggested might make too ripe a target for derisive critics. Soon enough, Stevens hit upon The Outer Limits as a substitute, and the finalized title was announced in the May 1 8th, 1 963 issue of TV Guide . Stevens retitled his pilot "The Galaxy Being , " and made the appropriate adj ustments in the introductory Control Voice narration. The great adventure in which the TV viewer was about to participate now reached "from the inner mind to THE OUTER LIMITS . " The tag speech of the original pilot had run :

VillA UI STHANO We now return control of your television set to you , until next week at this same time, when the Control Voice takes over. Until then , PLEASE STAND B Y.

Thi s was modified to : " . . . when the Control Voice will take you to THE OUTER LIMITS . " O f the Control Voice, Stevens says, " I originated the concept of the theme statement. I wrote it into the pilot and thought that at the end of each episode we could have some kind of brief nod to high-minded ideal s . " Regardless of who wrote the subsequent scripts for the show, Stefano wrote most of the Control Voice speeches, and his morali stic tone soon became another "thread" giving the show a week-to-week continuity. " S ome of them are pretty outrageous, " he said. " B ut the narration never said anything I didn't firmly bel ieve in, and never without a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek. There's a lot more humor in The Outer Limits than anybody ever dreamed, simply because that's a part of me that must play. " In reediting "The Galaxy Being" for its network premiere, Stefano got his first taste of working on a mov iola. " I learned how to cut film by watching footage on the machine . For example, there was a moment when the actress crosses into shadow, and you couldn't see her face. I said, 'Right there-start her dialogue, then cut to Cliff reacting, and we've gotten rid of three whole pages.' For me, seeing film in a moviola was l ike getting it back into the typewriter again-just an extens ion of writing. " A new credit sequence was done, with a slower succession of astronomical plates run behind the end credits. The final card was a real mouthfu l : A Villa di Stefano Production / In Association with Daystar Productions / United Artists Television. The most favorable reaction to the September 1 6, 1 963 premiere broadcast of "The Galaxy Being" came from The Hollywood Reporter: " [Stevens has] allowed his imagination to run wild almost to the point of incredulity in the initial plot, but the production was mounted so handsomely with special effects, smoothly accelerating suspense, and acting played straight down the middle for human values rarel y given more than fleeting development in shock themers , that this v iewer' s reaction was : 'It couldn ' t possibly happen ... but I wouldn't bet heavily that it couldn't. '" Production on regular series episodes for The Outer Limits began i n May of 1 96 3 . The Villa di

S tefano bungalow, l ike the Daystar Building, buzzed with activity. "Just getting scripts completed was a seven-days-a-week j ob , " said Morheim. "It never stopped. I was always taking scripts home with me. " " We always had five shows going at once, " said Tom Selden. " One being readied, one i n preproduction, one shooting, one being edited, and one in final postproduction . " A new Outer Limits was born almost once every seven days. S tefano found himself creating scripts " in a whirlwind, overnight-I'd hand stuff to Lou the next morning. I found out that when you're totally in control, you can get as much as you want-you get it written the way you want it, you get the director you want, and you do it the way you want to do it. B ut. . . your wife doesn't see you, your l ittle boy doesn't see you, and you become so exhausted that when the alarm goes off in the morning, you wonder if you're even capable of getting out of bed. When I found out ABC wanted thi s show, I real i zed that I'd have to do this every week, for 24 hours a day. "

Mari lyn Stefa no ba sed the "company log o " on an a rc h i tectu ra l floorp lan of the Stefa nos' home i n Beverly H i l l s . (Cou rtesy Gerd Oswa ld)

Selden's acting career incl uded parts i n Daddy Long Legs, The Young Captives , and Conquest of Spac e .

2 Egri authored the fundamental text

The A rt of Dramatic

Writing. As for the "duck," the reference is to the quiz show You Bet Your Life , in which a prop duck would drop down from the ceiling on a w i re to accost host Groucho Marx with

the Secret Word.

4J

TH f ounR liM ITS COM PANION

Season 0ne It got on the edges, in the first fifteen weeks, of being a breakthrough show. We could all feel it. After it was over we felt li ke it was an okay credit, and that was it. After five years, we saw it hadn't died, and it may have been an important show after all . In fifteen years' time there was a genuine feeling of, " Yes, there was something in there ! " It was worth all of the care and love we'd put into it. S o the feel i ng w e got during the first few weeks came true in t h e lon g run . -Leslie Stevens Other shows being done then, things l ike The Untouchables, had a raw-nerved edge to them . People don't work that way anymore. It was kind of w i l d i n those days. The so-called Golden Age of TV was just about over, and everybody was saying, " Let's get out there and just have a bal l ! " It was kind of l ike what I imagine they fel t like during the heyday of Hollywood, with certain groups off i n a corner somewhere, getting away with murder-little kook groups making the films they really wanted to make. And those are the films we're stil l watching today. -Joseph Stefano

liTHE

OUTER LlmlTSIl C H AN N E L

Co OJ

F R I DAY · 1 0 : 3 0 P. M.

SPONSOR Overleaf, Page 44: C h i l l C h a r l i e strikes the o n ly pose he ca n . Above : Ad m a t featu ring a shot from "The Sixth Fi nger. "

The order in which episodes of The Outer Limits were broadcast bears little relation to the order in which they were produced. " You're shooting a show every seven day s , " said Leslie Stevens, " and as soon as they're edited, you run rough cuts for the network. That was where people like Dan Melnick and Richard Dorso were reall y good-they'd pick what they thought were the best shows, the ones that should run first, of the ones we had finished. " Even though Dan Melnick had been a key figure in m idwifing The Outer Limits, Stevens was not to see Melnick again once the pilot aired. Melnick was to leave ABC in late 1 963-but not before he voted thumbs-down on another particularly wild idea: "I found out you could take a cycle note and oscil late it from the deepest possible bass to beyond the range of human hearing, and as you went it would resonate until objects in the room-glass, ashtrays-would begin to v ibrate, " said Stevens, who proposed broadcasting j ust such a tone ! "I cooked it up as an alien appearing aurally-a monster that wouldn't quit, and there'd be one in every house ! " A B C was appropriately mortified by the mere idea of their TV show causing a clock to fall on someone's head, so Stevens' " Sound Monster" was un-created.

SfASON ONf

T h e Galaxy B e i n g bows i n d u r i n g a commerc i a l for ABC ' s 1 96 3 season l i ne u p .

When "The Galaxy Being" premiered, it also featured a clip of coming attractions, with the Control Voice saying, "Experience the awe and mystery of the hidden world in these coming episodes of THE OUTER LIMITS ! " Footage from " The B orderlan d , " " The Hundred Days of the Dragon, " and " Architects of Fear" was shown. "Television was still fairly new then, " said Shirley Knight, who co-starred in "The Man Who Was Never Born," perhaps the single most enduring episode of the series. "Not everybody had a television. B efore that, Inner Sanctum let you know that there was time when you could sit before the radio i n your home and be frightened. B ut the Control Voice was the first time somebody said, And now we 're going to control your life , you know; you may THINK it's the television-and it was wonderful because of the idea that you could have something in your own home that you could watch , and be frightened. " Joe Stefano recalls a n early piece o f mail the company received j ust after the premiere : " It was from

a woman who wrote : 'Your Control Voice didn't give u s back control of our set at the end of the show. Our vertical has been in trouble ever since, and we think you should pay our TV repairman ! ' "

The fa m i l i a r Outer Lim its s i n e wave ma kes a g uest a ppearance on a m o n i tor screen i n "The H u m a n Factor. "

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TH f OUHR liMITS COM PANION

TH[ BORU[RlANU Broadcast 16 December 1 9 63 Writte n and d i rected by Les l i e Stevens Assista nt D i rector: Robert Justman Di rector of Photography: John N i ckolaus CAST: I a n Frazer ( M ark Richman). Eva Frazer (Nina Foch). M rs. Pa lm er ( G l a dys C o o p e r ) . Edgar P r i c e (Alfred R yd e r ) . Lincoln Russel ( P hillip Abbott). Dwight H a rtley ( B a rry Jones). Benson Sawyer ( G e n e Reynolds). O r. Sung ( N o e l DeSousa).

Mark R i c h m a n , "The Borderla n d '" s right-ha n d m a n .

The mind of man has always longed t o know what lies beyond the world we live in . Explorers have ventured into the depths and the heights . Of these explorers , some are scientists, some are mystics. Each is driven by a different purpose. The one thing they share in common is a wish to cross the borderlands that lie beyond the Outer Limits . . .

During a seance intended t o make spiritual contact w ith the dead son of industrialist Hartley, attending physicists Ian and Eva Frazer expose the medium, Mrs. Palmer, as a fake. Then they offer the grieving man another path to the afterlife-one without guarantees. Frazer's left hand was recently trapped in an electrical field during an experiment in polarity reversal, and the two perfect right hands he shows Hartley (one his normal right, the other the "reversed" left) convince the magnate to fund a larger-scale attempt to pry open the doorway to the alternate dimension, the

"borderlands" Ian glimpsed .. . if an attempt to contact his dead son is included in the deal. Mrs . Palmer's v indictive henchman , Price, arrives to sabotage the equipment just as Ian steps onto his newly-constructed energy platform. Price is electrocuted, the breakers blow, and the power loss causes Ian to get stuck between dimensions. He calls his wife's name, unable to orient himself in the limbo realm, his voice echoing through the lab weirdly out of sync with his lip movements. Eva blacks out the city to draw enough power to pull him back, and when his re-reversed, now-normal left hand reaches through the " ionic rain" obscuring the platform, she grabs it and hauls him out intact. Hartley chooses that moment to j ump into the field, calling his son's name. He burns out and vanishes before the machines can be shut down. There are worlds beyond the worlds within which the explorer must explore . But there is one power which seems to transcend space and time, life and death . It is a deeply human power which holds us safe and together when all othelforces combine to tear us apart. We call it the power of love.

" S c ience fiction i s a doorway that allows your imagination to freewheel," said Stevens. "Science is a c arefu l l y gridded and structured view of the mysterious, so that the rational mind has a firm grounding from which you can gaze into the inexplicable pec u l i arity of the universe-the fearsomely odd space-time reversals , black holes, and so on. There are actual mysteries that occur constantly, and to look at them rationally turns up extraordinary bends in math, l ike Hausdorfs Theorems-madness

THf BOROfRlANO bends i n math, l ike Hausdorf s Theorems-madness In the episode, Eva merely goes all stars truck and that i s totally real . Cold, analytical logic that proves blankly offers, "He's a gen i u s . " the sun can change places with a pea, and that you can A l s o omitted w a s a n exchange between E v a and put the sun i n your pocket. S cience fiction i s a way to fellow researcher "Linc" Russel that sheds some light expre s s these phenomena w i thout becoming so on what drives her: technical that you lose everyone except a few RUSSEL (smiles sadly) : I used to think you were technicians. " cold-blooded. "The Borderland," S tevens' opening salvo for his EVA : B ecause I helped him go into danger? brand-new science fiction series, crackles with highly RUSSEL: No-because you're a mathematician. It's technical dialogue, but the depth of his concept is lost unusual for a woman. Austere. ami d the pyrotech n i c flash of the Frazers' EVA : And beautifu l . He taught me how beautiful it can be. otherdimensional probing. The cast tries valiantly to RUSSEL: Oh yes, I know how he feels about make the drama work but i s perhaps overqualified to mathematic s. It's l i ke music to him. He has a play second behind the thunder and fury of the special way of making ordinary thi ngs, like magnets, effects, and all the characters emerge as thin as paper. become my sterious and beauti fu l . And Wrapped up in his desire to produce an impressive something else I know. You're not cold and fol lowup to "The Galaxy Being , " S tevens edited most you're not austere . You have mastered the sternest discipline for the simplest, feminine of the character out of his telepl ay i n favor of the reason. You want to please him. extravagant, though confusing barrage of v isual s . EVA : I love him . Stevens enj oys dealing with characters o f position RUSSE L : I w i sh I ha d what he has. and wealth, expressing a working knowledge of the power-brokering that transpires in the corridors of the Once again, we have Stevens' solitary scientist, on elite, where the tuxedo can be seen as a uniform that a quest. Thi s speech also lends some context to the confers high social status on the person who wears it. closing narration by the Control Voice on the efficacy The beginning of "The B orderland" i s overwhelmed of love. B u t stripped of such background shading, the by the trappi n g s of affluence and upper-caste scientists in "The B orderland" do very l i ttle other than protocol-which are intended to divert our attention bustle around thei r l ab in a mock-epi c succession of from the fact that the players are pretty dul l and conventional . From Hartley and Sawyer we get the doubletalk of cool cash; from the HEY/ li M E ! scientists, a lot of i mportant- sounding hp s (if [fll l f' f � Da u ' , to t h " l ar k . , ,- , ,U (' , , f I h � I l ' l o" t' t n tre l a r 1 credits, such as Eva's demure .' ro d " [ / :)11(' 1 1 ' 11 01 ,,-Jo. II: J r " ; wHw:> t 1 m b n� knewT' f a! ' iI '� oj' tt) "'j j� ,:'F'l d 1 If f j( 'II lflr-r·· n t1 a f PC t krJ (1