Submitted For Your Approval
July 6, 2009
I’ve been sitting on this exciting development for a little while now, so it is a great pleasure to make the following news properly public. I will be attending the annual Rod Serling Conference in Ithaca, N.Y. this year – as a guest speaker!
Earlier this year I submitted an abstract in response to a call for papers casting a fresh light upon Serling, the famed television playwright and Twilight Zone creator. Having forgotten all about my entry in the months following my submission I was delighted to receive an email telling me I had been invited over to present my work. I only hope my final lecture, entitled Second Chances: Rod Serling, Redrafting and Adaptation, can to justice to a man whose work I come to respect more with each new paragraph I read on him and each new product of his imagination I experience. To add to the considerable pressure of delivering my paper to a conference full of academics, this year marks the 50th Anniversary of The Twilight Zone – a pretty big deal in and of itself.
Still, I can’t let my paper be influenced by my own sense of awe surrounding Serling’s work and legacy. If anything I am to attempt to humanise the man by looking into his self-criticism and misgivings over his own work.
The conference is held on October 2-3 2009 and I encourage anyone who might be around the NY state area to at least check out the website detailing events here.
Now, to get writing!
It should be quite something to be part of, esp. being in the 50th anniversary.
I’m planning to watch the orig. series again… Serling’s intros are superb, giving the action a context all the stranger and more gripping (more subtly than the bombastic Sapphire and Steel voice-over). Never patronising to the viewer, but instead sometimes to the on-screen protagonists! Detached, omniscient, yet somehow comfortingly so… do you prefer it when he actually appeared on-screen, or not?
Any thoughts on the man’s cinematic work? He did a fair few screenplays, didn’t he?
A significant part of my presentation is going to concern Serling’s film work so I’ll hold back for now.
On the whole though I don’t think his film work ever lived up to his suberb plays for television. Even the filmed versions of ‘Patterns’ and ‘Requiem For A Heavyweight’, while fine in their own right, pale in comparisson to the TV originals.
I think there is something to be said for both his on and off camera introductions. On camera may be more gimicky but also more iconic and I can see the prodcuer’s logic in wanting a strong, constant and identifiable presence in an otherwise wildly varying series.