Marcusson and Conrad stand behind a metal fence looking up at their ship; their hands idly grasp the metal links. They look, for all the world, like animals in a cage.
THIRD FROM THE SUN (1/8/60)
Joe Maross
Written by Rod Serling
Based on the short story Third From the Sun by Richard Matheson
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Richard L. Bare
Director of Photography:Harry Wild
Music: stock
Cast:
William Sturka: Fritz Weaver Jerry Riden: Joe Maross Carling: Edward Andrews Eve: Lori March Jody: Denise Alexander Ann: Jeanne Evans Guard: Will J. White Loudspeaker Voices. John Launer
5:30 p.m.: Quitting tine at the plant. Time for supper now. Time for families. Time for a cool drink on a porch. Time for the quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screen out the moon. And underneath it all, behind the eyes of the men, hanging invisible over the summer night, is a horror without words. For this is the stillness before storm. This is the eve of the end.
Scientist William Sturka, certain that an all-out nuclear war is imminent, plots with test pilot Jerry Riden to steal an experimental spaceship and escape with their families to a planet eleven million miles away. They are almost stopped by a slimy government stooge named Carling, but they manage to overpower him, board the ship, and take off. In space, they wonder what their new home will be like. From radio broadcasts, they know it is inhabited by people like themselves, and that its name is … Earth!
Behind a tiny ship heading into space is a doomed planet on the verge of suicide. Ahead lies a place called Earth, the third planet from the sun. And for William Sturka and the men and women with him, ifs the eve of the beginning … in the Twilight Zone.
Serling adapted Richard Mathesons short story Third from the Sun (which appears in Mathesons collection of the same name), retaining both the title and the basic plot.
A neat little scientific inaccuracy crops up in this episode. At one point, Maross mentions that the distance from his planet to the Earth is 11 million miles. Considering the fact that Venus is our closest neighbor at 24,600,000 miles (at its nearest), then either a number of astronomers are nearsighted or Serling didnt do his homework.
In order to set the stage for the final twist, director Richard L. Bare resorted to some pretty tricky uses of the cameia. Only a handful of shots were filmed straight-on: most were distorted, tilted this way or that. And that wasnt all. I shot every scene with an extremely wide-angle lens, Bare explains. Even on closeups, which are normally shot with a 75mm or 100mm lens, I used a 28mm.
Buck Houghton elaborates. He used wide-angle lenses all the time on the theory that if you were going to tell people in the end that they werent on Earth, you should have a peculiar feeling while youre getting there, you should have been made a little restless or uncomfortable. And while Dick was a very straightforward sort of directorhed have to have a big reason not to use an eye-level camerahe was shooting up under tables and past flashlights to peoples faces and all that sort of thing, which I thought was very clever of him. It was an idea of his that I applauded.
The thirteenth episode to be produced by Cayuga Productions, Perchance to Dream, was the first script written for The Twilight Zone by the late Charles Beaumont. As did Matheson, Beaumont produced stories totally unlike Serlings, displaying virtually no sentimentality but revealing a strong morbidity and an almost clinical fascination with the horrific.
Chuck was the perfect Twilight Zone writer, says writer William F. Nolan, more than Matheson or Rod Serling, even. Matheson is very much of a realist who can mentally lose himself in those worlds. He doesnt live in them the way Chuck lived in them. Chuck actually lived in the Twilight Zone.
Charles Beaumont was second only to Serling in production of Twilight Zone scripts and was responsible for some of the series
THIRD FROM THE SUN (1/8/60)
Joe Maross
Written by Rod Serling
Based on the short story Third From the Sun by Richard Matheson
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Richard L. Bare
Director of Photography:Harry Wild
Music: stock
Cast:
William Sturka: Fritz Weaver Jerry Riden: Joe Maross Carling: Edward Andrews Eve: Lori March Jody: Denise Alexander Ann: Jeanne Evans Guard: Will J. White Loudspeaker Voices. John Launer
5:30 p.m.: Quitting tine at the plant. Time for supper now. Time for families. Time for a cool drink on a porch. Time for the quiet rustle of leaf-laden trees that screen out the moon. And underneath it all, behind the eyes of the men, hanging invisible over the summer night, is a horror without words. For this is the stillness before storm. This is the eve of the end.
Scientist William Sturka, certain that an all-out nuclear war is imminent, plots with test pilot Jerry Riden to steal an experimental spaceship and escape with their families to a planet eleven million miles away. They are almost stopped by a slimy government stooge named Carling, but they manage to overpower him, board the ship, and take off. In space, they wonder what their new home will be like. From radio broadcasts, they know it is inhabited by people like themselves, and that its name is … Earth!
Behind a tiny ship heading into space is a doomed planet on the verge of suicide. Ahead lies a place called Earth, the third planet from the sun. And for William Sturka and the men and women with him, ifs the eve of the beginning … in the Twilight Zone.
Serling adapted Richard Mathesons short story Third from the Sun (which appears in Mathesons collection of the same name), retaining both the title and the basic plot.
A neat little scientific inaccuracy crops up in this episode. At one point, Maross mentions that the distance from his planet to the Earth is 11 million miles. Considering the fact that Venus is our closest neighbor at 24,600,000 miles (at its nearest), then either a number of astronomers are nearsighted or Serling didnt do his homework.
In order to set the stage for the final twist, director Richard L. Bare resorted to some pretty tricky uses of the cameia. Only a handful of shots were filmed straight-on: most were distorted, tilted this way or that. And that wasnt all. I shot every scene with an extremely wide-angle lens, Bare explains. Even on closeups, which are normally shot with a 75mm or 100mm lens, I used a 28mm.
Buck Houghton elaborates. He used wide-angle lenses all the time on the theory that if you were going to tell people in the end that they werent on Earth, you should have a peculiar feeling while youre getting there, you should have been made a little restless or uncomfortable. And while Dick was a very straightforward sort of directorhed have to have a big reason not to use an eye-level camerahe was shooting up under tables and past flashlights to peoples faces and all that sort of thing, which I thought was very clever of him. It was an idea of his that I applauded.
The thirteenth episode to be produced by Cayuga Productions, Perchance to Dream, was the first script written for The Twilight Zone by the late Charles Beaumont. As did Matheson, Beaumont produced stories totally unlike Serlings, displaying virtually no sentimentality but revealing a strong morbidity and an almost clinical fascination with the horrific.
Chuck was the perfect Twilight Zone writer, says writer William F. Nolan, more than Matheson or Rod Serling, even. Matheson is very much of a realist who can mentally lose himself in those worlds. He doesnt live in them the way Chuck lived in them. Chuck actually lived in the Twilight Zone.
Charles Beaumont was second only to Serling in production of Twilight Zone scripts and was responsible for some of the series
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