The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling Wrote 'Speed On An Airplane' Decades Before Speed
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
It's a movie about a mad bomber who puts a bomb on a vehicle, and if that vehicle stops it's going to blow up. So the authorities try to figure out who the bomber is, but he's too clever to be captured, while the people in the vehicle do everything in their power to keep the engine running, find the bomb, and defuse it before it blows up.
That's the plot of the Oscar-winning blockbuster "Speed," directed by Jan De Bont and written by Christopher Yost (with an uncredited but substantial rewrite by Joss Whedon). When "Speed" came out in 1994 the premise seemed pretty novel, taking the already tried-and-true premise of "Die Hard on a [Blank]" and setting it on a bus that can't stop plowing through traffic in the middle of the day in Los Angeles, where there is — take it from somebody who's lived here his whole life — an absolutely comical amount of traffic.
"Speed" was a breakout success when it was released, thanks in no small part to the novelty of its premise. But if you were watching television in the 1960s you may have had a strange feeling about it. Almost as though it sounded a little familiar. Almost as though it was the premise of a made-for-TV movie released in 1966 that was written by "The Twilight Zone" creator Rod Serling.
Well, you'd be right. Because the vehicles may be different, but otherwise "Speed" is a heck of a lot like the 1966 thriller "The Doomsday Flight." A film that is tense and intelligent, and got banned. It got banned so hard. And even Rod Serling agreed that it should have been.
'The Doomsday Flight'
"The Doomsday Flight" is about a mad bomber who puts a bomb on an airplane, and if that vehicle stops — specifically if it descends below 4,000 feet — it's going to blow up. So the authorities try to figure out who the bomber is, but he's too clever to be captured, while the people in the airplane do everything in their power to keep the engine running, find the bomb, and defuse it before it blows up.
It's a corker of a premise, and it's got a humdinger of a cast. Van Johnson ("Brigadoon") stars as the pilot, who foolishly wishes his humdrum job would get exciting as the plane takes off. Oscar-winner Edmond O'Brien ("The Barefoot Contessa") plays the mad bomber, in an eccentric and fascinating performance. John Saxon ("Enter the Dragon") plays a matinee idol with more ego than courage. Jack Lord ("Hawaii Five-O") plays the FBI agent on the hunt for the bomber. Ed Asner ("Up") plays an airline supervisor trying to manage an impossibly complicated situation.
Rod Serling's screenplay for "The Doomsday Flight" is a thrilling procedural, in which scores of experts in their field are challenged by unpredictable circumstances with the lives of over 100 people on the line. But it's also rife with interesting characters, not the least of which is the bomber himself. Edmond O'Brien plays the villain as a sniveling retired nobody who's trying to bilk the airline out of $100,000, which would be nearly a million dollars today. But as the film progresses he realizes that he doesn't care about the money. What he's getting off on is the power. The unthinkable knowledge that the only thing keeping him from doing terrible things was his own unwillingness to do them. It's a disturbing performance.
So if this movie is so good, why haven't more people heard about it?
Eek! The Copycat
After "The Doomsday Flight" aired on television there was a surge in bomb threats at airports. The most famous case was at Qantas in 1971, where a bomb threat claimed that a flight to Hong Kong would explode if it dipped below 20,000 feet. The bomber left a similar bomb in a locker for the authorities to find and test for themselves, and it checked out. The airline paid the bomber $550,000, after which he revealed there was never a bomb on the airplane in the first place.
In response, Rod Serling said "I didn't realize there were so many kooks in the woodwork," and that "I wish ... I had written a stagecoach drama starring John Wayne instead. I wish I'd never been born." Peter Macari, who would later be arrested and deported from Australia (on a Qantas flight), admitted he was inspired by the film. Witnesses claimed he said, "That would be a good way to make money" after watching "The Doomsday Flight."
In 1971, the Federal Aviation Administration formally requested that television stations never air "The Doomsday Flight" again, citing claims that every time the movie was shown the number of bomb threats to airports increased. The organization couldn't force TV stations to ban the film but it essentially disappeared. Even Serling thought banning the film was a good idea.
"I fervently wish now I had never never written the script," Serling reportedly said. "I feel so hellishly guilty about it. You know, I wouldn't blame any country that banned the film."
It's still possible to find "The Doomsday Flight" online, but as you can imagine it hasn't been well taken care of. It's a shame so many people took inspiration from Serling's script to do terrible things in real life but the film itself is excellent and eerily presages "Speed," decades earlier. Just don't try it at home. Ever.