Wednesday, December 09, 2009

What Would Rod Serling Think Of This?

After I returned from my Trivia Night last night and posted the night's results, I turned on the TV shortly after 2 AM. I was still awake and not ready for bed yet so I decided to do a little channel surfing.

I found myself going through the Cinemax movie channels, and I saw one of their soft-core porn flicks had just ended and the credits were coming up. I have to admit I love watching those credits in movies like that, just to find the obviously phony names of the crew who are hiding their real names, as they obviously don't want their family or friends to know they are doing porn for a living.

Anyway, none of the names appeared to be phonies at first glance. I love some of the ones I have seen in the past, like "Phil Focus" (who was a cameraman in one I remember), "Rufus Leaking" and another of my all-time favorites, "Hugh Jorgen."

The movie was called "Cleavagefield," which is a porn takeoff of the strange sci-fi film of a few years back, "Cloverfield." (I also love those takeoff names, like "The Sopornos" and "Saving Ryan's Privates.") But one name jumped out at me in the credits: "Jeff Myrtlebank." I remembered that was a character in a famous "Twilight Zone" episode. Could there really be a guy with that name? I thought it might be just a coincidence.

Then seconds later I saw the name "Jesse Cardiff," which was Jack Klugman's character in "A Game of Pool." Then I saw "Gart Williams" which was the name of James Daly's character in one of my favorite TZ shows, "A Stop At Willoughby." Then I thought, holy cow, these guys are disguising themselves with the names of characters from "The Twilight Zone" episodes! As I looked further, I saw such names as "Henry Beamis," "Salvadore Ross," and many others. (Not everyone had TZ names, but there had to be 15-20 I recognized. I guess it's possible those names were just thrown into the credits as a compliment to the classic show also.)

I busted out laughing, and had to think that was a great idea, and I would bet very few people who saw the film and looked at the credits would have spotted it. (I checked with IMDB, but they don't list the names of the crew at their site for the film, so you'd have to see the film's credits after the film to see them.)

Hey, it's a lot more original than "Dick Hertz."

1 comment:

Suldog said...

Jesse Cardiff! I would have latched onto that one immediately. That's probably my favorite episode, with Klugman and Winters. My Dad's, too, as he was quite a good pool player (had his own cue, etc., and thought that playing at Ames, which he did while working for Eastern Air Lines in New York for a couple years, was like the Carnegie Hall concert of pool players.)