Proposed SOMETHING WICKED film updates story to 1980s

Since the announcement last year that Seth Grahame-Smith was attached to a new film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, there has been a period of silence. This week, Entertainment Weekly has provided an update. And the biggest news is that the film itself will update Bradbury's story - to the 1980s. This, Graham-Smith reports, is the era of his own childhood, "the most authentic time that I know how to represent."

This strikes me as incredibly faulty logic - like updating Huckleberry Finn to the 1970s.

The EW article is a survey of Grahame-Smith's current projects - and there are plenty of them: not only Something Wicked but proposed re-boots of Beetlejuice and Stephen King's It, among others. This is one busy writer-producer-director.

Something Wicked is reported as being scripted by David Leslie Johnson, from a treatment by Grahame-Smith. Johnson began his career as an assistant to Frank Darabont on The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Walking Dead; his biggest screenwriting credit to date is for The Wrath of the Titans. The earliest the film might go before the cameras is late 2015, but my recommendation (as always) is: don't hold your breath.

The EW report is here: http://insidemovies.ew.com/2015/01/16/beetlejuice-2-something-wicked-gremlins-seth-grahame-smith/2/

Two Years On

 It's now two years to the day since Ray Bradbury died.

Interest in his work continues, and has perhaps even intensified. Coming soon are:

• the second volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury: A Critical Edition, 1943-1944;
• the second volume of Jon Eller's literary biography Ray Bradbury Unbound; and
• the fourth issue of The New Ray Bradbury Review. 

Meanwhile, in Hollywood, Disney is planning its second attempt to film Something Wicked This Way Comes with Seth Grahame-Smith as writer-director. And in just over a week, BBC Radio 4 will be topping and tailing its season of SF dramas with two new productions based on The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles.

In the last year we have seen academic texts about Bradbury's works:

• About the Arizona and Mars connections - Orbiting Ray Bradbury's Mars;
• About one of his most enduring novels - Critical Insights: Fahrenheit 451. 

Finally, we have seen Bradbury's office contents shipped to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies for preservation future study, and the sale of the Bradbury house on Los Angeles' Cheviot Drive.
A time of change, to be sure.

Onward!

Something Wicked Turns Round and Comes Back for More

Deadline Hollywood is reporting that a new film is to be made based on Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Disney has attached Seth Grahame-Smith to the project as director - his first feature film in this role - and he is due to produce a treatment, after which a writer will be assigned. The story is here.

Well, it IS the twenty-first century, that period in history when Hollywood is only interesting in re-treading old product (as this fascinating infographic makes plain).

Whenever I hear of a new Bradbury-based film, I always say two things.

First, don't hold your breath. The history of Hollywood is one of options being taken out, traded and dropped; of scripts being written, rejected, rewritten, thrown away and written again from scratch; and of change in management that make one day's hot property the next day's embarrassing liability. Whatever happened to the Frank Darabont Fahrenheit 451? The Zack Snyder Illustrated Man? That proposed version of Dandelion Wine?

And second, don't pre-judge. The history of SF and fantasy film is that, based purely on announcements and rumours prior to release, fans get up in arms about who is attached to a project (they will ruin it!), changes to the story (that's not in the book!) and changes to the characters (he wouldn't do that!). Sometimes the adaptation will work despite such misgivings, sometimes not. The only way to find out is to wait and see.

That said, who exactly is Seth Grahame-Smith, the neophyte film director who is being entrusted with this undertaking? None other than the creator, writer and director of the MTV sitcom The Hard Times of RJ Berger (2010-1), the screenwriter of Dark Shadows (2012), the author and screenwriter of novel and film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2010 & 2012 respectively), and writer of the book (and forthcoming film) of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009 & 2015 respectively). More information here.

On the plus side, an association with darker themes. On the minus side, someone whose entire cinematic oeuvre to date is dependent on re-tooling existing stories and characters in a "quirky" way.

Hmm. Let's wait and see.