![]() ![]() ![]() “When people gave me a lined paper, I wrote the other way. “I want to be remembered as a person who early on in his life took control of his life and set goals,” he said in the TV Archive interview. Johnson received his first onscreen credit for a story that became a 1959 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and he went on to write episodes of Route 66, Honey West and Kung Fu. It morphed into the 1976 film that starred Michael York and a short-lived 1977-78 CBS series toplined by Gregory Harrison. Nolan co-authored the 1967 novel Logan’s Run, about how all people in the year 2116 are sentenced to death when they reach age 21. But “Rock-a-Bye Baby or Die” never was made. Roddenberry commissioned him to write another episode, and he turned in a script that had the Enterprise being threatened from within by a child-like force. Before it debuted, the Gene Roddenberry series had about a half-dozen episodes in the can, and Johnson’s was picked by NBC executives to air first. 8, 1966, the crew of the Enterprise visit a planet and begin dying from a sudden lack of salt in their bodies. In the first installment of Star Trek, “The Man Trap,” which aired Sept. “It helped to jack people up to a higher level.” ![]() “ The Twilight Zone played just as much a part in the renaissance transformation of the ‘ 60s as bright-colored clothing, rock music and marijuana did,” he said in an enlightening and entertaining 2003 interview with the Archive of American Television. Johnson later wrote the Twilight Zone scripts for “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” revolving around a bank clerk (Dick York) who discovers he has telepathic powers “A Game of Pool,” with Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters meeting in a high-stakes contest “Nothing in the Dark,” starring Robert Redford as Death “Kick the Can,” about elderly folks who get to become kids again and “Ninety Years Without Slumbering,” with Ed Wynn as a man who feels his fate is linked to a grandfather clock. In “The Four of Us Are Dying,” which aired on the first night of the 1960s, Harry Townes portrays a con man who can change his face to appear as anyone he chooses.Īnother of the writer’s stories led to another first-season episode, “Execution,” about a scientist (Russell Johnson) who uses a time machine to pluck a man about to be hanged in 1880 into the present day. Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling paid him $500 for his unpublished short story that Serling adapted for the 13th episode of the CBS series. A native of Cheyenne, Wyo., with a distinctive straggly white beard and long hair, Johnson was a beloved, colorful and mystical figure in the world of sci-fi. ![]()
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