copyright 1999 Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin

A producer and film crew from the E! Entertainment cable channel will be in Binghamton Monday to shoot footage and interview friends of the late TV playwright Rod Serling, who spent his youth in Binghamton.

The E! documentary, which has no air date yet, is the second film tracing Serling's life and career.

In 1995, pubic television station WNET in New York made a documentary for its American Masters series.

While here, the film crew is expected to tape scenes at Binghamton High School, where he graduated in 1944, the West Side's Recreation Park, which he used as a setting in a Twilight Zone episode; and The Forum theater, which has a Serling exhibit in the lobby.

Although he did not return to live in Binghamton after World War II, in which he served in the paratroopers, he often came back to visit old friends and speak at his old high school (which has a plaque in front in his honor), and make speeches at Broome Community College and Harpur College, later the State University of New York at Binghamton. At the time of his death at 51, in 1975, he was living and teaching in Ithaca.

His was the first bronze star to be placed in Binghamton's Walk of Fame at the entrance of the Metrocenter on Court Street.

Andrew M. Polak of the Rod Serling Foundation said he is setting up interviews for the Hollywood producers will, Serling's high school teacher, Helen Foley and two school friends, Robert Keller and Sybil Goldenberg, all of Binghamton.

Best known for creating and writing Twilight Zone, Serling wrote the plays Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, during what has been termed the "golden age" of television in the 1950s and wrote the screenplays for the motion pictures Seven Days in May and Planet of the Apes.