Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Outer Limits at 50 by David J. Schow "The Outer Limits at 50" — Limited Edition Book, Available Exclusively at Creature Features. Burbank, CA, March 17, 2014 --(PR.com)-- Visionary Cinema Publicity is proud to announce the release of this exclusively published book, not available on Amazon or other online vendors. Newly commissioned pieces from artists the caliber of Bernie Wrightson, Tim Bradstreet and Steve Bissette mingle with vintage production designs of original creature designer Wah Cheng, exclusive photos of surviving props and new texts from Schow and the original OL 'zine publisher Ted C. Rypel coming full circle. A 20-page preview of the book is now available to select media outlets. The file is available for a limited time only at: All copies pre-ordered before March 17th will come hand-signed by David J. Schow. Pre-orders can only be purchased here: Additionally, Visionary Cinema Publicity is equally proud to announce a gallery event and celebration, "There is Nothing Wrong With Your Television Set" The Special Event takes place on Saturday, March 22, 2014 — 6:00-10:00pm (Gallery Exhibit Continues Until April 12) at the New Creature Features Store and Gallery — 2904 West Magnolia Blvd., Burbank, CA 91506. Join the creators of The Outer Limits at 50 at a display of newly commissioned paintings, illustrations and sculptures inspired by the classic TV series, alongside original props and vintage memorabilia. Mingle with celebrities from the series as well as the artists in a celebration of five decades of Outer Limits fandom. Artists Featured: - Steve Bissette, Tim Bradstreet, Norman Cabrera, Monte Christiansen, Ken Daly, Ricardo Delgado, Frank Dietz, John Fasano, Wolf Forrest, Garrett Immel, Phil Joyce, Bob Lizzaraga, Rebecca Lord, Gregory Manchess, Ken Morgan, Rafael Navarro, Greg Nicotero, Mike Parks, Jeff Pittarelli, Eric October, Tim Polecat, Mike Sosnowski, William Stout, Woody Welch, and Bernie Wrightson For More Information: David Schow. David J. Schow (born July 13, 1955) is an American author of horror novels, short stories, and screenplays. His credits include films such as The Crow and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning . Most of Schow's work falls into the subgenre splatterpunk, a term he is sometimes credited with coining. In the 1990s, Schow wrote Raving & Drooling , a regular column for Fangoria magazine. All 41 installments were collected in the book Wild Hairs (2000), winning the International Horror Guild's award for best non-fiction in 2001. In 1987, Schow's novella Pamela's Get was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for best long fiction. His short story Red Light won the 1987 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. And in 2015, The Outer Limits at 50 won the Rondo Award for Book of the Year in a tie with The Creature Chronicles by Tom Weaver, of which Schow was a contributor. As an editor, Schow's work includes three volumes of writings by Robert Bloch and a book of short stories by John Farris. Schow has also been a past contributor to liner notes for cult film distributors Grindhouse Releasing/Box Office Spectaculars, notably on the North American DVD release of Italian filmmaker Lucio Fulci's horror film, Cat in the Brain . He has also written text supplements for the DVDs of Reservoir Dogs and From Hell, and has done DVD commentaries for The Dirty Dozen, The Green Mile, Incubus, Thriller and Creature from the Black Lagoon. An upcoming Blu Ray and DVD edition of season one of The Outer Limits features commentary by Schow on several episodes as well as a booklet essay written by him. Going Back to Things Unknown with ‘The Outer Limits’ The Outer Limits is a mix of science fiction, nightmares, and surrealism -- the very things that make life worth living even though they scare the bejeebers out of us. Cinema history has been dotted with pointless false oppositions between artists, as though we can only admire one or the other: Chaplin or Keaton? Ford or Hawks? Bergman or Fellini? Woody Allen or Mel Brooks? Parallel arguments have thrived in any number of schoolyards: Superman or Batman? Donald or Daffy? The Addams family or the Munsters? One of the most august debates among the throngs who care, and who were brought up glued to their televisions in the early ’60s and during subsequent reruns, was The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits ? Consider, if you will, children of the Kennedy administration, a political background combining Camelot glamour and Cold War nuclear-baiting while TV parades an array of violent westerns and gangster shows in between cozy family sitcoms with wise parents and well-dressed suburban tykes. What’s that signpost up ahead? What strange signal takes control of your set from a merciless alien authority? Why, it’s a couple of spooky shows: science fiction, nightmares, surrealism — the things that make life worth living. These two black-and-white anthologies scared the bejeebers out of tender minds during this era, and indeed the latter program was created partly in response to the former. The two series had many things in common, from certain creative contributors to the fact that both titles evoke a sense of dislocation far from any known map of reality. While Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone is generally considered the more intellectual of the two, The Outer Limits boasted something more blunt and effective: monsters. Whereas monsters were only infrequently depicted on CBS’ The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits made an agreement with ABC to feature a fantastic creature in every story. Those who worked on the show called it “the bear”. Some episodes tried to work around this prescription but most embraced monsters and aliens, courtesy of the special effects and make-up departments. This element caused some highbrows to consider the show cheesy and childish, but the powerful attraction to kids is one reason this two-season series has had such a lasting legacy. Another commonality of the two series is that both were uneven. The Twilight Zone could veer into heavy-handed moralizing or allow nifty ideas to dissipate undeveloped save for arbitrary twist endings. The Outer Limits , at an hour, could drag with stories that would have been better knocked out in 30-minutes. Ah, but what matters is that these shows were frequently good and occasionally great, and those kids (and grown-ups) were lucky to have both of them. No wonder they’ve been burned into impressionable brains ever since. These thoughts are occasioned by Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray remastering of Season One of The Outer Limits . Some of the 32 episodes are accompanied by optional commentaries from seven experts. Also included is a 40-page booklet by David J. Schow, who literally wrote the book on this series: The Outer Limits Companion , co-writted with Jeffrey Frentzen. Adopting an emblematic or fractal approach, whereby one small piece replicates in perfect miniature the larger pattern of a given phenomenon, we’ll take this opportunity to alert unwary readers to, in our opinion, the single greatest episode and one of the magnificent achievements in TV drama. I refer to “The Forms of Things Unknown”. The Forms of Things Unknown. The first thing you should know is that The Outer Limits sometimes opened its episodes with a pre-credits teaser that was a scene from later in the show. This episode does that, and you must bypass that teaser. Go directly to the Control Voice playing havoc with the horizontal and vertical elements of the image (must this be explained to the streaming generation?) while intoning: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission… You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the Outer Limits.” The episode begins as it means to continue: with maximum disorientation, even dizziness. We see a montage of shots of a fancy car speeding and swerving around country roads, the driver (Scott Marlowe) grinning demonically. In one of those interior driver shots, a woman (Vera Miles) suddenly emerges from behind his profile, revealing that she’d been sitting next to him. She doesn’t appear alarmed either. In one of the final shots, she embraces and kisses him while he’s driving! Barely have we processed this dangerous behavior than sound and motion cease in a sudden freeze-frame, followed by a jump-cut to an Edenic lake in a forest. It would explain everything if the characters had been killed and everything from this point is an “Owl Creek Bridge” dream or trip to an ambiguous afterworld, and we’ll never be able to swear such isn’t the case. One of the script’s structural motifs is that we hardly have time to absorb any new information before the episode shape-shifts into something else. That’s why we hesitate to give away any more, but we must spend a little more time in the first act. To lilting music, the camera pans left to where the man is now standing, his crotch initially concealed by a leaf in the foreground. This gives us the impression, astounding for 1964 TV, of a naked man in a forest. When the passing leaf reveals his tight light-toned shorts, he might as well be. Done with posing, he walks into the lake and, like a king or a Greek god of revelry, calls out the first line of dialogue: “Kassia! Leonora! Where’s my drink?” The montage during this speech reveals our first glimpse of yet another woman on this trip: the jittery Leonora (Barbara Rush). Maybe she was in the trunk. We also see immediately that the women are colluding to soak a poisonous leaf (from a “Thanatos tree”) into the cocktail shaker. “Come as you are, in your fine stiletto heels,” commands the alpha male, standing up to his hips and smirking with cruelty. The women, one in a black dress and one in white, obey and wade in as though approaching a baptism. Eventually they are stepped so far that, should they wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er. (No extra points if you pick up that reference.) Now the viewer’s balance of knowledge and ignorance, and our surmises about which characters know what in this multi-layered scene, become positively heady. Where is our drink? By this point, most well-viewed audiences in 1964 would have been reminded of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s very popular thriller Diabolique (1955), about a bisexual menage and a drowning in the French countryside. The lesbian element was signaled most clearly when Simone Signoret’s character refers to “our bed”, and the dynamic between the coldly commanding woman (new boss, same as the old boss) and the nervous mouse is the same as in this story. This episode is likewise set in France. Although ABC’s network censors had come this far, the script requires some alibi about blackmailing Leonora’s father over letters to Kassia, which really explains nothing and sheds no light on any twists in these relationships. As a result, viewers are free to speculate on the palpable three- way sexual tension and domination in the relations between the women and their gloating Andre. Wikipedia identifies Marlowe as bisexual, which may help explain the unsettling, confident animal magnetism he radiates through the picture tube, as though the whole world is his hunting ground and no ventures are off limits. Yet he’s still frustrated that he can’t have everything. “I am rich but I am noisy rich,” he declaims, “and I want to be quiet rich.” That’s his moment of projecting the wounded grievance of someone who can’t get into the club he really wants. The lesbian subtext is strengthened in Act Two, when the women find themselves in a fairytale house in the woods and Leonora says she feels “as if this house has been waiting for me. I’m afraid I’ll succumb to it.” Here the episode is suddenly channeling Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House . The heroine there is Eleanor, while the lesbian character is Theodora. Leonora is a conflation of their names. This particular house is haunted by the ticking of what Leonora calls “a million mad clocks”. The manor’s blind sage (Sir Cedric Hardwicke in his final role) declares, “My Mr. Hobart tinkers with time, just as time has tinkered with Mr. Hobart.” That’s a strange, fey young man played by David McCallum, who’d previously starred in the classic episode called “The Sixth Finger”. We’ll glimpse him hastily closing a door before doing something illicit with Andre’s near-naked body propped amid a conical instrument of strings, as some life-size harps have figureheads, or perhaps entwined in the sci-fi equivalent of St. Sebastian’s arrows. “My Mr. Hobart” lingers in the house as a kind of lost pet, and at first the women misjudge the men’s relations, just as the whole episode hinges on such misjudgments and speculations. In his commentary, Tim Lucas points out that the character’s first name, Tone, refers to time in the era’s telephone conventions. I can’t help wondering if the last name refers to cult actress Rose Hobart, who appeared in several horror films and played a demonic woman in The Soul of a Monster (1944). I’ve revealed enough to indicate that this story has an air of feverish polymorphous perversity quite uncommon for TV of its era, but I’ve said nothing of its dazzling visual style as orchestrated by director Gerd Oswald and photographer Conrad Hall, who was about to embark on an Oscar-winning career. The gorgeous festival of expressionist tricks includes canted angles, shadow silhouettes, play with key lights and eye reflections, high-contrast chiaroscuro, moments of soft focus and saturated light, gliding camera movements, zooms forward and back, wide angles, worm’s eye views, upside down shots and even flashes of handheld giddiness, all in glittering and lavishly textured black and white. Composer Dominic Frontiere is also going to town with unnerving frissons. Art director Jack Poplin has his own field day, even constructing a “Caligari” hallway of false perspectives and angles. The writer-producer is Joseph Stefano, who worked on the series’ first season along with creator and executive producer Leslie Stevens. This episode was constructed as a pilot for a possible horror anthology to be called The Unknown , then re-edited as the finalé of the first season. That’s why this is among the few episodes that don’t feature a “bear”, although a bear is referred to when Tone Hobart utters a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream , from which the episode takes its title. Stefano and Stevens, who both left at the end of this season, were largely responsible for the series’ vibe and for giving Oswald pretty much a free hand to indulge the German Expressionist tendencies he came by honestly via his father, silent German director Richard Oswald. Gerd Oswald spent most of his American career in TV, including The Twilight Zone and some particularly visual episodes of Perry Mason to which I’ve called attention here. His full career deserves careful tracking, though he’s currently best known for a handful of films, including A Kiss Before Dying (1956), The Brass Legend (1956) and Screaming Mimi (1958). Even that small output hasn’t been sufficiently explored yet. Where, for example, is Brainwashed (1960), a German movie based on Stefan Zweig’s “Chess Novella”? In his classic book The American Cinema , Andrew Sarris classifies Oswald under Expressive Esoterica and notes: “A fluency of camera movement is controlled by sliding turns and harsh stops befitting a cinema of bitter ambiguity… There are paranoiac overtones in all his films, and the anti-Nazi symbolism is never too hard to detect.” The Outer Limits, “Moonstone” episode (IMDB) As I mentioned, some of the episodes offer commentaries from among a pool of seven suspects. “The Forms of Things Unknown” is handled by Tim Lucas, my former editor at Video Watchdog magazine. His informative and friendly track, gleaned from his research and Schow’s book, gives background on the players and points out resonances with the Stefano-scripted Psycho (1960) and the Universal Frankenstein movies, among other details. We must still go whistling for what would have been a great bonus: the pilot version of “The Unknown”. In his excellent booklet, Schow says of “The Forms of Things Unknown” that “no single hour of television ever looked like this before, and your film education is incomplete if you haven’t seen it at least once. Not one of the ‘best,’ but certainly an essential Outer Limits episode.” I’ll respectfully disagree to the extent of asserting that I do find it one of the best, not just of Outer Limits but all TV. Certainly there’s a lot to enjoy in the other episodes. Oswald is the most prolific director, while others include Byron Haskin, Laslo Benedek, James Goldstone, John Brahm, Leonard Horn, Robert Florey and writer-creator Leslie Stevens. Future Oscar winner Robert Towne wrote one script, and Harlan Ellison and Jerry Sohl would contribute to Season Two, which we trust is forthcoming. Actors include Cliff Robertson, Robert Culp, Donald Pleasence, Martin Landau, Ed Asner, Peter Mark Richman, Ralph Meeker, Bruce Dern, Sally Kellerman, Carroll O’Connor, Warren Oates, Gloria Grahame, Luana Anders, Marion Ross, Macdonald Carey, Sam Wanamaker, George Macready, Betsy Jones-Moreland, Leonard Nimoy, Signe Hasso and Robert Duvall. My main bone to pick with this set is that it’s needlessly hard to find the episode you want. Discs are only labeled, for example, “Episodes 11-15”, and the booklet doesn’t number them. We must do math. I guess it’s a small price to pay. The Outer Limits, “The Zanti Misfits” episode (IMDB) We Are Controlling Transmission. An episode of The Outer Limits a Day as seen through the eyes of Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri. Friday, July 1, 2016. Your Quick Reference Guide to WACT. Welcome to We Are Controlling Transmission ! While we've finished our 49-episode marathon viewing and reviewing an episode of The Outer Limits a day, we hope you'll come along for the ride after the fact and post your comments on the episodes as you make your way through the series. While you can access all of the entries in the Blog Archive in the sidebar, we thought it would be helpful to provide this index with links to each of the episode reviews, spotlights, season and series wrap-ups, all of the interviews we conducted, and the other special features posted. The We Are Controlling Transmission (WACT) Crew (L-R): Peter Enfantino, David J. Schow, John Scoleri An Introduction to We Are Controlling Transmission David J. Schow's Season 1 Primer David J. Schow's Season 2 Primer Season 1 Wrap Up Season 2 and Series Wrap Up. "The Galaxy Being" Review - Spotlight "The Borderland" Review - Spotlight "The Human Factor" Review - Spotlight "Tourist Attraction" Review "The Architects of Fear" Review - Spotlight "Controlled Experiment" Review "The Hundred Days of the Dragon" Review "The Man with the Power" Review - Spotlight "A Feasibility Study" Review - Spotlight "Specimen: Unknown" Review - Spotlight "The Sixth Finger" Review - Spotlight "The Man Who Was Never Born" Review - Spotlight "Moonstone" Review "O.B.I.T." Review - Spotlight "Nightmare" Review - Spotlight "Corpus Earthling" Review - Spotlight "The Zanti Misfits" Review - Spotlight "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork" Review - Spotlight "The Mice" Review "The Invisibles" Review - Spotlight "ZZZZZ" Review - Spotlight "Don't Open Till Doomsday" Review - Spotlight "The Bellero Shield" Review - Spotlight "The Children of Spider County" Review - Spotlight "The Mutant" Review - Spotlight "Second Chance" Review - Spotlight "Fun and Games" Review - Spotlight "The Guests" Review - Spotlight "Production and Decay of Strange Particles" Review - Spotlight - Second Spotlight "The Special One" Review "The Chameleon" Review - Spotlight "The Forms of Things Unknown" Review - Spotlight "Cold Hands, Warm Heart" Review - Spotlight "Soldier" Review - Spotlight "The Invisible Enemy" Review - Spotlight "Counterweight" Review - Spotlight "Behold, Eck!" Review "Wolf 359" Review - Spotlight "Keeper of the Purple Twilight" Review "Expanding Human" Review - Spotlight "Demon with a Glass Hand" Review - Spotlight "Cry of Silence" Review - Spotlight "I, Robot" Review "The Inheritors – Part 1 and 2" Review - Spotlight "The Duplicate Man" Review - Spotlight "The Brain of Colonel Barham" Review - Spotlight "The Premonition" Review "The Probe" Review - Spotlight Interview with a survivor of the Zanti Holocaust. Wednesday, June 29, 2016. We interrupt this program for a very special announcement. Just when you thought you had seen the last of our "TV show a day" blogs, this week co-host John Scoleri threw caution to the wind, and has embarked on a journey to watch and comment on every episode of Dark Shadows on the 50th anniversary of its original airdate. And yes, that means starting at the very beginning, not 200+ episodes in when Barnabas arrives. Right now the key question is can he do it? Remember, we're talking about 1225 episodes here. Five years. Well, perhaps you have the complete DVD collection in your library, and have been waiting for the perfect opportunity to crack those babies open. What better time, and what better way than to join in on the fun. Check it out at Dark Shadows Before I Die! http://dsb4idie.blogspot.com. Monday, March 30, 2015. It's RONDO WINNING time! This blog has had more than 350,000 hits since we launched it. let's find out if that means anything and we found out that DID mean something! The Outer Limits at 50 TIED for Rondo book of the year! Congratulations David J. Schow, Ted Rypel, Keith Rainville and Creature Features publisher Taylor White! Friday, February 20, 2015. RETURN TO THE BILLY WILDER THEATRE! Yes, just as we did with the “lost” Joe Stefano film THE HAUNTED so now do we encore with a freshly-restored 35mm print of another “lost” Leslie Stevens film – PRIVATE PROPERTY (1960), starring Corey Allen, Warren Oates and Kate Manx (then Mrs. Leslie Stevens). Stevens’ hope was “to bring the (French) New Wave crashing into the heart of Hollywood,” and the movie was promptly condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency for tackling such taboo themes as dominance, rape fantasies, and "latent" homosexuality. This is a pristine, sparkling restoration that has to be seen to be believed, thanks to Scott MacQueen and the preservationists at the UCLA Film Archive. Funding courtesy of the Packard Humanities Institute. DJS WILL EMCEE (unless Scott tears the podium away from him). Come celebrate with us! (It’s also the UCLA Film & TV Archive’s 50th Anniversary!) Presented on no less than FRIDAY THE 13th (March 13th) at 7:30 P.M. at the Billy Wilder Theatre (Courtyard Level at the Hammer Museum). The Billy Wilder Theater box office opens one hour before show times. 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90024. General Admission: $9 Seniors: $8 UCLA Alumni Association Members: $8 Non-UCLA Students: $8. Parking is available in the lot under the Billy Wilder Theater. Enter from Westwood Blvd., just north of Wilshire Blvd. Monday - Friday before 6 p.m.: $3 for first 3 hours with museum validation and $1.50 every 15 minutes thereafter. To obtain validation, show your ticket stub at the welcome desk in the museum lobby. Produced on a minuscule budget reportedly just below $60,000, Leslie Stevens’ controversial directorial debut Private Property was hailed by Variety as a “possible forerunner of an American ‘new wave’ movement” and was equally condemned by the National Catholic Legion of Decency for its exploration of seduction, rape and latent homosexuality. Due to the film’s taboo subject matter, the Production Code Administration denied the work a code seal, making Private Property the first U.S. feature to be released without MPAA approval since Otto Preminger’s stark exploration of heroin addiction, The Man with the Golden Arm, in 1955. Lack of Code approval, however, which kept major distributors from picking-up and widely releasing Private Property, didn’t prevent the disquieting independent film from eventually grossing over $2 million in box office receipts and enjoying successful art house runs across Europe. Framed by Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Ted McCord’s gritty noir shadows as juxtaposed against a tony, sunbathed Beverly Hills location (in reality, Leslie Stevens’ own home), Private Property showcases a trio of edgy, superbly understated Method-esque performances by leads Kate Manx (in her screen debut), Corey Allen (Rebel Without a Cause, 1955), and Warren Oates (Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, 1974). As a vulnerable, affluent young woman driven to psychological distress by a sexless marriage, and further menaced by a pair of sociopathic drifters, Manx conveys a muted, permeating melancholy that effectively serves to anchor the drama’s purposeful excesses of Freudian symbolism. Married prior to the making of Private Property in 1958, Manx and Stevens would divorce in 1964, with the actress tragically dying later that year from a reported overdose of sleeping pills. Stevens continued to successfully work in film and television into the1990s, and is best-remembered for creating and writing and directing episodes of the cult-classic science fiction television series, The Outer Limits (1963-1965). —Mark Quigley. (Director: Leslie Stevens. Production: Kana Productions, Inc., Daystar Productions. Distribution: Citation Films, Inc. Producer: Stanley Colbert. Screenwriter: Leslie Stevens. Cinematographer: Ted McCord. Editor: Jerry Young. Music: Alex Compinksy. Cast: Corey Allen, Warren Oates, Kate Manx, Robert Wark, Jerome Cowan. 35mm, b/w, 79 min.) Restored from a 35mm acetate composite dupe negative, a 35mm acetate print and a 35mm acetate track negative. Laboratory services by The Stanford Theatre Film Laboratory, Audio Mechanics, DJ Audio, Simon Daniel Sound. We Are Controlling Transmission. An episode of The Outer Limits a Day as seen through the eyes of Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri. Sunday, March 13, 2011. In The Outer Limits Tavern with David J. Schow. Right after we hit California. You have to guess which one is DJS. DJS: We moved to Fort Worth, Texas before I kindergartened. Then Lexington and Paris, Kentucky for grades 1-3. People say, oh, military brat, but we didn’t start really moving around until after my Dad retired from the Air Force. Then it was off to Huntington Beach, California, where (because of the enrollment schedule) I stayed out of school for nearly a year prior to taking on the fourth grade. DJS: A total word-count on WACT would be instructive. I bet it’s book-length. JS: You're probably right. This is our 131st post, and to date there have been more than 2000 comments posted. Barker, Schow, Matheson, Stanley, and Berger. Clive was doing a signing for The Great and Secret Show right after the taping, but the rest of you guys (including the young “B” in KNB, Howard Berger) had some time before your return flight to LA so we met you and our Bay Area horror host, John Stanley, for lunch at your hotel. Since I had you all cornered I was able to get you to sign a bunch of books, including my copy of The Shaft manuscript. A pretty cool day for this 20-year old. Of course, that was the first of many encounters through the years. Another particularly special memory was attending the first public preview screening of The Crow (at which time I officially forgave Jeff Conner of all outstanding debts when he escorted us past the line deep into the parking lot and right into the theater). The fact that the screening was documented in the first chapter of Conner's book on The Crow: City of Angels is the only reason you'll find that in my library. I recall you were sitting in the very back row, and had to be pleased with the reception the film got that night. JS: You seem to have few kind words for 90s Outer Limits revival, oft-referred to as The NOTer Limits . The prosecution would like to enter into evidence Exhibit A, Season One Episode "Corner of the Eye," written by one David (no J.) Schow. One might reasonably assume your having a chance to write an Outer Limits episode would be a dream job. What can you tell us about that experience, and your thoughts on the episode itself? During the Writers Guild strike in 2007-08 I found myself shoulder-to-shoulder with the new blood, people like Scott Kosar, Steve Susco, Adam Gierasch, Jace Anderson, E.L. Katz, Adam Green, James Wan, Joe Lynch, Hans Rodionoff … and Dave Parker and I had just done Hills Run Red , to compete with all of them. They were uniformly welcoming and open; no “camps.” DJS with Father Adam and Monsignor Scott during the "exorcism" of Warner Brothers. A gang of horror writers picketing the home office of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers all on our own, before the Guild even did (the graybeard second from right is David Seltzer, who wrote THE OMEN) Simultaneously, I had gotten to work with two genre legends, Larry Cohen and Tom Holland, on Masters of Horror . Same attitude. 17 comments: Excellent and entertaining interview, and a fine wrapup of sorts to this blog that has been so rewarding from day one (and that I imagine most of us are sorry to see come to an end, aside from Peter). DJS, your comments about the "kid window" especially hit home--you could have easily been describing my youthful self, right down to the "melodrama means monster movies" weird categorizing style of the old TV Guide that we all learned quickly enough how to interpret! Very interesting also to get a view into the world of a writer toiling in Hollywood and elsewhere, although why you weren't discouraged a long time ago by all the ego and bullcrap that you have to put up with is hard to fathom. I've said before that I was a fan of the Companion from the beginning, and I also have had seemingly forever a copy of Gary G.'s book, from back in the day when it was the ONLY book on the subject of TV science fiction. It's been an honor and a pleasure to be able to participate in this blog with you two, as well as with Ted R. and the Holcombs, as well as all the others on board. I have imagined it as sort of sitting around an electronic campfire, sharing information and opinions and stories, as people have done all down the ages. I didn't get a chance to say so before, but thanks also to everyone who had kind words when I had to drop out for a couple of weeks--it was really appreciated, and being able to come back and check out the blog from time to time was a welcome relief from everything else that was going on. Special thanks to John and Peter for all the hard work they did on this, and for making it available to begin with. It was indeed always "welcoming," and I too have been surprised (and inspired) by the level of commentary and acceptance of opposing ideas that has taken place here--such a contrast to the sort of lowbrow insults and automatic, snarky dismissals that pass for "conversation" on many other sites. I'm proud to have been a part of it, and hope that it will stay up here for a long time as a resource and a testimony to this show that meant so much to so many of us. P.S. As we noted earlier, The Duplicate Man mentioned in its script the year the Companion first appeared, 1986, and of course displayed the plaque with the year of this blog, 2011. But the episode took place in 2025 according to DJS's account--does that mean we should all get back together again during that year and take another look at the series from the point of view of our by then old selves? (I can hear you all gasping and groaning already--never mind!) Worth hanging around for. That interview was the perfect finale before "The Probe" drives a stake in TOL. I don't know if "Batman" is the sorbet for this feast, though. How do you mock a series that mocks itself? And when did Fox ever license any DVDs? I thought Adam West was still stranded on a rock waiting for those royalties. I don't read much science fiction any more. I wonder if it's dead. Replaced for overactive minds by pure fantasy. We know we won't be reaching the stars any more any time soon, so why not just invent completely different worlds instead of imagining how we will ever get off this one? I mostly read non-fiction and biographies now, which is why I so enjoyed this interview. I guess I read biographies to gleen some life experience, some out-of-this-body account that fills in the the places, emotions or actions of the roads not taken. I also look for points of intersection to solidify my thoughts on some universal consciousness we all share. My early life experiences in a hermetically-sealed nuclear family right out of "Leave it to Beaver" couldn't more dramatically contrast with the details DJS reveals here of harsh, nomadic beginnings. And yet we played with the same toys; Robot Commando; Zor; James Bond Attache Cases, and were attracted to the same, often melancholy leaps of escapism such as TOL, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and Fredric Brown. And I lived in the basement and often felt alone in my eccentric interests. In another post I speculated that we all took leaps into dangerous visions because our early lives were actually so safe; we felt secure enough to poke our heads out of the bubble. But DJS' experiences here blows that theory to shit. But at some point, I put alway all that dark stuff, sold the complete Marvel Comics Collection (Spiderman 1-50! X-Men 1-50!), bought a pair of 150 pound speakers and embraced the bright light and partying of Sun Tan U and never really looked back. Much. Until now. I'm back in a dark room embracing the fever dreams of busy brains practicing the lonely art of imagination, and changing history realizing we were never alone . ever.