- The British are masters in this form, Victorian mansions, ghostly footsteps, foggy streets. But there's also such an enormous body of American fiction that there's a publishing house, Arkham, in Sauk City, Iowa, devoted to nothing else but these kinds of stories, and it's catalog of titles is a thick book in itself. Aside from an occasional original story by Rod Serling, we plan to do only adaptions from this massive body of work.
- I knew the stories were solid and would hold up because they did in their short story form, they had to be meaty or they would not have stood the test of time, I merely had to make certain the visuals, and not visuals in the ordinary sense, could be created by our special effects department.
- I like to borrow from the classics for two reasons, first, many of the stories I like personally, and second, you're almost sure they will work, if a script writer fails with a story idea, you just pass it on to another writer, someone will do it right and come up with the spirit of the original source material.
- Material is always the problem in television, and in this genre it is virtually inexhaustible, not only do you have tens of thousands of stories from specialists in this field, but almost every great writer of fiction tried tales of the supernatural and the mysterious at one time or another in their career.
- You can have all the organizational ability in the world, but, if you don't have visual judgment, the battle can be lost right at the beginning.
- One of a producer's main jobs is to take pages of type-written material and decide whether it will be exciting and dramatic when it is transformed into a television production.
- The public has a certain image in its mind of a particular actor and it's difficult to go against the grain, especially if they've played a revered person.
- I sympathize with these performers, I was an actor myself and felt the same way at times.
- By the same token, an actress who'd played a tramp in her last 10 films wouldn't be acceptable as Joan of Arc.
- After Ralph Bellamy portrayed Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello (1960) a producer couldn't very well turn around and use him as a villain, no matter how well he was qualified to do the role.
- I wrote everything, history, comedy, westerns, you name it, I've done it. I still enjoy writing.
- There is so much published material, I could do Night Gallery for seven years without any problems.
- I'd rather have a band. I headed one once for three years. There's no money in that, though.
- I'm an old ham, I started as an actor.
- Writers you don't associate with this kind of story tried them, Kipling, H.G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, we're making poet Conrad Aiken's classic short story, Silent Snow, Secret Snow and also a story by his daughter, Joan Aiken.
- But an anthology has no need for permanent sets, so it has no stage, it's transient, a floater. And we're not just an anthology, we're an anthology within an anthology's they'll push us so far back, they'll have trouble reaching us by telephone.
- An anthology is an orphan, you've got a continuing series, you've got a stage for your permanent sets like Dr. Welby's office or the operating room at Blair Hospital or the apartment of Chief Ironside. You've got a home.
- Motivation: I am compulsively driven.. there is nothing in this world which cannot be improved upon.
- The motion picture industry is in the grips of corporate giants and their Wall Street equivalents and their art will be sacrificed in the name of fiscal responsibility, and audiences will be doomed to an unending succession of xeroxed entertainment.
- I am a true film buff, a self-educated person scholar in the "history of the cinema" as both art and entertainment, I collect films, both sound and silent, as well as lobby cards, window cards, inserts and one-sheets and books on this eternally fascinating subject.
- Television languishes in the grip of statisticians and research consultants....network programming executives with an axe poised perpetually above their heads are afraid to be bold, daring and innovative...and so it goes.
- I am an amateur photographer and a gourmet cook and am well traveled, but not nearly so well as I'd like to be. I have recently completed a mini-series for a major network which deals with the relationship between Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg and the history of MGM. It was a labor of love.
- Broadway is a disaster area.
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