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IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
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Re: IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
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TomWeaver999
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Aug 5 10 6:59 AM
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From UNIVERSAL TERRORS--THE 1950S:
According to William Alland, "Many of my films were based on one- or two-page ideas that I would submit to the studio, and they would say, 'Yeah, go ahead, work on it.' In fact, I don’t think I even had to show [Universal executive] Bill Goetz my outline for It Came from Outer Space, I just told him about it and he said go.
"I had an idea to make a science fiction film, and the very simple idea was this: A spaceship accidentally crashes on Earth, and the beings in it take one look around at this place and say, 'Jesus Christ, let's get the hell out of here.' Because they sense that we're an inferior breed--savage, brutal, stupid, beastly. They understand that we are a species that destroys anything that frightens us, that destroys anything we don’t understand. I wrote this up in a couple of pages with the idea that they crash here, they want to get out, they realize that the Earth beings want only to destroy them, and they have the power to destroy us if they have to. (But they don’t want to do that, they just want to get out.) And, ultimately, cooler heads prevail and they are allowed to leave. That's basically what I had.
"The studio said, 'Get a writer and see what you can come up with.' They had such confidence in me--I'm serious!--that I got permission to do four pictures a year for seven years, for God's sake. That's an incredible accomplishment. One of the reasons was that they gave me carte blanche--they knew that I would always come in under budget, they knew that my pictures always had a beginning, a middle and an end, and that they worked, see? As a matter of fact, that began to work to my detriment; one of the reasons that I got out is because I couldn’t get them to buy a decent property for me. They wanted me to come up with my own ideas all the time."
Now faced with the chore of choosing a writer, Alland thought immediately of Ray Bradbury, author of [blah blah]. Alland continues, "Over lunch, I told him the very simple idea, and he said, 'Fine, I think I can do this for you'--we didn’t even discuss it that much. And he went off, and came back about two weeks later with an absolutely, incredibly beautiful treatment. Actually, you could have shot it, it was so photographic, so complete. It was almost like a silent movie--there was very little dialogue in it."
It was in late August 1952 that Bradbury's work began; the 32-year-old commuted by bus from his West Los Angeles home to Universal, and did his writing in a two-office bungalow he shared with Sam Rolfe, who was writing a Western. At noon each day, according to Sam Weller's book The Bradbury Chronicles, the studio's new $300-a-week employee took his sack lunch to the "Main Street, America," set on the back lot, where "the set of quaint, charming houses conjured warm memories of his Illinois childhood." Bradbury told Weller, "There was an entire street, just like the street in Waukegan where I was born. And there was a house very much like my grandparents' house, and I sat on the front steps of the porch and had my lunch."
According to a Starlog interview with Bradbury, Universal was initially leery about hiring him, because at that point he'd never written a screenplay. "[Universal was] not sure I could do it, and I, of course, knew I could," he told the magazine's Jeff Szalay. Bradbury told me that, during his time at Universal, he actually wrote two treatments:
I told them that their idea [for the movie] was okay but that I had a better one. I offered to write two versions, one for them, one for me. They thought I was crazy. They said, "But won't you do better work on your idea?" "Yes," I said, "because it is a better concept. Okay? And if you choose the wrong one of my versions, I'll leave. If you choose the right one, I'll stay and finish a longer version." I wrote the two versions, turned them in and the studio had enough sense to see that, indeed, my version was better than theirs.
Bradbury related the tale of his first screenwriting assignment more colorfully in "The Turkey That Attacked New York," his introduction to the 1981 anthology They Came from Outer Space: 12 Classic Science Fiction Tales That Became Major Motion Pictures. He began by saying that the story of his experiences "might shed a little light on why fiction is so often excellent and films so often shoddy," and continued:
All [Universal] knew was that they wanted Something to arrive from Outer Space: a grisly monster, a proper fright that the Westmore brothers could have fun with in the makeup department. In my preliminary talks with the producer and director, I could see we were light years apart. I wanted a more subtle approach, something with a real idea in it. They saw only the obvious--and the vulgar obvious at that.
He went on to describe doing the best job he could of writing a treatment using "their mildewed idea," "using their creaking machinery as center," and then having some good fun writing the second one, "my own just for me." Within 48 hours of submitting both, Bradbury was told that Universal was going to go with his version; "Frankly, I was stunned."
A little bird sent "Turkey" to Alland, sensing it might ruffle his feathers--and it did: "I read that cockamamie thing, and it just outraged me. ...[H]e denigrated us [Alland and Arnold], didn’t mention our names, and wrote with contempt about the whole experience--outrageous!" By the time of our 1995 interview, Alland had no memory of Bradbury's two-treatments approach, and in fact was adamant that it did not happen that way. Boiling over, he told me, "I'm too old and too tired to call him up and say, 'You *f***in' liar, what's the matter with you?' but if you ever meet him you can tell him that I told you he's a god-damn liar."
The 40 years-plus and dozens of movie and TV credits between It Came from Outer Space and our interview had obviously blotted out the two-treatments incident in Alland's mind; Bradbury's version must be true because the two treatments still exist. Sloppy photocopies have long been available "under the table" to diehard fans, and then in 2004 Gauntlet Publications came out with an entire book on It which featured FOUR treatments: three nearly word-for-word-identical ones based on the "vulgar obvious" ideas with which Bradbury says he was presented, and then a much longer fourth one based on his "better concept."
Last Edited By:
TomWeaver999
Aug 5 10 7:19 AM. Edited 1 times.
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