The Twilight Zone Episode That Required The Cast And Crew To Eat Salads During Breaks

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One of the best episodes of "The Twilight Zone" season 1 was "I Shot an Arrow Into the Sky," which follows a group of astronauts who crash onto a desert planet and soon start to turn on each other. Corey (Dewey Martin) is the last one left. After he betrays and kills the other survivors, he sets off on his own, prepared to survive as long as he can in this harsh alien wasteland. But then he comes across a sign labeled "Reno, 37 miles." 

That's right: they were on Earth the whole time, and they could've all survived if they'd just kept their wits about them and had walked a bit in the right direction. Don't you hate it when that happens? On the bright side, at least they didn't have any talking apes to deal with; Rod Serling would reuse this twist when writing the script for the original "Planet of the Apes" film in 1968.

But as exhausting as this episode was, the actors were having an even worse time behind the scenes. The episode was filmed on location in Death Valley, California, a desert area that regularly exceeds 110°F in the summer. No rain was recorded there from 1929 to 1953, and even at night, the summer temperatures often only dipped down to 80 or 90°F. It's easy to understand why the astronauts in the episode confused this place for a barren alien planet, because that's sure what it feels like when you're in there. 

The constant heat was why the cast and crew largely stuck to salads during the production. Salads are cool and hydrating, the logic goes, so it helped prevent the crew from sweating too much or getting too thirsty. 

"Dietetically speaking, our meals were very much more on the salads — very satisfying, but light," producer Houghton would later recall. "Also, we said to the crew, 'Look, we're going to have a two-hour lunch. We're going back to the hotel and serve lunch around the pool. You can go to your room. And don't lets have horseplay about the union and the overtime and all that jazz because you know very well that it's the best thing to do for all of us, and you'll still come out the same number of pay hours as we gave you the 45-minute lunch out here on location and made you sweat through it and work on till six.'"

The reason why the production was so firm around this salad and relaxation approach is that this wasn't the first time they'd filmed in Death Valley. The second episode in the show's production, "The Lonely," was the first to film at the location, and with that episode, the cast and crew were definitely not prepared for what was in store. Their first mistake was filming the episode in June, one of the hottest months of the year; their second mistake was what they served for lunch.

"That was unbelievable heat when we shot out there," the episode's director Jack Smight, recalled. "The temperature was around 130 degrees. One day the caterer very foolishly served a very heavy meal for lunch, and about eight crew members just dropped in the afternoon." At one point, the director of photography George Clemens fell off a camera rig, having collapsed from either heat exhaustion or dehydration. 

By the time they returned to the area to film "I Shot an Arrow Through the Air," the valley hadn't yet cooled down much from its summer peaks, but at least now the crew was prepared. With the new diet and the new relaxation precautions, there was far less fainting involved with this episode's production. "The Twilight Zone" would even return to Death Valley a couple more times throughout its run, most notably in season 2's "The Rip Van Winkle Caper." Shooting in the desert is never fun — just ask Steven Spielberg — but at least "The Twilight Zone" crew found a way to make it work.