The Illustrated Author: Something Wicked This Way Comes

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
Open locks,
Whoever knocks!
Second Witch, William Shakespeare’s "Macbeth," Act IV, Scene I

For fans of Ray Bradbury, the most satisfying of crossovers from page to screen - though not without problems of its own - was the 1983 production of "Something Wicked This Way Comes," a satisfaction derived in no small part from the fact that, unlike "Fahrenheit 451" and "The Illustrated Man," Bradbury himself wrote the screenplay, based on his 1962 novel about the eerie autumn arrival of a macabre carnival in a small Midwestern town and its mysterious effect on two local boys, Will Halloway and his best friend, Jim Nightshade.

Ray Bradbury often asserted he wanted to be a magician as a youngster in his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois. His self-acknowledged epiphany to become a writer stemmed from a childhood visit to a traveling carnival where the twelve-year-old boy encountered a magician who called himself "Mr. Electro." "He was a miracle of magic," Bradbury later recalled, "seated at the electric chair, swathed in black velvet robes, his face burning like white phosphor, blue sparks hissing from his fingertips. He pointed at me, touched me with his electric sword - my hair stood on end - and said, ‘Live forever.’"

Bradbury returned to the carnival day after day, befriending the illusionist. "He took me down to the lake shore and talked his small philosophies and I talked my big ones." Fostering notions of reincarnation and immortality in the boy, Mr. Electro told him they had met long ago. "You were my best friend," Mr. Electro said. "You died in my arms in 1918, in France." Bradbury remembered, "I knew something special had happened in my life. I stood by the carousel and wept."

In "Something Wicked This Way Comes," the carnival that pulls into the picturesque village on a late-night train - with no engineer in the locomotive and no passengers in the cars - is ominously billed as Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival. In short order, the new attraction tempts the locals by fulfilling long-harbored wishes but with ironic twists, not unlike storied bargains with the Devil.

Curiously, the seed of "Something Wicked This Way Comes" was first planted by the author into the brain of one of the screen’s greatest dancing stars, Gene Kelly. Bradbury fancifully deemed "Singin’ in the Rain" (1952) a "science-fiction musical." In his afterword for the 1997 edition of Something Wicked This Way Comes, he posited, "Didn’t (‘Singin’ in the  Rain’) describe how silent films re-invented themselves as a technology of sound? Dreaming a concept and then birthing it? It did! It started with a fiction and ended with a science."

Sifting through his manuscripts, Bradbury came across something he had titled "The Black Ferris," "no more that ten typewritten pages," he noted, "the tale of a strange carnival and two small boys and a night with no end in sight." According to Bradbury, Gene Kelly declared, "This must be the next picture I direct!"
Unfortunately, no studio seemed interested in backing the production. (One year after Kelly’s death, Bradbury dedicated the 1997 publication of Something Wicked This Way Comes "with love, to the memory of Gene Kelly, whose performances influenced and changed my life.")

The title of the story outline became "Dark Carnival," which Bradbury transformed into the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes in 1962. By the middle of the 1970s, after a series of screenplays for various studios were either passed over or simply forgotten, Sam Peckinpah - of all people! - the director of "The Wild Bunch" and "Straw Dogs," two landmark works which forever changed how movies depict bloodletting, passionately voiced his desire to sign on. Bradbury asked, "How will you do it, Sam?" in response to which the grizzled filmmaker growled, "Rip the pages out of your book and stuff them in the camera!"

In 1977, Bradbury sold the screen rights for the novel to Paramount. Bradbury and Jack Clayton, who had earlier rubbed elbows when the former was working on the screenplay for "Moby Dick" (1956) and the latter was one of director John Huston’s associate producers, collaborated on a completed script, but the project ended up being shelved in the Hollywood limbo known as turnaround.

By the early 1980s, after observing the box-office success of dark fantasy films like "Time Bandits" and "The Dark Crystal," Walt Disney Pictures turned its attention to features with a more mature appeal in an attempt to break free from the stereotypical image of a kiddy-fodder factory. Peter Douglas came on board as producer for his father’s, Kirk’s, production company, and Ray Bradbury was hired to write a new screenplay from the bottom up.

The author himself suggested Jack Clayton as director. As a director, Clayton had a hit-or-miss career bringing literary classics to the screen, from the acclaimed 1959 version of author John Braine’s angry-young-man novel Room at the Top to the spine-tingling ghost story "The Innocents" (based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw) to the remote aloofness of the 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow.

As the filming of "Something Wicked This Way Comes" progressed, two conflicting approaches came into play. Bradbury, naturally, wanted to remain faithful to his darkly hued text, while Disney, despite its pretenses otherwise, favored a family-friendly atmosphere. Bradbury and Clayton had a falling out when, at Disney’s request, the director hired John Mortimer, a renowned British dramatist and barrister, to revise the screenplay. The resulting footage tested poorly in preview screenings, and Bradbury was welcomed back into the fold to script new opening and closing narration by actor Arthur Hill (as the adult Will Halloway). In the end, Disney pumped an additional $5 million into the film’s budget for extensive re-shoots, re-editing, even re-scoring the music soundtrack.

Like the most memorable of Walt Disney’s classic animated fairy tales, "Something Wicked This Way Comes" has, at its twisted core, an unforgettable villain. For the pivotal role of the sinister carnival’s ringmaster, Mr. Dark, Ray Bradbury originally pictured Christopher Lee or Peter O’Toole, but the studio envisioned a smaller paycheck and cast the then relatively unknown Jonathan Pryce (above). Pryce, who would win a Tony Award for his show-stopping performance as the French-Vietnamese Engineer in "Miss Saigon," is best known for portraying Governor Weatherby Swann in the first three "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, as well as the President of the United States in the "G.I. Joe" films. He had memorable roles in director Terry Gilliam’s "Brazil," "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" and "The Brothers Grimm."

In "Something Wicked This Way Comes," the actor literally ignites the screen as the gaunt, charismatic personification of evil. The film’s highlight is a late-night confrontation between Mr. Dark and the town librarian, the aging father of young Will Halloway, brilliantly portrayed by Jason Robards, who, in the words of critic Roger Ebert, "is allowed to use his greatest gift, his magnificently controlled speaking voice, more poetically in this movie than in anything else he’s done in years."

"All that time spent living only through other men’s lives," Mr. Dark sneers at the librarian, "dreaming only other men’s dreams. What a waste!"

"I know who you are," Mr. Halloway ventures cautiously. "You are the autumn people. Where do you come from? The dust. Where do you go? The grave."

"We are the hungry ones," Mr. Dark responds. "Your torments call us like dogs in the night. And we do feed, and feed well…"

Halloway utters, "To stuff yourselves on other people’s nightmares."

"And butter our plain bread with delicious pain," Mr. Dark adds.

Roger Ebert went out of his way to praise the picture’s "love of language," calling it "one of the rare American films to savor the sound of words, and their rhythms."

It is Jason Robard’s remarkably honest relationship onscreen with his son, Will, and his aching need of redemption for a long-past act of parental negligence that provides the film with its unique heartbeat. Fourteen-year-old Vidal Peterson, disarmingly unaffected in his first motion picture, went on to capitalize on the film’s cult following with guest appearances on the science fiction TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (below left) and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" (below right) in the early 1990s before fading into obscurity.














Diane Ladd (mother of actress Laura Dern and an Academy Award nominee as Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance as Flo the waitress in 1974’s "Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore") is a standout in a memorably pathetic if all too brief turn as Jim Nightshade’s doting mother (below), waiting in vain for the return of a wandering husband.

Likewise, veteran character actor Royal Dano (memorable as Elijah in director John Huston’s screen version of "Moby Dick," ominously prophesying, "A day will come when you’ll smell land and there’ll be no land, and on that day, Ahab will go to his grave…He will rise and beckon! Then all save one shall follow!" ) makes a remarkable impression as traveling lightning rod salesman Tom Fury (below).

A welcome surprise in the cast is the appearance of Pam Grier - once the gun-toting amazon in such blaxploitation flicks as "Coffy," "Foxy Brown," "Sheba, Baby" and "Friday Foster," and later the object of director Quentin Tarantino’s unabashed valentine "Jackie Brown" - as the stately and (literally) heart-stopping Dust Witch (below).

The film’s special effects-riddled conclusion seems hurried and unplanned. Sadly missing, in particular, is the climax in the original novel when Mr. Halloway ingeniously dispatches the Dust Witch with a wax bullet engraved with a smile. Roger Ebert, however, noted, "It’s one of the few literary adaptations I’ve seen in which the film not only captures the mood and tone of the novel, but also the novel’s style. Bradbury’s prose is a strange hybrid of craftsmanship and lyricism. He builds his stories and novels in a straightforward way, with strong plotting, but his sentences owe more to Thomas Wolfe than to the pulp tradition, and the lyricism isn’t missed in this movie."

Ebert wrote, "In its description of autumn days, in its heartfelt conversations between a father and a son, in the unabashed romanticism of its evil carnival and even in the perfect rhythm of its title, this is a horror movie with elegance."

Gregory Benford, UC Irvine physics professor and a Nebula Award-winning science fiction writer, observed, "Nostalgia is eternal. And Americans are often displaced from their origins and carry an anxious memory of it, of losing their origins. Bradbury reminds us of what we were and of what we could be…His stories tell us: Hold onto your childhood. You don’t get another one."