Up Till Now: The Autobiography

killed a man in a street fight. On Arrest and Trial I was an ambitious TV executive planning to kill my way to the top. In The Virginian I was a gold miner driven by greed into trying to kill my rivals and in The Fugitive I was a psychotic killer.
    When I wasn’t killing people I was saving them. On Alcoa Theatre I was a doctor with serious emotional problems, on The Nurses I was a doctor who had to deal with euthanasia, on Ben Casey I was an unconventional children’s doctor, and on Dr. Kildare I was, finally, a patient.
    If I wasn’t killing them or saving them I was catching them or defending them on The Defenders and Checkmate and Burke’s Law and For the People. I never stopped working; if it’s Tuesday it must be Naked City . And I treated each of those parts as if they were equally significant; my work ethic is such that I never made a distinction between an important job and an unimportant job. And one show almost always led to something else.
    And the reality is that if you throw enough programming against the wall, some of it is going to get framed and be called art. Certainly one of the most memorable programs I did during that timewas a Twilight Zone episode entitled “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Memorable now in television history, but truthfully I probably wouldn’t have remembered too much about it a month and three or four other shows later. The story concerned a... Here, let Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling describe it: “Portrait of a frightened man. Mr. Robert Wilson, thirty-seven, husband, father, and salesman on sick leave. Mr. Wilson has just been released from a sanitarium where he spent the last six months recovering from a nervous break-down...Tonight, he’s traveling all the way to his appointed destination which, contrary to Mr. Wilson’s plan, happens to be in the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone.”
    Basically, as I’m flying home with my wife I look out the window into a raging storm and see a hairy creature at play on the edge of the wing, tearing away at the metal. But when anyone else looks, the creature hides. I know the creature is not a figment of my imagination; I know it, do you hear me, I know it! “Gremlins!” I scream, “Gremlins! I’m not imagining it. He’s out there. Don’t look, he’s not out there now. He jumps away whenever anyone might see him. Except me.”
    If I persist in screaming that there’s a creature playing on the wing at twenty thousand feet my wife will believe I’m having another nervous breakdown and send me back to the crazy house—yet if I don’t the plane will be destroyed and all aboard will die. Finally I grab a revolver from a sleeping police officer and kill the creature. The flight ends as I’m taken off the plane in a straitjacket—but as viewers can see I will soon be vindicated, because a portion of the wing has been ripped apart. Or, as Serling explains it so beautifully, “[T]angible manifestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even from so intangible a quarter as...the Twilight Zone.” Do -dodo-do, do -do-do-do, dooooooooooo—ba da da daaaa.
    That half-hour has been parodied numerous times, including an episode of The Simpsons entitled “Terror at 5 1 ⁄2 Feet” in which Bart sees a gremlin tearing apart his school bus, and a music video made by the metal band Anthrax. And when a full-length Twilight Zone movie was made in 1983 this episode was one of the three chosen tobe remade, with John Lithgow playing my role. They had actually asked me to appear in the film, but I was doing T.J. Hooker and couldn’t get a release.
    Believe me, at the time nobody realized we were making a classic television episode. This was the fifth season of Twilight Zone and they were just churning them out. I met Rod Serling, but I certainly didn’t get to know him. He always seemed so busy to me, so removed from the actual production, but perhaps he didn’t consider working with an actor worth the time it would take.
    This was a series in which they spared every expense. But the writing was so good, as was this script by the great Richard Matheson, that the story overwhelmed the cheap production values. The gremlin was portrayed by an acrobat named Nick Cravat in a ridiculous furry costume; it looked sort of like a distant relative of Chew-bacca, and by distant I mean several light-years away. This was such a cheap costume, it looked like the actor was molting. That animal would have been uncomfortable in a tree,