More from UNIVERSAL TERRORS:

Producer Alland assumed that he could have Bradbury follow up on his preliminary work and write the film's screenplay--a suggestion instantly vetoed by his bosses. Alland told me, "Bill Goetz said, 'What do you mean? Are you crazy? You're not going to let Bradbury do the screenplay, are you? You need a screenwriter to do that. He's not a screenwriter.' It was amazing! But in those days, my guts were in my butt--I rarely stood up and fought for anything. If Goetz didn’t want him, he didn't want him. So then, the next question was, what do I do to preserve this beautiful piece of writing?"

Enter Harry Essex (1910-1997), a New Yorker whose first jobs in young adulthood had included stints in the offices of the local papers The Daily Mirror and The Brooklyn Eagle. In the mid-1930s, while employed at the Mirror and dreaming of a Hollywood career, the twentysomething Essex and co-worker Sid Schwartz wrote a treatment which years later (1941) became Universal's Man Made Monster; they also wrote the Broadway play Something for Nothing, which lasted two performances (The Hollywood Reporter: "crudely constructed"; New York Daily News: "incredibly stupid"). All 128 lbs. of Essex enlisted in the Signal Corps during World War II; just a few days after his discharge, he ran into an acquaintance whose current assignment was finding playwrights to turn into screenwriters for Columbia Pictures. During his first several years in movieland, Essex was among the writers on well-done detective procedurals like He Walked by Night (1948) and The Killer That Stalked New York (1950) but mostly toiled in the marshes of the B picture. He and Bradbury first crossed paths during the making of It.

"My meetings with Harry Essex were very pleasant," Bradbury says in an interview in the It Came from Outer Space book: "When I first had lunch with him, the film was in production. The first thing he said to me was, 'What a fool you were to let your long treatment go through because the studio hired me and mainly what I did was re-type your treatment and turn it into a screenplay. You gave them 80 or 90 pages [actually, 100-plus] and a treatment is only supposed to be 30 or 40. But thank you for the gift.' He was very kind about it and very generous..."

Not behind Bradbury's back, he wasn’t: In my interview with Essex, he shockingly tried to glom practically all the It credit, insisting that a three-page story was all that Bradbury ever wrote--and that the Bradbury treatments were actually his (Essex's) despite Bradbury's name on the covers! (He did allow that Bradbury had "attempted" to write a screenplay, but "it was just no good. He's not a screenplay writer.") Giving him more rope with which to hang himself, I asked if it bothered him that Bradbury is so often credited for It's success. "Well, it disturbed me for a while, yeah," continued the pants-on-fire screen scribe. "All my friends and all the people 'in the know' knew what the facts were, but I doubted that the public knew. When Bernard Shaw and Joe Blow write something, they're going to give all the credit to Shaw!"

In 1995, when I told Alland of Essex's reality-lite contentions, he quite understandably let out a gasp of "Oh, my God...!":

Isn't that sad, that he needs to do that? What would a man want to do that for? I've told Ray several times he ought to publish that treatment. It was marvelous, it was just beautiful. As I said, you could actually shoot it, almost! Oh, for God's sake, Harry Essex is trying to take the credit?! Isn't that terrible! Oh, that's an outrage! Harry called me maybe a year ago...and if I knew this then, I would have chewed his ass out! That's sad, that's really sad. ...Harry must be 80 years old by now, so, who the hell knows?, maybe by this time, he's talked himself into that.*

(Arthur Ross, who worked on the screenplay of Creature from the Black Lagoon [1954] before Essex came aboard, was even more blunt about the situation, telling me that It Came from Outer Space "was Ray Bradbury’s story and his dialogue and his picture. I think Harry Essex was psychotic!")

While Essex most certainly was not the author of It Came from Outer Space to the extent that he wanted me to believe, he hugely minimized his contributions when he told Bradbury that practically all he did was re-type Bradbury's final treatment. (There was just no in-between with this guy!) Assuming that all the differences between Bradbury's September-October 1952 treatment and the finished film are Essex's doing, it was he who wrote Putnam's opening narration, added the scene in which George's alien replacement addresses Frank and George, and made a real character out of the sheriff, instead of the Bradbury-conceived slow, aged, Stetson-wearing madman who makes a cartoon-strip speech about hating and wanting to kill anything he doesn't understand (and who lives up to it by blasting Alien Frank for smiling at him). Essex also gives the sheriff more screen time, introducing him in the first crater scene rather than a third of the way into the story as Bradbury does.

Other changes between Bradbury's treatment and the movie: Ellen does not accompany Putnam to the bottom of the crater and does not see the spaceship, thereby making Putnam "a man alone" in the subsequent drama; Putnam is mocked by reporters in the crater rather than in his house; Dr. Snell is present at the crater instead of being a kooky character on the other end of a phone chat; Putnam kills Alien Ellen less cold-bloodedly; and Putnam has an uplifting climactic speech ("There'll be other nights, other stars for us to watch...they'll be back...") rather than the glum, pessimistic one in the treatment ("It's all over. They've gone home. ...For good. Forever. And they won't come back."). Equally beneficial to the movie were many of Essex's deletions of unpromising-sounding Bradbury material: a narratively useless scene of a pouting major at the Pentagon fielding a phone call from The New York Post; the silent movie-ish comic-romantic window-shopping scene; Ellen's squabble with the Board of Education; Putnam's exaggerated-and-then-some reaction to a glimpse of the creature in the mine; and Putnam's killing of the alien Putnam. He also eliminated reams of unnecessary dialogue (including a heated argument about the spaceship's shock absorbers) and rewrote a lot of what he left--even improving Bradbury's "92° speech" with some pruning. (From Bradbury's version: "...But 92°, Fahrenheit, people get itchy, itchy. People get itchy, irritable, hot, cranky. Mean." And they don’t know when to stop talking! <<