Twilight Zone: The Movie

Twilight Zone: The Movie
Original 1983 theatrical poster
Directed by	Joe Dante John Landis George Miller Steven Spielberg
Written by	Rod Serling (television series) John Landis George Clayton Johnson Richard Matheson Melissa Mathison Jerome Bixby Robert Garland
Produced by	Frank Marshall Steven Spielberg
Starring	Dan Aykroyd Albert Brooks Vic Morrow Scatman Crothers Kathleen Quinlan John Lithgow Burgess Meredith (narrator)
Cinematography	Allen Daviau John Hora Stevan Larner
Edited by	Malcolm Campbell Tina Hirsch Michael Kahn Howard E. Smith
Music by	Jerry Goldsmith
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release dates	June 24, 1983 (USA)
Running time	101 min.
Language	English
Budget	$10,000,000

Twilight Zone: The Movie is a 1983 film produced by Steven Spielberg as a theatrical version of The Twilight Zone, a 1950s and 60s TV series created by Rod Serling. It starred Dan Aykroyd, Albert Brooks, Vic Morrow and John Lithgow.

The film remade three classic episodes of the original series and included one original story. John Landis directed the prologue and the first segment, Spielberg directed the second, Joe Dante the third, and George Miller directed the final segment.

The film is perhaps best known for the helicopter accident that took the lives of actor Vic Morrow and two illegally hired child actors, although in the subsequent trial no one was held criminally culpable for the accident.

Tagline

You're traveling through another dimension. A dimension, not only of sight and sound, but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. Next stop, the Twilight Zone!

Plot

Prologue

The film starts with a driver (Albert Brooks) and his passenger (Dan Aykroyd) driving through the mountains very late at night, singing along to Creedence Clearwater Revival's cover of Midnight Special on a cassette, which then breaks. Then the conversation turns to what scares them. The driver turns off the headlights and continues to drive. The passenger becomes nervous and demands he turn them back on. They play a game where they challenge each other to name TV theme songs. After several theme songs are mentioned, they begin to talk about their favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone. The passenger then asks the driver (which is now a legendary question), "Do you want to see something really scary?" The driver says yes. "Pull over," says the passenger. "Pull over?" the driver asks. The driver pulls over. The passenger asks him again, "You sure you really want to see something scary?" The driver, exasperated, says yes. The passenger says "ok," and turns away from the driver. "What are you doing?" the driver asks. The passenger turns back around, and he has become a monster. The figure attacks the driver, and as we hear a very audible "SNAP!" followed by silence, the familiar Twilight Zone theme music begins, as do the opening credits.

First segment

The only original segment was the first, directed by Landis. It is loosely based on the original Twilight Zone episode "A Quality of Mercy" and slightly "Deaths-Head Revisited." An outspoken bigot finds himself traveling through time, occupying the bodies of victims of injustice: a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, a black man about to be lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, and a Vietnamese man about to be killed by U.S. soldiers. As a result of the fatal accident that occurred during its filming (see below), this segment ends quite differently than originally scripted. Originally, Morrow's character was to learn a major lesson in compassion when, during the Vietnam scenes, he rescues two children who are innocently caught in a firefight between Viet Cong and US troops. However, the segment ends with Morrow's character being sent off to a Nazi concentration camp, with no redemption possible. This explains why the segment seems truncated to most viewers.

Second segment

The second segment is a remake of the episode "Kick the Can", directed by Spielberg. An old man (Crothers) arrives in a retirement home and restores the residents' youth through a magical game of kick the can. After a brief joyous romp as children, the rejuvenated residents decide to revert to their true ages, preferring to have their memories and experience. However, one resident disappears into the night intending to start life over again from a youthful age.

Third segment

The third segment is a remake of the episode "It's a Good Life", directed by Dante.

A woman (Kathleen Quinlan) gives a boy (Jeremy Licht) a ride home. When she is invited in for dinner, she finds herself the newest member of his "family" consisting of Kevin McCarthy, Patricia Barry, William Schallert and Nancy Cartwright. The family members are actually strangers who were lured to the house in the same way the woman was. They are all imprisoned by the boy's ability to turn his imagination into reality and cannot leave the house.

The ending of this version is happier than that of the TV episode. Here, the boy is convinced to end his cruelty and to develop his power for a greater good, while in the show he continues to be bad and kills the person who rises up against him.

Fourth segment

Remake of the "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" episode, directed by Miller. An already fearful airline passenger (John Lithgow) starts seeing a gremlin on the plane's wing, tearing apart the engine. Panicked, no one believes him. He breaks a window and grabs an officer's gun, trying to shoot the gremlin. The gremlin gets away, and the plane is forced to make an emergency landing. It is only as the man is being taken away that the plane's crew discovers unexplained damage to the engine.

Epilogue

The end of the fourth segment connects with the character from the prologue. John Lithgow's character is in an ambulance on his way to an asylum when the ambulance driver turns around to reveal himself as Dan Aykroyd's character from the opening. The driver says, "Had a bit of a scare up there, huh? Well, wanna see something really scary?..." at which point the movie ends.

Helicopter accident

The making of the movie had consequences that overshadowed the film itself. During the filming of a segment directed by John Landis on July 23, 1982, actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le (age 7) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6) died in an accident involving a helicopter being used on the set. The helicopter was flying at an altitude of only 25 feet, too low to avoid the explosions of the pyrotechnics used on set. When the blasts severed the tail rotor, it spun out of control and crashed, decapitating Morrow and Le with its blades. Chen was crushed to death as the helicopter crashed. Everyone inside the helicopter was unharmed.

The accident led to legal action against the filmmakers that lasted nearly a decade, and changed the regulations involving children working on movie sets at night and during special effects-heavy scenes. Hollywood also avoided helicopter-related stunts for many years, until the CGI revolution of the 1990s made it possible to use digital versions. As a result of the accident, one second assistant director had his name removed from the credits and replaced with the pseudonymous Alan Smithee. The incident also ended the friendship between director Landis and producer Spielberg, who was already angered before the accident that Landis violated many codes, including using live ammunition on the set.

Release and reaction

Twilight Zone: The Movie opened on June 24, 1983 to mixed reviews. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times rated each segment individually, awarding them on a scale of four stars: two for the prologue and first segment, one-and-a-half for the second, three-and-a-half stars for the third, and three-and-a-half for the final. The Nightmare segment was widely praised, with John Lithgow's performance often singled out, but the other segments were less popular. Many critics accused Spielberg's Kick the Can of excessive sentimentality. The film was very much hurt by the controversy of the infamous helicopter accident, and the box office results showed lukewarm public interest.

According to boxofficemojo.com, it grossed $6,614,366 in its opening weekend at 1,275 theaters. It later expanded to 1,288 theaters and ended up grossing $29,450,919. It was not the enormous hit that executives were looking for, but it remains the number one grossing anthology film in cinema history and helped stir enough interest for CBS to give the go-ahead to the 1980s TV version of The Twilight Zone.

It has been released to VHS several times, most recently as part of WB's "Hits" line, but never to DVD. However, in a recent chat with the Home Theater Forum, a WB Home Video representative said that they recognized the great demand for a DVD release of the film and that it was under "heavy consideration." A more recent WB chat with the HTF on Feb. 27th, 2007 revealed WB's intent to release the DVD by Halloween 2007.

References in TV and film

• During the Vietnam sequence, one of the soldiers says "I told you guys we shouldn't have shot Lieutenant Niedermeyer!" This is a reference to Animal House, in which the character of Niedermeyer is said to have been killed in Vietnam by his own troops.
• In the comedy series 3rd Rock from the Sun, starring John Lithgow, events in the fourth segment are mentioned twice:
  • In episode 12 of the first season, Dick (Lithgow) and Mary (Jane Curtin) are seated in a plane which is about to take-off for Chicago. Suddenly, Dick goes berserk, looks out the window and shouts "Oh my God! Out there! There's something on the wing!". Mary's assurance that "it's an engine" doesn't seem to calm him down. They end up driving.
  • In episode 23 of the fourth season, "Dick's Big Giant Headache, Part I"; the Big Giant Head (played by William Shatner, who portrayed the main character from the original televised Twilight Zone episode) has just disembarked from a flight at the airport. Meeting the Solomon family at the gate, he tells them, "It was a horrible flight! There was a man on the wing of the plane!" Dick then exclaims, "The same thing happened to me!"
• The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror II" spoofs It's A Good Life with Bart (voiced by actress Nancy Cartwright, who appeared in that segment of the film) taking the role of Anthony. On the audio commentary, the commentators laugh at the realization that her fate in the segment (being trapped in a cartoon world) is similar to her endless career in voice over since the film was released.
• In an episode of Pani Poni Dash! the character Becky has a dream in which she is talking to two other children. The children tell Becky that they were the ones killed on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Becky, shocked by this revelation, asks what became of "the man". One of the girls responds that he is in Hell, but they are in Heaven "because God always puts kids in Heaven, cause they're sweet and nice."
• In a "Mad About You" episode, Jamie is in bed with Paul, when Paul looks away from her and turns again as a monster, in similar way as the prologue of the movie.
• Original "Johnny Bravo" cartoons included a series of three episodes spoofing three famous Twilight Zone episodes. Two of them were also included in the film, being "It´s a Good Life" and "Nightmare at 20,000 feet"

External links

• Twilight Zone: The Movie at IMDb
• Template:Dmoz
• NTSB report on the helicopter accident
• Google Earth view of the accident site in Indian Dunes, CA.
• All About the Twilight Zone tragedy by Denise Noe, Crime Library
• Vic Morrow's death on the set of the Twilight Zone movie