WAMG Interview: Ann Serling – Author of AS I KNEW HIM: MY DAD, ROD SERLING

Ann Serling will be a guest at the upcoming 35th Annual St. Louis Jewish Book Festival.

Best known for his role as the host of television’s THE TWILIGHT ZONE, Rodman E. “Rod” Serling, an American screenwriter, playwright, television producer, narrator, and teacher had one of the most exceptional and varied careers in television. The winner of more Emmy Awards for dramatic writing than anyone in history, Serling challenged the medium of television to reach for loftier artistic goals. Serling expressed a deep social conscience in nearly everything he did and was known as the “angry young man” of Hollywood, clashing with television executives and sponsors over a wide range of issues including censorship, racism, and war.

Born in 1924, Rod Serling grew up in the small city of Binghamton, New York. The son of a butcher. His experiences of the working-class life of New York, and the horrors of World War II, where he served in the Army, instilled in him a profound concern for a moral society. Serling had his first big break with the NBC television drama PATTERNS. Dealing with the fast-paced lives and ruthless people within the business world, PATTERNS was so popular it became the first television show to ever be broadcast a second time due to popularity. Throughout the 1950s he continued to write investigative dramas about serious issues. His television dramas REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT and A TOWN HAS TURNED TO DUST, are still considered to have some of the best writing ever done for television.

THE TWILIGHT ZONE which ran from 1959 to 1964won Rod Serling three Emmy Awards. As the host and narrator of the show, he became a household name and his voice seemed always a creepy reminder of a world beyond our control. Serling wrote more than half of the one hundred and fifty-one episodes. For much of the 1960s and into the 1970s Serling turned to the big screen, writing films that included a remake of REQUIEM FOR A HEAVYWEIGHT (1962), THE YELLOW CANARY (1963), and ASSAULT ON A QUEEN (1966). His most famous movie script, however, was his adaption of the classic PLANET OF THE APES (1968). Similar to his early work on THE TWILIGHT ZONE, THE PLANET OF THE APES was a moralistic tale of contemporary life told through a science-fiction fantasy in which Apes have taken over the world. By the early 1970s, he found a job teaching in Ithaca, New York. Continuing to write for television, he sought to impart a sense of moral responsibility and artistic integrity to the new generation of television writers.. Today, almost 40 years after his death, Serling’s legacy continues to grow.

Rod Serling married his college sweetheart, Carolyn Kramer in 1948 and the couple had two daughters. Rod Serling was just 50 when he died in 1975 from conditions exacerbated by his well-known smoking addiction. His youngest, Ann has written a book about her father titled AS I KNEW HIM, My Father Rod Serling which was published this past Spring. In it, the author delves into her father’s writing career, his deep commitment to social justice and her grief following his death.

Ann Serling will be speaking as part of the 35th Annual St. Louis Jewish Book Festivalon Thursday November 14th at 10:30am at JCC Staenberg Family Complex – Arts and Education Building in St. Louis, MO.

Tickets can be purchases in advance through Brown Paper Tickets HERE

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/483204

The Facebook page for the 35th Annual St. Louis Jewish Book Festival can be found HERE

https://www.facebook.com/events/239989029481963/

Ms Serling took the time to answer questions about her book, her life, and her famous father for We Are Movie Geeks.

We Are Movie Geeks: Can you tell me about some of the things you have written before you wrote AS I KNEW HIM?

Ann Serling: I have written a lot of poetry and two books I didn’t complete. One was a book titled “IN HIS ABSENCE” that I began a few years after my father died. I was still trying to work through my grief and so it wasn’t the best time to write that book. I am presently working on a novel “AFTERSHOCKS.” Because, like my dad, I don’t work with an outline, I am finding this to be an arduous process!

WAMG: How long did it take you to write AS I KNEW HIM?

AS: AS I KNEW HIM took about seven years to complete.

WAMG: Can you give me an overview of what readers might expect when they buy your book?

AS: It is predominately about the relationship between my father and me during the tumultuous times of the sixties and early seventies. It touches upon my dad’s childhood and war years, and his college and subsequent writing years. The book contains letters to and from my dad’s parents to him before he was shipped to the Philippines in WW11; letters that he wrote to me over the years and also family photographs.

WAMG: How much of the book is a biography of your father and how much is about yourself and your relationship with him?

AS: It is an amalgamation of both—a biography and a memoir. It is also the story of grief, and that very difficult journey.

WAMG: Have you read any other bios of your Dad? If so, were there stories or legends about him that you feel needed to be set straight?

AS: I read enough of portions of them to know they were sensationalized and fictionalized describing my dad as a dark and tortured soul. These books were in fact one impetus behind my writing my memoir. I wanted to set the record straight—who my dad really was. Those books described a person that was not remotely familiar to me or to anyone that KNEW my dad.

WAMG: How do you think your Dad would feel about your book? Besides the writing obviously, what do you feel you and your Dad have in common?

AS: The greatest compliment I have received from friends and readers is this: “Your dad would have been so proud of you.” My dad and I share a similar sense of humor, political views, unconditional love for our children and a love of animals. Also, like my dad, I have a propensity to look back, a yearning like he had, to return to the past.

WAMG: You were born right when your Dad’s popularity was starting to take off. When did you begin to realize your Dad was famous?

AS: I knew from an early age that my dad was a writer but I didn’t know specifically what he was writing until a mean boy on the playground asked me one day if I was “something out of The Twilight Zone. I went home and asked him what that meant. He explained he wrote for a series and it was a little too old for me. We did, though, watch as a family the episode Night of The Meek every Christmas sometime after that incident.

WAMG: Your Dad was a noted workaholic. How did he balance his work and his family life? What were vacations like in the Serling family when you were growing up and what were some of the fun things you did together?

AS: As I wrote in my memoir, although I knew my father worked hard, I never felt he was unavailable or that his attention was in short supply. I remember for years, when I would come home from school and my dad and I playing basketball.
Vacations were fun—particularly summers when we would come back East and stay at our cottage. The cottage was built by my great and great great grandfathers on my mother’s side. This annual pilgrimage is something we all loved; a slower and quieter pace. We loved to play miniature golf, go to the taste freeze, swim in the lake. Typical lazy, wonderful summer days.

WAMG: Why did your Dad create TWILIGHT ZONE?

Certainly he had a love of science fiction and fantasy but what really catapulted him into The Twilight Zone was the incredible censorship back then. For instance, he tried to write about The Emmit Till case. When asked by Variety if his story was about Emmit Till, my dad responded, “If the shoe fits.” That was all it took. Anything that would reference a southern town had to be changed; even Coke bottles had to be removed. Ultimately the script had to be altered so drastically that it was unrecognizable. In another story my father wrote, the Chrysler building showed in the New York skyline and that had to be blacked out because the sponsor was Ford. After several more of these edits and cuts where so much dialogue was cut, he realized, as he said: “An alien can say what a Democrat or a Republican can’t” and so he launched The Twilight Zone.

WAMG: Do you remember the first TWILIGHT ZONE episode you ever watched?

AS: Yes, it was “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” I watched it with my dad at our cottage. Even though he didn’t write that episode, it was Richard Matheson, I was completely terrified. It was a while before I watched again!

WAMG: What are some of your favorite TWILIGHT ZONE (and NIGHT GALLERY) episodes and why are they your favorites?

AS: I love the stories that go back in time. My favorite Twilight Zones dealing with that theme would be Walking Distance”, “A Stop at Willoughby” and the Night Gallery episode, “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar.” I think all three of those scripts are so beautifully and powerfully written. I also thought the Twilight Zone episode “ Death’s Head Revisited” about the Nazi officer returning to the concentration camp was and remains excellent. That episode’s closing narration, by the way, was one of the few that didn’t end with the phrase: “The Twilight Zone.” The message of this episode was clearly so important to him, he ended with “Something to dwell on and remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s earth.

WAMG: Your Dad used television to speak his mind about political issues such as anti-war activism and racial equality. What motivated him in this regard and how did others in the television industry react to this?

AS: He was referred to as “the angry young man of television” because of his frustration with censors and sponsors. He felt it was criminal not to be able to express ones ideas about what was going on in the world without fear of the blue pen. He was quoted as saying he felt it was the writer’s role to menace the public’s consciousness.”

WAMG: Did you ever have any input in his later stories?

AS: Only one that I recall and that was a Night Gallery episode: “Clean Kills and Other Trophies.” I had a friend at the time whose father was a hunter and he used to go on safaris and bring home his “trophies.” He would make stools out of elephant’s legs, etc. Their garage was packed with animal parts that wouldn’t fit in the house. My dad and I both found this absolutely abhorrent and tremendously sad. We discussed together the ending of that episode: the hunter’s head on the wall, rather than the animals.

an image from “Clean Kills and Other Trophies.”

WAMG: Were you Dad alive today, how do you think he would have adapted to the age of technology and the Internet?

AS: My dad was so prolific even when he first began writing with a typewriter and two fingers. ( He later used a Dictaphone.) He was not the most mechanically minded person, but once he mastered a computer he would have loved it. A cell phone would have been a good/bad thing for him—as it is for all of us. The ability to constantly be in touch with producer’s, etc. would have greatly interfered with any down time my dad had.

WAMG: Have you seen the carousel at the park in Rochester that was painted last year with murals featuring TWILIGHT ZONE episode images?

AS: Yes, it’s in Binghamton. I just saw it a few months ago. Impressive. I think my dad would have gotten such a kick out of that.