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One of the best episodes of season 1 of “The Twilight Zone” was “I pulled an arrow in the sky”, which follows a group of astronauts which crash on a planet of the desert and soon start to turn against each other. Corey (Dewey Martin) is the last on the left. After betraying and killed the other survivors, he leaves alone, prepared to survive as long as he can in this hard wasteland. But then he comes across a panel labeled “Reno, 37 miles”.
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It is true: they were on earth all the time, and they could all have survived if they had just kept their minds about them and had worked a little in the right direction. Don’t you hate when it happens? On the right side, at least they had no speaking monkeys to manage; Rod Serling would reuse this torsion when writing the script for the original film “Planet of the Apes” in 1968.
But as exhausting that this episode was, the actors spent a time even worse behind the scenes. The episode was shot on site in Death Valley, California, an area of the desert which regularly exceeds 110 ° F in summer. No rain was recorded there from 1929 to 1953, and even at night, summer temperatures often did not decrease only 80 or 90 ° F. It is easy to understand why the astronauts of the episode confused this place for a sterile extraterrestrial planet, because it is sure what it does when you are there.
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Constant heat was the reason why distribution and crew are largely stuck to salads during production. The salads are fresh and moisturizing, the logic goes, so it helped prevent the crew from sweating too much or being too thirsty.
“Dietetically speaking, our meals were much more on salads – very satisfactory, but light”, the producer Houghton Would recall later. “Also, we Said to the Crew, ‘Look, we goo 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 lets have Have Horseplay About the Union and the Overtime and All that Jazz because 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 rental and Made You Sweat Through It and Work On Till Six. ‘”
The production approach of “I pulled an arrow in the sky” was born from a past disaster
The reason why the production was so firm around this salad and relaxation approach is that it was not the first time they were shooting in Death Valley. The second episode of the production of the show, “The Lonely”, was the first to film at the location, and with this episode, the cast and the team were certainly not prepared for what was in store. Their first error was to film the episode in June, one of the hottest months of the year; Their second error was what they were used for lunch.
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“It was an incredible warmth when we pulled there,” recalls the director of the Jack Smight episode. “The temperature was around 130 degrees. One day, the caterer very stupidly served a very heavy meal for lunch, and about eight crew members had just fallen in the afternoon.” At one point, the director of photography George Clemens fell from a platform, having collapsed from heat exhaustion or dehydration.
As they returned to the region to film “I turned an arrow in the air”, the valley had not yet cooled much from its summer peaks, but at least now, the crew was prepared. With the new diet and new relaxation precautions, there was much less to pass out in the production of this episode. “The Twilight Zone” would even return to Death Valley a few times throughout his race, especially in “The Rip Van Winkle Cape” of season 2. The shooting in the desert is never fun – just ask Steven Spielberg – but at least the crew of “The Twilight Zone” found a way to operate.
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