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SCHNEE, THELMA (Thelma Moss 1918–1997). American writer and actress.
Acted in: "The Devil in Glencairn" (1951), episode of Lights
Out.
Co-produced with Paul Finder Moss: Ant City
(documentary short) (1950).
This intelligent woman graduated from Carnegie Tech and made
her way to New York, where she garnered some Broadway credits as an actress and
writer during the 1940s. At some point, she met and married a Hollywood
producer, Paul Finder Moss, who brought her to Hollywood and undoubtedly helped
her find occasional work in the film industry. As an actress, she can be
observed playing a maid in the Lights Out episode "The Devil in
Glencairn," employing a reasonably good faux Scottish accent and appropriately
displaying fear in the face of Jonathan HARRIS's theatrically threatening
Satan; but she was neither beautiful nor remarkably talented and wisely chose
to focus on writing. Working directly with her husband, she co-produced a short
documentary, Ant City, offering close-up views of the insects while the
narrator likens their behavior to human activities, and she wrote the
screenplay to a Moss-produced adaptation of the Father Brown stories, The
Detective (1954).
Schnee's life abruptly changed in 1954, when her husband
suddenly died—due either to cancer or botched ulcer surgery
(reports vary)—leaving her a single mother with two small children to raise. The deeply
depressed woman twice attempted suicide but still accepted a few writing
assignments, including a 1959 episode of Adventures in Paradise and two
characteristically slow-moving episodes of Science Fiction Theatre: "The
Negative Man," based on an Ivan TORS
story, about a man who develops heightened sensory powers after a jolt of
negative electricity, and "The Throwback," about a man who seems destined to
die in the same sort of accident that killed his distant ancestor, though a
scientist's research enables him to escape that fate. She is most noted,
though, for writing the screenplay for Eugene
LOURIE's extraordinary The
Colossus of New York. If that film seems unusually personal and emotional,
it is surely in part because it was written by a woman who was in precisely the
same situation as its female protagonist, a widow who had lost her husband at a
young age and was left alone to raise a son. True, unlike Mala POWERS'
character, Schnee did not have to deal with a misguided effort to resurrect her
husband by placing his brain inside a robotic body, but Powers' responses to
her previously warm but now cold companion may reflect Schnee's sense that a
business she had once felt comfortable in now felt far less inviting.
Endeavoring to escape her depression, Schnee ingested LSD as
a participant in experimental therapy and wrote a book about her experiences, My
Self and I (1962), using the pseudonym Constance A. Newland. Then, she may
have recalled the conclusion of "The Negative Man": having lost his improved
senses, the hero resolved to go back to college so he could further research
the mysteries of the human mind. And Schnee, now calling herself Thelma Moss,
did exactly the same thing, eventually earning a Ph.D. from the Psychology
Department of the University of California, Los Angeles, where she also was
given a position as a full-time professor. Further, while heading a facility dedicated
to parapsychology, she chose to specialize in studying the very stuff of
science fiction—psychic powers, ghosts, and astral projections recorded by
Kirlian photography. Perhaps these investigations into occult matters
represented her effort to reconnect with her late husband, though unlike the
heroes of science fiction, she never achieved definitive proof of these
phenomena, and while she was a well-respected researcher in the 1970s, her area
of expertise is now relegated to the status of pseudoscience. Yet she still
commands attention because she effectively gave up writing science fiction in
order to prove that science fiction was true.
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