Rod Serling Festival: Library Enters New Dimension Of Sight And Sound

One hundred years after his birth — and half a century after his death — Rod Serling’s legacy remains strong.

His TV scripts — for “Kraft Television Theatre,” “Playhouse 90” and most memorably, “The Twilight Zone” — explored themes of censorship, racism and war that still resonate today.

Serling wrote a few of his best-known scripts in Westport. He lived here in the 1950s, before moving with his wife and daughters to California.

Later this month the Westport Library explores Rod Serling’s impact, with a 4-day symposium. It includes landmark “Twilight Zone” episodes, films inspired by the series, and discussions of his life and work.

The event kicks off Thursday, September 26 (6 to 9 p.m.), with Serling’s most Westport-themed work: “A Stop at Willoughby.”

In what Serling called his favorite show of the first season, an overstressed ad executive naps on the train ride home. The conductor calls out an upcoming stop: “Westport/Saugatuck.”

He awakens to find the train stopped in Willoughby — in the year 1888.  He asks about the idyllic town, but the conductor tells him there is no such place.

Is there?

The familiar face of Rod Serling reappears at the end.  In his trademark voice, he says:

Willoughby?  Maybe it’s wishful thinking nestled in a hidden part of a man’s mind, or maybe it’s the last stop in the vast design of things, or perhaps, for a man who climbed on a world that went by too fast, it’s a place around the bend where he could jump off.

Willoughby?  Whatever it is, it comes with sunlight and serenity, and is a part of the Twilight Zone.

Arlen Schumer — author of “The Five Themes of The Twilight Zone” — will screen “Willoughby.” It will be followed by “The Swimmer,” the Burt Lancaster film based on John Cheever’s 1964 short story, which has thematic ties to “Willoughby” — and was filmed partly in Westport.

On Friday, September 27 (6 to 9 p.m.), Schumer talks with author Nick Parisi about his books “Rod Serling: His Life, Work, and Imagination,” and “America’s Twilight Zone: How Rod Serling Foreshadowed the Age of Trump.”

Two episodes will be screened: “Walking Distance” (about another ad executive’s desire to return to the past), and “He’s Alive” (a rare 1-hour episode from 1963 starring a young Dennis Hopper as an American neo-Nazi who is visited by the ghost of Adolf Hitler).

Saturday, September 28 (5 to 9 p.m.) features a conversation with Schumer and author Mark Dawidziak about his book, “Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in The Twilight Zone.”

Their talk is followed by a screening of the Oscar-winning “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (based on the Ambrose Bierce short story), and “Jacob’s Ladder,” a 1990 film inspired by that episode.

The festival ends Sunday, September 29 (1 to 5 p.m.) with a pop-up art show of Staples High School student artwork inspired by Serling’s “Eye of the Beholder” — the mind-bending episode in which today’s standards of beauty and ugliness are reversed.

A screening of that show will be followed by “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” set in a dystopian future in which every adult has their body surgically altered into one of a set of physically attractive models. It will be shown complete with original commercials from its 1964 air date.

The final event is a screening of the cult classic 1975 movie “The Stepford Wives.” It shares of “Number 12″‘s themes — and was partially filmed in Westport.

DEE-DEE dee-dee DEE-DEE dee-dee…

(Click here for full details of the 4-day Rod Serling symposium.)

(“06880” is “where Westport meets the world.” Today, for example, Rod Serling meets the 2024 Library — and we travel back to his 1950s years here. Please click here to help us continue our work!)