This story is offered in the great tradition of Magical Realism. It presents an imaginative version of Rod Serling’s life AS FACT, explaining in the most interesting way possible the many surprising turns in the life story of the world’s most famous television writer.

Like other writer biographies, such as Professor Marston, Goodbye Christopher Robin, Finding Neverland, and Shakespeare In Love, actual events will be fictionalized as early inspirations to Rod Serling’s genius series. It is the telling of an alternate reality very much like Mr. Serling’s own creation, The Twilight Zone.

None of us knew it at the time, but Rod Serling was visiting a real Twilight Zone of his own creation.

The tale is told in an episodic way to honor his landmark series. Each trip to the Zone by Mr. Serling has it’s own dramatic twist. He finds the Door as a 10-year-old boy, a 20-year-old paratrooper in WWII, and as a 30-year-old television writer.

We will witness how events of his life are the origin of a particular story, how some stories would haunt him later. Art imitates life imitates art imitates life, like the spinning pinwheel in the show’s opening. There are over 100 nods to famous Twilight Zone episodes.

Inside the Twilight Zone is a strange place. It’s a world very much like our own, but with better art design and cinematography. The look of the dimension on the other side of the Door will reflect the visual style of The Twilight Zone television show.

Once there, Rod will find and fall in love with a wartime nurse, named Caroline. Heartbreak propels our hero into a real world love affair with Carol, who, it should be remarked upon looks exactly like the Twilight Zone’s Caroline.

Rod Serling, who had a famously overactive imagination, was a war survivor in a time before anyone spoke of PTSD. He was deeply affected by what he experienced on the front lines in the Pacific Theatre of the most terrible war of our time. We will see how his experiences as a paratrooper surfaced later as an episode, called The Purple Testament. 

We’ll see what brought him to write Monsters Are Due On Maple Street and what happened right after the crew shot The Man In The Bottle.  Rod will catch the 3-eyed Venusian diner cook sneaking onto the CBS lot. A little more worrisome is when Mr. Bemis shows up, demanding new glasses, because Mr. Serling, after all, is the responsible party.

The saying, “stress can tear a man to pieces,” was never truer than for Rod Serling. Like his own episode Mirror Image, Rod finds himself chasing a duplicate of himself from the parallel universe of The Twilight Zone. Is he there to replace him, the same fate he handed his Millicent Barnes?

With overactive imagination running amok, his Twilight Zone characters escape their world to come to ours. They are led by the murderous felon, DeCruz, to seek revenge for their ironic fates.  Art attacks the artist, and the artist fights back.

In his own amazing rhythm, our hero rehearses the narration for a show too unbelievable to write: 

“If the world is a spinning pinwheel of human events driven by the winds of coincidence and circumstance, then maybe, just maybe, the only thing that makes sense is the eternal balance of ‘what goes around comes around’. The curser will become the cursed.”

It is the story we never knew. Rod Serling would say with his trademark smile: “Submitted for your approval? You wouldn’t have believed it.”

The utmost respect is paid to Mr. Serling, his accomplishments, his beliefs on social change, and his writing genius.  If Rod Serling were stressed out during the heyday of his brilliant career, well, we now know why. On the other side of that Door - The Twilight Zone! 

Screenwriter Chuck Fitzpatrick has placed in the Academy’s prestigious Nicholl Fellowships six times.