Broken Frontier

I'm writing my column to you this week from Binghamton, New York, a small town about four hours upstate from Manhattan. I'm here because it is the hometown of Rod Serling, the Emmy Award-winning film and television writer who is now best known as the creator and host of The Twilight Zone TV series.

During my stay here, I have visited his boyhood home at 67 Bennett Street, Binghamton High School, from where he graduated in 1943, and Recreation Park, where a bandstand and a merry-go-round bear a striking resemblance to similar landmarks in "Walking Distance," an episode of The Twilight Zone about a man who pays a life-changing visit to his hometown.

I am pleased to find that Binghamton High School has a Rod Serling School of the Performing Arts and a plaque out front that honors their most famous graduate. I am also pleased to find a plaque in the bandstand acknowledging its role in that famous episode. But I am disappointed to find that a listing in the telephone book for the annual Rod Serling Video Festival is listed as the Rod Sterling Video Festival. I guess you can't expect everyone to have the same level of care and respect we writers do. Or can we?

In my documentary, The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick (about the author of Blade Runner, Total Recall and Minority Report), one of my interviewees tells a compelling story about his visit to Russia and their treatment of their authors – Pushkin, in particular. It seems that even if Pushkin had spent only two weeks in some location, it had been turned into a shrine of sorts, open to the public, maintained as it was during his stay, complete with the pens and paper and desk that he used. He tells this story, not so oddly, while standing in front of a house where Philip K. Dick used to live. When we filmed his interview, we wondered if the present residents were even aware of their abode's storied history. We doubted it.

Today, as I stood in front of 67 Bennett Street and took the picture you see here, I wondered the same thing and had the same doubts.

While on a trip through the South many years ago, I stopped in a small town in Mississippi where famous Blues man Muddy Waters was born. Some passersby saw the California license plate on the car and asked if we had really driven all the way there from such a distance. I assured them we had. "Why?" they asked. "Because this is the place where Muddy Waters was born," I answered. "Who?" they said. It was a moment, like these today, that reminds me how little respect it seems we have for our artists. America in particular seems more interested in the history of its politicians and businessmen.

I don't know why it seems so important for me to visit these places. I guess at one level I feel that I am somehow giving proper respect to Mister Serling (or Mister Dick or Mister Waters). That somehow, by taking the time out of my life to go and see these places, I am paying back to them a little bit of what they have given me.

I wish I could buy the house at 67 Bennett Street. I wish I could turn it into the Rod Serling museum. He certainly deserves it. He deserves much more than that, truth be told. But I can't of course. Not right now. So I will continue my pilgrimages and hope that my respect for our artists and their achievements rubs off on my children. Who knows, maybe in the future one of them will have enough money and time to make a more permanent monument to those who entertain and enlighten us. Until then, this week's column will have to do. Call it my personal shrine here in cyberspace. A little corner set aside to remember Rod Serling and the others like him. Those writers who have given us so much and too often get so little in return.