The link below will take you to THE SCREAMING WOMAN, a 1972 made-for TV movie based on Ray Bradbury's classic short story. It was directed by Jack Smight (who also directed THE ILLUSTRATED MAN film), with a screenplay by Merwin Gerard (perhaps best known for his writing work on the TV series ONE STEP BEYOND). While the star, Olivia de Havilland, is one of my all-time favorite actresses, and the film has a fine supporting cast that includes Joseph Cotten and Walter Pidgeon, I have never been that thrilled with the movie, mainly due to the padding of the short story required to stretch it out to feature film length. However, in an interview with Arnold Kunert in a 1973 issue of TAKE ONE magazine (reprinted in the book CONVERSATIONS WITH RAY BRADBURY, published by the University Press of Mississippi), Ray said that he liked the film, especially the performance of Miss de Havilland and the ending:
Thinking some more about Ray Bradbury's "The Screaming Woman" made me recall a little-known fact about that short story. I mentioned this in a post way back in 2004, but thought I'd bring it up again for the benefit of any latecomers. When Ray wrote the story, he penned alternate endings, one far more downbeat than the other. The version of "The Screaming Woman" that was originally published in 1951, and which has generally been reprinted since, has the "happy" ending. Per Stuart Schiff's excellent anthology, THE BEST OF WHISPERS (Borderlands Press/Whispers Press, 1994), Ray's preferred ending was the one that was far more grim. In a letter to William F. Nolan mentioned in THE BEST OF WHISPERS, Ray speculated that the mix-up in which version got used at the time of the story's original publication probably occurred in the editorial offices of the story's original publisher or in the offices of his agent. In that same letter to Bill Nolan, Ray mentioned how disappointed he was that his preferred ending had not been used. Ray's preferred version is the one that appears in THE BEST OF WHISPERS. I'd rather not say more about that alternate ending, so as not to spoil it for those that have never read it.
The following link takes you to a site devoted to the music of composer John Williams (who wrote scores for such classic films as STAR WARS, ET, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, JAWS and many more.) The site discusses how THE SCREAMING WOMAN score was added to the film during a composer's strike, and how Williams ended up receiving the only on-screen music credit for about 43 seconds worth of music in the film. The site also discuses the reaction of Ray Bradbury and film critics to the movie:
From Thanksgiving, 1948, the link below will take you to "a tale well calculated to keep you in suspense": the radio series SUSPENSE and its version of Ray Bradbury's "The Screaming Woman", starring Margaret O'Brien:
