EURweb |
ROD SERLING SCRIPT ABOUT EMMETT TILL GETS READING: Ithaca College will present twice-censored work during conference.
*Rod Serling, the award-winning writer-creator of "The Twilight Zone," had already started his career in television when the lynching of Emmett Till took place in Mississippi and helped to galvanize the civil rights movement.
Moved by the story of Till – a black 14-year-old from Chicago brutally murdered by whites for whistling at a white woman – Serling dramatized the events and acquittal of Till's killer in a stage script titled "Noon on Doomsday," but it was twice censored by network television.
More than a half-century later, the original work will be read Saturday in its entirety during a conference on Serling's life and legacy at Ithaca College, where he taught from 1967 until his death in 1975.
"Serling was one of the first people to write about current events. He was taking a major front-page issue and showing the universal appeal of it and showing our own implications. Today that's a dime a dozen. But when Serling was doing it, that was shocking," said Amy E. Boyle Johnston, one of the researchers.
In both attempts to get "Noon on Doomsday" on television, Serling met with sponsor censorship and network interference that diluted his final work, according to Johnston and co-researcher Tony Albarella.
"Serling seemed to struggle with network and sponsor censorship all his career but I believe his trying to tell the story of the Emmett Till case was the pinnacle of this battle," said Andrew Polak, the board president of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, a Binghamton-based nonprofit group that works to further Serling's legacy. "This will be the first time the story will be told as Rod intended."
Serling's Till story was initially accepted and approved by the producers of ABC's "The United States Steel Hour," for which he'd already written several well-received scripts. But when word initially got out that Serling was writing about the Till case, thousands of protests poured in, mostly from members of the White Citizens Council, a Southern white supremacist organization, said Johnston.
Serling produced three "Doomsday" scripts. The first two were for the stage, said Johnston. In the original, the victim was a college-aged black man. Serling's language and descriptions also were more coarse and idiomatic in the original version, she said. When it ran on television in April 1956, "Noon on Doomsday" was so watered down as to be meaningless, Johnston said.
The location was changed to New England. The word "lynch" was excised from the script, as was anything deemed "too Southern" in connotation. The villain was softened to "just a good decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong," Johnston said.
Two years later, Serling tried again to examine the extreme consequences of prejudice embedded in Till's tragedy. His new effort was titled "A Town Has Turned to Dust," and he offered it to CBS for "Playhouse 90." But CBS executives again picked apart the script — changing the central character to a Mexican boy who falls in love from afar with a white shopkeeper's wife, said Albarella,
Although it received critical acclaim, a dismayed Serling later said, "By the time 'A Town Has Turned to Dust' went before the cameras, my script had turned to dust."
One year later, in 1959, Serling decided the only recourse for avoiding such artistic interference was to create his own show, titled "The Twilight Zone."
Share and Bookmark |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
.jpg)
