Tale of a Script

"Our society is a man-eat-man thing on every possible level," says Writer Rod Serling, 33, and his tough, uncompromising television plays (Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Comedian) reflect this belief. So does his professional life. He has contended with networks, ad agencies and sponsors over what he could say, scrapped with directors over how to say it, become TV's most outspoken authority on the devious ways of television censorship. But short (5 ft. 5 in.) Author Serling is more in demand than any other playwright in the TV business, was recently corralled by CBS on the fanciest terms ever offered a TV writer--$10,000 apiece for three Playhouse 90 scripts, 40% ownership in CBS's forthcoming science fiction series titled Twilight Zone, plus freedom, to turn out four scenarios for M-G-M for $250,000.

Suggestion of Veils. "Success is a terrible attack on your sense of values," admits onetime Paratrooper Serling. "You get teed off because the heater of your swimming pool doesn't work. But you've got to keep remembering that half of living is wanting." Last week Serling had more to fret over than his Hollywood pool. He, his sense of values and his Playhouse go show called A Town Has Turned to Dust were in the eye of one of the wildest storms ever to batter a TV script.

Viewers who saw last week's production of Town could see little similarity between its story and the celebrated murder of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago Negro beaten and shot to death in Mississippi after he unwarily whistled at a white storekeeper's wife (TIME, Oct. 3 and Nov. 21, 1955). Yet Town began, through CBS's courageous suggestion to Serling, as a thinly veiled dramatization of the Till case. A precis of Serling's first effort was rejected by all but one of the sponsors; they would not lend their brand names or money to a treatment of racism that might prejudice Southern customers against their products.

Wearily, Serling set to work on a new script. He had been through all this before. In 1956, for the U.S. Steel Hour, he had written another play that roughly paralleled the Till tragedy and watched disgustedly as it changed by sponsor's edict. His summary: "Every word of dialogue that might be remotely 'Southern' in context was deleted or altered. A geographical change was made to a New England town. When it was ultimately produced, its thesis had been diluted, and my characters had mounted a soapbox to shout something that had become too vague to warrant any shouting."

Face of Prejudice. In the current script, Town's locale was moved to "a small Southwestern town in the 1870s." Emmett Till became a romantic Mexican youth who loved the storekeeper's wife, but only "with his eyes." Throughout the 120-page script, network and sponsors (which include Allstate Insurance, American Gas & Electric, Bristol-Myers, Kimberly-Clark, Pillsbury Mills, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco) suggested changes. An earlier lynch victim was named Clemson; this was changed because South Carolina has an all-white college of that name. The ad agency for Allstate Insurance vetoed a suicide in the story. The ad agencies objected to the phrase "20 men in hoods"; it was changed to "in homemade masks," but Actor Rod Steiger slipped up and said "in hoods" anyway. After all possible aspects of the script that might offend religious or regional groups were hashed over, the laundering was applied to whatever might cause Mexicans to take umbrage (deleted: "Mex," "enchilada-eater," "bean-eaters," "greasy").

The result was far better than any one of the surgeons had a right to expect. Director John Frankenheimer caught the drought-tautened tension of the desert town, William Shatner was terrifyingly convincing as the rabble-rousing shopkeeper bent on avenging his hurt pride, Steiger made the drunken sheriff both scruffy and appealing, as Serling intended.

Seldom has the hate-twisted face of prejudice been more starkly depicted. But the story dealt with symptoms, ventured only timidly into the shadowy causes of the disease. Admitted Author Serling himself: "I particularly did not like the staging and writing of the last act. It was overwritten." Retorted Playhouse 90's Producer Martin Manulis: "It was a great tribute to the ad agencies that they ever let this show go on the air!"

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