13 Planet Of The Apes Facts That Will Blow Your Mind

11. It Took A Twilight Zone Writer To Adapt It

When producer Arthur P. Jacobs acquired La Planete Des Singes as a literary property, he commissioned Rod Serling, the host and sometime screenwriter of the classic Twilight Zone TV series (1959-63) to adapt it into a screenplay. So began a process of turning a piece of often whimsical satire into harder-edged Hollywood fare. Budgetary restrictions led Serling and later co-writer Michael Wilson (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962) to ingeniously exchange Boulle's modern city for the primitive Ape City, based on the Catalan architecture of Gaudi. Most of all, Serling brought his own urgent style of pulp philosophy. Take a look at the first season of The Twilight Zone, particularly a story called 'I Shot An Arrow Into The Air'. In it, a small crew of astronauts crash-lands in a desert on an unknown planet. One of them, Corey, is untrustworthy and murderous, killing two of his comrades. After murdering his captain, he clambers up a sandy ridge - to find he's in Reno, Nevada: "Oh my dear God€ We never left earth. That's why nobody tracked us€ we just crashed back into it." Anyone familiar with the classicPlanet of the Apes ending will find a chilly echo here.