Twilight Zone Companion (24 page)

Considering his background, its remarkable that George Clayton Johnson was able to emerge as a writer at all, and absolutely astounding that he was able to produce works of such sensitivity and merit. Johnson was born in a barn outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, on July 10, 1929. At the time, his father was in the Army but later worked as an occasional day laborer and small-time bootlegger. When Johnson was young, his parents were divorced. He and his older brother were left in the care of their alcoholic mother, but because of her drinking Johnson was shuttled between aunts and cousins who treated him as a sort of charity case, wearing hand-me- downs and receiving little affection.

When he was seven, Johnson was hospitalized for nearly a year as the result of a broken leg. It was an isolated, lonely existence with no one to talk to and precious little to do. Once a week, his mother would visit.

I kept telling her to get me pulp magazines, he recalls, but she couldnt understand what I meant. 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 bought 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.

After his hospital stay, Johnson returned to school, but having missed the second grade he was hopelessly behind. Succeeding years only made things worse. He flunked the sixth grade and dropped out of school entirely in the eighth. At fourteen, the courts took him away from his mother and placed him in the state orphanage in Casper. After a year, his mother was able to convince the courts to return custody 10 her. But things did not go well.

We went back to Cheyenne, my mother and I, Johnson remembers, and she started up her old tricks again, she started drinking. When she was drinking, my mother just didnt seem to see disorder or dirt, and little elements like was there any way of building a fire or was there any food in the house just didnt 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.

So before he was sixteen Johnson was on his own. In Casper he got work in a shoeshine parlor, but very quickly, he felt the limitations of his situation. This was no kind of life. It depended entirely upon strangers giving me quarters, and it was also a cold, barren little town.

At seventeen, he enlisted in the Army and almost immediately realized that it was a mistake. But in the Army he did learn drafting, which enabled him to make a living afterwards. Upon his discharge, he came to California, got married, had a son and a daughter, and worked designing houses and doing architectural renderings. By this time, however, he had decided that he wanted to be a writer. He closed his drafting office and began to associate with Beaumont and his circle of writer friends. For five long, lean years, Johnson struggled to make his first sale. Finally, he sold All of Us Are Dying, then Execution. But those were stories; Johnson had never sold a teleplay. The year was 1960, and the script that changed all that was A Penny For Your Thoughts.

Johnson recalls that the impetus to write the script came from his friends. We had a practice of going out in a car and shmoozing while we just drove interminably out along the beach and here and there. And I was having some very strong opinions about science fiction and about stories and about what was art, and John Tomerlin [later to work with Beaumont on Number Twelve Looks Just Like You] was writing the Lawmanseries and Beaumont was writing The Twilight Zone and Naked City and Have Gun Will Travel and a couple of things like that, and I was writing nothing, except those two short stories which I had sold. So Chuck said to me, George, you ought to put your money where your mouth is. Its one thing for you to have all these opinions about whats good and whats bad and to put us down in various ways, but then youve got to prove that you can do it better or else we cant take you seriously. So I decided then that nothing would stop me from finishing the work I was doing, which was A Penny For Your Thoughts.

Because of Beaumonts rebuke, Johnson was determined to make good, and when Buck Houghton offered to buy the story rights to A Penny For Your Thoughts, Johnson was adamant that he be allowed to take the story through at least a first draft teleplay himself. It took Houghton a week and a half to agree, but it was a decision he never regretted.

Johnson sums up his approach to fantasy in this way: For me, fantasy must be about something, otherwise its foolishness. If its not about something then its just oddballsville for oddballsvilles sake. If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting. The game must be like a game of chess, it must have restrictions set on it. A man with one miraculous talent but not two. A man with one miraculous talent, howeverthere are certain kinds of imposed rules on how that works and what it must be about, and 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.

A PENNY FOR YOUR THOUGHTS (2/3/61)

Written by George Clayton Johnson

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: James Sheldon

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast:

Hector B. Poole: Dick York Miss Turner: June Dayton Mr. Bagby: Dan Tobin Mr. Smithers: Cyril Delevanti Mr. Sykes: Hayden Rorke Mr. Brand: Harry Jackson Driver: Frank London Newsboy: Anthony Ray

Mr. Hector B. Poole, resident of the Twilight Zone. Flip a coin and keep flipping it. What are the odds? Half the time it will come up heads, half the time tails. But in one freakish chance in a million, it’ll land on its edge. Mr. Hector B. Poole, a bright human coinon his way to the bank .

After paying for his morning paper with a coin that lands on edge, mild bank clerk Hector Poole finds he has the power to read peoples minds but it gives him nothing but trouble. His revelation that Sykes, a businessman applying for a sizeable loan, intends to bet it on the horses in a desperate attempt to repay embezzled funds results in the man storming out of the bankan act that greatly displeases Bagby, Pooles boss. Then Poole overhears Smithers, an old and trusted bank employee, thinking about going into the vault, filling his briefcase with money, and escaping to Bermuda. Poole tells Bagby, who searches Smithers briefcase and finds travel folders, a sandwich, and a pair of socks. Smithers thoughts were no more than a recurring daydream. Poole is fired. Miss Turner, a fellow-employee who has a crush on Poole, tries to console him, but she doesnt know what to think of his claim that hes telepathic. Just then, Bagby rushes up. Sykes has been arrested Poole was right. He offers Poole his old job. Miss Turner sends Poole the thought that he should press for a promotion. Using information hes gained telepathically about Bagbys weekend plans with his mistress, he blackmails Bagby into making him an office manager and giving Smithers a free trip to Bermuda. Leaving with Miss Turner, Poole buys an evening paper from his usual newsstand, where the newsboy has been keeping his earlier miracle-coin standing on edge all day. But the coin Poole now tosses knocks over the other and his telepathic powers are gone.

One time in a million, a coin will land on its edge, but all it takes to knock it over is a vagrant breeze, a vibration or a slight blow. Hector B. Poole, a human coin, on edge for a brief time in the Twilight Zone.

The first of George Clayton Johnsons four Twilight Zone scripts was his lightest, but the easy tone doesnt detract from it. The episode is charming and funny, and it does have a point: that people do things without thinking about them and think things without having the slightest intention of doing them. Or rather, that telepathy isnt all its cracked up to be.

The humor in this piece is precarious, requiring just enough exaggeration to be funny but not so much as to seem ridiculous. Fortunately, both the acting and direction were up to the task. Dick York (pr^-Bewitched), June Dayton, Dan Tobin and the utterly delightful Cyril Delevanti all perform their roles with just the proper sense of self-satire.

This was the first of six episodes directed by James Sheldon. Beyond guiding the episode, Sheldon also conceived two funny bits of business. In the first, Hector Poole overhears some sympathetic thoughts about himself and at first believes them to be coming from a bust of George Washingtonwhen theyre actually from Miss Turner. In the second, Poole, deliberately eavesdropping on the thoughts of the banks customers, idly strolls up to a woman who is smiling blissfully and holding a stack of moneyonly to find that shes thinking absolutely nothing.

On the set during the filming were George Clayton Johnson and his wife Lola. He recalls that the reaction to his story was very favorable. Dan Tobin said that it was a darn clever idea. He thought that it would make a series, of what would happen to people who came into contact with that coin. So I wrote a presentation called A Penny For Your Thoughts, and I wrote a story about a gambler who got the coin which allowed him to read thoughts. He was in a big poker game and he knew he was going to win, hed won one poker game and another and another, because he could read the minds of the other players. Now its finally the biggest poker game of all, and its all very obscure. He is taken to this very special place to meet with this very famous gambler, and the very famous gambler is an Orientaland the Oriental thinks in Chinese when hes watching the cards!

The dearest memory that Johnson holds regarding A Penny For Your Thoughts stems from another incident that occurred during the filming. I felt sort of like a stranger on the set, he recalls. It was the Twilight Zone set, not mine, and I felt like I was being allowed to eavesdrop by even being allowed to be there while it was done. And while this was happening, Rod came through with a couple of people, visitors that he had brought on, and he saw me and Lola and he stopped to introduce us to these people. And his attitude toward me was one of great respect. It wasnt like, Tm Rod Serling and this is one of the flunkies on the set, it was more like, Look, heres the man who wrote this absolutely wizard thing that were making right now. It really built my ego and made me feel worthwhile.

THE TROUBLE WITH TEMPLETON (12/9/60)

Written by E. Jack Neuman

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Buzz Kulik

Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

Music: Jeff Alexander

Cast: Booth Templeton: Brian Aherne Laura Templeton: Pippa Scott Barney Flueger: Charles S. Carlson Willis: Sydney Pollack Freddie: Larry Blake Sid Sperry: King Calder Marcel: Dave Willock Ed Page: John Kroger Eddie: David Thursby

Please to present for your consideration Mr. Booth Templeton, serious and successful star of over thirty Broadway plays, who is not quite all right today. Yesterday and its memories is what he wants, and yesterday is what he’ll get. Soon his years and his troubles will descend on him in an avalanche. In order not to be crushed, Mr. Booth Templeton will escape from his theater and his world and make his debut on another stage in another world that we call the Twilight Zone.”

Feeling very old and very tired, Templeton longs for those years in the twenties when his beloved wife Laura was alivethe only truly happy time in his life. When Willis, a brash young director, severely dresses him down for arriving late to the first rehearsal of a new play, he rushes from the theater and finds himself back in 1927. Searching, he locates Laura in a speakeasy. Although as lovely as he remembered, her manner is quite the opposite; she is flirtatious, vulgar, and self-centered. His idyllic memories destroyed, he returns to the theater and the present. But he has inadvertently brought back a memento: several sheafs of paper Laura was fanning herself with. Inspecting them, he sees they are pages of a script, entitled What To Do When Booth Comes Back. Realizing the entire thing was staged for his benefit so that he would stop dwelling on his past and get on with living his life Templeton is filled with a new self-confidence. Commanding Willis respect, he plunges energetically into rehearsing the new play.

Mr: Booth Templeton, who shared with most human beings the hunger to recapture the past moments, the ones that soften with the years. But in his case, the characters of his past blocked him out and sent him back to his own time, which is where we find him now. Mr. Booth Templeton, who had a round-trip ticket … into the Twilight Zone.

The Trouble With Templeton marked the only contribution to The Twilight Zone of E. Jack Neuman, a friend of Buck Houghtons and writer-producer of eleven pilots which have become TV series, among them Mr. Novak, Dr. Kildare, Petrocelli, and Police Story.

Of Templeton, Neuman says, I had often toyed with the notion of You cant go home again, and it should have been, You shouldn’t go home again, ever, which is what I was trying to say here. Although the script is beautifully written, Neuman wasnt able to labor on it long. I wrote it in about a day, he recalls.

Cast as Templeton was Brian Aherne, and a better choice could not have been made. Like Templeton, Aherne had been a great actor, superb as the Emperor Maximilian in the movie Juarez. At fifty-eight, he was still a remarkably handsome man and a perceptive and skillful performer. But when he received the Twilight Zone script, he didnt know what to make of it. When I first read the script I thought the writer must surely be out of his head, he said at the time. Then Rod Serling … suggested I have a look at one of the earlier shows. Id never seen it before, as Im not much of a TV fan. Then I realized what twilight zone meant, and that the script was really as excellent one.

Brian Aherne was just a charming, wonderful, delightful man, a terribly professional man, and one of the nicest people that Ive ever worked with, says Director Buzz Kulik. He was very touched by what he had to do. It was very, very real to him. As for himself, Kulik admits that he too was moved by the material. Maybe it was because it was about show business, maybe because I could relate to it myself much more than most things, but Ive always had a very special affection for that show.