Serling Wanted This “Terrifying Tale” for The Twilight Zone, But The Sponsor Rejected It

George Clayton Johnson didn’t notch as many Twilight Zone scripts as Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont did, yet he certainly left his mark on the series.

“Nothing in the Dark” alone, with Gladys Cooper as the old woman determined to keep Mr. Death out of her home, would cement his legacy among TZ fans. But he also scripted “A Game of Pool,” “Kick the Can,” and “A Penny for Your Thoughts.” Plus he wrote the short stories that Rod Serling adapted as “Execution” and “The Four of Us Are Dying.” Superstar status: Confirmed.

But not everything Johnson wrote for the fifth dimension made it into the end Zone. Consider what he had to say in this 1994 interview quoted in Steven Jay Rubin’s “The Twilight Zone Encyclopedia”:

“Rod loved things that were tense and grim … where the harshest words were said in a whisper … If you could set up a dismal, or a grim, or a dangerous, or a mysterious, or a poetic mood … Rod really loved that.

“So when I started trying to write stories for the series, my intention was to get down and grim, because that’s what he did. And that’s ‘The Four of Us Are Dying,’ and that’s ‘Execution,’ the story of a hanging.

George Clayton Johnson, Writer of “Wisdom Fiction”

I’ve written a blog post about Richard Matheson and his Twilight Zone episodes. I’ve written one about Charles Beaumont. I’ve even written one about Earl Hamner. And Heaven knows I’ve written plenty about Rod Serling.

But I’ve never written one about George Clayton Johnson. And now the news of his death at 86 is making me wish I had done so much sooner.

True, I did spotlight one of his wonderful TZ episodes before now, “A Game of Pool” (twice, in fact – here and here). But no post yet about “Nothing in the Dark”? “Kick the Can”? “A Penny For Your Thoughts”? There’s hardly a Twilight Zone fan out there who doesn’t list at least one of those classics among his favorite episodes.