The Stone Cutter (1959)

Episode 34 of One Step Beyond · One Step Beyond: Dead Ringer · One Step Beyond: Father Image

John Newland, Gail Ingram · 1959 · 25 min

A gravestone cutter finds himself carving the date of death before the death. A single idea, held for twenty-six minutes, and it holds.

Chosen print: Archive.org item one-step-beyond — One Step Beyond THE STONE CUTTER S2E12.mp4, 93 MB · 25 min.

One torrent per episode, with the Archive.org item as a BEP 19 webseed alongside our seedbox and tracker. Not yet fetched, hashed or watched: the print report is completed when the file is downloaded and verified against Archive.org's published size and checksum.

Public domain: registered as published, never renewed. World Television Programming, Inc. registered this episode with the Copyright Office as a published motion picture, which is the fact that matters most — a series that was only broadcast and syndicated was never published, never needed renewing, and would still be protected today. The registration line reads: The stone cutter. © 8Dec59; LP15584.

No renewal was filed in the 28th year. The check is not a search for this episode's title, which can be spelled differently on the record than on air; it is a sweep of the Copyright Office's post-1978 records for the claimant's own filings, which returns exactly twelve renewals across the whole series and does not include this one. Underneath, the teleplay is original — no renewal surfaced under any credited writer — and Harry Lubin's theme returned no renewal under composer or title, so unlike most vintage television nothing survives in the music.