Games - The Bard

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	Games - The Bard

Cast

Synopsis

A bumbling screenwriter, Julius Moomer, is in desperate need of brilliant scripts so he conjures up the spirit of William Shakespeare by use of black magic. Shakespeare produces a riveting screenplay for the writer, but he is aghast at all the script rewrites caused by the sponsor, the sponsor’s wife and the leading man. Eventually Shakespeare becomes so angry that he punches the leading man and then storms out for good. Later, when Moomer gets his next assignment, a TV special on American history, he figures he will fail without Shakespeare... until he remembers his book on black magic and uses it to conjure up his new writing staff.

Trivia

An excerpt from Hal Erikson’s article “Censorship: Another Dimension Behind the Twilight Zone”, published in the October 1985 edition of The Twilight Zone Magazine: :When Serling wrote the 1963 opus “The Bard,” he did so with the express purpose of ribbing those overcautious ad executives who’d disallowed photographs of the Chrysler Building in programs sponsored by American Motors, or who’d removed the words “American” and “Lucky” from programs sponsored by the Liggett and Meyers tobacco company. In “The Bard,” William Shakespeare is reborn and enters the twentieth century TV-writers’ market, only to find that sponsorial demands have taken all the guts (or insides) out of his best works. Producer Herbert Hirschmann applauded Serling’s script, but suggested ever so discreetly that the character of Shakespeare’s sponsor (played by John McGiver) not be shown smoking a big black cigar, as Serling’s stage directions had required, “We might have a cigarette sponsor,” explained Hirschmann.

In the book _The Twilght Zone Companion_ Serling is quoted as saying that things were so bad with the overcautious ad executives that "one could not ford a river if Chevy was the sponcer."

Moomer's final writing staff is mostly compossed of famous people rather than famous writers a sad commentary on the way we treat our writers.

Themes

A parody of the network censorship that prompted Serling to create The Twilight Zone in the first place.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Bard (The Twilight Zone) ]

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