TOUR OF THE GALLERY

Greetings to all aficionados of art and oddness, all devotees of the demonic. I’m deliberately channeling the spirit of the great Rod Serling to welcome you to what will prove to be the most artistic entry--in the most disturbing way--of this, The Quantum Blog. And for this I must gratefully acknowledge a lad named Danny B. in Corinth, NY, for a particular photograph, and the curator of the Website www.nightgallery.net for the paintings and the TV Guide Closeups you’ll be viewing on this visit, this ghoulish guided tour, this sortie into the supernatural, through Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

The episodes on our tour come from the first two seasons of the series. It’s my understanding that a complete DVD collection of all three seasons has lately been released, but to acquire the third season I’d have to purchase the first two again as part of the set. This is because the merchandisers of television’s past are what would in the vernacular be called a pack of greedy bastards; they’ve done the same thing with the entirety of Mary Tyler Moore after previously releasing only the first four seasons as discrete sets. To obtain all seven seasons I would have to buy seasons 1-4 a second time. For that reason alone, they should all be permanent exhibits in the Night Gallery, if you take my meaning, but I digress. Now, on with the tour.

I’ll go back to being myself for the rest of this.

SEASON ONE:

”Eyes” by Rod Serling. In the Night Gallery pilot, a young director named Steven Spielberg who never amounted to much (ahem) directed Joan Crawford for his first professional job in a story about a callous, selfish, mean-spirited, but very wealthy woman who buys a destitute man’s eyes for temporary sight, and gets what’s coming to her in proper Serling fashion.

”The Dead Man” by Douglas Heyes. This one sports one of Night Gallery’s most chilling endings. A doctor, through hypnosis, is able to induce his hunky young test subject to simulate any illness, or even death itself. But his suspicions about the hottie and the doctor’s wife get the better of him when he causes the lad to “die” and for some reason can’t bring him back--until the wife figures out what he did wrong. The result will stay with you long after you’ve seen it.

”Make Me Laugh” by Rod Serling stars Godfrey Cambridge and Jackie Vernon (the voice of Frosty the Snowman in the perennial holiday cartoon) in the story of a pitifully unfunny comedian and an incompetent genie. When the genie grants the comic the ability to make anyone crack up any time he opens his mouth, it’s a lesson in being careful what you wish for.

”They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” is an Emmy-nominated classic in the best Rod Serling style. A middle-aged widower on the brink of being discarded at work has more of a life in his memories of former happy times at a closed-up old tavern than in reality. When the demolition crews come for Tim Riley’s bar, they’re tearing down our sad man’s world.

SEASON TWO:

”The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes” by Rod Serling has another of those heart-stopping endings. A young boy has precognitive powers that make him a TV star--until one day he doesn’t want to do the show any more. Why? The reason is one you won’t soon forget.

”Class of ’99” is another Serling shocker that he would never have been able to to on The Twilight Zone just a few years earlier. Honestly, when I watched this again on the DVD after not having seen it in years, I couldn’t believe it! It stars Vincent Price as the professor of a graduating college class, giving a final oral exam that will have your jaws dropping to a student body that will startle you. This detour into science fiction one is among Rod’s most profoundly troubling works.

”A Fear of Spiders” by Rod Serling. I must admit I personally relate to this episode. If I see anything with eight legs, it had better be on stage singing harmony or broiled on my plate with melted butter! An insensitive writer who keeps brushing off his infatuated lady neighbor wishes he had treated her better when he finds an uninvited eight-legged visitor in his apartment--one that not only won’t go away, but keeps growing bigger and bigger! You’ll be shuddering.

”Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” by Gene Kearney from the story by Conrad Aiken, has the customary Serling intro and an internal narration by Orson Welles. It tells of a young boy being engulfed by schizophrenia as the snow becomes a living entity, calling him into its world and freezing him out of this one until no one can reach him. The boy, incidentally, is played by Radames Pera, a child star best remembered as young Grasshopper in the original Kung Fu series.

”Brenda” by Matthew Howard. Even by Night Gallery standards, this one is just plain weird. A little girl who doesn’t play well with other kids finds an unlikely friend in a mossy, hulking monster that lives in the forest. What ends up happening to a girl who can’t relate to anything human?

”Pickman’s Model,” by Alvin Sapinsley from the story by H.P. Lovecraft, is a perfect story for a series arranged around paintings. A young painter teaches art to society girls by day and does canvases of grotesque monsters by night--but where is he finding his subjects, and what happens to the pupil who’s falling for him? Rod may not have cared for monster stories, but this is one of the more entertaining exhibits in the Gallery.

”The Messiah on Mott Street” is everything you love about the work of Rod Serling, and a story that I’ll be adding to my annual Christmas Eve viewing tradition from now on. An impoverished, dying old Jewish man doesn’t fear death so much as leaving his sweet young grandson to foster care. The little boy goes desperately seeking the Messiah to save his grandfather, and thinks he’s found him--but has he? As an old show tune had it, "And tell me what street compares with Mott Street!" This Emmy nominee is the perfect bookend to The Twilight Zone’s “Night of the Meek”. (1960s or 1980s version.)

”The Different Ones” by Rod Serling. And speaking of bookends, this science fiction piece is the thematic twin of The Twilight Zone’s “The Eye of the Beholder”. Standing the premise of that story on its head, this one has a heartsick father sending his grotesquely deformed son to live on another planet. What awaits him there will remind you of what happened to Donna Douglas in the Zone classic.

”Lindenmann’s Catch” by Rod Serling tells of a fisherman who hauls up a mermaid in his net. He wants to care for the creature, but this yarn is nothing like that of Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah in Splash! In fact, it comes to a truly bizarre and stomach-churning end.

”You Can’t Get Help Like That Any More,” starring Cloris Leachman (moonlighting from Mary Tyler Moore, where she was playing Phyllis at the time) is another Serling companion to one of his Twilight Zone tales, this one harking back to “A Thing About Machines”. In a world of lifelike android servants, the help is more human than you’d expect--especially for a decadent rich couple that abuses the mechanical maid. This one strikes a blow for good relations with workers--literally!

”The Caterpillar” by Rod Serling is the first story in the last episode of Season 2, and takes the prize for the all-time most horrifying ending in the entire series. For the record, the idea that the earwig, a type of insect, actually crawls into the human ear and eats into the brain is an urban myth. It is not real; it does not happen. Someone made it up. Really. But what happens to the lecherous would-be seducer of another man’s beautiful wife when he tries to eliminate the husband with an earwig and takes the insect up the ear himself comes to an ending that will leave you squirming for life. I kid you not; this is one that I never forgot!

Night Gallery ironically saw its ratings spike in its third season--this, after NBC cut it back to half an hour and one story a week and dumped it in a time slot after the Mystery Movie on Sunday nights, but NBC cancelled it anyway. Go figure. The workings of TV network minds can be more spooky than anything hanging on the walls of the Night Gallery, as Rod would have attested. At some point I’ll rent the Netflix disks for the third season, so I expect we’ll be visiting Rod Serling’s Night Gallery here on The Quantum Blog again some time in the future.

Now we’ve finished our tour, I encourage you again to surf over to www.nightgallery.net. The official Night Gallery site contains most of the paintings from the series. These are the work of an amazing artist named Tom Wright, who somehow managed to vary his styles and techniques so much that it seems that the works were created by dozens of different artists. You’ll also find lots of background info on the series, some reviews of the show, and even some actual Night Gallery scripts including Rod’s teleplays for “Class of 99” and “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar!” I hope you’ve enjoyed--and survived--your visit to the Night Gallery. As dawn approaches, the exhibit is now closed. And...pleasant dreams!

ENTER THE GALLERY, IF YOU DARE

Between last Christmas and now (time considerations being what they are), I spent some of my dinner hours in the same way that I spent a couple of summers when I was in school: Catching up on (or revisiting, in this case) Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

Night Gallery was the series that the creator of The Twilight Zone did on NBC at what would be the twilight of his illustrious career. I remember being truly fixated on this show when it was actually on. Rod Serling was one of my boyhood heroes and I seized on anything and everything about his imaginative stories. Back then you could not have convinced me that Rod Serling was not God Almighty. I was in total awe and hero-worship of him. As an aspiring imaginative storyteller myself, I thought there could be nothing cooler in the universe than to be the person who not only created The Twilight Zone, but wrote it and introduced it on the air! Before I wanted to be Gene Roddenberry (and before I settled on wanting to be Stan Lee and Jack Kirby), I wanted to be Rod Serling. And now, with Night Gallery, he was doing it again!

My misfortune back in those days was that Night Gallery ran at 10 PM on Wednesday evenings for its first two seasons, I didn’t yet have a TV of my own, home video was still in the future, and my parents wouldn’t let me stay up to watch the Gallery for those two years. I truly agonized over this. It was a kind of torture. I used to sneak downstairs to my sister’s room to watch the show surreptitiously (until my mother caught me, damnit, and I think it was right in the middle of “Pickman’s Model”). Some nights I used to lie in bed, desperately listening to faint sounds of the show emanating from my father’s room down the hall. (Such as the night when the episodes “The Phantom Farmhouse” and “Silent Snow, Secret Snow,” which got a “Close-Up” in TV Guide as two of the best stories in the series, aired for the first time.) Thus I remember a couple of summers, when there was no school, that I spent glued to the TV every Wednesday evening for the reruns of my show.

What is now a truly obscure fact of TV history is that Night Gallery was created as one element of one of those “rotating series” that TV, and NBC in particular, used to do in the 1970s. Night Gallery was originally part of a rotating series called Four in One, in which one of the other shows that alternated in the time slot was McCloud starring Dennis Weaver. Four in One lasted only one season, but McCloud was imported into The NBC Sunday Mystery Movie where it alternated with Columbo starring Peter Falk and McMillan and Wife starring Rock Hudson and Susan St. James. Night Gallery was (I assume) the most popular part of Four in One (and rightly so), and was promoted to a weekly series the following season.

Night Gallery was different in concept and emphasis from The Twilight Zone. The format was that there was a macabre museum filled with disturbing paintings and sculptures, each one illustrating a different creepy story, many of them written (or adapted from works of horror fiction) by Rod himself. Rod would usher us into the Gallery, acting as our tour guide, show us a given painting, and set up the story to follow. Where T. Zone dealt mostly in fantasy and dabbled in unscientific science fiction, Night Gallery mostly concentrated on horror and the occult. (With some exceptions, and we’ll be discussing those next week.)

However, Night Gallery was also a reiteration of Rod Serling’s love/hate relationship with the medium of television that made him rich and famous. It’s at this point that I wish I had gotten round to buying the Night Gallery book (note to self--DO THAT!), for what I have to offer you by way of background comes from the chapter on the show in the book Fantastic Television by Gary Gerani and Paul Schulman. Their Night Gallery chapter begins with a telling quote from the master storyteller himself:

“The way the studio wants to do it, a character won’t be able to walk by a graveyard. He’ll have to be chased. They’re trying to turn it into Mannix in a shroud”. (In one of the earliest Quantum Blogs I remembered that Mannix is a show for which I cared nothing, except that I loved its jazz-waltz theme music by Mission Impossible composer Lalo Schifrin!)

This kind of thing is, I’m sure, the reason why Rod wrote the Twilight Zone episode “The Bard”. (Look it up if you’re not a Zonie.) That story must have been a kind of therapy--and revenge!--for him. Fantastic Television goes on to illuminate Rod’s conflict over what would be his last weekly series:

In sharp contrast to The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery was panned by critics. Among those not infatuated with the show was Rod Serling himself. No stranger to the interference of sponsor, networks, and censors, Serling once again found himself locked by contract into an untenable situation. Imagine a clothing company started by a tailor whose name is sterling to his customers--Gluckman, let’s call him. Gluckman’s success and popularity are based on his flawless reputation. His main competitor is Schwartz’s Ready-to-Wear, where everything is done by machine. The day comes when Gluckman produces a few designs and finds that they can’t be marketed because his company, too, has hired machines to imitate the stuff being cranked out by Schwartz. And there is nothing Gluckman can do about it.

That is the kind of situation Rod Serling found himself in. He owned Night Gallery, created it, and it was sold to network and audience on his reputation. The competition on CBS was Mannix, a formula private-eye shoot-and-rough-’em-up. Serling felt that NBC and Universal were doing their best to imitate Mannix, with an emphasis on monsters, chases, and fights. They turned down many of his scripts as “too thoughtful”. Serling lamented, “They don’t want to compete against Mannix in terms of contrast, but similarity.” Not only was Serling unable to sell them scripts, he was also barred from casting sessions, and couldn’t make decisions about his show--he had signed away creative control. As a result, he tried to have his name removed from the title, but NBC had him contract-bound to play host and cordially introduce the parasite to the TV audience.

Being “too thoughtful” was what got Star Trek passed over on its initial pitch, as we’ll remember. Object lesson: Avoid at all costs relinquishing control over something that you have created! If television values your work enough to want to buy it and put it on the air with your name on it, make sure what they’re going to put on the air is your true vision! I can only imagine the grief that my hero Rod Serling suffered over this show.

It is testament to the strength of Rod’s vision and the talent that he put into it that Night Gallery frequently rose above the banality to which NBC and Universal would have consigned it, and produced some stories that more than justified my furtive boyhood efforts to watch it. Most of the best work on the show was in the second season, which I just finished watching on DVD. This is because the second season was a full season with hour-long, multiple-story episodes. The first season, Night Gallery had its hour-long, multiple-story format, but was part of Four in One. The third season (when NBC dumped it on Sunday nights at 10 PM Eastern) was half an hour with only one story a week. In next week’s Quantum Blog, we’re going to take a tour of the Gallery and look at the best of Rod’s ghoulish treats. See you then.