Moby Dick: A Screenplay | ||||||||
Ray Bradbury | ||||||||
Subterranean Press, 192 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Steven H Silver
Bradbury's screenplay was used as the basis for Huston's film, although the film doesn't entirely follow Bradbury's script. With
the release of Bradbury's work in Moby Dick: A Screenplay, the differences Huston decided were necessary become immediately
apparent from the opening moments of the film.
Actually, Huston followed Bradbury's dialogue relatively closely, although not entirely. The sermon given by Father Mapple, for
instance, strays quite a bit from Bradbury's script. Most of changes are in stage direction. Bradbury has a very strong image for
the opening of the film, which was jettisoned by Huston in favor of superimposing the credits over whaling paintings instead of
Ishmael's arrival in New Bedford.
By reading the screenplay, the vision Bradbury originally had for the film becomes more easy to see, although not
entirely. Screenplays and scripts are meant to be performed, not read. The dialogue often falls flat without having the actor's
presentation behind it. The descriptive passages, more rare than in a prose piece, don't entirely capture the author's vision,
instead providing an outline of what the director should attempt to show, with the help of the production staff.
Despite the drawbacks of Bradbury's text being a script, Bradbury still manages to tell an excellent story and his characters
do come to life, even without the actors' interpretations. His Ahab, Ishmael, Starbuck, and Queequeg are individuals, in some
cases, such as Queequeg, even more fully realized on the page than they eventually were in Huston's film.
Bradbury's screenplay and the Huston film made from it are considered so definitive that the book has only been adapted directly
to film one other time, in a 1998 made-for-TV version. Other filmed versions are based on a play by Orson Welles and as a one-man
show by Jack Aranson. Bradbury's script, however, written by a man who had never read the novel before given the task to
adapt it, remains the primary filmed version.
In addition to Bradbury's own text, the book includes short essays by William F. Touponce and Jon R. Eller. These essays are
interesting and tend to deal more with the background of Bradbury's actual work on the script rather than the script itself,
but both shed light on the creative process and make Moby Dick: A Screenplay a more fully realized volume than if the scripts
had been left to stand on its own.
Steven H Silver is a seven-time Hugo Nominee for Best Fan Writer and the editor of the anthologies Wondrous Beginnings, Magical Beginnings, and Horrible Beginnings. He is the publisher of ISFiC Press. In addition to maintaining several bibliographies and the Harry Turtledove website, Steven is heavily involved in convention running and publishes the fanzine Argentus. |
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