Last in a series of six previously unpublished profiles.
Author and screenwriter Jerry Sohl (1913-2002) was the senior member of the Southern California Group that included Charles Beaumont, Robert Bloch, Ray Bradbury, George Clayton Johnson, Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, and Ray Russell. He contributed to some of the best-loved SF series from the 1960s, such as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Star Trek.
Sohl’s books include The Haploids, Costigan’s Needle (his personal favorite among his SF novels), The Altered Ego, Point Ultimate, and his critically acclaimed mainstream debut, The Lemon Eaters. The posthumous collection Filet of Sohl: The Classic Scripts and Stories of Jerry Sohl includes unproduced teleplays, plus a treatment, as well as tributes from friends and family.
While on the staff of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Sohl scripted “Dead Weight,” “Not the Running Type,” “The Doubtful Doctor,” and “A Secret Life.” As he told this writer in an interview for Filmfax, “That’s the first thing that I did. [Producer] Joan Harrison liked me…and we got along very well. She had short stories…[they] had purchased here and there, and from [those] I fashioned the teleplays.”
Sohl wrote scripts for Naked City, Route 66, and especially The Twilight Zone that were credited to Beaumont, who died of a degenerative disease at the age of thirty-eight in 1967. Sohl recalled, “the trouble with Chuck Beaumont was that he was ill and his wife needed the money, so for nothing I did the teleplays for him, so that she would get the money and the residuals….
“He was going downhill at the time, so what he said was some kind of title, let’s say, and I just took it from then on. You know, I was perfectly familiar with the format, so there was no problem in getting [them] done,” he said. “The New Exhibit,” “Living Doll,” and “Queen of the Nile” were published in The Twilight Zone Scripts of Jerry Sohl, edited by Christopher Conlon.
“The New Exhibit” and “Queen of the Nile” were both directed by John Brahm. “We discussed various scenes, and there was no difficulty…I really liked him a lot, and he was very good…He had his own ideas, and he translated whatever I gave him into what I thought was better than I could have done by myself, because he was a very experienced person,” said Sohl.
“Living Doll,” in which Telly Savalas is menaced by the macabre Talky Tina, is one of the most memorable Twilight Zone episodes. As Sohl recalled, “Chuck Beaumont and I were walking along and saying, ‘Suppose we had a doll that talked and could answer our questions and reprimand us. Just think of all the things that a doll could do!’…It turned out very well.”
During the show’s fifth and final season, William Froug succeeded Bert Granet as the producer of The Twilight Zone and drastically altered or cancelled scripts by Beaumont, Johnson, Matheson, and Sohl that had been accepted by his predecessor. “Pattern for Doomsday” and “Who Am I?” are included in Filet of Sohl, also edited by Conlon; both books are published by BearManor Media.
Matheson and Sohl were playing golf on November 22, 1963, and broke off their game when they learned that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Their real-life encounter with a psychotic trucker on the way home grew into Matheson’s story “Duel,” published in Playboy, and the eponymous 1971 TV-movie that marked a young Steven Spielberg’s feature-length debut.
Sohl adapted his own stories “The Invisible Enemy” and “Counterweight,” first published in pulp SF magazines of the 1950s, for The Outer Limits, although “Counterweight” was heavily rewritten by Milton Krims, to his dismay. Its alien-possessed plant, animated by Jim Danforth, was one of the more memorable monsters, or “bears,” that ABC insisted must be in each episode.
“Initially…they wanted the monster shown at the beginning of the show. My feeling about the matter was [that then] you might as well forget it all and just show the monster, that’s it. You have to show something mysterious and continue on, and the mystery mounts until you find that it is a monster who is doing this terrible thing, whatever it is,” as Sohl later observed.
Among Sohl’s few feature-film credits are two adaptations of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, both produced in England by American International Pictures (AIP) and starring Boris Karloff. Sohl scripted Daniel Haller’s Monster of Terror (aka Die, Monster, Die!, 1965), but received only the story credit on Vernon Sewell’s The Crimson Cult (aka Curse of the Crimson Altar, 1968).
“I really liked the way that he wrote,” Sohl said of Lovecraft. “He had a unique style of writing, and his mind worked in mysterious ways, so we all admired him. It was nice to be able to use something that was so new and startling, and it certainly was startling, many of the things that he did. So to put that on the screen required some maneuvering, but I think that we [did it].”
In Monster of Terror, based on “The Colour Out of Space,” Karloff conducts dangerous experiments with a radioactive meteorite that eventually mutates him. An uncredited adaptation of “The Dreams in the Witch House,” The Crimson Cult assembled Karloff, Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele for the first time, to sadly little effect, in the tale of a vengeful reincarnated witch.
Surprisingly, Sohl is credited on Furankenshutain tai Chitei Kaijû Baragon (Frankenstein Against the Subterranean Monster Baragon, aka Frankenstein Conquers the World, 1965), a U.S.-Japanese kaiju eiga (giant monster movie). Recruited by one of the producers, he devised a story in which the Frankenstein Monster’s heart, irradiated in Hiroshima, grows into a behemoth.
“I took five minutes of my time and…explained how it happened, and I think you’d be pleased with it but you would not be too pleased with the picture. They have a funny style over there. I did the whole [treatment] and sent it to him. He paid me $2,500 for it and sent it over to Japan. They made a picture out of it and I did not have to write a screenplay,” as Sohl recounted.
His seminal contribution to Star Trek was the first episode shot after its two pilots, “The Corbomite Maneuver,” which introduced the characters of McCoy and Uhura. Sohl’s subsequent scripts were so heavily revised that he only shared the story credit on “This Side of Paradise” (as Nathan Butler) and “Whom Gods Destroy” with final writers Dorothy C. Fontana and Lee Erwin, respectively.
“When you’re doing the first script, you have the blueprint of the pilot before you, so you have to figure out, ‘Well, what is [a particular character’s] job, really? What does he do? What is he afraid of? Does he have any panache? Does he like little girls?,’ or whatever. You think of all these things…because that’s the blueprint of how the thing is going to play,” Sohl related.
Sohl worked on two episodes from the SF series The Invaders, collaborating with fellow Twilight Zone contributor Earl Hamner on the teleplay for “The Watchers,” and scripting “Dark Outpost.” He also shared the screenwriting credit on a 1977 Man from Atlantis TV-movie, “The Disappearances,” with producer Herman Miller, who used the nom de plume of Luther Murdoch.
The TV-movie Night Slaves (1970) was directed by Twilight Zone veteran Ted Post, and adapted by Robert Specht and producer Everett Chambers from Sohl’s 1965 novel about humans controlled by aliens to repair their ship. “I was very pleased with the whole thing,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it interested me [when] I sat down to watch it…[and] they did a marvelous job.”
Star Trek contributors Sohl, Johnson, Matheson, and Theodore Sturgeon incorporated as The Green Hand and pitched ideas to network executives, but “they didn’t seem to understand us at all…When they saw us…come in and invade their office, they seemed to be overpowered and stunned and open-mouthed, and they would never buy anything that we were selling,” Sohl said.
Sohl commented on the enduring appeal of his classic 1960s shows: “What we did was new, unusual, startling, sparkling, and because they had never been done before, you had a lot of leeway in doing them. But the fact that they are on the tube now shows that the things that we did at the time were the right things. Otherwise, they would be like the rest of TV, forgotten.”
I wonder how much Twilight residuals are worth?
Don’t know, but since Beaumont’s widow, Helen, had cancer and didn’t outlive him by more than a few years, I’m sure their four orphaned children (to whom the Mathesons served as a kind of foster parents, despite having four kids of their own) needed it…