Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Column
Risky business
Tom Cruise is not one of us. He's always aloof and alone, seemingly judging us with his eyes. He makes us very, very nervous. Maybe that's why we can't resist him.
By Sarah Vowell
[01/19/00]

Movies
Laughter after irony
Are new movies like "Holy Smoke" and "American Beauty" reinventing screen comedy?
By Christopher Kelly
[01/18/00]

Column
We are family
You don't have to be Italian for "The Sopranos" to hit home.
By Joyce Millman
[01/14/00]

Movie Review
"Mr. Death"
An idiosyncratic documentary examines the life of Fred Leuchter, a man who built a better electric chair -- and denied the Holocaust death camps.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[01/14/00]

Column
King of "Kings"
With dark horse Oscar candidate "Three Kings" trotted out for another showing, director David O. Russell talks about Michael Jackson, visual studies and George Clooney's Cary Grant turn.
By Michael Sragow
[01/13/00]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Luckily, the "Felicity" cast was game to try it -- including Keri Russell, the star, whom Johnson considers an "unbelievable" talent. Johnson, a formidable yarn-spinner, convinced the actors that the "Twilight Zone" style worked on a level of parable and myth that satisfies a vast hunger in the audience. "At the museum tribute," he says, "there were 45 minutes of selections from the series, and it was apparent that people were eating them up with a spoon. I looked around and the faces were rapt. And there were some fabulous episodes of that show, with all their theatrical lighting and acting and payoffs. Do you remember the one where Burgess Meredith plays this older guy who wants only to escape the hurly-burly and read for the rest of his life? And it's the end of the world and he's got this library all to himself -- except he steps on his glasses and can't see?"

(Actually, I do remember: The climax is a bespectacled bookworm's primal scene. In fact, a screenwriter friend of mind just showed it to his son, who was beguiled by it -- and terrified.)

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

In an interview the WB sent to TV reviewers, Johnson neatly summarized his view of the show's appeal: "It is an old-fashioned tale-telling kind of form. It's relatively uncomplicated by subplot -- a relatively clean line -- with an extremely intriguing hook."

Johnson told me that the show's poverty-row tactics only underscored its strengths. "Obviously, it was in black and white, with a cut-to-the-bone starkness in its look, and no real dressing of the sets. There was none of the incredible décor that is done now to bring about a sense of fleshing out and make the environment of a show something people recognize. The look was barren, but formalized. Some of the most exciting episodes -- like the one with Jack Klugman as a pool player -- were shot in sets that were clearly sets, where you could see flats [i.e., backdrops] that didn't quite join. As a director, you were reduced to what you could get by with, and that's what I love about working in the theater.

"When you don't have money, you can do remarkable things," Johnson continued. "You get by with suggestions, curious symbolic arrangements of props. In a lot of these ['Twilight Zone'] episodes, you rarely see actors go through a door, because there was very little in the way of walled scenery. Yet somehow that releases you to focus in more and more on the actors and the text. You don't have to lumber through anything such as the tremendous productions they have onstage today, with huge elevators working winding staircases on monster productions like 'Sunset Boulevard,' which I now find so tiresome they just beat the shit out of me."

At first, Abrams and Johnson tried collaborating with a veteran "Twilight Zone" writer who "had fascinating germs of ideas that were in no way related to 'Felicity,'" Johnson said. "In no way could you get value from taking these actors and putting them into these situations. We spent about a month or six weeks before the 10 days I had to prep the show talking about why it wasn't working. But 'Five Characters in Search of an Exit' was always J.J.'s favorite episode, and when we were brainstorming we realized we could work backward from that." The nub of J.J.'s inspiration was that "the collision of emotions on the part of the characters right now renders them incapable of living life and sends them into an artificial zone of some sort. When that came to him, J.J jumped up and down said, 'I'm going to do this' and started to write it -- while producing the rest of the show."

The scintillating result is richer and more amusing than many an original "Twilight Zone." It's actually a combination of two kinds of "Twilight Zone" episodes: the ones about bizarre medical treatments and the ones about alternate realities. The part of the episode that could be called "The Clinic" begins in a "Felicity"-like manner, with our college-sophomore heroine drifting though her chores as a counter girl while she mulls over her feelings for the feisty jock Ben (Scott Speedman) and the gentle teaching assistant Noel (Scott Foley). This time, though, one of her customers reads her thoughts and hands her a card with the phone number and address of "The Clinic" -- which promises to repair broken hearts. ("For the incurable romantic, the Clinic is the cure.") The ensuing psychological mayhem involves a marvelously pasty-looking doctor (Dennis Lipscomb), a wonderfully woebegone zombie (Gregory Cooke), crystal hearts and hideous scars and mysterious secret dosages of medical and emotional anesthesia.

Next page | Robert Redford causes an "old-lady sexual reawakening"