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Probably the greatest episodes of “The Twilight Zone” season 1 was “I Shot an Arrow Into the Sky,” which follows a gaggle of astronauts who crash onto a desert planet and shortly begin to activate one another. Corey (Dewey Martin) is the final one left. After he betrays and kills the opposite survivors, he units off on his personal, ready to outlive so long as he can on this harsh alien wasteland. However then he comes throughout an indication labeled “Reno, 37 miles.”
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That is proper: they have been on Earth the entire time, and so they might’ve all survived in the event that they’d simply stored their wits about them and had walked a bit in the best course. Do not you hate it when that occurs? On the intense facet, at the least they did not have any speaking apes to take care of; Rod Serling would reuse this twist when writing the script for the unique “Planet of the Apes” movie in 1968.
However as exhausting as this episode was, the actors have been having an excellent worse time behind the scenes. The episode was filmed on location in Dying Valley, California, a desert space that recurrently exceeds 110°F in the summertime. No rain was recorded there from 1929 to 1953, and even at evening, the summer time temperatures typically solely dipped all the way down to 80 or 90°F. It is easy to know why the astronauts within the episode confused this place for a barren alien planet, as a result of that is positive what it looks like whenever you’re in there.
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The fixed warmth was why the solid and crew largely caught to salads in the course of the manufacturing. Salads are cool and hydrating, the logic goes, so it helped forestall the crew from sweating an excessive amount of or getting too thirsty.
“Dietetically talking, our meals have been very rather more on the salads — very satisfying, however mild,” producer Houghton would later recall. “Additionally, we stated to the crew, ‘Look, we will have a two-hour lunch. We’re going again to the lodge and serve lunch across the pool. You possibly can go to your room. And do not lets have horseplay concerning the union and the time beyond regulation and all that jazz as a result of you realize very nicely that it is the smartest thing to do for all of us, and you may nonetheless come out the identical variety of pay hours as we gave you the 45-minute lunch out right here on location and made you sweat via it and work on until six.'”
The manufacturing strategy for ‘I Shot an Arrow Into the Sky’ was born out of a previous catastrophe
The explanation why the manufacturing was so agency round this salad and leisure strategy is that this wasn’t the primary time they’d filmed in Dying Valley. The second episode within the present’s manufacturing, “The Lonely,” was the primary to movie on the location, and with that episode, the solid and crew have been undoubtedly not ready for what was in retailer. Their first mistake was filming the episode in June, one of many hottest months of the yr; their second mistake was what they served for lunch.
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“That was unbelievable warmth after we shot on the market,” the episode’s director Jack Smight, recalled. “The temperature was round 130 levels. At some point the caterer very foolishly served a really heavy meal for lunch, and about eight crew members simply dropped within the afternoon.” At one level, the director of pictures George Clemens fell off a digicam rig, having collapsed from both warmth exhaustion or dehydration.
By the point they returned to the realm to movie “I Shot an Arrow Via the Air,” the valley hadn’t but cooled down a lot from its summer time peaks, however at the least now the crew was ready. With the brand new weight loss program and the brand new leisure precautions, there was far much less fainting concerned with this episode’s manufacturing. “The Twilight Zone” would even return to Dying Valley a pair extra occasions all through its run, most notably in season 2’s “The Rip Van Winkle Caper.” Capturing within the desert isn’t enjoyable — simply ask Steven Spielberg — however at the least “The Twilight Zone” crew discovered a technique to make it work.
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