Nightmare at 20 000 feet book5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And unlike Serling’s, this one worked perfectly. It’s too bad it backfired, though I’m sure he and Rod had a lot of laughs long after that day, just recalling the attempt.īut that wasn’t the only practical joke that someone involved with “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” tried to pull. I would lie in bed thinking how we could do this.Ĭan you even imagine what Matheson’s reaction would have been? What a great gag. And I had spent hours in the planning of it. It was an old prop airplane… He never saw it. So what happened was, we get on the plane, there was the seat, he sits down, the curtains are closed, I lean over and I say, ‘Dick -’ at which point they start the engines and it blows the thing away. It was like three or four weeks after the show was on the air, and I had spent three weeks in constant daily communication with Western Airlines preparing a given seat for him, having the stewardess close the when he sat down, and I was going to say, ‘Dick, open it up.’ I had this huge, blown-up poster stuck on the so that when he opened it, there would be this gremlin staring at him. Matheson and I were going to fly to San Francisco. It occurred shortly after the first broadcast of one of the most iconic episodes of the whole series, Richard Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. Here’s one of my favorite stories, courtesy of Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion. Don’t let his serious expression fool you! But one thing I didn’t mention was how much he enjoyed practical jokes. I’ve written before about what a great sense of humor Rod Serling had. ![]()
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