Legal Commentary

Strange how the mind works. Well, strange how MY mind works. Reading about Charlton Heston's death today made me think of Rod Serling. Eh? you might exclaim (especially if you're one of the McKenzie Brothers). I'll try to explain.

My first two years of college, I majored in Radio/Television at Ithaca College in upstate New York. Rod Serling had a home there and taught at the college. He spoke to his students in exactly the same manner that he spoke to the camera on "The Twilight Zone," only while uttering a litany of self-deprecating, often ribald jokes, and while chain smoking Salem cigarettes. The fact that he died of a massive coronary at age 50 likely had nothing to do with the chain smoking, since everyone knows that it's secondary smoke that's the real killer, but I digress.

In one class, Serling was telling us about all the "slick, perverted Hollywood trash" he had written, "the kind of trash that bought my wife a mink coat and that's putting my kinds through college." It might have been the television movie "The Doomsday Flight" that he was referring to (my memory is not precise on this aspect of a conversation that occurred over 40 years ago), but talk soon turned to "Planet of the Apes," a film for which Serling was given co-writer credit and that Serling asserted was a good idea gone bad. He was trying to prepare us (especially those of us who fancied ourselves writers) for the realities of the real world, where our artistic visions would run smack dab into "the suits" and the "bean counters" who ran (and apparently still run) the film and television business.

Serling had been hired to write the screenplay for Planet of the Apes. He said he gave much thought to how the world would look if apes, rather than men, were the dominant species. He created a language for the apes, mapped out set directions, envisioned houses with such detail as doorways that were shorter but broader than those designed for human beings, had apes flying around in  specially designed helicopters, and wrote dialog that he thought "rang true." At the time, Serling was one of the giants of television writing, a lion of television's golden age, a man who'd won six Emmys and who'd written such television classics as "Requiem for a Heavyweight" and "The Rack" (a teleplay about the effects of torture on a Korean war veteran), and the recent screenplay for "Seven Days in May." He wasn't chopped liver. Nevertheless, when the bean counters "costed" his script, they determined the studio would have to budget at least $18 million dollars, an astronomical sum for the mid-1960s.  The studio brought in a co-writer, who had the apes riding horses and living in caves. He also rewrote almost all of Serling's dialog.

Serling screened the film and critiqued it. I recall him talking about Charlton Heston as a man too good looking and over-the-top heroic for the role of the astronaut that he envisioned, but it wasn't Heston's persona that especial;;y galled him, it was the dialog coming from his mouth. In the early scenes, after the astronauts have crash landed on an unknown planet, the talk in a way that, to Serling's ear, wasn't real.

"Think about how men talk to one another. Imagine how professional military men and scientists, in a traumatic situation like that, would talk to one another. Then write it down and speak it out loud. If it rings false to you, it's almost certain to ring false to an audience. A key to good writing is making people believe that these are real people on the screen. It's bad enough when they don't look like real people, but it's fatal when they don't sound like real people."

Serling claimed that the only line of his the director kept in the movie was near the end, when Heston's character kisses a female chimpanzee and she makes a face and says "But you're so damned ugly!" He also claimed that the only scene of his that wasn't drastically altered was the final scene of Heston realizing he was on Earth and cursing what "they had done" as he kneels on the beach before a half-buried Statue of Liberty.

I have other memories of Serling, about his liberal politics that were the opposite of mine, but how he had such good humor about the human condition that he made you laugh at some of your own ideas as well as some of his. He made light of his experiences in World War II, but I later read about his purple heart and bronze medal that he failed to mention. I also recall how he obviously loved to teach young people, enjoyed being surrounded by students, and how much patience he had with the overly-earnest crowd of us, many of whom went on to prove that their already large egos would, under the ether of the entertainment biz, swell to gargantuan proportions (and one of whom, the drop-dead gorgeous "Golden Girl," Jessica Savitch, came to an early, tragic end). He was rich, he didn't need to teach, he was working on other projects with big names, yet he devoted so much time and talent to teaching newbies at a small college. He was a great talent, but an even greater human being.

A television report on Heston's death today showed him in his role in Planet of the Apes. I thought of Serling's screening of the movie and his lecture on it, which led to other thoughts of him. So, not much about Chuck Heston in this post, is there? Instead, just a small slice of another memory of someone entirely different.

As I said, it's strange how the mind works.