I got an e-mail this weekend from someone asking about my Tales From the Darkside episode “Baker’s Dozen,” which originally aired on November 24, 1986. It’s the only one of my three episodes I haven’t already shared about here. There’s a reason for that. (You can find information about the other two, “Fear of Floating” and “My Ghost Writer the Vampire,” by clicking on the tag at the bottom of this entry.)

Prompted by that note, below is the video for “Baker’s Dozen,” since someone has already done the work of uploading the episode to YouTube in its entirety. But for anyone else who might be tempted to watch it, let me explain why I haven’t offered it here until now. Unfortunately, I found the final script spun from my treatment so offensive that I almost removed my name from the screen.

In my original treatment, I made no mention as to the races of any of the actors. But for some reason, in the final script, the baker’s assistant was transformed into a shiftless character along the lines of Stepin Fetchit and Mantan Moreland, and I was appalled. I didn’t want anyone to think I had come up with such a stereotypical caricature, so I haven’t talked about this episode much in the years since.

Maybe I’ll post my original treatment someday, so you’ll all be able to see the story I’d originally wanted to tell. But in the interests of completeness, and to fulfill the wishes of my recent correspondent, here’s “Baker’s Dozen.”

If you’re offended, too, don’t blame me. (more…)

Just after we finished eating dinner, the phone rang. Irene answered.

“It’s someone from the Writers Guild,” she said.

I picked up the phone, and heard a woman tell me, “We’re holding some residuals for you. We tried to send them to you, but they were returned by the post office.”

She asked for my new address, which I gladly gave her.

“How much are you trying to send me?” I asked. She rattled off three figures, which totaled $116.74.

This was money earned for work I did on Tales From the Darkside from 1984 through 1986.

It’s not a huge amount of money, but nothing to sneeze at either, and so I repeat—I just got paid for work I did more than twenty years ago.

Do you need any further evidence than that?

Since I’d mentioned earlier today that a short story of mine which had originally been published in Space and Time had been adapted into an episode of Tales From the Darkside, I figured I’d share it with you, even though it had been extremely loosely adapted and was painful for me to watch.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the original short story told the tale of a man for whom gravity did not work. It had what I felt was a bittersweet ending, sort of like the one in the “Time Enough at Last” episode of The Twilight Zone. (You know, the one in which Burgess Meredith starred as the guy who broke his glasses.) But by the time the script rewrites were done, the TV episode was awash in buckets of blood.

Seeing my name on the screen was fun. Seeing what came after … not so much. But since you couldn’t possibly be as close to the source material as I was, the disparity might not bother you. (more…)