Could be Bradbury wasn't available to do it, or as suggested earlier in this thread the studio had their misgivings in letting a writer who was not primarily a screenwriter hand it in without letting their own guy give it the once over first.  Nothing much is to be extrapolated from it creative-wise.  It could have just meant they could get Essex for cheaper than Bradbury, for what was just essentially a edit / polish.
Why not just accept what both Bradbury and the producer Alland have to say about it?  Bradbury said he finished his job. Alland said he suggested Bradbury for the script but was vetoed, and he hired Essex instead?

I doubt that Harry Essex got less than Bradbury, whatever their respective bone fides were at the time.  Three hundred bucks a week is pretty rock-bottom. I'd guess scale on a weekly at the time was probably about $150 a week.  And Essex was the right guy for the job-- an ex-newspaper guy with a number of punchy crime thrillers-- someone whose apparently terse prose style would balance out the poetic and verbose material in the treatment.  And Essex had written a lot more scripts than Bradbury. (Well, one would be a lot more than Bradbury.)

Last Edited By: Ted Newsom Aug 15 10 10:58 AM. Edited 1 times.