HOW SOMETHING WICKED CAME (1996)

If Gene Kelly hadn’t danced, Something Wicked This Way Comes might never have been written. In fact, it is an absolute certainty my carnival would not have come alive to travel and arrive at 3:00 A.M., the soul’s midnight.

The details of creation are such that, looking back, one experiences apprehension. Gene Kelly invited me and my wife, Maggie, to a private screening of his all-dance musical Invitation to the Dance. If I had refused the invitation, again, this book would have been stillborn. Fortunately, Maggie and I attended the screening and walked home from MGM that night filled with admiration.

On the way I confessed I would almost tear off my right arm to work for Gene Kelly.

“Do it,” Maggie said. “Go through your files, look at all those stories you’ve put away, find something that might fit, do a screen treatment, and send it to Gene.”

“Just like that?” I said.

“Just like that,” said Maggie.

One episode in Gene Kelly’s Invitation to the Dance had to do with a carnival/circus, with overtones of Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Lon Chaney’s tragic 1926 film.

Rifling my file of some thirty published and unpublished stories, I found variations on carnival and circus themes, most of them put away when I was twenty-six years old, one published in a pulp magazine when I was thirty, “The Black Ferris.”

The story told of a strange carnival that operated a Ferris wheel that aged people younger or older, depending on which direction the wheel turned, backward or forward. Two boys, discovering the secret of the wheel, are almost destroyed by the carnival owner, who, in turn, trapped on the wheel, is aged around and around, until he dies, an ancient mummy.

Just like that, as Maggie said.

In five weeks I wrote Dark Carnival, a seventy-page outline/treatment, and gave it to Gene Kelly.

He called the next day, wild with enthusiasm.

“Do I have your permission to take this to Paris and London and try and find funding for a possible film?” he said.

“You have more than my permission,” I said. “Go!”

He went and came back a month later, crestfallen.

“No takers, no money,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I’m honored that you tried.”

With the screen treatment dead, a novel came alive. The idea refused to lie dormant. In the next five years, I transformed the film script into a three-hundred-page novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The novel, finished, had rough going. It was rejected by Doubleday, who had published six of my books. I was forced to move on and sold the novel to Simon & Schuster, whose editor, Bob Gottlieb, became a moving force in my life.

Even rougher, the book was optioned by a series of studios and producers. I wrote at least three new screenplays for those studios and got caught in a power war at Paramount Studios, where Barry Diller and Michael Eisner disagreed as to whether the script would sink or swim. The wrangling went on just long enough that I picked up my screenplay and canceled the obligation.

At which point Sam Peckinpah appeared, expressing interest.

“How would you film Something Wicked?” I asked.

“Rip the pages out of your novel,” said Sam, “and stuff them in the camera!”

I scanned the chapters of my book, staring, and he was right. The pages were scenes, the paragraphs were long shots or close-ups. “Sam—” I said.

But he was gone.

I wish he had stayed. I often wonder what kind of film he would have made of my midnight shadow show.

The film of Something Wicked This Way Comes was finally finished and previewed in 1983. The preview was a disaster. My director, against my wishes, had thrown out my screenplay and substituted one written by a British writer who understood Evelyn Waugh but misapprehended fantasy.

My daughters, attending the terrible preview, called me the next day saying, “Daddy, what happens next?”

“I’m waiting for the phone to ring,” I said.

It rang. The head of the studio asked me to come over. When I walked into his office, he said, “I hope you’re not going to say ‘I told you so.’ ”

“There’s no time for that,” I said. “Rebuild the sets, rehire the actors, I’ll write an opening narration and hire a composer for a new score.”

The studio spent $5 million in three weeks’ shooting, to bring the film back to life. It was released in 1983 to mostly good-to-fine reviews, not a great film, no, but a decently nice one.

The original screenplay and the published novel remain. Thank God for that. No, come to think of it, thank Gene Kelly for that.