delgadosaur: Bradbury didn't aim brickbats at Harry Essex. In fact, they remained friends, and worked together on something 25 or 30 years later, a play or something. Essex was not part of the IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE brew until after Bradbury was finished. Clearly, his derogatory comments are therefore not aimed at Essex, but someone upstream. Since William Alland was the only person he was dealing with, that would be him.

In deference to Essex, he DID write the script, Bradbury's pontifications not withstanding. Nearly every screenplay is written from some form of other material: a book, a short story, prose poem, painting, song title... whatever. It's the screenwriter's job to pick and choose what works, what doesn't, what will make a practical movie scene or bit of dialogue, what needs to be trimmed or expanded, and create a practical blueprint which can be read and understood by everyone involved. Essex was given Bradbury's detailed 111 page screen treatment, and within it were chunks of dialogue that-- with judicious trimming-- became screenplay dialogue. The characters and their attributes were all there, as was the description of the location.

It's the screenwriter's choices of what to keep-- and what not to keep-- that make a screenplay work or not.  John Huston, for instance, did the obvious thing on THE MALTESE FALCON none of the previous adapters had done in the two prior film versions-- kept most of the story and a great deal of Hammet's dialogue verbatim.

It helps (sometimes) to have a detailed story like Bradbury's.  And often the screenwriter will retype good stuff verbatim from the previous work.  Same thing happened with David Koepp's first draft of Spider-Man.  A lot of specific description and dialogue was lifted word for word from the James Cameron "scriptment"-- not because Koepp was a poor writer, but because that's the job he was hired to do.

There were also amorphous descriptions which would give designers, prop makers and make-up artists fits. If you're writing a novel, or a description for radio, it's all well and good to describe an alien creature as an angel-hair-covered bloblike bat-rat-spider-crab with gossamer arms and a liquid eyeball, Lovecraftian and indescribable, etc., etc. However, a screenplay is a practical means to an end, not a stand-alone work of art. Things need to be explicit rather than poetic.

A good example is in Bill Warren's KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES in the chapter on ANGRY RED PLANET. The big blob creature which attacks and engulfs the rocket is described as an amoeba with an eye revolving in its membrane. Not bad, pretty icky. Except the prop makers read it and literalized it, so this thing had an eye on it that revolved around like the turret of a tank.

Last Edited By: Ted Newsom Aug 9 10 7:03 PM. Edited 2 times.