Lamont Johnson is an actors' director who is also a director's director. Acclaimed, respected, and superbly consistent, he is television's answer to William Wyler. Between his 1964 Emmy nomination and Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award for a Profiles in Courage episode ("The Oscar Underwood Story") and his 1992 Emmy nomination for the real­ life disaster film Crash Landing, Johnson amassed 11 Emmy nominations (winning in 1985 for Wallenberg: A Hero's Story and in 1988 for Gore Vidal's Lincoln) and eight DGA nominations (winning four, plus a special award as the Most Outstanding TV Director of 1972). Although he has racked up admirable big­ screen credits, too, such as The Last American Hero (a 1973 movie based on Tom Wolfe's profile of a stock-car racing champion, "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!"), television is the medium that has allowed Johnson the most room to flex his creative muscles. His video credits list contains character portraits, period epics, theater pieces, and docu­-dramas.

     Employing what he learned in theater, radio, live TV, and feature films, Johnson imbues his TV movies with dramatic briskness and invention, vital sound, and visual dimension. His distinctive humane touch derives from his feeling for performers, who in some way become his true subject. Almost every year brings new additions to his gallery of unforgettable figures, from John Ritter's agonizingly frustrated Vietnam vet in the Agent Orange expose Unnatural Causes (1986) to Annette O'Toole's Rose Fitzgerald-part stoic hero­ine, part religious maniac- in The Kennedys of Massachusetts (1988). The vibrant characters who populate his TV films would fill a small city-Johnsonville, USA-except his art encompasses the world. One of his most impressive accomplishments is Wallenberg: A Hero's Story, starring Richard Chamberlain, in which the Scarlet Pimpernel-like heroism of Raoul Wallen­berg (the Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews) puts the horror of the Holocaust in stark relief.

     Gifted with a “roaring bass voice,” Johnson turned pro as a radio actor at age 16 and financed his college education by working as a broadcast performer, news announcer, and disc jockey. After student theater experience (such as directing a production of Liliom in a women's gym), he moved from Los Angeles to New York with the aim of acting on the stage. He became a mainstay of radio soap operas and a Broadway understudy; on a USO tour through Europe, he befriended Gertrude Stein, who gave him rights to her play, Yes ls for a Very Young Man. His first professional directing job was to mount it, in 1948, at off-Broadway's Cherry Lane Theater, with a cast that boasted Anthony Franciosa, Gene Saks, Michael V. Gazzo, Bea Arthur, and Kim Stanley.

     Although he swore off directing after that-he could not bear the role of referee-Johnson came under its spell for good while acting for such broadcast luminaries as John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, and Jack Smight. In 1955 Johnson made his TV directorial debut guiding Richard Boone through an adaptation of Wuthering Heights for the hour-long live drama series, Matinee Theater. (Johnson ended up doing 28 of those shows in two years.) In 1958 Boone gave Johnson the opportunity to break into filmed TV when the star insisted that Johnson be hired for six episodes of the second season of his hit western, Have Gun-Will Travel. In the late I950s and early 1960s, Johnson went on to direct popular and innovative dramatic series such as Peter Gunn, Naked City, and The Defenders. He did a fistful of episodes for The Twilight Zone, including "Kick the Can" (which Steven Spielberg remade in his The Twilight 'Zone: The Movie). Four decades later, when Felicity creator J.J. Abrams decided to shake up his lethargic collegiate characters by dropping them in a latter-day Twilight Zone, he turned for direction to Johnson, who ended up reworking an episode he had directed in 1961: "Five Characters in Search of an Exit." More than a replica, the result was a unique hybrid that transformed the youthful self-absorption of the Felicity characters into something both eerie and hilarious.

     It was a trio of collaborations with the producing-­ writing team of Richard Levinson and William Link that cemented Johnson's place in broadcast history. Levinson and Link smartly emphasized the plight of " individuals while blazing trails in TV movies' depictions of race relations (My Sweet Charlie, 1970), homosexuality (That Certain Summer, 1972), and American military conduct (The Execution of Private Slavik, 1974). Coming fully into his own as a director, Johnson shaped performances with an emotional combustion to match the script's social conflagrations. Working on location whenever possible, he brewed alive and unpredictable atmospheres. It is rare to remember character bits and mood points from what arc usually called "message movies," but what springs to mind from My Sweet Charlie is the edgy sheepishness of the fugitive northern black lawyer (played by Al Freeman Jr.) as he tries to persuade the pregnant southern runaway (Patty Duke) that he can impersonate a down-home black man. From That Certain Summer: one recalls the uncomfortable-looking figures of the gay hero (Hal Holbrook) and his teenage son (Scott Jacoby) as the father struggles to explain his lifestyle on a three-minute downhill walk. Picture The Execution of Private Slavik-the first docudrama TV movie-­ and a different trek pops into memory: the penetratingly sad, snow-blown death march for the only U.S. soldier to be executed for desertion after World War 11. Though the writers received the lion's share of attention, and the scripts were solid and sensitive, Johnson' direction was the most artistic aspect of these ambitious projects, lending them delicacy as well as poignancy. In the capper to this spate of TV productivity, his 1975 Fear on Trial (based on a David W. Rin­ tels script), Johnson's evocation of a frigid 1950s New York City winter overpowered the screenplay's conventional, simplistic anti-blacklisting theatrics; it looked as if the Cold War itself had set the city's temperature.

     Johnson did astonishing work while constantly shuttling among media from the mid- 1970s to the mid­ 1980s. In 1980 two of his favorite TV productions premiered. The first, Paul's Case, a 52-minute-long drama for the PBS American Short Story series (shot in ten days on a $180,000 budget), is a powerful, peculiar American tragedy about the downfall of a fragile e-capist. Following Willa Cather's original story to the letter, Johnson led Eric Roberts to his best performance—he is splendidly off-kilter as a high school boy in 1905 Pittsburgh who is too far into his dream world of glamor and theatricality to come out of it alive. Johnson's TV-movie Off the Minnesota Strip, which aired just three months later, is a revelation of a contemporary adolescent limbo, with Mare Winning­ ham as a teenage hooker, brilliantly conveying the in­terlocking  social  and  sexual  pressures  that  trap teenagers into self-destructive fantasies of "making it." Around the same time as these TV milestones, Johnson completed one of his finest feature films, Cattle Annie and Little Britches (not released until 1981), an offbeat western  that  explored  Americans'  need  for  pop mythology and turned the adventures of its young pulp heroines (stunningly  played  by Diane Lane and Amanda Plummer) into coming-of-age action poetry. 

     Pulling off three wildly different projects in a year would be admirable for the resident director of a repertory company or an anthology series; to do it by leapfrogging the worlds of network TV, PBS, and independent filmmaking would seem a feat. But not for Johnson. He has nurtured a robust, sane creativity by approaching the theatrical arts as a continuum­ and creating an emotional spectrum that retains its in­tensity whether projected on a movie screen or transmitted via satellite and cable.