As of December 24th, 2021, we are happy to report that negotiations regarding author rights to Oceans 11 were successful. Thank you to all involved. As mentioned elsewhere on this website, George created the story (crediting co-author Jack Golden Russell for his contributions) and the screenplay on which the 1960 and 2001 films “Ocean’s Eleven” were based. This was the first story and screenplay he ever attempted to write and which has now become a billion dollar Hollywood franchise. We looked forward to further interest and development from the studio in the future.
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The Fictioneer
The legendary writer, George Clayton Johnson, allows us into his inner circle, sharing special memories and moments from his friendships, business relationships, and collaborations with such notable writers as Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, and William F. Nolan, among others.
George Clayton Johnson: Fictioneer discusses the intricacies of writing for the classic television series, The Twilight Zone, and reveals the twists and turns of imagination that led him to pen his iconic Twilight Zone episodes. He wrote four stories-with-teleplays for The Twilight Zone (Nothing in the Dark, A Penny for Your Thoughts, A Game of Pool, and Kick the Can). George also wrote four stories adapted by others into teleplays for The Twilight Zone(All Of Us are Dying story re-titled The Four of Us are Dying and Execution story, both adapted by Rod Serling;The Prime Mover story adapted by Charles Beaumont; and Ninety Years Without Slumbering adapted by Richard DeRoy.
George discusses the creative process behind Logan’s Run and Ocean’s Eleven, and reveals how his teleplay for Star Trek, entitled The Man Trap, came to premiere even before the pilot aired.
This giant from the Golden Age of Television shares invaluable wisdom, insights, and tricks of the trade in this enlightening, instructive, and delightful account of his life as a Fictioneer.
Johnson shares an Academy Award nomination with Ray Bradbury for the screenplay of Icarus Montgolfier Wright and a WGA nomination with Jack Golden Russell for the story upon which Ocean’s Eleven was based.
Just as he did when lecturing at such stellar institutions of higher learning as UCLA, USC, or Cal Arts, George Clayton Johnson gives the reader a birds-eye view into the writing life and the early days of television and film, painting a picture filled with richness, texture, heart, and imagination.
https://a.co/d/jcPwRn0 – Buy on Amazon.
Icarus Montgolfier Wright
Bradbury collaborated with Johnson on Icarus Montgolfier Wright (1962), an Oscar-nominated short film about the history of flight. “It was a way of adapting his five-page short story into seventeen pages of lyrical prose in which I would try to visualize paintings merging and melting into each other, so as to use superimposure and the moving camera on works of art.” –
https://bradleyonfilm.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/george-clayton-johnson/
The story concerns an early vision of the first manned rocket flight to the moon and was uncannily accurate seven years prior to the Apollo 11 mission. Joseph Anthony Mugnaini, an illustrator and Bradbury’s long-time friend and collaborator, spent two years creating thousands of sketches and more than 300 oil paintings to help create the animated short film, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1962.