From the Cutting Room Floor: Brode meets Serling

Usually due to space limitations, some of the more interesting elements of many of my interviews end up on the cutting room floor before publication. For example, in my recent interview with Douglas Brode about the book Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone: The Official 50th Anniversary Tribute, I couldn't include the entire story about his first meeting with Rod Serling.

Here is the complete unexpurgated tale:

“As he was getting ready to leave, I just walked up to him,‘Mr. Serling, I’m Doug Brode. I’m one of the new professors here. I would love to do an interview and article with you.' [At the time, Brode was a regular contributor to the now-defunct Premiere-style publication Show Magazine.] Without a moment’s hesitation, he quickly pulled out a piece of paper — didn’t have a business card — wrote down his home phone number, and said, ‘Doug, I’m gonna be busy for the next month. If you can call me one month from today at this number, I’d love to set something up.’ Just like that, and he left. A month later to the day, I dialed the number, and an unmistakable voice picks up at the other end. I started to say, ‘Mr. Serling, you probably won’t remember me.’ ‘Yeah, is this Doug?’ That's the kind of guy he was. 'Are you free for lunch next week?' 'Yeah. Sure.' 'Can you get down to Ithaca?' 'Sure' 'Great. Meet me at the Ithaca spa.' 'Fine' Ithaca spa. So I packed up a swimming suit and a towel since I was going to the spa, right? Well, the Ithaca Spa is a little a diner. It's just a name. I walk in with a wrapped up towel and a bathing suit I didn't need. We sat and talked. He couldn't have been more wonderful and open about everything. Like we were best friends. He mentored me as a writer. And just a few years later, he was dead.”

Tripping through the ‘Twilight Zone’

My interview with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone: The Official 50th Anniversary Tribute author Douglas Brode appears in the Feb. 4 San Antonio Current.

Using Carol Serling’s words as a framing device for each chapter, Brode reviews and analyzes some 80 of the show’s 156 episodes. Since several books, most notably Marc Scott Zicree’s exhaustive The Twilight Zone Companion, have explored the entire run, Brode decided to take a different approach. “I wanted to do a book where I only focused on the great ones and put the other ones aside.”

Not merely a puff piece, Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone portrays a complex view of the famed auteur. Brode is the author of more than 30 books, and this delicate balance is central to his body of work.

“I try to show in all my books, beginning with Shakespeare — even going back to Sophocles — to Spielberg today with Disney and Rod Serling in-between, the people I consider the great artists, popular entertainers, the ones who reached the masses — they are the ones who have a very balanced view,” says Brode. “Their politics are not easy. The artists who most move the masses are the ones who have that Yin/Yang between progressivism and traditionalism. And as I show in the book, Rod Serling is exactly that way.”