George Lefferts is one of the most prolific writers to have worked in Hollywood. He has won five Emmys, two Golden Globes and numerous other awards for journalistic writing and for television shows he has written and produced. He is probably best known to genre fans for his work on the 1950s radio anthology series "Dimension X" and "X Minus One." He recently spoke to Airlock Alpha about these shows.

"I didn't aspire to be a writer, but I always wrote," he told Airlock Alpha's Michael Simpson. "Looking back, even in grammar school I edited the school paper. Then in high school I edited the high school paper and the yearbook for my class. In college I edited the college paper and wrote a lot of stuff for them."

Born in Patterson, New Jersey, in 1921, Lefferts studied for a BA in Engineering at Drew University before transferring to the English program at the University of Michigan. While there, he studied poetry under W.H. Auden. After that he served in World War Two, first as a public relations officer for an Army psychiatric hospital and then transferring German POWs from North Africa to prison camps in Texas. After the war ended, his writing career began to take off.

"I didn't intend to be a writer but when I got out of the Army I had two choices," Lefferts said. "I was already married. I had a chance to go to medical school, which was my first love actually, and I just decided I didn't have time to do that. I wasted four years in the war and so I sat down and wrote, which I knew I could do because I had always done it. And then I got to really like it."

Lefferts locked himself in his mother-in-law's apartment, he said. There he wrote a tongue-in cheek article called "Violence in Radio," which he sold to Esquire magazine. He also wrote an epic poem, and a script for radio. It was the latter that got him his break in Hollywood.

"At that time NBC had a drama script department and I got a call from a guy named Richard McDonough," Lefferts said. "He said he had just read the script I sent in and he thought it was very good and [asked], 'What was I doing?' I said, 'Looking for a job,' and he said, 'Well, you have a job'."

As an apprentice writer at NBC, Lefferts met Ernest Kinoy. The pair forged a successful partnership as radio scriptwriters, particularly after NBC asked them to help create the science fiction series "Dimension X." Lefferts was already no stranger to science and science fiction. When he was starting out he read Ray Bradbury voraciously, he said. He also got "good fodder" for "Dimension X" from some earlier NBC assignments.

"I remember being sent down to wherever they were working on [the first big computer]," Lefferts said. "It might have been Trenton, New Jersey... It took up one full floor of a building that was a city block long. They [also] sent me down to Baltimore to do a mock atomic bombing of a city that they had built down there to train civil defense workers. Right after the war this was, 1947 or so...and of course at the time it was all live broadcasting. We had arranged for some B-29 bombers to come up from an airbase in Virginia and...we would put the cameras on them as they came up over the horizon... It was a big operation; they had probably more than a thousand workers come from Washington to be volunteers to help us. And we cued the bombers and the show started and the announcer was standing in the middle of the city and the bombers didn't show up. They didn't get our radio signal. And at the very end of the show, when he's standing out there in the open [and] saying, the line I wrote was, 'And peace finally comes to Maryland,' the technical director says in my headphones, 'Here they come,' [and] the bombers came thundering over the city."

Three years after that "Dimension X" had its premiere. It was among the first 'serious' science fiction anthology series to be broadcast using a mass medium and it predated "The Twilight Zone" by nine years. Its failure to become as well known as its televised counterpart only reflects radio's relaxed grip on our memory; the show was popular then with listeners and critics. It imposed heavy demands on Lefferts and Kinoy, however.

"We had less than a week to do each show," said Lefferts. "And we had to keep coming up with them. The show was on every week. So, sometimes I would work by myself; sometimes Ernie and I would sit down and talk over something he was doing or I was doing and we managed to roll out a lot of scripts."

Between them, Kinoy and Lefferts wrote over 40 scripts for "Dimension X." Many were adapted from works by well-known science fiction writers, including Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut. Lefferts made a point of calling the authors to get their feedback. He also tried to stick as closely as possible to their original work.

"I didn't want to distort it," Lefferts said. "There were times when you would just have to do it. Sometimes the material just didn't lend itself and you had to do some other things but generally, especially with people like Bradbury who wrote so well, I tried really to be true to what their intent was."

Lefferts and Kinoy also wrote some original scripts for "Dimension X." Lefferts said he found that easier, but his inspiration often came from desperation.

"I had to come up with stuff and there was just no fooling around," said Lefferts. "I would take some crazy notion and develop it. I remember looking up at the moon one night when I had to do a script and I developed a script called 'The Man in the Moon.' It was about transporting Earth people to the Moon to work as pretty much slave labor in the mines on the moon. Anything would suggest an idea."

Listeners, NBC executives and authors weren't the only people that Lefferts was trying to please. Censorship was rampant in those days, he said.

"There were restrictions that people wouldn't believe today," said Lefferts. "We could not use the word 'crazy' for example. It was not politically correct. We certainly could not use any sexual references, although I managed to get around that with a show I did about a robot. I can't remember the name of it, and the last line, the robot comes into his mistress and I remember I wrote, 'Oil me, Lola,' which was about as sexy as you could get on radio in those days."

In addition to restrictions imposed by censors, Lefferts had to deal with challenges specific to writing science fiction for radio. By definition, the genre includes elements that are not part of everyday experience. Lefferts' scripts had form images of these things in listeners' minds and still generate dramatic momentum.

"It's pretty tough to visualise a space ship, you know, hurtling through space or what aliens look like...and that sort of thing," said Lefferts. "But somehow we were able to work around it without being too descriptive in narrative. I always tried to avoid narration. I thought that narration indicated a failure in my ability to make the characters come alive and visualise things. So most of it was dialogue."

Lefferts work wasn't done when his script was turned in, either. It was incumbent upon a writer to go to rehearsals because scripts might require revisions, he said. They may be too long or too short, and sometimes directors or actors would ask for changes. Besides, they were his "babies" and he "didn't want to see them screwed up too much," he said.

Among his favourite scripts was his original story "Perigi's Wonderful Dolls" (also broadcast as "Marionettes, Inc."). First aired on Aug.4, 1950, it was about a young girl who borrows a sinister doll from a shop in Washington D.C. It ends with her father apparently killing the shop's proprietor. But like the best "Twilight Zone" stories, there is a twist: the only real doll is the proprietor and the 'fake' dolls are evil aliens. Another of Lefferts' favourites was inspired by some of his more down-to-earth writing.

"I used to write the dialogue for the Macy's Day Parade every Thanksgiving and I took my kids to see it," Lefferts said. "When I was trying to get an idea for 'Dimension X' it occurred to me, what if the [parade] was an excuse for Martians to appear and take over?"

That idea became "The Parade," which first aired on Sep. 25, 1950. It tells the dark tale of a publicist who is paid a large sum of money to organise the title event, which he believes is meant to advertise a new film. He discovers too late that the marchers have conquest in mind. Other favourites of Lefferts include some adaptations, two of which were inspired by poetry rather than prose.

"'Nightmare' was a Stephen Vincent Benét poem," said Lefferts . He wrote a series of them: 'Nightmare One,' 'Nightmare Two,' 'Nightmare Three,' and the one that I did I believe was 'The Revolt of the Machines.' I remember one line in which a 5th Avenue bus had a broker pined to the steps of the 5th Avenue library."

Benét was a renowned poet who had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1929 and 1944. He had also written the short story on which the 1941 fantasy film "The Devil and Daniel Webster" was based. Another Lefferts script, "There Will Come Soft Rain," was based on a Ray Bradbury short story, which, in turn, was inspired by a poem of that name by another Pulitzer Prize winner, Sara Teasdale.

"That was a rather nice one," Lefferts said. "I did that as a companion piece to Ray Bradbury's 'Mars is Heaven'."

"Dimension X" finished its run in Sept. 1951. It wasn't Lefferts' only contribution to science fiction at the time, though. Another Old Time Radio series, "Lights Out," had moved to television in 1946 and become a regular series in 1949. Lefferts wrote one of the most popular episodes, "The Martian Eyes," which was first broadcast in Oct. 1950. It starred Burgess Meredith as a man who could identify Martians on Earth with the help of enhanced vision.

After "Dimension X" Lefferts and Kinoy worked together writing radio scripts for, among other things, NBC's "Rocky Fortune" (1953-54), an adventure series starring Frank Sinatra, and "Dr. Sixgun" (1954-55), which was a western. In 1955 NBC commissioned a new science fiction anthology series, "X Minus One." That series ran until 1958 and scripts (and some shows) from "Dimension X" were used during its run. Although Lefferts couldn't recall writing any new material for "X Minus One," its success was a further tribute to his love of science fiction and his rapport with Kinoy.

"We really enjoyed working together," Lefferts said. "We did have a lot of fun. We would throw out some outrageous ideas and if they caught fire we would develop them. And sometimes they were just too ridiculous and we would just sit there and laugh and try and come up with something else."

In 1958 Lefferts became a producer and writer of films for the Department of State in Washington D.C. He would later produce at ABC, Time-Life Films and back at NBC. His work would include the science fiction television film "Alien Lover" (1975), in which Kate Mulgrew (Captain Janeway in "Star Trek: Voyager") made her TV debut. Other writing and producing credits include award winning dramas and documentaries and acclaimed plays and stage musicals. Radio remains his first love, however, and he recalls his genre work with particular fondness.

"It was just the best time I've had in my life as a writer," Lefferts said. "Doing science fiction gives you so much freedom. It's so challenging also, and its fun. And also there's an element in it of trying to predict the future, and actually doing it sometimes. I think most of the great advances we have today would have been challenged as being impossible even 25, 30 years ago."

Radio shows like "Dimension X" remain popular because they appeal to the imagination, he said. That popularity might not have benefited him as much as it should - he has tried unsuccessfully to get residuals from some companies that were syndicating and selling recordings of shows he wrote - but the longevity of his work has produced pleasant surprises.

"I was working on a spy movie in Berlin," Lefferts said. "And the bell hop took me up to the room [in the Berlin Hilton], turned on the radio to show me how it worked and here on German radio in Berlin the first thing I heard was, 'Written by George Lefferts.' I thought it was a joke. And then it said, 'This had been a presentation of Armed Forces Radio in Berlin.' I think it was a science fiction show, one of the 'X Minus One's that I wrote."

It is reassuring to know that the work of George Lefferts, Ernest Kinoy and other writers who helped to bring serious science fiction into the mainstream still has a place on the airwaves.

Michael Simpson is a writer and science fiction fan living in Canada. You can reach him at msimpson@airlockalpha.com. He would like to thank Sean Dougherty of Friends of Old Time Radio (www.fotr.net) for his help in setting up this interview.