SHOOTING HAIKU IN A BARREL
It started as The Black Ferris a g,ooo-word story, published in Weird Tales (1948), about two youngsters who suspect there is something peculiar about the carnival that comes to town. The story became a seventy-page screen treatment, Dark Carnival (1958), a project for Gene Kelly to direct. Unproduced, the treatment became a novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962); the novel, a screenplay (1971), then a second screenplay (1976), and now, at last, a film. The author of the story, the treatment, the novel, and the screenplays is of course Ray Bradbury. Lucky that Bradbury feels, "I have always been a good editor of my own work. "
"I've tried to teach my writing friends that there are two arts: number one, getting a thing done; and then, the second great art is learning how to cut it so you don't kill it or hurt it in any way. When you start out life as a writer, you hate that job, but now that I'm older it's turned into a wonderful game, and I love the challenge just as much as writing the original, because it's a challenge. It's an intellectual challenge to get a scalpel and cut the patient without killing."
If editing is a wonderful game, then Something Wicked This Way C
omes is a veritable Parker Brothers of possibilities, so long has Bradbury been adapting and readapting and readapting the little story of Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade and the demonic carousel whose riders age a year with each revolution. He is satisfied that the Jack Clayton version, which Disney will release in February, "is the closest yet of anything of mine on the screen. " He seems pleased with their collaboration; "I spent six months doing a whole new screenplay for Jack, which was a gorgeous experience, because Jack is a wonderful man to sit with every afternoon. "
MITCH TUCHMAN
I had to a 260-page screenplay. That's six hours. Jack said, "Well, now you've got to cut out forty pages." I said, "God, I can't." He said, "Go ahead, I know you can do it. I'll be behind you." So I cut forty pages out. He said, "Okay, now you've got to cut another forty pages out." I got it down to 180 pages, and then Jack said, "Thirty more." I said, "Impossible, impossible!" Okay, I got it down to 150 pages. And Jack said, "Thirty more." Well, he kept telling me I could do it, and, by God, I went through a final time and got it down to 120 pages. It was better.
When you gave Clayton 260 pages, did you think he would shoot it that way? As an experienced screenwriter, you must have known…
Oh, sure, I knew it was too long. I knew I could do the first cutting… but, from then on, it gets harder. First of all, you get tired and you can't see a thing clearly. So, it's up to the director or the producer, who are fresher than you are, to be able to help you find shortcuts.
What sorts of ideas did Clayton come up with?
Just day-to-day sitting and saying, "Instead of these six lines of dialogue, can't you find a way of saying it with two?" He challenged me to go find a shorter way to say it; so I found it; so it was the indirect suggestion and the knowledge that he was backing me psychologically that was important.
Would you be cutting dialogue or action?
Everything. The main thing is compression. It really isn't cutting so much as learning metaphor-and this is where my knowledge of poetry has been such a help to me. There's a relationship between the great poems of the world and the great screenplays: they both deal in compact images. If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.
You look at a thing like Lawrence of Arabia: some of the greatest scenes there are nondialogue scenes. The whole scene where Lawrence goes back into the desert to rescue the camel driver: there's not a line of dialogue. It goes on for five minutes, and it's all image. When Lawrence comes out of the desert, after everyone's waited for him for those minutes of beating sun and violent temperature-the music rises and your heart rises with you. That's the sort of thing you're looking for.
I'm an automatic screenwriter; I always have been. I've always belonged to films. I'm a child of movies. I've seen every film ever made, starting when I was two. I'm just chockful. When I was seventeen, I was seeing as many as twelve to fourteen movies a week. Well, that's a hell of a lot of movies. That means I've seen everything, and that means all the crap. But that's good. It's a way of learning. You've got to learn how not to do things. Just seeing excellent films doesn't educate you at all, because they're mysterious. A great film is mysterious. There's no way of solving it. Why does Citizen Kane work? Well, it just does. It's brilliant on every level, and there's no way of putting your finger on any one thing that's right. It's just all right. But a bad film is immediately evident, and it can teach you more: "I'll never do that, and I'll never do that, and I'll never do that."
Tales of novelists dissatisfied with screen adaptations of their work are legion. Often their dissatisfaction is a result of their own false expectations. Can you give an example of advice that Ray Bradbury the screenwriter might have given to Ray Bradbury the novelist while adapting Something Wicked?
Jack and I debated for a long time about the Dust Witch. She's a very weird creature. In the novel I have her coming to the library, and she's got her eyes sewn shut. But we were both afraid that if you didn't do it just right, it was going to be hilarious. So we reversed it; now she's the most beautiful woman in the world (Pam Grier). Occasionally she'll turn suddenly, and the kids will see what she is underneath: this ugly, ugly creature. I think it works better that way.
In the book, Charles Holloway has a sorrowful attitude toward the inevitabilty of youth slipping away. Was there some way to express that in the film other than with rueful looks? Some way to retain that internal monologue that has no action connected with it?
There is. It's not all there, but we've strengthened it, I believe. At a given time in his life, when his son was young, Charles Holloway (Jason Robards) missed a chance to save him from drowning; and the man across the street, Mr. Nightshade, saved him instead.
So, you then have this as a recurring chord. At the very end, it's up to Holloway, then, to save his son (Vidal I. Peterson) in the mirror maze; that strengthens that.
Then you have little hints in the script all through of the father talking with the mother (Ellen Geer) late at night or with the son on the porch. You don't have to do it too heavily. That's the great thing about film work: you just have someone look a certain way or sense the wind a certain way, and you don't have to go through all the speeches.
There's a wonderful scene when the father's sitting on the porch with Will late at night, and the little boy says, "Sometimes I hear you moan late at night. I wish I could make you happy." And the father says, "Just tell me I'll live forever." It breaks your heart.
What about hyperbole? I guess there's no question of retaining "The billion voices ceased, instantly, as if the train had plunged in afire storm off the earth. "
My dear young man, there's a scene where the boys (Peterson and Shawn Carson) run through the graveyard and watch the train go by. They're huddled against the embankment, and a certain moment the train whistle screams and all the stones in the graveyard shudder and the angels weep dust. Ah ha!
You have an eye-catching way of using nouns as verbs. At one point you describe Charles Holloway as "a father who storked his legs and turkeyed his arms. " Can descriptive language like that ever make it to the screen?
A good director could do it.
Would you still see the bird?
A good director would find a way, because what you're shooting is haiku. You're shooting haiku in a barrel.
Let me give you an example of what we're talking about. I've been lecturing at the University of Southern California cinema department for twenty-two years-I go down there a couple of times a year-and various students have come up to me and said, "Can we make films of your short stories?" I say, "Sure, take them. Do it. But there's one restriction I put on you. Shoot the whole story. Just read what I've done and line up the shots by the paragraphs. All the paragraphs are shots. By the way the paragraph reads, you know whether it's a close-up or a long shot." So, by God, those students, with their little cameras and $500, have shot better films than the big productions I've had, because they've followed the story.
All my stories are cinematic. The Illustrated Man over at Warner Brothers a couple of years ago (1969) didn't work because they didn't read the short stories. I may be the most cinematic novelist in the country today. All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. Each paragraph is a shot.