Rand Ravich Will Write the New 'Twilight Zone'
Filed under: Classics, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Scripts, Remakes and Sequels
You might have caught the news last year in one of our quick write-ups -- Warner Brothers and Leonardo DiCaprio's production company had grabbed Twilight Zone to stretch into a feature-length movie. It's taken a year, but they've finally got a writer on-board. Variety reports that Rand Ravich, the pen behind The Astronaut's Wife and NBC's Life, will write a script for the adaptation. This won't be an episodic tale, like Twilight Zone: The Movie was all those years ago. How it will turn out, however, is anyone's guess.The show certainly covered enough themes that this could make for a wonderful film if it's done well. Fantasy, horror, science fiction... It's got all the tropes that put the bodies in the seats. Trying to steer clear of the '80s film, however, I would imagine that this would be a fresh story, and not simply the remake of episodes. So, it'll all come down to how well it's done, and whether it can live up to Rod Serling's genius.
The fan in me, who always chose the Twilight Zone marathon over Rockin Eve New Years' plans, is sitting on the fence. The possibility is there, but the reality is still so far away. Could anything compare to "The Lonely," "The Eye of the Beholder," "The Obsolete Man," or any of the other excellent episodes, not to mention the first movie?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-21-2009 @ 11:02AM
Jonathan Kuhn said...
If it doesn't have more than one story in it, how in the world can it be considered a Twilight Zone movie? Is the only thing that differentiates it from another creepy film the fact that it's calling itself a Twilight Zone movie?
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7-21-2009 @ 1:25PM
Bob Westal said...
Also, I don't see how Monika knows that it's not going to be an omnibus film based on what's in the rather brief Variety article. I didn't see anything there that said just what form the movie would take.
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7-21-2009 @ 1:03PM
Bob Westal said...
Woops. My bad. I was too quick on the trigger and failed to look at Monika's link from a year back when they did say they were looking for single-story film drawn from the series. Still, I wouldn't necessarily assume that the idea has held for the last year, seeing as how it seems like an extraordinarily wrongheaded one. (As a brand, "Twilight Zone" means "anthology" -- doing a feature length version of a single episode might work, I guess, if it's intended as a series of films, but that seems extraordinarily risky and complicated in trying to communicated that to an audience.)
7-21-2009 @ 4:20PM
MediaOKra said...
I just hope they don't have a Rod Serling caricature giving tongue in cheek monologues. That would be miserable.
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7-21-2009 @ 4:53PM
OneTheyCallGSK said...
I don't think I'll be watching this. The 2002 revival on UPN was good, but nowhere near the quality of the original series. I hope this does the series justice, because I don't think any long-time Twilight Zoner will want this to leave a bad taste in their mouth.
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8-18-2009 @ 1:19AM
Tom Brody said...
I recommend these episodes to be put into a multi-storied TWILIGHT ZONE movie:
THE MIND AND THE MATTER. An office worker (Shelly Berman), perhaps an attorney or accountant, becomes more and more irritated by the noise in his office. The man is somewhat likeable though and is a curmudgeon. A young colleague gives the man a book as a gift. It teaches the occult. The man discovers that he can make everybody in his office disappear. But then he is driven crazy by the boredom, and by the fact that he has nothing to do but sit. So he wishes everybody back, but that all of the people are identical to him. But he finds this unsatisfactory, since he finds his own self to be unpleasant. Eventually, he wishes things back as they originally were.
TO SERVE MAN. There is no need for me to explain this one. This one is a classic.
WHAT'S IN THE BOX. A weird television repairman leaves the T.V. in a form that provides glimpses of the future. A husband and wife have little spats over the fact that the man, a taxi driver, has a girlfriend across town. But the man wants to apologize. While watching a fight on the T.V., the picture changes, and it shows the man killing his wife by accident. As it turns out, and hour later he kills his wife by accident.
PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN. A man, a bank manager, wakes up to a world where nobody knows him. Not his wife. Not the folks at the bank. Not his bartender. Eventually, after a very miserable day seeking people who might remember him, the man wakes up. It had all been a dream. But now comes the surprise ending of all surprise endings. When he wakes up, people know him, but the man does not recognize anybody at all.
CAVENDER IS COMING. Cavender is Coming stars Carol Burnett. Cavender is Coming is a female version of the Twilight Zone episode called, Mister Bevis, which stars Orson Bean. Cavender is Coming is the most charming and most comedic of all the Twilight Zone episodes. It deals with an angel trying to better the condition of a charming and loveable, but unskilled, young single woman.
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