Charles Beaumont was born on 2 January 1929. He was born Charles Leroy Nutt. I only mention it because it’s such an awesome name.
He was a successful science fiction and horror writer starting in the early 1950s. I know him for his screenplays — especially for The Twilight Zone. He was closely aligned with Richard Matheson. The two were the primary writers for Corman’s Poe Cycle, for example. I suspect Beaumont would be more famous today if he hadn’t died so young.
Charles Beaumont died on 21 February 1967 at the age of 38. He had been ill for several years. He suffered from some kind of mental decline. Some suggest it was early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, but that is rather too early. It seems more likely to have been some kind of frontotemporal dementia. It could have been Pick’s disease. Regardless, he was pretty much unable to write the last couple of years of his life.
Some of Beaumont’s friends ghostwrote works for him at the end. He wrote 22 episodes of The Twilight Zone. But his friends apparently wrote four of these (3 by Jerry Sohl and one by John Tomerlin). And he wrote the first draft of The Masque of the Red Death. But R Wright Campbell had to write the revisions since Beaumont was too ill.
But let’s not watch any of his excellent genre films. Instead, let’s watch The Intruder. Beaumont wrote the novel in 1959 as well as this 1962 screenplay. It tells the story of a white supremacist (played by William Shatner). He comes to a small town on the verge of integrating its high school to whip up racial animus. Samuel Fuller could easily have made this film. It’s very good!
Charles Beaumont via IMDb. It is in the public domain.