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Rod Serling's widow found two unproduced Twilight Zone scripts and helped create the ''Lost Classics''
Carol Serling rescued the stories from certain fiery doom!
What could be more like the Twilight Zone than episodes from beyond the grave?
That was the case with two "Lost Classics" discovered in 1994. According to an article in the Longview Daily News, Serling didn't get around to filming all his Twilight Zone stories, with two in particular cast aside during the show's classic run.
The hero of this story is Carol Serling, the wife Rod left behind when he passed away in 1975. Nearly twenty years later, Carol found the two Serling-penned narratives in her Hollywood home.
"I discovered (the scripts) because I had moved," Carol Serling told the Longview Daily News in 1994. "And I live up in the hills, where the fires can come, and I decided that it would probably be a good idea to get this material out of my garage.
"And so I went through and in the process discovered this material. So, that's when it all came to light."
Lawrence Horowitz, the executive producer of what would become Twilight Zone: The Lost Classics understood exactly how rare and important the unearthed writing was.
"We couldn't believe our good fortune," said Horowitz, "when (Serling's representative) said, 'By the way, we have an actual, original Rod Serling script that's never been produced. Would you be interested in seeing it?'
"And you can imagine what our reaction was. And it was even more intense after we read it because we see a lot of scripts coming across our desks now, and there's just such an extraordinary difference to look at the words of, really, one of the great masters."
Fans of quality writing were in for a treat: The first vignette, titled "The Theatre" was rooted in a Rod Serling short story and prepared for the screen by acclaimed genre writer Richard Matheson. The author was best known for novels like I Am Legend, and Stir of Echoes, and had previously written 16 episodes of the original Twilight Zone.
These last two tales from the master storyteller starred such luminaries as James Earl Jones, Jack Palance, and Amy Irving.
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