Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man
Imagine becoming the top writer for Playboy in your twenties. Imagine being a mainstay for the ground-breaking Twilight Zone series. Imagine verging on the cusp of a major film writing career. Then imagine a mysterious illness stealing your mind and youth.Writer.
Adventurer.
Provocateur.All of these words apply to one man: Charles Beaumont. As one of the principal writers for the original Twilight Zone series, Beaumont became a mainstay of 1960s television. Later, working with filmmaker Roger Corman, he embarked on a promising career in movies (7 Faces of Dr. Lao, The Intruder). By this time, Beaumont was also a primary contributor to Playboy, Esquire, and several other major magazines of the day. Beaumont overcame humble roots, bouncing between Chicago and Washington state, to become the nucleus of a group of Southern California writers whose ranks include Richard Matheson, William F. Nolan, George Clayton Johnson, Harlan Ellison, and Ray Bradbury among others. At the height of his career, Beaumont began exhibiting strange and frightening symptoms: slurring words, balance problems, memory lapses. Was it alcohol abuse? Was it leftover from his childhood bout of meningitis? Perhaps it was stress... Whatever the cause, he would not live to see his 39th birthday.
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