I grew up watching the Twlight Zone and thought Serling was a genius. One of the things I didn't know however, until years later was that he regularly bought stories from anyone with a good idea. I guess things were different back then and people were less litigation-happy, though I do recall that in a few cases things got messy and the show was sued. But I always thought that M. Night Shyamalan could have learned something from Serling, seeing as they swim in the same speculative sci-fi waters. I feel like after the success of the twists of Sixth Sense and Unreakable, when he was running out of good ones, that he should have just started churning through unsolicited ideas, and buying outright the ones he liked. Now, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what kind of hoops you'd have to put in place so that you didn't get sued out of existence, but he shoulda just done that rather than try to recapture a former glory with his subsequent flaccid attempts.

He has always been one of my heroes - thanks for posting these.

I think it would be practically impossible for someone like M. Night to just start buying other's ideas for the simple fact that the Hollywood system of today is an intentional world class ego inflater. I'm sure so much smoke was blown up his rear over the brilliant twists in 6th Sense that he felt the need to keep one-upping himself in order to please the buyers, stay interesting and maintain the mystery his work. He became a stand alone brand. That was his curse. Truth is he just wrote one very good script and accidentally found the hook on accident. I remember reading somewhere where he says something to that effect.