As most of you know, recently I posted a series of interview excerpts with Rod Serling. Based upon the enthusiastic response from GITS readers, I’ve got two treats for you:

First, I created this webpage which features all 15 posts and video excerpts. You can find it as well on the blog home page under List as “Rod Serling On Writing.”

Second, Lee Matthias — who deserves a massive H/T — sent me a link: Rod Serling’s last interview. It was conducted on March 4, 1975. Serling died 4 months later. Here are the thoughts of the interviewer Linda Brevell:

Rod Serling: The Facts of Life

An Interview by Linda Brevelle

Rod Serling’s last interview took place at Franco’s La Taverna on Sunset Strip on March 4, 1975 just a few months prior to his sudden death at fifty. The restaurant was a favorite hangout of Serling’s, a place where he could observe a wide range of human types who might conceivably become models for characters in his scripts and where, as a celebrity, he was often observed by them as well.

Serling was as cooperative an interviewee as I have ever met. There was no pre-rehearsed or packaged dialogue, no bored or weary let’s-get-this-over-with routines such as one so often finds in the famous. Without getting side-tracked, I found it easy to take in his wit, compassion, and crusading spirit.

I regret that he was unable to complete the screenplay he was writing (an adaptation of Morris West’s The Salamander). Looking back, it seems the frequent references to mortality lent a haunting foreshadowing to his untimely death, and only now, as his words come drifting back, do I wonder if he knew our interview would be his last.

“I’ve never planned ahead,” he told me. “I just sort of go through life checking the menu of three meals that day. I never worry about tomorrow. It’s only since I’ve gotten older that I’ve begun to wonder about time running out. Is it sufficient unto itself that I don’t plan? Because maybe next Thursday won’t come one day. And then, I’m concerned about that. But that’s not uniquely the writer’s concern, that’s the concern of every middle-aged man who looks in the mirror.”

I miss the full-bodied voice now faded from the airwaves, except for occasional reruns of Twilight Zone and Night Gallery at ungodly hours on local tv stations. As for Franco’s, it too is now gone having been replaced by another establishment not long after Serling’s death. But I can’t think of a more appropriate epitaph than what was said that day.

Linda Brevelle

It’s a lengthy, wonderful interview, filled with Serling’s wit and wisdom, and you see over and over again his self-identification as a “writer.” In fact he said, “I think I’d rather win, for example, a Writer’s Guild award than almost anything on earth.”

Here are some key excerpts:

Brevelle: Do you have any encouragement for writers who accumulate a lot of rejection slips?

Serling: Only that somehow, some way, incredibly enough, good writing ultimately gets recognized. I don’t know how that happens but it does. If you’re really a good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you’ll write, and you’ll be read, and you’ll be produced somehow. It just works that way. If you’re just a simple ordinary day-to-day craftsman, no different than most, then the likelihood is that you probably won’t make it in writing. You’re going to wind up either getting married, working for an insurance company, joining the regular army, or what-all. But if you have a spark in you, a cut above the average, I think ultimately you make it.

—-

Brevelle: What causes you to write?

Serling: I never really thought about it. If I could really conjure up an answer to that, I suppose I’d be able to answer a lot of questions that bug me.

Why do I write? I guess that’s been asked of every writer. I don’t know. It isn’t any massive compulsion. I don’t feel, you know, God dictated that I should write. You know, thunder rents the sky and a bony finger comes down from the clouds and says, “You. You write. You’re the anointed.” I never felt that. I suppose it’s part compulsion, part a channel for what your brain is churning up.

But I don’t subscribe to the “Know Thyself” theory. I’m afraid that if I started to ponder who I am and what I am, I might not like what I find. So, I’d rather go along with this sense of illusion that I’m a neutral beast going along through life doing everything that’s preordained. I’m out of control anyway, so why fight it. I suppose we think euphemistically that all writers write because they have something to say that is truthful and honest and pointed and important. And I suppose I subscribe to that, too. But God knows when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I’m hard-pressed to come up with anything that’s important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important.

—-

Brevelle: What do you like for people to say about your writing?

Serling: Well, I guess I like for people to enjoy it.

Brevelle: And what do you want them to say about the writer Rod Serling a hundred years from now?

Serling: I don’t care. I just want them to remember me a hundred years from now. I don’t care that they’re not able to quote any single line that I’ve written. But just that they can say, “Oh, he was a writer.” That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.

Thanks again to Lee Matthias for finding this gem. And here’s to remembering Rod Serling for his creativity and remarkable insight into the craft of writing.