:13:02
the creature was a violent and beset thing
that had no choice but to fight them."
:13:08
After Ross finished, one last writer,
Harry Essex, was brought in. Earlier,
:13:12
Essex had had the simple job of turning
a 111-page Ray Bradbury treatment
:13:17
into the screenplay of It Came
from Outer Space, which he did,
:13:20
and undeservedly got
a solo screenplay credit for it.
:13:23
In later years, Essex was happy to take all
the credit for It Came from Outer Space,
:13:27
and he liked to try to take
all the credit for Black Lagoon, too.
:13:30
Writers had worked on Black Lagoon for
months, many drafts had been written,
:13:34
and Arthur Ross had it
all whipped into shape.
:13:37
But to hear Essex tell it,
when he was hired
:13:39
all Universal gave him to work with was
"a very, very poorly-written short story".
:13:44
"Just the basic idea of a fish
that had been discovered in the jungle."
:13:47
"Universal bought the story
for very little, and assigned me to it."
:13:51
"I was angry. I didn't want to do anything
called Creature from the Black Lagoon."
:13:54
"It was an embarrassment to me."
:13:57
I should add that the title was just
Black Lagoon when Essex worked on it,
:14:01
but I'm sure you're already taking
all his comments with a grain of salt.
:14:04
Essex went on to tell me "Universal
pleaded with me to do the picture."
:14:08
"And so I began to redevelop
the whole damn thing."
:14:10
"It's pretty much formula for the kind
of horror stories we used to do then,
:14:14
except in this case I added
the Beauty and the Beast theme."
:14:17
"The idea was to give
the creature some humanity."
:14:20
"He wants to love the girl,
but everybody's chasing him."
:14:22
"It's an old formula of mine that
I've used with great success."
:14:26
Harry, Harry, Harry...
:14:29
Some interesting touches in scripts
that never made it to the screen:
:14:32
The first intent was to keep the gill-man
off camera until the middle of the movie.
:14:37
Universal spent so much money on the
gill-man costume that, understandably,
:14:41
they finally decided
to show him early and often.
:14:43
But all you see of him in
the first halves of early scripts
:14:46
are flash shots, you see him
in silhouette, in shadow, et cetera.
:14:50
There was an evocative scene, also
not filmed, where the captain of the Rita
:14:53
talks about the fable of a mermaid who
lived in one of the Amazon's lagoons.
:14:58
"A beautiful legend about this mermaid,
she falled in love with a man on a ship."