Bill Russo's video: One Step Beyond The Open Door: Season 2 Episode 7

A star-studded cast, a good plot, and a fascinating look at the 'village people' of Greenwich Village in the 1950s, make this one of the premiere episodes of OSB. A talented magazine illustrator, who yearns to be a ‘real’ artist, looks out his open window (it’s a hot New York summer night and there is no A.C.) and sees a distraught woman in the next building close her window and then put a towel under her door. She opens the oven, and prepares ‘to gas herself’. The artist, played by stage, film, and soap opera star Michael Higgins, dashes across the street to save the woman’s life. But when the disbelieving manager of the flop-house (an SRO building - single room occupancy), lets him in, he sees that the room is unoccupied. The next night, he views the same grim tableau, but this time his model sees it too! The cast includes 5’10” Louise Fletcher, (she plays the artist’s model) who 15 years later would make cinematic history – wining the Oscar for her portrayal of Nurse Rached in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest". One Step Beyond is an anthology series about the weird and unexplainable. It is sometimes compared to the Twilight Zone, which showed its first episode nine months after the debut of One Step Beyond. While the Twilight Zone was purely fictional, One Step Beyond claimed that its programs focused on actual people and events. Host John Newland, who also directed every episode, said that the stories were based on ‘human record’ – but he never explained exactly what that meant. The series was broadcast for three seasons by the ABC Television Network from January 1959 to July 1961 and later spent several years in syndicated showings.