HBO's "Carnivale"

Anytime I see a movie about carnivals, or a circus, and run by sinister characters such as the devil, or a host of our undesirables ... I start glancing towards 'Something Wicked...' to see what similiarities (rip-offs) may occur. Shall we call them admirable resemblances?

This upcoming HBO special (or it may wind up on the Sci-Fi Channel)... may have some of us looking back at one of our favorite Bradbury novels for such clues...(saw a brief 'film attraction' of the program, and it looks very beautiful, similiar to one of these nearly surrealistic Union Bank commercials on TV few years back). See for yourself. The 'Making of Carnivale' ...will be aired on HBO, Thursday, August 21st.

(click on, or type into finder http://www.filmjerk.com/nuke/article500.html



[This message has been edited by Nard Kordell (edited 08-09-2003).]

Actually, I am hoping that "Carnivale" will be a lot like "Something Wicked" (which is one of my all time favourite Bradbury works).

I've seen the adverts for this series, and from those brief glimpses it does look really interesting; just the sort of thing that I would like. And yes, it instantly put me in mind of many of Bradbury's stories that have the sideshow as a backdrop. The fact that the series is set in the 1930's is an added plus for me, as I'm a nostalgia buff as well.

I just checked, and the HBO site has almost no information on this new series. All I can find out is that the show will begin airing regularly on Sunday, 14 September at 9.30 pm. I assume that at least 12 episodes have been shot. I hope that HBO will give the show a chance to find an audience-- something that the broadcast networks don't seem to care about anymore. (I'm still ticked off at the lousy way ABC treated the wonderfully eerie series "Miracles"--after constantly pre-empting the show so that no one ever knew when it was on, they didn't even bother to finish airing the episodes that had already been filmed.)

On a related note, anyone here ever see the 1932 film "Freaks"? It was also set in a sideshow (and starred many real-life sideshow performers)--very, very creepy!

If anyone here has read "The Circus of Dr. Lao" by Jack Finney, please don't say too much, as I haven't read it and do plan to, but it seems from what I heard of it to be based on a similar concept. "Twilight Zone" also loved this sort of thing.

Dandelion, I just read "The Circus of Dr. Lao"--I found out about it from this board, in fact. The story had been mentioned in another thread as being part of the short story anthology that Mr Bradbury edited called (surprisingly enough) "The Circus of Dr. Lao and other Improbable Stories." It's an interesting story--but I won't say more than that just now, so as not to give anything away!

That story, however, is by Charles G. Finney, not Jack. I'll put in a little plug for Jack Finney here, though. He was a minor writer, perhaps, but some of his work easily stands next to the best of any other sci-fi fantasy author from the fifties. I highly recommend his book of short stories called "About Time"--some really excellent pieces there. I think that most anyone who enjoys Bradbury would also like this book--the subject matter and general tone are very much in line with Bradbury's.

The filem "Freaks" was out of circulation for many years because it was thought to be socially unacceptable in the Ziet Giest of the sixties and seventies, which taught that we should not exploit the disadvantaged among us. I have seen the film several times, it has played on cable channels recently. Given the above, it is a very interesting film and story line. Many of the performers in the film had acting roles in other of the usual Hollywood horror flicks at one time or another. Many years ago, in the fifties, I remember an amusement park on Beverly Blvd in LA that had a miniture house in which two very tiny people would put themselves on display and talk with passersby. I believe one or both of those tiny people were the film as well.