Rod Serling Committed Plagiarism In The Twilight Zone – By Accident
The pilot episode for Rod Serling's seminal sci-fi TV series "The Twilight Zone" was called "Where Is Everybody?," and it aired on October 2, 1959. It was directed by Robert Stevens and, like most episodes of "The Twilight Zone," was written by Serling himself. This was, according to an article in LitHub, part of his contract; Serling was to write at least 80% of the show's scripts. For the remaining 20%, Serling solicited scripts from just about every writer in Hollywood and reportedly received maybe 14,000 spec scripts in less than a week. That seems high to this author's eye, but given the number of starving writers living in L.A., it could very well be plausible.
It was clear that soliciting scripts from the writers' world at large wasn't practical; there's no way Serling could read all those stories in any kind of timely fashion. Serling put the scripts aside and decided to get more intimate with it. The "Twilight Zone" creator began approaching established sci-fi writers about the possibility of writing for his new show, or if they would, at the very least, be interested in letting Serling adapt their stories.
Sam Weller interviewed author Ray Bradbury numerous times and published most of his interviews in various papers and in books. In one of those interviews, Bradbury recalled meeting with Serling and putting the desperate TV writer on the right path. It was Bradbury who, he said, pointed Serling in the direction of the best sci-fi and weird fiction authors of the day. Serling was grateful and began writing more stories ... including a pilot episode that just happened to look exactly like a tale from Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles."
The authors
Bradbury remembered meeting Serling at a WGA function when he was approached as a potential writer for Serling's show:
"After dinner, Rod said he was starting a series, a fantasy series, but he didn't really know what he was doing, he needed help. [...] I said, 'Come to the house with me right now and I'll give you books that will help you.' I gave him copies of books by Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, John Collier and Roald Dahl. I said, 'Now you've got a complete idea of what your show should be like. Buy some of these stories or hire these authors to work for you, because you can't do the whole thing yourself.'"
And indeed, a lot of those authors' stories made their way onto "The Twilight Zone," if they weren't just hired outright. Two of Matheson's stories were adapted by Serling, and Matheson himself penned 14 episodes. Beaumont authored or co-authored 18 episodes. "The Chaser" was based on a Collier story. Dahl, sadly, never made it to air, although he would get to host his own genre anthology series in 1961 called "'Way Out."
Bradbury only wrote one episode of "Twilight Zone," called "I Sing the Body Electric!" (May 18, 1962), the show's 100th episode. He recalls, however, the weird creative relationship Serling had with the above-listed writers. Despite the massive talent at work on "The Twilight Zone," Serling was still writing most of the episodes, culling the sci-fi books Bradbury lent him for ideas. After a while, Bradbury began to get the feeling that Serling, however unwittingly, might be plagiarizing some of them.
This was especially clear when Bradbury was invited to watch "Where Is Everybody" and found it a take on his own story "The Silent Towns" from "The Martian Chronicles."
The Silent Towns
Bradbury was unambiguous when addressing Serling's "inspiration." He explained:
"The first program of 'The Twilight Zone' is based on a story from 'The Martian Chronicles.' He invited me to a screening with my friend Bill Nolan and the other boys in the gang, you know, and when we came out we all looked at each other and said, 'God, that looks a little bit like a story from "The Martian Chronicles."' I didn't say anything because I was embarrassed. And a month or so later, Rod called me on the phone and said, 'Why didn't you tell me?' I said, 'Tell you what?' He said, 'Well, my pilot script is based partially on a story of yours from "The Martian Chronicles?"'"
It seemed that Serling didn't know that Ray Bradbury had beaten him to a "lone soul wanders a human-free landscape" story by about nine years. Serling then told Bradbury that it took his wife, Carol, to point out the similarities to him. Luckily, she happened to be readying Bradbury's book at the time. The author recalled:
"[Serling] said 'I was in bed reading with my wife and Carol turned over, she was reading "The Martian Chronicles" and she said, "Rod, read this, it's like your pilot."' And he said, 'My God, I realized that inadvertently I'd stolen part of your idea.'"
Luckily, Serling wanted to do the honorable thing, and give credit where credit was due; it seems that Rod didn't want to rip off any ideas or claim credit for himself. He offered to pay Bradbury to appropriate amount to purchase the rights to his story. Bradbury refused, saying that the acknowledgment was enough, offering him vindication.
But, it seemed, that Serling later put himself back on the hook.
Back on the hook
Bradbury received a second phone call which was seemingly polite but ultimately made an offer Serling didn't follow up on:
"...[H]e calls back two weeks later and he said, 'I can't stand it, you know. I can't stand it. I've gotta buy your story. My lawyers will call you.' He hung up and the lawyers never called. He shouldn't have made the second call. He was off the hook. I let him off the hook. And then he called and talked about his lawyers and they never called. Well, after that, he stole from Henry Kuttner, he stole from John Collier."
Later, in the 2014 biography "Ray Bradbury Unbound," author Jonathan R. Eller described a minor "turf war" between Serling and several of sci-fi's more notable luminaries at the time. Some authors would accuse Serling of lifting elements from their stories, and Serling would maintain that the stories were his. Rather than be accepted as a new member of the sci-fi author's community, Serling became a suspicious outsider.
The consensus, with Bradbury and among most authors, was that Serling was not a thief or a plagiarist, but that he was reading a lot of the hot sci-fi stories at the time, not digesting it properly, and "borrowing" a lot of what he had read. Bradbury felt that:
"Rod is a Johnny-Come-Lately, who will come and go and be forgotten in the s-f field; his greatest strength, and I wish he would realize it, lies in the sort of powerful realism he did for 'Playhouse 90.' I wish he would go back to that and leave the s-f to us guys who know how to do it ... meaning myself, Chuck Beaumont, Heinlein, and others."
Hard words.