![]() Richard Denning was cast as the trigger happy heavy who does, Julie Adams came aboard as the Gill Man’s unwitting love interest, and Whit Bissell was there too, if only because he was in everything. Jack Arnold, who was fast establishing himself as the king of Universal science fiction, was again brought in to direct, and Richard Carlson was again brought in to star as the heroic scientist who doesn’t want to hurt the Gill Man. The final script, which had been reshaped and redirected by Arthur Ross, remained mostly an amalgam of scenes and ideas from earlier films, including Kong, The Lost World, It Came From Outer Space, and The Thing from Another World. Once there, by law, the creature runs amok before being killed.īut even as the first few (of many) drafts of the script were being written and rewritten by a handful of writers, Alland decided to distance himself from the Kong connection by confining the action to the Amazon and leaving the creature’s fate in question at the end, just in case a sequel was called for. The Kong influence was clear, as Alland’s original treatment involved the creature falling for a young human woman and getting captured by scientists who drag him back to civilization. He whipped up a quick treatment in which he essentially moved King Kong’s storyline into the waters of the Amazon. He came up with the idea (later fleshed out by Ray Bradbury) for It Came from Outer Space, which he produced in 1953 with director Jack Arnold and star Richard Carlson.īut a full decade after first hearing it, that Amazonian fishman story was still sitting there in the back of his head, nagging at him. Although he’d mostly worked on Westerns, he developed an interest in the booming popularity of science fiction, and began jotting down story ideas. Still, by the early ’50s Alland had become a producer at Universal. It’s unclear if anyone ever took him up on that. The other guests got a chuckle out of that, but the cinematographer insisted it was absolutely true, even offering to provide photographic evidence. ![]() ![]() In 1941, Alland was at a dinner party at Welles’ home when one of the guests, a South American cinematographer, told the story of an amphibious humanoid creature who emerged from the Amazon once a year, grabbed a young woman from a local village, and then disappeared again. William Alland was a close friend of Orson Welles, a member of the Mercury Theater troupe, and the man who played the faceless reporter in Citizen Kane.
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