Because I wanted to connect my name, George Clayton Johnson, with that kind of story. So when I put together this collection of stories about magical thinking, it truly will be an example of me struggling to become that guy. Many of these short stories are rare—you haven’t seen them around. One of the stories was in a collection I did called ALL OF US ARE DYING AND OTHER STORIES.
FM. Is that in print still? That collection? GCJ. There were only 600 copies of it printed at the time! It went out of print almost immediately. But it’s out there; you can locate it on eBay or some place. But the point, really, is that those stories were only seen by 600 people, many of whom never actually read the stories. They just put it in their libraries. So I’m thinking of taking a few scripts out of it and putting in some more short stories and making it a slightly different volume.
FM. I think the TWILIGHT ZONE angle will make people want to read the literary origins of the script material. GCJ. Well, I hope so, because I have a whole trunk full of material that I’d like to put in motion before I kick off, you know.
FM. Do you have a favorite episode [of THE TWILIGHT ZONE] that you wrote? GCJ. Well, I have several favorite episodes, depending on who I’m talking to. I like “A Penny For Your Thoughts”, because it’s a comedy, and it’s hard to write comedy. It’s not laugh-out-loud comedy, just a touch of humor here and there—and it makes you smile. That kind of story is very rare. Also, there’s enough intricacy in it, and enough truth in it… because it’s basically a story that says a lot of us daydream about doing stuff that we’ll never do. And this is an example of that—but one that causes a lot of consternation, because the guy’s daydream is that he’ll take the money out of the bank vault and go off to Bermuda with it. And as he dreams of doing it, it sounds like a crime in progress, but it’s just a daydream. Another one was the utter perfection that Robert Redford and
Gladys Cooper brought to the story “Nothing in the Dark”, where he’s Mr. Death, and she’s an old woman who is afraid to die, but she has to let him in out of pity for his situation, then finds herself having a discussion in which she ends up telling him about her fear of Mr. Death. And Gladys Cooper, one of the grand ladies of stage and screen, she goes back so far, and worked for people like Mr. Hitchcock. Robert Redford, before he became the movie star… in
a significant role that everybody remembers. But I think the best of the group that I wrote, the most enduring,
is “Kick the Can”. Ernest Truex was the old man who believed that by learning to play children’s games again, he could become young. He’s trying to get these old people to join with him to play Kick the Can, because he thinks it’s the secret of youth. He’s a minister to their existence, almost, because of his total enthusiasm about it. Ernest Truex and Russell Collins played the two leads. Wonderful actors.
FM. Do you have a favorite that somebody else wrote? GCJ. Charles Beaumont’s “The Howling Man”. H.M. Wynant takes refuge in a monastery in the middle of the black forest some place… and while he’s in there, he hears screams, and when he inquires about what that is, he’s told that it’s the Devil. That they’ve caught the Devil and chained him up. And the guy helps him get out. It’s a rich story that was given an awful lot of attention. I have a dozen of these in my head… that when I think about THE TWILIGHT ZONE, I think oh, those were really extraordinary stories. One that Charles Beaumont did right at the beginning of his writing career—he wrote 22 episodes—one of them was called “Shadow Play”. Had Dennis Weaver in it. He’s in jail, and he’s trying to explain that he’s been through this before… once he was the court reporter, once he was the defendant, once he
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