Something Wicked: Exaggerated Claims Resurface...

An article about the 1983 film Something Wicked This Way Comes is doing the rounds, and perpetuates the myth that Ray Bradbury directed the film. Regular readers of Bradburymedia and listeners to Bradbury 100 will know that this claim - originating with Ray Bradbury himself - is at best a wild exaggeration of the truth, and at worst an outright falsehood.

Something Wicked suffered at the hands of a preview audience, and producers at Disney decided it needed substantial re-shoots to make it work, delaying the release for about a year. Bradbury was involved in devising some new material to rescue the film, and late in life Ray's own recounting of these events gradually shifted with each re-telling from the plausible "I helped with the re-shoots and re-edit" to "I more or less directed the re-shoots" to the preposterous "I directed Something Wicked". (These are not exact quotes; I'm paraphrasing.)

The problem with the article at CBR.com is that it relies on a single account, that given by Sam Weller in 2005's The Bradbury Chronicles, who in turn merely repeats what Ray has told him.

Let's set the matter straight.

I thoroughly researched the making of Something Wicked for my 2017 PhD thesis, which examined Bradbury as a screenwriter. From primary research using the Bradbury papers (held at the Ray Bradbury Center at Indiana University Indianapolis), I was able to reconstruct the timeline of the re-shooting and re-editing of Something Wicked, and I determined that Bradbury's claim to have directed the film is false.

True, Bradbury was present during some of the re-shooting - but so was the film's credited director Jack Clayton. However, true artistic control over the film during this re-shoot phase was vested in neither Bradbury nor Clayton, but in the Disney special effects department (with Lee Dyer supervising on set, and Tom Wilhite overseeing production).

I have written and lectured extensively on this topic. You can find a brief account on this very website, here: https://bradburymedia.blogspot.com/2020/05/lockdown-choice-something-wicked-this.html

You will also find my detailed podcast episode on the "re-making" of Something Wicked here: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/bradbury-100-episode-45-rescuing-something-wicked-this/id1521151939?i=1000613486403

Finally, the full account of my findings can be found in chapter 4 of my Liverpool University PhD thesis, available here (third download link): https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/3009310/