Boomer Hall of Fame

Creature from the Depths of the 50s

Orson Welles hosted a dinner party sometime in the 40s—maybe during the making of Citizen Kane. Present were his then-girlfriend, actor Delores Del Rio; Gabriel Figueroa, the Mexican cinematographer who shot Night of the Iguana and Bunuel’s Mexican films; and William Alland, member of Welles’ Mercury Theatre and participant in the famed radio “panic broadcast” of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds. Figueroa told what he said was a true story about a half-man, half-fish who lived outside a village in the Amazon. The Creature left the villagers alone except for once a year, when he took one of the village maidens. When others laughed at him, he became indignant, claiming he’d even seen a photograph.

Alland didn’t laugh: he remembered. As a movie producer in the early 1950s, he came up with the idea for a film that became It Came from Outer Space and passed it off to Ray Bradbury to develop, so he could concentrate on writing the story of the half-man, half-fish he called “The Sea Creature.”His treatment eventually led to three movies, made back to back and released in 1954, ‘55 and ‘56.

The first was Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Continued at the Boomer Hall of Fame...