An Elephant's Bathroom Habits Put The Twilight Zone On A Tight Deadline
The key to the success of Rod Serling's original run of "The Twilight Zone" (and its enduring popularity) was ingenuity in all aspects of production. Obviously, the writing was almost always top-notch, with episodes boasting wildly clever premises from genre masters like Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, and George Clayton Johnson. Though the budgets were modest, directors employed all manner of trickery and inventive makeup effects to dazzle and/or terrify viewers. Meanwhile, the strange tales conjured by Serling's stable of scribes required fully committed performances from actors both established and new to the scene. They had to roll with the weirdness.
On certain occasions, however, Serling and his collaborators couldn't resort to special effects to transport their audience. Sometimes, they had to shell out some dough and wow 'em with the real thing. And sometimes this forced the director to scramble a good deal more than usual. Such was the case on the series' season Oone finale in 1960, when a gargantuan co-star's gastrointestinal predilections nearly left the cast and crew knee-deep in ... well, stick with me here.
A writer's creations made flesh
Written by Matheson (the hugely influential horror/sci-fi/fantasy author of, among many other classics, "I Am Legend," "The Incredible Shrinking Man" and "Hell House") and helmed by ace journeyman Ralph Nelson ("Charly," "Requiem for a Heavyweight," and a Best Picture nominee for "Lilies of the Field, which won Sidney Poitier a Best Actor Oscar), "A World of His Own" starred Keenan Wynn as a playwright capable of literally bringing his characters to life via dictation.
At the outset of the episode, Wynn's character's wife (Phyllis Kirk) spies him flirting with another woman (Mary LaRoche) in his study. She believes she's caught him red-handed in the midst of an extramarital affair, but he swears it isn't so. These are physical manifestations of his imagination. When Wynn proves this to his wife by summoning the other woman again, she attempts to flee. To stop her, Wynn creates an elephant.
Here's where things got a little messy.
An actor with an intestinal ticking clock
While shooting, Nelson initially wanted to go the easy route and insert the elephant via rear projection. Unfortunately, the effect was distractingly unreal, so they brought in an actual elephant. Obviously, the screen-friendly pachyderm arrived with a handler capable of coaching the animal through its paces. This might sound relatively simple, but there was a catch.
In Marc Scott Zicree's "The Twilight Zone Companion," producer Buck Houghton revealed the elephant's digestive system put them on a tight clock. Per Houghton:
"I came around the stage corner and there was the elephant. And the elephant man was having him go on his nose and then on his back legs, and on his nose and then on his back legs, and then his nose — I stood there wondering what this guy was beating this poor elephant to death for. Finally — he didn't give the next order — the elephant s*** a bale of hay. And he says, 'Now he's good for two hours.' So I went in and I told Nelson, 'You've got two hours to use the elephant or we're in trouble.'"
Evidently, Nelson shot the beast out before it unloaded another bale-bomb. As for the quality of the elephant's performance, it's not quite in the class of Anna Mae's portrayal of Annie in George Stevens' "Gunga Din," but it got the job done without a drop of dung.