The Real-Life Censorship Battle That Helped Create 'The Twilight Zone'

In the fall of 1955, an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted two men tried for the murder of Emmett Till, and Rod Serling sat down to write a teleplay about a town closing ranks around its own killers. What reached the air on April 25, 1956, as "Noon on Doomsday" on CBS's United States Steel Hour, no longer pointed anywhere near Mississippi: the victim was an unnamed foreigner, the town was in New England, and somebody had gone through the set removing Coca-Cola bottles.The version usually retold is that Serling wrote a Black victim and was made to whiten him, which is not what Serling said. In his introduction to the 1957 Bantam edition of Patterns, he laid out the script as he first wrote it: "At no point in the conception of my story was there a black-white issue. The victim was an old Jew who ran a pawnshop." The killer was "a neurotic malcontent," the real antagonist was the town, and his reading of the Till verdict ran six words: "They're bastards, but they're our bastards."Let's continue the conversation to learn more about the real-life censorship battle that helped create "The Twilight Zone." 'IF THE SHOE FITS'Rod Serling | Archive Photos/GettyImagesThe fight started with a shrug. Describing the plot to a news-service reporter on the Coast, Serling heard back, "Sounds like the Till case," and answered, "If the shoe fits..." The wire stories began calling the play a dramatization of the Till case; some 15,000 letters and wires arrived from White Citizens' Councils protesting a broadcast that had not happened yet, and denials from the Theatre Guild and U.S. Steel's agency changed nothing: "the impression persisted," Serling wrote.Then came the rewrite by committee. The script "was gone over with a fine-toothed comb by thirty different people," and Serling sat through "at least two meetings a day for over a week, taking down notes as to what had to be changed." His victim "could no longer be anyone as specific as an old Jew"; the town, deliberately unplaced, was "shoved as far north as possible, making it a New England town"; every word of dialogue that might remotely be "Southern" in context was deleted or altered; and the killer was reissued as "a good, decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong." Serling told Mike Wallace in 1959 that the sponsor even had Coca-Cola bottles pulled off the set for their Southern connotations, and that what aired was "a lukewarm, eviscerated, emasculated kind of show."Two years later, Serling went back to the same material and lost again. "A Town Has Turned to Dust" aired live on Playhouse 90 on June 19, 1958, directed by John Frankenheimer, with Rod Steiger as the sheriff and William Shatner as the shopkeeper who raises the mob – and the version he had proposed a year earlier was killed before any of that. Producer Martin Manulis promised to push it through "the opposition that could be expected from the six sponsors Playhouse 90 had at the time," Serling recalled in 1960, "but they ganged up on him."A SCRIPT 'TURNED TO DUST'The second round of changes was as granular as the first. The lynching moved to a drought-stricken Southwestern town in the 1870s, and the victim became Pancho Rivera, a 19-year-old Mexican who loved the storekeeper's wife "only with his eye." The phrase "twenty men in hoods" became "twenty men in homemade masks." One of the sponsors, an insurance company, objected to the sheriff killing himself – suicide complicates the settling of policy claims – so he was dispatched in a gunfight instead. "By the time "A Town Has Turned to Dust" went before the cameras, my script had turned to dust," Serling said, and of the process: "They chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer."What was left still landed. Jack Gould of The New York Times called it "a raw, tough and at the same time deeply moving outcry against prejudice," then ended his review with a line that was not about the play: "'Playhouse 90' and Mr. Serling had to fight executive interference ... before getting their play on the air last night."On September 22, 1959, ten days before "The Twilight Zone" premiered on CBS, Mike Wallace asked Serling whether he had given up, for the foreseeable future, on writing anything important for television. Serling did not argue with the premise: "If by 'important' you mean I'm not going to try to delve into current social problems dramatically, you're quite right. I'm not." Earlier in the same hour, he had given the reason: "I don't want to fight anymore. I don't want to have to battle sponsors and agencies."Read More: