When my friend L.J. Dopp approached me about possibly running this interview on the Mondo Cult website, I tried very hard not to jump through the phone line and prostrate myself at his feet in gratitude. It would have been unseemly. However I'm perfectly willing to admit to the desire.

I hope you'll all enjoy this wonderful journey at least half as much as I did. It'll start 2005 off right: with a smile.

I've left the piece in the format Larry presented it and with original artwork by Dopp as well as photos from his personal collection. Enjoy!

Jessie Lilley

George Clayton Johnson
Original Artwork by L. J. Dopp

A Conversation With

George
Clayton
Johnson

By L. J. Dopp

© 2003 - L. J. Dopp

This interview, originally published in early 2000 on the Subterranean Press website, was commissioned and paid for by William K. Schafer, in order to detail and underscore Mr. Johnson’s 465-page, hardcover career retrospective, “All of Us Are Dying and Other Stories” (Subterranean Press, ed. W.K. Schafer).  It was conducted over the phone Thursday, October 28, 1999.  Updated and re-edited here on my website, it remains one of the most fascinating, informative, and important pieces of writing I have ever been associated with.  Okay, so I end a sentence in a preposition now and then, but I love writing, and if you do too, and would like a lesson from a true master - a Jedi Knight of the written word - then read on. 

Besides illuminating a wonderful book, this dialogue hopes to enlighten, describing the “between the lines” process that a great writer undergoes in order to present us, the readers, with these tightly humming short stories, teleplays and story outlines.  The book also includes essays on writing and a complete screenplay by Johnson.  Making things look (and read) easy is where the true craftsmanship comes in, as you will see.  The book, “All of Us Are Dying and Other Stories,” also includes character-defining interviews and a stirring afterward, by Christopher Conlon and Dennis Etchison, respectively.  I believe the publisher is sold out, but it wouldn’t hurt to contact Subterranean Press regarding reprinting it, or to inquire about other books by Mr. Johnson.

When did you begin writing?  

GCJ: (he confers with Lola, his wife of nearly fifty years) … Forty-five years ago (1954).

You have a Burt Shonberg illustration on the dust jacket of “All of Us Are Dying and Other Stories,” Was he a friend of yours?  (Note: Shonberg did the paintings seen in Roger Corman’s Poe pictures, among many other famous works).

GCJ:  Damned right.  A very, very good friend, back in the fifties… I bought a lot of his paintings, I have paintings of his in my home; I own that illustration.  He was a very, very intimate friend, one of the most talented men that I knew.  He was a comer – I knew he was going to be an important person, and we remained friends until the day he died.

Tell us about “The Creature’s Blood,” your Frankenstein-based TV series treatment…

GCJ:  I was hired by Universal Pictures, who said, we want to do a series about the Frankenstein Creature.  Come over and look at all of our movies and tell us what you think, and I told them.  And they said, all right, write the story as a pilot, and I wrote it and turned it in – only by that time the producer had been changed.  The new producer was Gene Coon, who would soon be producing Star Trek, and when he started to ask me to change the script around the way he wanted it done, I figured he was just an utter jerk, and said no, because it seemed silly… He wanted to modernize the Frankenstein series and make it take place in New York City… I thought… I see a guy like the Frankenstein Monster on the street in New York City – I think he’s a war vet or something… I don’t think that he’s a creature from hell or anything like that, he just looks like a poor victim in   modern times, but back in that gothic world, he’s an ominous and frightening figure.

You have a lot of treatments in here… outlines for TV and the movies.  “Ocean’s Eleven?”  I have to ask – it’s not in the book, but it’s a seminal work of yours…

GCJ:  It’s the first thing I ever wrote… The beginning of the book started in 1954, when  Jack Russell and I sat around a kitchen table trying to write what started out as a novel.  But later on, when a director friend-of-a-friend saw the pages, he said this would make a fine movie, so I started to rewrite it as a movie…  But that was the first thing I ever sold, and I spent five years after that, with that one thing sold and never sold anything else.  Because during those five years the movie wasn’t made, and as far as I knew I’d sold it to a couple of guys in a closet and the minute I took their little money, that was the end of them as far as I knew.  I never heard from them again – I had no idea in the world it would go to Sinatra… but I knew the Lawfords had bought it, because the check was signed by Patricia Kennedy.

Did Charles Beaumont introduce you to Rod Serling, and wasn’t the story for “The Four of Us Are Dying,” your first sale to Rod? 

GCJ:  I met Rod Serling for the first time at a party at Chuck’s house – nobody needed   to introduce you to Rod Serling, everybody knew who Rod Serling was…  I introduced myself to him.  Later on, I submitted the story to an agent, and the agent was Jay Richards at Famous Artists Agency.  Jay Richards read this story; he didn’t like the title – the title at that time was, “All of Us Are Dying.”  He drew a line through it with a ballpoint pen.  He scrubbed out the title and he wrote, in printing, “Rubberface.”  And I thought, ooh, how obvious and how awkward, and how stupid a title that is… “Rubberface!”  But then, he offered to submit it to The Twilight Zone, which he did, and then they subsequently bought it.  Rod saw the original title, “All of Us Are Dying,” and he used the title, “The Four of Us Are Dying,” because at the end of the show, the “all of us” are really only four people.

One of my favorites came next, I believe.  You sold the story for “Execution,” that featured Albert Salmi and Russell Johnson (no relation).  Then what?  

GCJ:  After “Execution,” “A Penny for Your Thoughts.”  But in between… there was another show called “Sea Change.”  I submitted it to the Twilight Zone offices.  By then, I knew who they were and they knew who I was, so I had a meeting with them, and they bought it.  And then – about a week later I got a call from Rod, saying that his sponsor was General Foods, and that the idea of chopping a man’s hand off over the dinner table didn’t appeal to them when they’re trying to sell food, so they didn’t want to use it – a case of censorship.  Rod called me to ask if I’d buy it back – and I did.  And then, he felt somewhat obligated to me, so I offered him the fourth story a few weeks or months later, “A Penny for Your Thoughts.” 

“A Penny for Your Thoughts” was the first one you wrote the teleplay for, right?

GCJ:  …He wanted to buy it, and I then held him up.  They call it “breaking into television” – well, I held him up and said no, not unless I get a chance to write a first draft.  It looked like the sale was off for two weeks, and I sat around the house thinking I’d blown it – because here I was, collaborating with the greatest TV writer of all, and now, over a silly thing like this, I was telling him I had to write the first draft.  But then I got a call from a lawyer who represented Cayuga Productions, who said they were going to buy it.  He called me into his office and he had a contract… in which they would buy the story and then they would option the rights from me to write a first draft of the script.  He had a check there for the both the story and the option on the first draft.  I went home and wrote the first draft – and then they filmed it… exactly as written, with no changes.

“The Twilight Zone” was famous for that, for not toying too much with the writers’ work, isn’t that correct?

George at the "California Society" signing, September 1999.
Photo by: Chris Herbert

GCJ:  Yes.  There was some rewriting; I rewrote on several scripts – just a question of making them better, but in this particular case, there was no need for that rewriting, because they liked it the way it was. 

Could I ask which of your “Twilight Zone” stories you like the best?

GCJ:  “Nothing in the Dark” is the one that I think is the best…  But I think “A Penny for Your Thoughts” is right in there, because comedy is very hard to write.

Of the “Twilight Zones” that you didn’t write, do you have a favorite episode?

GCJ:  … I have a lot of favorites… “Walking Distance,” by Rod Serling; “The Howling Man” and “Shadowplay,” by Charles Beaumont; and “The Hunt,” by Earl Hamner, Jr.  I thought those were exceptionally fine shows.  There were a number of others that I liked an awful lot…

Although the main purpose of this interview is to discuss the book, “All of Us Are Dying and Other Stories,” I have a couple of questions that aren’t about the book; you mentioned “Sea Change” – that’s in your own underground comic book, “Deepest Dimensions.”  Do you have a favorite comic book artist of all time?  … Prose writer?  … Pulp Magazine?

GCJ:  Not of all time, no, but if you want to talk about the great comic book artists of the past… people like Hal Foster, Burne Hogarth, of course… But, as to today, I’d say the underground comic artists, Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams…  And as for favorite prose writers – Ray Bradbury for the lyrical part of it;  Alfred Bester, a science fiction writer, for excitement – I think he’s really, really good.    I have tons and tons of prose writers that I think are wonderful.  And as far as pulp magazines – no.  No favorite – except perhaps Famous Fantastic Mysteries, a big pulp quarterly.

Were you a fan of “Weird Tales?”

GCJ:  Not much.  Famous Fantastic Mysteries featured writers like A. Merritt.  I would say that of all the old pulp magazines, the one that I looked for the most was Famous Fantastic Mysteries.

You were interviewed in the Oct./Jan. 2000 issue of “Film Fax,” were you not?

GCJ:  They did a major interview with me, and several others...

There’s an article about Charles Beaumont’s Group and one by (the late) Beaumont, himself…

GCJ:  Yes, there’s an article about the Group by Chris Conlon, taken in part from his introductions to my book and the California Sorcery anthology.  I was interviewed by Matthew R. Bradley, as were Richard Matheson and Jerry Sohl, in that same issue.  

Do you want to talk about the E! Entertainment show?

GCJ: I was interviewed for their Rod Serling documentary.

You mentioned the other night that you were watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” are you a fan of “Buffy?”

GCJ:  No.  But I like to keep up with what’s going down… that’s part of the reason I watch “Buffy…”

It’s nice to see horror making a comeback on TV with some quality shows, Buffy’s got a spinoff now, and the Sci-Fi Channel has a lot…

GCJ:  Do you like those shows?

I like to see the genre kept alive – I don’t watch them…

GCJ:  Yeah, well, see – there you are, I don’t watch them either, usually… My wife watches them a lot.  When you called I was watching (“Buffy”).

Actually, I have all the “Outer Limits” from Showtime in my library, as well as all the “X-Files.”  What the “Buffy”-type shows may do is prompt kids that are bright and want more, to go find books.  If having things on television that attract the interest of young people causes them to read – even comic books – then, that’s probably a good thing. 

As to writing: according to “All of Us Are Dying…” you write on a typewriter, rewrite extensively, listen to TV and radio in the background, and sometimes put it off when you don’t know what to do.  Frank Yerby was quoted as saying, “I quit writing if I feel inspired because I know I’ll have to throw it away.  Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration.”  Would you advise other writers to abandon inspiration in favor of discipline and consistency?

GCJ:  The thing is, when we look at Frank Yerby, we could just as well be looking at Danielle Steele, or one of those current people who write these, what’s the word…? There’s no attempt there to try and write anything in the way of serious literature, but I’ve read Frank, and he’s an excellent writer (Frank Yerby, an African-American author, wrote the novels, “Foxes of Harrow” and “The Saracen Blade” in the forties, both of which were made into motion pictures).

Now, when he’s saying, “…Believe in inspiration,” yeah, some writers do.  Like your “Daughter of Depravity” was an inspiration, wasn’t it?  You had an idea, you’d probably been cooking the idea for a long time about trying to use these gothic writers.  But now, suddenly, you had a concept, or an idea, and you went for it – you made a rough draft…

What kicked it off were the phonies at that other signing…

GCJ:  … So that’s pretty much the way it works.  The idea of inspiration comes with the idea – when an idea occurs to you, when you suddenly realize you’ve got a good story here, that’s the inspiration part of it.  But, when it comes to working on things, it is pretty dogged.  Most of the people that I know, who are professionals, who write every day and make a profession of turning out words, they don’t – none of them – seem to talk about inspiration.  I’ve talked with Robert Silverberg a lot.  Robert Silverberg is a disciplined guy; he goes in his office, he works a certain number of hours, he turns out a certain number of pages, then he leaves.  And he does that every day, every day – if he had to depend upon inspiration, he’d be doomed.  Look at William Faulkner.  William Faulkner didn’t believe in inspiration either, he was a worker.  He sat down and he built his books, and so do most people.  This idea that you sit down, an idea suddenly occurs to you, and you write a great novel – it doesn’t work that way, it takes months and months – it might take years, to write a novel.  I have to re-write everything.

What’s the ratio of your rewrite pages to final draft pages? 

GCJ:  (He mentions an average half-hour teleplay) …  The files on it measure about three inches thick; it’s about four or five manila folders filled with notes, typing, drawings, pages, diagrams, synopses, dialogue and other things…  And it reduces down to less than a quarter-of-an-inch in terms of a final draft.  When I look at almost every story that I’ve written, I’ve got that same situation of looking at a huge, huge pile – a great big folder, and then out of it, you pluck out the story itself – it’s maybe eight pages.  So it is a case of building it, an inch at a time.

Well, and then you’ve got Harlan Ellison, who likes to write them in bookstores.

GCJ:  … Those stories that he writes in the bookstores, he doesn’t just turn around and sell them.  He writes them in bookstores to show that he can write them, and then he puts them in his files, and maybe ten years later, he sells them – after he’s thought of what the hell is wrong with the middle.  That’s the way it works…  Most of the writing I’ve done in the last ten years is still in my workroom. 

I have a major opera… a musical drama that I think is like Phantom of the Opera, Man of La Mancha or Westside Story… It’s music and it’s drama, and it’s the whole story of the death of Emile Zola, and it fills a file box with folders, jammed folders.  And it’s not finished yet, it’s about half-finished.  All the music is written.  All the lyrics are written.  I’ve got various drafts of the drama itself, but in terms of turning it into a screenplay…?  The story itself is basically a love story between Emile Zola and his wife, Alexandrine, and this is all taking place during the Dreyfuss affair, when Zola’s life is being threatened because he’s dared to accuse the general staff of the Army of France of taking part in a conspiracy – in a cover-up. 

Now, if someone said to me, “What about this thing?  It was dramatized in the year 2005, when did you write it?”  Well, I’ve been writing it for over ten years, in bits and pieces, when I get off of the work that I do for a living, when I’ve got time to work on things like that.  I’ve got half of the sequel to Logan’s Run written, called Logan’s Run: Lastday.  Nobody has seen any of it…  I’ve written a lot of stories that I’ve never sold.  Some of the stories in All of Us Are Dying… were never sold, some really quite fine stories.  But I never found a magazine, or a publisher that was at all interested… for that purpose.  So, when they’re sold, when they’re written – there’s no connection whatsoever. 

(I’d originally tried to correlate the writing of his stories and scripts with their publication dates – not a good idea, I found out.  As to gaps between appearances of his work, George was most particular about how that’s all about not selling, as opposed to not writing) …What happens when the producers who like and buy your work don’t have anything going, do you make new inroads?

GCJ:  Or, you go write a short story, or you go write an article, or you don’t sell anything – you just keep writing stuff, and nobody buys it.  That’s the life of a writer…  Eventually you have a trunk full of it, and somebody comes along and says, “How ‘bout we publish a book of yours?”  And you say, fine, and you whip out all this previously written stuff, and you show it to them, and they think it’s all brand-new.  Some of the stuff that looks the newest, is the oldest.

I was really impressed with “A Bicycle Like a Flame.”  I had an intense emotional reaction at a certain point in that beautiful story…  I don’t want to give anything away.

GCJ:  That story is really quite a true one.  “A Bicycle Like a Flame” is not all made-up, there really was an Abraham and George.  And they were really good friends.

It’s a great story; to be in touch with that kind of emotion that isn’t artificial or calculated…

Brad Linaweaver, George and L. J. Dopp on location for
The Low Budget Time Machine

You don’t expect it if you know YOU… (I laugh again)  First impressions and all that, but you never know…

GCJ:  Or, how ‘bout yourself?  If you were in a position where you really thought your life was threatened, do you think you might drop a lot of your old code systems and go to work with a shovel or something?

“Lord of the Flies.”  We’re all animals at heart, and there’s a tremendous sense of self-preservation in most people, so I think that, sure, in a given situation, anybody could…  I have a story, too – a long one – called, “Snake in the Grass,” about two kids in Iowa in 1960 that has a similar bent to it.  It sort of goes from “Huckleberry Finn” to “Something Wicked This Way Comes” to “Deliverance.”  It has a lot of truth in it because a lot of it really happened, and it’s about real places and real incidents.  I just jammed a lot of them together and made up some things to bridge the gaps…

GCJ:  That’s sort of the way I function as well.  There are a lot of little things that happen to you, and you know that they’re material for a story, even though you don’t have a story for them.  For example, the guy coming up to me and saying, “I used to be a serial killer…?” 

Yeah…?

GCJ:  That happened.  And I was pretty chilled by the damn thing, too, thinking my God, I don’t want this guy to follow me home.  But, I walked away.  I never had a second meeting with him, I made that part up.

It’s inevitable that we change subjects abruptly, considering how many, truly different elements are included in the “All of Us Are Dying” volume – it must have been tough to edit.  There’s also a complete teleplay from “The Law and Mr. Jones, ” an hour-long drama from 1962 starring James Whitmore, produced about the same time you were selling the Twilight Zone half-hours?

GCJ:  Here’s the way that worked… I had this agent.  This agent knew that I was writing these things for The Twilight Zone, and he wanted to broaden my base.  He didn’t want me to be stuck with the fact that I could write these kinds of things, but what happens when there’s no more Twilight Zone?  So he sent me out to the show, Mr. Novak…  And he sent me out to this show, The Law and Mr. Jones.”  He also sent me out to Dobie Gillis.  The Dobie Gillis guys, they had a premise – an idea.  They said, if you can turn this into a story, we’d like to hear about it, but I never could quite figure out just exactly what they wanted, so nothing came of that.  The Mr. Novak people?  I went back for endless meetings – endless, endless…  I must have taken seven months of meetings and talks with these people before I got a commitment to write their show.  When I went to see The Law and Mr. Jones, their situation was, they had shows to write and their theme was the first ten amendments to the Constitution; the Bill of Rights.  They said, choose one of these ten, so – the right to dissent, the idea that you could stand up and say no, and that that was a power, is the one that I chose to do.  And that’s how I got The Law and Mr. Jones gig.  I worked quite closely with the producer, and with James Whitmore on the development of it.

Okay.  Great answers, George.  People who read this on the internet and want to pick up a copy of “All of Us Are Dying and Other Stories”(still in stock in many bookstores and with online booksellers) will now have a better understanding of just what it contains.  

I asked Ray Bradbury about you, and he said you were a wonderful short story writer, and that you should write more short stories.

GCJ:  … I tend to talk my stories a lot – Ray says, don’t talk.  I tend to think a lot when I’m writing – Ray says, don’t think, just go in, vomit it out onto the page, send it out.  Don’t ask, is it any good or not?  Let the editors worry about that – if nobody buys it, well, too bad – it’s their mistake.  You’re a great writer, keep on writing, go write…  I can’t function that way.  For me, unless a thing is really good, I don’t want it published.

Maybe he doesn’t understand that…

GCJ:  The point is, he’s a different person than I am, he’s had a different experience than I have.  My ambition is, not to do a lot of things, most of which are crap.  I would like to do a lot of things, all of which are good.  Whether or not I’ve done that is another question for people to answer, but that’s my motive, and I don’t really like to let anything out of my workroom until I’m ready to stand up in front it because I don’t want someone to read one or two of my stories and decide I’m a lousy writer, just because they happened to pick up the two worst things I ever wrote.

See, now we’re getting to the heart of it, because this is how you give that impression of being a great writer – as I said in the introduction, “A world-class writer,” and it’s because you’re not a hack, you’re not out there cranking out these novels, you’re not trying to be a millionaire.  I don’t want to name names …  They write into tape recorders, some of them…And some other poor bastard has to make sense out of their gibberish.  But when people read something of yours, they don’t realize it’s been crafted.  It’s been rewritten and personally retyped and retyped and polished and put away, and you come back six months or a year later and read it and say, that’s what’s wrong with it!

GCJ:  Of course the truth is, Ray Bradbury does that too.  Ray Bradbury writes and rewrites and rewrites, that’s exactly why his work is so hot.  Maybe he doesn’t have to do as much of that recently as he used to when he was younger.  But one of the things that he was always talking to me about was rewriting.  I learned something from Ray that I think is one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned; it’s a very simple word: cutting.

How to take sixteen pages, turn it into twelve pages, and not lose anything, not take anything out of it.  Just get rid of four pages somehow – a half a line, here… a word there.  Compress these three paragraphs into one paragraph – cut, cut, cut.  And I find that every time I do cut, it sharpens the piece, the work starts to take on a lean quality.  It starts becoming less commonplace.  And learning how to spot the crap in your work is the hard one.  You have to develop a very good detector; it’s very easy in someone else’s writing, to find the weak stuff – you know, I don’t like this, or this second act doesn’t work or I don’t believe this premise…  But try and do that to your own work, and it’s really very difficult.

I need time.  I need time from when it’s first written to come back to it, and come back to it – things that seem really heavy, two weeks later you think, what was I thinking of?

GCJ:  I’m still the same way – there are certain things that I look at, and I see that nobody else gets it, but it works for me… now I’ve got to figure out what it is that I’m putting into it when I read it, that isn’t on the page.  Some thought or memory that I have, and I’m unaware, completely, that I just haven’t put it in yet…

I know, that’s tricky.  When it’s in your mind, and you automatically know that element, but another person doesn’t have that element to work with…

GCJ:  They say well, how long has she known him?  And you realize that’s a very interesting thing to know – in the story.

We could discuss the elements of writing endlessly, particularly of short stories… But there are going to be quite a few stories, etc., that we won’t have time or space to address, here…  What about that complete screenplay, right in the middle of your 465-page book?  Do you want to talk about “The Edge of the World?”

GCJ:  I’m very, very ambitious to see that screenplay actually made.  See, I think that  today, a story about the ‘60s, kind of lampooning and exaggerating the ‘60s would make for a very good movie.  Perhaps it would be better today, than when it was written.  When it was written, the decade of the ‘60s was fairly fresh and many people were still wandering around in a daze from it.  But now, in retrospect, I think The Edge of the World would make a very fine film.  Of course, it’s a first draft – I wrote The Edge of the World for Sid and Marty Krofft, and they were going to do it for Columbia, and Columbia, after reading the script, decided that they didn’t want to do it, and that killed the deal.  And so, The Edge of the World, though everyone was paid, never got made.  Now, the question is, how to get The Edge of the World made, because in order to do it properly, it requires a rewrite. 

Well, you should get Terry Gilliam interested, your opening is like something he’d do; I mean, Columbus and his three sailing ships go over Niagara Falls and wind up in the ‘60s, getting rescued by a warship, and escaping into New York City, dressed as 15^th century sailors? …Anyway, plunging on – You were telling me that you have 42 filing boxes full of manuscripts in your house?

Tony "Mutant" Mostrum strangles George on
The Low Budget Time Machine set,  as L. J. Dopp looks on

You know the part of “All of Us Are Dying” that I’ve been dying to ask about, the outline for the movie, “Lovecraft, Man of Mythos?”

GCJ:  Some guy came to me and he had this theory that the town of Providence, in celebrating H.P. Lovecraft, one of their favorite sons, might end up financing a movie if the movie was done in Providence.  I thought it was a bad idea, but the guy offered me a thousand dollars to tell him where was the story in H.P. Lovecraft.  So, I went and read all of Lovecraft’s material; I read everything I could get my hands on, including the novels.  And I read the short stories, and then I read about his life, and I read biographies and even his fanzine – he published one of the first fanzines – it was called The Conservative, and they’ve got seven or eight copies of it at Cal State Northridge in their Lovecraft file.  But, I took the thousand dollars, I read all of Lovecraft’s stuff, and I tried to figure out, where is the story?  Do you try to do a Lovecraft novel?  No, I didn’t think so because most of them, when you get down to it, are really more terrifyingly described than in terms of what you might actually see if you were there.  He’s always seeing things that would freeze him into helplessness, the narrator character in his stories, that is…

Which was basically him…

GCJ:  Which was basically him, but several of his stories are really quite him, because he identifies with his character, Randolph (Carter).  So, I ended up writing that little outline for how to go about making the movie about the death of H.P. Lovecraft, and encompassing a lot of his material in the movie without necessarily trying to dramatize a particular novel or a short story of his.

As Lovecraft’s dying in the hospital, we see flashbacks of his life – from his friends and family, gathered outside his hospital room, as well as creatures and supernatural elements from his stories in the form of his own dreams and nightmares…A “Finnegan’s Wake” with tentacled monstrosities lurking in its subconscious… It’s a great idea – and one way of getting all those things in…

GCJ:  Yeah, that’s what I thought.  They were unable to get it off the ground, so now,  it’s all reverted back to me.  Nevertheless, that’s sort of how one’s life goes on its way…  You asked about The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward?

That’s something we discussed the other day, Charles Beaumont’s screenplay for Roger Corman’s “The Haunted Palace,” actually an adaptation of the Lovecraft novel, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” disguised as an Edgar Allan Poe movie.  I don’t know if Beaumont wrote it for Sam Arkoff, Roger Corman, or if he had already written it – but it’s one of my favorites in that cycle…

GCJ:  It was something that he had when I met him.  He had made attempts to sell it – all of us have several scripts we’ve tried to sell; he sold The Queen of Outer Space, but he couldn’t sell The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward.  Until finally, Roger Corman came along, but Corman came along much later.  By that time, Beaumont was a well-established author.

You have a lot of short stories in “All of Us Are Dying…” Were they written with eventual dramatization in mind, since you were “writing for the tube,” as one of your essays, contained herein, is titled? 

GCJ:  Each of these short stories was written to be a specific story, for an attempt mainly just to continue to make a living at selling stories.  And I would send them out to the various magazines and get them back.  I was never very, very successful at short stories, so when Ray tells me to go ahead and write more short stories…  Now that I’ve got an established reputation, I could probably sell almost anything I wrote that was any good.  But I wrote some things that were absolutely wonderful, and never, ever got them sold.

I read about Lovecraft getting rejected, too.  From the editor of “Weird Tales,” what was his name, Farnsworth Wright?  He would stamp “A Farnsworth Wright reject” across the top of the first page before returning them, and Lovecraft would send them straight off to Harry Bates at “Strange Tales” like that.

GCJ:  Where did you read that?

In an interview with Hugh B. Cave in Cemetery Dance (#29; with Darrell Schweitzer).

GCJ:  And Harry Bates rejected them, too.  I think Lovecraft’s stories were mostly published in Weird Tales, and only about a dozen, all in all; most of his work was never published in his lifetime.  Many of the novels, like At the Mountains of Madness, were never even typed up, although they were all fully written.  After his death they were dug out, but typing was such a difficult task for him that until he knew he would have a sale for them, he just left them in manuscript form.  He was, during his lifetime, fairly unknown.  He became much more famous afterwards.

Look at Robert E. Howard, and look what’s been done with the bits and pieces and scraps of his story ideas by L. Sprague DeCamp and Lin Carter… They made a cottage industry out of exhausting every possible idea in Robert E. Howard’s files…

GCJ:  … And Roy Thomas is continuing the work in the comics, with the young Conan.

I think Howard would be pleased…

GCJ:  Yeah, sure, Conan is an interesting character, especially since he represents Robert E. Howard’s attitude.

Back to your book again:  “Star Trek: Rock-a-Bye Baby – Or Die!”  Is that the one that was never produced?

GCJ:  That was the Star Trek story that never got filmed.

And it has something to do with the ship, itself, taking on a life?  An idea which was later used in “Nightflyers” and more recently, in “Event Horizon,” but back then, it was a pretty original concept…

GCJ:  Oh, it was.  It was an original idea, yeah.  They were absolutely happy to have the idea, the only problem was, their producer wanted to change it, and he and I got into a fight, and I bought it back.

That was Gene Coon, again?

GCJ:  Yes.

And the script they did buy?  Wasn’t that the first Star Trek episode aired?

GCJ:  Yes, it was.  It’s called “The Mantrap.”

Going back to the fifties, for a minute – you came out of the army into the beat generation, and you mentioned your interest in psychedelia, the Merry Pranksters and the ’60.  But before that, there was the beat generation, which kind of morphed into the hippie thing about ten years later.  You seem to have taken your image from, and were forged more as a personality by, the late ‘60s – early ‘70s, than by the ‘50s.  If I had to guess by looking at you, I would say, this is a man of the ‘60s.  A lot of people of your generation are more rooted in the ‘50s, do you know what I mean?  They have crew cuts…

GCJ:  Yeah, it’s true…  The late ‘50s is when that beatnik thing was really going well.  And that’s when I started hanging out in Laurel Canyon, trying to become a writer.  I spent a lot of time arrogantly flaunting my poverty; sandals, no shirt… a windbreaker, pair of dungarees – that was my idea of dress-up.  And of course to let oneself go to seed, so to speak.  There was a lot of wine and partying, bongo drums and marijuana… Stuff like that was going on amongst the so-called beatniks.  I was very much caught up with the whole beat generation idea.  The Jack Kerouac thing, I could identify with an awful lot of that.  As you say, it sort of morphed into this other thing when the Beatles came along, and added that element of color, and the exotic aspect…

And rebellion.  The element of revolution – the cultural revolution in which, like most cultural revolutions, the advanced guard were the college students.  So, unlike the beat generation, where everything was kind of a really delicious secret to those special few that chose to live on this wavelength – all of a sudden, there was a cultural revolution, and it became very popular to live on this “expanded” wavelength.

GCJ:  That’s right.  I really had roots in that, and knew the others – the Allen Ginsburgs of the world and people like that – I knew those guys.

You had a column in The Staff?  Who was the editor, Brian Kirby?

GCJ:  Yes, and before that I wrote for The Freep (The Los Angles Free Press),  for Art Kunkin.

Well, that’s where I started out – my first real job, selling cartoons and comic strips, working for Art Kunkin at the Free Press.  Harlan Ellison had a column there, too, then (“The Glass Teat”), and so did Charles Bukowski (“Notes of a Dirty Old Man”), who hadn’t really become famous yet, nationally.  Back then, he drove a beat-up Volkswagon.  Occasionally, on production night, Art would come off the phone and say, “No column this week, – Bukowski’s on a binge again,” so we’d run a plug that said exactly that.

GCJ:  I remember it was a very grubby scene.  We worked at a coffee house – the Third Estate.  He had offices downstairs, Art Kunkin did, and I’d go there and hang out with him.  That was on Sunset.

It was a great time, and I’m glad to have been a part of it.  I’m very proud to have worked for a newspaper that was on Nixon’s White House enemies list.  I believe you had a comment for the close of this interview?

GCJ:  Yes…  I could make another entire book, like All of Us Are Dying, out of just what’s in my files.

Then we could do another interview…

(We will now travel back in time, through the miracle of computer memory, to the 18^th of September, 1999, to visit with George, his “Logan’s Run” writing partner, William F. Nolan, and some of the other writers that we’ve been discussing.  Some of the comments appear in the complete story of that day’s historic signing, titled, “California Sorcery Signing:  The Quest for the Green Hand,”  published in Cemetery Dance Magazine #33, 6/00; other parts are otherwise unpublished, and exclusive to this interview.)

It is near the end of the signing here, at Dark Delicacies bookstore in Burbank.  Ray Bradbury has left, and Richard Matheson, John Tomerlin and Jerry Sohl are in the process of leaving.  George arrived very fashionably late, and all the people that were in all the other authors’ lines have been stacked up in front of George like planes over O’Hare on Christmas Eve.  He takes the time to date and copyright each autograph, personalizing upon request and talking with his readers like they’re old friends. 

William F. Nolan, seated beside George, has already signed most of the these peoples’ “California Sorcery” books ( which have now sold out); I get a chance to talk to him about word counts while George signs:

WFN:  … I’ve written stories as short as 100 words and as long as 24,000.  And the novels go up from 50,000.  I don’t really have a preference – whatever the subject dictates – that’s what the length of the story is…  I’ve done a lot of non-fiction, too, of course, but you just have to write what intrigues you the most at that given moment, at least that’s how I operate.

GCJ:  Why don’t we talk together, here, Bill and I, about Logan’s Run.  But before we go into that, let me tell you about William F. Nolan and me.  We’re both fans; dyed-in-the-wool, knowing persons about science fiction.  When I met him, I realized that this guy knew as much about science fiction as I did, which I thought was pretty heavy because I was familiar with all the golden age people, and everyone you could think of in the field.

(To Nolan)  How long have you known this guy, George Clayton Johnson?

WFN:  Since about ’56 – No, I met him in ’57, almost 42 years ago. 

GCJ:  The first time I saw William F., he was hard at work, editing a book called The Omnibus of Speed.  He and Charles Beaumont were rushing from room to room, clipping together these essays and articles and revising stuff, making a monumental pile of papers.

Which ended up being a volume about this big (indicates the size of a normal book), and the definitive book on road racing.

Woman in line: Road racing?  (Dark Delicacies bookstore is totally devoted to horror.)

WFN:  Yep.  Auto racing – Grand Prix and sports car racing… Not drag racing, and not track racing, but Grand Prix and sports car…

GCJ:  And I envied him because he was working with Charles.  And, he was professional and successful.  He’d sold a lot of stuff to magazines, totally impressed me.  I felt very fortunate to be with the whole crowd of friends that grew around my friend, Charles Beaumont – William F. Nolan, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and all these fine people (including Harlan Ellison, John Tomerlin, Jerry Sohl, and Charles E. Fritch).

WFN:  They were all here today.  We got ‘em all in one place – I didn’t think I could do it, but all eight (living) people who are in the book are here.

Sue Howison:  (Who with her husband, Del, owns Dark Delicacies) You were responsible for Ray Bradbury coming.

WFN:  Yeah, I talked Ray into showing up.  (Yet another fan with a big bag of books shows up for George; I mention that I thought I’d been the last one in line, having waited until Del brought the store copies for Johnson to sign.)  …There’s never a last one – there’s always one more.

(I ask about their acting roles  in Roger Corman’s 1962 black-and-white film version of Charles Beaumont’s novel, “The Intruder,” a tale of a white-supremacist rabble rouser, played a bit like a strident Captain Kirk by none other than William Shatner, who stirs up a wave of hatred and violence in rural, pre-Civil Rights Amendment, Missouri.)

In 1962, you and George drove all the way to the Missouri location in his Volkswagon?

WFN:  No – we came back from Missouri together.

GCJ:  Beaumont and I drove there.

WFN:  I drove a Lincoln Continental with Ocee Rich.  On the way back, George and I shared his Volkswagen.

GCJ:  And on the way there, Charles Beaumont shared my Volkswagon.  Coming home, he flew, didn’t he?

 (All three men, including screenwriter Beaumont, played small-town Missouri locals in “The Intruder.”  You haven’t lived until you’ve seen the youthful George fire-bomb a Baptist church) How did you wind up getting assigned those acting roles?

WFN:  Because Chuck was our dear friend and he said, come to Missouri with me and I’ll put you in the movies.  He was doing a movie based on his book, and so Roger Corman said, hey, we get free actors, why not?  Oh, we were paid some miniscule amount, very small money.

Unknown Man:  (In background on the tape)  … Psychopath!  By psychopathic writers…

George mentioned that you two wrote “Logan’s Run” in twenty-one days?  Does that include rewrites?

WFN:  Oh, no…  We did the rough draft in twenty-one days.  We’d been making file cards; he did his own file cards, I did my file cards.  We met at a motel, we wrote it in twenty-one days at the motel, then I took it up to San Francisco alone, and went over the whole thing and polished and smoothed-out and cut.  And then, I brought it back to George, and he approved everything I’d done, and that’s the way it went in…

And he said that instead of a quick paperback sale, you held out and shopped it to five hardcover publishers?

WFN:  I remember Ron Goulart, the humor writer, told me that we could probably get an Ace double out of it, or we might get $1,500 out of it from Ace as a single, and I said, “No, no.  We want $100,000, not $1,500.”  And he said, what?  George and I told him, yes, that’s what we want – of course we were talking about the film rights, and indeed we did get $100,000 from MGM for it, so… at the time, back in ’67, that was worth about a million now… that our dollar is a lot less effective than it was then.

Back in ’67 you guys were like Nostradamus, at least as far as ageism in today’s TV industry is concerned.  The concept of mandatory retirement from life at thirty, like in the movie, is bad enough – but in the book – you do away with people when they turn twenty-one!  Coincidentally, the same number of days it took to write; twenty-one days – that’s amazing, considering what it spawned; the movie, the TV series, everyone knows that picture…

WFN:  Oh, it’s gone on – still going.  A new edition is coming out next month from Buccaneer Books, a new limited edition hardcover.  And Warner Brothers is talking about remaking the movie; when that happens, there’ll be a big surge of re-interest in it.  It’s been out in twenty-five countries around the world, I think.  It’s still a big, big thing.

RANDOM COMMENTS of that day follow, in no particular order, many in response to my “Quest for the Green Hand” queries for the Cemetery Dance article.  That mysterious name, “The Green Hand,” belonged to a four-man California corporation formed by Matheson, Johnson, Jerry Sohl (who passed away in 2003) and the late Theodore Sturgeon in the ‘60s, the purpose of which was represent TV shows created and written by that eclectic cadre of west coast fantasy writers known as The Group, centered around the late Charles Beaumont.

“… How long have I known George?  Since his birth – no… (laughs) Since I came to California, which was in 1958.”

– Jerry Sohl

“… What do I need a computer for?  A computer is just a typewriter, isn’t it?  I’ve already got a typewriter.”

– Ray Bradbury

“… I believe it was George’s idea to call the group the Green Hand… I think it came up at George Clayton Johnson’s house, that’s where it started.”

– John Tomerlin

“… I came to California in ’51 or ’52.  I’d corresponded with Bill Nolan… you know the other guys, we’d get together socially and read stories.”

– Charles E. Fritch

“… I don’t write specifically for the horror market, I just write.”

– Harlan Ellison

“… (Re: George) … I keep nagging him.  He’s a wonderful short story writer and … I’m hoping he’ll do a couple dozen more, or I’ll beat the hell out of him…  Write more stories – no-one cares about the essays.”

– Ray Bradbury

“… If I had to describe the writing of my late friend, Theodore Sturgeon, with but one word, it would be ‘tattered.’”

– George Clayton Johnson

“… I’m not a science fiction writer.  I’ve only written one science fiction book – Fahrenheit 451.  (A reader asks about The Martian Chronicles) … That was a fantasy.”

– Ray Bradbury

(Did he like the Outer Limits episode, “The Human Operators,” from a story by A. E. Van Vogt and him)  “… Yes, they did a very nice job.”

– Harlan Ellison

“… George said, ‘I never thought I’d be signing on the same page with Ray Bradbury.’  He said, ‘That is the strangest thing… That’s eerie…’”

 – Del Howison

“… It’s an amazing turnout.  You don’t get Ellison, Matheson, Bradbury – people like that together in the same store… I don’t think it’s gonna happen again for a long time.”

– William F. Nolan

“… George is a rara avis!”

– Harlan Ellison

(Minutes later, oblivious to Ellison’s comment on him)  “I’m something of a rare bird…Sam Spade called the Maltese Falcon the black bird.  When they asked him what it was, he referred to it as a ‘rara avis,’ which was, the ‘rare bird.’  But, also, I’ve always thought of myself as the ‘Wild Bird,’ or, if you will, the ‘Dog without a Collar.’”

– George Clayton Johnson