re: YouTube Pick Of The Day

Lost Rod Serling Interview (1970)

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In 1970 University of Kansas professor James Gunn interviewed a series of science fiction authors for his Centron film series "Science Fiction in Literature". This footage from an unreleased film in that series featuring an interview with Rod Serling, which wasn't finished due to problems with obtaining rights to show footage from Serling's work in television.

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A very interesting interview even if you aren't a big SciFi fan (I'm hardly an expert on the genre myself). Serling discusses a number of topics: his favorite Twilight Zone episodes, the logistics of working on TV budgets, using science fiction to comment on the contemporary scene, and most fascinatingly, Serling (a committed liberal) comes out against tokenism in casting -- what we would now call "political correctness":

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Most television fiction that I watch has very little relevance. I think it's one thing to say that we will now have a program called Mod Squad, say, and we will have one black man and one oriental and one Hawaiian to show this marvelous melting-pot concept. But I think, Jim, that's altogether phony. I don't think that's... I think at best condescension and at worst exploitation. The fact is that we have so distorted the pure ethnic minority over the years by making every black man a banjo player, and a village idiot, and a coward, that suddenly we are going to reverse switch, he is now a brain scientist or an atomic scientist or any one of an equal distortion at the other end.

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