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Old 28th June 2011, 08:04 AM
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Default New Charles Beaumont Documentary

A new 140 minute cut of the documentary Charles Beaumont: The Short Life of Twilight Zone's Magic Man has recently been released. He was the second most prolific Twilight Zone writer after Rod Serling.

You can order it HERE.

Here's the details, if anyone's seen it, post your thoughts!

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. As the only child of an obsessed mother with an explosive temper, he endured many hardships, such as seeing his pets tortured and being dressed as a girl. Plagued with health problems and very fragile, Beaumont was a prodigious young talent whose artistic and writing abilities surpassed his peers.

Following his dreams to Los Angeles, the driven, intellectual Beaumont became the charismatic 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. Charles Beaumont's intensity and unabashed heed to confront controversy influenced early television and science fiction; he understood the human condition, and lived at the edge in everything he did and created.

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...

He began to age - looking more like a man of 70 than a young man in his thirties. Charles Beaumont seemed to be trapped in one of his own Twilight Zone stories.

Whatever the cause, he would not live to see his 39th birthday.


Price: $24.99
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