Twilight Zone: The Movie

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Twilight Zone: The Movie
Image:TwilightZoneMovePoster.jpg
Original 1983 theatrical poster
Directed by John Landis (prologue and segment 1)
Steven Spielberg (segment 2)
Joe Dante (segment 3)
George Miller (segment 4 and epilogue)
Produced by John Landis
Steven Spielberg
Kathleen Kennedy (segment 2)
Jon Davison &
Michael Finnell (segment 3)
Written by Rod Serling (television series)
John Landis (prologue and segment 1)
George Clayton Johnson (original screenplay 'Kick the Can', segment 2)
Richard Matheson and
Melissa Mathison (segment 2)
Jerome Bixby (story 'It's a GOOD Life', segment 3)
Richard Matheson (segment 3)
Richard Matheson (short story 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet' and screenplay, segment 4)
Narrated by Burgess Meredith
Starring Dan Aykroyd
Albert Brooks
Vic Morrow
Scatman Crothers
Kathleen Quinlan
John Lithgow
Kevin McCarthy
Dick Miller
Music by Jerry Goldsmith
Cinematography Allen Daviau
John Hora
Stevan Larner
Editing by Malcolm Campbell
Tina Hirsch
Michael Kahn
Howard E. Smith
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release date(s) June 24, 1983 (USA)
Running time 101 min.
Language English
Budget $10,000,000 (estimated)
Gross revenue $29,500,000 (USA)
Preceded by The Twilight Zone
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

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 which 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.

Contents

[edit] 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!

[edit] Plot

[edit] 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 demonic monster, which makes a very loud roar and 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. The trademark opening monologue is spoken by narrator Burgess Meredith, a veteran of the original TV series.

[edit] 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 which 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, and would then be sent back to the present a changed man. However, the segment ends with Morrow's character being sent off to a Nazi concentration camp, with no redemption possible. The filming accident that took the lives of Morrow and two child actors (described below) forced this segment to be truncated.

[edit] Second segment

The second segment is directed by Spielberg and is a remake of the episode "Kick the Can". 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 elders look into the night intending to start life over again from a youthful age.

[edit] Third segment

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

[edit] Fourth segment

The fourth segment is directed by George Miller. It's a remake of the "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" episode. 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Helicopter accident

The making of the movie had consequences which 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 (8 meters), 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 survived sustaining minor injuries.

The accident led to legal action against the filmmakers which 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 had violated many codes, including using live ammunition on the set.[citation needed]

[edit] 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.[1] It was not the enormous hit which 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, and has been announced for DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray discs releasing October 9th, 2007.

[edit] References in TV and film

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines.
The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.
  • 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. The earlier film was also directed by John Landis.
  • 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 the original 1961 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 show was created.
  • 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"
  • The third segment is filled with miscellaneous references to various episodes of the original Twilight Zone series. First, the character played by Kathleen Quinlan, who is a schoolteacher and ultimate mentor to Anthony is named Helen Foley. In the first season, "Nightmare as a Child", the main character is also a schoolteacher named Helen Foley. In this third segment of the Twilight Zone movie, Helen is traveling in the country and gets lost. She stops in a diner to ask for directions. The counterman mentions towns of Cliffordville and Beaumont. Cliffordville is the name of a town in the fourth season hour long episode "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville". Beaumont is most likely a reference to Charles Beaumont who wrote a number of scripts for the original series. Helen also mentions that her home town is Homewood, a reference to a town of the same name in the first season episode "Walking Distance". She also says that she is on her way to visit Willoughby, a reference to another first season episode "A Stop at Willoughby". And Bill Mumy, who played the boy in the original twilight zone episode, plays a guy in his twenties inside the diner at the beginning when Helen meets the kid.
  • The film Death Scenes 2 contains several shots of the helicopter crash.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=twilightzone.htm
The Twilight Zone
v • d • e
Series

The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) | The New Twilight Zone | The Twilight Zone (2002 series)

Key People

Rod Serling | Buck Houghton | Charles Beaumont | Richard Matheson | Jerry Sohl | George Clayton Johnson | Earl Hamner Jr. | Reginald Rose | Ray Bradbury

See Also

Playhouse 90 | List of The Twilight Zone episodes | List of The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) guest stars | The Twilight Zone (pinball) | Twilight Zone: The Movie | The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

v • d • e
Films directed by John Landis

Schlock (1973) • The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977) • National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) • The Blues Brothers (1980) • An American Werewolf in London (1981) • Trading Places (1983) • Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) • Into the Night (1985)• Spies Like Us (1985) • ¡Three Amigos! (1986) • Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) • Coming to America (1988) • Oscar (1991) • Innocent Blood (1992) • Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) • The Stupids (1996) • Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) • Susan's Plan (1998) • Slasher (2004) • Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project (2007) •

v • d • e
Films directed by Steven Spielberg

Duel (1971) · The Sugarland Express (1974) · Jaws (1975) · Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) · 1941 (1979) · Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) · Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) · Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) · The Color Purple (1985) · Empire of the Sun (1987) · Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) · Always (1989) · Hook (1991) · Jurassic Park (1993) · Schindler's List (1993) · The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) · Amistad (1997) · Saving Private Ryan (1998) · Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001) · Minority Report (2002) · Catch Me if You Can (2002) · The Terminal (2004) · War of the Worlds (2005) · Munich (2005) · Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) · Untitled Abraham Lincoln biopic (TBA) · Interstellar (TBA) · Tintin (TBA) The Trial of the Chicago 7 (TBA)

 v • d • e Films directed by Joe Dante
The Movie Orgy | Hollywood Boulevard | Piranha | The Howling | Twilight Zone: The Movie | Gremlins | Explorers | The Shadow Man | Innerspace | Amazon Women on the Moon | The 'Burbs | Gremlins 2: The New Batch | Eerie, Indiana | Matinee | Runaway Daughters | The Second Civil War | The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy | Small Soldiers | R.L. Stine's Haunted Lighthouse | Looney Tunes: Back in Action | Homecoming | Trapped Ashes | The Screwfly Solution | The Greatest Show Ever
additional contributions Rock 'n' Roll High School | The Phantom
v • d • e
George Miller
Feature filmsMad Max(1979)  · Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981) · Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) · Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) · The Witches of Eastwick (1987) · Lorenzo's Oil (1992) · 40,000 Years of Dreaming (1997) · Babe: Pig in the City (1998) · Happy Feet (2006)
fr:La Quatrième Dimension (film)

it:Ai confini della realtà (film 1983) nl:Twilight Zone: The Movie ja:トワイライトゾーン/超次元の体験 ru:Сумеречная зона (фильм, 1983)

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