Serling’s ‘Dead’ Comes to Life on CBS

All things considered, “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling would probably appreciate the irony that the last script he completed before his death in June, 1975, was a tale about prolonging life.

Nearly two decades later, that teleplay itself has been revived as the main event of a two-segment television film, “Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics,” airing Thursday night on CBS.

Titled “Where the Dead Are,” the 90-minute story stars Jack Palance as a mysterious doctor in 1868 New England whose patients have some unusual qualities. It shares the two-hour time slot with the 30-minute “The Theatre,” starring Amy Irving as a woman who sees her future played out on a movie screen.

The latter was written by “Twilight Zone” veteran Richard Matheson, from a treatment by Serling. Both were directed by Robert Markowitz, with James Earl Jones assuming Serling’s narration duties.

The projects had come to light about two years ago, when Serling’s widow, Carol, was sorting through material to send to the newly established Rod Serling Archives at Ithaca College in New York, where the prolific television pioneer frequently taught.

“Up popped this screenplay,” she recalls. “It had been buried and forgotten.”

She gave that work and a number of treatments in various stages of completion to her attorney, Rene Golden, who asked two other clients, producing team Michael O’Hara and Lawrence Horowitz, if they would be interested in having a go at the script.

“Rene said it almost as an afterthought,” remembers O’Hara, whose credits with Horowitz include the miniseries “Switched at Birth” and the NBC “Moment of Truth” telefilms. “I had a pile of scripts, which I usually procrastinate about reading. But I read this one right away and, after 30 pages, called my partner and said, ‘I love it.’ ”

But with 90-minute television movies passe, the producers needed something to fill two hours. They chose the treatment for “The Theatre” because, O’Hara says, “it was completed and terrific.”

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For O’Hara, himself a childhood fan of Serling’s allegorical science-fiction series, “Where the Dead Are” was a welcome change of pace from his usual TV-movie fare. “It’s no fault of the writers writing the material, because fact-based stories are the market,” he says, “but those are narrow. This is pure imagination, a period piece, literate--some might say wordy. If Rod Serling’s name weren’t on it, it wouldn’t have a chance at getting made.”

Other than some deletions, no changes were made in the script, in which surgeon Ben Ramsey, played by Patrick Bergin, discovers evidence of a long-ago injury on a young patient that no one could have survived. Intrigued, he launches a search for answers, landing on an island inhabited by Palance’s retired regeneration research specialist.

The key story points also remain unchanged in “The Theatre,” in which film buffs Irving and her boyfriend, played by Gary Cole, get swept up by events beyond their control after one too many visits to their local movie house. The characters, though, were updated to reflect the 1990s: Irving’s Melissa Sanders was initially a secretary in love with a co-worker, but is now a sculptor with a doctor-boyfriend.

O’Hara says he believes the two segments remain true to the original “Twilight Zone” series. For her part, Carol Serling, who served as a producer, says she is “thrilled” with the project and the cast, particularly Palance, who won an Emmy for her husband’s television classic “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”

“Some of the other treatments could be developed and produced,” she says. “And there’s one other screenplay people are looking at. A lot of people out there want to do a remake, but I’m not rushing to that. If something was done right the first time, why do it again?”

* “Twilight Zone: Rod Serling’s Lost Classics” airs at 8 p.m. Thursday on CBS (Channels 2 and 8).