Title: “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine”
Original transmission date: October 23 1959
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Mitchell Leisen
Starring:
Ida Lupino as Barbara Jane Trenton
Martin Balsam as Danny Weiss
Jerome Cowan as Jerry
Ted de Corsia as Marty Sall
Alice Frost as Sally
Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Isolation/seclusion; wishing for the past
Parodied? Yes, at the very least in the American Dad episode “A Star is Reborn”
Rating: B
Serling’s opening monologue
Picture of a woman looking at a picture. Movie great of another time, once-brilliant star in a firmament no longer a part of the sky, eclipsed by the movement of earth and time. Barbara Jean Trenton, whose world is a projection room, whose dreams are made out of celluloid. Barbara Jean Trenton, struck down by hit-and-run years and lying on the unhappy pavement, trying desperately to get the license number of fleeting fame.
A woman sits in a room alone watching films, films of herself. She is an actress, or was: her time has now long passed, her best years behind her, and she is reliving her past glories as bitterness twists her up inside. Barbara’s becoming increasingly reclusive and retreating more from reality, trying to regain her past, unwilling to face the world. When Danny, her agent comes to try to coax her out of the room she is initially resistant, until he breaks the news that he has a part for her to play, and suddenly visions of her golden years come flooding back, and she is happy to leave the room.
However, it turns out that the part is not what she was expecting. She refuses to see that she has grown older, that the world has moved on and nobody wants her anymore. She can’t “demand” the roles she wants, as she says herself, and anything she does get is going to be for the more mature woman. She refuses the part, rushes home, locks herself in again, wishing herself back in the 1930s. Danny tries to shake her into reality by having one of her co-stars call by, and at first she is excited, as she hasn’t seen him in twenty years, but Gerry is older now, and she almost doesn’t recognise him. Stupidly, when told he was coming, she had pictured him as he had been in the movies in which she starred with him. It’s a big shock, but does the reverse of what Danny had hoped, and sends her scurrying back into her room, eager to avoid the present and the fact that she too has grown old.
When the maid comes to bring her coffee, she can’t find her, and then looks up at the screen and screams. A while later Danny arrives, confirming that Barbara is nowhere to be found. Reluctantly, he turns on the projector, and is amazed to see Barbara on the screen, as she is now, talking to all her old friends (as they were then, and not as characters but as the actors and actresses they were). He calls to her and she responds, coming to the screen, smiles, blows him a kiss and turns away. The film ends. Danny picks up the scarf she threw to him, from the screen, which is now at his feet, and smiles.
Serling’s closing monologue
To the wishes that come true, to the strange, mystic strength of the human animal, who can take a wishful dream and give it a dimension of its own. To Barbara Jean Trenton, movie queen of another era, who has changed the blank tomb of an empty projection screen into a private world. It can happen in the Twilight Zone.
The Resolution
Again, highly ridiculous. Barbara, unable to cope with her fading fame in the real world, simply “wishes” herself into the screen. It’s absolute nonsense. At least if she had wished herself into one of her old movies, with no sign of her in the house and one of the old films perhaps betraying a wink or a smile not there originally, to hint at the possibility that she had somehow managed to transfer into the film, but here, she’s shown in her own house but in the 1930s, surrounded by all her friends, actors who have passed on. It’s, as Burt Reynolds once said on The Simpsons, garbage.
The Moral
A very poor one I feel. If you want to live in the past, and can’t face the future, why then just wish really hard and you’ll be back in the past for which you crave. Never mind cowboying up and facing reality!
Those clever little touches
I don’t know if it’s intentional, but when Danny talks of Barbara’s room, he says it’s “dark, damp and full of cobwebs”. And she’s sitting there, alone, in the dark, trying to relive the past or at least blot out the present. Reminds me of Miss Havisham from
Great Expectations.
Iconic?
Although Serling’s scripts are mostly original, there are one or two episodes which seem to draw from previous writings, either on television or on film, and of course it often goes the other way too, as later writers copied, used or built on his ideas. This isn’t the same, of course, as parodying the episode or parts of it, which is why this is in its own section.
This episode draws heavily on two movies of the 1950s, one totally indeed iconic, Sunset Boulevard, and the other perhaps lesser so, Bette Davis’s The Star.
And isn’t that…?
Ida Lupino (1918-1995)
She plays the fading actress. Ida Lupino was a film maker in Hollywood at a time when the industry was almost completely male-dominated. She is acknowledged as one of the finest filmmakers of her age, and also starred in films and on television.
Martin Balsam (1919-1996)
How odd! Born one year after Lupino and died one year after her too! Balsam was a Hollywood actor who appeared in three iconic movies -
Pyscho, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the original
Cape Fear. He was also originally cast as the voice of HAL in
2001: A Space Odyssey but was rejected by Kubrick for sounding “too American”.
Themes
Basically we have two: the self-imposed seclusion by Barbara of herself from the rest of the world, living in her own darkened little picture house, unwilling to accept that she is older and that the world has changed. There’s an almost admirable, Trumplike quality to Barbara’s refusal to accept reality, and in the end, it seems, she gets her wish. There’s a definite theme of loneliness here too, as Barbara cuts herself off from her old friends and co-stars, who are either dead or have grown too old (she does not see herself as old, but still as she appears on the screen in her old movies, and hates to be reminded of the passage of years) and becomes the sole inhabitant of her own world. Like a vampire hiding from the sun, she keeps the curtains drawn and the windows closed, living in a fantasy land where time never moves on, nothing changes, but in this world she is completely alone, and on some level she knows this, even though she resists it.
The other real theme is one of wishing for and living in the past. All Barbara wants is for it to be the 1930s again, when people were more sophisticated, kinder, more elegant. She abhors the “new rock and roll” and everything the fifties (verging into the sixties) brings with it. She’s happy to live on - and literally in - past glories, rather than face the fact that the world has changed, and she needs to change with it.