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Obama Reach feat. Coloria

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Uploaded by on Apr 13, 2008

A collage of images put to the song "Reach" by Coloria......And now for something completely different
ITHACA, N.Y. - Submitted for your approval, finally.

More than a half-century after it was twice censored by network television, Rod Serling's story on the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till and his message about prejudice will finally be told the way Serling wanted.

The original stage script of Serling's "Noon on Doomsday" will be read Saturday at Ithaca College during a conference on Serling's life and legacy. The award-winning writer-creator of "The Twilight Zone" taught at Ithaca from 1967 until 1975, when he died.

"Serling seemed to struggle with network and sponsor censorship all his career but I believe his trying to tell the story of the Emmett Till case was the pinnacle of this battle," said Andrew Polak, the board president of the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation, a Binghamton-based nonprofit group that works to further Serling's legacy. "This will be the first time the story will be told as Rod intended."

Historians view Till's case as one of the catalysts of the civil rights movement. Till was a black 14-year-old from Chicago who whistled at a white woman while visiting relatives in Mississippi. The two men accused of kidnapping and brutally murdering Till were acquitted, though they later admitted to the crime.

Serling tried twice to dramatize Till's murder and the acquittal of his killers. In both cases, the writer met with sponsor censorship and network interference that diluted his final work, said researchers Tony Albarella and Amy E. Boyle Johnston.

"Serling was one of the first people to write about current events. He was taking a major front-page issue and showing the universal appeal of it and showing our own implications. Today that's a dime a dozen. But when Serling was doing it, that was shocking," said Johnston, who's working on a biography of Serling to be published in 2009.

By the time Till was lynched, Serling was one of the most celebrated writers of TV's Golden Age and already had written several socially conscious scripts, including "Patterns" (about corporate corruption) and "Requiem for a Heavyweight." Serling's Till story was initially accepted and approved by the producers of ABC's "The United States Steel Hour," for which he'd already written several well-received scripts.

But when it was reported that Serling was writing about the Till case, thousands of protests poured in, mostly from members of the White Citizens Council, a Southern white supremacist organization, said Johnston.

Serling produced three "Doomsday" scripts. The first two were for the stage, said Johnston. In the original, the victim was a college-aged black man. Serling's language and descriptions also were more coarse and idiomatic in the original version, she said.

When it ran on television in April 1956, "Noon on Doomsday" was so watered down as to be meaningless, Johnston said.

The location was changed to New England. The murdered Jew was transformed into an unnamed foreigner. The word "lynch" was excised from the script, as was anything deemed "too Southern" in connotation. The villain was softened to "just a good decent, American boy momentarily gone wrong," Johnston said.

Two years later, Serling tried again to examine the extreme consequences of prejudice enmeshed in Till's saga. His new effort was titled "A Town Has Turned to Dust," and he offered it to CBS for "Playhouse 90."

But CBS executives again eviscerated the script — changing the central character to a Mexican boy who falls in love from afar with a white shopkeeper's wife, said Albarella, who's working on the sixth book of a 10-book series about "The Twilight Zone" called "As Timeless As Infinity,"

Although it received critical acclaim, a dismayed Serling later said, "By the time 'A Town Has Turned to Dust' went before the cameras, my script had turned to dust."

But those experiences, said Polak, help lead Serling to another place — where he was free to explore the darkened human heart by use of allegory and within the context of fantasy: "The Twilight Zone,Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety

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Uploader Comments (ggullet)

  • US economy in collapse and people doing gay song movies... Please...

  • or criticizing people doing "gay song movies"

  • Ok i'm sorry dude you're video is good i just don't think obama is gonna fix america's problems.

    Didn't meant to be rude i apologize

  • accepted, thanks

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    This video made me want to puke...

    I'm gonna go take a nap.

  • you need 2, wake up!!!

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  • ignorance is bliss... keep drinking the juice

    what a load of shit

  • I am voting for a man who has one house over a guy who cannot remember how many houses he has.

  • Obama is versatile in his leader proficiency qualities vs McCain war vet vanity of myopic thinking...the same temperament that got us in this crisis through Bush. Obama have interacted with a vast walk of live vs McCain seclusive understanding to become empathetic to others. Obama cares about the less fortunate vs McCain vote down to increase simple wages for the poor. Obama can improve healthcare vs McCain good health discount for those whom already have sufficient insurance. Obama 08

  • McCain is an old redneck that does not know how to use a computer. He is the status quo and will lead the country in to more problems. He wants to stay in Iraq who will be the troops. I guess that 100 year war will need to start the draft agian so all american boys black and white can join the wr on terror.

  • Will McCain repair it. He is a decendent of Cain in the Bible wh destroye the good man able.

  • The republicans have already turned our economy over to the Chineese that are communist. They have created enemies in the middle east and are teaching theses people how to defeat us by staying in Iraq. Your Bush administration has destroyed the country.

  • Obama is not the answer except to give America to Communism?

  • Page 28 if I remember correctly. :)

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