Rod Serling -- Twilight Zone

Should I bother to note how big a fan I am?

Videos:

• Someone took a very good hand-held video [4 min] of the Twilight Zone-based ride, Tower of Terror, at Disney's Hollywood Park.
• A long [7 min] video of Serling describing the show to potential advertisers. It is an oddity since he isn't smoking while he speaks.
• From the Twilight Zone Movie - a long [8 min] and short [1 min] version of the great introduction to the 1985 movie. I loved the Burgess Meredith connections.

Twilight Zone Introduction - season 1:

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

Twilight Zone Introduction - season 2:

You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into ... the Twilight Zone.

Twilight Zone Introduction - season 3:

You're traveling 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. That's a signpost up ahead, your next stop, the Twilight Zone.

Time Enough At Last - 11/20/59:

[Introduction] Witness Mr. Henry Bemis [Burgess Meredith], a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself--without anyone.

[Closing] The best laid plans of mice and men--and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis ... in the Twilight Zone.

Eye of the Beholder - 11/11/60:

[Introduction] Suspended in time and space for a moment, your introduction to Miss Janet Tyler, who lives in a very private world of darkness, a universe whose dimensions are the size, thickness, length of a swath of bandages that cover her face. In a moment we'll go back into this room and also in a moment we'll look under those bandages, keeping in mind, of course, that we're not to be surprised by what we see, because this isn't just a hospital, and patient 307 is not just a woman. This happens to be the Twilight Zone, and Miss Tyler, with you, is about to enter it.

[Closing] Now the questions that come to mind. Where is this place and when is it? What kind of world where ugliness is the norm and beauty the deviation from that norm? You want an answer? The answer is, it doesn't make any difference. Because the old saying happens to be true. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, in this year or a hundred years hence, on this planet or wherever there is human life, perhaps out amongst the stars. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lesson to be learned ... in The Twilight Zone.

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John Simon

Reverse Angle - A Decade of American Films

In the present film, Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun.... Oh, for the gift of Rostand's Cyrano to evoke the vastness of that nose alone as it cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across our horizon like a blot of fleshy lightning; it towers like a ziggurat made of meat. The speaking voice continues to sound like Rice Krispies if they could talk.

Reverse Angle - A Decade of American Films

The first thing we see on the screen, after some amusing fish swimming around the credits, is Jacqueline Bisset's breasts encased in a white bathing suit that, underwater, becomes translucent, and affords us a fair idea of this magnificent matched pair of collector's items. The camera dives along with them (not being human enough to dive into them), in a glorius exordium, after which The Deep is downhill all the way.

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Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises - chapter 1:

The lady who had him, her name was Frances, found toward the end of the second year that her looks were going, and her attitude toward Robert changed from one of careless possesion and exploitation to the absolute determination that he should marry her.

The Sun Also Rises - chapter 3:

We would probably have gone on and discussed the war and agreed that it was in reality a calamity for civilization, and perhaps would have been better avoided. I was bored enough.

The Sun Also Rises - chapter 5:

"I'm sorry. I've got a nasty tongue. I never mean it when I say nasty things."
"I know it, Cohn said. "You're really about the best friend I have, Jake."
God help you, I thought. "Forget what I said," I said out loud. "I'm sorry."

The Sun Also Rises - chapter 6:

"He's [Mencken] through now," Harvey went on. "He's written about all those things he knows, and now he's on all the things he doesn't know".

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