The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode Four “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine”

Original Air Date: October 23, 1959
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Mitchell Leisen

“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.“
-Rod Serling

Barbara “Barbie” Jean Trenton (played by Ida Lupino) is an aging film star from the 1930s who lives in a hazy world of conceit and denial. Her home in Beverly Hills is an old dark mansion where, secluded from the world, Barbie draws the shades and watches and rewatches the old movies from yesteryear. Her agent and caretaker is Danny Weiss (played by Martin Balsam). He visits Barbie regularly despite her unpleasant rejection of her age and the modern world. Film buffs will note that “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” pays homage to the legendary Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard as both the film and the Twilight Zone episode share the same central theme and musical composer, Franz Waxman. However, whereas Sunset Boulevard ends in tragedy, “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine” concludes with Barbara Jean finally achieving her dream. She escapes into her celluloid dreamworld. Like Don Quixote or Pygmalion, her life is swallowed up by a desire to live inside a work of art.

Barbie suffers from nostalgia. She longs for the “golden age” of old tinseltown, a time when she was young, when she starred in major motion pictures like “A Farewell Without Tears” (1933) and “A Night in Paris” (1934) and attended lavish parties with her friends like leading man (not “co-star”) Jerry Hearndan. Presently, she lives in a fantasy world, a fabricated vision of the past, where she is consumed by romanticism and overwhelmed with a longing for what cannot be.

One day, Danny orchestrates a meeting for Barbie with the studio head of International, Marty Sall (played by Ted de Corsia), but instead of offering Barbie the lead role in an upcoming film, as have been the case if she were still a pretty young actress, he instead offers her the part of a middle-aged mother. Offended, she storms out of his office and announces she will throw a party for her many Hollywood friends, but Danny reminds her that most of her friends have either died or moved away from Hollywood.

Again, Barbie retreats to her library (her “sixteen millimeter shrine”) to watch old films from the glory days. Then one day, Danny arrives to tell her that her old friend Jerry Hearndan (played by Jerome Cowan) will be visiting. In excitement, Barbara Jean dons an old classic dress and greets Jerry only to find, in horror, that he has aged considerably. No longer an actor, Jerry now runs a string of supermarkets outside Chicago.

In dismay, Barbara Jean insists that they leave and she locks herself inside her library and plays a film to distract herself from the outside world –a reminder of her lost dreams. As she watches the picture, she calls out to a younger Jerry Hearndan onscreen hoping she can once again join him in the old days just as the screen fades to a blur. Later, Sally the maid enters and shrieks in horror as she gazes upward at the screen. Danny is immediately called in and when he arrives he cannot seem to locate Barbara Jean. But when he looks up at the still running 16mm projection, he watches as Barbara Jean appears within the movie being shown on the screen –she has finally returned to her old life, permanently preserved in celluloid film. She now lives within the movie, as a living memory of old Hollywood. Danny calls out to her on the screen, but as Barbara slowly turns back, she blows him a kiss before leaving with a young Jerry Hearndan, never to return again. When Danny slowly leaves her mansion he finds her scarf lying on the floor where it was dropped in the film. He leaves her house with his own musings: “To wishes, Barbie,” he says. “To the ones that come true.”

“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.”
-Rod Serling

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My Thoughts on “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine”

“The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine” explores the life of an aging Hollywood star who lives alone with her fading memories. Hollywood, her home in more ways than one, serves as a dream factory –a place of pure imagination and hope– but it is not real. In the United States, it is movies, rather than paintings or poetry, which are the true architectural building blocks of our cultural mythology. And in many cases, we look to the movies for uplifting mimetic representations of our cultural aspirations. But finding the boundary between art and reality (verisimilitude) poses a difficult problem for us, and Barbara Jean is merely one more aging victim of Hollywood sentimentality and nostalgia. “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” shows us the frightening possibility of a wish when it actually comes true.

Ida Lupino delivers a pitch perfect performance in this episode as a mad, delusional, declining, ghostly slightly Gothic woman haunting her cobweb-filled house. Her performance is wonderfully matched by the talents of Martin Balsam, director Mitchell Leisen, composer Franz Waxman, and cinematographer George T. Clemens. “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” is another splendid masterpiece from Rod Serling.

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Credits:

• Director: Mitchell Leisen
  • Mitchell “Mitch” Leisen (1898-1972) had a lengthy career in Hollywood, starting out as a costume designer and an art director in the silent era. He was an uncredited worker on Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927). He made his directorial debut in 1933 and followed this up with numerous screwball comedies, romances, and costume melodramas. He later went independent in 1951, leaving a lucrative contract at Paramount, and he began directing television shows. Twilight Zone cinematographer George T. Clemens remembered Mitch Leisen as an old-school director who struggled to adjust to the new age of television (he first met Leisen when he was a costume designer for Cecil B. DeMille). Clemens boasted that he was instrumental in getting Leisen his directing job on The Twilight Zone. Ironically, Clemens recalled that Leisen often lived in the past, Leisen hired himself a chauffeur to drive him to the lot in his rolls royce and insisting on having a lot pass and so on. He was said to be gay or possibly bisexual, having had a long-term relationship with a dancer, actor, and choreographer named Billy Daniel. Leisen died of heart disease in 1972 at the age of 74. He directed three episodes of The Twilight Zone: “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine,” “Escape Clause,” and “People Are Alike All Over.”
• Written by: Rod Serling
• Music by: Franz Waxman (he also provided the musical score for the film Sunset Boulevard), Leonid Raab remains an uncredited co-composer for this episode (his only contribution to the series)
• Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
• Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
• Film Editor: Bill Mosher
• Art Directors: George W. Davis and William Ferrari
• Assistant Director: Edward Denault
• Set Decorations: Henry Grace and Rudy Butler
• Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino
• Casting Director: Mildred Gusse
• Cast:
  • Ida Lupino…..Barbara Jean Trenton
    • Ida Lupino (1918-1995) was a British actress who had a lengthy career as a leading woman in Hollywood, both as an actress and a director. She is sometimes considered a pioneering feminist filmmaker. She acted in such films as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) and High Sierra (1941) among many others, and she was the first woman to direct a film noir The Hitch-Hiker in 1953 (no relation to The Twilight Zone episode of the same name). She was the only woman to star in an episode of The Twilight Zone and then later direct another episode (Season Five’s “The Masks”). Years later, cinematographer George T. Clemens remembered her as a fiercely dedicated director who “worked too hard.” She was the daughter of revue star and comedian Stanley Lupino and actress Connie Emerald. Lupino started her professional film career at the age of 15 working alongside her father in England in The Love Race (1931) before making her directorial debut years later on the film Not Wanted (1949) when director Elmer Clifton fell ill and Lupino took over the project. She was a polio survivor and married and divorced three times in her lifetime (including to fellow Twilight Zone star Howard Duff for 33 years). She had one daughter. She died of a stroke while undergoing treatment for colon cancer in Los Angeles in 1995 at the age of 77.
  • Martin Balsam…..Danny Weiss
    • Martin Balsam (1919-1996) was a prolific and instantly recognizable character actor known for his many roles in classic films like 12 Angry Men (1957), Psycho (1960), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Catch-22 (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and All the President’s Men (1976) among others –in addition to an uncredited role in On The Waterfront (1954). He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in A Thousand Clowns (1965). He played Dr. Arnold Gillespie in the one-hour episode of Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse episode “The Time Element” which served as an unofficial pilot for The Twilight Zone. Balsam appeared in two Twilight Zone episodes: “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” and “The New Exhibit.” He was married and divorced three times and had three children. He died of a stroke in his hotel room while vacationing in Rome in 1996 at the age of 76.
  • Jerome Cowan…..Jerry Hearndan, Barbie’s old friend
    • Jerome Cowan (1897-1972) was a stage, television, and film actor. He appeared in more than 100 films, but was perhaps best known for his roles in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947). He also appeared in several installments of the Blondie series as well as Deadline at Dawn (1946), June Bride (1948), and High Sierra (1941) also alongside Ida Lupino. He and his wife had two daughters. He died in 1972 at the age of 74.
  • Ted de Corsia…..Marty Sall, International studio executive
    • Edward Gildea De Corsia (1909-1979) was known for his roles as Sidney Broome in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947), an ex-wrestler murderer named Willie Garzah in the film The Naked City (1948), and as a gangster named Joseph Rico in The Enforcer (1951). He also appeared in television shows like The Lone Ranger, Have Gun – Will Travel, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Get Smart, and The Monkees. He played a New Sentry in an episode of The Outer Limits (“It Crawled Out of the Woodwork”). He was married twice and had two children. He died in 1973 at the age of 69.
  • Alice Frost…..Sally, the maid
    • Alice Frost (1910-1998) was an inaugural member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on radio and the stage before she turned to acting in film and television. In her radio days, she was known for her impeccable mimicry, and Orson Welles considered her one of his favorite actresses. For nearly ten years she played the role of Pamela North in the radio show Mr. and Mrs. North. She later appeared in television episodes of Gunsmoke, The Virginian, Bonanza, Wago and two episodes of The Twilight Zone (“The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” and “It’s A Good Life“). She died in 1998 in Naples, Florida at the age of 87.
  • John Clarke……Young Jerry Hearndan (uncredited)
    • John Clarke (1931-2019) is best known for portraying Mickey Horton on the NBC soap opera Days of Our Lives for 39 years, beginning with the debut of the program in 1965 until his retirement in 2004. He had one daughter, Melinda Clarke, who also became an actor and has appeared in shows like Days of Our Lives, The O.C., CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and others. John Clarke died in October 2019 from complications of pneumonia at the age of 88.

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The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• The title of this episode refers to a 16mm motion picture film reel, a semi-professional format for screenings used in homes, schools, and institutions.
• This is the first episode to feature a female lead character.
• Many consider this episode to be director Mitchell Leisen’s best, however Rod Serling publicly declared he thought this episode was a failure.
• Ida Lupino was paid $5,000 for this episode and she had a “favored nations” clause in her contract. She was known to be punctual and professional behind-the-scenes.
• Ida Lupino did not appear on camera again in the series, but she did work behind it, directing the Season 5 episode “The Masks.” She was the only woman to direct an episode of The Twilight Zone (original series).
• Martin Balsam is one of the few actors to appear in more than one series of The Twilight Zone.
• The score for this episode was completed by legendary German-American composer Franz Waxman. He had also provided the score to Sunset Boulevard (for which he won an Academy Award), a film which had a strong influence on this episode. Waxman’s music was also featured in classics like Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Rebecca (1940), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), Suspicion (1941), and Rear Window (1954). This was the only episode Waxman worked on for The Twilight Zone. Now an aging man, he was less in demand by this point (further buttressing themes in the episode) and he died in 1967.
• This episode draws upon the classic Award-winning film, Sunset Boulevard (1950).
• Rod Serling was apparently dissatisfied with this episode. He later remarked: “I don’t know where the hell I got this idea, but I wish I’d never gotten it.” He also received sour reviews of the episode at the time.
• In Barbara’s living room, the photo in the center of the lowest row is of Edward Arnold (1832-1904), an English poet and journalist. The photo of the young blond woman next to Edward Arnold’s picture is of actress Thelma Todd (1906-1935), also known as “The Ice Cream Blonde” and the “Hot Toddy,” a friend of Ida Lupino and her entertainer father. Thelma Todd died at age 29 in 1935 as a result of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in her garage. She had attended a party at the Lupino’s house the night prior. Her death was considered suspicious by many people, but it was ultimately ruled accidental.
• Barbara says she made three films together with her leading man Jerry Hearndan, two of which are: “A Farewell Without Tears” (1933) and “A Night in Paris” (1934).
• The grand staircase and banister in this episode also appears in future episodes – The Purple Testament, Elegy and Long Live Walter Jameson.
• The set used as Marty Soll’s office later appeared as Penell’s apartment in The Four of Us Are Dying.
• There is an amusing story of a ninth grader named Tom Brown of Towson, MD who wrote to Rod Serling in 1969 asking to perform this episode as a two-act play in his Dramatics Club. Rod replied granting permission and wishing him luck.

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