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BRADBURY, RAY (1920–2012). American writer.
Wrote
episodes, based on his stories, for The Ray Bradbury Theatre (also
host and executive producer): "Marionettes, Inc.," "The
Playground," "The Crowd" (1985), "The Town Where No One
Got Off," "The Screaming Woman," "Banshee" (1986),
"The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl," "Skeleton,"
"The Emissary," "Gotcha!," "The Man Upstairs,"
"The Small Assassin," "Punishment Without Crime,"
"On the Orient, North," "The Coffin," "Tyrannosaurus
Rex," "There Was an Old Woman," "And So Died
Riabouchinska" (1988), "The Dwarf," "A Miracle of Rare
Device," "The Lake," "The Wind," "The
Pedestrian," "A Sound of Thunder," "The Wonderful Death
of Dudley Stone," "The Haunting of the New," "To the
Chicago Abyss," "Hail and Farewell," "The Veldt,"
"Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!" (1989), "Mars Is
Heaven," "The Murderer," "Touched with Fire,"
"The Black Ferris," "Usher II," "Touch of
Petulance," "And the Moon Be Still as Bright," "The
Toynbee Convector," "Exorcism," "The Day It Rained
Forever," "The Long Years," "Here There Be Tygers"
(1990), "The Earthmen," "The Jar," "Colonel
Stonesteel and the Desperate Empties," "The Concrete Mixer,"
"The Utterly Perfect Murder," "Let's Play Poison,"
"The Martian," "The Lonely One," "The Happiness
Machine," "Tomorrow's Child," "The Anthem
Sprinters," "By the Numbers," "The Long Rain,"
"The Dead Man," "Sun and Shadow," "Silent
Towns" (1992).
Wrote as
by Douglas Spalding: The Picasso Summer (based on his story) (tv movie)
(Robert Sallin and Serge Bourguignon, uncredited 1969).
Creative
consultant: Mirrors (Black 1974).
"Concept":
Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (animated) (Misami Hata and
William T. Hurtz 1992).
Films
based on his works: "Zero Hour" (1951), episode of Lights Out;
"The Man" (1951), episode of Out There; "Summer
Night" (1952), episode of Suspense; "The Rocket"
(1952), episode of CBS Television Workshop (1952);
"Homecoming" (1953), episode of Tales of Tomorrow; The
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugene
LOURIE
1954); "The
Relentless Weavers" (1954), episode of Fireside Theatre;
"The Man" (1955), episode of On Camera; "Zero
Hour" (1955), episode of Star Tonight; Windows (tv series)
(1955); "The Great Wide World" (1956), episode of Studio 57;
"A Sound of Different Drummers" (1957) (uncredited), episode of Playhouse
90; "The Jar" (1964), episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour;
Mañana Puede ser Verdad (tv series) (1964-1965); "The Fox and the
Forest" (1965), episode of Out of the Unknown; El Marciano
(short) (Francisco Montolío 1965); "El Doble," "La
Sonrisa" (1966), episodes of Historias para no Dormir; Fahrenheit
451 (Francois Truffaut 1966); The Illustrated Man (Jack SMIGHT
1969); The Screaming Woman (tv movie) (Smight 1972); "La
Crisalide," "L'Assassino," "I Sosia" (1979),
episodes of Racconti di Fantascienza; The Martian Chronicles
(tv miniseries) (Michael
ANDERSON
1980); Castigo
senza Delitto (tv movie) (Fabio Piccioni 1981); "All Summer in a
Day" (1982), episode of NBC Peacock Theatre; "Any Friend of
Nicholas Nickleby Is a Friend of Mine" (and appeared in) (1982), episode
of American Playhouse; "Robbers, Rooftops and Witches"
(animated) (1982), episode of CBS Library; Savannen (tv movie)
(Tord Pååg 1983); Quest (short) (Elaine Bass and Saul Bass 1983); Budet
Laskovyy Dozhd (animated short) (Nazim Tulyakhodzayev 1984); Habia una
Vez (Alba Mora 1985); Clarinda y el Tiempo en una Botella (short)
(Emanuel Tacamba 1985); Elektronnaya Babushka (Algimantas Puipa 1985);
"The Burning Man" (1985), episode of Twilight Zone;
"The Jar" (1986), episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Veld
(Tulyakhodzhaev 1987); Walking on Air (Ed Kaplan 1987); Trinadtsatyy
Apostol (Suren Babayan 1988); It Came from Outer Space II (tv
movie) (Roger Duchowny 1996); Vino iz Oduvanchikov (Igor Apasyan
1997); Con Palos y Piedras (short) (Leandro Bartoletti and Federico
Sidañez 2000); El Umbral (short) (Erwin Jaquez 2003); El Que Espera
(short) (Juan Luis Molina 2004); A Sound of Thunder (Peter HYAMS
2005); A Piece of Wood (short) (Tony Baez Milan 2005); The Small
Assassin (short) (Chris Charles 2007); The Pedestrian (short)
(Chard Hayward 2008); Chrysalis (Milan 2008); A Very Careful Man
(short) (Charlie Simmons 2010); The Jar (short) (Brandon Young 2011).
Appeared
in documentaries: "The Illustrated Bradbury" (1966), episode of Telescope;
The American Comic Strip (John Musilli 1978); "Ray Bradbury: The
Illustrated Man" (1980), episode of Omnibus; The Fantasy Film
World of George Pal (Arnold Leibovit 1985); The Whimsical World of Oz (1985);
Time Travel: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy (Gayle Hollenbaugh and Suzanne
McCafferty 1985); Aliens, Dragons, Monsters, and Me (Richard Jones
1986); Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Ray Ferry 1991);
Hooray for Horrorwood (Ferry 1991); In Search of Oz (Brian
Skeet 1994); 100 Years of Horror: The Evil Unseeable (Ted Newsom
1996); 100 Years of Horror: Aliens (Newsom 1996); 100 Years of
Horror: Dinosaurs (Newsom 1996); 100 Years of Horror: Ghosts
(Newsom 1996); A Century of Science Fiction (Newsom 1996); In
Search of Tarzan with Jonathan Ross (Luke Jeans 1998); The Harryhausen
Chronicles (Richard Schickel 1998); Universal Horror (Kevin
Brownlow 1998); The Fly Papers: The Buzz on Hollywood's Scariest Insect
(2000); Lon Chaney: A Thousand Faces (Brownlow 2000); Besuch bei
Ray Bradbury (Eckhart Schmidt 2001); Walt: The Man Behind the Myth
(Jean-Pierre Isbouts 2001); "Poe's Tales of Terror" (2001), episode
of Great Books; The Music of Fahrenheit 451 (Laurent Bouzereau 2003); Fahrenheit
451, the Novel: A Discussion with Author Ray Bradbury (Bouzereau 2003); The
Making of Fahrenheit 451 (Bouzereau 2003); Cosmic Thoughts (Mark
Young 2003); Hollywood Legenden (Schmidt 2004); The Optimistic
Futurist (Jeff Kurtti 2004); documentary included with Ray
Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection (2005); I'm King Kong!: The
Exploits of Merian C. Cooper (Christopher Bird and Brownlow 2005); The
Sci-Fi Boys (Paul Davids 2006); Famous Monster: Forrest J. Ackerman
(Michael MacDonald 2007); A Conversation with Ray Bradbury (Lawrence
Bridges 2008).
For after a brief and stumbling apprenticeship,
there was a period of about fifteen years when Bradbury produced a rich stream
of masterfully evocative stories that made him not only one of America's most
famous science fiction writers, but one of America's most famous writers. Then,
sometime in the 1960s, it all just stopped, and this-once productive writer
went on to spend the next half century of his life wasting his time—writing
poetry, making speeches to bask in the adulation of crowds, repackaging and
republishing his greatest works, appearing in documentaries to praise favorite
creators of the past like Lon
CHANEY
and Ray HARRYHAUSEN,
and occasionally engaging in bursts of creative activity,
producing unremarkable new stories in an effort to show that he was still
relevant, although he was not. So, in contemplating his career upon his death
in 2012, one must conded that if he had died fifty years earlier, in 1962, the
posthumous praise for his remarkable achievements would have been pretty much
the same, since all of his most memorable achievements had already been
completed by then.
It's hard to say precisely why this happened.
Perhaps Bradbury was only born with so many stories to tell, and by the 1960s
he had told them all. More probably, like rock groups who suddenly realize that
they can earn vast sums of money playing their greatest hits for the rest of
their lives without ever recording new songs, Bradbury simply found that he no longer
had any incentive to create, inasmuch as his existing body of works was sure to
provide him with a healthy income for as long as he remained alive. True, some
highly successful writers somehow contrive to carry on with the same frenzied
energy that defined their early careers, but perhaps Bradbury's gently bucolic
childhood, celebrated in some of his best stories, simply didn't provide him
with that sort of drive.
In any event, since one of the ways Bradbury
wasted his time was by writing for films, or allowing his works to be adapted
as films, he obviously merits an extensive discussion in this encyclopedia,
even if it seems improperly belated. His association with science fiction film
actually began as a sideline in the 1950s, when he was still producing
admirable stories, although the precise nature of his contributions to the
early days of television may always remain obscure: references can be unclear
as to whether he actually scripted some programs, or merely had his stories
adapted by other hands; whether some programs were fantastic or realistic can
be similarly hard to discern; and since some of these programs are undoubtedly
lost, definitive answers may be impossible. (Be warned, then, that the
accompanying credits sometimes represent only my best guesses about such
matters.) But his capable work for Alfred Hitchcock Presents survives,
most memorably on display in "Design for Loving," an adaptation of
his clever story "Marionettes, Inc.," though viewers are
unfortunately more familiar with his Twilight Zone episode, "I Sing
the Body Electric," surely one of the dullest stories that Rod
SERLING
was ever obliged to introduce. And from these early adventures in
television, one can detect the persistent problem that Bradbury and others
encounter whenever they adapt his works to the screen: he is a writer of ideas
and moods, conveyed in brilliantly evocative prose, but not a storyteller in
the traditional sense. True, if the idea is striking enough, the results can be
compelling drama—as shown by "The Jar," another writer's adaptation
of a Bradbury story which was surely one of the best episodes of The Alfred
Hitchcock Hour; but if the idea isn't quite as strong, filmed versions of
Bradbury stories, lacking the support of his descriptive prose, regularly fall
flat.
Bradbury's early contributions to films are
better documented, if less felicitous. For Jack
ARNOLD's classic film It Came from Outer Space, he wrote multiple
stories (collected in a 2003 volume of that name), but though he can be
credited with its central idea of a friendly alien invader, the film remains
mostly the work of screenwriter Harry Essex. And while purportedly an
adaptation of Bradbury's haunting story "The Foghorn," The Beast
from 20,000 Fathoms, an early template for the rampaging-giant-monster
movie soon perfected by Inishiro
HONDA,
is essentially unrelated to what the author wrote. It is telling that, when he
signed up to write his first screenplay, he avoided science fiction and instead
adapted Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1956), which was a competent effort
but hardly the sort of project that required the talents of someone like
Bradbury; clearly, and ominously, he preferred the prestige of an association
with a classic American novel more than the creative challenge of writing
something more imaginative. This might also explain why he bizarrely agreed to
write the narration for the biblical epic King of Kings, though he
ultimately chose to remain uncredited. However, another project linked to a
famous creator—his screenplay The Picasso Summer, involving a man's
quest to meet the elusive artist—evidently displeased Bradbury (and everyone
else), so he concealed his work with a pseudonym and embarked upon a long
period of relative inactivity (both in films and in writing).
But he returned to screenwriting with renewed
energy in the 1980s, producing an effective vignette for the revived Twilight
Zone, a television film version of "I Sing the Body Electric,"
and most memorably, the screenplay for a 1983 film based on his novel Something
Wicked This Way Comes, undoubtedly his best work in this arena, a story
that combined Bradbury's special ability to adopt a child's perspective with a
nicely contained and spooky narrative. Then, Bradbury launched an unprecedented
project: for the first time, a major author would write all episodes of a
series devoting to adapting his most noteworthy stories. Surely, one might
think, this would be widely recognized as a landmark achievement in the history
of the genre; yet the resulting series, The Ray Bradbury Theatre, was
and has remained unheralded and rarely viewed, for the simple reason that its episodes,
like other adaptations of Bradbury stories, were consistently lifeless. Then,
after this Indian summer of his film career, the aging Bradbury essentially
retired, producing only a screenplay for an animated version of his children's
book The Halloween Tree and yet another adaptation of "The
Wonderful Ice Cream Suit," an empty and condescending tale that he
inexplicably finds fascinating, having offered versions of it as a television
episode, story, play, and film.
And so, Bradbury left the work of adapting
his stories to others, though this had already been going on since the 1950s,
with generally unsatisfactory results. One prominent lowlight was the film Fahrenheit
451, which might have worked if director François Truffaut had been more
familiar with English and had not bizarrely cast Julie Christie as both the
protagonist's unsympathetic wife and his free-spirited lover; another was Jack
SMIGHT's ill-conceived The Illustrated Man, which embedded at best
tolerable versions of three Bradbury stories within an irksome frame story. Yet
Michael ANDERSON's television miniseries The Martian Chronicles
was a better film than most would have you believe, condemned mostly because
its episodes did not cohere as a unified narrative—precisely like the book it
was based on. The lesson to be learned from these mixed efforts is that if you
want your Bradbury adaptations to work, generally keep them as short as
possible, allowing for productive use of his concepts and dialogue without
being hampered by the absence of a strong story line; one notices, then, that
most recent adaptations of Bradbury stories have been shorts. A prominent
failure to follow this advice, Peter HYAMS' disastrous A Sound of Thunder,
has apparently soured executives on the idea of further Bradbury films,
although his death may bring some long-moribund projects to life—all of them,
undoubtedly, involving stories that are more than fifty years old. No one can
deny that Bradbury thoroughly deserved all of the tributes he received upon his
death, from scores of major figures including President Obama, for few writers
have produced so many classic works. Only someone focusing exclusively on
science fiction film is unfortunately obliged to focus on aspects
of his long career which were less than classic.
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