Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Ray Bradbury and Walt Disney loved each other very much. The two men met by chance at Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles around Christmastime in 1964. They had lunch the next day and immediately formed a deep friendship that lasted until Walt’s death in 1966. Bradbury would even occasionally serve as an often unpaid, off-the-books advisor on a number of Disney theme park attractions. But it wasn’t until the early 1980s that the Disney studio took a stab at adapting one of Bradbury’s books, his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Sadly, it was not one of the legendary author’s happiest Hollywood experiences. But despite the behind-the-scenes turmoil, the movie itself remains one of the best Bradbury adaptations to date.

Something Wicked was destined to be a movie almost from its inception. In 1955, Bradbury attended a screening of the film Invitation To The Dance, directed by his friend Gene Kelly (Bradbury had a deep bench of famous friends). Inspired by the movie, Bradbury began searching through his back catalog for a project he and Kelly could work on together. He landed on the short story The Black Ferris, originally published in Weird Tales magazine in 1948. Bradbury expanded the story into an 80-page treatment titled Dark Carnival. Kelly loved it but was unable to secure financing, possibly in part because Invitation To The Dance itself had been an expensive flop. Still, the unrealized Gene Kelly version of the story remains one of the more tantalizing Hollywood what-ifs.

Never one to let a good story go to waste, Bradbury turned his treatment into the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. The book, dedicated to Kelly, was published in the fall of 1962. It was an immediate success. Bradbury began tinkering with turning the novel back into a screenplay in the early 1970s, working on it with British filmmaker Jack Clayton. Clayton had worked on John Huston’s 1956 adaptation of Moby Dick, which Bradbury had cowritten with Huston. Since then, he’d become a director in his own right, although not a terribly prolific one. 

This version of the film was set up at Paramount with Sam Peckinpah attached to direct (another fascinating path not taken). It also fell apart but the rights were quickly picked up by producer Peter Douglas, son of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea star Kirk and half-brother of Napoleon And Samantha star Michael. Like the other Douglases, Peter Douglas was looking to move into production and hoped to make Something Wicked his first film with his father as town librarian Charles Halloway. Once again, directors came and went, including Steven Spielberg, but the film never came to pass. In the meantime, Peter Douglas found another project to make his producing debut with, the sci-fi thriller The Final Countdown.

In 1981, Douglas brought Something Wicked to Disney. He, like a lot of filmmakers around that time, was encouraged by the studio’s recent willingness to think outside the traditional Disney box. Head of production Tom Wilhite gave Douglas the green light. When the search began for a director, Bradbury recommended his old friend Jack Clayton. Clayton had directed a handful of films, including the gothic horror film The Innocents, but hadn’t been able to get anything off the ground since his 1974 version of The Great Gatsby. Wilhite and Disney CEO Ron Miller weren’t entirely sold on Clayton but decided to take a chance.

Things began promisingly as Clayton assembled a stellar cast. Jason Robards, who had been attached to star in the Peckinpah version as the malevolent carnival owner Mr. Dark, switched gears to take over the role of Charles Halloway from Kirk Douglas. Ten years earlier, Robards would have made a fine Mr. Dark. But the part of a bookish, risk-averse librarian who became a father late in life suited him even better. Robards gives a nuanced, lived-in performance that sits at the heart of the picture.

Bradbury had a long wish-list of actors in mind to play Mr. Dark, including Peter O’Toole and Christopher Lee, none of whom Disney could afford. But Clayton wanted to find an unknown for the role. He lobbied for Jonathan Pryce, an actor who’d built an impressive reputation on the London stage but had barely made a dent in the States. In person, Pryce was quiet and nothing at all like what anyone had imagined for Mr. Dark. But after seeing a taped performance of his Tony Award-winning work in the play Comedians, everyone agreed Clayton had found their Mr. Dark. Pryce will eventually make his way back into the Disney fold and return to this column.

Clayton’s biggest challenge was casting the two boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade. After a nationwide search, Clayton finally settled on Vidal Peterson as Will. Peterson didn’t have a lot of experience. His highest-profile gig to date was probably an hour-long episode of Mork & Mindy as a 700-year-old Orkan Elder sent to help Mork reconnect with his Orkan roots. To play Jim Nightshade, Clayton selected Shawn Carson, the nephew of actress Karen Black, who had worked with Clayton on The Great Gatsby. Carson’s resume was even more limited, having only appeared in Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse. But the two boys had a natural, easy chemistry that propels the story.

One of Clayton’s most intriguing casting choices, at least in retrospect, was the great Pam Grier as the beautiful but deadly Dust Witch. Grier was going through a fallow period between her blaxploitation heyday of the 1970s and her rediscovery and renaissance in the late 1990s. Clayton had taken notice of her in Daniel Petrie’s 1981 drama Fort Apache, The Bronx in a standout performance that really should have opened more doors for her. Grier doesn’t have any lines as the Dust Witch but she’s such a strong, magnetic presence that she dominates the screen whenever she appears.

Clayton rounds out his cast with an eclectic group of character actors, a few of whom have appeared in this column already. Royal Dano, who plays Tom Fury, the lightning rod salesman, was last seen in the misbegotten Old Yeller sequel, Savage Sam. Schoolteacher Miss Foley is played by Mary Grace Canfield, who’d made an appearance early in her career in Pollyanna. And Ed the bartender is James Stacy, who twenty years earlier had been the unrequited object of Hayley Mills’ affections in Summer Magic.

Stacy had had a tumultuous couple of decades since then. He’d become a bit of a star after landing the lead in the Western TV series Lancer in 1968. But in 1973, he and his girlfriend were hit by a drunk driver while riding Stacy’s motorcycle. His girlfriend was killed and Stacy himself lost his left arm and leg. After his recovery, Stacy returned to acting, making his comeback in the 1975 Western Posse, directed by and starring none other than Kirk Douglas. And if his story ended there, it’d be an inspirational tale of strength and courage. Unfortunately, it did not. In 1995, Stacy was arrested and pled no contest to charges of molesting an 11-year-old girl. While awaiting sentencing, he fled to Hawaii where he attempted to kill himself. He eventually served a six-year sentence for the crime and died in 2016 at the age of 79. In 2019, he popped up as a character (played by Timothy Olyphant) in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood but Stacy’s own life had already proven to be much stranger than fiction.

Clayton’s cast was more than up to the challenge of bringing Bradbury’s words to life but Clayton himself was in over his head. The director had earned a reputation as a meticulous perfectionist. But he had little use for storyboards and even less understanding of the complexity of elaborate visual effects. Originally, Clayton hoped to avoid the use of special effects completely, relying on mood and atmosphere as he’d done to brilliant effect in The Innocents. But that was not the movie Disney had hired him to make. Clayton reluctantly agreed to shoot the elaborate effects sequences but, without storyboards and a clear vision, the footage was a mess. Arguments were common between the art department, the cinematographer, the makeup effects team, the visual effects crew and Clayton himself.

Disney originally hoped to have the film ready for release during the 1982 Christmas season. But a disastrous test screening convinced Ron Miller and Tom Wilhite that the movie needed a major overhaul. The cast and crew were called back for extensive reshoots, Georges Delerue’s musical score was scrapped entirely with James Horner called in at the eleventh hour to start from scratch, and Clayton himself was essentially sidelined. Effects man Lee Dyer supervised the reshoots, most of which involved major effects sequences.

Ray Bradbury himself was a somewhat reluctant participant in the reshoots, advising on the structure and rewriting scenes as necessary. He may have been more likely to go to bat for Clayton’s work if the director hadn’t gone behind his back to rewrite Bradbury’s screenplay earlier in the production. This had created a rift between the two that still hadn’t quite healed. Bradbury didn’t agree with all of the changes Disney was making but he was pragmatic about the situation and did his best to come up with a compromise he could live with.

Considering all the behind-the-scenes drama, it’s a small miracle that Something Wicked This Way Comes works at all. Virtually none of Clayton’s excised footage has been released to the public, which I would argue works to the film’s benefit. We’re forced to grapple with the movie we have and not the movie that might have been. Fortunately, the movie we have functions very nicely on its own merits. Production designer Richard Macdonald luxuriates in period detail, bringing Bradbury’s beloved Green Town to the screen in all its nostalgic glory. Cinematographer Stephen H. Burum captures a marvelously chilly, autumnal feel perfectly suited to the novel. Robards and Pryce take top honors in a uniformly excellent cast. Jonathan Pryce in particular exhibits a magnetism that few other filmmakers took complete advantage of.

Something Wicked This Way Comes finally hit screens on April 29, 1983, quite possibly the absolute worst time of year to release a movie that exudes the scent of fall leaves. It predictably tanked at the box office, earning just over $8 million. Critics were divided on the film’s merits but even the negative reviews admitted that it was a noble attempt. But that wasn’t enough to save the picture. Within a month, it was essentially gone from theaters and Disney had moved on to their next project.

Ray Bradbury continued to have a checkered relationship with Hollywood after the release of Something Wicked This Way Comes. In 1985, he served as the host of The Ray Bradbury Theater, an anthology TV series adapting his stories to the small screen. He’d also win an Emmy for his screenplay adaptation of The Halloween Tree, an animated special produced by Hanna-Barbera. He crossed paths with Disney once more on Stuart Gordon’s film The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, a low-budget feature produced by Touchstone that the studio dumped straight to video in 1998. Disney doesn’t even acknowledge their participation in that movie anymore, so Something Wicked fans should consider themselves lucky that at least it’s available on Blu-ray.

Jack Clayton passed away in 1995 at the age of 73 having completed only two more films, The Lonely Passion Of Judith Hearne and Memento Mori. Ray Bradbury lived to be 91, continuing to publish books and short stories for years. As of 2023, there still has not been a definitive Bradbury film that captures the evocative tone, language and imagination of his best work. But Something Wicked This Way Comes gets a lot nearer to the mark than most. It’s a special little movie deserving of celebration, flaws and all.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

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