Listen to the Echoes

by Ray Bradbury

  Today, an argument can be made that Ray Bradbury is the first truly literary writer to have his sense of narrative shaped by cinema. Bradbury is an idea man. Many of his stories are “high concept.” His plots are instantly memorable and easily articulated, similar to Hollywood films.

  The last dinosaur on earth lumbers from the depths of the sea, mistaking the moan of a shoreline foghorn for the call of its lost mate.

  An assassin storms an amusement park exhibit to shoot a robotic Abraham Lincoln.

  A foundling, adolescent child, raised by a family of vampires, yearns to be like his loved ones.

  The strikingly visual nature of Bradbury’s writing certainly reflects the influence of movies on his imagination. Who could ever forget the Tyrannosaurus Rex in “A Sound of Thunder,” with its “pebbled skin the mail of a terrible warrior”?

  Or the Illustrated Man covered in a “riot of rockets and fountains and people, in such intricate detail and color that you could hear the voices murmuring small and muted, from the crowds that inhabited his body”?

  Addressing the visual nature of Bradbury’s oeuvre, filmmaker Sam Peckinpah said once that adapting his work is easy, just “rip the pages out of the book and stuff them in the camera!”

  From his earliest childhood recollections of film, to his experiences living in Hollywood during its golden era, to his own accomplished work as a screenwriter, film has always been a vital component of his identity.

  WELLER: What are your earliest recollections of cinema?

  BRADBURY: My mother took me to see a movie when I was two. I’m trying to remember, it was with Erich von Stroheim. It was about some sort of Russian or German wedding. Then, when I was three, everything changed because she took me to see The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Lon Chaney at the Elite Theater in Waukegan. The hunchback appealed in some secret way to something inside me, which made me feel at the age of three, that perhaps I was some sort of hunchback myself.

  How this film could have evoked in a three-year-old a feeling of sympathy, I don’t know; except Chaney was so incredible at doing his portrayal and his lost love was so touching and immediate that my whole soul went forward at that young age and, it seems amazing that in my small body, I would crouch down inside myself and become the hunchback. A few years later, when I was five, I saw The Phantom of the Opera and then The Lost World and I was in love.

  Lon Chaney died when I was ten. Later that year they revived The Phantom of the Opera at the Academy Theatre, which was very unusual. I attended one night with a pain in my side, which I thought was appendicitis. But I refused to give up to death, because in those days, if you had appendicitis, the chances were you could die. But I sat in my seat in the Academy Theatre groaning in pain. I had to see that film, knowing that I might be dead in two, three days. So that’s the intensity with which I love films.

  WELLER: I’ve always wondered, your father was in and out of work, how did you afford to go to the movies?

  BRADBURY: I went to matinees. They didn’t cost anything then. Ten cents for a kid.

  WELLER: How often did you go to the movies in Waukegan?

  BRADBURY: My mother took me every week. We always saw Rudolph Valentino do his films, and he died when I was six, along with Houdini, who died on the same day.

  WELLER: You moved to Hollywood in April 1934. For a movie fanatic, that must have been nirvana.

  BRADBURY: I went crazy. My parents let me roller skate into Hollywood, day after day. All during 1934, 1935, 1936, I was away from home. Where was I? I was in front of Paramount Studios and all the other film studios seeing famous people and collecting autographs. It’s a nutty thing. I had one good friend that I hung around the studios with, Donald Harkins. He’s buried near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. So when I go to Paris I visit him. But no one else I knew from my school was outside the film studios like I was, day after day, collecting autographs and taking pictures. I stood outside the Brown Derby restaurant and the Vendome Room every day getting autographs. In 1935 I saw Shirley Temple set her feet in cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. I was all over Hollywood.

  WELLER: There’s a photograph of you with George Burns taken when you were a teenager. What are your memories of him?

  BRADBURY: I was fourteen and he encouraged me with my writing. I wrote scripts for the Burns and Allen radio show, which they never used of course because they were so horrible, but George pretended they were good. I hung out in front of the theater one day, and I asked him if he would take me into the broadcast. And he did. He took me and my friend Donald in and sat us in this theater. Burns and Allen did the show for the two of us. It was an empty theater. There were no audiences in those days.

  WELLER: Didn’t he actually use one of the jokes you wrote for him?

  BRADBURY: Yes. In February 1936. Gracie faints on the air, and George tries to revive her, saying, “Gracie, say something! Say something.” And Gracie wakes up and says, “This … is … the Columbia Broadcasting … System!”

  WELLER: Do you remember where you were when that aired?

  BRADBURY: At home listening on the radio. Oh God, that was exciting.

  WELLER: Did you ever meet Burns again later in life, after you had become famous yourself?

  BRADBURY: I was at an awards banquet at the Coconut Grove about forty years ago, and in the middle of the awards, I looked over in the corner and there was George Burns. I hadn’t seen him since I was a kid. And I stopped everything. I said, “To heck with these awards that we’re giving out, I want to give an award to a friend of mine who may not remember me because I was a kid, he was very kind to me—George Burns. Thank you, George.” When it was over, George Burns rushed up to me and said, “Was that you! Was that you! I remember you!”

  WELLER: How do you think the movies shaped you as a storyteller?

  BRADBURY: I wouldn’t be where I am without them. All the Lon Chaney films deeply affected me. When he died, it was the end of the world. I thought to myself, “If Mr. Death can die, we’re all in trouble.”

  WELLER: You used to mill about outside the old Uptown Theatre in Los Angeles, and you saw many stars of old cinema there. What are your memories of that period?

  BRADBURY: The theater has been gone thirty years or so now. They tore it down. It was a quality theater. MGM put on all their previews there. So there was a preview about one night a week. I saw Laurel and Hardy, and Irving Thalberg in his tuxedo, and Norma Shearer wearing a silver lamé evening gown. After the theater, they’d go over to the Coconut Grove. I helped Norma Shearer get into her limousine when I was fourteen. When we lived in an apartment on Hobart Avenue, I could stand on our balcony and see all the way to the theater. There was a red light on top of it, and when it was on and blinking—that meant a preview. And I’d get all excited and rush over to the theater.

  WELLER: What sort of Hollywood encounters did you have while working as a newspaper boy?

  BRADBURY: People used to come to the corner and talk to me. I must have been a good talker. John Barrymore used to buy newspapers from me, and Buster Keaton, and James Dunn, who made films at Twentieth Century Fox. Pedro de Cordoba was a customer. He played the priest in Ramona with Loretta Young, which was made in 1936 when I was in high school.

  WELLER: Is there anyone during the golden age that you wish you had met? Is there anyone you didn’t get an autograph from?

  BRADBURY: Bette Davis. But I did meet her very briefly at the Academy Awards in February 1935 at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA. I was there with a mob of people. They had no barriers and no police were there to stop us. I saw Bette Davis trying to get in through a side entrance, and she couldn’t open the door. So I ran down and opened the door for her. I helped Bette Davis get in to win her first Academy Award. I never saw her again after that. I wish I could have.

  WELLER: How about Greta Garbo? She was notoriously reclusive. Did you ever meet her?

  BRADBURY: In October 1938, I came out of the downtown LA Library. I walked past the Biltmore, and t
hey were showing a George Bernard Shaw play—Candida. As I walked past the theater, I heard applause. I knew the play was just over, and I got down near the entrance and heard running footsteps, and a woman ran out of the theater and fell against me. I grabbed her shoulders and she lifted her face toward me. She was wearing a hat. It was Greta Garbo. She looked startled, and she broke free and ran across the street into the Biltmore garage to get her car. When she broke away from me, she didn’t look as she crossed the street. She could have been killed.

  I knew the girl behind the ticket window at the theater, and she said, “Did you just see something unusual?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “Was it Greta Garbo?” And I said, “Yes.” She told me that they always sold Greta Garbo the last seat in the last row. She would come in after the lights went down and the play had started so no one could see her. And when the play was done, before the lights came on, she would duck out and be the first one out. The girl at the ticket window verified that I had, indeed, run into Greta Garbo.

  WELLER: Amazing story. I’m curious, do you have a favorite film?

  BRADBURY: Citizen Kane and Fantasia. I fell in love with those movies in the same year. They are unusual. Nothing like Fantasia has ever been made since. It’s all by itself. And Citizen Kane is a real combination of director, screenplay, and acting—all those elements in one film. I knew the first time I saw it that it was the greatest film ever made. Long before film critics started putting it at the top of their “best movie” lists. My intuition worked for me. I came out of the theater and God told me, Citizen Kane will be in your heart forever. I go with my instincts. I saw it again the other night and I’ve never changed my mind. I first saw Fantasia with my Aunt Neva, and the following week I took all my friends. With all the money I had, I bought tickets for my friends so they could see it, and if they didn’t like it—that was the end of the friendship!

  WELLER: In 1962, you were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short for Icarus Montgolfier Wright, but you didn’t win. You’ve never won an Oscar, yet you have one on your mantel in the living room. What’s the story there?

  BRADBURY: A nice old man, Bill Scowl, gave that to me. His picture is behind the Oscar. He was a member of the Lafayette Escadrille in France during World War I. I wrote about him in the story, “Lafayette, Farewell.” And he was also a cinematographer. He photographed Father of the Bride with Spencer Tracy forty years ago. And he worked on Joan of Arc in 1948. He won the Oscar for that film.

  When he died, he left word with a minister who came here to speak to me, and he said, “Bill left word that anything you want over in the house you can have.” He said, “What do you want?” I said, “I want the Oscar, because I’m never going to win one. And therefore I’d be so proud to put his Oscar here with his picture behind it.” It’s been there over twenty years now. And every time someone asks, I tell them about my friend and neighbor.

  WELLER: You began your career as a prose writer. How did you learn to write screenplays?

  BRADBURY: Going to movies helped. I accumulated all these films in my subconscious, and by the time I was fourteen, I was seeing as many as four or five films a week. When I was in high school, I was seeing half a dozen films a week or more. So I was putting all this junk into my system, along with the great stuff, and I was learning all the time. The best kind of learning is the secret learning you’re picking up and you don’t really know it, and then you go back later and you dredge through all this material and it helps you write screenplays.

  WELLER: You wrote the narration to the 1961 film, King of Kings, yet you were not given a screen credit. Why not?

  BRADBURY: The author of the screenplay didn’t want someone else getting credit even though the narration was my writing. He wouldn’t allow it.

  WELLER: Those were all your words, the narration is all yours?

  BRADBURY: That’s correct.

  WELLER: Is it legal to keep your name off it even though you wrote it?

  BRADBURY: The studio decided. I didn’t decide. And Orson Welles didn’t get a screen credit either, because he wanted money to use his name and they wouldn’t pay. So they took his name off too.

  WELLER: But they used his voice?

  BRADBURY: That’s right. But no name.

  WELLER: How did you come to write the screenplay for Moby Dick?

  BRADBURY: In the late 1940s, my friends started asking me, “Ray, when are you going to do a screenplay?” My answer always was, “When John Huston asks me.” Huston was my hero, and I knew that I wanted to work for him. Well, I gave John all of my books of short stories one day in 1951, and he wrote back from Africa where he was making The African Queen and said, “Yes, I agree with you, someday we’ll work together. I don’t know on what.”

  In 1953, the day finally came. I came home from the Acres of Books bookstore in Long Beach. I was there with my friend Ray Harryhausen looking for dinosaur books. When I walked into the house, Maggie said, “John Huston just called. He wants you to come to the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

  So I went to Huston’s hotel room. He put a drink in my hand and he sat me down and he leaned over and he said, “Ray, what are you doing during the next year?” I said, “Not much, Mr. Huston. Not much.” And he said, “Well, Ray, how would you like to come live in Ireland and write the screenplay for Moby Dick?” And I said, “Gee, Mr. Huston, I’ve never been able to read the damn thing.”

  Well! He’d never heard that before, and he thought for a moment, and then he said, “I’ll tell you what, Ray. Why don’t you go home tonight, read as much as you can, and come back tomorrow and tell me if you’ll help me kill the white whale.” So I went home that night and I walked into the house and I said to my wife, “Pray for me.” She said, “Why?” I said, “Because I’ve got to read a book tonight and do a book report tomorrow.”

  WELLER: In your 1992 novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, you documented your experience of working in Ireland with John Huston. You have been very candid over the years about Huston’s dark side. How soon after you arrived in Ireland in September 1953 did the relationship begin to sour?

  BRADBURY: Fairly early on—perhaps a month into the project. I was at lunch one day with John and some English reporters, and John said, “I don’t really feel that our young writer here has his heart in writing the screenplay of Moby Dick.” And I froze. I couldn’t move for the rest of the lunch. I couldn’t eat. I was so horrorstruck that he would say that to strangers, and when it was over and they were gone, John looked at me and said, “What’s wrong, Ray?” I said, “My God, John, did you hear yourself in there? Here I am adapting the work of one of the greatest American authors, Melville, and I’m working with one of the greatest American directors—you. There’s no one else in the world I want to work for. How could you have said that I didn’t have my heart in the project?” And I began to cry.

  John ran over and put his arms around me and said, “Oh, Ray, Ray, it was a joke.” So he apologized and we went on with our friendship, and then, a week later, he did something just like that all over again. He couldn’t resist. There was a thing in him that he had to tantalize people. I saw him do it to his secretary. I saw him do it to his wife. The very first day in Ireland that I visited Huston at his home at Kilcock, he made his wife cry right in front of me. It’s a shame. On the other hand, when he wanted to be sweet, no one could romance you better.

  I’ll give you an example: At dinner one night out in Kilcock, he had a lot of people invited in from Dublin and London. I was seated at one end of the table, and John started talking. He said, [imitates Huston] “I read a short story the other day about a lighthouse and a foghorn and a monster in the deep, rising up and falling in love with the lighthouse when hearing the foghorn.” John told the story completely. It took ten minutes. When he was finished, he said to all of his guests, “That story was written by that young man right there,” and he pointed to me. Well! You’d kill for him, wouldn’t you? I blushed with pride! My hero had praised me in front of
a dozen other people. So you’d kill for him. Then, a week later, bang!, in goes the knife in your back.

  WELLER: You shared screenplay credit with John Huston for Moby Dick, but you have said that that was a mistake. Why?

  BRADBURY: I offered him credit on the screenplay. I shouldn’t have, but I was grateful. I was loving. One night in winter, it was a really bitter, cold night, and I called for my driver at Heeber Finn’s Pub, and he pulled up in front of John’s house in Kilcock, and John gave me a glass of whiskey against the cold, and he felt the breeze coming and said, “Wait just a moment, Ray,” and he went over to the closet, and he brought over his coat, his overcoat, and put it on my shoulders. Well! You know, God has just knighted me! I wore that coat home, and I didn’t want to give it back to him; my love was that complete. So I got home, and I was grateful that we made up, and I sent additional pages for Moby Dick to him overseas when they started shooting in ’54, and everything went okay.

  WELLER: You were rewriting material for the script even after you had returned stateside?

  BRADBURY: Yeah. I had ideas I wanted to add. So I sent them. It might have been twenty pages of scenes. The film didn’t premier until two years later. When the first ads appeared in Variety, they said at the bottom, “Screenplay by Ray Bradbury.” I got one put away. And then a few weeks later I got a letter from the Writers Guild saying if I didn’t protest, the screenplay would read: “By John Huston and Ray Bradbury.” Well! I hit the ceiling. He put it in to take credit. And so I became paranoid. For the next month I would have killed him if I had seen him, because he had his chance. I offered it to him, and if he had accepted it, there never would have been any trouble.

  WELLER: When you first realized that Huston had inserted his name into the screenplay credit, what did you do?

  BRADBURY: I knew there was nothing I could do. I protested to the Writers Guild—I’ve got copies downstairs somewhere—I gave them my screenplay. And as proof of what he had done on the screenplay, he had a copy of my script that he had marked with a red pencil. I said to the Guild, “Look, every single screenplay of Moby Dick has my name on it. They were all mimeographed in London by his people, not by me. So you can’t find a screenplay anywhere with his name on it! Now isn’t that proof?” But then, later, they wrote letters to me, and the judges said, “If it were anyone else but John Huston, we would give you sole credit.” I have those letters from three judges.