The Bard (The Twilight Zone)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Twilight Zone Original series Season four (1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5) January 1963 – June 1963 List of The Twilight Zone episodes
Episodes: In His Image The Thirty-Fathom Grave Valley of the Shadow He's Alive Mute Death Ship Jess-Belle Miniature Printer's Devil No Time Like the Past The Parallel I Dream of Genie The New Exhibit Of Late I Think of Cliffordville The Incredible World of Horace Ford On Thursday We Leave for Home Passage on the Lady Anne The Bard

“The Bard” is an episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

[edit] Details

Episode number: 120
Season: 4
Production code: 4852
Original air date: May 23, 1963
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: David Butler
Producer: Herbert Hirschman
Director of photography: George T. Clemens
Music: Fred Steiner

[edit] Cast

Role	Actor
Julius Moomer	Jack Weston
William Shakespeare	John Williams
Rocky Rhodes	Burt Reynolds

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A bumbling screenwriter, Julius Moomer, is in desperate need of brilliant scripts, so he conjures up the spirit of William Shakespeare by use of black magic. Shakespeare produces a riveting screenplay for the writer, but is horrified at all the revisions laid on by the sponsor, the sponsor’s wife and the leading man. Eventually, the poet becomes so cross that he punches the leading man and then storms out for good. Moomer's next assignment, a TV special on American history, seems doomed to failure until he remembers his book on black magic and uses it to conjure up a new writing staff.

[edit] Trivia

An excerpt from Hal Erikson’s article “Censorship: Another Dimension Behind the Twilight Zone”, published in the October 1985 edition of The Twilight Zone Magazine:

When Serling wrote the 1963 opus “The Bard,” he did so with the express purpose of ribbing those overcautious ad executives who’d disallowed photographs of the Chrysler Building in programs sponsored by American Motors, or who’d removed the words “American” and “Lucky” from programs sponsored by the Liggett and Meyers tobacco company. In “The Bard,” William Shakespeare is reborn and enters the twentieth century TV-writers’ market, only to find that sponsorial demands have taken all the guts (or insides) out of his best works. Producer Herbert Hirschmann applauded Serling’s script, but suggested ever so discreetly that the character of Shakespeare’s sponsor (played by John McGiver) not be shown smoking a big black cigar, as Serling’s stage directions had required. “We might have a cigarette sponsor,” explained Hirschmann.

In the book The Twilght Zone Companion Serling is quoted as saying that things were so bad with the overcautious ad executives that "one could not ford a river if Chevy was the sponsor."

Moomer's later staff mainly comprises a who's who of celebrities rather than writers.