See Also The Male Mind AFTER The No Contact Rule- What Is He Thinking? Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C. “It ended up not as difficult as I thought it would be,” she said, adding, “a lot of people really connected with me and their own grief-which was humbling and gratifying.” Unable to “be that open with my grief” in an early draft, she “opened up more because it was so essential” after being encouraged by her editor. I had to set it aside and finally write this one, which I started six or seven years ago.” I started another book eight years after he died, but I wasn’t even beginning to work through my grief–even after almost a decade. “But I guess you do arrive at some peace every day I miss my dad. “My dad always said to me, ‘If only you knew your grandfather’-and I never dreamed I’d say the same thing to my children,” she said. He was going to major in physical education, but was so traumatized he pursued writing to get it all off his chest.”Īnne Serling seems to have come to her own career as a writer out of personal pain. My dad enlisted in the Army the day after he graduated high school, and his scars never healed. And one of the most difficult things for him was writing letters to and receiving them from his parents during the war: My own son was 18 when I was writing the chapters that includes them, and I was reading his letters from training camp and it drove home how young these guys are that we send to war, and the letters broke my heart. “For instance, I didn’t know how my dad had to battle the censors-I wasn’t cognizant then. “That was one of the toughest things,” she said. Besides revisiting those classic episodes, Serling researched his letters and speeches in fleshing out the public and private man that she as a child knew most closely as a loving father-not as a man who suffered for his work. “He wasn’t a dark, tortured soul.”īut he was deeply concerned with the world around him, and often used The Twilight Zone to express his hatred of prejudice, injustice and war. “I felt it was time to set the record straight,” she said. Still, Serling, who was 20 when her father died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1974 at age 50, had heard him described as quite the opposite. “He was so down-to-earth and welcoming and fun-and brilliantly funny. “Any trepidation my friends had in meeting him that was connected to The Twilight Zone immediately dissolved within just a few minutes,” Serling related, echoing her warm descriptions of him in As I Knew Him. His Twilight Zone intros and recaps, delivered in his signature gritted-teeth intensity, were full of foreboding, though he still somehow came off as comforting, too. Much of that emotion, of course, came from Rod Serling. “I’m paraphrasing, but black-and-white gives you back that raw emotion.” “I heard a quote last night, something about how black-and-white leaves an impression on you that color takes away,” she said. Not at all that her dad didn’t spend time with her rather, a bit of “Pip”’s dialog was taken from an affectionate father-daughter routine.īut Serling surmises that the fact that The Twilight Zone was in black-and-white helped. She also cited “In Praise Of Pip,” in which Jack Klugman famously played a bookie who learns of his soldier son’s serious wounds in Vietnam, and is filled with remorse for not having spent more time with him as a child. “That’s one of the episodes that’s still relevant today: It gives you that punch, and maybe deals with a theme that our our age is in tune with: of going back in time and back to your hometown. “I was watching ‘Walking Distance’ some time ago,” she said, speaking of the celebrated episode where an advertising executive returns to his hometown to find it hasn’t changed-at all-since he was a boy. “I think that’s why they’ve endured.”Īlthough she was just a child in the Twilight Zone’s heyday (in her book she recalls her dad bringing home Willy, the frightful ventriloquist dummy form the famous “The Dummy” starring Cliff Robertson, to amuse her), like everyone else, she has her favorites. “His writing dealt with the human condition, and social and moral issues that are still relevant today,” she said. But Anne pointed out that her father, among other landmark achievements, wrote 92 of his historic Twilight Zone series’ 156 episodes.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |