'Star Trek,' 'Twilight Zone' and 'Ocean's 11' Writer Had A Rough Childhood In Cheyenne

Mr. George Clayton Johnson. Storyteller. A middle school dropout who escaped lonely life in a cold, barren little town only to become one of the most imaginative minds of Tinseltown.

He was inspired by visionaries and inspired others to become visionaries. He traveled the world and led countless millions to new worlds. But the irony is that Mr. Johnston never returned to a place that he never left, and the elation he evoked in so many others came from a determination to overcome the depths of lonely desperation in the Cowboy State.

The author of “Ocean’s 11.” One of the most revered and provocative storytellers of “The Twilight Zone.” The screenwriter who introduced the world to “Star Trek.”

Any of those accolades would cement a Hollywood screenwriter's reputation for many lifetimes. George Clayton Johnson did it all before he was 40, and his impact on screenwriting continues today.

“George's writings remind us of what the medium (of film and television) is capable of at its best,” said author, screenwriter, and producer Marc Zicree. “He gave us the watermark to aspire to. George was one step away from homelessness as a kid, and the fact that he could then become one of the greatest writers who ever worked in television is a testament to his talent and his determination.”

Johnson’s life story is just as captivating as any of his stories. But every story has a beginning, and Johnson’s started with a difficult upbringing in Wyoming.

Paying It Forward

Zicree has countless film and TV writing credits of his own in Hollywood. He’s also the author of “The Twilight Zone Companion,” a comprehensive history and analysis of all 156 episodes which he started as a 22-year-old fan of the series. 

George Clayton Johnson was more than an inspiration to Zicree – he was a mentor, supporter, and friend.

“George was central to ‘The Twilight Zone Companion’ coming into existence,” Zicree told Cowboy State Daily. “I was 16 when I met George at a science fiction convention. He was the first interview I did for the book, connected me with other people he knew who worked on the show, and even offered to co-author it with me. He was always outgoing and supportive.”

Zicree formed a close bond with Johnson, who was serving as an elder statesman among Hollywood’s creative minds. He described Johnson as “incredibly supportive and encouraging.”

“There's a tradition in science fiction that we mentor the next generation coming up,” he said. “George had been mentored by some of the greatest writers in science fiction, like Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont. He had been a beneficiary of this, and I was too, via George and the other writers who then went on to mentor me.”

By the time Zicree started writing "The Twilight Zone Companion" in 1982, Johnson’s greatest creative achievements were behind him. He wasn’t writing with the same success and fervor as he found in the 1960s but he remained a highly respected figure who “really loved being George Clayton Johnson.”

“He was not a shrinking violet,” Zicree said. “When he came into a room, with his electric-colored clothing and long white hair and beard, you noticed him. He was definitely the center of attention wherever he went.”

One can’t fault Johnson for resting on his laurels. He made significant contributions to some of the highest-regarded franchises in Hollywood history. But Johnson’s Hollywood life, with his eccentric apparel and marijuana, belies his origins as a born-and-raised Wyomingite. That, Zicree believes, might have been by design.

“I think George very much felt like an alien who had to put up a facade to blend in,” he said. “He was on his own from an early age, and was always interested in the idea of disguise, hiding who you are, to survive in the world.”

A Cold, Barren Little Town

George Johnson was "born in a barn outside Cheyenne" on July 10, 1929. He had a very rough childhood, being shuffled between relatives after his parents’ divorce left him with an unstable, alcoholic mother.

In “The Twilight Zone Companion,” Johnson told a story of how he broke his leg when he was seven years old. He was hospitalized for almost a year, and his mother visited him once a week.

“I kept telling her to bring me pulp magazines, but she couldn’t understand what I meant,” he said. “I kept trying to tell her it was a big, fat, thick book with a lot of stories in it, fantasy stories, but she never brought them for me. So I stayed in this place, and about the only thing I had to do was to daydream, to reverie, to sleep. So I did that.”

Johnson flunked sixth grade, dropped out of school entirely by eighth grade, and spent a year in a state orphanage in Casper when his mother lost custody of him. She regained custody, but when his mother “started up her old tricks again,” he was determined to leave home and find something better.

“When she was drinking, my mother didn’t see disorder or dirt,” he said, “and little elements like was there any way of building a fire or was there any food in the house didn’t seem to bother her too much, she went away without worrying about that. So I asked her if I could leave. Finally, she said okay.”

At age 16, Johnson was on his own. He briefly worked at a Casper shoe-shining parlor but, feeling the desperation and hopelessness of his circumstances, decided to leave Wyoming behind.

“This was no kind of life,” he said. “It depended entirely on strangers giving me quarters, and (Casper) was a cold, barren little town.”

Zicree said Johnson never shied away from discussing the difficulties of his childhood in Wyoming. With that knowledge and understanding, he can easily see how his early experiences influenced his creative endeavors.

“His childhood in Wyoming influenced his work to a great extent,” he said.

A Big Score

After brief stints as a telegrapher in the U.S. Army, an architectural draftsman, and a college student at what would become Auburn University, Johnson made his first attempt at creative writing.

Johnson spent 1956 and 1957 writing a 40,000-word novel about a high-stakes heist in Las Vegas. With input from a friend and former paratrooper, Jack Russell, he decided to turn his novel into a screenplay.

The script he wrote became the basis of the 1960 film “Ocean’s 11,” which famously starred Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and the rest of the Rat Pack.

The 1960 “Ocean’s 11” became the basis of the 2001 remake starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Johnson has story credits on both films and every subsequent film in the Ocean’s franchise.

Encouraged, Johnson kept going. He wrote a story that appeared on Alfred Hitchcock Presents as “I’ll Take Care of You,” and published stories in magazines like Playboy.

Then, Johnson fell into the orbit of some of Hollywood’s biggest and best writers: the Southern California School of Writers, which included titans of television like Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson.

“They were extremely young, ambitious, and creatively competitive, but in a very good way,” Zicree said. “They sparked off each other. George was strongly influenced by Bradbury, but he was mentored by all of them.”

This screenwriting circle facilitated Johnson’s entry through the door unlocked with the key of imagination. Beyond it was another dimension of sound, sight, and mind. Of shadow and substance, of things and ideas.

Stepping Into ‘The Twilight Zone’

Johnson was trying to make his break as a Hollywood writer while supporting his young family when he sold his first story, “The Four of Us Are Dying,” to Rod Serling, the creator of “The Twilight Zone.”

An agent changed the title to “Rubberface” before sending it to Serling, who bought the story but wrote a teleplay that built the premise around a new story. That was an achievement, but not enough to garner the full esteem of the rarefied writers on “The Twilight Zone.”

“Charles Beaumont challenged him and said, ‘Unless you can prove that you can write as well or better than we can, we’re not going to listen to your opinions anymore.’ That put George's feet to the fire, and he rose to the challenge. And thank God for that.”

Johnson ultimately contributed to eight episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Four were stories adapted by others, while the other four were teleplays — ideas and scripts entirely written by Johnson.

“They would either buy ideas, storylines, or published short stories that Serling and others would adapt into teleplays, or buy a full script that they would shoot,” Zicree said. “The great thing about the best television is you can write one script for one show, and that can put you on the map forever. Writing an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ would be a hell of a credit to have.”

Zicree considers Johnson’s “story by” credits the lesser of his “Twilight Zone” contributions. One of them, “Ninety Years Without Slumbering,” was produced three years after Johnson wrote it and altered to such a degree that he was credited as “Johnson Smith” to distance himself from the “trivial” nature of the rewrite.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s teleplays, which he had complete creative control over, are more than his best “Twilight Zone” episodes. Zicree considers them among the best stories ever told on television.

• In 1961’s “A Penny For Your Thoughts,” a modest banker (played by Dick York of Bewitched fame) gains the ability to read minds after a coin he tosses lands on edge. He uses his new power to get a promotion, get the girl, and foil a bank robbery.

• In 1961’s “A Game of Pool,” Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters spend a night in a billiard hall in a life-and-death stakes competition to see who will go down as “the best.” (The episode aired with an alternate ending that Johnson wrote but didn’t enjoy as much as his original, bleaker ending where Klugman’s character is doomed to desperate obscurity “as all second raters die: you'll be buried and forgotten without me touching you.”)

• In 1962’s “Nothing in the Dark,” an isolated old woman trying to protect herself from death breaks her solitude to help an injured police officer, only to find she’s been tricked by the calm voice and handsome empathy of a 26-year-old Robert Redford.

• In 1962’s “Kick the Can,” a group of elderly friends confined to a rest home try to and (in true Twilight Zone fashion) successfully return to their youth by playing their favorite childhood game. This story would later be included as one of the segments in 1983's "The Twilight Zone: The Movie," directed by Steven Spielberg. 

The Best That’s Been Written

For Zicree, Johnson’s teleplay episodes show he could go “toe-to-toe” with Serling, Beaumont and the other “Twilight Zone” writers. They were eager to make more episodes from his stories but were rebuffed by a streak of independence Johnson maintained throughout his career.

“I was interviewing Buck Houghton, the producer of ‘The Twilight Zone,’ and he said it'd be great to have had more scripts from George Clayton Johnson, but that wasn't within his capacity,” Zicree said. “You would be grateful for what you did get. He wanted to do things himself and wanted to write teleplays for his stories."

Zicree highlighted the themes of Johnson's stories: isolation, struggle, survival, competition, ways to win, youth, and old age. He referred to his “Twilight Zone” scripts as “jewels” of the series and easily among the best of his career.

“His teleplay for ‘Kick the Can,’ which faces the issues of aging, life, death, facing these issues, and how to hold on to your youth with old age, is possibly the greatest thing ever written on that subject,” Zicree said. “And he wrote all of these teleplays in his late twenties.”

As to their legacy, IMDB ranks “Nothing in the Dark” as the seventh-best episode of the entire series, and Redford was told it was the most rewatched “Twilight Zone” episode, probably for his comforting portrayal of death and Johnson's words spoken in his soothing voice.

“You see? No shock. No engulfment. No tearing asunder,” Redford says. “What you feared would come as an explosion . . . is a whisper. What you thought was the end is the beginning.”

Johnson shared his own ethos on storytelling with Zicree, which he published in "The Twilight Zone Companion."

“For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise it's foolishness,” he said. “Ultimately, it must be about human beings, it must be about the human condition, it must be another look at infinity, it must be another way of seeing the paradox of existence.”

Johnson spent a short but meaningful moment in “The Twilight Zone” that cemented his position as one of the best writers on the show. He stepped out of that dimension, only to boldly go where no Hollywood writer had been before.

The First Trek

On Sept. 8, 1966, “The Man Trap,” the first episode of the original “Star Trek” series ever aired, premiered on NBC. George Clayton Johnson wrote the teleplay for that episode.

Johnson was hired at the recommendation of “Star Trek” story producer John D. F. Black. Although it was the sixth episode of the show filmed, it was deliberately chosen to be the first episode of the series to air, thus becoming the world’s introduction to “Star Trek.”

“I was 10 years old when that episode aired, and I was blown away by it,” Zicree said.

In “The Man Trap,” the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise battles a shape-shifting alien, played by Jeanne Bal, that kills its victims by extracting the salt in their bodies (giving Johnson the honor of the first “red shirt” death of the series). Spock’s resilience to the alien gives the Enterprise crew an edge, and Doctor McCoy fires the fatal phaser that kills the lovely but lethal threat. 

The horror element of the “salt monster” in Johnson's script convinced NBC’s executives to choose “The Man Trap” as the series’ first episode. Star Trek was a success right out of the gate, in no small part because of Johnson’s story and how it introduced the characters that would soon become icons.

However, this enormous contribution to “Star Trek” was Johnson’s only contribution to “Star Trek.”

According to the 2013 book “These are the Voyages: TOS, Season One,” Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry rewrote Johnson’s teleplay because he felt his story didn’t match the overall vision for his show. Among other issues, Johnson allegedly said he didn’t like Spock as a character, even though he’d become the series’ most iconic character.

Nevertheless, Black went on record saying that he believed Johnson’s script was superior to the final teleplay, and Johnson considered the rewrite of his script “a downgrade.” Still, he was pleased with the final episode, and Johnson and Roddenberry tried to collaborate on future episodes that never came to be.

Zicree believes Johnson was sought out by the “Star Trek” team not only because he was an extremely talented screenwriter. His creative ethos, evident in his contributions to “The Twilight Zone,” was perfectly aligned with the optimistic spirit Roddenberry wanted to evoke with his saga of peace, diversity, and courage for the future of humanity.

“The people who created and worked on ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘Star Trek’ were not cynics, pessimists, or fatalists. They were optimists,” he said. “They were realists — they saw the world for what it was — but they had the courage to say that the power of love can change the world as much as the power of hate. But it's incumbent on us to put our compassion into action. That's a message as relevant now as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, if not more so.”

Johnson made one noteworthy contribution to the teleplay, which Roddenberry was captivated enough to keep. It could be the most direct reference Johnson ever made to Wyoming.

In “The Man Trap,” the murderous alien has taken on the appearance of Nancy Crater, the wife of Professor Robert Crater. Despite the alien killing his wife, the professor continued to feed it because it was the last remnant of an extinct civilization.

Crater compares the alien to the “now-extinct buffalo,” a story element Johnson added as a parallel to the near-extinction of the American bison. As the first episode of “Star Trek” ends, Captain James T. Kirk has a contemplative moment in the Captain’s Chair.

“Something wrong, Captain?” says Mr. Spock.

“I was thinking about the buffalo, Mr. Spock,” Kirk replies.

Being George Clayton Johnson

“Ocean’s 11,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Star Trek” — Johnson’s career was far from over by 1966, but his storytelling output significantly declined and never reached the same heights.

Johnson’s most significant work post-“Star Trek” was “Logan’s Run,” a 1967 novel he wrote with friend and fellow science-fiction author William F. Nolan. It told the story of a dystopian future of 2116, where population growth is kept in check by killing anyone who reaches the age of 21.

“Logan’s Run” was adapted into a feature film in 1976, produced by MGM and starring Michael York, Farrah Fawcett and Peter Ustinov. Johnson and Miller received a story credit, while David Zelag Goodman wrote the screenplay.

In that classic sci-fi movie based on the novel, the age people were terminated at was changed to age 30.

“That was around the time when I first met him,” Zicree said. “I was meeting and interviewing him when the movie came out. A whole wall outside MGM was covered by a poster of ‘Logan's Run’ with his name in one-foot-tall letters. I took a photo of George standing by his name outside MGM.”

The film received mixed reviews.

Robert Ebert gave it three stars for being “a vast silly extravaganza ... that delivers a certain amount of fun,” while his future partner Gene Siskel felt it was “an artistic con job from beginning to end" and gave it zero stars.

Johnson wasn’t producing many new stories by 1976. He tried developing a sequel to “Logan’s Run” called “Jessica’s Run,” but it was never published, and most of his newly published works were collections of his old stories.

Zicree has a theory of what might have contributed to Johnson’s drop-off. He can’t prove it, but he finds the timing of a significant switch in Johnson’s life a little too coincidental.

“If you look at photos of him from The Twilight Zone era, he's wearing a suit and tie with short hair,” he said. “He looks like a very strait-laced kind of guy, but the story goes that he was a chain smoker back then. When the Surgeon General's report on tobacco came out, George switched to marijuana and became the world's oldest hippie.”

Johnson was a vocal advocate for marijuana legalization, and Zicree thinks his switch from cigarettes to cannabis might have done more than transform his appearance. However, he also believes that Johnson might have contented himself with the accomplishments of his early years in Hollywood.

“When he was at his peak, George was one of the greatest writers to ever work in television,” he said. “But I also think that sometimes lightning strikes, and you ride it as long as you can. Just because you have a great career at one point doesn't mean it'll always be there, but George certainly was George Clayton Johnson until the day he died.”

Nothing In The Dark

George Clayton Johnson died Dec. 25, 2015, at 86. He was survived by his wife of 63 years, Lola, and his children, Pat and Judy.

Akin to the character he wrote in “The Four of Us Are Dying,” Johnson had a transformation of his own. When he arrived in Hollywood, he became and remained George Clayton Johnson.

“He came up with ‘Clayton’ because it had more heft than simply being ‘George Johnson,’ Zicree said.

One could argue that George Johnson never left Wyoming. Johnson never set a story in the Cowboy State, but Zicree said his experiences there never left him and were extremely influential on the stories he told.

“There's great truth in his writing, and that's why it's lasted,” he said. “His stories are so meaningful. When you look at ‘Nothing in the Dark,’ about this totally isolated woman living in an apartment to avoid death, you have that sense of isolation and struggle. But a theme that runs through George’s work is that you have to reach out, not be afraid, and trust death.”

In “Kick the Can,” Charles Whitley has to convince his elderly friends to join him in the game, but his best friend Ben Conroy refuses, thinking it’s a foolish and futile endeavor. When the magic works, and Charles and the others become young again, Ben is left old and alone, cradling the can he refused to kick.

Zicree believes Johnson’s formative years were extremely influential on his creative works, particularly in his work on The Twilight Zone. “Nothing in the Dark” and “Kick the Can” are reflections of George’s own story — embracing life, forging your way, and accepting the harsh realities of the world while refusing to let them isolate and rob you of your life’s joys and happiness.

“There's a real bittersweet quality to George's work, but there's also a great sensitivity and understanding of humanity,” he said. “He was on his own from early on, which left an impact.”

Johnson’s stories show how people accept or reject these themes and how these decisions determine their fates. Johnson had a rough start in Wyoming, but he never let it deprive him of the life he wanted, found, and maintained.

Zicree also noted that Johnson ensured his family was loved and supported until his dying day -something he never felt he had as a lonely, imaginative child in Wyoming. In that sense, and many others, the best and most empowering stories he created were those he knew would outlast him.

“There's no one else like George,” he said. “His work is totally distinct.”

Mr. George Clayton Johnson. A lonely boy who escaped a sad story, only to discover that the words he needed to lead others into unknown dimensions and unexplored star systems could only be found by revisiting the story of struggle, success, and genuine human emotion told to no one but himself ... in the Cowboy State.

Contact Andrew Rossi at arossi@coboystatedaily.com

Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.