Unnecessary Rewrites: John Mortimer (1923-2009)

100 years ago today, writer John Mortimer was born. He's best remembered for his Rumpole of the Bailey stories and TV series. But did you know that he was an uncredited contributor to the screenplay of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)?

Ray Bradbury wrote the original Something Wicked script, but the film's director Jack Clayton commissioned a re-write from Mortimer - without telling Ray. This caused a serious rift in their working relationship. Ray and Jack came to the film as friends, but departed as strangers.

 

[Update for clarity:

 

Having read Bradbury's screenplay drafts as well as the Mortimer/Clayton version which was filmed, it's clear to me that Bradbury needed no re-writing. What underpinned these shenanigans was a difference of philosophy between Bradbury and Clayton. Bradbury rightly believed that fantasy stories need plotting that carefully builds, and this can include partial repeating of, or reminders of, events that have gone before. Clayton on the other hand believed that it was wrong to have repetition in a script, and that scares and suspense required constant novelty. He repeatedly expressed this as "a mouse doesn't come out of the same hole twice".]

Ironically, two years earlier Mortimer was himself a victim of an uncredited rewrite, when his scripts for the award-winning Brideshead Revisited TV series were scrapped by director Charles Sturridge. Mortimer retained the sole script credit for Brideshead (and, presumably, entitlement to any royalties), just as Bradbury retained the sole credit for Something Wicked.

In this BBC Archive clip, John Mortimer talks about his father and Rumpole: https://twitter.com/i/status/1649331741155262464

Bradbury's drafts

It's a good job that I like reading film scripts... I've lately been working through all of Ray Bradbury's script versions of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Although he didn't see it as such, this was a monster project, started as an outline for Gene Kelly in 1954, and then developed through at least five stages of work:

1. an almost full script c.1960;
2. re-writing it as the novel published in 1962;
3. writing an entirely new script based on the novel for Twentieth Century-Fox in 1973;
4. substantially revising and reducing the script for Jack Clayton in 1976;
5. re-working it again in 1981 for Disney, again with Jack Clayton.

When the film was finally made (and released in 1983) it was from Bradbury's screenplay, but with uncredited script doctoring by John Mortimer of Rumpole fame. After supposedly disastrous previews - I say "supposedly", because I never trust reports that a film did badly in previews - Disney went into damage-limitation and spent a year on re-editing and re-shooting.

The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies holds manuscripts of most of Bradbury's script work on this project. These are the folders for the 1973 and 1976 screenplays. The Bryna Company is Kirk Douglas's production company, which teamed up with Disney for the 1983 film.

(Photos by Phil Nichols, courtesy of the Bradbury Memorial Archive, Center for Ray Bradbury Studies.)

Something Wicked

The BBC has a surprise Halloween treat this Saturday: a new radio dramatisation of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

All I know about the production is what is on the BBC web page.

SWTWC has been dramatised a few times. There was a film scripted by Bradbury (and an uncredited John Mortimer) in 1982, a play by Bradbury in 1988, and a radio production by Colonial Radio Theater a couple of years ago. Brian Sibley, co-writer of a number of Bradbury adaptations for radio and writer of the recent BBC Gormenghast adaptations, tried to raise interest in SWTWC as a "classic serial" production a few years ago, but without success.

This new production is written by Diana Griffiths, a playwright with a long list of credits for original works and adaptations. Her CV includes several items in the fantasy and SF genres, so she would appear to be an excellent choice.

You can listen to the play live on the BBC Radio 4 website at 2.30pm BST on Saturday 29th October 2011. It should then be available for catch-up listening for seven days. There is usually no geographical restriction on accessing BBC Radio broadcasts on the web.

Who to blame, who to praise?

I recently saw this brief piece on the web which compared the novel and film versions of Something Wicked This Way Comes. The article mentions in passing that "Disney" made some changes to the story in adapting the novel to film, specifically the invention of some new minor characters.

This first made me smile, because I wondered if the author of the article was aware that the screenplay for the film was written by... Ray Bradbury himself. To "blame" Disney for the alterations seems wrong, if the original author was in control of the adaptation.

But then I had second thoughts.

Although Bradbury receives sole screen credit for the screenplay, it is no secret that the late John Mortimer carried out some uncredited rewrites, under the instruction of the film's director Jack Clayton. Without talking to Bradbury about it, or better still examining the script drafts, it's impossible to be sure how much was Bradbury's and how much was Mortimer's. Or Clayton's. Neither Clayton nor Mortimer are with us any more, so Bradbury is more or less the only one left who we could ask, with the possible exception of the film's producer, Peter Douglas.

But even if we learned whether Bradbury invented a given character himself, that wouldn't necessarily tell us what prompted him to do it. It could be his own free creative choice, or it could be at the suggestion of... "Disney".

I've been having similar thoughts about Bradbury's largely unpublished (and totally unfilmed) screen work in adapting The Martian Chronicles. I am currently studying various materials from the 1950s and 1960s, where Bradbury was attempting to work for a succession of production entities (for want of a better phrase) on bringing MC to the screen. I see an enormous amount of evolution of the script materials, but without access to script notes, correspondence, studio memos and the like, it is impossible to know for sure what motivated many of Bradbury's rewrites.