Mirror Image (The Twilight Zone)
"Mirror Image" is episode 21 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It aired on February 26, 1960 on CBS. Millicent Barnes waits in a bus depot in Marathon, New York, for a bus to Cortland, en route to a new job. Looking at a wall clock she notices, she asks the ticket agent when the bus will arrive, he gruffly complains that this is her third time asking. Millicent denies this. While speaking with the ticket agent, she notices a bag just like hers in the luggage pile behind her, she mentions this to the ticket agent. She does not believe this, she washes her hands in the restroom and the cleaning lady there insists this is her second time there. Again, Millicent denies this. Upon leaving the restroom, she glances in the mirror and sees, in addition to her reflection, an exact copy of herself sitting on the bench outside, she meets a young man from Binghamton named Paul Grinstead, waiting for the same bus. Millicent tells Paul about encountering her double. Paul, attempting to calm Millicent, says it is either a joke or a misunderstanding caused by a look-alike.
When the bus arrives and the two of them prepare to board, Millicent looks in the window and sees the copy of herself seated on the bus. In shock, she faints. Millicent lies unconscious on a bench inside the depot while Paul and the cleaning lady attend to her. Paul agrees to wait for the 7:00 bus. While they wait, now coming to, insists the strange events are caused by an evil double from a parallel world - a nearby, yet distant alternative plane of existence that comes into convergence with this world by powerful forces, or unnatural, unknown events; when this happens, the impostors enter this realm. Millicent's doppelgänger can survive in this world only by replacing her. Paul says the explanation is "a little metaphysical" for him, believes that Millicent's sanity is beginning to unravel. Paul tells Millicent he will call a friend in Tully who has a car and may be able to drive them to Syracuse. Instead, he calls the police. After Millicent is taken away by two policemen, Paul begins to settle himself.
After drinking from a water fountain, Paul notices. Looking up towards the doors, Paul notices another man running out the door of the bus depot. Pursuing this individual down the street, Paul discovers that he is chasing his own copy, whose face shows excited delight, his copy disappears as Paul calls out "Where are you?" while looking around in confusion and shock. Vera Miles as Millicent Barnes Martin Milner as Paul Grinstead Joe Hamilton as Ticket agent Naomi Stevens as Washroom Attendant In a short film pitching the Twilight Zone series to a Dutch television station, creator Rod Serling claimed to have gotten the idea for "Mirror Image" following an encounter at an airport. Serling noticed a man at the other side of the terminal who wore the same clothes and carried the same suitcase as himself. However, the man turned out to be younger and "more attractive"; this is one of several episodes from season one with its opening title sequence plastered over with the opening for season two. This was done during the Summer of 1961 as to help the season one shows fit in with the new look the show had taken during the following season.
This episode inspired Jordan Peele's 2019 film Us. DeVoe, Bill.. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0 Grams, Martin.. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0 "Mirror Image" on IMDb
Jerry Goldsmith
Jerrald King Goldsmith was an American composer and conductor most known for his work in film and television scoring. He composed scores for such films as Star Trek: The Motion Picture and four other films within the Star Trek franchise, The Sand Pebbles, Logan's Run, Planet of the Apes, Papillon, The Wind and the Lion, The Omen, The Boys from Brazil, Capricorn One, Outland, The Secret of NIMH, Hoosiers, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Air Force One, L. A. Confidential, The Mummy, three Rambo films, Explorers, he collaborated with some of film history's most accomplished directors, including Robert Wise, Howard Hawks, Otto Preminger, Joe Dante, Richard Donner, Roman Polanski, Ridley Scott, Michael Winner, Steven Spielberg, Paul Verhoeven, Franklin J. Schaffner, his work for Donner and Scott involved a rejected score for Timeline and a controversially edited score for Alien, where music by Howard Hanson replaced Goldsmith's end titles and Goldsmith's own work on Freud: The Secret Passion was used without his approval in several scenes.
Goldsmith was nominated for six Grammy Awards, five Primetime Emmy Awards, nine Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, eighteen Academy Awards. Goldsmith, was born February 1929, in Los Angeles, California, his family was Romanian Jewish. His parents were Tessa, a school teacher, Morris Goldsmith, a structural engineer, he started playing piano at age six, but only "got serious" by the time. At age thirteen, he studied piano with concert pianist and educator Jakob Gimpel and by the age of sixteen he was studying both theory and counterpoint under Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who tutored such noteworthy composers and musicians as Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Herman Stein, André Previn, Marty Paich, John Williams. At age sixteen, Goldsmith saw the 1945 film Spellbound in theaters and was inspired by veteran composer Miklós Rózsa's soundtrack to pursue a career in music. Goldsmith enrolled and attended the University of Southern California where he was able to attend courses by Rózsa, but dropped out in favor of a more "practical music program" at the Los Angeles City College.
There he was able to coach singers, work as an assistant choral director, play piano accompaniment, work as an assistant conductor. In 1950, Goldsmith found work at CBS as a clerk typist in the network's music department under director Lud Gluskin. There he began writing scores for such radio shows as CBS Radio Workshop, Frontier Gentleman, Romance. In an interview with Andy Velez from BarnesandNoble.com, Goldsmith stated, "It was about 1950. CBS had a workshop, once a week the employees, whatever their talents, whether they were ushers or typists, would produce a radio show, but you had to be an employee. They needed someone to do music, I knew someone there who said I'd be great for this. I'd just gotten married and needed a job, so they faked a typing test for me. I could do these shows. About six months the music department heard what I did, liked it, gave me a job." He progressed into scoring such live CBS television shows as Climax! and Playhouse 90. He scored multiple episodes of the television series The Twilight Zone.
He remained at CBS until 1960, after which he moved on to Revue Studios and to MGM Studios for producer Norman Felton, whom he had worked for during live television and would compose music for such television shows as Dr. Kildare and The Man from U. N. C. L. E.. His feature film debut occurred, he continued with scores to such films as the 1957 western Face of a Fugitive and the 1959 science fiction film City of Fear. Jerry Goldsmith began the decade composing for such television shows as Dr. Kildare and Thriller as well as the 1960 drama film The Spiral Road. However, he only began receiving widespread name recognition after his intimate score to the 1962 classic western Lonely Are the Brave, his involvement in the picture was the result of a recommendation by veteran composer Alfred Newman, impressed with Goldsmith's score on the television show Thriller and took it upon himself to recommend Goldsmith to the head of Universal Pictures' music department, despite having never met him. That same year, Goldsmith composed the atonal and dissonant score to the 1962 pseudo-biopic Freud that focused on a five-year period of the life of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Goldsmith's score went on to garner him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score, though he lost to fellow first-time nominee Maurice Jarre for his music to Lawrence of Arabia. In 1963, Goldsmith composed a score to The Stripper, his first collaboration with director Franklin J. Schaffner for whom Goldsmith would score the films Planet of the Apes, Patton and The Boys from Brazil. Following his success with Lonely Are the Brave and Freud, Goldsmith went on to achieve more critical recognition with the theme music to The Man from U. N. C. L. E. and scores to such films as the 1964 western Rio Conchos, the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, the 1965 romantic drama A Patch of Blue, the 1965 epic war film In Harm's Way, the 1966 World War I air combat film The Blue Max, the 1966 period naval war epic The Sand Pebbles, the 1967 thriller Warning Shot, the 1967 western Hour of the Gun, the 1968 controversial mystery The Detective. His score for The Blue Max is regarded by many Goldsmith aficionados as one
The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series)
The Twilight Zone is an American anthology television series created and presented by Rod Serling, which ran for five seasons on CBS from 1959 to 1964. Each episode presents a stand-alone story in which characters find themselves dealing with disturbing or unusual events, an experience described as entering "the Twilight Zone," ending with a surprise ending and a moral. Although predominantly science-fiction, the show's paranormal and Kafkaesque events leaned the show towards fantasy and horror; the phrase “twilight zone,” inspired by the series, is used to describe surreal experiences. The series featured both established stars and younger actors who would become much better known later. Serling served as executive head writer, he was the show's host and narrator, delivering monologues at the beginning and end of each episode. Serling's opening and closing narrations summarize the episode's events encapsulating how and why the main character had entered the Twilight Zone. In 1997, the episodes "To Serve Man" and "It's a Good Life" were ranked at 11 and 31 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time.
Serling himself stated that his favorite episodes of the series were "The Invaders" and "Time Enough at Last". In 2016, the series was ranked No. 7 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest shows of all time. In 2002, The Twilight Zone was ranked No. 26 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked it as the third best-written TV series and TV Guide ranked it as the fourth greatest drama and the fifth greatest show of all time. By the late 1950s, Rod Serling was a prominent name in American television, his successful television plays included Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, but constant changes and edits made by the networks and sponsors frustrated Serling. In Requiem for a Heavyweight, the line "Got a match?" had to be struck because the sponsor sold lighters. But according to comments in his 1957 anthology Patterns, Serling had been trying to delve into material more controversial than his works of the early 1950s; this led to Noon on Doomsday for the United States Steel Hour in 1956, a commentary by Serling on the defensiveness and total lack of repentance he saw in the Mississippi town where the murder of Emmett Till took place.
His original script paralleled the Till case was moved out of the South and the victim changed to a Jewish pawnbroker, watered down to just a foreigner in an unnamed town. Despite bad reviews, activists sent numerous wires protesting the production. Serling thought that a science-fictional setting, with robots and other supernatural occurrences, would give him more freedom and less interference in expressing controversial ideas than more realistic settings. "The Time Element" was Serling's 1957 pilot pitch for his show, a time travel adventure about a man who travels back to Honolulu in 1941 and unsuccessfully tries to warn everyone about the impending attack on Pearl Harbor. The script, was rejected and shelved for a year until Bert Granet discovered and produced it as an episode of Desilu Playhouse in 1958; the show was a great success and enabled Serling to begin production on his anthology series, The Twilight Zone. Serling's editorial sense of ironic fate in the writing done for the series was identified as significant to its success by the BFI Film Classics library which stated that for Serling "the cruel indifference and implacability of fate and the irony of poetic justice" were recurrent themes in his plots.
There is a fifth dimension, beyond that, known to man. It is a dimension as timeless as infinity, it is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination, it is an area. The Twilight Zone premiered the night of October 1959, to rave reviews. "Twilight Zone is about the only show on the air that I look forward to seeing. It's the one series that I will let interfere with other plans", said Terry Turner for the Chicago Daily News. Others agreed. Daily Variety ranked it with "the best, accomplished in half-hour filmed television" and the New York Herald Tribune found the show to be "certainly the best and most original anthology series of the year"; as the show proved popular to television's critics, it struggled to find a receptive audience of television viewers. CBS was banking on a rating of at least 21 or 22; the series' future was jeopardized when its third episode, "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" earned a 16.3 rating.
Still, the show attracted a large enough audience to survive a brief hiatus in November, after which it surpassed its competition on ABC and NBC and convinced its sponsors to stay on until the end of the season. With one exception, the first season featured scripts written only by Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson; these three were responsible for 127 of the 156 episodes in the series. Additionally, with one exception, Serling never appeared on camera during any first-season episode (as he woul
Culver City, California
Culver City is a city in Los Angeles County, California. The city was named after Harry Culver; as of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 38,883. It is surrounded by the city of Los Angeles, but shares a border with unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. Over the years, it has annexed more than 40 pieces of adjoining land and now comprises about five square miles. Since the 1920s, Culver City has been a center for motion picture and television production, best known as the home of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. From 1932 to 1986, it was the headquarters for the Hughes Aircraft Company. National Public Radio West and Sony Pictures Entertainment have headquarters in the city; the NFL Network studio is based in Culver City. Archaeological evidence suggests a human presence in the area of present-day Culver City since at least 8,000 BC; the region was the homeland of the Tongva-Gabrieliño Native Americans. The city was founded on the lands of the former Rancho La Ballona, Rancho Rincon de los Bueyes, Rancho La Cienega o Paso de la Tijera.
In 1861, during the American Civil War, Camp Latham was established by the 1st California Infantry under Col. James H. Carleton and the 1st California Cavalry under Lt. Col. Benjamin F. Davis. Named for California Senator Milton S. Latham, the camp was the first staging area for the training of Union troops and their operations in Southern California, it was located on land of the Rancho La Ballona, on the South side of Ballona Creek, near what is now the intersection of Jefferson and Overland Boulevards. The post was moved to Camp Drum, which became the Drum Barracks. Harry Culver first attempted to establish Culver City in 1913; the first film studio in Culver City was built by Thomas Ince in 1918. Silent film comedy producer Hal Roach built his studios there in 1919, Metro Goldwyn Mayer in the'20s. During Prohibition and nightclubs such as the Cotton Club lined Washington Boulevard. Culver Center, one of Southern California's first shopping malls, was completed in 1950 on Venice Boulevard near the Overland Avenue intersection.
Many other retail stores, including a Rite Aid and several banks and restaurants, have occupied the center since then. Hughes Aircraft opened its Culver City plant in July 1941. There the company built the H-4 Hercules transport. Hughes was an active subcontractor in World War II, it developed and patented a flexible feed chute for faster loading of machine guns on B-17 bombers, manufactured electric booster drives for machine guns. Hughes produced more ammunition belts than any other American manufacturer, built 5,576 wings and 6,370 rear fuselage sections for Vultee BT-13 trainers. Hughes grew after the war, in 1953 Howard Hughes donated all his stock in the company to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. After he died in 1976, the institute sold the company, which made it the second-best-endowed medical research foundation in the world; the Hal Roach Studios were demolished in 1963. In the late 1960s, much of the MGM backlot acreage, the nearby 28.5-acre of the RKO Forty Acres, once owned by RKO Pictures and Desilu Productions, were sold by their owners.
In 1976 the sets were razed to make way for redevelopment. Today the RKO site is the southern expansion of the Hayden Industrial Tract, while the MGM property has been converted to a subdivision and a shopping center known as Raintree Plaza. In the 1990s, Culver City launched a successful revitalization program in which it renovated its downtown as well as several shopping centers in the Sepulveda Boulevard corridor near Westfield Culver City. Around the same time, Sony's motion picture subsidiary, Columbia Pictures, moved into the old MGM lot; the influx of many art galleries and restaurants to the eastern part of the city, formally designated the Culver City Art District, prompted The New York Times in 2007 to praise the new art scene and call Culver City a "nascent Chelsea."In 2012 Roger Vincent of the Los Angeles Times said that, according to local observers, the city's "reputation as a pedestrian-friendly destination with upscale restaurants, gastropubs and a thriving art scene is less than a decade old."
Hundreds of movies have been produced on the lots of Culver City's studios: Sony Pictures Studios, Culver Studios, the former Hal Roach Studios. These include The Wizard of Oz, The Thin Man, Gone with the Wind, the Tarzan series, the original King Kong. More recent films made in Culver City include Grease, Raging Bull, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, City Slickers, Air Force One, Wag the Dog and Contact. Television series made on Culver City sets have included Las Vegas, Cougar Town, Mad About You, Hogan's Heroes, The Green Hornet, Arrested Development, The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, U. S. M. C. Jeopardy!, The Nanny, Hell's Kitchen, MasterChef, the syndicated version of Wheel of Fortune and Tosh. O; the television series The Green Hornet featured Bruce Lee as Kato. John Travolta's "Stranded at the Drive-In" sequence in Grease was filmed at the Studio Drive-In on the corner of Jefferson and Sepulveda, it served as a set including Pee-wee's Big Adventure. The theatre was closed in 1993 and demolished in 1998.
Culver City's streets have been featured in television series. Since much of the
Helen Westcott
Helen Westcott was an American stage and screen actor and former child actor. She is best known for her work in The Gunfighter. Westcott was the daughter of singer Hazel Beth McArthur and Warner Bros. studio actor Gordon Westcott who died when Helen was 7 years old, in 1935. She attended Los Angeles City College; when she was 2, Westcott appeared in vaudeville with her mother, when she was 7 she began a nine-year run playing the daughter on stage in a production of The Drunkard in Los Angeles. When Westcott was 4 years old, she appeared in a series of short films. At 5, she appeared in the full-length Thunder Over Texas, she appeared opposite Gregory Peck in the western classic The Gunfighter released in 1950. She was known in part for her role in Charles Lamont's 1953 comedy horror film Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Westcott moved from the big screen to television roles in the late 1950s. In 1958 she appeared on Perry Mason as murderer Marcia Greeley in "The Case of the Haunted Husband."
She made guest appearances on Bonanza, The Twilight Zone and Wanted Dead Or Alive. Westcott appeared on the stage in her career, as well as in films including Anthony Mann's God's Little Acre in 1958. Westcott wed actor Don Gordon on February 18, 1948. In 1950, they had Jennifer, they were divorced in 1953. Westcott died of cancer in Edmonds, Washington on March 17, 1998, her body was cremated. Source: The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Film: Ali Baba to Zombies Helen Westcott on IMDb Helen Westcott at Find a Grave
Third from the Sun
"Third from the Sun" is episode 14 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It is based on a short story of the same name by Richard Matheson which first appeared in the first issue of the magazine Galaxy Science Fiction in October 1950. Will Sturka, a scientist who works at a military base, has been producing a great number of H-bombs in preparation for imminent nuclear war. Sturka realizes that there is only one way to escape—steal an experimental, top-secret spacecraft stored at the base, he plans to bring Sturka's daughter Jody. The two plot for months, making arrangements for their departure; when production of the bombs increases, Sturka realizes. He and Riden decide to put their plan in action—take their families to the craft to tour it, overpower the guards and take off. Sturka's superior Carling overhears the two men talking; that night, everyone gathers for a game of cards where Riden reveals that he has found a place to go—a small planet 11 million miles away. During the game, Carling unexpectedly appears at the door and hints that he knows what the group is planning.
He hints at trouble: "A lot can happen in forty-eight hours." After he leaves and Riden inform the women that they must leave that moment. When the five arrive at the site of the spacecraft and Riden spot their contact, who flashes a light; when the contact steps forward, though, he is revealed to be Carling, armed with a gun. He prepares to call the authorities; the women, who have been waiting in the car, watch as Carling orders them out. Jody throws the car's door open, knocking the gun from Carling's hand and giving the men enough time to overpower him; the group rushes into the ship. That evening, the group has safely escaped their doomed planet and are on course. Sturka comments. Riden smiles as he points out on the ship's viewer their mysterious destination, 11 million miles away—the third planet from the Sun, called "Earth". Todd VanDerWerff of The A. V. Club rated it A and called the twist "justifiably famous". "Probe 7, Over and Out", another Twilight Zone episode with a similar plot. "The Invaders", another episode in which a farm woman encounters tiny "alien" astronauts, who are Earthlings.
"Death Ship" is a TZ episode again featuring the Forbidden Planet Cruiser, where explorers find their ship E-89 has somehow crashed on the alien planet they have just found. Ancient astronaut theory DeVoe, Bill.. Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0 Grams, Martin.. The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0 "Third from the Sun" on IMDb "Third from the Sun" at TV.com Matheson, Richard. "Third from the Sun". Galaxy Science Fiction. P. 61. Retrieved 17 October 2013
John Brahm
John Brahm was a film and television director. His films include The Undying Monster, The Lodger, Hangover Square, The Locket, The Brasher Doubloon, the 3D horror film, The Mad Magician. Brahm was born Hans Brahm in Hamburg, the son of actor Ludwig Brahm and the nephew of theatrical impresario Otto Brahm, he started his career in the theatre as an actor. After World War I he shuttled between Vienna and Paris becoming a director, was appointed resident director for acting troupes at the Deutsches Theater and the Lessing Theater, both in Berlin. With the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany, Brahm left the country. After working as a movie production supervisor he got a chance to direct his first film Broken Blossoms in 1936, a remake of D. W. Griffith's 1919 film by the same name, he moved to the US the next year where he began his Hollywood career at Columbia Pictures and moved to 20th Century-Fox. He directed the ill-fated Let Us Live, the true story of two men wrongly convicted of murder who were executed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Authorities there were embarrassed by the incident and put pressure on the studio to cancel the film. The studio made the film nonetheless, but with a small budget. In his book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, American film historian and critic Andrew Sarris states that Brahm "hit his stride" in the 1930s with "mood-drenched melodramas", suggesting that Brahm went into artistic decline after this period. Sarris further notes that Brahm did not lack work, as he made "approximately 150 TV films" during the 1950s and 1960s, directing numerous episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. Brahm's last full-length film was Hot Rods to Hell, he married his first wife Hanna, an actress, who ran off with another actor leaving him depressed. He married, secondly, to actress and singer Dolly Haas, who married Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist after their divorce. In the 1950s he married his third wife, with whom he had two children. John Brahm on IMDb Tribute site, sumishta.com.
