The Twilight Zone exists as a kind of anomaly in the history of television. It was a high-concept (well, most of the time) anthology of short plays, tales of the bizarre - designed to provoke thought and ideas - contributed to by the best sci-fi writers of the time. Viewers were asked to confront each week's episode with new curiosity, and they did. Looking at the show, now, it seems pretty dated. Today, the twists and ideas presented in the show are mostly well-worn. But at the time, it came closer than most television shows to actually being art.

George Clayton Johnson was among the writers for The Twilight Zone. At the time, he ran with Ray Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon, and William F. Nolan, among other sci-fi luminaries. His contributions to the program are held in high regard by fans.

The Tacoma Public Library presents "A very special evening with George Clayton Johnson" Thursday, Feb. 4 at 7 p.m. inside its Main Branch. He will be participating in a live interview/discussion with fellow Zone writer Nolan. Nolan received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association this year.

Fifty years after the Zone, he's just as brimming with ideas. Speaking with him on the phone, I'm impressed with his eloquence and loquaciousness in describing the experience of writing for such a specific format as The Twilight Zone.

"Oftentimes, Rod [Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone]'s scripts had to pass through [producer] Buck Houghton before they were actually filmed, same as ours," says Johnson. "So, there was a standard of goodness. If you couldn't meet that, you couldn't stay with the show."

Talking more about the process of putting together an episode, Johnson says, "It becomes so richly collaborative, each person putting in a very necessary part - of sights and sounds, of images on a screen. And if those images are right, they'll make you cry, and that's the objective, is to make you cry ... to make you care, to involve you, to show you a little bit more about infinity or the human condition - something so fundamental that everybody knows it, but it's never been put into words."

Johnson was born in a barn, dropped out of school in eight grade, joined the military, and eventually wrote his first story, which would become Ocean's Eleven. But his fascination was always with sci-fi.

"I developed a taste in that area and started following those kinds of writers," says Johnson. "You'd be surprised. Guys like Jack London wrote The Shadow and the Flash about the Invisible Man. Two guys who had different theories about how light worked, one of whom thought light was the combination of all the colors, another who had an idea that it had none of the colors, and somehow they work themselves into a situation where they ended up in some cosmic reality representing the shadow and the flesh - and which one of them is more invisible than the other? Wonderful mental gymnastics can be played when you're reading, adventuring, in that climate."

One of Johnson's better-known Twilight contributions is an episode called "A Game of Pool." In it, Jack Klugman plays a young hotshot pool player. Klugman is hanging around in a pool hall, after hours, lamenting that Fats Brown, the greatest pool player of all time, is dead. If he were alive, Klugman would give him a run for his money. Suddenly, the ghost of Fats Brown (as played by Jonathan Winters) appears, and takes his challenge, adding that if Klugman loses, it'll mean his life.

This episode's notable because Rod Serling changed Johnson's original ending. In Serling's version, Klugman beats Winters and finds out that, in the afterlife, Klugman must now accept every pool player's challenge until he is finally defeated, at which point he could rest.

I find Johnson's ending more interesting. Johnson has Klugman lose. Klugman, noticing that he hasn't died, wonders why. Fats tells him that he'll die "as all second-raters die: you'll be buried and forgotten without me touching you. If you'd beaten me, you'd have lived forever."

Had this ending been aired, Serling would have closed the episode by saying, "Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime... And departing, leaving behind us footprints on the sands of time, on the Earth, as we know it, and ... in the Twilight Zone."

It's a hungry moral from a young, ambitious writer, whose twilight years have failed to slow him down one bit.

[Tacoma Main Library Olympic Room, George Clayton Johnson with William F. Nolan, 7 p.m., no cover, 1102 Tacoma Ave. S., Tacoma, 253.591.5666]