Twilight Zone Companion (5 page)

For the first three years of The Twilight Zone undeniably the best years of the series Houghton was the single man most responsible for translating the visions of Serling and the other writers on the show from paper to film. From the purchasing of scripts (other than Serlings) to casting to scoring to cutting, no decision was made without Houghtons approval. And, as the series itself testifies, no abler, more imaginative man could have possibly been found for the job.

Douglas Heyes, director of some of The Twilight Zone’s finest episodes, including The After Hours, The Howling Man, and The Invaders, holds Houghton in high esteem. I think Buck was the best producer I ever worked with. He would listen to suggestions and try to support the director or the actor or whomever in their own originality as much as he could. He brought out the best in everyone and he made me feel like I wanted to do innovations and do exciting things for Twilight Zone, much more than I ever felt for any other series.

Buck Houghton was born Archible Ernest Houghton, Jr., on May 4, 1919, in Denver, Colorado. The nickname Buck was tacked on at such

A SELECTION OF TWILIGHT ZONE OPENINGS

Youre travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Thats the signpost up ahead your next stop, the Twilight Zone!

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of mans fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

Youre travelling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imaginationNext stop, the Twilight Zone!an early age that Houghton isnt really sure where it came from but says, I think I had buck teeth when I was a kid. When he was eight, he and his parents moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up in the shadow of Hollywood. From his early years, Houghton intended a career in film. His majors at UCLA were economics and English, but only because there wasnt a theater department there then.

College behind him, he landed a job as a reader for Val Lewton, then working as a story editor for David Selznick at Selznick International Pictures. Of Lewton, Houghton says, I didnt know him from a hole in the fence. I just wrote him a letter, saying that I was an English major from UCLA and that I thought I was reasonably articulate and fairly perceptive and Id love to work for him. So he called me in and we chatted and he gave me a book to write a report on. By the time he had the third or fourth report, he thought I was pretty good.

Since the job as a reader consisted of piece work and didnt bring a steady income, Buck had to take on an additional job working in the mailroom at Paramount Studios. Eventually, he was promoted to the studios casting office and, after a year, into the budget office.

With the advent of World War II, Buck attempted to join the Army but, failing the physical, ended up working for the Office of War Information, making propaganda shorts for European distribution. It was fun, says Houghton. I had come from an industry that figured that you couldnt take the lens cap off the camera without forty fellas standing around. I found out you could do it with three and a station wagon, which is what we did.

After the war, Houghton got a job working as an assistant to Jack Gross, an executive producer at RKO. Coincidentally, one of the producers Gross was working with at the time was Val Lewton, for whom Buck had worked before the war. As a result of this, Houghton was in on the production of a number of Lewton films which are today considered classics of the horror genre: Curse of the Cat People, The Body Snatchers, and Bedlam. Certainly, this experience didnt hurt him when it came time to produce The Twilight Zone.

After four years at RKO, Houghton moved to MGM as an assistant story editor. Two years later, he got his first job in television, as story editor on Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. After three years, he decided it was time to move up. Having worked in both story department and budget department, I knew how to handle money and I knew how to handle writers, so it was more or less natural that Id want to produce. My first experience of that was on China Smith

China Smith was a syndicated television series starring Dan Duryea in the title role as a renegade Irishman in Singapore, a private-eye type with good, entertainingly seedy connections. For the freshman producer,

China Smith was a harsh proving ground. Over a period of a year and a half, fifty-two episodes were made. Of these, the first thirteen had shooting schedules of two days each, with no rehearsal. For the rest, Houghton was allowed a more leisurely pace: an extra half day.

After China Smith, Houghton produced Wire Service, a weekly, hour-long series with a rotating cast featuring Mercedes McCambridge, George Brent, and Dane Clark as reporters. After that came Meet McGraw, starring Frank Love joy as a private eye; followed by Yancy Derringer; a western set in New Orleans starring the pre-Tarzan Jock Mahoney as a gentleman riverboat gambler; and in 1958, Man With a Camera, starring Charles Bronson as an intrepid and persistent freelance photographer (with choice lines like Ive been trying to shoot this guy all day, and Im going to shoot him!).

Then came The Twilight Zone.

Houghtons first order of business was the selection of a studio. The pilot had been shot at Universal, but that had been done simply as a courtesy to CBS, as Universal did not rent its facilities to outside production companies. Houghton decided to rent space and facilities at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. I knew it had the best storehouse of sets in town. MGM traditionally kept everything they ever made. Just about everything you could ever wish for in an anthology was there, including the back lot, which had New York streets and forests and lakes and you name it. The you name it included small towns from Middle America and the Old West, a European village, a frontier fort, facades of tenements, shops, and movie theaters, a courthouse, a state capitol, a park with bandstand, a jungle, a river, a dock, a cruise ship, a paddleboat, a three-masted schooner, modern and nineteenth-century trains and train stations, various roads, a gas station, and southern mansions.

Next came the hiring of a production crew. From the MGM makeup department came Bob Keats and from the art department came art director William Ferrari, an Oscar winner for the movie Gaslight (and later to do The Time Machine). From his associations on Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, Houghton hired production manager Ralph W. Nelson and director of photography George T. Clemens. Clemensa distant relative of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and a cameraman on High Noon, Chaplins The Great Dictator, the Fredric March Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Valentino Blood and Sand, among a multitude of otherswould prove particularly vital to the series, establishing a look that was unique in television. For casting director, network boss William Dozier suggested Mildred Gusse, someone Houghton had never heard of. But Doziers suggestion was a handshake and welcome aboard, says Buck, because you didnt call up Bill Dozier and say, I think youre wrong. But the choice proved a good one. She just turned out brilliantly. She fought for who she thought were the right people, didnt just bring the lists. She was thoroughly effective.

Before production began, Serling, Houghton, and George Clemens had a meeting to discuss directors, in order to have a list at hand as the various episodes came due for production throughout the season. Houghton strongly believes that directors should be cast with every bit as much thought as goes into the casting of actors. So often it happens that the best efforts of people come from their enthusiasm, not from their saying, Fine, it was a good job of work. Ill go ahead and connect the pipes and then turn on the water and there wont be any leaks, dont worry about a thingyou know, a good journeyman job. So the problem then is to arrange it so that a director is just enthused about what he must do.

Clemens recalls the meeting. Rod had a couple of favorite directors that Buck and I didnt like at all, and we had a couple of favorite directors that he wasnt too happy with. So we made a compromise: We wont use him if you dont use him.’ So it worked out fine.

Together, the three pooled their considerable knowledge of directors into a list that represented some of the most talented men to ever work in film and television. The majority were primarily television directors but several were men who had distinguished themselves in film. Most notable among these, at least to Houghton, was Mitchell Leisen, who had directed, among many, many other things, the classic fantasy Death Takes a Holiday, starring Fredric March. To Houghton, hiring Leisen held a special importance.

Well, that was pure hero worship, he explains. When I was a kid at Paramount, he was making the biggest pictures in townFred MacMur-ray-Barbara Stanwyck dramas, The Big Broadcast of 1937 and 1938. Some way or another, he lost all his money, and he was a very merry, pleasant fellow who just said, Well, if they dont want me in pictures then the hell with it, Ill direct television. So I called him up and I said, Mitch, you wont remember me because I was a fourth assistant director on one of your pictures, but are you honest-to-God doing television? He says, You bet your ass. What have you got? I was delighted because, God, this was a guy I had tiptoed around when I was a kid.

Hiring movie directors to do television didnt always go smoothly, however. Robert Parrish had been an Oscar-winning editor with credits that included Body and Soul, A Double Life and All the King’s Men, and had also worked as a movie director, but the direction of the Twilight Zone episode One for the Angels, starring Ed Wynn, was something totally

new to him. Houghton recalls: He was a friend of Rods and Rod suggested him. And Bob said, My God, I dont know anything about television! Ive got a thirty-page script. I only shoot five pages a day. Thats fifteen pages and this is thirty pages. How am I going to do this in three days?

I said to him, Bob, forget its television. Just take the script and bring me a list of all the camera setups you want, just like you had six days to do it, five pages a day, thirty pages.

The next day he brought in a legal-size piece of paper with all of his setups. I said, Now cross off all the shots that represent two ways of doing it. All right. Now cross off all the shots that are redundant, that give you a choice between over-shoulders and closeups. Then I said, How many are left? He said, I can do these in three days.

With the rental of space and facilities at MGM, the hiring of a production crew and selection of directors, The Twilight Zone settled into a regular routine. Each episode was given what wasfor television at leastan extremely generous schedule: one full day of rehearsal plus three shooting days. Full production began in June. Twenty episodes would be made before those working on the show would have the slightest inkling of the publics reaction.

As for Serling, his commitment to the show was total. During the early months, he was working twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. He would get up very early, Carol Serling remembers, grab a cup of coffee, and be out there at the crack of dawn. In his office in back of the house, hed dictate his scripts into a tape machine. Often, if the weather was nice, hed take the machine outside with him and sit by the pool (prompting writer Mary Wood to observe, Hes the only person I know who can get a tan and make money at the same time). Usually, says Carol, he finished writing at twelve or one oclock; hed written himself out. Rod would then drive from Pacific Palisades to MGM in Culver City. There, he would work on until late into the evening.

Rod was around all the time, recalls assistant director Edward Denault, now a vice-president with Lorimar Productions. He was instrumental in the development of the scripts and in the rewrites, was in on the post-production, always looked at the dailies. If we got in a jam and something had to be rewritten in an effort to get the show finished on time or if we were short of minutes, he was always ready and could knock off a scene very quickly. He was very, very much involved.

For all his involvement, Serling also knew his own limitations. And although he was credited as executive producer, he had no pretensions of being a producer. You see, Rod had a very short span of attention,

explains Buck Houghton. He was a very intense guy and he worked very hard and he drove himself very hard and he was very short of patience. He was not impatient; patience was not something he had. A ten-minute story conference with him was the limit, then hed want to go out and get an icecream soda or a shoeshine. So, as far as sitting through a dubbing session or going through the casting lists or sitting and cueing the music with a composer, that sort of thing: no thanks. And thats not to derogate the title of executive producer; he did have the final say. If things had started to come apart, Im sure he would have leapt in there one way or another. But in what I consider the producers function, which is to bring creative forces together and make the most out of them, that was not his intention nor did he try to do it.

Edward Denault believes that Houghton and Serling made a perfect team. Buck complemented Rod in those areas where Rod did not have the expertise. Because Buck understood production, you could go to him and explain a problem, and then he would go to Rod and say, Weve got a problem and here it is and I think we can resolve it this way. He satisfied both sides, and I think he was very good for Rod.

Over a nine-month period, Serling produced twenty-eight of the first seasons scripts. These scripts fell into three basic categories: science fiction, horror, and fantasyall employing the surprise twist ending which came to characterize The Twilight Zone.

I am writing faster now than ever before, Serling said at the time. Some of the plays I did for Playhouse 90 took me from six months to a year to complete. Each Twilight script took from thirty-five to forty hours. Yet none of this was hack work. The scope and variety of The Twilight Zone scripts were amazing. How was Serling able to accomplish it? First, Ive been wanting to do a show of this kinda series of imaginative tales that are not bound by time or space or the established laws of naturefor many years. So I had a backlog of story ideas. You could say many of the stories were written in my mind.