Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree Page B

beyond Mathesons teleplay. Director of photography George Clemens recalls, When he landed at this airport and taxied up, youve never seen people come around a thinglike kids around a new toyas these modern-day jet pilots. They looked in the cockpit and felt the wings. Theyd never seen anything like that! This attention was so enthusiastic
    the plane had to be roped off and special guards posted to protect it from damage.
    It is a mark of both the quality of the writing and the respect in which the written word was held on The Twilight Zone that Mathesons script was filmed almost exactly as written. The only change was one of title, from Flight to The Last Flight.
    I had double meanings in many of my titles, says Matheson, and I wanted it to refer not only to the flight of the airplane but to the protagonists flight from the situation he was in. I suppose it still had a similar meaning. It was the last time he ran away as a coward.
    AND WHEN THE SKY WAS OPENED (12/11/59)
    Written by Rod Serling
    Based on the short story Disappearing Act by Richard Matheson
     Producer: Buck Houghton
    Director: Douglas Heyes
    Director of Photography:
    \George T. Clemens
    Music: Leonard Rosenman
    Cast:
    Col. Clegg Forbes: Rod Taylor Col. Ed Harrington:Charles Aidman  Maj. William Gart: James Hutton   Amy: Maxine Cooper  Girl in Bar: Gloria Pall Bartender: Paul Bryar Nurse: Sue Randall Investigator: Logan Field Officer: Oliver McGowan Medical Officer: Joe Bassett Mr. Harrington: S. John Launer Sue Randall and James Hutton Nurse Two: Elizabeth Fielding
    Her name: X-20. Her type: an experimental interceptor. Recent history: a crash landing in the Mojave Desert after a thirty-one-hour flight nine hundred miles into space. Incidental data: the ship, with the men who flew her, disappeared from the radar screen for twenty-four hours… . But the shrouds that cover mysteries are not always made out of a tarpaulin, as this man will soon find out on the other side of a hospital door.
    Three astronauts have returned from this first space flight. Major Gart is hospitalized with a broken leg, but the other two, Colonels Harrington and Forbes, go off for a night of revelry. In a bar, Colonel Harrington suddenly gets a strange feeling. He calls his parents. They tell him that they have no son. Suddenly, mysteriously, Harrington disappears, with no one but Colonel Forbes remembering that he ever existed. When Forbes tells Gart the story at the hospital, Gart says he doesnt know any Ed Harrington either. Suddenly, Forbes gets a peculiar feeling of euphoria. He shakes it off, screams, I dont want this to happen! and runs out of the room. By the time Gart gets to the hallway, Forbes too has disappeared, and nobody else has any memory of him. Then Gart disappears, and with him their ship, wiping the last evidence of their existence off the face of the earth.
    Once upon a time, there was a man named Harrington, a man named Forbes, a man named Gart. They used to exist, but dont any longer. Someone or something took them somewhere. At least they are no longer a part of the memory of man. And as to the X-20 supposed to be housed here in this hangar, this too does not exist. And if any of you have any questions concerning an aircraft and three men who flew her, speak softly of them … and only in the Twilight Zone.
    Serlings script for And When the Sky Was Opened was ostensibly based on Mathesons short story, Disappearing Act (which appears in his collection, Third From the Sun), but the connection was very thin. The original story concerns an unsuccessful writer who finds that the people in his life, one by one, are disappearing, and only he remembers them. Ultimately, of course, he too disappears. In comparing the episode with his short story, Matheson says, My feeling about it is like my feeling about the second version of my novel, I Am Legend [filmed as The Omega Man. its so far removed that theres nothing to judge by.
    And When the Sky Was Opened marked