George Clayton Johnson obituary

George Clayton Johnson, who has died aged 86, was the writer in 1966 of the first broadcast episode of Star Trek, and part-author of the 1967 novel Logan’s Run. Johnson was part of a loosely defined group of writers calling themselves the Southern California School of Writers. They included Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson and William F Nolan. It was with Nolan that Johnson co-wrote Logan’s Run, an efficient and well-told dystopian satire about a post-apocalypse community in which it was forbidden to live beyond the age of 21. The book was picked up by Hollywood, and released as a film in 1976 – in which the story’s age limit was upped to 30, presumably to give credibility to the casting of its lead actors, Michael York and Jenny Agutter.

Logan’s Run turned out to be the last of the studio-inspired attempts to film big-budget science fiction without either knowledge of or love for the genre. Within a year of its release, the first film in the Star Wars sequence was to appear, immediately making the earlier film look like a period piece. Logan’s Run, with its miniskirted young women and bouffant-haired young men, the brightly coloured pristine sets, the risible model work and the ponderous acting, was all too obviously an outmoded style.

Even so, the film enjoyed a spell of audience success, feeding the then unrecognised popular appetite for science fiction, however clumsily it was filmed. Critical reaction was largely indifferent, but it made Johnson’s name and guaranteed him a successful career.

View image in fullscreen

By his own account, Johnson was born in a barn, outside the city of Cheyenne, Wyoming. His parents, Charles and Laura, split up after his birth – he remained with his alcoholic mother, but soon he was made a ward of court. After a spell in the US army, and a period of drifting, Johnson started writing in 1959, selling stories to the American magazines of the day: Rogue, Playboy, Gamma, Twilight Zone Magazine and others. He also started pitching stories to TV shows such as Route 66.

In 1960 he co-wrote with Jack Golden Russell a treatment for a heist movie – this became Ocean’s 11, with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Although other writers produced the final screenplay, Johnson’s screen credit made a difference. Through the Southern California group he attracted the interest of Rod Serling, then producing the science-fiction TV anthology series The Twilight Zone for the CBS network.

Johnson wrote more than half a dozen of the best episodes of this series, notable among them a story called Nothing in the Dark (1962). This gentle tale of an old lady terrified of death, and meeting the Grim Reaper, was remarkable for its casting, although only perhaps with hindsight: Gladys Cooper in one of her last roles played the old lady – the Grim Reaper was played by a young Robert Redford.

In the mid-1960s a new TV series was being planned by Gene Roddenberry, to be called Star Trek. A number of writers were commissioned to come up with a script for the pilot show. Three were bought and filmed, but only one was actually broadcast: this was The Man Trap by George Clayton Johnson. Although the story was revised and cut by Roddenberry, Johnson later said he was pleased with it. Many of the underlying themes and the now iconic main characters were set out in his story.

Ocean’s 11 has returned to the big screen, in a version starring George Clooney, and a remake of Logan’s Run has been talked about for several years: many starry names have been attached to the project, including the directors Bryan Singer and Nicolas Winding Refn, screenwriter Alex Garland and actor Ryan Gosling. Nothing so far has come out of this pre-production hell, which must have been a long-running agony to Johnson. At the time of his death, he was planning a putative sequel of his own, called Jessica’s Run.

Johnson was a hippie all his life and a proselytising vegetarian. He was also a campaigner for the legalisation of cannabis. He was an inveterate user, smoking the weed, he said, all day and every day. He sometimes acted small parts in films – including The Stranger (1962), which starred William Shatner, later Captain Kirk in Star Trek. A quiet-spoken, affable man, with a distinctive mane of long straight hair, a broad-rimmed hat and a gap-toothed smile, Johnson was a popular attendee at many science-fiction conventions, where he was famously approachable.

He was married in 1952 to Lola Brownstein. She survives him, as do his son, Paul, and daughter, Judy.