Something Wicked...

[Night Listener]

As mentioned here ( http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=197 ) Welles did a radio adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes, reading the narration around bits of the as-yet-unreleased movie's soundtrack.

Somebody finally coughed up a copy and here it is:

Part 1: http://www.mediafire.com/?3l00zaj0z2z
Part 2: http://www.mediafire.com/?yqmqwttnyuz

Ray Bradbury introduces, and Jason Robards and others in the movie cast are heard. Part 1 is 40 minutes, Part 2 is 46.

Not terribly significant, but it's a fun listen.

[Store Hadji]

Thanks! I'd forgotten all about this one and have never heard it. I'll add it to the museum page for the featured monthly addition.

[Glenn Anders]

I second Terry, as I usually do in matters of Radio. "Something Wicked Comes This Way" would make an excellent monthly addition for the Wellesnet Radio Archive Museum.

Thank you so much, Night Listener. You seldom speak, but when you do, I find you almost always "on target at 200 yards."

My self-set task for this evening had been to tidy up some work for Mr. French which Toddy Baesen should have dealt with. I clicked on Part 1 of the adaptation, taking you at your word that the work would be only slight, and intending to listen but to a few minutes of the show. Because a couple of the Baesen matters for Mr. French were running in the background, as I discovered, the download would take over twelve minutes to complete.

I began to putter around on the other work until, having lost track of the time, suddenly the radio play began to run automatically. With Mr. French's problems scarcely tended to, I was immediately, hopelessly, hooked. I ended up, downing tools on everything else, and shooting the evening in a two hour radio listening enrapturement.

Orson Welles, two years before his death, with that telltale breathiness I now know so well myself, was still an incomparable storyteller, still a master in Radio's "The Theater of the Imagination."

Jack Clayton's SOMETHING WICKED COMES THIS WAY, on the other hand, in the tradition of a Wellsian curse, had been taken out of the Director's hands and butchered during a year of re-shoots and re-edits. Mr. Dark turned out to be Walt Disney . . . or at least his dark shadowed Ghost, the Disney Corporation. Hence, this long anticipated film would be a box office flop, as Bradbury, Clayton, Welles, and all concerned must have known by April 1983. I would like to think that the radio show, slyly presented as an advertisement for the picture, was actually their way of saying: "Just sit back, Bradbury fans, close your eyes. This enchanting spell by Orson Welles is how SOMETHING WICKED COMES THIS WAY might really have been."

I liked the Old Magician's mixed media event very much.

Thank you again, Night Listener.

You are aptly named.

Glenn

[ToddBaesen]

Glenn:

How could you let a radio play distract you from the important work you were supposed to be doing for me?

Actually, I can see how, as I had the same experience myself! The 86 minute program pretty much drew me in from what I was doing as well, and I had to sit down and listen to the whole thing!

Bravo to Night Listener for providing the link.

[Roger Ryan]

Thanks "Night Listener" for providing this download.

"Something Wicked This Way Comes" is one of my favorite novels and I was quite disappointed that the film version wasn't stronger than it was. Jack Clayton directed what I consider the finest of all ghost story films with THE INNOCENTS (1961) and I've always been curious what his original intentions were for the SOMETHING WICKED... film. This radio adaptation is a marked improvement over the movie if only for Welles' ability to grab and hold your attention with his descriptive narration. The soundtrack clips mostly get in the way in my opinion; I would almost prefer to only hear Welles tell this story. I am glad they included without abridgement the film's most successful scene where Dark mocks Mr. Holloway by counting off the years of his life; Jonathan Pryce was excellent in this scene.

In some ways, Bradbury's prose is not ideal for filmic adaptation and his own screenplays tend towards making dialogue a little too literary and verbose. But for radio adaptation, Bradbury's style is much less distracting and it would have been interesting if the author had come from an earlier age allowing for Welles' Mercury Theatre to adapt his work during their heyday.

[ToddBaesen]

*

You make a good point Roger...

And now, thanks to Night Listener, we can all edit the show however we like!

I personally didn't mind the clips from the movie, but wondered why on earth there is a second narrator?

In my version of the show, the second narrator will be cut out completely, as he simply repeats points that we already know, and are mostly redundant.

Something else I don't understand, is why Disney didn't get Welles to narrate the actual movie! Arthur Hill is nowhere near as good as Orson Welles would have been...

[Roger Ryan]

I got the impression that the second narrator was added after potential commercial breaks during the original broadcast. The producers were probably thinking that the audience would lose the flow of the story during two or three minutes of someone hawking frozen peas or what-have-you, so added a quick recap of the action following each break (this occurs four times during the course of the program which would be a logical number of ad breaks).

[ToddBaesen]

*

That seems to make sense. In fact it might be fun to keep the second narrator and put back in four specially selected commercials of Orson's where he's selling us various food products such as frozen Peas or Paul Masson wines!

[Alan Brody]

I remember liking "Something Wicked" when it first came out in the early 80's, but having heard Welles narration, I think they should have tried to figure out a way to get it into the movie, ala Barry Lyndon. I enjoyed the radio show, though.