The Many Loves of Ray Bradbury
Wed, October 1st, 2008 at 7:58AM PST
Updated: Wed, October 1st, 2008 at 8:45AM PST
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| Ray Brabury |
Well before author Ray Bradbury appeared on stage, the audience at Sunday’s West Hollywood Book Fair
eclipsed the number of available seats. When he arrived, Bradbury was
greeted by applause. Needing no introduction, the writer began to tell
the audience about love. “Over a period of years, [I’ve discovered] the
answer to everything is love,” he told the crowd. Bradbury loves films,
plays, and people. His passion for these things has afforded him an
extraordinary life. With a new production of “Fahrenheit 451” opening
soon, many of Bradbury’s thoughts focused around the novel and play.
His story began with actor Charles Laughton.
“Charles Laughton was my teacher and my good friend. He asked
me to write a [stage] version of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’” Bradbury recalled.
“He took me to Disneyland and I flew over [Peter Pan’s London] with
Charles Laughton. You can’t beat that, can you?”
It was on this trip that Laughton asked Bradbury to write a
long-form play. The result was “Fahrenheit 451.” “One night, he called
me and took to dinner with Paul Gregory, his producer,” Bradbury said.
“Over dinner, they gave me two double martinis before they gave me the
bad news. My play didn’t work.”
Bradbury famously wrote the novel version of “Fahrenheit 451”
in the basement of the Powell Library at UCLA. “When I first got
married, and we had two children, it was hard to write around the
house. I needed an office, but I had no money,” he remembered. “I was
wandering around UCLA one day at the Powell Library and I heard typing
downstairs. I went down to see what was going on.” It turned out there
was a typing room in the basement with a pool of twelve typewriters.
“You could rent one for ten cents an hour,” Bradbury recalled. “I said,
‘Oh my god! This is going to be my office! I don’t need money!’ I went
to the bank; got ten dollars worth of dimes. I went to UCLA, moved into
the typing room and in nine days, I spent nine dollars and eighty cents
and wrote the first version of ‘Fahrenheit 451.’”
This drew applause from the crowd. “So it was a dime novel, wasn’t it?” he joked.
Written during the McCarthy era of suspicion and paranoia,
Bradbury had a hard time placing his novel for publication. He recalled
the person that eventually did publish it. “A young man came along. He
was starting a new magazine. He was roughly the same age as I was.”
Bradbury was twenty-six at the time. “He said, ‘I don’t have much
money, can you sell me a story of some sort?’ I said, ‘Look, I’ve got
this new novel in three parts, ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ can you buy that from
me?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’ll give you three hundred dollars.’ So, in late
winter of 1953, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ appeared in the first issues of
Playboy Magazine. Hugh Hefner has been a good friend for fifty years.”
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| Ray Brabury discussed his novel 'Fahrenheit 451" at the West Hollywood Book Fair |
Around this time, twenty-seven of Bradbury's stories were
adapted by EC Comics. “They stole the stories! I caught them at it!” he
recalled with a smile. “I trapped them and they started to pay me and
the adaptations came out very well. The illustrations were beautiful. I
am very proud of my association with that comic magazine.”
Despite the way that situation began, Bradbury feels his
stories appearing in comics form made sense. “I started my life with
comic strips. When I was nine years old, Buck Rodgers came into my
life. I looked at Buck Rodgers. He pulled me into the future and I
never came back. Buck Rodgers is one of my fathers. It’s natural I
would want to be in comic strips.”
Shifting from the stage and magazines to the screen, Bradbury
talked about his early cinematic experiences. “I started going to films
when I was three-years-old. I saw ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ with
Lon Cheney. I saw ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ I saw the dinosaur film, [The
Lost World], when I was seven and dinosaurs changed me for life. I met
Ray Harryhausen when I was eighteen and we promised each other to
someday do a film together.” In 1952, Harryhausen created the creature
for “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” based on Bradbury’s short story,
“The Foghorn.”
“The Foghorn” grew from Bradbury’s boyhood love of dinosaurs.
Like “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” that love would lead to another
film, John Huston’s 1956 version of “Moby Dick.” “[‘The Foghorn’] was
the first story in [the short story collection] ‘The Golden Apples of
the Sun,’” Bradbury explained. “I gave a copy of that book to John
Huston. He read that first story and later told me he gave me the job
because he read my story about dinosaurs.” Working on the film was not
the happiest of experiences and would later form the basis for the
novel, “Green Shadows, White Whale.”
It was during this time that the stage entered the circle of
Bradbury’s loves. “I went to work in Ireland for a whole year writing
screenplay of ‘Moby Dick,’” he remembered. “While I was in Dublin, I
saw the work of Sean O’Casey on the stage there. I saw George Bernard
Shaw’s production of ‘Saint Joan’ and these productions began to teach
me to write for the stage.” All the while, he would receive letters
from friends sure that Bradbury would come home and write something
about Ireland. He would write back with, ‘No, I don’t think I will.’
Eventually, that position changed. “When I’d been home about a year, a
voice cried out inside my head, ‘Rick, darlin’!’
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| Many of EC Comics' adaptations of Ray Bradbury stories were collected in "Tomorrow Midnight" |
“I said, ‘Who is it?’
“He said, ‘It’s your cab driver that drove you every night
from Gillcock to Dublin and from Dublin to Gillcock to meet with John
Huston. Do you remember all that, Ray?’
“I said, ‘Yes.’
He said, ‘Would you mind putting it down?’ So I began to
write one act plays about Ireland and I didn’t know if they were any
good or not.”
Eventually a friend of Bradbury’s asked about the plays. “He
said, ‘Come to my house next Thursday night. I’ll have some actors
there and they’ll stand up and read your plays to you and you’ll be
able to tell if they’re any good.’ So, the next Thursday night, I went
to his house and he had actors there and they read my plays and we fell
on the floor. The goddamned things work! So at long last, I was
thirty-seven-years-old, [and] I was beginning to write plays that
worked.” This would eventually lead to his long form play about
Ireland, “Falling Upward.”
Working out of Desilu Studios (now part of the Paramount
lot), Bradbury put on productions of plays such as “The Pedestrian” and
“The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.” Performed with amateurs and minimal
lighting and direction, Bradbury discovered despite the technical
difficulties, his plays really did work. He opened “The World of Ray
Bradbury” in New York in 1964. “You feel your way, don’t you,” Bradbury
said. “You love something and you do it. Then it works, or it doesn’t.
Then you do something else that you love.”
Eventually, Bradbury even made that stage version of “Fahrenheit 451” work.
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