"Long Distance Call" is episode 58 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on March 31, 1961, on CBS. In the episode, a 5-year-old boy named Billy communicates with his dead grandmother using a toy telephone that she gave him on his birthday. It was one of the six episodes of the second season which was shot on videotape in a short-lived experiment aimed to cut costs. "Long Distance Call" was the last of these six episodes to be aired.
The episode originated as a spec script by Maxwell Sanford entitled "Party Line" that was submitted to the producers via Sanford's friend, Richard Matheson (who in 1953 had written an unrelated short story titled "Long Distance Call," about a woman who receives mysterious telephone calls from a cemetery). Charles Beaumont offered to undertake revisions and ended up taking a joint credit on-screen with Bill Idelson instead. Sanford, (full name Maxwell Sanford Miller) was also an entertainment attorney and he successfully contested the credit through the Writers Guild. Thereafter the writing credit was changed on some prints in strip syndication to Maxwell Sanford. According to Martin Grams Jr in his book on the series, the episode was subject to at least two separate plagiarism claims regarding the authorship.
See also
- List of The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) episodes
References
- DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media.
- Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing.