Why the Cast & Crew of This Classic Twilight Zone Episode Ate Salads for Most of Shooting
Returning to Death Valley after production on "The Lonely," the crew was much better prepared for the extreme temperatures the second time around.
In the past, we've talked at length about just how darn hot it could get on the set of the original Twilight Zone — episodes of which air regularly on SYFY. Despite the sweltering temperatures experienced by cast and crew on "The Lonely" (produced right after the pilot), the show still returned to the harsh environs of Death Valley, California for another Season 1 installment: "I Shot an Arrow into the Air."
Based on a story idea by Madelon Champion that series creator Rod Serling purchased on the spot for a sum of $500, the Stuart Rosenberg-directed episode (named after a line in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, "The Arrow and the Song") follows three survivors of humanity's first manned mission into outer space, after their ship crashes on a seemingly desolate asteroid. The heat and hopelessness give the men enough trouble, but it's Flight Officer Corey (Dewey Martin) who begins to cause a raucous by living out his own personal Lord of the Flies scenario.
He's desperate to stay alive, almost rabidly so, and immediately begins to contemplate how he can keep the dwindling water supply all to himself. In the end, he kills his fellow comrades — Colonel Donlin (Edward Finns) and fellow Flight Officer Pierson (Ted Otis — in cold blood, only to learn a short time later that they were on Earth the entire time (a little under 100 miles outside Reno, Nevada). Upon this ironic revelation, which laid the groundwork for the big reveal at the end of Serling's Planet of the Apes screenplay a few years later, Corey breaks down with remorse over his barbaric actions, but, of course, it's too little too late.
While "the weather was no better" than it had been on "The Lonely," according to Twilight Zone producer Buck Houghton (via Marc Scott Zicree's The Twilight Zone Companion), the cast and crew were better prepared this time around. To keep everyone from dropping like flies in the 100+ degree heat of the ominously-named Death Valley, meals were a much lighter affair. That meant salads, and lots of them.
Why the cast and crew of The Twilight Zone's "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" episode ate salads for most of the shoot
"Dietetically speaking, our meals were very much more on the salads — very satisfying, but light," Houghton remembers in the aforementioned Companion.
"Also, we said to the crew, 'Look we're going to have a two-hour lunch. We're going back to the hotel and serve lunch around the pool. You can go to your room. And don't lets have horseplay about the union and the overtime and all that jazz because you know very well that it's the best thing to do for all of us, and you'll still come out the same number of pay hours as we gave you the 45-minute lunch out here on location and made you sweat through it and work on till six.'"
The crew was amenable to the producer's reasonable request, showing their assent with a single word: "Hail!"
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
