Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room
episode of The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series)
"Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" is episode 39 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone. It originally aired on October 14, 1960, on CBS.
According to the book The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic by Martin Grams, Serling wrote the teleplay in response to a request from CBS to write scripts using as few actors as possible for budgetary purposes. This episode was produced $5,000 under budget.
Opening narration
This is Mr. Jackie Rhoades, age thirty-four, and where some men leave a mark of their lives as a record of their fragmentary existence on Earth, this man leaves a blot, a dirty, discolored blemish to document a cheap and undistinguished sojourn amongst his betters. What you're about to watch in this room is a strange mortal combat between a man and himself, for in just a moment, Mr. Jackie Rhoades, whose life has been given over to fighting adversaries, will find his most formidable opponent in a cheap hotel room that is in reality the outskirts of The Twilight Zone.
Plot
An insecure, unsuccessful gangster named Jackie Rhoades waits in a cheap hotel room for instructions from his boss, George. George gives Jackie a gun and orders him to shoot a barkeeper who has refused to pay for protection. Jackie begs to be given another job, but George flatly refuses, roughs Jackie up, and leaves.
“Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” enters the record as episode of The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nervous, Four and Dollar can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2860817. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.