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.
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